The first time I saw The Christian Science Monitor, I expected it to be chock full of wing-nut proselytizing, like, say, The Watchtower, that curious piece of rubbish the Jehovah’s Witnesses leave behind after you shoo them off your front porch.
What a pleasant shock it was, back in the day, to discover that this little broadsheet was a respectable, serious newspaper that publishes insightful exposes and often breaks major national stories. And they even had reading rooms, where you could wander in off the street, sit down in a quiet place and read the paper (or the religious books they provided) — how cool is that?
Yesterday the CSM announced that after 100 years, it will stop producing its newsprint edition and publish only on the Web. It finally makes too much sense economically and environmentally not to do that, and it’s only a matter of time before other national publications follow suit.
As previously noted, the Yellow Pages are now as antiquainted and useful as dial-up rotary phones. Yahoo and Google have redefined how people find businesses by offering simple but powerful search functions. And now a San Diego start-up is poised to unveil a next-generation business directory that will incorporate Web 2.0 features to give consumers a voice — and maybe a lot more influence in the marketplace.
MojoPages is in alpha and rolling toward beta, and doing so in very transparent fashion. You can follow the impending Mojo launch through a series of videos on Veoh, a new one shows up every Tuesday, and on the MojoPages blog here. The video series introduces the team, tells the story well and captures some of the early-stage energy behind what looks like a great idea.
And the timing for an interactive business directory that enables consumer ratings and feedback couldn’t be better. Just last week Citizen Marketers, a new book by Church of the Customer bloggers Ben and Jackie was published. As the big media behemoths continue to lose ground to new media outlets like MySpace and YouTube, businesses are necessarily searching for new ways to effectively reach their customers. The trend is toward engaging customers in conversations, and businesses that ignore the trend do so at their peril. Your customers are your best evangelists, and they are about to become your marketing team too.
So why not an online outlet for raving fans? While MySpace and to some extent YouTube are great for the narcissistic, it’s-all-about-me set, there’s room for a practical, useful Web 2.0 play — one that helps you find a decent plumber when one you need one, or a muffler shop or whatever. Word of mouth, after all, is the mother of all marketing, the ancient method of assuring that the cream rises to the top. If MojoPages can become an agent of truthiness (props to Stephen Colbert) we all win.
Practicing what he preaches, George Siemens has made his new book “Knowing Knowledge” available for download as a pdf, and posted it as a wiki. It’s also for sale on Lulu.com. Scanning it, part one is theory, part two appears to be more focused on practical implementation, but it effectively raises some interesting questions right off the bat:
Is the book still a viable vehicle for knowledge transfer? Think about it, a book is essentially a snapshot in time from one tiny pin-prick of a perspective. Business books typically assert an authoritative viewpoint — this is how to solve this problem. But how can someone sitting at a keyboard in a small room for a certain period of time anticipate the particulars of your specific problem? If that person is knowledgable, they can produce an artifact that has value, sure. But can they compete with say, a network of semi-experts?
Will kids being born today actually consult “books” when they reach adulthood? Or will all human knowledge be readily available, and accessible on the fly, in other formats?