Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

Taken from a kawasaki tweet link to an article in Psychology Today:

“People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic,” he says, “because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made.”

In short, there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback. Which reminds me, not many people look after their health like I feel they should. I really think everyone should keep this in mind over everything. I always try to keep in mind many thing that I have learned over the years that help me take good care of myself. If you would like to research this topic further you can check here For More Information.

Make 2009 your year of being real, being authentic.

Grok linked to a 15 year old cartoon from my favourite stable – Calvin & Hobbes

Which then reminded me of Tom’s enlightening post about the usa car manufacturers handouts

All rather uncomfortably funny.

Fun and serious review of how business is structured in reality. As a usability company, we deal in the reality of expectations – we don’t aim to change the world, just oil the wheels and maybe point our users in the best possible direction.

Sigurd’s explaination of business frameworks.

Experts are pragmatists, they re-set or re-frame the problem to make it solvable. Novices are realists, they take the problem as a given and get stuck.

taken from ‘noise between stations‘ – an interesting blog just added to my rss feeds.
So, maybe the stars of tomorrow are easy to spot. Enlightened novices use experts for support and guidance – the others, out of ignorance just get stuck in, passionately getting stuck.

Please don’t ask me which camp I’ve put you in :-)

I didn’t realise it – but Last.FM are based in the UK. yeah.

I love the concept – but get really stressed with the way it works. There seems to be so much good stuff inside – but how do I use it? I wanted to listen to a user’s radio station in my desktop player and couldn’t work out how to do it. I payed for 3 months of service to see if that improved matters. One of the fab bits about Last.FM is the wikpediaesque library of info about the artists accessed on the site, through the player. I’ve learned alot about my favourite bands recently and discovered some new stuff. Which is what it’s all about.

The main rival to Last.FM is Pandora (apparently only for users in USA, cough, cough) and it’s streets ahead when it comes down to the user experience. Pandora is simple, robust and leaves me with a smile everytime I use it.

Maybe the guys and girls at Last.FM are too close to their baby to understand how joe public use it. Maybe they are all OSX users that haven’t noticed there’s no pause button on the XP player? or tried to listed to a user’s station?

Tom loves Last.FM and has done some clever stuff with the API – but that doesn’t fix my very basic desires:

– build my very own radio station, just how I want it

– explore more music through other people

I’d love to work on the IA and Customer Journeys within Last.FM. I think it would be a pretty major gig/project – which then leads to the 64 thousand dollar question – can they afford the work they need to do? cos it’s ambitious, complex, sticky, etc. I think our heads would hurt doing the project. But hey, what a project?

Jaguar had me watching/drooling for over 3 minutes with their video about a contemporary use of materials – how much would that have cost in old advertising money? Even changed my perception of Jaguar.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u4jrl1UWbBc

Heuga – please shoot some videos. please.

more design-led videos from Jaguar here

http://uk.youtube.com/user/JaguarCarsLimited

We build lots of websites at the dry board…. but we’ve never got round to stitching one together like this.

http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/ 

Credit to Seth for flagging this one up.

Apple have released a few notes about the next version of osx – and they’re going to include a wiki server… bet it’s a great wiki. Apple are doing some great things at the moment – although a little late for us because we need this stuff now!

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/wikiserver.html

If you have a spare hour or so… I do recommend watching the WWDC 2006 video with Steve doing his thing

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/aug_2006/event/index.html

Mr Jobs and his company are great at what they do. As a PC & MAC user – it’s also fun to see the smoke and mirrors from both sides of the story. Sure thing that Vista is copying OSX – but so’s OSX copying XP/Vista. Apple is ace though.

Looks like I should be looking at the new version of Socialtext – the’ve just released an open source version of their wiki software.

http://www.eu.socialtext.net/stoss/index.cgi

Just checking our logs and saw that somebody had found us from a google search in arabic. It’s the first time I’ve seen Google in right to left mode.

go check it out – google in right to left

Yesterday, I had an idea for a video promo. Needs some work, but may be fun to shoot and possibly encourage a few people to challenge the quo.

Analytics Hostage Takedown
When approaching the technical team for improved ROI tracking or visitor data on your website, it can feel like some sort of hostage release negotiation. All you want is some data, or a number crunching application to tell you if the website is working – just some info for the benefit of the company.

What do mean, you’re not happy with hits and referral data? You want more?

That would mean re-coding the website, the site structure will not let that sort of information be collected…

Cue police squad cars arriving outside the building, black helicopters circling overhead, snipers in positions… etc…

At this point I have to decide, in the promo, whether we storm the building and rescue the website (install an onsite analytics solution) or difuse the situation with peaceful mediation (install offsite page tagging analytics).

Yeah, it needs some work – but there really is no excuse for no business analytics from your website.

gapingvoid: blogger’s wine freebie

It’s a nice idea, give out a few bottles, get people talking, if the stuff’s any good, you get a strong base to grow a loyal organic market. Being possibly the first company promoting a wine this way, also develops a nice story to tell all types of traditional press, builds a few nice links from many sites to bolster that google ranking, etc

I’ve emailed a few times to participate in this offer – but heard nothing – which got me thinking about the down side.

I will never know if Hugh got the emails with my details, or the email chasing my details – at one point I even felt I had to apologise for not writing up the wine tasting ‘cos maybe the postal system had snaffled my bottle? Maybe a spam filter blocked me. Maybe I just didn’t make the grade. I guess the latter, which is ok – their loss. But at this point Stormhoek are a brand I’ll avoid. They’ve anchored a poor feeling and I’ve got plenty of great Sauvignon Blancs already to choose from to go with our crispy duck, summer evenings, late night working…. Infact, we had a party this weekend and our lovely guests left 5 different bottles of Sauvignon for us to quaff, amongst other interesting wines.

I’ve just got to finish off that fabulous cask of Guzzler from our amazing local brewery. (note to self – must write a few words about York Brewery – they’re doing so much stuff, very well, with a very nice team)

Brand is the emmotion left in your belly fueled by communication. For me, Stormhoek didn’t work.

Anybody else avoiding Stormhoek?

A local search engine optimisation company was recently overheard recommending to a customer that they should get a blog to help with their rankings on Google. The company then offered to write the blog for them, to ensure the keywords etc were correct.

This is so wrong. In fact it’s as wrong as selling live8 tickets on ebay. Yes you can do it, but it’s wrong. Blogs should be written by passionate individuals, experts in their own field – whether it’s your personal blog (being an expert in yourself) or your area of interest. How can an SEO company write your blog?

If you have a trademark or product, I recommend heading over to a blogging search engine like technorati or blo.gs and do a few searches and see who’s using your words and brand within spammy blogs, stuffed with keyword rich site maps and random text. I wouldn’t loose too much sleep over it, but something to bear in mind if this activity ever influenced your placement within search engine results.

Video send up about google autolink

watch the video – really funny. What could you do with a camera and an official looking backdrop?

Click around the site – is this another case of me missing the party – Better Bad News – it’s a hoot.

Think different – choose your own colour

Nice paint job for your boring mac. The imacs look rather nice – just too many colours to choose from.

InternetRetailer – Search Engine Marketing Results

Are marketing people still so ignorant of the net these days that they need a report to work this stuff out?

In a nutshell….

• Those that spend money on making their sites more visible, sell more goods online.
• Those that spend money on advertising, sell more goods.
• Natural listings on search engines, produce more sales than adverts
• Those companies that have both an inhouse and external team working on advertising and site visibility, out perform those that only use either

Please tell me you could work this out for yourself…….

Kontraband – almost TV Adverts
Very funny/crude adverts from some big brands that you won’t see on tv. put your headphones on and watch in your tea break.

Carly parody
I’ve never met Carly Fiorina – now ex ceo of Hewlett Packard. I’ve seen her in action on a few webcasts and thought well of her. I think she once ‘mis-behaved’ in a presentation about PC tablets with Bill Gates. She was annoyed and didn’t hide it. She’s now moving on and I guess she will go do something great somewhere else.

The satirical parody above is rather funny though.

www.scambuster419.co.uk
Rather funny website about a rather serious problem.

Reminded me of when this group scammed the scammer and mocked up a portable computer out out of a folder, to sting an ebay fraudster. They staked out a cafe and then sent the scammer a box that would have a large customs & excise bill. Very clever!

Make the royal family dance.
Yeah it’s been done before – but like Fawlty Towers…. it’s still funny.