Every year, we gather ’round the Yule log-in button and recall how one Christmas Eve, not so long ago, Hammock was visited by a mysterious elf from North Helvetica named Sans-serif Claus who delivered us a shiny new logo. Click the “play” arrow below and we’ll show you how we remember it happening.
[If you’re viewing this on an iPhone or iPad and don’t see the video, we’d be surprised — but just in case, you can click over to YouTube and watch it there.]
Each year about this time, I’m asked by various publications and websites to contribute my predictions on trends in the magazine industry and new media in general. After a couple of decades of constant curiosity about the evolving roles of media focused on helping companies and associations strengthen their relationships with customers and members, I’ve come to this conclusion: In attempting to predict the future, it is far more challenging to predict the “when” than to predict the “what.”
For instance, the people who follow my blog know that I spent years predicting what finally, eight months ago, became the iPad. While I predicted the “what it was going to be” with great accuracy, I was less accurate on the when. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, author Steven Johnson explains the concept of “adjacent possibilities,” a term coined by scientist Stuart Kauffman. The term is an attempt to capture the essence of a creative process wherein new possibilities are made possible only after the occurrence of some preceding “first order” innovation. For the iPad that means two-decades of innovations were required before the “adjacent possibility” of the iPad could finally arrive — innovations in the areas of networking, mobility, memory, miniaturization, Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law and lots of laws related to the FCC and telephone carriers.
I can only guess about when the following predictions will occur because some of them may not quite be ready for their prime time. But I’m fairly confident that one day, they will be.
Until they heard of the controversial website WikiLeaks, many people thought the word “wiki” and the website Wikipedia were synonymous.
Today, there are countless wikis, many built using the same approaches and software used by Wikipedia. SmallBusiness.com, a wiki created and managed by Hammock, is one of them. Other wikis use different software, different approaches and are so different looking from Wikipedia, you may not even realize they’re wikis. (Ironically, there’s nothing about the software or approach used by the website WikiLeaks that is a wiki as popularly defined.)
If you’ve ever wondered why Twitter is so gigantic, it may be because you’ve only looked at Twitter one way: on the website Twitter.com (where, by the way, you can find Hammock Inc here: @hammockinc).
But to better understand Twitter, and why it is so important, you must think of it as more than a website. Indeed, there are millions of Twitter users who rarely, if ever, visit the Twitter website.
[Cross-posted on RexBlog.com]
For the past several months, I’ve served on the search committee to find a new president and CEO of the business-to-business media association, American Business Media. Today that committee disbanded as the Board of Directors of ABM made official the hiring of Clark Pettit as President and CEO, succeeding Gordon T. Hughes II. (I’ve included the press release at the bottom of this post.)
Thanks to those from around the country who have reached out with concern about how we may have been affected by what will forevermore be known in Nashville as the Flood of 2010. While some infrastructure challenges in our building caused many of us to work virtually on Monday, we are fortunate that no one who works at Hammock-Nashville has been forced out of their homes like so many of our neighbors in the area. As I wrote today on my blog, Nashvillians will pull together to journey through the devastation and loss we’re currently experiencing.
For those who have asked how you can contribute to the flood recovery efforts, let me make two suggestions. While there are many groups that are worthy of your support (a great list of them can be found on this post at Nashvillest.com), there are two groups that many of us at Hammock have worked with personally in the past — and even during the past 24 hours.
Either group will put your contribution to work immediately:
The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee: In partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, the Community Foundation is coordinating contributions to the Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund and Tennessee Emergency Relief Fund.
This just in: All proceeds from the sale of this T-shirt go to the Community Foundation.
Hands on Nashville: On behalf of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, Hands on Nashville is coordinating the volunteer efforts.
Over the weekend, Nashville experienced massive flooding due to unprecedented torrential rain. Our office building’s management is working to address issues related to some flooding in the elevator shafts, so the building is closed for the day. All Hammock employees have the ability to work remotely and you should be able to reach them using their regular direct numbers or through our main number 615-690-3400. All employees are safe, but many have neighbors in need, so we’ll also be reaching out to those friends and neighbors today, as well. Thank you to the many kind expressions of concern over the weekend. And for those who would like to help, please contribute to this fund set up by the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
[Photo credit: zordroyd/Flickr via Wiki-Commons]
As many people know, Hammock Inc. is the developer of the wiki project, SmallBusiness.com.*
What you may not know is that my title on SmallBusiness.com is “Head Helper.” Being head helper for a project as big and complex as a 20,000-entry (and growing daily) wiki running on the same software platform used by Wikipedia has given me a few years of knowledge that is limited to a rather small group of people. (And, as I’ve attended one, I can even tell you where you’d find them.)
While Hammock is likely the only custom media and content marketing firm to create and grow such a large-scale wiki project as SmallBusiness.com, I predict others will enter the field as companies and associations become more aware of the hidden magic of the wiki platform. To be honest, if for no other reason than trying to figure out why Wikipedia shows up on the first results page of nearly any Google search, I’d be spending time trying to understand everything there is to know about Wikipedia, even if I wasn’t a wikimaniac.
Here are, in no particular order, some of the most important things you should know about wikis – straight from an official wiki “head-helper”:
At Hammock, we’re currently re-thinking the design, content — even the role — of our company’s primary website.
That’s not unusual. We’ve been rethinking it constantly since we first launched it in 1995.
I used to think a website — the design and structure part — should last for a couple of years. While I’ve always thought the content should constantly change, I thought the “look” and “feel” should stay fairly constant. Such a personal bias can be seen in my 10-year-old blog. Despite undergoing three or four significant re-designs and three changes in content management systems, even a regular reader would be hard-pressed to point out anything that has changed about the design of RexBlog. Being subtle with the changes sometimes is more difficult than a major overhaul.
I’ve also always believed (and still do) that different people visit a site for different reasons and a company should make the site’s navigation flexible enough for any of those reasons to be satisfied. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered over the years that no matter how flexible you make a site, it won’t work for everyone. So you keep trying.
Today, we’ve thrown out the two-year rule. Today, we accept the reality that a company’s website design and structure should be constantly reconsidered. Things change — rapidly. And the need to have a website change along with new ways people use the web should be a part of your approach to maintaining the site.
[Part 4 of a Series: See: Introduction. See: Links to other posts in this series.]
Journalists and librarians are each, in their own ways, devoted to the recording and dissemination of information (or, more precisely, those things we all hope result from such activities: wisdom, insight, knowledge, understanding, truth). However, at the same time, journalists and librarians are quite different in the ways they approach the craft and science of organizing information so the rest of us can access it. Indeed, thinking of what they do as a craft or as a science is one of the ways in which they differ.
