Hello, and happy holidays! I am done traveling for the year, and since I'll be home for the holidays, starting now, I look forward to blogging more and reconnecting with the folks out here.

My final speaking gig of the year was last week, where I was the emcee at Ragan’s Web Content Conference.

There were a ton of good sessions, but the highlight was probably, as it almost always is, Shel Holtz’s workshop on where the Internet is heading.

My great pal and mentor Shel did his usual terrific job of scaring the holy living hell out of everyone with a glimpse into a technology-heavy future—a future filled with Twitters and Tweets and Edge Content and widgets. A world where everyone has an online avatar, and that’s how you travel around the Internet. A world where nobody e-mails anyone anymore . . . if you want to reach someone, you go to their MySpace-like page (yes, everyone will have one) and leave a message there.

Shel is not a geek . . . but he does play one at conferences.

If there’s a online gadget, tool, or application Shel has it, uses it, or teaches it.

When I introduced him, as the keynote session on Day Two, he strode up to the microphone wearing an all-black shirt with a symbol on it that looked like the indicator on your computer that shows how powerful the wireless symbol is.

Then he reached into his pocket and flicked a switch. And the damn thing lit up.

But it wasn’t just a prop. It was an actual wireless indicator. I swear to God. As Shel moved around the hotel, he would gain and lose bars, just like the wireless icon on your computer.

Shel has always worn his love for technology on his sleeve, and now he’s wearing it on the front of his shirt as well.

Earlier in the conference, before Shel even got there, I had some fun with him.

Over the course of introducing the luncheon speaker, I let it slip that our Day Two keynote speaker, Shel Holtz, was a bit of a “bedwetter.”

Shel, of course, is not a bedwetter. He gets along with the bedwetters and propeller heads in IT, because he speaks their language. But he's not one himself.

I guess an apt way to say it would be: Shel is comfortable sitting on a urine-soaked bed with other IT people, but he would never wet the bed himself.

But here’s why I called him one anyway: I was introducing our lunch keynoter, who happens to be a monster among men, a real titan of the industry, a great mind, and a wonderful person. (See if you can figure out who I was introducing).

So I said: “Our Day Two keynoter, Shel Holtz, is also a great man, but next to our luncheon speaker, he is a hopeless bedwetter.”

Well . . . of course a bunch of snitches told Shel about what I said when he got there, so he opened his speech by saying: “Despite what Steve Crescenzo said, I am not a bedwetter.”

Then he turned his shirt on.

Thank God Shel’s not really a bedwetter. If I know Shel, he probably wears his little electric shirt to bed, so he can test the wireless as he’s Twittering and Tweeting himself to sleep . . . so if he were ever to actually wet the bed, he would probably fry important parts of himself.

And I'd like to see him explain that to his lovely wife, Michele. Michele is half Sicilian, half Jewish. She'd probably fry whatever parts the electric shirt missed.

The other highlight of the conference was a session by Gerry McGovern . . . but that’s worth a separate post, so I’ll tell you about him tomorrow.

At the recent Ragan Web Content Conference in Chicago, keynote speaker and online communication expert Gerry McGovern had a great riff on the problem with many corporate intranets.

“Most intranets should be subtitled, ‘A Survivor’s Guide to a Shitty Week,’” he told the crowd. “People turn to the intranet when things have gone wrong--like when they've forgotten to fill out an expense report and need to find one in a hurry, or when they need to do something with their benefits.”

A Survivor’s Guide to a Shitty Week. I like that. I like that a lot.

And it’s so true. While the Internet has all sorts of fun things on it—like YouTube and blogs and podcasts and online communities and games and even virtual worlds—the intranet has . . . forms. And benefits information. And lousy search engines. And more forms. And org charts. And more benefits information. And the employee directory. And . . . well, you get the idea.

Of course, there are exceptions. Companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have intranets that closely mirror the external net. They have interactivity and podcasts and blogs and video and other interesting content.

But they are exceptions. Intranets, from what I’ve seen (and I’ve seen quite a few in my work as a seminar leader, journalist, and consultant) usually are fairly functional, and incredibly boring.

You use them when you need to do something and there’s no other way of getting it done. If you were still allowed to enroll in the benefits plan by talking to an actual person or filling out a paper form, you would. But that was disallowed three years ago, so you have to use the intranet.

If you could swing by your boss’s admin and get an expense form for your trip to Des Moines next week, you probably would. But they stopped printing those forms four years ago, so now you have to go on the intranet, type “expense form” into the search engine, disregard the first two or three options that come up, and eventually find the form in the bowels of the HR section of the site.

And so on. Gerry has it exactly right: Most intranets are tedious. They’re task oriented. They are, in a word, boring.

But do they have to be? It seems to me that one of the biggest arguments for adopting social media tools is that they will no doubt make your intranet, if nothing else, a little more interesting.

What if, while you were out there planning for a shitty week, you came across a well-written blog by one of the senior executives of the company, and he was writing about the new product the organization just launched—the same product that you just added to your sales portfolio?

And what if there were 35 comments to that blog post, some of them coming from salespeople—just like you—who were trying to iron out some of the kinks in that new product? Think you might join in? Would you consider that boring? Probably not.

Or what if you were out there to enroll in benefits, and you came across a podcast from the vice president of research and development, talking about some of the cool things that were in the pipeline. And you realized that you could sign up for that podcast now, and listen to it on the way to Des Moines? Might you do that?

Or what if, while you were out there looking for an employee’s phone number, you encountered a MySpace-like page for that person instead—listing all their different qualifications, their interests, the best way to get in touch with them, and a place to leave private messages that you know will get to that person quickly?

There are a million and one reasons to start exploring the use of social media inside your organization (and almost as many reasons to be wary of them).

One reason to give them a shot: it could make your intranet a place people want to go to, rather than a place they have to visit when they’re having a shitty week.

Hello, and Merry Christmas!

Cindy and I have been getting bombarded by people who want to know what to get us for Christmas. Clients, readers, relatives, former clients, former readers, former relatives . . . everyone seems to want to get us something!

Rather than respond to everyone individually, I thought I would just throw some ideas out here. Please act accordingly. First, let’s do Cindy.

Cindy has been dropping a lot of hints lately about wanting—and I’m not really sure what this is—a swinging basket that you can screw into the ceiling? Has anyone heard of that?

I assume it’s for plants or something . . . but according to Cindy, it has to be big enough to hold a grown person. That is one helluva plant! She must be planning to get a ficus tree, or something.

Anyway . . . if you have an idea of what she’s talking about and that’s what you want to get her, just send it along to the home office. Address is on the Web site, www.crescenzocomm.com.

If a mongo-sized swinging planter is out of your budget, Cindy would also like gift certificates to Allen Brothers Steaks, and wine from Cakebread Cellars.

And for me? Oh, I don’t want much. Just for everybody to be healthy this year, and for the Cubs to make it to the World Series, and for Jesus to come down to earth right about the time of the Iowa caucuses and publicly call Mike Huckabee an asshole.

If those gifts are out of your reach, I’d also like a table-top deep fryer, a Kitchen Aid mixer with sausage grinder and pasta maker attachments, a new Weber smoker, tickets to the Led Zeppelin concert if they tour again, a shoebox full of bootleg Xanax, memberships to several wine clubs, some Vicodin, and new martini glasses because I keep breaking mine.

And if those are out of your reach as well, here’s what I really want:

I want advice on how to turn my son Zach into an avid reader and a lover of books. I want that so bad I'll give up everything else if you can help me.

It’s not that Zach can’t read. He’s actually an excellent reader. In fact, he’s only eight, and yesterday he finished Charlotte’s Web.

(I interrupt this blog item for Nice Parenting Moment #1,456: I was making a London broil for dinner, and my son interrupted me to tell me that there was a spider on the kitchen floor. I was about to step on it, but Zach grabbed a paper towel, patiently let the spider crawl onto the towel, and then took it outside to let the spider free. I said: “Hey, that was nice. I’m glad you did that.” And he said: “Dad, I’m reading Charlotte’s Web.” End of interruption).

But he wasn’t into Charlotte’s Web like I was, when I read it. He wasn’t into Stuart Little like I was, when I read it. He liked both books okay. He got through them. But there was never an instance when he couldn’t put either one of them down.

And that breaks my heart.

Because when I was a kid, I could never put a book down. I used to sneak a flashlight into my bed every night, and read until I conked out.

I read everything I could get my hands on. I read The Great Brain and Enclyopedia Brown and The Black Stallion series. I read the entire Little House on the Prarie series. Twice.

I read the Hardy Boys and the entire Time Life series on the Old West. I read the Hobbit in fifth grade and The Lord of the Rings in seventh. When my eighth-grade class was reading whatever they were reading, I was reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I read about King Arthur and Cochise and Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone. I read about Bart Starr and Joe Namath and Willy Wonka and Sherlock Homes. I read a Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Willows, then I read about Blackbeard and the Crusades and the Mississippi riverboat gamblers.

My favorite Christmas memory was the year, I think I was in sixth grade, that I got two things: A bean bag chair, and a novel about Robin Hood. I didn’t move from that bean bag chair for my entire Christmas vacation.

My childhood was one discovery after another. When I discovered the Narnia series, I didn’t leave the house for months, as far as I can remember.

And as I got older, that love for reading never faded. In fact, it got stronger. Our entire bedroom is filled with books (maybe that’s what Cindy wants the swinging basket for!). We have books in bookcases, books stacked in corners, books on the bed, books everywhere. Books = Life.

And I’m scared to death that my son Zach isn’t ever going to develop that passion for reading, and for books, that came naturally to me.

It’s not his fault. When I was a kid, we didn’t have Nintendo or Wii or Xbox or GameCube. There wasn’t a new kid movie out every week. There weren’t seventy-five kids’ cable stations to watch.

For me, it was either read books or watch Mr. Rodgers. And even at the tender age of six, Mr. Rodgers irritated the shit out of me.

I fear that there are too many options these days for kids. They have movies and TV shows and video games and Club Penguin and Webkinz and Gameboys.

If I had all that available to me when I was a kid, I can’t imagine picking up a book either, unless I was forced to.

So now I’m in a position of having to force my kid to pick up a book . . . and by doing so, I think I’m sucking all the joy and adventure and fun out of it.

I had a startling moment of clarity in this area last night. Zach and I were laying in bed, reading. He was reading Charlotte’s Web, and I was reading Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. It was past his bedtime, but he wanted to keep reading.

I remember thinking: Oh, maybe this is it! Maybe he’s going to get it! And if he does, he has Hemingway and Vonnegut and Twain and McDonald and Mencken and Royko to look forward to! He gets to experience Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle and Orwell for the first time! He still gets to read David Sedaris and Pat Conroy and Bill Bryson. I'm going to be able to give him The Confederacy of Dunces one Christmas! And he still has John Irving . . . My God, he’s going to get to read Garp for the first time, the lucky bastard!

Of course I let him keep reading. It was an hour past his bedtime, and I let him keep reading. If he wanted to pull an all-nighter to finish the book because he was into it, I would have let him. Then I would have put no-doze into his coco puffs and pushed him off to school the next day.

But eventually he got tired. And just as we were turning the lights out, Tracey (Zach’s mom and my ex-wife) came home from work. We went back downstairs so he could say goodnight, and I said:

“Guess who read five chapters of Charlotte’s Web tonight?”

And Tracey said:

“That’s awesome, honey. Do you love it?”

And Zach said:

“Yeah . . . I’m almost to the point where Charlotte dies.”

And that’s when it hit me. The kid knows the Goddamned ending! Why? Because he’s seen not one but two versions of the movie. He’s also seen Stuart Little. He’s seen Narnia, and he’s seen the Lord of the Rings.

My God, they even made a shitty movie out of Harriet the Spy, and we watched that one night.

To an adult, a movie can never be as good as a book. To a kid, the exact opposite is true. Charlotte's Web, this masterpiece, this wonderfully crafted slice of life by one of the greatest writers in history, E.B. White, can’t stand up to a lousy animated movie. Not in a kid’s mind, anyway.

And I fear that’s what I’m up against. How can a book compete for the attention of ADD-riddled children who live life at the speed of light these days?

If anyone has any advice for me, I’d consider it the greatest Christmas gift in the world. More than the swinging plant holder, even.

And my advice to you, if you have children five years old or younger: Burn those DVDs of Charlotte’s Web. Smash that Stuart Little movie. Put the Lord of the Rings and Narnia movies on the top shelf of your closet . . . and only bring them out after your kids have read the books.

Otherwise, you don’t stand a chance. And neither do they.