Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
I'm facinated by unintended consequences. Tiny, or apparently unrelated acts, can hugely impact people's lives. The introduction of rabbits in Austalia is a good example. One expatriate British landowner wanted a little of his home country and so brought out 24 rabbits for hunting to Australia. Within ten years, millions of rabbits plagued Austalia, destroyed… Continue reading Unintended consequences
I've gotten into a bad habbit. Recently, I've found myself only wanting to write about topics when I can think of a good headline. Which reminds me, a new high-watermark was set by a genius in the copy-editing team at the Sun this week. A front-page banner headline relating the Jacqui Smith expenses furore (over… Continue reading Hierachy of feeds
I'm not a twitter expert. This seems to put me in the minority. And it's a great thing that so many people have a view on what the microblogging service is doing in communications and how people, and companies, should be interacting with it. Over at e-consultancy there's been a couple of recent interesting outbreaks… Continue reading Just because you can
In the last post, I talked a bit about the new Skittles site. This post really comes by way of an apology for a small experiment I ran following that post, and a couple of unexpected observations that came out of it. The experiment was to try and take over the twitter search feed which… Continue reading A funny thing happened on the way to the forum
One of the most compelling, and commented on, phrases that has emerged from the new Obama administration is that 'no crisis should be allowed to go to waste'. There's some not very subtle code in here, regarding redistribution, and of course some powerful rhetoric (as we heard in inaugaration) about a new era of responsibility.… Continue reading No crisis wasted
Disorganized ramblings from the ‘trying things out for size’ department and the ‘Yesterday was Epiphany’ team: The original crisis in branding in the 70s – staring Bruce Willis – was a result of the multiple retailers asserting the power they had over the consumers’ attention spans to push out brands and promote own labels. And,… Continue reading Crisis in branding 2 – the revenge
So Ted McConnell, P&G's general manager for interactive marketing and innovation has just told a conference audience that he didn't want to buy any more ads on Facebook (thanks to Dan W for the link). He succinctly summarises his thinking: "What in heaven's name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking… Continue reading Soap operas
A few weeks ago, on the occassion of the company's tenth anniversary, Marissa Mayer - Google's VP, Search Products & User Experience - shared her thoughts on the future of search. The most striking feature of the analysis is a kind of quasi-religious fervour with which Mayer takes on her mission to extend the scope… Continue reading Search as the new science
More news from the department of 'if Microsoft did it, they'd be strung up from a lamp post but if Apple does it, no one cares' department. It seems that you have to be so cool to be a member of the apple app creators' club that you're not allowed to even talk to the… Continue reading Hostage for a fortune
It's a funny industry, the web industry. What started out for many of us as a job creating digital expressions has fast become the job of watching the world change how it communicates with itself and then coming up with ways in which we, or our clients, might fit into it all. Buoyed up by… Continue reading Abstraction and absurdity
Leading product 