Category: Themes

I'm doing a wee bit of research at the moment into another Ignite presentation at the end of the month (more details, and opportunity to sign up here). I'm going to cover off a favourite topic of mine - the madness of measurement; basically a piece of controlled moaning. What's cropped up has been a … Continue reading Campbell’s law, Goodhart’s law, and the trouble with observation

There is a debate that is coming to a head in the UK at the moment about the future of cigarette packaging. The government has been running a consultation exercise to examine the potential effect of making all tobacco products available in generic packaging, removing any individual branding. The debate, hugely simplified, goes a little … Continue reading The value of marketing?

I love radio. In my days at university I spent many a long hour broadcasting on the Campus radio station LCR, playing music, shooting the breeze... well, I say "broadcasting", but only in the loosest of senses as a couple of speakers in the next door pizza bar and a few rooms in halls of … Continue reading The digital takeover outlier: Radio

There have been three pieces of information that have particularly caught my eye in the past few weeks (above all of the Olympic hullabaloo, anyway): In 2011, for the first time, Ofcom recorded that Digital advertising formed the biggest single category of advertising in the UK (£4.8bn), bigger than TV (£4.2bn), Press (£3.9bn) or any … Continue reading Digital takeover

Every once in a while I catch an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, a half-hour weekly slice of sociology presented by the wonderful Laurie Taylor. This week’s edition reports on a recent paper by academics at Durham University analysing the labour market in the UK media industry. About 20 years ago, … Continue reading The casualization of software development

One of my favourite books of recent years has been Jonah Lehrer's Imagine; it turns out that he made some of it up. To be honest, I don't really care; it's a great book, there is lots of value in it, I'd still recommend you read it, and I for one know that you shouldn't … Continue reading Big ideas and the reality of ambiguity

There was a fascinating article published last week on the Cult of Mac website last week which, if you look away from the sensationalist headlines gave an interesting viewpoint on some of the challenges of the use of skeuomorphic design  within MacOS (and comparing that to the "authentically digital" design patterns within Windows 8). A skeuomorph is "a … Continue reading Skeuomorphism and the power of metaphor

In simpler days it would take quite some effort to spread nonsense around the world. The costs associated with the transmission of information were such that mass media were generally only accessible to the rich and the professionally trained (journalists). These days, with the world of media being completely disrupted by digital technology, and as … Continue reading How the blogosphere bends the news agenda

We're about to get the first floor of our house rewired, and it's made me have to think about what we do today, and what we might do in a few years time. The house was built at the turn of the last century, and then had extensions added in the 1920s and the 1980s. … Continue reading Home infrastructure