This is just a heads up that our blog will be coming back very soon. It has not gotten any attention in a few years. But we have been thinking a lot about it lately, we both miss the good times of business blogging. So we are back at it, writing up our ideas, and you should see them appear here very soon.
We just gave ACSM’s American Fitness Index its annual update. What are the nation’s healthiest and fittest metropolitan areas in 2010? Find out at www.americanfitness.index.org. See AFI’s new collection of Best Practices, where American communities showcase their AFI-selected community health & fitness programs. Read about the new AFI report in Shape Magazine’s June 2010 issue! Read about it at Forbes! Read about it at USA Today! Read about it at MSN and at Yahoo, too!
This spring, Glopilot created an elegant, audience-focused, interactive design for the Heffter Research Institute. HRI promotes research of the highest scientific quality with the classical hallucinogens and related compounds (sometimes called psychedelics) in order to contribute to a greater understanding of the mind, leading to the improvement of the human condition, and the alleviation of suffering. Our design strategy aimed to draw attention to HRI’s formidable researchers and their ground-breaking investigations into the science of consciousness and the treatment of anxiety in cancer patients. Visit Heffter.org to view our work and that of this pioneering institute. In addition, The New…
From M-novels to the Death of Paper Publishing Part 2: Kindle, nook, Google Editions and Rumors of a Tablet PC (If you missed Part 1, read it here.) Just after Barnes and Noble’s hand-held book reader, nook, was released, Amazon’s stock skyrocketed. Why? Because the other major American bookseller had decided to participate in the hand-held reader market. It wasn’t just Sony’s failed publishing experiment anymore. Now, Amazon’s Kindle was the market leader in a big, booming, brand new business: digital book publishing. Even Google is going for the monetized digital book. Google is emerging with a service called Google…
From M-novels to the Death of Paper Publishing Part 1: The South African M-Novel Kontax The m-novel. The mobile novel: a novel written and delivered on a cell phone. The m-novel is typically associated with the confessional thumbs of emotionally distraught Japanese girls. Although, the first m-novel, Deep Love (posted online in 2000), was written by a Japanese man, a tutor in his mid-thirties, who self-published his book and sold one hundred thousand copies (Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker, December 2008). Smartly, Japanese publishers now scoop up popular m-novels and routinely sell them by the tens of thousands. The m-novel…
Participatory Media Part 4: Successful Participatory Media Adoption Here are four recommendations for overcoming resistance to participatory media adoption caused by the social-context shift and effort expenditure detailed in the previous two sections of this series. These essentials will help an organization develop the previously mythical long-term value of Web 2.0 technologies. 1. Participatory media must not be optional but embedded into an organization’s workflow. It is the workflow of a new kind of more deeply networked company infrastructure. According to McKinsey’s September 2009 survey results on How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: [C]ompanies reporting business benefits … report…
Participatory Media Part 3: Time & Effort Contributing to a participatory media community takes a great deal of time and effort—especially at first. As the temporary excitement for the new wanes, an individual may be struggling to master the new technology as well as a new social context. Before tangible, positive value is seen, participatory media may be prematurely judged as discomfiting, time-consuming work for which no payoff is apparent. Members may naturally stop contributing. The following video from Howard Rheingold both introduces the new participatory paradigm and describes the difficulty that even his students at Stanford had in integrating…
Participatory Media Part 2: Social Context Shift Social Context Shift Although participatory media is being adopted by Generation Y and by members of older generations who are more tuned-in to the pulse of times, many individuals and organizations remain resistant to the social context shift that it requires. 1. From a “Top-Down” Agenda to “Informal Group Conversations” For example, a 2006 Economist survey on the impact of participatory media reports: The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre, “don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations.”…
Participatory Media Part 1: Resistance May Actually Be Futile If you don’t know how to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into your business model, you aren’t prepared to compete, learn or innovate in the 21st century. Dramatic, but true. The impact that participatory media has had on society, culture, learning, politics and the marketplace makes the clarity of this fact astounding. Howard Rheingold makes this point saliently in the following video (July, 2009): http://vlog.rheingold.com/index.php/site/video/21st-century-literacies/ A great deal of research has been focused on children and teens regarding computer-mediated interactions—either for capitalizing on technology-saturated youth or protecting them from media manipulations. This…
In the world of Flash design (and Web design in general) there is this idea that one must always be on the cutting edge. If you want to make an impression on your audience you’d better deliver some form of bang-wow that they didn’t know was possible until you showed them, right? Software is in a near constant progression of capabilities and discoveries that compel the world of digital design to feel like it has some ever-changing high-tech image to live up to. This happens all the time in the movie industry. It seems that every new mega-special effects project…
