Richard Filing

I subscribe to Fast Forward’s RSS feed and here’s another good reason why - it originates from a NY Times article - If the US State Department Can Use Wikis and Blogs Effectively, So Can Your Organization ?
Excerpt: I came across a recent NY Times article about the growing use of wikis and blogs within the US State Department, an organization that clearly has interest in controlling its messages AND in understanding better how to use information, knowledge and brainpower to be effective. Read in full here

From Jens Meiert
Excerpt: Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance and quality assurance as important process ingredients which have to be applied continuously. But let’s see what this really means for our work.
Read full post here

Great story in INC Mag’s March issue about Blogger.com and Twitter founder Evan Williams
Excerpt: Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”
Read the entire story here

This is welcome news from Milissa Tarquini at Boxes and Arrows.
Excerpt: Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice.
Read the full article here

A little off topic but such a great post that I can’t help pass it on …. Kevin Kelly’s ‘Better than Free’ posting is right on the money. Here’s an excerpt:

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.  I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

Read the entire post here

Excerpt: … But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period. Read full article here

Google recently started to include a set of links below some results to pages within the site. These new links are called Sitelinks. Google displays Sitelinks if a web site is an authority site for the search term.  Google Webmaster Help Centre

From McKinsey
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information