Category: Technology (page 9 of 10)

28 November 2008 / 0 Comments

Where the social Web goes from here

It's good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.

I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics: “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”

Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.

Three amazing things

I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter-fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed, you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.

You’re not normal. Read more

19 September 2008 / 0 Comments

When Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be the marketers best friend

Let me show you an image and ask you some questions. Do complete the questionnaire and all will be revealed later at the end of this post!

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You might have established that I am not a qualified automotive designer, researcher or marketer. But what do you do when you do want to know answers to questions like these?

Enter Amazon 's Mechanical Turk service.

Their FAQs describe the service as follows:

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient. Read more

1 July 2008 / 6 Comments

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence.

The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.

It's just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it's done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com, or you can simply click here to download it.

I do hope the ebook stimulates discussion and debate about this vital and nascent field, and look forward to the ongoing "distributed conversation". Love to know what you think.

Thanks to Larry Weber, David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis and the Social Web Analytics vendors for their support and contributions.

24 June 2008 / 0 Comments

End-to-end marketing: the possibilities of a new Internet protocol

We're just about to go through a complete renumbering of the Internet, and I think some marketing issues and opportunities will emerge along the way.

The way the Internet works today means that just less than 4.3 billion different Internet devices can be addressed uniquely... an address being just that, the unique identifier stating where packets of information are sent from and where they should go. So just as my work address is Building 5, 50 Brook Green, London, W6 7BJ, UK - a unique address at which I'm sure to receive anything you send me - my current IP address at this Boston hotel is 209.190.164.35.

I know that because I just visited www.whatismyip.com and they looked at the server I was connected to, grabbed the address and stuck it on their homepage for me. Try it. Read more

16 May 2008 / 0 Comments

A Rolling Stone gathers no location based information

: Image via Wikipedia

I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I'm not a 'celebrity'...

"Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?"
"I don't believe it... is that really you? We're big fans of......"
"I've got all your albums."
"Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?"
"I don't believe it, is it really you?"

Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one... "Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition." From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.

We got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it's all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction. Read more

11 April 2008 / 0 Comments

Internet Best Practice Challenge – recognition for your Internet leadership

Nominet is running their Best Practice Challenge for the second year. The awards recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.

The six award categories for 2008 are:

Best development project
Best security initiative
Raising industry standards
Personal safety online
Internet for all
Open Internet

If you think your organisation, or your client's, should be recognised for leadership in any of these categories, you have until 25th April 2008 to get your entry in! Winners and runners-up get some significant international exposure feeding in to the UN's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the newly formed UKIGF.

The 2007 winners included Computer Aid International, Netcraft, Childnet, mySociety, CEOP and Internet Watch Foundation.

3 April 2008 / 0 Comments

Twingly in private beta – "a next-generation blog search engine"

I've signed up and will let you know what I find when I'm allowed in! From their press release today...

Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?

Spam free, social search

Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.

Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.

Powerful search language and tech plan Digg

Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.

But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!

UPDATE

Well I've got my invite and I've logged in to take a look. Read more

28 March 2008 / 0 Comments

UK Next Generation Access – what might we have to play with?

We've come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries.

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect's excellent report "Connecting Britain's Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband":

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry... the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK. Read more

7 March 2008 / 0 Comments

Write-off reading and writing. The three R's are dead; long live the three M's

Despite the hammerings of educationalists, the so-called three R's are far from sacrosanct: reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m talking specifically about the first two of these.

(OK, I’m not talking about them, I am actually writing and that irony isn’t lost on me. But then I am future gazing, and I could after all have podcast this post.)

Reading and writing have been bedrocks of civilisation, some would say the foundation, and it is only relatively recently that they have had competition as a media for non-synchronous communication. The 20th Century triumphs of broadcast radio, broadcast TV and semiotics compensated slightly for an individual’s illiteracy, but they were far from a perfect substitute and entirely useless when that individual wished to communicate back.

The 21st Century hasn’t taken long however to present a cornucopia of communication possibilities. Whilst applications of the Internet were dominated just a few years ago by text, and lots and lots of it, new applications pivot massively around the audio-visual. "Radio" and "TV" over IP / Narrowcasting / Podcasting / Moblogging / Vlogging / On Demand / Voice over IP / Video conferencing... Read more

26 February 2008 / 0 Comments

Morph

I'm obsessed with device usability, and high on that list is the graphical user interface. Marketers focused on phones and mobile Internet devices emphasise their understanding of the impacts of the user interface and everything stacked up behind it, but what about the possibilities of mobile sensory marketing?

Future mobile devices will be able to sense their surroundings: sight, sound and smell. We already have forward thinking companies like Mobile Acuity interpretting still images taken by mobile phones for consumer engagement objectives, but what would you do with smell!?

Nokia and the University of Cambridge have been collaborating on a concept they call Morph. This video accompanies this week's press release and should get us all thinking. I get the feeling we don't have to rush though :-)