Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
In the Spring '07 Market Leader (the Marketing Society publication from WARC), Y&R's Simon Silvester talks about how it is the limitations on our ability to learn and adapt to new technologies which will actually restrict their spread; that innovation is useless without usability. He points out that the "geek" audience of super-early-adopters have… Continue reading Humans don’t scale
NetVibes (which is like iGoogle, Live.com or Page Flakes) is now allowing brands to take their personal home page and publish it so everyone can see it (they call it "Netvibes Universe"). Obviously, you'll include different content on a page you or your brand is going to make public than from your personal start page but otherwise it's an… Continue reading Spot the difference
When it comes to technology innovation, it's interesting to hear some people still talk about a "five-year plan". After all, YouTube went from zero to £1.65bn in 18 months. Google only lost their beta tag 7 years ago. Paradigms can change literally overnight. In this fascinating interview, Jobs and Gates reveal that they've not got a… Continue reading The Bill and Steve show
A great video on Ted Talks from Sir Ken Robinson challenges the targets which we set for kids in school. He argues that modern teaching methods are virutally designed to hamper creativity, polarising right and wrong and setting a premium against exprimentation. A brilliantly witty presentation in its own right, this talk brings to bear some of the same thinking… Continue reading School’s out
Like Antony, I'm waiting for Royal Mail (or rather Amazon) to deliver my copy of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. From reading around the book, it seems it will be a fascinating look at the role for taxonomy in the new world order of infinite capacity. The traditional taxonomies of… Continue reading Truth and classification
Rather than trying to predict new trends across the whole of the interweb, let's take things one at a time and try and trend spot just what will happen on Facebook, the site which - within the agency echo-chamber at least - appears to be becoming a bit of a phenomenon. With the minor exception of their API privacy… Continue reading Future of facebook
The site that promised to measure the size of the internet has failed dismally. It failed for the same reason that "viral" campaigns fail on the internet and in the real world - because the message or motivation wasn't strong enough. But this shouldn't be suprising, messages that captivate everyone are incredibly rare. Advertising people… Continue reading Size matters
Thanks to Nicola for spotting this great new site that aims to map and count the internet's users. The theory they're working on is that if each person spreads the word to three friends and that the spreading process takes 1 day a time, they will have reached the internet's entire population in under… Continue reading Axes of I-ville
A lot of arguments are about complex nuance and deeply entrenched beliefs. They seem intractable because they are so closely related to ideology. Well here's one that isn't. This is just the difference between X as tool and X as hobby: Linux people can never understand why people would want to use Windows: all those fidgety… Continue reading The battle for hearts and desktops
For all of those who find WebCameron interesting but mainly cringe-worthy (and I'm definitely one of the them), it seems pretty likely the 2008 presidential race in the states will set a new high water mark in the way candidates communicate and connect with their audiences. Just when does that kick off? Well, amazingly enough… Continue reading Scoble on Edwards Campaign Trail
Leading product 