Silly? You may call it silly, but it neatly summarizes what I did today: NaDa. How serious can fun be? How Zen can software be?
Who’s Not A Professional?The blog of a belgian IT magazine signals a “strange” press release from an internet marketing company. If you can’t read Dutch, here’s the redux: the company apparently recycled a previous press release, leaving the old text in a red strike-out font type. Recycling may the way to go when dealing with paper and other materials, but let’s face it: this is silly. You could call the press officer or whoever wrote the release a “non-professional” – it’s true that she or he should have seen what happened after copying the text from a fully-featured word processing application into the email body (because that is what probably happened). But I would like go a step further: what this also proves is that much of our software applications are badly adapted for the things that we do, or rather: that we often abuse applications for purposes beyond their design. As in any other trade, you need the right tool for the job. Here, a serious templating/boilerplating system or a content management system that is capable of taking a single document as input and transform it automatically into a fax and an email at the same time would seem much more appropriate than a copy of MS-Word and a poor secretary to whip up the right media mix!
