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NEWS AND COMMENTARY
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Theresa Cramer, on January 12, 2012
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Theresa Cramer, on November 02, 2011
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Like most of my fellow Connecticutians, I have been wandering the Nutmeg State since Sunday in search of warmth, electricity, and an internet connection—in that order. I found warmth at a friend’s house thanks to his fireplace, and on Monday morning after checking in on my grandmother I headed to the mall, which never lost power. I, along with much of the greater Hartford area, was looking for free WiFi and a plug to charge my various devices.
I was out of luck.
 The line out of the Starbucks was so long I didn’t even bother to stop for a chai latte, and instead I started walking up and down the aisles, stepping over teenagers without school and past their parents who were either sick of being stuck at home with them, or were trying to work. The children’s section was filled with adults, sprawled out around low, brightly colored tables with laptops and iPads (and sometimes both).
The first free outlet I found was outside the actual store in the mall. As I sat down on the floor in front of the pillar and outlet a mattress salesman emerged from his store to warn me that the outlet did not work—he’d been watching people sit down, plug-in, and then leave disappointed all morning. I should have known it was too good to be true. My laptop had some battery power left, however, and I was able to get onto the WiFi so I stayed put… until I realized that the hundreds of people who had the same idea I did were bogging down the connection.
Simply trying to open an email was a minutes-long process. I headed back into the store and plunked down in front of a bunch of Star Trek novels. Getting closer to the source of the WiFi didn’t help. Despite the spotty cell service (thanks to multiple towers down across the state) it was easier and quicker to send emails on my iPhone than it was from my computer.
Eventually I gave up. Tuesday I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose—even though I was still camping out on a floor in front of a fireplace. My friend had gotten his power back during the night and I was hopeful that meant he had cable and internet as well. No dice.
So I went and sat in line for gas before heading to check on my grandmother again. On my way to her house I saw that her community had power back in the town center, and that stoplights were working closer and closer to her house. She still didn’t have electricity but I was able to grab a bagel and some counterspace (and an outlet!) at the downtown Starbucks and get back to work.
As I watched my fellow refugees, and heard their tales of woe I got to thinking about the perils of working in the cloud. One woman could not log on to her office’s secure network over the very un-secure public network at Starbucks. I watched one guy pace back and forth in the parking lot on a very long cell phone call—which I later found out was a conference call.
Meanwhile, I slogged through the emails that I hadn’t gotten through the day before. I started downloading EContent boards, making a list of author corrections, and building a folder of documents to edit offline. I knew access to the cloud infrastructure I’ve built to be able to do my job from anywhere at any time was, well, not guaranteed. Eventually, the Starbucks crew would kick me out and I’d have to work the old fashioned way.
Somewhere during that time my grandmother got power back—but my house was still dark, and cold. So I spent the night there, reading boards and inputting corrections at the dinner table. And I was even able to send the files back to the ITI staff in Medford, NJ via Dropbox thanks to her internet connection.
About 98% of the time I am immeasurably grateful for the convenience of cloud computing. It allows me to work from home, which allows me to live near my friends and family rather than near an office. But when the power and internet fail, and the cell towers go down I hardly know what to do with myself—and clearly many of my neighbors don’t either.
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Theresa Cramer, on October 26, 2011
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NEWS FEATURES
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FEATURED ARTICLES FROM ECONTENT MAGAZINE
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It's true in any industry: you never know where the next success story is going to come from. That's especially true in the world of digital publishing, where anyone with a passion and a little bit of know-how can start a site or community for like-minded people across the globe. No where was this more evident than in the story of Sean Collins, an icon in the surfing community and founder of Surfline.com.
A number of companies have taken the "we know our market" approach by using a simple demographic definition of the market, as opposed to defining the market based on an understanding of the drivers of demand. Knowing these drivers offers far more insight when establishing a market strategy.
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COLUMNS
I don't have to tell you how the word "expert" is just a tad over used. You are probably cynical about social media experts without any help from me, but putting the snarky comments and jabs aside, let's talk about this seriously as I have some important points of considerations for you.An expert is someone that has mastered a topic and/or specialty. So while the world of social media continues to evolve, how can one accomplish mastery of something that isn't done evolving?
Coca-Cola and Google are both making big commitments to content marketing, and are marking a new era in the way global brands advertise.
CASE STUDIES
Though best known for its rigorous educational material intended for college bound kids, William H. Sadlier decided that in early 2011, it wanted to expand its repertoire, and target struggling middle school students and English language learners as well. Working with educational experts, Sadlier settled on creating a vocabulary program that used audio and video to not only engage students, but provide an alternative teaching strategy for educators.
For MLBAM, being in charge of MLB.com and the league's 30 team sites means managing a lot of digital content. Whether it is baseball season or the off season, MLB fans are always hungry for everything from statistics to video highlights, and it is MLBAM's job to keep them satiated with fresh content. When MLBAM realized that it was wasting too much time with traditional methods of logging and publishing all the different kinds of baseball related information, Rob Boysko, manager of multimedia publishing at MLB, started looking for a solution to simplify the process and cut down on content headaches.
FACES OF ECONTENT
As the sole database administrator (DBA) for startup Perfect Market, which provides traffic and content optimization solutions for web publishers, Tracy Tan likes the dual nature of her role. "It's nice to play with data-when business users ask me questions I can retrieve the answers. But I also like table design, and I get to do that for both our operational database and data warehouse database."
Of her title as conference co-chair and community manager for O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) area of practice, Kat Meyer says, "That's a long way of saying I am a connector. I seek out and bring together the people, companies, and organizations that are creating the future of publishing." The TOC team produces in-person events, co-produces events and publications with partners, and publishes books. Meyer helps maintain TOC's online and social media presence via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the O'Reilly Radar blog.
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