Three great examples of the educational potential of new media:

1. This visual dictionary of 53,463 nouns in the English language on one page

2. This incredible video that gives a visual representation of the Civil War in four minutes (please Google it if you have trouble with this version)

3. This animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Notice the effect in each case of the use of multimedia to compress time and space, relate the visual and the semantic, and give a big-picture perspective.

In the case of the Civil War, for instance, we’re given an instinctive sense of the relative length of its major stages that would be hard to get from a written narrative, as well as an animated representation of wins and losses as control of territory: the time between Lincoln’s inauguration, Southern secession, and the beginning of hostilities; the seeming border stalemate through the middle of the country that begins early on and lasts for most of the war; the significance of certain battles for the control of territory; the seemingly glacial pace of the North’s acquisition of territory, as it moves like an amoeba across the map, until Lincoln’s second inauguration, after which the rate seems to increase exponentially. Meanwhile we get a running tally over time of the war’s cost in human life.

The dictionary is the most obvious case of the relationship between visual and semantic meanings, since it both matches images to words and orders words by the relatedness of their meanings. So you might learn that “Jell-O” and (oddly) “substance” are semantically close and then go on to explore visual similarities or differences.

Finally, there are some good reasons to animate a representation of the Bayeux tapestry: for those of us who haven’t gone to France to see it, it’s nice to get something of the experience by video. But then we need some compensation for the loss of the power of actually being in the presence of a 260-foot-long 12th century work of art—especially one that is also a historical narrative of a central event in English history. Since in this case the new medium—video—is a barrier between the audience and its subject; it needs to overcome that distance by drawing on its strengths. One of these strengths is movement: but what’s needed is more than a long (and potentially boring) pan of the tapestry. The new medium must tell the story in a compressed space that the old medium unfolded along 260 feet. So it’s helpful to have both a long pan of the tapestry and an animation of its content.

Recently, Ammon’s blog post “Will Younger Workforce Ease Fed New-Media Fears?” mentioned the impending wave of Baby Boomer workforce retirement.

A younger, tech-savvy labor force is arriving ready to prove their digital prowess, but lingering security concerns remain. I was wondering, though, even if the Federal administrators and training decision makers were open to letting the kids play, what of the retirees that will be targeted for full-time, part-time or encore work? Plenty of Boomers are leaving the public sector, but many from the private sector are showing up, sharing their experience and enjoying a late-career shift to public service.

How will they be recruited? How will their skills be matched to Government need? And will they be prepared for next-generation of digital work environments?

Last year the Partnership for Public Service initiated a campaign to recruit passionate, experienced retirees from nonprofits and the private sector into the Federal workforce, banking on the echo of JFK’s initial call to duty.

While tapping into this pool makes sense, the Partnership describes several obstacles that make the task difficult, one the most obvious being recruitment. The Partnership describes the Federal Government as “isolated” and gun-shy of hiring “outsiders.” Largely a cultural issue, but HR issues of preferred promotion from within, security clearance, and general flexibility remain issues they are actively seeking to improve.

In order to recruit these individuals, it seems a combination of new and traditional media will come into play. Why do I say this? The older generation (in an ageless cycle) will get their information from younger new-media junkies. A Gen X or Gen Y parent will call Boomer grandparents to remind them that the grandkid wants a Webkinz for his or her birthday. The call (or IM exchange) will go something like this:

>”WEBKIDs? what’s a Webkid?

>”Webkinz, Dad…with a z.”

>”{expletive}”

(Note: Actual conversation heard at recent party.)

After twenty minutes of attempted explanation, Grandpa was fascinated but still unclear about the whole process. Someone whipped out a laptop, got onto the Internet via wi-fi, and gave him the virtual tour, which has Flash animation and audio commentary. In less than five minutes, Grandpa understood Webkinz. As luck would have it, he then opened a present—a Magellan GPS navigation device. In half an hour a former technophobe was ready to navigate both virtual and real landscapes.

How do you connect GPS devices, cuddly web denizens and next-generation Government employees? Simple: Retirees have experience and leadership that could surely help alleviate the impending Federal workforce crisis, provided they can be quickly trained and are able to easily access and implement emerging training architecture.

If the Government can quickly train Grandpa for his new Federal job while simultaneously getting him comfortable with new technology, it will be able to more quickly tap his expertise and avert its organizational mission-performance concerns.

Bottom line? Be nice to Boomers. They just might be our ticket to a well-trained, technologically proficient, high-performing Federal workforce.

Sometimes it’s when you experience something that affects how you experience it. Timing is everything, right?

Today my friend, a fellow new parent, sent me to Gever Tulley’s TED presentation titled 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. Obviously that was meant to be taken for what it was, an enlightening commentary on countering the ever-tightening safety regulations that, to paraphrase Tulley, are essentially stunting our children’s educational experiences. I couldn’t help taking more from it, due largely to when I watched it.

There’s been a lot of talk around Mind & Media lately, and in the press in general, about the impending retirement of baby boomers. The federal government in particular is facing huge a wave of boomer-based workforce retirement, with a younger generation that just doesn’t have the numbers to fill in. In response, we’ve had agencies turn to us, as far back as 2003, to help recruit job candidates and train existing workers. After a few years of navigating those waters, I couldn’t help draw some comparisons to Tulley’s talk.

As Tulley tells it, we are ever-increasing the safety measures around our children to the point of immobility. Society as a whole is so concerned with a bruise-free existence that experimentation and experiential learning are stifled, and real breakthroughs in understanding and education are missed. Secure, sure, but stunted.

Back to the fed. They need to recruit and train to tackle an impending disaster. Online media should be the cornerstone of those efforts, but all too often agencies are cocooned in safety and security and watch-dogging to the detriment of the effort.

No hard data to back up this claim, but I’m certain that folks who access federal agency websites or intranets actually use the public Internet as well. They’ve heard of YouTube, they’ve seen a Flash animation, and they’ve listened to streaming audio. To pound it home, do you think 20-something college graduates may be familiar with such things? Graduates who may consider employment in the federal workforce? They live it. They expect it. They want to be engaged. And yet use of, and access to, the so-called new media is often outside scope for federal agencies.

Some examples: I’ve come across folks within federal agencies who want us to stream media for their audience but can’t access the media while at work due to policies that forbid it. I’ve had folks request we use Flash animations to aid in training, only to find that they are unable to install Flash player on their agency computers. And I’ve seen just-in-time online training get mired in months of legal review. Not so just-in-time anymore, eh? What’s frustrating is that they are workers in those agencies who get it and who want to evolve the media that is coming out of those agencies. It’s just an uphill climb.

Perhaps federal agencies are scared of new media or dynamic websites, what with viruses, bandwidth constraints, employees watching streaming music videos, and what have you. Maybe they don’t know how to leverage the technology. I understand the gargantuan federal government isn’t nimble, but a systemic shift in thinking is necessary if they are to compete for recruits or are going to effectively train the workforce that remains after The Great Retirement. Static doesn’t do it anymore. Static content doesn’t attract, engage, or help retain. It sure as hell doesn’t compete. Agencies may consider it playing with fire, but, hell, if we can let our kids do it, how bad can it hurt?

It’s time to let folks get dirty, get a little banged up. This is no time to be timid.

The California DMV has shifted into a new gear by posted a number of training videos on YouTube. There are over 100 videos on YouTube that cover “Rules of the Road,” “Top Ten Reasons for Failing the Driving Test,” and specific questions from the test. When I first heard about this, I was skeptical that the videos could both inform and entertain today’s crop of drivers-in-training. The YouTube channel is doing just that. According to the New York Times,

“Since the department’s effort at youtube.com/californiadmv began last month, some of the clips have been viewed nearly 5,000 times.”

With those numbers you can certainly consider this experiment a success, especially since YouTube is a free service. Conversely, the DMV’s MySpace page is less popular. It currently boasts fewer than 40 friends, despite having a Q&A section called “Ask George.”

Why is it that folks simply don’t know about Google Docs?

Last night my wife was grinding away at a school project, specifically a collaboratively written 37-page paper. Sounds like a blast, eh? As the deadline loomed she and her two collaborators were taking turns frantically making edits and then emailing the doc to the others for their turns in order. So while one person was working, the other two sat idle. In other words, at any given time, roughly 36 of the 37 pages were not being touched, and two-thirds of the brain power were checking their email every 30 seconds. That’s crazy talk! Enter Google Docs. It might still technically be in beta, but Wes dug up some sweet stats on its soaring popularity.

Money quotes from blogger Becky Blitzenhofer:

Lately, I seem to be getting more invites to view a Google document (rather than a Word document). I guess I’m not surprised though. It has been just over a year since Google Docs and Spreadsheets was officially released, and it has been just under a year since Microsoft released Office 2007. As many know, Office 2007 includes a whole new interface that is unfamiliar, and potentially frustrating, to the veteran Office user.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets are free and easy to use. In addition, they offer online sharing and collaboration, which is becoming a complete necessity in today’s workplace. The more people share links to their documents, the more people will be exposed to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google doesn’t have to do much, as Docs and Spreadsheets are viral by nature and should continue to spread. Google can move on to saving the world (such as with this project), while users continue to spread the news about a possible alternative to Office 2007.

Check the charts. There were roughly 200,000 unique visitors in October 2006 and over 1.4 million a year later. Nice jump indeed, but compared to computer users overall (or even just Microsoft Office users), that number isn’t much.

Google Docs is to documents what content management systems are to websites. What? That analogy isn’t razor sharp and crystal clear? I just like to insert “content management system” into everything I write these days.

What I mean is that in the old days of 2005, most organizations had to shepherd any and all website changes through the almighty webmaster. If two revisions showed up at once, one request sat idle while the first revision was made. Now we have content management system websites that allow multiple layperson contributors to edit multiple pages at will.

Further that, the editing takes place on a Web server, so you’re never without your latest content or development tools, like Dreamweaver. If you can hit the website, you can edit the content. That’s how Google Docs works. The documents live on a Google Web server, so if you have Internet access you can get your doc. No more, “Oh crap, I left the Fitzbergensimmons report on my C drive!”

AND here’s the kicker: multiple users can access and edit the same doc in real time. And all edits are tracked and recorded, so if some bossy wanker deletes your brilliant phrase, you can bring it right back. In short, once you use, and collaborate on, a web-based doc, the limits of desktop applications will simply glare into your eyeballs like those annoying halogen headlights.

So we’re back to the question of why don’t folks know about Google Docs? It’s been around, in one form or another, since the summer of 2005. This free, web-based, collaborative word processor has been available for over two years, and three well-educated graduate students had no inclination to use it, and at least one had never heard of it. Why not? I don’t know if it’s lack of promotion or lack of understanding, or if it’s simply because the large majority of computer users are Microsoft lemmings. We don’t know what we’re not missing, right?

Well now my wonderful wife knows what she was missing, and I hope she gets her teammates on board. I know I won’t miss the late-night panic attacks she’s been suffering.

My latest OnlineMediaDaily newsletter pointed me to a Catherine Holahan article at businessweek.com about the seeming downward slide of user-generated (read “amateur”) video on the Web. Amazing, considering we really just got started consuming user-generated video in 2005 when YouTube launched. Can it really be a flash in the pan?

A highlight:

Over 57% of U.S. Internet users say they have watched or downloaded online videos, according to a July study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But they’re not flocking to home videos. According to the study, viewers are most interested in news videos, followed by comedy bits and television shows. Research by Burst Media, an Internet ad network that studies the video market, echoed the findings, ranking news clips, movie trailers, comedy sketches, music videos, and TV shows as the top categories. The category that includes clips produced by users placed ninth out of 11.

I’m not surprised by that ranking, are you? But it’s not about from where, or by whom, the video is generated. This is about quality of content. And in that sense, sure, professionals have the upper hand. More years in the game, bigger production budgets, more contributors with proven chops as writers, editors, and directors. That’s not the point. The point is that user-generated content can be powerful, and can have a hell of a lot more impact than we currently expect from it.

I get that with the birth of user-generated content, the Web was flooded with, as Holahan put it, “skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties.” That crap will die down eventually, and good content will both rise up and find niche homes online. I leave the term “good content” vague purposely. I mean the really funny, the really unusual, the very passionate, the very dramatic, the most relevant.

In the past two weeks I’ve talked with folks about using user-generated video to help promote a park by letting visitors post video of their reactions and comments online. I’ve talked with folks who want to build a virtual museum from user-submitted interviews and stories. And I recently posted about Amazon allowing customers to submit video product reviews. All three are great applications of user-generated video. But in all three cases it still comes down to quality of content. People mooning the camera at the park, uninspired museum interviews, and lame product reviews would each render the respective intents worthless. BUT enthusiastic raves about the park, passionate storytelling, and insightful product reviews would each have greater impact than any professionally produced marketing piece could ever hope for.

Don’t write off user-generated video—just help it find its purpose.

About a year a go I recorded myself saying “Vibrate!” very loudly into my cell phone so I could use it as a quasi-existential ringtone. In quiet situations, people would hear my obnoxious ring and ask me to set it to vibrate. Oh wait, it already is! Ha ha!

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that funny, but I noticed a story in the Associated Press the other day that led me to wonder how and why we personalize our PDA announcements, alarms, ringtones, etc. Take the hottest ringtone hitting the streets, elevators, and subways of Madrid, for example: ”Por que no te callas?” or “Why don’t you shut up?”

It’s quite an unremarkable yet popular audio file celebrating a recent snap from Spain’s King Juan Carlos at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during a heated exchange at a summit in Chile this month. Downloads from hip-hop artists and classic rockers I get, but a dis from a presidential summit?

The choice of ringtones is clearly no longer really to notify us of incoming calls. It’s rather an exhibitionist’s overt ploy to engage someone in discussion about them and their likes. For me it’s just a distraction and gives me way too much info about the person than I need, especially strangers. I don’t need to know you’re a Smashmouth fan or that you like Stewey Griffin if we are sitting side by side on the Metrobus, do I?

Granted, ringtones can be icebreakers, but you don’t have control over when they might go off. Remember, first impressions can be deal clenchers in business and social settings. You wouldn’t want the Bee Gees singing Staying Alive while at your uncle’s funeral, would you?

So maybe a simple bell evocative of age-old technology will safeguard one from embarrassing disclosures or inappropriate timing. The aural landscape is cluttered enough with the cacophony of our culture. Let’s head back to basics. Right, Watson?

PS: According to legend, before the bell, Alexander and friends first worked up a vibrating receiver for the fledgling phone. Put it on vibrate, and you’re truly old school.

While USA Today and WSJ circulation numbers are climbing or holding steady, respectively, the outlook is dire at other dailies.

BizzyBlog has more details.

As a former reporter, I have mixed emotions. In the late 90s, I participated in website content development for a major daily intent on transitioning its print presence. Clearly, papers recognized a decade ago that they were headed for a primarily electronic existence, but I’ll still raise a glass to the smell of fresh newsprint.

As a former PR flack, I’m wondering how agencies are adjusting their promotional fire. The explosion of web-based user-driven outlets has created plenty of new placement potential. Unfortunately, the overall audience is about the same size. So, instead of two million people reading an article on the front page of one daily paper, you get one person deciding which of two million sources he or she might get information. Does that mean more pickup for a press release, or is finding a way to make all those editors happy even possible?