Jeff Says

The reports of Michael Jackson’s untimely passing ripped through the internet causing outages on TMZ and other celebrity gossip sites. Even CNN.com reported serving over 20,000,000 page views in the hour after The King of Pop’s death.

Twitter was abuzz with the news of Jackson’s passing causing it to fail more than ever. Here is a fan-made Twitter Fail Whale image of Michael Jackson ascension, courtesy of Twitter tweeter birds.

Image by Raul Orozco.

With surprising accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte predicts what will happen with CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone and his own One Laptop per Child project. (this was in 1984, mind you!)

I read Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital” in 1999 while writing a legal paper in mass communications on music sampling, digital downloads (mp3) etc. I was struck by his forethought of what technology could become years before it happened. This guy is awesome. Watch this video and read up on Negroponte, you will not be disappointed.

Eric Pratum and I had a quick exchange on Twitter about people who say things like “Twitter and blogging are a waste of time” or “it’s a bunch of self-indulgent crap, I don’t care what you are doing right now”.

Eric recommended a great short article about the validity of social networking by Cheryl McKinnon on socmedia101.com. The article is titled Actually, Yes, I DO Care What You Had For Lunch.

The article discusses how we praise in-person networking, talking to clients to find out what they are up to. Talk about their favorite sports team, what they did with their family over the weekend and so on. How important it is to build relationships with clients and customers so that they will continue to work with us. The natural progression is for us to do the same, digitally, since most of us work at a computer all day and are not out shaking hands and doing business lunches.

This is a quick read and has great ideas for how to explain the viability of social networking to those who refuse to accept it.

I picked up this brochure while getting my tires rotated the other day and was struck by the images of the classic video game Space Invaders.

“How retro is that?” I thought.  That was followed by me saying “Wow, do these guys know what they are doing with my car? They are making an 80’s video game reference to explain car computers.”

When you are informing or advertising, you should stay current. Yes, retro is in; but it gives off the impression you are out of touch with what is currently happening in the world. Remember that certain Senator describing the internet as “a series of tubes”?

Inform, advertise and stay current. Your customers will respect you for it.