Art Wolfe Travels To The Edge

We just launched a new website for internationally known nature photographer Art Wolfe. The new site will support Mr. Wolfe’s new television series, Travels to the Edge and is located at www.TravelsToTheEdge.com.

Lux created the entire website, including design, development and unique hosting concerns related to management of such a highly trafficked site. Lux also created, wrote and edited all of the content, from interviews with Art Wolfe team members to the final copy edit.

For the multimedia sections of the site, Lux used Adobe Flash in a complex configuration to serve multiple video streams, utilizing XML.

Major sponsors for the program include Canon and Microsoft. The program is produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and distributed by American Public Television.

Where the Hell is Matt?

At LuxWorldwide.com we launched a website for Dancing Matt from WhereTheHellisMatt.com. He is currently on another round-the-world trip, this time seeking out others to dance with him. Check out his site where you can follow him on Google Maps.

Learn more about the project in our News section.

Gray Lady Down

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

O, my prophetic soul. A little over a month ago, I made the prediction that the newspaper industry had no choice but to adapt to the digital world, that the Internet would entirely eliminate the print versions of local and national newspapers. Furthermore, I said it was a good thing.

I was greeted with skepticism, one friend telling me that there will always be a market for the print version of papers, and that a flagship paper like The New York Times will always be available in some print form or another. He scoffed at my prognostication.

Yesterday, the chairman and publisher of The New York Times announced that they will move entirely to the Internet within 5 years ... if they can survive long enough to do it. The Gray Lady, so called due to their resistance to adopt color printing until the very last (they didn't want to be too much like USA Today, after all) has relied heavily on tradition and old-fashioned newspaper publishing as its main thrust. But now, after losing $570 million between the Times and the Boston Globe, the Times publishing group has been compelled to take action. And "compelled" is the right word: their banker, Morgan Stanley, is attempting to take over the group to stop the bleeding.

Once again, let me just say, everything that can be digital will be digital. The Internet is re-writing the rules for virtually every information and communication company in the world, and those who don't pay attention to the changes or rely on what they have always done in the past are doomed to the same fate as the Times.

I can already hear the moans and the teeth-gnashing from dozens of friends who subscribe to but do not read The New York Times. Soon they will no longer have the New York Times Book Review to conspicuously carry around. Not to worry, the same content will be available on the net so you will still be able to quote Maureen Dowd as if she really mattered in Seattle, and be able to wow your book club with cribbed reviews of the newest Edith Wharton bio.

The Times they are-a changin'.

Project Management vs. Account Management

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

It's not unusual for clients whose have primarily worked in the past with advertising agencies to express some confusion when they see a role called "Project Management" in bids from web development companies.

It's a term that seem fairly self-explanatory to those of us who come from a software development background, but it is not at all clear to those with an advertising or PR background. This is very understandable-in the same way that web development mixes media, it mixes production techniques and processes from different industries. Web Development companies try to borrow what's worked in the past, modifying it to new media development, and also create new roles that are better adapted to the online paradigm.

Those with an agency background work with an account manager and usually don't see a line item calling the project management work type out in a bid. The idea is that account management is "free" to the client. That is, the person or person who are assigned to watch over the project process, see to it that deadlines are met, and serve as the client's main point of contact is offered up without charge as a cost of doing business. That's why it strikes some people as odd when seeing a bid from a web development company that not only calls out project management, puts it front and center in the project process, but then has the gall to charge good money for it. Some take great offense. If some companies offer it for free, why do others charge for it? Well, they are right about this: someone is trying to rip them off.

The fact of the matter is that everyone charges for project management, but some approaches are just a little more, well, honest than others. You see, the agency that includes the project management cost for "free" is simply marking up their other hourly rates to pay for the project oversight. The costs are there, simply hidden in a mish-mash of numbers, obscured in the design and build rates. The bid is simply cooked and the numbers monkeyed-with until the actual cost is reached.

Lux and the other web development companies that use a software development model feel the agency model is fundamentally dishonest, does not help the client understand the actual costs associated with web development work, obfuscates the process, and prevents clients from getting clear and accurate project feedback. The simple truth is managing the communication, scheduling, process, and production of online materials takes time and money, and hiding it behind other work types, or, worse yet, burying those costs in time and materials deals where it can never be clearly accounted for, is just plain wrong.

So, if you see those project management hours in bids for Internet service work, do not despair. All it means is that the service company is being clear and accurate for you, and that you will get an experienced project manager assigned to your project, not some intern that you never meet or who doesn't know his HTML from his BS.

Y2K Redux

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

As we all know, the millennial fears associated with the Y2K "bug" never materialized, but that didn't stop Y2K consultants from making billions of dollars by playing on the public's anxiety. Y2K consultants were little better than snake oil salesmen, and their legacy has damaged the Internet service sector's reputation.

Not surprisingly, many of these same consultants have re-emerged as proponents of the so-called Web 2.0 movement, once again panning for gold in a river of woeful consumer ignorance. My advice to potential employers in the tech sector is to scan resumes for references to Y2K consulting, and to deposit those resumes in the garbage can accordingly.

Because many consumers feel they were misled, when problems do arise in the future you will hear them say ... "this is just another Y2K scare." It's necessary to have a healthy skepticism of any doomsday talk, and, like Chicken Little, prophets of disaster will go ignored. I suppose that's because of the profits of disaster.

So here's the newest disaster scenario for you. It will probably have more effect than Y2K ever did, but even if it's twice as bad, two times zero is still zero.

About five years ago, the US Congress ordained that daylight saving time would be extended by a month starting in 2007 in order to conserve energy. In other words, this year we'll be "springing ahead" about a month early. The problem is, banks, airports, government, and the entire corporate business structure has pre-programmed the change to occur a month later-the results, we are told, will send the entire world into confusion … time itself will be set out of joint. Appointments missed! TIVOs recording the wrong program! People arriving early for work! One extra hour of interest paid to bank customers! Half of the people will have to reset their alarm clocks! Panic in the streets!

The fact is, this will have little or no affect whatsoever. As the late Douglas Adams said, "Don't Panic." Whenever you see someone hyping a technical concern like this, ask yourself who stands to gain from it. Somewhere back behind the scenes you will find the same old snake-oil salesmen pushing their new unctions and remedies.

So, watch out for this new ploy and anyone who would profit by its promulgation (sorry, my alliteration key was stuck).

Web 2.0, Meet Business 101

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

We've been hearing an awful lot about so-called Web 2.0 "initiatives" over the last couple of years, and I'm still not exactly sure what Web 2.0 means. And since people are talking about Web 3.0 now, I thought it was time to suss this out.

Web 2.0 is a diaphanous marketing concept liberally applied to a hodgepodge of technical approaches, websites, and web communities to separate them somehow from that which came before - Web 1.0, I imagine. While no one, not even Wikipedia can give you a firm definition of what the expression Web 2.0 really means, it does roughly allude to the use of technologies such as Ajax, and evokes the idea of community-based sharing (for instance YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, etc., social networks and so-called folksonomies that are part of the "semantic web." The term appears to have been coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2004:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called 'harnessing collective intelligence.')".

If I may be blunt, this is a pretty lousy definition. In fact, I see absolutely nothing new or novel about Web 2.0 ideas at all. What I do see are business people attempting to recast perceptions about web development in order to attract investment. I see the desire to separate technology companies from the Internet crash of the late 90s through rebranding and renaming what is seen as having failed in the past. Essentially, the Web 2.0 concept was created to differentiate Internet technology companies from the failed the dot-coms that preceded them.

But dot-coms they are, prone to the same excesses, and facing the same sobering business realities that one day, one day soon, they will have to actually make more money than they spend. While the new high priests of Web 2.0 preach the democratic notion of folksonomies, they baffle consumers with jargon and misinformation, and when you try to pin them down about specifics, they move on to the next big thing. Sounds familiar.

Web 2.0 concepts are simply a natural evolution of the Internet and require no re-branding or new jargon. All web development should be plainly understandable--be wary of those who would baffle you with FOAF, tag-based taxonomies, synergies and rich web applications that somehow fit their vision of the future, but not your needs. There is no magic in web development; it is a very practical medium.

Let's hope the Web 2.0 bubble just drifts away without collateral damage to rest of the Internet economy.

CEO Blogs

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide

In an article in this week's Puget Sound Business Journal, local CEOs were taken to task for revealing too much about themselves and their companies through their blogs. The main thrust of the article is that many CEOs have taken to blogging and, like any other piece of corporate marketing writing, blogs ought to be vetted by editors et al before they are posted to make sure they aren't saying bad things that will damage the company's and the CEO's reputations.

Luckily for me, I am a mere vice president, so the article clearly wasn't direct my way.

From a consumer's point of view, knowing more about a company and its management is a good thing; I've always thought there should be some kind of simpatico between a client and the business, particularly in the service field. Furthermore, and I don't think the Business Journal points this out, I will be the first to admit that blogging is less about a CEO's primal need to preen in front of an enrapt public, and more a way to attract the attention of Google and other search engines (you see, frequently updated, novel content attracts search engines and improves a company's search ranking ;)

As to the Journal's suggestion that blogs be carefully edited, I can't say that makes much sense. A blog is an informal form of communication, and one would hope that a corporate director would show a little common sense in choosing their topics and would strive to present their company in the best light.

I myself am frequently self-editing so as not to reveal my lengthy criminal record (white collar, of course); my thirteen year stint as an operative for the CIA within the Median Cartel; my role in the creation of robots who will one day subdue and enslave mankind; that Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks was named after me; that I have a Carpenters' CD in my player right now; that I think Alec Baldwin is handsome, but only in a certain light; that I changed my name from Jarman to Jarmon to avoid the authorities; that "Jay's Blog" is actually an anagram for "Jay's Glob"; that grey aliens are actual more on the purple side.

So, have no fear Puget Sound Business Journal, you'll find no such damaging revelations here.

PS -- Did I mention that this blog is actually written by a mandrill? You know, the monkey, not Barbara or one of her sisters. That would be crazy.