EMG 30-Second Rundown: The pace at which technology is accelerating is exaggerating the differences in culture, expectations, and mindsets among different generations of today’s children, teenagers, and young adults. It’s essentially creating mini-generation gaps. Kids only years apart might have vastly different communication preferences, and even mental capabilities such as multi-tasking.
Key Quote: “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology…College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
The EMG Takeaway: Perhaps the notion of the “18-25 year old” marketing segment loses a bit of relevancy as the difference of only a couple years displays itself in exaggerated ways. The article is also resounding endorsement of the discovery process, truly understanding who you are trying to reach, their expectations and needs, and why that knowledge might alter your tactical approach. It’s a phenomenal reminder too for us to step outside of our own expectations for how we want products marketed to us. While one generation might find receiving a text message upon entry to a grocery store utterly intrusive, another generation (or sub-generation) might expect the interaction and find the experience odd or disappointing without it.
Final Words: An article interesting for the insight it provides, and the reminder that it serves.
Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:
1. How do you stay actively in touch with the expectations of those outside your own generation?
2. Have you observed instances of this mini-generational gap in your own life?
3. Kids have always had the attitude that their parents are hopelessly out of touch; is this any different, or is the contrast of the divide starker than ever?
Basically, someone goes out and hides something in public and posts the coordinates online. You are then supposed to go to that website, get the coordinates and put them into your GPS (hand-held GPS, not your car navigation).
The coordinates get you pretty close to the item (or “cache” as it is called) and you have to use the clues they post online to find it.
The caches ranges in size from a small matchbook to a big ammo box. Inside you’ll always find a log where you can put your name, and in the bigger ones people leave little knickknacks and toys. It’s great for kids because they can trade one of their old toys for a toy that is inside. Some caches even have stuff for grown ups like movies (my buddy got a Willow DVD out of one).
Geocaching is a great hobby for technical geeks like me who like to “figure things out” and for families who want to spend time together outdoors.
So far, me and my family have found 48 caches in and around our city. How about you? Are there any other geocachers out there?
I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now. In case you somehow haven’t heard of Google Wave before, here is a description from the website:
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
In simple terms, I see it as a dynamic message board. It’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t been hooked on it yet. It doesn’t feel conducive for everyday use. I definitely do not see it replacing email or IMing anytime soon, like some suggest will happen. Seems more for specific group projects or interest groups.
Even then, you have to be able to wrap your head around the concept and features in order to be able to use it and I think the general public might be turned off to it before they get past the learning curve.
One of the hardest things at first is that you don’t have any friends when you first join. Two things to help:
1) When you join Google Wave, you should get a wave in your inbox from Google that allows you to invite some friends.
2) In the search box, type “with: public” without quotes so you can browse and join public waves. (see below)
I just got a bunch of invites and sent it out to a few people here at EMG. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart once I start using it in a business setting.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Day Ignite 2009 Customer Summit in Chicago (10/28 - 10/29) as a Day Partner, care of Earthbound Media Group (my employer and Day Partner). Topics covered ranged from the upcoming Communiqué (CQ5) 5.3 preview (which I’ll comment on momentarily) to running CQ5 in a Cloud environment to the new Microsoft Sharepoint Connector - and much much more! At the conclusion of the conference, we were treated to dinner and a show at the Chicago House of Blues - Foreigner! It was pretty neat!
The first thing that I want to share is the David Nuescheler’s Top 10 list of new features in CQ 5.3:
I have been involved in content migrations for EMG and its clients and a few in my earlier jobs as well. Some of them wanted to migrate from a database driven custom CMS to a ECMS product, Some wanted to migrate from a Database driven CMS to another Database driven CMS tool and some others were not sure of which way to go except for the fact that they wanted to move from their current CMS. Bottomline for all these migration scenarios is the client wants a better Website or Intranet (as the case may be) that gives the client more mileage.
Whatever the case maybe there are some common factors for content migration that will determine the complexity of the entire process.
1. Origin of Content / Content Repositories - The simplest scenario will be to migrate from a well defined relational database to the new system. But, this is never the case. There are always multiple systems from where the content originates – it could be a combination of one or more of the following : database systems, flat file, legacy systems, another content management system etc. The complexity of the migration process increases with the number of content sources.
2. Content Quality – One of our clients had their navigation system in imagemaps, thankfully, they did not want to migrate the existing navigation system as-is. In another instance, when we were automating a migration from flat files, we found that the HTML files did not follow any template and some of them were missing values for fields that were mandatory on the new system. So, we had to do a partially automated migration.
3. Content Types and Amount of content– Content Type could be text, Documents, Media etc. In a manual migration, Amount of content to be migrated will play a major factor.
4. Upgrade existing system – So far, I have not come across a scenario where the client wanted to do an as-is migration. There has been a substantial upgrade – either by defining additional fields, additional value add by implementing Search Engine Optimization, Information Rearchitecture, content cleanup etc. The complexity of migration will obviously increase with more value adds to the existing system.
5. Users, Roles and Business workflows - Mapping the users, roles and business workflows from the as-is system to the new system is a time consuming process. Sometimes we may have to redefine the mapping if the new system does not support the working of the as-is system.
Method of migration – Based on the above factors, we should be able to figure out if we can do a completely automated migration, completely manual migration or a combination of automated and manual migration.
The entire process will be successful only if we keep the actual “freeze” time (change over from the old system to the new system) within acceptable limits.
I recently received an ‘IT Insights’ mailer from a placement company I once worked for. Included in that letter was a section on Developer Skills and what to focus on over the next 5 years. I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out, comment on, and add my own two cents to the topics in this article.
The main topics of this article were:
The big three languages
People/soft skills
Web development and services
RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
Mobile
Let me review these topics, but in a slightly different order…
Left brain verses right, numbers versus pictures. What happens when numerical data exceeds the ability to provide useful information, not because it’s unsolvable, but because the amount of data is expanding so fast that meaning cannot be derived? Sure there is automation to help with the processing, but eventually that data has to be refined to into palatable representations. As marketing becomes more data driven it’s also important to remember it’s marketing’s goal to create emotional reactions.
Think of the Twitter cloud. While an extremely simple example, the Twitter cloud easily displays the biggest topics by increasing the size of the words relative to the number of times a particular word / phrase is mentioned. The data could have easily been presented in numerical results, “245,000 mentions of ice cream,” lifeless. Instead, we “feel” the importance of Ice Cream simply by visualizing its size relative to the other words. We are able to instantly compare the significance of the data based upon feeling, supported by raw numbers. Simple right? What about the fact that data is the fastest growing thing on this planet and its grown rate is actually beginning to exceed the performance abilities of the mediums it’s stored on.
Between the years 2000-2003, two economists at Berkley, Varian and Lyman, estimated that the total production of new information in the year 2000 alone reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year between 2000 and 2003. This is pre-facebook, twitter and MySpace, and look at the amounts of data in those three arenas alone.
Data visualization is crucial to connecting emotional depth with an increased understanding of numbers, especially as we begin to tackle staggering amounts of data. It provides the bridge to communicate the meaning and emotion of the data. It can even bridge the communication gaps that exist between data analysts (left brain) and creative marketing leaders (right brain). The future of marketing relies on both, equally.
Interactive Data Visualization: The following image is a snapshot from Fidg’t, a Java-based desktop application that visualizes a user’s social network using Flickr and LastFM tags. More than just a simple data visualization tool, it allows you to interact with the visual elements and create dynamic relationships from complex data sets and meta-tagging. Simply put, it provides emotional meaning to the data.
Culture is defined as - the art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Technology is changing the recording and dissemination of collective information. There is no better representation of this than the online Enterprise Content Management System. Because of the collaborative nature of these systems it is much easier to update content and keep your message current and valid; but it is also much easier to have conflicting content and incorrect versions of your content.
As a project manager I orchestrate the implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems for a living. I have managed builds from the ground up and I have managed implementations of third party solutions. Every system out there is unique and each have strengths and weaknesses but there are certain issues that run across all of them. These issues aren’t necessarily flaws in the application but rather, they have to do with the intricacies of deploying information about an organization on a company-wide scale.
In a recent project we had done in CQ5.2, I was trying to hook into the built in logging configuration that exists in Apache Felix.
What I wanted was 1 log file for each of our sub projects. This meant I needed one Logger and one Log Writer.
For example: I have an emg-commons bundle and an emg-components bundle and I would like to have a different log file for each. I’m able to create this using the configuration section of the Felix console by creating two Sling Logging Writer Configurations and two Sling Logging Logger configurations.
The disadvantages here are the the different elements are unreadable when I want to come back in and change the logging levels. They have a pId in the name when created, so i have to remember the one I want looks like this:
In addition, any time I create a new local instance for testing … I have to go in and re-create these with the screen interface. (An interface that doesn’t clear form values but does reset drop down menus leading to a headache when trying to add and edit logging configuration).
So I did what any responsible developer would do. I took an undocumented, fly-by-testing-it-out, shortcut.
The standards and best practices in creating HTML Email are different compared to creating HTML for a web design. Instead of checking for cross-browser compatibility, it’s necessary to test to check how different email client types render HTML and CSS.
The Email Standards Project [www.email-standards.org] is an organization leading the way to improve the web standards and accessibility in email. They are working with both the designers and email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. Currently, acid test is conducted on several of the email clients to determine the level of support. Based on the acid test, they’ve determined which commonly used CSS are supported.
For example, in Google Gmail, there is partial or no support in following high priority styles:
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