2008 // Posts published in 2008
Its still about the content
A while ago, I bought one of those Creative VADO videocams. Really cool gadget, great for creating short clips and publishing them to the likes of YouTube for sharing. If you have good content to film, of course. And that’s the problem with user-generated content. The web is filled with rubbish – videos of pets...
Playing with google optimiser
Last week I discovered Google Website Optimiser. It’s a great free service that allows you to perform some simple A/B and multivariate tests on a website. And it helped me to understand more about what these types of tests are, and how to set them up. First, A/B Testing. Put simply, A/B testing is where...
Comments are free but the code is rubbish
One of the things I’ve been keen to do for a while is to add a better comments tool to London for Free. Recently, I discovered an excellent script from GentleSource, which seemed to do the trick nicely. All I needed to do was to set up a mysql database from my webhost and download,...
A peoples history
The anniversary of Sept 11 this week got me thinking about how far we’ve come in only 7 years with the use of web 2.0 tools and methods for sharing information. Back then, I think the media coverage was measured by how quickly organisations could update their web pages, capture and show film footage and...
Just because they can doesnt mean they will
Between reading Groundswell I’ve also been reading Here Comes Everybody, which discusses the social impact of web 2.0 technology and the ways that people mobilise around issues that concern them by forming online groups and so on. And it dawned on me that, unless I’ve missed something, the writers of Groundswell have made a bit...
Do you web too?
Apparently, 21% of UK online consumers visit social networking sites but only 10% read blogs. In the US, the figure is 25% for each. And interestingly, in France its the opposite: 21% read blogs and only 3% visit social networking sites. For organisations trying to tap into the conversations their customers are having online, its...
The second coming of communities
Reading through Groundswell, I had a sense of deja vu. There was something vaguely familiar about a lot of this stuff. All this talk about people having conversations online with each other, forming groups, getting what they need from the community and other customers rather than from organisations, the challenges faced by organisations around driving...
Power to the people
As I continue developing my understanding of web 2.0, social media and organisations, I’ve been reading an excellent book recently called Groundswell. Written by two Forrester analysts, it talks about the importance of organisations paying attention to what their customers are doing online. They define groundswell as a social trend in which people use technologies...
The purpose of our lives is to be happy - Dalai Lama