But, Adobe really messed up by making the YouTube video of this campaign an unlisted video. According to Google/YouTube, “only people who know the link to the [unlisted] video can view it (such as friends or family to whom you send the link). An unlisted video will not appear in any of YouTube’s public spaces (such as search results, your channel, or the Browse page).” It apparently can’t be embedded in a WordPress blog post like this one letting people know how fabulous an idea it was, until, well, we realized it was “unlisted”. We’re certain there are reasons one might like to use the “unlisted” feature, but we’re not certain this situation was one of them.

What are your thoughts? Did you bother to click the link and watch the video? Would having it embedded in this post make it any more likely you would view the clip? Or, does it matter at all?

The video you could have watched here on this blog if Adobe hadn't made it "unlisted"

Join us Thursday, January 26 for a live round table discussion with McGraw-Hill – one of Apple’s education partners; Digital Book World – the publishing industry’s premier digital publishing forum; and Aptara – trusted digital solutions partner to the world’s largest publishers, to assess the specifics and reveal likely impacts of Apple’s enhanced eBook ecosystem.

The event is free. It takes place Thursday, January 26 at 11:00am New York / 8:00am Los Angeles / 4:00pm London / 5:00pm Paris. Registrants will receive a link to the recording of the event so you can listen in at a time convenient to your schedule.

Hope to see you there!

The folks at FoodBeast.com explain the idea this way: “McDonald’s Big Mac is such a well known item across the planet that it can be used as a global standard of determining purchasing power between two currencies by comparing the cost of the Mickey D’s burger between any two countries.”

Hmmmm, sounds pretty ‘Fish-o-Filet’ to us, but you’ll have to be the judge. The infographic we feature here today, provided by Online MBA Blog, does a great job of demystifying the index and explaining it’s use.

Via: Online MBA News

Too many companies are still treating enterprise web content as an animal separate and apart from the rest of the enterprise’s content. It’s a wasteful mistake that leads to some crazy behavior. Let me explain.

I work for a financial services provider which is supposed to file its web properties with an industry watchdog or face audits and possible fines. When I started with the company, the websites had never been filed, and the compliance department was reluctant to increase the public web presence for fear of drawing unwanted attention to this fact. Since I was hired to make our sites competitive in the market, this was a nonstarter; obviously, I thought, the sites had to be filed so that we could be loud and proud.

We use a web content management system (WCMS) from one of the big enterprise providers. It’s a notoriously crummy implementation, so hard to use that mentioning it in meetings is a reliable source of hilarity. It’s so bad, in fact, that the folks in the compliance department refuse to use it to review web content; they only go in there to approve or refuse content, not to provide feedback. In order to file the web content, they told me, someone would need to print every web page and every attachment, and deliver the paper copies to the compliance team for markup. The web team would receive the paper markup and transfer the changes to the WCMS, create new printouts…lather, rinse, repeat. Paperpalooza; we have 1200-some webpages.

Now, this company traffics in compliant enterprise content; we administer people’s retirement savings, so we damn well better keep good records. The enterprise realized long ago that the key to accuracy and efficiency is to automate enterprise content management. We have a bajillion systems, processes and automated workflows to ensure that disclosures are compliant, money is moved according to regulations, and records are securely retained and stored.

We pride ourselves on being trustworthy stewards of other people’s money, and on managing our own responsibly and efficiently. But because web content has always been treated as a sideline to our core business, we don’t attribute the same value to the content we put on the web that we do the content in our backend systems. And consequently, we don’t apply the same level of technical sophistication. When it comes to bridging the gap between backend and the web, we rely on a lot of workarounds to accommodate the bad WCMS implementation instead of fixing it. Since those busy paper shufflers who manage compliance won’t use the WCMS, the labor-intensive paper review process throttles the amount of new content we publish, and discourages changes to existing content, so our websites are weak…which in turn perpetuates the perception of the web as an afterthought. It’s a beautifully vicious circle.

Problems? Yeah, we got problems.

Crummy, stale web content: since publishing new content requires a new round of paper reviews, content doesn’t get added or refreshed very often.

Inconsistent content across channels: because the WCMS isn’t integrated, web content doesn’t harmonize with content from other sources. For example, a new print and email marketing campaign that has a web component requires someone from the web team to manually copy-and-paste content from the other channels, tweak it for the web, and submit it for separate review (on paper, remember!). If, say, the print content changes for some reason, the web team has to rely on luck to learn about and reflect those changes on the web.

Error-prone content: since web content is a copy-and-paste job, and since it must manually be reconciled with content from other channels based on luck and happenstance, mistakes get made. For example, we recently discovered that the mailing address for one of our field offices had been wrong on the web for several years. It had been changed in the corporate directory but that database doesn’t talk to the WCMS, and no one had notified the web team of the change (a customer had to point it out). It’s not like automated content reuse is some sort of mystery in the web content world. Ann Rockley has been writing about how to avoid this problem by adopting a Unified Content Strategy for more than a decade.

No audit trail: the paper review/feedback process means that until content gets into the WCMS, there’s no audit trail of who requested which changes, which leads to…

Inconsistency between reviewers: since paper reviews are conducted by whomever happens to be on review duty in complianceland at a given time, one set of corrections is often superseded by the feedback from the person who gets the next review copy. This kicks off a round of meetings with anyone and everyone who might have an opinion. Maybe even a committee. Or two! Since there’s no “tiebreaker” reviewer, the meetings are time-wasting consensus-building exercises. And at the end of the day there’s no record of these negotiations since they occur outside the WCMS.

By rearchitecting the WCMS and integrating it to play well with other systems that produce content, and building in feedback workflows that those responsible for compliance will actually use, we could cut down significantly on the hidden costs of all these problems, and we could focus on producing more, higher-quality content. But until the web content is perceived as of equal value to other enterprise content, we have trouble getting resources to fix the problem. And since the web continues to suck, it continues to be treated as a sideline. I spend a lot of my time trying to explain this to any-and-everyone who’ll listen, and seeking funds to upgrade and integrate the WCMS.

Meanwhile, my colleague, a smart and experienced web professional with far more patience than I just spent six days creating screen grabs of every single web page, printing them, collating them with their attachments, and numbering and cataloging them. The company paid her to do this. She carried them over to complianceland on Friday. I hope she doesn’t spend next week looking for a new job.

I’d like to hear from you

I’d wager you have similar experiences. If so, please share them here. I, for one, can’t wait to read your stories of information mismanagement. Please tell me I’m not alone.

Words matter. Selecting the wrong ones can impede communication. But, while word choice is critical, equally important are spelling, style, punctuation and grammar.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Val Swisher, CEO of Content Rules, Friday, January 13, 2012 for our first show of the new year. Our special guest Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl), will discuss the fast-changing world of language and how we use and abuse it. And, she’ll take questions from the audience.

The specifics

Date: Friday, January 13, 2012

Date: Friday, January 27, 2012
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST
Cost: Free

Register today!

Ten registrants will be selected at random to receive a free copy of the best-selling book for writers, “The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl”. Filled with bite-size writing tips, fun quizzes, puzzles, and efficient memory tricks, The Grammar Devotional gives you a daily dose of knowledge to improve your communication skills and also serves as a lasting reference you’ll use for years to come.

Can’t wait for a chance to win a free copy? Grab one from Amazon right now!

Who is Grammar Girl?

Formerly a magazine columnist and technical writer, Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl) is the founder and managing director of Quick and Dirty Tips, a website that offers short, actionable advice from friendly and informed authorities about topics related to work and life, in general. Grammar Girl also serves up digital stream of lessons on language daily via Twitter.

Thanks to the folks at Marc Posch Design, we’ve got a new brand identity — complete with a new mascot, logo, fonts and more. It’s a work in progress, so keep your eyes peeled for additional changes and new products and services (including new smartphone and mobile device layouts). If you’re interested, take a peek at the logo design presentation and see how the new look-and-feel will appear on print collateral, signs, and the like.

As always, we’d like to know what you think. Please share your comments with us.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

eBooks are making a big dent in the publishing industry. There’s no doubt about that. They’re convenient, and can be downloaded on an increasing variety of mobile devices.

In order to “strike while the iron is hot”, many organizations are rushing to get their existing content converted to eBook formats (there’s more than one). But doing so is oftentimes more complicated — and expensive — than many imagine. It’s easy to make costly mistakes — errors that can impact the usability (and sales) of digital publications.

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) recently announced an online service designed to make the move to be eBooks easier and error-free. It’s called EPUB on Demand, a web-based, one-book-at-a-time conversion service that allows you to submit content to DCL for conversion into one of two eBook formats EPUB and .mobi. No, it’s not an “automagical” conversion service in which you load content in, click “convert” and out pops an eBook in one of two flavors or both. Instead, it’s a one-stop web portal for submitting content in need of conversion.

Once received, the conversion mavens at DCL treat the project as they would any other conversion job (they’ve converted hundreds of millions pages of content in their 30+ years in business). They assign a project manager, resources to handle the conversion, and contact you with any questions or concerns you might have.

Why get help converting content to eBook formats?eBook formatting errors are preventable. Problems can be detected and corrected in the source file.

According to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) — the global trade and standards organization dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption — EPUB (not ePub, ePUB, EPub or ePub) is the “standard format for reflowable digital books and other digital publications that are interoperable between disparate reading devices and applications. It’s a distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications and documents that is based on web standards.

EPUB defines a means of representing, packaging and encoding structured and semantically enhanced web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format. EPUB allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.”Mobipocket (aka .mobi) is used to create Kindle eBooks. .mobi is actually a file format based on the Open eBook standard (now superseded by EPUB) using XHTML and can include JavaScript and frames.

Because, despite what some software vendors — and conversion shops — would have you believe, it’s not as easy to create quality eBooks as you might expect. There are all sorts of issues to consider. Which standards to support? On which devices? In what languages? With images? Tables? Equations? Full bleeds? Color or black-and-white photos? What fonts? And that’s just the beginning.

When you don’t have an experienced team of digital publishing experts at the ready, you’ll likely run into all sorts of quality problems. Words may suddenly disappear or be mysteriously replaced by unrelated terms (“The reader is invited to examine the next Jew chapters…”). Sentences may be replaced with illogical strings of text (“arroz con polio”). Graphics disappear. Formatting shifts. Fonts rescale. Tables don’t work at all. Random typographical artifacts, unsightly indentation, hyphenated headers, hexadecimal notation, character codes, and other digital gibberish creep into the prose leaving readers wondering, “Did anyone even bother to edit this content?”

Quality matters

Consumers don’t like poor quality eBooks. They vent about it in online forums. They especially dislike being charged $9.99 and up for sloppily-produced digital books.

But publishers are starting to take note. In a recent DCL survey of publishing industry professionals, 70 percent of 411 respondents cited ‘quality’ as the most important consideration when publishing an eBook.

“Eighteen months ago, more publishers were concerned about getting their information onto an eBook platform and quality was not the overarching theme it is now,” said DCL President and CEO Mark Gross. “The survey demonstrates that the publishing industry realizes consumers will not tolerate typos and bad formatting in a $15 eBook,” predicted Gross.

“The survey confirms what we have been hearing from publishers, that while the initial push to digital was important, they are now seeing a need to go with the best partners and to improve their quality control and workflow,” said Bill Trippe, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell, an industry analyst firm. “Digital products are becoming the lifeblood for publishers, and consumers are expecting an optimal experience,” he added.

The DCL survey also discovered 43 percent of publishers realized the importance of compatibility with all eReaders, including iPad, MOBI (Kindle), Nook and custom formats. Within the publishers group, the iPad edged out Kindle at 44 percent as an eReader, versus 36 percent preferring a Kindle.

Of course, the DCL survey isn’t representative of all publishers. But, it’s a good indication that quality may be getting more than lip-service from eBook publishers.

Learn more about DCL OnDemand.