Making fun of bad logo designs is lame. So, let’s say that Xerox’s new logo is just fine, if a little curvy/Speed Racery looking, and move onto that weird ball thing next to it.

Around the office here we are thinking what it might represent. Surely there will be a corporate short story written about how it moves the company smoothly into its next phase or some equally ridiculous metaphor. I think it looks like a drag racer’s parachute. Jei thinks it resembles that Pokemon ball that the weird boy (?) kept those effeminate monster things in and threw at people. I’m sure we’re both right, but that’s not the point here. What follows is what Xerox might attach to their logo presentation to help us understand it more completely, and to justify the millions of dollars they spent on a logo that a college student might have handed over sheepishly to his design professor.

“The red sphere is at once familiar and mysterious, as it implies transparency and stability. It stands heroically next to its lower-case partner, instilling confidence as this new chapter of xerox advances. At its core the new mark of xerox is a streamlined thoroughbred, a coiled spring from which ingenuity will vault. Deep down, below the superficiality of its animal allure, lies the truth of xerox’s rebirth (mark). The sphere of a new day is also a reassuring nod to the past, as the confident x reminds us always of our upper case past.”

Pretty sweet, right? And it’s fun. Send your best (most terrifying) xerox logo descriptions and we’ll post them right up here.

In the summer I wrote a post vaguely complaining about the deterioration in the design of Barack Obama’s campaign website.

Here is the site when it first launched early in 2007:

I liked this. The design was clean and the site was really easy to navigate. After initially launching this version, the campaign spent a few months developing tons of great new features which they didn’t really have a place to put.

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The desire to cover local communities is nothing new to newspapers.  However, it is hard for a paper that covers a large area to focus on events that are happening in all neighborhoods in the circulation area.  Time, page space, and budgets all constrain such coverage, but some papers are finding ways to cover hyperlocal news.

In the cover story of the Newspaper Association of America's January 8 issue of Presstime, "Cover Story: 8 Trends to Track in ’08," we can learn about newspapers that are succeeding in covering communities.  See the eighth trend.

The article spotlights how The Dallas Morning News works with community members to publish information on its neighborsgo sites.  People submit content through this site, and some of it makes into print and on the newspaper's homepage. 

Oscar Martinez, managing editor of neighborsgo, told Presstime that these hyperlocal sections act as "17 small-town papers."  Further, when mentioning the role of the public, he also said, "We're saying, 'This is your turn to speak up first, and we'll take it from there…' We're not creating a need to share information. We're providing tools to be able to do so."

That's the great thing about the Internet. It facilitates connections between people and those with their sources of news.  That's one of many ways that the Internet can help newspapers. 

Jerry Johnson of Jerry's Juice Bar fame, and a friend, colleague, client and golf partner has put up a blog called "Taking The Blogosphere Seriously ." He's got some trenchant things to say about both the Serious and Not Serious sides of the Blogosphere.  Give it a read and add your comments. He'll be taking them with him as a panel speaker to the Consumer Electronic Show next week. I know Jerry; he'll give full attribution to whatever you have to add.

My friend Kevin Anderson, an online journalist, wrote an interesting post titled "What is an online journalist?" yesterday on his blog Strange Attractor.

The gist of the post focuses on how it is still common in contemporary journalistic culture to feel that the Internet is not a medium suited for unique quality news reporting and analysis.  Of course, it is a great place to repurpose, publish, or post reporting from other media, but true journalism supposedly cannot originate in the digital realm.

With newspaper ad revenue and dropping, radio and television audiences declining in both quantity and attention paid to specific sources, and a burgeoning amount of sources providing news, news companies and journalists cannot afford to ignore the value of online journalism.  Beyond the fact that the medium lends its well to more up to date and in depth reporting in ways that print and broadcast outlets can't match, more and more people are turning to the Internet as a primary news source.

Hopefully, in 2008, more journalists will realize this and value the online medium by viewing it as a complement to their work and not a threat.