Andrew Martin : Blogging

Flow chart for dealing with blog posts

Andrew Martin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:05:00 GMT

Interesting image from Scamp about how the US Air Force responds to blogs

Twitter is no longer useful

Andrew Martin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:13:00 GMT

I've been to many conferences over the years which have set up a dedicated back channel which has always added to my experience of the conference.

Twitter seems to be the back channel for SxSW and most people seem to be using it. I have an account but have never used it to tweet simply due to a lack of time and not wanting to start something which I simply won't be able to maintain in the longer term.

In my opinion the volume of traffic on Twitter about SxSW has made it unusable and has got to a level of noise where nobody would be able to keep up with it and get any value from it. Some sessions have been setting up specific hash tags such as #kebab which does give you a more focused feed but these aren't always set up or widely published.

Tags: SxSW , Twitter

Twitter for Business

Andrew Martin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:53:00 GMT

Personally I'm not a big Twitter user and don't need to write lines like Hugh's cartoon.

I see the benefit of Twitter, my lack of usage is mainly due to the amount of time I have available rather than anything else. From a company point of view a lot of people use it and we use Yammer from an internal messaging perspective.

I came across this webcast by O'Reilly titled Twitter for Business which is an excellent intro and includes a number of examples to how companies are using it currently.

Tags: Twitter , Yammer , Gaping Void

Microsoft does the Pepsi challenge

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:35:00 GMT

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.

From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.
To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use Vista
To what if Apple had done it
To why did they use Flash for it rather than Silverlight
and a whole load in between

On the whole I think that the Microsoft marketing team were trying to do a good thing and demonstrate that a lot of the feelings about Vista were based on hearsay rather than experience of using it.

Yes I agree that you can make a number of things look better than they actually are in a demo, just ask most start ups, but they have included some videos of people who picked that what they were looking at was Vista.

Personally I'm a Vista user and find it OK. As with most OS's there are some good and some bad bits my team enjoy nothing more than watching me struggle with one of our Linux or OS X test boxes. I don't complain about it I see them as other operating systems in the market that as web professionals we need to be aware of and build solutions which work well on them. I just don't use them every day so will always be a little slower on them and not know all the things they can do. I'm sure that if somebody showed me a top notch demo of Vista I'd hardly recognise some of it either.

Maybe Microsoft should go the whole hog and provide a copy of Vista and a video camera to 100 people and get them to record what they think of their first month of using Vista. I doubt they will.

Full disclosure Microsoft is a client.

Tags: Mojave Experiment , Microsoft , Flash , Silverlight , Vista

10 Downing Street is getting a new website

Andrew Martin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Hat tip to Puffbox that 10 Downing Street is soon to be releasing a new website, looks like a big improvement.

You can read their post here but in short

Wordpress based
More video
Streamlined navigation
no go live date as of yet

Tags: 10 Downing Street , Puffbox , Wordpress

Creating delightful experiences

Andrew Martin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:59:00 GMT

Once again Reboot was very enjoyable but due to some hardware issues I wasn't able to get online, I think this may have made it more enjoyable it certainly meant I paid more attention to what people were saying.

This year seemed to be the year of white writing on black backgrounds as most presentations seemed to have this.

One of the most enjoyable was Andy Budd's packed out presentation on Designing the User Experience Curve.

You can check out the whole presentation on Slideshare.

Tags: Andy Budd, Reboot

Penguins that can fly

Andrew Martin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:39:00 GMT

The BBC has found a colony of Penguins that can fly. You can see the video on their iPlayer site

OK so this might be an April Fool.

The teams at Google/YouTube seem to have gone to town with a whole range of stories.

Search the future - http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
YouDigg - http://youtube.com/watch?v=vi9erdy7sz0
Rick Rolling features - http://uk.youtube.com/
Virgle the Virgin Google joint venture to Mars - http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
The Google wake up kit - http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/new_wakeup.html
Google book search now smells better - http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-book-search-now-smells-better.html
Gmail Custom Time - http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

You can see these and a big list of other online April Fools jokes here

Notes from Reboot

Andrew Martin — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:41:00 GMT

A few follow up thoughts on the two days in Denmark.

Overheard comment from an American - "If this was in the US all people would be asking would be how we make money from this. Here in Europe it's about how good they can make something."

Favourite phrase somebody used to describe how we're always online - " Super hyper connectivity"

I wonder the impact that the Wii is having. Quite a few people talked about why we have to spend so much time interacting with a computer in the same way that we have always done and how we should be looking at better, more fun ways to interact with them.

I spent the plane ride back talking with Euan Semple which was interesting. He commented that one of the things he likes most about Reboot is that everybody understands the basics, and not having to explain things enables you to have much more productive conversations.

Stowe Boyd's talk on flow was good but I think the bit about always responding to your network first depends on what type of role you have. In every team you have to have people who get on and do the work. Maybe this is just me coming at things from a consultancy point of view but it would work better in an end user type environment.

The most interesting talk was "A town called kozarac.ba" by Lee Bryant. Really great to hear a personal perspective on how online communities can help people in life.

Wierdest fact: no two countries that have a McDonalds have been at war with each other.

Does this mean that McDonalds should just open an outlet in every country and we'll rid the world of war.

As always it seemed that the most difficult thing was deciding which talk to go to, or whether to go and talk to people.

I'll definitely be back.

Tags: Reboot, Stowe Boyd, Euan Semple, Wii, Lee Bryant

Rebooting humanity

Andrew Martin — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:16:00 GMT

After a midnight finish and a 4:30am start this morning I've made it to Reboot, my favourite conference of the year.

It has great presenters who are articulate and passionate about their subjects. It always makes you think about new and interesting subjects making me think about life in a slightly different way.

This years focus is Human?. I went to a session this morning by Jeremy Keith on Soul. One stat that he used was the number of neurons in the brain, 100 billion, and questioned how many links there are on the web and whether there would be more or less that this. If there are more does this make the web the brain of humanity.

Tags: Reboot, Jeremy Keith

Does Tom Glocer really blog?

Andrew Martin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:05:00 GMT

Tom Glocer CEO of Reuters has a blog.

On it he says

"We are all subject to a lot of official communications these days from companies, governments, celebrities and others. All too often these are ghost written passages concocted by overeager PR machines and do little to tell you anything new about the author or his or her true interests."

However there seem to be two different users who post to the site.

The first is Tom Glocer who has been a member since 11/24/2006, last accessed the site on 2/24/2007 and has posted twice.

The other is tom who has been a member since 8/25/2006, last accessed the site on 2/23/2007 and has posted 55 times, I think this must include comments as I can't find all the posts.

Is one of them a ghost writter concocted by an overeager PR machine?

Tags: Tom Glocer, Reuters Transparency, PR

Andrew Martin — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:45:00 GMT

I saw this list of icons at the bottom of a blog post recently.

In there you have

Digg
Del.icio.us
Newsvine
Furl
Blinkbits
Blinklist
Blogmarks
Co.mments
Connotea
De.lirio.us
Fark
Feedmelinks
Linkagogo
Ma.gnolia
Netvouz - don't quite know why this is in there doesn't look anything like a collaborative site
Rawsugar
Reddit
Scuttle
Shadows
Simpy
Smarking
Spurl
Tailrank
Wists
Yahoomyweb

Quite a collection, any more to add?

Makes our two look a bit pathetic :)

Lost in translation

Andrew Martin — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 17:33:00 GMT

That seems to be the general consensus at Le Web 3 today.

Three times today we have had the conference interrupted by politicians. The first Shimon Peres talked to us. He came across well, talked openly, took questions, had gravitas and I think was generally well received.

The next two were French political candidates who came across really badly. Based on the feedback (Sierralog, Dave Weinberger, Shane Richmond Christian Jung, Paulo Gagliardi, Nicole Simon's, Tom Raferty .....) not very many people enjoyed it, me included. The main reasons were that

they only spoke in French when both speak English
they talked about France when it kept being mentioned that we had 36 countries there
one of them didn't take questions
other more relevant/interesting speakers were badly treated
it wasn't what attendees had paid to see

In his open letter to Loic Dieter Rappold says that he won't come back because of this. I won't go that far at the moment. Why I come to events such as this is passion. The passion of the audience, some speakers and people you meet are what makes it for me and Le Web 3 had loads of people with passion.

When you work for an largish agency you have a number of clients demanding your attention, rightly so, on projects which aren't always the most cutting edge as it can often be seen as a risk to do something that nobody else has done. I'm lucky enough to get the chance to work on a number of very interesting projects and technologies but always enjoy meeting people with passion and find events such as le web a way to not only come across some new ideas but also to remind me why I work in technology - because we're all able to come up with new ideas that can change how the world works.

Shimon Peres presents to Le Web 3

Andrew Martin — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 09:26:00 GMT

He has just left the building and the next panel has just started. I don't know if people are thinking about what is being said now or what has just been said.

When I arrived this morning you could tell something was going on as the number of police outside was huge and getting more as you got closer to the conference hall.

Apparently Loic asked or people to close their laptops during the talk but didn't see many people who did.

Mr Peres said some interesting things and came over as though he had thought about how the internet was changing the world. He talked for approximately 45 mins and then spent a further 15 answering questions.

Some things he said were

"The stone age is over, not because there is no more stones, but no more age. Finished. You people of the internet are trying to give birth to this new age. You are the midwife."
"Why should we waste our intellectual energy remembering things? Google can do it for us."

There is a good write up on One Man and his Blog

Tag: leweb3

Le Web more popular than MySpace and Youtube

Andrew Martin — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:03:00 GMT

Well on Technorati searches anyway.

Tag: leweb3

blogging from le web 3

Andrew Martin — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:37:00 GMT

After an early start this morning and getting the train over from London I have now arrived at Le Web 3.

It's a lot bigger than last year, much bigger venue and room, little mini conference outside. However the same wifi problems.

According to Gogelmogel and Technoblog Shimon Peres is attending.

Tag: leweb3