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The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
Advertising is
Reality
The System
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If you happen to be tooling around Europe this autumn/fall, you may wish to
take a trip to Dublin to attend the Internet World Ireland Conference.
"The Internet creates a Network Economy, a network connecting people and
business, not machines. This conference will explore the business rules for
operating with a network environment", as the press release tells us.
The topics that the Network Economy Conference will to cover include:
principles for doing business within a network, online communities,
relationship marketing, online brand building success stories, case studies
that illustrate best business practice within a network environment.
Keynote speaker is Esther Dyson, who, as well as being famous for
being - well - Esther Dyson, is, apparently, Number 12 in Upside's Elite
100. Upside recently wrote
that Dyson's "stature is based entirely on her ability to influence others
with her ideas rather than directly control companies or huge amounts of
capital."
Ireland appears to be emerging as Europe's digital powerhouse, so if you
have the chance, it's probably well worth attending.
Internet World Ireland Conference
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Internet Guide is another of those "Best of the Web" guides, which
ranks sites on a 1 ("noteworthy) to 5 ("best of the web") star grading scale.
As such, it is as useful as any other list o' links. (We must admit to a
bias against any Encyclopedia Britannica after the 1898 edition...however...)
The third item in eBlast's current list of goodies is an excellent article
on the state of web design by David E
Brown. David is a former associate editor of Metropolis design magazine.
David bemoans the lack of inspirational creativity evident in both online
and mainstream media design. We are inclined to agree with him. ABC's recent billboard campaign,
featuring black text on a yellow background (Semiotics 101) is a fine
example of a boring lack of originality.
Good design in any medium is the seamless melding of form and function. In
the case of web design, it involves intuitive site architecture married to
illuminating graphics and solid information design - qualities which are
all too rare on today's Web.
David does, however, point us in the direction of RockShox, a company which makes
suspension units for bicycles.
We like this site. It incorporates animation on the homepage unobtrusively
and effectively. Graphics are original and small, and one is never in doubt
as to what one will find at the end of each link. We found the site as a
whole fast to load, even at a miserly 24,000 bps.
Take a look at this site, even if, like us, you haven't been on a bicycle
for years. And take 10 minutes to read David's article - it's food for
thought.
--John
Blower
Everyone knows that the best form of advertising is word-of-mouth, and this
is nowhere more so than on the Web, where (mis)information spreads faster
than a Florida wildfire.
Well, now the folks at Web
Cards - who produce postcards printed with an image of your
homepage - have just added a new service to their site called
Recommend It
Here's how it works: You add a "Recommend
It" button to your site, and when visitors click on the button, they are
presented with a brief form to fill out. Recommend It uses robots
to create
an email message which is instantly sent to their friend recommending your
site.
Any fears you may have about presenting Recommend It with your email
address, and thus attracting a well known processed "meat" product is
assuaged by the site's rubrick:
This is quite a nifty idea, although it's apparent that it's not suitable
for all sites. Long-in-the-tooth 'Net sophisticates will probably spurn the
notion, but as the level of "Web savviness' declines, this could well be a
shrewd way of generating traffic.
The Recommend It site
features
their Top 10 and Top 50 pages. While they don't disclose figures
on their member site traffic, they have many sites that they claim have
generated well
over 10,000 Recommend-It emails since they joined the service.
Everyone knows that different makes and versions of browsers render HTML
differently, not to mention the differences imposed by competing platforms.
The prudent site designer will keep several different browsers "on tap" so
that viewing options are constantly available, and the design can be
tweaked for optimum effect across a broad consensus of browsers.
We all do that - don't we?
Reasons for not keeping several versions of Netscape and IE, Lynx, Opera
and a slew of others open to view completed pages range from "Not enough
memory," to "Can't be bothered," to "Uh?".
Here's Browserola v1.01 for Windows 95. This nifty little
number "lets you view your HTML creations through the eyes of other
browsers, without keeping a copy of each on your machine." ("Other
browsers" are confined to Netscape and Explorer, but nonetheless...)
You simply select the browser(s) you want to emulate, the HTML standards
level, type in the file location and - voila! - Browserola checks
the page.
So now you have no excuse for having to slap a "Best viewed with..." button
on your page.
Unless you're working on a Mac, of course...
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
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