The DMI has created an Innovation Blog, but without some drastic changes and added features I fear it will not become as influential or as useful as it should coming from such a great institution. Here’s a link to the blog: DMI Innovation Blog
IMHO the DMI has an enormous opportunity for influence on the Design blogoshpere, if it can only put the right framework in place to take advantage of its amazingly talented membership. If it could use blogs to facilitate the capture and distribution of it’s communities intellectual capital it has the potential for huge influence in the business arena.
The first problem with the innovation blog is where it lives, it seems to have been created as an adjunct to one of their conferences, it’s breadcrumb illustrates where it lives:
Home > Conferences > DMI International Summit > Innovation Blog. That doesn’t bode well for any permanence, as soon as it gains any sort of popularity they’re going to want to give it a home and detach it from its conference genesis
The second problem with the innovation blog fails to take advantage of many of the features and best practices that makes blogs successful, three major problems IMHO are :
- Commenters don’t get a link back to their own website
- Commenters email addresses are exposed to harvesting
- No permalinks or trackback (imagine how much faster they would see this feedback if they had tracback enabled)
Don’t get me wrong, i love the DMI, I just feel that it squanders opportunities to facilitate the design community, when it could really become a lynchpin.
3 comments so far
Hi Karl
I agree with you – DMI has a great potential, still. But as I see the blog-initiative it’s 2 seconds to twelve for DMI.
And I think they just realized – Tom Lockwood is just hired as new President, and now they are trying out some of the “new stuff” on the Internet. I hope the best for them, I really do.
…and I agree with you – they have to adjust a few things if hoping for a blogging success.
All the best
Hans Henrik
Hi Karl,
Excellent analysis of the blog and it’s issues, both current and future. I also agree with Hans Henrik on this.
best,
niti
Couldn’t agree more, Karl. The characteristics you cite are some of the key differences between blogs and other websites. But they’re simple fixes…if somebody’s listening!