Almost three years in my editorial post at a business magazine, I was called into my editor-in-chief’s office. He, my publisher and a member of HR were all sitting there, looking at me with pity in their eyes. We’d received a mass email that morning about company-wide layoffs, so when I saw an HR rep with a folder in her lap and a box of tissues by her side, my face went blank. As I shut the office door behind me I sighed at my boss: “I know what this is about.” Read More »
I’ve just completed a complete migration of all my websites from one hosted server to another — it wasn’t painless but it could have been a lot worse. This migration thankfully marks the end of a frustrating month of security issues with my previous hosting provider and domain name registrar, BlueHost and GoDaddy respectively.
Yes, this is going to be a screed against lousy customer service from both of them. Read More »
We work with a lot of ‘defaults’ in content. Maybe it’s because we’ve found the best format for certain information. More often than not, it’s because we get a little lazy. It’s tough to take information that, say, has always been in the written form and figure out how to make it better and even more useful to visitors. But what’s the use of translating your product’s tech specs into a video if it’s just shovelware of a datasheet? Why would anyone want to watch that? What would they get out of it that they couldn’t in print?
If no one’s clicking on that heavily-promoted whitepaper, maybe its information — with some tweaking — is best delivered as a presentation? Or a blog post? Or a video? Or a __(insert your brilliance here)___. *Insert cheezy content version of tree falling in woods metaphor* Metrics are a must here, of course.
But let’s back up. What about before you hit the Big Red Publish ButtonTM?
Sometimes the information has a clear Content Destiny. Great! But it often doesn’t.
How do you get it there? How do you choose? When you’re just drafting up a creative brief or a project proposal, is it just Gut + Experience that helps you lead your information arrive at its Content Destiny? Rule of thumb? Or just curiosity to try a new approach?
I’d love to go to the conference to hear what the experts have to say. Unfortunately I can’t attend as I’ll be away on vacation (oh cruel fate!)
I’ve been wracking my brains for the past few months on how I’d like to retool this blog, how I can better engage other people, how I can write in a sustainable way. I think I’ve found my answer. With some incremental design updates I hope to give this blog new life. Keep an eye out :)
So, what have I been up to? The banner for this post is from this past February. I spent a lovely week and a half in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands with my family. My brother lives on Saipan and we had a fantastic time visiting him on his tropical paradise home. One of the trip highlights was a beautiful two days on Rota, where I took the picture you see above.
Though it’s on the other side of the world from Boston, it’s still part of the United States. Absolutely amazing!
Have to thank my colleague Kim for showing me this — here’s a fun example of a video throwing it all into the pot, so to speak. Earth, Wind and Fire’s video for “Let’s Groove,” fun because hey, it’s Earth, Wind and Fire (I have a weakness for disco, I admit), but from a video nerd perspective, check out alllllllllllll the effects they toss into this video. It starts out a little crazy but not too bad considering it was 1981, but about 16 seconds in it gets insane. Especially when the floating heads make an appearance.
But isn’t it something that this video is really fitting for the song? The music scene was already splintering by the early 80s, but the flashiness is so fitting for the shameless fun and funk of EWF’s disco. There’s a content lesson for you.
I’ll be honest, I don’t even know the names of all the effects they use in this because honestly when do you even use most of this stuff anymore? EWF was using this stuff because they could and, hey, why not? We have the technology! Let’s do it!
This probably cost I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-it amounts of money to produce at the time. But now with a bit of cheap chroma key muslin (or paint), a half-decent video editor and just for kicks a bit of After Effects, your average editor at home could reproduce this with moderate effort. (Anyone up for that challenge?)
Wordless Wednesday #5