Email Standards Project

Anyone who has developed HTML emails of any complexity will tell you its an incredibly painful process. The email may look completely different depending on whether the recipient views the email in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, or any of the dozens of other programs and email websites. While web development is moving swiftly to web standards that work the same on all browsers, it's the wild west when it comes to emails. As a result we are forced to go back to 'old school' table-based HTML with font tags just to get any kind of consistency in how they look. With that in mind the folks over at the Web Standards Project are starting up the Email Standards Project to try and bring the same level of standards to HTML emails that we see on the web. Here's hoping that they are wildly successful.

The Rise of the Social Media Newsroom

In today's Internet based society if the press, or anyone else for that matter, comes across your company the first thing they do is pull up your website. Unfortunately, many websites have vital information scattered everywhere. Most people, and especially the media, are always in a hurry and if they can't find what they want quickly, they'll leave your site and you will have lost an opportunity to get out your message.

Vince Bank from our media department brought up the concept of a Social Media Newsroom which has been a big hit at Optiem. It's a page on your site that provides all of the information the media wants in one place. I could try to explain it more, but the best way to understand it is to look at a Social Media Newsroom prototype we built. It's a simple, but powerful idea that is already catching on with our clients. It won't be long before I expect to see media newsrooms on almost all corporate web sites.

It's definitely a Web 2.0 concept and uses other Web 2.0 technologies such as focus clouds, RSS, AJAX, and microformats.