All it will take is one high-quality rebel to jump into digital textbook distribution. I studied the economics of that business last year for a client and saw the raw numbers of what you say. Someone’s going to come along and convince a large state to go with digital distribution, bundled with something like this new e-book. Talk about a saving in gasoline for shipping!
According to Wade Roush in Negroponte Unveils 2nd Generation OLPC Laptop: It’s an E-Book, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said recently that “… The next generation laptop should be a book.” With two screens, Negroponte says, the device he revealed at a recent conference will cost $75 each.
What Comes After Web Sites and Online Social Networks?
Today we use the web in many ways. Traditional web sites — “places we go” on the web to do things — still exist. But increasingly, web based transactions also depend on the nature of our online relationships with other people.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out corporate IT manager Jim MacLennan’s RSS: Underappreciated Web 2.0 in the Enterprise blog post.
Are you interested in Linkedin and Facebook but don’t understand the similarities and differences? Maybe this will help.
My 5-year-old neighbor uncupped his hands to reveal the contents and asked, “Can you tell me what this is?”
I’ve already written positively about my use of Twitter. Here I write about a pet peeve: the popular practice of reporting on conference sessions via Twitter.
Is "My Dow Network" a "Social Network"?
I recently spoke with Trish Bharwada of The Dow Chemical Company. Trish manages My Dow Network, a web-based online membership service launched in 2007 that targets retirees and former employees of Dow.
In my recent post Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email I listed questions management should ask about corporate email to help plan for adoption of more modern collaborative software applications. The idea behind that post was simple:
Dennis Howlett’s The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media, once you get past the hyperbole of the title and ZDNet’s antiquated requirement to register in order to leave comments, makes some good points.
Dennis McDonald's Personal Facebook Saga
I’ve been reducing my use of Facebook recently having found it to be less useful — and less easy to use — than other social and professional networking tools.
What the Heck is "Social DRM"?
When I first heard the term “social DRM” in the context of e-book anti-piracy efforts — the link is to the RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “socialDRM” — I thought it referred somehow to group peer pressure not to copy files without permission.
According to Lindsay Lorenz of “The Good 5 Cent Cigar,” the student newspaper at the University of Rhode Island, university students are relying more on electronic research than ever before. One quoted statistic, based on data reported at the University of Rhode Island, is that students twenty years ago borrowed more than twice as many books as they did in 2007.
Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email
This document discusses some of the questions you can ask about your organization’s current use of email and how improvements can be made. Also discussed is email’s impact on the adoption of new tools more suited to supporting workgroups and collaboration such as blogs, wikis, and groupsites for sharing information about people and projects.
To add to my previous lists, here are some more podcasts I’ve been listening to:
I recently helped an association client with an “online focus group.” In this approach to exploratory research a series of questions is asked of a recruited group of geographically distributed members via a series of interactive web-delivered question-and-answer sessions.
Comments and Jumping Through Online Hoops
Jive Software’s Sam Lawrence is at it again. In his blog post Media execs are asleep at their own wheel he takes online magazine publishers to task for putting too many roadblocks in the way of readers’ gaining access to and engaging with their content. According to Sam,
One year ago I published Balkanization of the Web - or Just Better Focus? There I expressed concern that the proliferation of specialized search engines — and the indexing to support them — would lead to a more fragmented web. I thought that gaining the benefits of specialization could ultimately reduce the benefits we experience from the nearly universal access to web based contents that we’ve been taking for granted.