The AG and change agents by Jonas

TIME is launching a redesigned version of it’s site this week, nice and sleek design, although it clearly reminds me of the New York Time’s site and the work of Khoi Vinh.

With the new launch they also introduced something called the AG, which has a prominent position on the first page. Basically it’s a regular blog with the difference that it currently is a mixture of Techmeme and the Netscape “navigatorsâ€?. Written by the Cardiff-based journalist Matthew Yeomans, he makes a selection of the top stories of the day and writes a summary of the existing coverage from various sources, then links to the most interesting articles. It’s not a very unique feature but essentially a RSS feed of the top news stories with a nice introduction to them. The style of Yeomans brings a distinct personal feeling to the stories and the posts, which adds color to the Time website and makes it more current and human at the same time.

Large companies really do need the personal feeling and making the transfer from print (impersonal) to the web (human) is a daunting task but still something most media companies need to address and execute on. Scoble might be the most recognized change agent with his blogging for Microsoft, but there are these agents on all markets, for example here in Sweden Martin Jönsson at SVD, and he’s an outstanding example of this. Calacanis is one of the very few change agents that publicly speaks about it and recognizing himself as one, with his blogging for AOL and Netscacpe.

Most likely, more of these change agents will come through and not only in media companies but also in organizations working in traditional industries but that needs to execute on social media and bringing a human voice to the company. In many markets, especially the US, this has already been done (one exceptional example of how to use a corporate blog was Cisco’s recent respond to the lawsuit on Apple), but many, many companies would need to expand their efforts in this area.

[tags]Scoble, Change agent, Calacanis, Netscape, Time, Matthew Yeaomans [/tags]

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January 12, 2007 / 1 Comment.

One Comment

  1. matthew replied:

    We would like to inform you that your blog has now been added to the Megite index. We kindly invite you to explore Megite’s latest version at http://www.megite.com and Megite Video at http://www.megite.com/video.

    January 12th, 2007 at 4:31 pm. Permalink.

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