Chevrolet Volt called back over battery-fire issues

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | No Comments

Electric vehicles timeline 2011

Posted on | December 31, 2011 | No Comments

The world’s most dogged industry

Posted on | December 14, 2011 | No Comments

The newspaper industry is nothing if not dogged.

It’s been savaged by multiple IEDs on Evolutionary Road–the Internet, mobile phones, video, podcasts, two major recessions in 10 years–and it’s still alive.

Sure, Lee Enterprises, which owns the St. Louis Post Dispatch, filed for bankruptcy this week, but those stories seem to come less frequently these days. The industry has, after all, slimmed down significantly and is slowly but surely embracing the digital world.

One sign post on that road just now shows just how dogged the industry is: The Washington Post’s creation of The Washington Post Social Reader on Facebook has generated more than 5 million readers, according to Social Media Today. That’s what brand recognition can do for you in an era of digital realignment.

You can see more doggedness if you check out the Andrew Rossi documentary Page One, about the recently struggles and evolution of the New York Times. I mean how much more inspiring (and metaphoric) can you get when media reporter David Carr doggedly defends his profession and his paper by telling a media source who has dissed The Times to go fuck himself. “Now, please continue,” Carr adds.

Pure stones.Watch the film. It’s great and it’ll make your heart beat warmly.

In the meantime, I think of that old joke about the indefatigable dog whose owner is looking for it:

“LOST: male dog, has one eye, mangled left ear, paralyzed hind leg, crooked tail. Answers to the name, ‘Lucky’.”

About those emailed holiday greetings…

Posted on | December 12, 2011 | No Comments

I’ll admit: I’ve come full circle. Fifteen years ago or so, I wondered aloud why so many PR agencies and companies still sent, through the U.S. Postal Service, holiday greeting cards. In those days we still got barrels-full of snail mail every day, and the far more efficient and green email was just beginning to be used. Toss. Toss. Toss. Toss. Keep. Toss.

A lot of people would decorate their cubicles and offices with the greeting cards, often those Kodak-picture jobs adorned with signatures and the occasional smiley face. But it seemed to me a much greener and cleaner thing to simply email us something. The medium was ripe for the pickins.

Now, 15 years later, the chickens have come home to roost, and it’s dreadful. If it can be, it’s even more soulless than the robo-cards of the snail mail era. In our leveraging of the medium to touch everyone, we really touch no one. It’s like getting back change in pennies.

In our industry, there are a handful of people who still send hand-written notes (Susan, Nanette, you know who you are), and they’re memorable for that act alone. Being memorable amid an unrelenting onslaught of messages is huge.

In a digitally cacophonous world, we need to redo this holiday practice. Even if it means touching fewer people and organizations, we should buy some cards, pull out a pen (preferably a fountain pen) and touch a few folks.

Author photos must go

Posted on | July 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

Here’s a suggestion for newspapers that want to reinvent themselves as they’ve evolving in the digital age: get rid of author pictures.

You know the ones I’m talking about: They’re outsized photos of head shots of columnists or authors that take up a lot of valuable page real estate in print.

Second, I’d rather not know what he or she looks like in the same way I’d rather not know what the local radio personality looks like. I want my mind to imagine what that person looks like in the same way I want my mind to be stimulated by the columnist’s words.

Third, most of them look like slobs. You have pictures of guys in that classic reporters pose–ties askew, collars torn open, looking like they’ve been up for 36 or 37 hours working on the story. Seriously: who wears ties anymore? They’re usually really pasty looking like they haven’t been out from behind their desk in six or seven months.

But the real reason these pictures need to go is the fact that they represent the face of a dying generation of reporters, one, frankly, that hasn’t handled the transition to the digital age very elegantly. If you want to appeal to a younger audience (even in your digital properties) think about not making the face of your publications look like the kids’ grandparents.

Dear Mr. Cameron: Regulate this

Posted on | July 8, 2011 | 2 Comments

One of the most stunning pieces of media news in our times is being followed with another piece of stunning news.

News Corp. announced this week that it is shutting down the 168-year-old News of the World newspaper in an attempt to limit the damage from the publication’s involvement in hacking into citizens’ phones for stories.

There are any number of perspectives as to what it all means. Mine is pretty simple:

Murdoch’s got stones. I will admit (I’m sure to sound and fury) that I admire Murdoch. He’s the smartest, toughest publishing baron of our time, one who, by the way, has a special fondness for print while moving his company aggressively into the digital age (OK, maybe the MySpace wasn’t so bright). Perhaps, his son, James conceived of the end game, but Rupert signed off it without too much hand-wringing.

That news was followed today by a more depressing bit of news: British PM David Cameron, who has personal links to many of the players in this drama, announced an investigation and vowed tougher regulation of the media.

Reported Reuters:

So widespread was the rot, Cameron told an emergency news conference after Murdoch dramatically shut down his best-selling Sunday paper, that only a completely new system of media regulation and a full public inquiry into what went wrong over a decade at News of the World and beyond would meet public demand.

A new system of media regulation. That’s a completely ridiculous and dangerous notion that needs to be smothered in its crib right now. The U.K. already has pretty strict media regulations that obviously did nothing to disabuse certain reporters from their baser instincts. Instead:

• The hacking came to light.
• Investigations are underway.
• People already have gone to jail
• And the guy who owns the offending (and offensive) newspaper just pithed it in one of journalism most historic decisions.

What more do you need?

Oh, right. Cameron needs political cover.

Engineers and social media: the saga continues

Posted on | June 22, 2011 | No Comments

At Design Automation Conference a few weeks ago, I grabbed Joe Hupcey of Cadence and got him in front of our cameras to talk about our favorite shared topic: social media.

Joe’s a longtime observer, a healthy-engineer skeptic and a savvy guy when it comes to figuring out what to use when with this unique audience. He dives into the details in the video below. Here are some quick take-aways:

• Engineers use social media all the time and always have: “One of the most popular aspect of any EDA site are the forums.” (My add: They were huge participants and advocates of the old BBS system).

• The trick is to complement each social media type and get them to reinforce each other. For instance, forums are user territory. Even if you’re hosting the forums, be careful not to meddle. Instead, look to blogs where your company’s engineers can post tech tips, code examples (especially where there’s a tool that allows you to try out a piece of code).

• Question: How do you avoid enabling customers to slam your products and technology on your own site? “Customers are talking about you anyway. The discussions are already out there. In terms of shaping the message, at least you have the opportunity to tune into it. Don’t shape it. you can say your piece, put that out there and people can evaluate it. And that can be more endurable.”

• There’s no silver bullet. People go to different channels for different reasons. For example, LinkedIn: People are there for professional reasons. Cadence has created a verification forum. That’s a different slice than someone who’s going to read your blog.

• What’s your  best bang for the buck? The blogs, and they work hand in hand with YouTube. On the digital verification space, the mini app notes on blogs, etc. have been effective. Cadence complements that with YouTube videos. “We shot a video at DVCon a few years ago has 600 views: There are 600 people in the world interested in object-oriented v. aspect-oriented verification. Who knew?”

• Twitter? Marginally effective. LinkedIn? Early days. Facebook? There’s some activity there but we haven’t focused on it.

• Joe’s most intriguing comment came at the end: A lot of social activity will migrate inside the EDA tools. “You run OrCad, and the marketplace is embedded in the tool.”

Mike, king of PixelGlacier

Posted on | June 22, 2011 | No Comments

Who is this man? This is Michael Torpea of PixelGlacier, a fantastic design/development house out of St. Louis that’s working with us at UBM Electronics to build the Drive for Innovation site. Mike makes sites pretty; his partner, co-founder and co-king Jacob Hawkins makes it work.

Why the photo? He and I were running our WordPress back end through its warm-up paces and we hooked my iPhone’s WP app into our DFI WP site. Had to test the photo functionality!

We’ll be hitting the road in mid July from Chicago, so stay tuned as the long strange trip gets underway.

How to build audience engagement from scratch

Posted on | May 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

The fundamental difference between media now and media 15 years ago is proximity and data. The rise of digital publishing put readers in touch with reporters instantly via comments. The feedback loop was squeezed immensely; in some cases, it tightened like a noose around the necks of reporters and editors too siloed to listen to what their readers wanted.

Smart reporters looked at their traffic to understand what headlines worked, what story lengths worked, what posting times worked (or didn’t).

Fifteen years later these practices have been weaved into reporter DNA for the most part. It helps nurture existing audiences, builds tighter bonds with readers and helps spawn new fans.

How do you use this proximity, this data, when you’re starting a site and a project from scratch?

This is the really cool challenge we have with Drive for Innovation. We have a compelling title with a double entendre. A snappy Android-ish-looking logo.

But really no one knows about it the minute you light up the site. And within just a few months, we have to demonstrate traffic and engagement: Zero to 60 in six seconds ideally.

It helps that we can leverage our publishing position and our brands. That’s a rolling start. But really it’s much more than that. We will pulling every lever we can imagine, like some fantastic clanking, steam-powered mechanical marvel spawned in the mind of a writer like Jules Verne.

Come along for the ride. This project is as much about its business and editorial objectives as it is learning how to build community on the fly.

Are you nuts?

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

Yes. We’re driving a Chevy Volt across country, starting in July. Our YouTube video below gives you a little of the backstory. In short, we want to celebrate innovation in electronics and got a fantastic, visionary sponsor to foot the bill.

For me, this represents not only a truly epic road trip but a fantastic opportunity to conceive and create some amazing digital content and to really work the levers of social media to spread the word. In the past month or so, I’m learning the ins and outs of geotagging and using spreadsheets and Google maps to create interactive maps.

Our site at the moment is essentially a shingle, but in the next couple of months it will morph quickly into a hyper-interactive place for road-trip content, design stories and features as well as interactive games. My brother, Kirk, will be along for much of the ride, capturing, editing and posting video. My goal there is to become a master of the two-minute documentary.

The challenge is to create a compelling site but one that does an excellent job of driving our target audience back to the sponsor (Avnet Electronics Marketing) site. And it will certainly evolve as we learn what content and engagement works and what doesn’t.

Stay in touch with us here or at

• The Drive for Innovation site
• Facebook
• Twitter

Let the long strange trip begin: