8 posts
Before another age goes by, here’s a round-up of the stuff we’ve been momentarily distracted by recently:
1. Twittersheep: See the key characteristics of your Twitter followers.
2. Business Guys on Business Trips: Solving global issues, such as page registration procedures
3. The Vendor-Client relationship in real world situations: Very entertaining – we all need to laugh at ourselves!
We’re very excited about today’s launch of Facebook Connect for Protect The Human, Amnesty International UK’s digital campaigning platform.
I found this on Mike Laurie’s ace blog the other day – it’s a video put together by Ji Lee, Google’s Creative Director at the Google Creative Sandbox (just launched). The video demonstrates how much real people know about the Web. It’s a salutory reminder for anyone whose job it is to discuss complex ideas with customers and end-users: despite the nodding you shouldn’t assume they understand *anything*.
This blog post at Social Media Today just got sent round the office about how *not* to use Twitter. It’s the rubbishiest use of Twitter we’ve ever seen (and let’s face it, the bar ain’t that high!).
The offender is trendy furniture store Habitat, who appear to have been sold some kind of automatic tweet-spam generator. Said tool goes off and fetches hashtags for trending topics and inserts them into lame tweets about product. The result is unbelievably crass, as you can see below, and includes hashtags for those following the Iranian Election, with the result is a tweet that reads, “#MOUSAVI Join the database to win a £1000 gift card Now!”
I’ve been meaning to write a response to William’s blog post of a few weeks ago about the news that some publishers (including Rupert Murdoch) are preparing to start charging for some of their content. I agree with William that people will be unlikely to buy a subscription to, for example, The Sun or Times Online but I’m not sure that is what is being proposed.
As William says in his blog post:
I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth?
Massive excitement at Made By Many as the resident Apple fan-boys stayed in the office to keep up with the WWDC keynote. We cursed our recent MacBook Pro purchases and waited for news of the new IPhone. Some great news there but let down by the news that getting the IPhone 3GS means buying out the existing contracts! (Bad news here, all employees have an business IPhone at Made By Many).
I chanced upon this set of videos via Design Observer and Konigi at a very timely moment, because just last week I finished reading ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization’ by Tom Kelley, brother of David Kelley, the founder of Ideo. It’s a really great read that gives an insider’s view of the circumstances and methodologies that are crucial to always coming up with innovative ideas that can change the lives of a product’s users for the better, something that Ideo is well-known for.
There’s a barber shop down the road from us that displays a standalone drawing board with extremely interesting thoughts on them. Currently, this is what it says:
