Category
Web
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04.10.08Here it goes againSpeaking, as we were not so long ago, about unreferenced advertising homages to internet viral creative endeavours....here's another one for the collection. First, watch this new ad from Berocca. People dancing on treadmills. Strangely familiar? Indeed. OK Go did this to great viral effect not so long ago: I know. Ad creatives in ripping off internet shocker. <rolls eyes>
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03.06.08The Jet SetI've been away for 48 hours in Istanbul, where I was invited to attend and speak at a conference for a global NGO. I'm sorry I didn't have more time to spend in the city, but the tantalising glimpses of it I was able to snatch during cab rides and a trip into town for dinner gave me plenty of food for thought - something which I'll expand on in a later post. But I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about how transitory a lot of our jobs - and lives - are these days, ...
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02.27.08A milestone, of sortsI've just noticed that this photo, taken last Saturday at Penzance Harbour in Cornwall, and looking out towards St Michael's Mount across the bay: ...is photo number 5,555 in my Flickr stream. That's the equivalent of a photo a day for over 15 years, though I've actually managed to post them in a couple of months shy of four years. Not all of my photos are public Over the last four years, my passion for photography has grown and grown, mostly through use of Flickr, and all the exposure, feedback, support, inspiration, experimentation and practical technique refinement that has entailed. I hope that ...
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02.27.08The Seven Deadly Sins of TwitterOR a list of social faux pas that are likely to get you removed from my follow list (From my perspective: you may disagree. In fact, you probably will. Life's rich tapestry and all that...) Using Twitter instead of (or as well as) an RSS feed. Most web publishing services these days have RSS built in as standard. If you've got an RSS feed and I want to know when you've updated, I've already subscribed to it. If I haven't, then I don't, and you endlessly publishing links to your most recent blog output - constantly pushing your links at me - looks ...
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01.03.08My Week In MediaChallenged by m'colleague Neil to reveal what I've been consuming, media-wise this week, I am delighted to flash my digital hem, as it were, particularly because it affords me the parallel opportunity to apologise for being AWOL since before Christmas. I've been away, you see, and as a result, my media consumption for the past week has been a bit different in many ways to what I might otherwise have consumed. What I read Despite not being in the office (or perhaps because of it), I've enjoyed reading the paper: The Guardian, of course and particularly enjoyed the NYE quiz special edition ...
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12.20.07Pimp my privacySo, back in August I wrote about Facebookand the perils of prodigious sociability - that the "one giant bucket for all your friends" nature of the site was a limiting and messy experience. At the time, I sketched out a possible workaround: making custom groups which users can then sort their "friends" into, and set permissions on a per-group basis. My solution involved using the existing "groups" functionality to manage subsets of friends, but better still would be to have the potential for grouping people within the mega list, right? Well, the first bit has happened: Facebook has now added the ability ...
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12.17.07Reflections on Le Web 3Last week, I went to Le Web 3 in Paris with my boss (who was participating in an onstage recreation of this debate and m'colleague Neil. It was a good event, mostly, and great to connect with a variety of people I like and admire both personally and professionally. I go to a lot of conferences - both as speaker and participant - through my work at The Guardian (and previously at AOL) and in a personal capacity, so it's always interesting to get another perspective on the industry we work in. This time, it was with a distinctly European ...
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11.27.07Coining a new phraseWeb 2.Oaf: someone who has got the consultants in, hoovered up everything they said, lapped up the expensive research & swigged down kool-aid to the point where they've managed to spill it all over their presentations, board reports, conversations and pants, as well as using the information and resources and buzzwords they have amassed like a big blunt stick to beat everyone into agreement with, but still doesn't really, fundamentally get it, and manages to make rather poor decisions about their digital business in spite of all the time, money and conferences. A good example of a little knowledge - ...
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11.09.07Ten Reasons Why Numerical Lists Are The New BlackNearly a decade ago, when I worked in the editorial department of a major ISP, one of the homepage editors had a theory that while lists were always a good thing, there was a magic list number - a sort of divine proportion, if you like - which was the perfect length for any list of items, where perfection is measured in people's enacted interest which is proxied by the action of following a link trail. This number, I can reveal, is seven. Her reasoning was this: Five items is too short: it feels like there's not enough content there, or not enough ...
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10.15.07A World In Your EarSo, I didn't really get podcasts when they first became popular a few years back. This is probably mostly to do with the fact that, since my commute was a) above ground and b) short, I was more than happy to just listen to the radio on the way to and from work, which seemed to coincide perfectly with BBC Radio Four's morning slot (9am - things like Andrew Marr's Start the Week plus The Long View, Midweek, Desert Island Discs and Thursday's Boffinmungous (oh, alright, In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg, and then on the way home at ...
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