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Monthly Archives: November 2007
Why email must get more relevant and targeted
As I read this white paper from Responsys on the new rules of engagement for email, I couldn’t help but agree with the basic idea that email needs to get more relevant if it’s to cut through the clutter. Not just the spam clutter, but the clutter of untargeted email.
For example, I regularly receive updates from a networking group, telling me about their meetings taking place each month and encouraging me to attend. Trouble is, they’re quite long, and half a dozen towns are featured as well as my own, meetings I’m unlikely to travel to.
Its and it’s
As reported by The Guardian, England is now 19th in the world literacy league (‘England plunges in rankings for reading‘)
Good news for those of us who make a living from writing!
Keep recruiting teachers who can’t spell, keep up the errors and typos in the newspapers, encourage kids 2 txt and read nothing but Harry Potter until they’re 53! Keep kids on the computer and tell them that reading is boring! Yay! More work for us!
But that report’s probably rubbish anyway, because, as everyone knows, students are passing more and more and more exams with more and more A, A* and A*&%£!?* grades, so today’s kids must be WAY cleverer than those grumpy old men & women who know the difference between its and it’s!
Mapping the media landscape
Still on the subject of tools, here’s Deborah Schultz’s map of the tools available in the social media landscape… itself a useful tool.
I find conceptual maps interesting in that they say as much about the author’s viewpoint as about the landscape itself. I look at this and picture one or two ‘here be dragons’ labels.
Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it’s Social Media
I have a confession to make: ten years ago my introduction to the internet was in the form of an online community for history lovers. We each created our own avatars, took on Roman, Greek or Egyptian family names, and cavorted around the various special interest message boards and chatrooms all day and all night. I made pretend friends and real friends; some I even met IRL (as they say). I learned fluent emoticon-ese, took part in online arguments, role-played, formed some groups, joined others, attended virtual weddings and parties, created banners and avatars for fellow citizens and learnt basic HTML.