Ah, the Friday after Thanksgiving.
I’ve heard whiff and rumor that some people were up early (3:45 a.m.!) to make the sale at Kohl’s. Barbaric! I gladly yielded last night to a tryptophan- and champagne-induced sleep, woke up late, and fully expected to spend the majority of my day on epicurious.com digging for turkey-recycling tips.
I didn’t get far. No further than my start page-the New York Times-where I found a little tab called “My Times.” Click, and play play play.
Now let me come clean, I’ve always been a New York Times fan. I think that they’re a wonderful model for communications, customer service, and information delivery. Some proof points:
– I’ll soon be able to read the daily paper on my mac via the Times Reader (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/timesreader.html). Again, free, with my home delivery subscription. This is in addition to the multiple ways I can pull new news via RSS or email alerts.
But, back to today’s treat: My Times. After my experiences with Yahoo and Google News, I’m a bit of a cynic about news portals, but My Times (currently in beta) really works. I’m able to:
This all to me is fantastic! It simplifies my news-surfing time and pulls relevant information into a consistent interface that I have appropriate capability to customize. Why is this important? Well, for me, because it’s all about me. For the Times, because it fosters more loyalty from a member of its subscriber base, but more importantly because it signifies an understanding of the state of communications and service in our information mashed-up, web 2.0‑driven, P2P-soaked, search-steroided world. The Times doesn’t pretend to be the the only definitive news source on the planet. Moreover, it doesn’t attempt to restrict information access only to its “paying customers” (see, for instance, http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html). In point of fact, it gives people the best of all possible worlds, and that’s a terrific lesson in changing with the times.
Voltaire Santos Miran EVP, Web Strategy I've developed and implemented communication strategies in education for more than 20 years now. I think my team at mStoner is the smartest, funniest, and coolest group of colleagues ever, and I can't imagine being anywhere else. Except Barcelona. Or Paris. Or Istanbul. To quote Isak Dinesen, "the cure for everything is salt ... tears, sweat, and the sea."