Jakob Nielsen has issued his annual 10 Best-Designed Intranets list. I guess we’ll have to take his word for it since you have to pay $174 to download the pdf to see the screenshots.  But, his post explaining why he selected these particular intranets is peculiarly unconvincing and in some cases downright scary. He seems to think, […]

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you sure don’t have to count circulation figures and ad pages to know that internet has been a disasterous paradigm buster for newspapers in particular and print journalism in general.
Last week’s fire sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune was only the latest ominous cloud of smoke to rise over the […]

Google has just added its re-designed (or shall we say, “un-designed”) Writely word processor to its online spreadsheet offering and renamed  the package Google Docs & Speadsheets.  Is this the end of Microsoft Office?  Not a chance.  Will it be a threat to Microsoft someday?  You bet your ass. 
As is its style, Google has stripped away […]

cyn-in, a web based service that lets enterprise workers easily build, share, manage and publish documents, media and files within a secure hosted online environment, has just gone live.
I’ve been using the new service from the India-based company Cynapse, to work with some colleagues for the past week as part of a sneak preview and I have to tell you I am […]

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that almost anybody with talent and luck can get into the game.  Unlike the pre-2001 bubble, which was marked by big, expensive software development costs and required the endless ramping up of high-overhead people,  much of the current phase of web-application growth is fueled by free or low-cost applications like blogs and wikis or built directly for […]

Those brilliant young men at System One are working on a terrific new application that allows you to find photographs and other images by drawing a rough sketch onscreen of what you’re looking for or uploading a similar image.  Finding images now is  a textual process (by keywords, tags, etc.) but retrievr uses image retrieval algorithms to search […]

How do you maintain a fresh, engaging intranet that 350 employees will actually use–without hiring a full-time editor?  That’s one of the challenges often faced by mid-sized companies and big departments within larger enterprises.  Without frequent updates and compelling content, intranets quickly go stale and employees just don’t use them. 
Tracy Hutton, Director of Learning at […]

Old media may be dying but it’s going out in style as this photograph of world-famous architect Sir Norman Foster’s handsome new Hearst Tower at Eighth Avenue and W.57th in Manhattan shows.  The 46-story tower (which emerges out of the shell of the 1928 orginal Hearst Building) will officially open next month although much of the […]