Archive : February 2008

We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.

Images from the Flickr Coversourcing pool

Random House have come up with a very good wheeze to promote the upcoming book ‘Crowdsourcing’. Crowdsourcing, for the unitiated is:

Here at Made By Many we are technology agnostic. Primarily because we believe a client should use the best technology solutions to fit them and fit the problem we are trying to solve. We work with lots of in-house technology teams and out-sourced partners for clients, offering technologyconsultancy wrapped into a holistic offering on next-generation website problems.

That’s not to say we don’t have technology preferences. With all things being equal for greenfield deployments we can work with the best technology to do the job. That’s why we have delivered several solutions using Ruby On Rails and use WordPress for delivering blog solutions, such as this one.

(the logo on the left is cooler…)

Everyone’s going on about the Semantic Web. It’s tipped to be the big thing in 2008. It’s all you can hear in the cafes and bars. Semantic this… NLP-that… It’s hard to get a word in edge-ways, and don’t even bother going out if all you want to talk about is simple keyword extraction. Keywords don’t tell you sh*t. (thanks Mark)

We use the traffic ranking tool Alexa to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web; it’s a good measure of the speed with which social media is transforming web habits and economics. But most of its users know that Alexa’s a relative measure, so if a chart’s showing downward movement it doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is falling.

Alexa measures traffic by encouraging people to download its tracking tool to their browser, and then monitors their usage. Most Alexa users know that it indicates a site’s share of reach, rank and page views by revealing what proportion of the Alexa sample has visited the site, and that there’s no clear indication of absolute numbers. Also, Alexa clients tend to be skewed towardstechies and other early adopters so it doesn’t necessarily give an accurate view of market share across internet users as a whole.

I love online cartoons. I’ve always been a fan of penny-arcade, pvponline and userfriendly. Since offline media began, monks have been scribing illustrations in margins and the newspaper cartoonist has been an institution in expressing the zeitgeist. Now several web2.0 startups like such as Toondo and Pixton let you create your own.

I like Toonlet which is so straightforward but allows for some cool looking comics. Here’s one I created earlier:

It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 – Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.

We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.