Month: August 2011
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Have Focus Groups Had Their Day?
"They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products." Jonathan Ive I'll admit to having never really been fond of focus groups. For quite some time I've been troubled by the question of whether they yield quite the value that companies seem to invest in them. Or rather, I should perhaps more…
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On Anxiety
This weekend I spent a bit of time with Andrew Zuckerman's work and (courtesy of Maria Popova) listened to this talk he gave at this year's 99% conference which contains a series of fantastic insights into his view on the creative process, wonderfully illustrated by soundbites from his work, most notably the Wisdom and Music projects.…
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Never Ending Stories
I read this Frog Design piece a while back and it's stuck in my mind ever since. It's an interview with artist Jonathan Harris (he of We Feel Fine fame) about his (not yet live) new project that is about encouraging people to tell long-form stories (or integrated memories) using photos, videos, timelines, sound maps, and…
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Digital Curation – SXSWi 2012
The uber-smart Len Kendall, Alicia Kan, and the not-so uber smart me, have joined forces on a panel proposal for SXSWi 2012 on the subject of Digital Curation. It's subtitled "Why Value Over Volume Wins", and we're attempting to provide some useful perspective on the thorny subjects of information overload and digital content curation which…
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Porous Paywalls
This piece by Felix Salmon is the smartest post on paywalls I've read in a long time. In it, he talks about how the porousness of the NY Times paywall is a feature, not a bug: "It allows anybody, anywhere, to read any NYT article they like. That makes the NYT open and inviting —…
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Innovation Inertia
Why do some businesses just seem to stop innovating? Or at least open themselves up to being out-innovated by smart, agile competitors who are still hungry and foolish (in a good way) enough to prioritise new ideas highly? I'm not one for Lazy End-ism, but this proclamation of the demise of Flickr makes some good…
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Post Of The Month – July 2011 – The Winner
An even spread of voting for much of this months vote, which then became a contest between Edward Boches' excellent Social Media Trends post and Martin Weigel's challenge to Stop Fetishising The Insight. But in the end it was the latter that won through, so well done Martin. As always, you get the props of…
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Post Of The Month – July 2011 – The Vote
Thanks as always for some good nominations. So this month's vote is between: If Your Website's Full Of Assholes, It's Your Fault by Anil Dash Stop Fetishising The Insight from Martin Weigel If You Want To Succeed, You've Got To Assume No-one Cares by Martin Weigel Rigidly Defined Areas Of Doubt by Andy Whitlock Approaches…
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Playing With Ratios
Fred Wilson writes an interesting post about what he calls the common 'web/mobile laws of physics', making the observation that many of the tech services and companies they see as VCs exhibit similar ratios between the number of registered user or downloads (if it's a mobile app) the service has, the number of monthly and…
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Post Of The Month – July 2011 – Nominations
Slightly later than usual due to holidays, but nominations are now open for Post Of The Month. So please nominate the best posts that you've read and which were posted in the month of July in the comments below. As usual, I've listed a few starters (you may notice there's a double nomination for two…