Taking Five: How I Started Six Months Ago....

Last summer I was hired as the head of interactive for a terrific, independent full-service advertising agency in Minneapolis called Periscope. Periscope has a long tradition of integrated marketing for clients like Target, Cox Communicastions, Arctic Cat, and Papa Murphy's Pizza.

But many of my collegues at Periscope in account management, print production, advertising creative and media felt they were still catching up to the possibilities of interactive. And more, when they heard about something new in interactive--like blogs, or SMS text messaging, or advergames--they wanted to see the best and most innovative work being done in these new channels.

So I created "Take Five," a weekly internal e-mail newsletter which each week brought five new "things" from the Internet to my colleagues inboxes. Those "things" have included great creative, new trends, new business models, and strategies. Most of all they have included examples of great interactive thinking and design.

It's designed to be a very short set of links--just a paragraph on each link to set it up. In the past six months I've written about everything from AJAX to advergames. The audience for this missive includes everyone from traditional creatives and media planners to interactive friends.

I find these "things" as part of my personal mission to keep lurking, looking and learning about this (very) rapidly evolving suite of digital channels which have been begotten from TCP/IP and other bitstreams. It takes about a half an hour to write up each edition, and usually within a day I've got a half dozen comments back from other people.

Now I want to continue to publish a susinct blast of fast, relevant, broad-based news from the frontier of the Internet---but through this blog.

I hope that it becomes a place where others can post comments or links to great interactive ideas they see in the digital world.

A paragraph about me: I'm Rohn Jay Miller, and I live in Minneapolis in the USA, a lovely metropolis with a large advertising and marketing community, anchored by corporate headquarters for Target, Best Buy, General Mills, 3M, St. Paul Travellers Insurance and United Health Care. For most of the 1990s I was in San Francisco, where I was a partner in Ikonic, one of the seminal interactive design firms. We were part of the design team for Pathfinder for Time Warner, the Microsoft Windows site, the SEGA Heat game network and the SMARTpages for SBC. From 2000 to 2003 I was Senior Vice President for Product & Technology at Knight Ridder Digital in San Jose, and the Real Cities Network. I now make my home in here in Minneapolis (my home town) where my wife is an executive with Target---and our two girls attend school where my brother-in-law leads the history department.

I'm going to aggressively send out links to the many terrific blogs and sites I frequent, hoping for link exchanges, and I'll work to post the best of those on my site.

If you have any ideas about this blog---or see any great interactive ideas out there--please post them here as comments or send them to me at rmiller@modoweb.com.

Thanks--Rohn Jay Miller