The Hammock Blog

Social media and marketing rockstar Chris Brogan invited Rex for a recent Skype interview about Google+, publishing, customer loyalty and the topic of "Helpability," something we'll be sharing more with you about on Hammock.com in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere, Rex has said he's corrected the location of his webcam so that he won't appear so gigantic next time he's interviewed. However, we like the whole 1984 look. From the many positive comments on Chris's blog, it appears there are others who enjoy Rex's passion for new media and marketing advances:

Each year about this time, I'm asked by various publications and websites to contribute my predictions on trends in the magazine industry and new media in general. After a couple of decades of constant curiosity about the evolving roles of media focused on helping companies and associations strengthen their relationships with customers and members, I've come to this conclusion: In attempting to predict the future, it is far more challenging to predict the "when" than to predict the "what."

For instance, the people who follow my blog know that I spent years predicting what finally, eight months ago, became the iPad. While I predicted the "what it was going to be" with great accuracy, I was less accurate on the when. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, author Steven Johnson explains the concept of "adjacent possibilities," a term coined by scientist Stuart Kauffman. The term is an attempt to capture the essence of a creative process wherein new possibilities are made possible only after the occurrence of some preceding "first order" innovation. For the iPad that means two-decades of innovations were required before the "adjacent possibility" of the iPad could finally arrive — innovations in the areas of networking, mobility, memory, miniaturization, Moore's law, Metcalfe's law and lots of laws related to the FCC and telephone carriers.

I can only guess about when the following predictions will occur because some of them may not quite be ready for their prime time. But I'm fairly confident that one day, they will be.

A few of the gazillion
Twitter apps and clients

But to better understand Twitter, and why it is so important, you must think of it as more than a website. Indeed, there are millions of Twitter users who rarely, if ever, visit the Twitter website.

Rex recently outlined his thoughts about the iPad, touching on the debate among early adopters regarding whether or not the iPad is "good for creating content." Google Docs are read-only on the device, but the Keynote app allows you to create an entire presentation.

And while he doesn't view magazines as a medium that needs saving, he does believe that the iPad "provides lots of opportunities for magazine companies who do something other than replicate magazines on an app."

Over at PM Digital, they asked their digital bloggers for first impressions of the iPad:

• Tim Kilroy: "It means your presentation layer just got cooler, and more transparent. The opportunity to create impact and engagement just increased."
• Anthony Avolio: "Marketers must actively consider touch interfaces when planning their designs... While the iPad is just one device, it's likely the start of a new mainstream push for touch interfaces."
• Glenn Lalich: "The iPad just gave email creative a dazzling shot in the arm... And it didn't cost marketers a cent."

That's not unusual. We've been rethinking it constantly since we first launched it in 1995.

I used to think a website -- the design and structure part -- should last for a couple of years. While I've always thought the content should constantly change, I thought the "look" and "feel" should stay fairly constant. Such a personal bias can be seen in my 10-year-old blog. Despite undergoing three or four significant re-designs and three changes in content management systems, even a regular reader would be hard-pressed to point out anything that has changed about the design of RexBlog. Being subtle with the changes sometimes is more difficult than a major overhaul.

I've also always believed (and still do) that different people visit a site for different reasons and a company should make the site's navigation flexible enough for any of those reasons to be satisfied. Unfortunately, I've discovered over the years that no matter how flexible you make a site, it won't work for everyone. So you keep trying.

Today, we've thrown out the two-year rule. Today, we accept the reality that a company's website design and structure should be constantly reconsidered. Things change -- rapidly. And the need to have a website change along with new ways people use the web should be a part of your approach to maintaining the site.

If the Marines do have weather-control equipment, it would likely have been on display at the Expo, which brings Marines and the folks who supply them together for three days of equipment critiques, evaluations and discussions.

Recent research from the Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7 billion mobile apps will produce $4.2 billion in revenue in the next five years. The number of smart phone users is expected to quadruple during that time, to about 160 million.