A living (or dynamic) document is a document “which may be continually edited and updated”. Wikipedia is a fantastic example of a living document, especially when contrasted with a physical printed volume of a traditional encyclopedia. In essence, all websites are living documents because they can (should) change overtime, whether it be copy changes or the addition of fresh content. To be honest with you, as a former video producer and academic, the idea of a living document excites me. I challenge you to find a media textbook written in the last 15 years that does not include a clause like “the specifics of this book will be outdated by the time it goes to print” in the introduction. However, as a web project manager, I have come to fear the hidden repercussions of the living document.
Yesterday I rediscovered this old post about the WAC hiring a PR firm to bolster Boise State’s quest for a BCS birth. Well, I forgot about this post, otherwise I would have made this update 6 weeks ago, but Boise did, in fact, go undefeated and did reach a BCS game. Ironically they beat TCU, who received the non-BCS autobid. I am not sure what the Boise/WAC payout was, or what the PR firms cut was. But in the end, the campaign worked.
I like that our agency has a variety of clients. Some are big, some small. They come from different industries. Each client contact has a different job description. That variety helps keep our work fresh. But it also allows us to see how smart our clients are, each in their own ways. They know their business, customers and business goals like the back of their hands. The reason they hire us is because they value what we do, and what we do falls outside of their areas of expertise. I would like to think that we do a good job of forming partnerships with our clients, to become the means to extend their brand, their presence and their business goals to exciting new markets. I hope that we help them articulate their frustrations and aspirations to find unique and successful solutions for them. I hope this is the case, because the alternative scares the hell out of me. Continue Reading →
Curtis asked me to write about the “big crunch/big bang” of digital content distribution. I think this is a wonderful topic, but not something I can address at the moment. I would like to do a fair bit of research and reflection before tackling the subject. In the meantime, here is something completely unrelated. A couple of weeks ago I swear I saw a post in the NASA twitter feed that contained a nasa.gov branded shortened URL. I have combed the hundreds of posts from that time period but can’t seem to find it; perhaps I imagined it. Maybe I am crazy… like a fox.
As someone who has grown up using the internet, I always favor services that allow me to conduct business over the web. I do things like shop, pay bills, and bank online whenever possible. In addition to being convenient, I always feel a little better about not wasting paper and other resources required to facilitate these processes. So each year at this time, I’m always grateful for the ability to file my taxes online. And to do this, I’ve always used H&R Block…. that is until this year.
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A friend put me on to an HTML5 <canvas> tag demo that looks like Doom and doesn’t use anything even resembling flash: http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/.
Clearly you’ll need an HTML5-ready browser if you want to play (with) it. It’s interesting enough, especially if you’re from the generation that grew up with Doom (and Marathon, for those of you who were Mac users before it was cool). As my friend noted, it even includes “5D space.”
What really precipitated from this sharing between gamers-cum-developers was a discussion about Adobe and their future. The gist of our tête-à-tête was the increasing capabilities of simple HTML, and the subsequent lessening of importance for Flash, as the standard grows.