Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Being a Part of Great Collaborations
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they should take care of every element of a project, when they really would offer greater value to clients through collaboration with other specialists. Our friends (and collaborators) at Finesilver Design + Communications wrote a post on the power of great collaborations. Find out if you can collaborate with those who can make every aspect of your business exceptional – we like to think it’s working for us.
Tweeting Ourselves Fit
Active Twitterer Caroline read about a new study claiming that Twitter may help you lose weight. While it’s a more-or-less low impact pursuit on its own, Tweeting updates on your fitness progress can encourage gym check-ins and other active pursuits, as well as help dieters eat like birds. We’ve read elsewhere about the health benefits of social circles and being part of a supportive group in real life. Why not extend that to Twitter?
Exciting Improvements Anticipated Through Automattic Acquisition
WordPress aficionado Andy was excited to hear that Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, bought Simpermium, the maker of Simplenote, a clever note-taking app for iOS. In addition to improving Simplenote, the brilliant minds behind Simperium will help rework WordPress’ mobile apps so that cell phone users won’t download entire blog posts, but rather only what’s changed. What it is expected to do is help end users reduce bandwidth needs. We like to think of it as a simply perfect deal.
Breaking Out of Ad Sections with Native Advertising
David knows that people are likely to tune out online ads – especially the variety separated from regular content and located in designated ad sections. This is why the concept of Native Advertising – where paid content is interspersed with “earned” content – is becoming a popular idea. Blurring the lines with Native Ads has become an exciting idea for advertisers, but, as Neicole Crepeau notes, sites that do so risk eroding the trust between writers and readers whenever a product is mentioned. It’s a tricky line to draw.