The Kindle 2 has arrived, offering “20 percent faster page turns,” and access to 1,500 books at a time in a 10-ounce, 1/3-of-an-inch package.

I’ve not held one in my hands yet, but I am eager to see how many nanoseconds it takes to riffle through War and Peace. Did they build in the fanning effect you get with a real book?

Seriously, we are going to have to redefine “book.” And not just into something that’s a sleek little electronic toy. The term will also need to encompass features like communal bookmarking, and possibly Twittering.

That’s one of the features being promised by Shortcovers, a Kindle competitor that will work on devices including the iPhone and Blackberry, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Now, Twittering is about producing and consuming 140-character messages. It accommodates the extremely short attention span. I’ve done some Twittering, and I’ve read a lot of books.
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Technological change has never been as fast and furious as it is today, obviously.

An outcome of this is that the tools we work with every day are continuously changing, even as we use them. While there’s only one way to swing a hammer, an iPhone has new capabilities every week. You can’t hope to master all of them. So how do you regard a tool like that? What’s more, how do you adapt your work habits to accommodate to a workplace that’s ever-changing, often in ways that are actually pretty radical?

Leo at the Zen Habits blog has a lengthy but good post that explores a dozen or so ways in which the increasingly open-source, distributed network of the Internet has transformed the ways we work. I especially like his observations that:

We’re in a communications stream, which we can dip into and out of as needed (and we need to give ourselves permission to opt out of it regularly, as it will go just fine on without us).

Fewer tasks are better than many, which again, could be considered a no-brainer, but there is so much pressure to produce in the workplace, that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that excellence is a function of attention. If you want to be the best in the world at what you do (and you do want that) then you have to do less than asked sometimes.

Anyway, it’s a good read.

The Break Up

Jilted yet clueless…

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

“The Machine is Us” from Michael Wesch, Kansas State University

Happy New Year! As you look out on 2007 and set some goals to achieve this year, it may be a good time to assess your strengths and weaknesses. Here then is the test to see which superhero you are most like. I came out as the Flash — although I’m more of an endurance runner than a sprinter. My proclivity toward redheads may have been a determining factor.

Job-security rock?

This is not going to become a video blog, but I had to post this one after seeing it over at the Church of the Customer. As referred to by the Wall Street Journal, it is “cringeworthy” and so much more… any ideas on what to call this emerging genre?

“Citizen Marketers” author interview on CBS News

Here’s Ben McConnell discussing some of the new realities of customer/company relationships.

Playing catchup to Google, Microsoft is planning to become more of a player in the advertising space, today launching its Digital Advertising Solutions, which will enable companies to target audiences using the Xbox, MSN, etc.

It makes sense…

“As today’s consumers spend more and more time online across various digital devices like mobile phones and video games, advertisers are finding they can no longer reach their entire target audience by advertising on a single medium,” Joanne Bradford, Microsoft’s vice president of global sales, said in a statement.

How will this change advertising? We can expect online ads to become more targeted, thus more relevant. Will ads become more provocative, which has been one of the ways that advertisers have tried to reach increasingly jaded viewers? Or less provocative but resonant in other ways?

Maybe we’ll see the product-placement dynamic come online, with more and more staged product appearances in blogs, forums, etc. Personally, I don’t think that will work, as audiences will see right through it and react loudly against it.

On the phone last week with an old friend, I asked when she’d be back in San Diego, as it had been a while. She replied that although some of her relatives had passed away and she had expected to come back on those occasions, they weren’t having funerals — they were instead having online memorials.

Is this a trend? If so, without passing judgment, and from a purely crass perspective, it would be bad news for funeral directors, hotel owners and the airlines I suppose. Although it might be good news for Proflowers…

An online memorial might include video snippets of the deceased, and more and deeper personal recollections than you might experience at an actual wake, and it might last forever as a tribute. It might be a good complement to an actual ceremony, but do you think it works as a replacement?

I’m launching SmarterCompany.com this month as a new kind of marketing service provider. We will help small businesses use Web 2.0 tools (podcasts, RSS feeds, forums, Skype, wikis, etc.) to connect with their customers and prospects. Why? Because the media landscape has changed: people are Tivoing past commercials; listening to iPods instead of radio; throwing direct mail in the trash; and viewing everything as a commodity. Marketing has to change too.

Smarter companies realize that they need to be in partnership with their customers. It’s about listening, and having an authentic brand story to share. That’s where we’re going, and it’s going to be a lot of fun!

More soon…