2007

The Future of Newspapers: 10 Obvious Things – Ryan Sholin and I are clearly on the same page. His list tells newspapers who they need to stop blaming and what they need to start doing to get to a profitable future. Now I wish someone would write a list explaining to bloggers why newspapers have a future. Hmmm.. maybe I should do that?

Wikis… in plain english – In this excellent video explanation, CommonCraft explains what wikis are in a way that anyone(not just any techie) can understand. It’s a follow-up to their even better video, RSS in Plain English, which as of May 28th was viewed over 80,000 times. More consultants need to be educating their customers so they understand why expert knowledge is needed, instead of consultants keeping customers in the dark in an attempt to have job security.

comScore measures recent Internet usage across Europe – According to comScore, there are more monthly unique users in Europe than there are in all of the U.S. This data is from April 2007. The Internet is a global platform, and online businesses should be more conscious of their potential international customers. The UK has 31 million Internet users. Germany has 32 million, and their schools start teaching English in the 3rd grade.

I’m doing work for a service based in the Netherlands, Floorplanner.com. Their country has the highest percentage of “Internet Penetration”, 83%. Floorplanner is an easy home design tool with sharing features. Does it matter to a user in the U.S. that they’re based in the Netherlands? Of course not. Online service businesses are global.