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
Thinking about the behaviors of Habitat and Moonfruit over the last week begs the question about what we mean by SPAM. Clearly, inserting marketing messages into randomly trending topics is corrosive and shows no respect for the community. Doing that when the topics were the first voices of dissent from Iran was just plain dumb. But what about… Continue reading Catch it, kill it
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
I imagine I was not the only person struck by the media collision around the coverage of the death of Jade Goody. The last few weeks of her life were marked by a quite depressing co-dependency with a media at once uncomfortable with their proximity to the unfolding real-life anguish, and delighted by it. For… Continue reading Status anxiety
I know it's a sort of liberal utopian wet dream and I keep going on about it, but a number of things today have pushed me towards the view that our future will move significantly away from mass media, and that the change will happen much faster than most people currently expect. Indeed, the speed… Continue reading The life of Riley
There's seems to have been a massive surge in Facebook popularity, amongst my contacts at least. Can this new contender catch up with the mighty MySpace? Currently Facebook is trailing by 20m users to MySpace's 180m and Live Space's 120m. If they can, it will be testament to their user-centred approach over MySpace's feature loading.… Continue reading Feeding the disease
Proving that despite their inability to cope with massive demand, Twitter still has a sense of humor (and following up from their page-not-found error), here's twitter's 500 (server error) page which has been available for all to see for much of the last 24 hours: Not a great advert for Ruby on Rails (on which the… Continue reading This twitter is undergoing “planned maintenance”
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
Leading product 