An old friend of mine yesterday asked me to share a list of the things I've been reading recently. Thought I'd share more widely: 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know: your really need to know (50 Ideas) a bluffer’s guide to economics Adland: A Global History of Advertising another self-explanatory title. Useful to … Continue reading The Book Shelf
Category: Technology
It's often said that the Internet is leading to a disintermediation of services: that the ability for organisations to communicate and transact with their customers online cuts out intermediators (more widely known as middle men). What's happening in London with taxi firms these days seems to show an opposite effect. I've written in the past … Continue reading Intermediation
I had two meetings scheduled yesterday where the people I was expecting to meet found themselves without their mobile phones. One was lost, the other had turned into an iBrick. Both cases had fairly catastrophic impact on their owners' days. As we become increasingly reliant on smart devices, the impact of their failure becomes heightened, … Continue reading Single points of failure
In the past 48 hours three of the services that I use fairly extensively have had significant changes: LinkedIn's user interface (UI) has been tweaked, seemingly in their drive to make things look as much like Facebook as possible, TweetDeck's user interface has been significantly altered and "given a cleaner look", and the Android phone … Continue reading The UX problem with Agile
How long does it take for a new electronic communications system to be regarded as a social medium? It seems about half a century. I'm currently reading a book on the social history of the telephone, and the parallels with the emergence of computing are fascinating. From the phone's inception in the late 1870s, it … Continue reading Going social
Old chum and occasional Facebook identity victim @Euan just posted to a very thought-provoking article from Stowe Boyd on the concept of Shadow IT. It argues that within the next few years the vast majority of spend on "IT" will be in those technologies and services that aren't procured through traditional IT departments. I think that … Continue reading That that shall not be named
There's a retrospective piece about a project that one of the agencies I've been working with, The Partners, did in 2007 on D&AD's website this week. The work, for The National Gallery, took reproductions of some of the works of art in their collection onto the streets of London. One of those reproductions is still … Continue reading Time flies
There have been a few events in the past week that have made me revisit a theme that I've had in my head for most of the last 15 years: that one of the crucial elements that holds back the Internet is a standard verifiable identity for individuals on the net, but that much … Continue reading Identity crisis
Here's an interesting idea taken from the early chapters of a book (Claude S Fischer's America Calling) I've just started reading about the social history of telephone: when a new technology comes to market, we have a tendency when not knowing what its effects will be to project the technology's attributes onto our own potential behaviours. … Continue reading Projection
I've got a couple of public events coming up in the next month if you're interested: I'm running a short online presentation for The Marketer magazine on the subject of Online Communities on June 5th 1-2pm London time. You can register for that here, and if you are a CIM member it can count towards … Continue reading Upcoming events – June 2013
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