Shifting to my own domain … at some point

July 22, 2008 by Dave Haynes

When I started this thing I was under the spell of a British CEO at my old employers, who convinced me the world was moving away from the term digital signage. Screen media was the handle that was to be on the tip of every tongue!

Well, clearly I’d skipped my meds that day, yet again, and I went with screenmedia as the handle for my WordPress blog.

Giant, slippery piles of nonsense later, here I sit with 100s of posts on the unwieldy blog URL: screenmedia.wordpress.com

I have been thinking for a while I should really have my own blog site, and maybe add some things. So $45 later (honest), I had sixteen-nine.net as a domain and a year of hosting on a web server, with the content management tool Joomla already installed.

I am still figuring out how to use the thing (fortunately, a few people I know have stupidly blurted that they were Joomla power users), but have started populating it with the same posts as on this main WordPress blog. The intent is to cut over at some point … soon-ish.

Among the things I want to add:

The nice thing about Joomla is that it is largely modular and use style sheets and components to make updating dead simple and quick, so the extra work should be minimal.

I am interested in your thoughts on the switch, and any ideas about other things to add. Let me know!

  1. Barte says:

    I think your instincts are not as misguided as you may think: Screen Media an all-encompassing industry label works better than Digital Signage, the latter term’s applicability to video/TV not being immediately apparent. Other variations might include Digital Screen Media (DSM – everyone loves a good acronym), Digital Advertising, DigiScreen, DigiMedia, etc.

    Will the industry adopt a name-change? Maybe if enough people use it enough of the time. Just a thought.

  2. Nate Nead says:

    Good to hear. I’ll add it to my reader.

  3. Barnaby Page says:

    We discuss this almost constantly in our search for the perfect strapline. 🙂 I agree with Barte that “digital signage” is a dismal term – to many people the first image it conjures up is the kind of clunky, low-res display that tells you your plane is half an hour late ate gate 94. It’s also less and less appropriate as the sector’s focus moves further from the world of signage into the world of advertising.

    Subjectively, “digital signage” seems still to have a lot more traction than “screen media” – although a Google AdWords query suggests it only gets about 25 percent more searches. (Of course, what the people using “screen media” are really looking for, we don’t know…)

    Among the other contenders, “digital out-of-home” is a nice one and seems to be growing in popularity, while I haven’t heard anyone mention “captive audience networks” for quite a while.

  4. James Messina says:

    Happy to hear this blog’s success warrants a bigger home. I can attest that as a long time reader, this blog provides a fantastic and objective view of all the noise in this space.

    Digital Signage vs. Screen Media vs. Digital Communication etc. is a debate that will rage on until this industry matures. Too many players serving too many things to a uneducated audience.

    Cheers to your graduation!

  5. msdesign says:

    Thats funny, I always wondered why it was screen media, and even after being apart of the industry for the past 3+ years I still have never heard that term used for ds. That said, we do have frequent conversations around the office of how we don’t care for the “digital signage” term either. Not to mention, no spell checker agrees with “signage” (even as I type this entry!).

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