links for 2008-04-22
April 22, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
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Has anyone tried this yet? I’m adding it to my list to check out.
New Research on Premium Branding
April 21, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
This weekend I got the chance to sit down and read some of the huge stack of magazines that I previously hadn’t had time to read. I certainly didn’t make it through all of them, but a couple caught my eye. One of the most recent ones is the April 28th edition of Business Week.
One of the first things I noticed was that they are really trying to be trendy in their page design. They’ve got highlighting, charts and fly-aways, and some interesting section headings (like BTW). Since this is the first time I’ve noticed these things, I guess that tells you how often I read Business Week. It’s no fault of their own, magazines just aren’t as high a priority as working through the 1000+ headlines in my RSS reader in the evening (I often cheat and hit “mark all as read” if in general the headlines aren’t grabbing my attention in any particular folder of feeds).
But back to the post at hand, in this week’s BTW there is a short blurb about premium branding. As in, another researcher just did the old “wine tasting” test again. Where essentially they blindfold people and tell them they’re trying a $5 bottle of wine, and then a $45 bottle of wine… People inevitably choose the $45 bottle as tasting better even though the wine came from the same inexpensive bottle.
It’s a nasty trick for those of us easily influenced by marketing. But it illustrates something larger, since people still respond to premium branding. Shouldn’t you be interested in branding yourself as a top-shelf whatever you are?
I think that in the age of personal, and professional branding that more attention should be paid to finding out what makes a brand premium or not on the web. Is it different than in the brick and mortar world? What makes an online brand premium? I would argue that it’s easier to “fake” a premium brand on the Internet. If by image alone, the raw talent of the magnificent graphic designers and writers out there should be able to pull off a premium distinction.
That’s not to say that consumers on the Internet are more more susceptible to being abused, in fact customer service and having the solid foundation to support a premium brand is harder to fake. People using the Internet for research, entertainment, or learning gain the skills necessary to figure out “fake” premium brands. There is no long-term shortcut. As in the brick and mortar world, your image can get your foot in the door but it’s your content and substance that makes the sale.
Netdiver Magazine - Best of the Year / 2007
March 3, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Netdiver Magazine - Best of the Year / 2007: “”
(Via Netdiver Magazine.)
In case you needed reminding, there are people out there who are more creative than you or I. Sure we may fancy ourselves pretty creative and innovative but geez, there’s more out there!
Netdiver Magazine put out their Best of the Year 2007 in web design last month and there’s some really amazing items in the showcase. A lot of the sites use the power of Adobe Flash to bring animation, typography, and design to life.
This is both a good and bad thing of course, Flash does allow designers the freedom to manipulate and control how a site looks and feels, but it also restricts the viewer in terms of needing ample bandwidth to view the site and the whole search engine robots not being able to crawl Flash thing (which is improving by the way, thankfully!).
I’d use Flash a lot more in my day to day projects if it was friendlier to the viewers but it just isn’t. Flash is also just plain hard to work with sometimes. Of all the Adobe applications, I think it has the steepest learning curve. It’s definitely one of those things that if you don’t use it, you loose it.
Now go check out those beautiful web designs and be inspired to create something!
links for 2008-02-16
February 16, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
links for 2008-02-15
February 15, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Television News
January 23, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Television news has been a passion for me since I was in Junior High School. Throughout my younger years I was always enamored by ‘the news’ and wanted to be a part of it. I’ve always been big on conversations and the knowledge you can gain by talking to people.As I went through high school, my journalism bug got worse, I was the News Director of the schools television news magazine program, award the National Student Television Network journalist of the year, was Editor in Chief of my highschool’s nationally award winning news magazine and more.It was only fitting that I then attend the world’s first and finest journalism school, the Missouri School of Journalism. There I was able to hone and develop my journalism bug and gained a lot of news judgement and leadership skills.My time at the Missouri School of Journalism is accentuated by the numerous opportunities I was afforded to work in real newsrooms on real news products. Including at KOMU-TV8.Here are some of the convergence packages I reported, produced, or edited for KOMU News.
- PetAssage
- Columbia Regional Airport Woes (airport microsite)
- Risky Hands (poker addiction microsite)
WiMax is coming! (Thanks Sean Maloney)
August 29, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As the major telcos continue to complain about the cost of laying even more fiber under our streets and into our homes, Intel is betting that wireless is the way to go.WiMax is the next great wireless technology, it’s built similarly to cell-networks, it sits on towers, has a range of up to several miles, is high-speed, and doesn’t degrade when you have hundreds of people using it at the same time.
Some of the biggest players in electronics and the web are coming together on this one and they’re betting that consumers will come aboard soon.
There are a few hotspots if you will popping up in the major metropolitans and we should see hundreds more around the world within 2007 and 2008.
This is one emerging technology that we shouldn’t take lightly.
Read more here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_36/b4048401.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_technology
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