For twenty years I have been a scientist* working in a sector dominated by artists. That doesn't make it lonely - as a result my colleagues and customers are quite probably more fun and maybe more capable of inspirational thinking - but... Read More

B L Ochman has an interesting post which links to the Logic+Emotion site and talks about how "blogs are what connect the community clusters".  One of the things that the post includes is this diagram where the green dots are the interaction between... Read More

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger links to a post about the difference between being 1st and 2nd on Google for a particular search term. "I can tell you that our site receives approximately 30k of visits on average per day from Google,... Read More

Artist Christian Nold's Bio Mapping project uses galvanic skin response detectors, the Global Positioning System, and Google Earth to create maps that link physical locations with levels of emotional arousal."The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to... Read More

The Outsell Report on click fraud has garnered a lot of headlines this week. $1.3bn is a very headline grabbing number but its not a new problem - either Click Fraud (Yahoo! and Google have both had problems) or its old world predecessors.  My... Read More

from Communication Nation an image showing how the distribution of requests on Google.com changes through the day.You can read the whole  research paper this comes from here ... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

Always had a soft spot for compelling data visualization. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has a post on how people are using source data from the Guardian's Datastore to re-package and re-present data on the MP's expenses furore here in the UK.... Read More

Read Michael Castellon's blog on a new initiative to defuse the alien threat to Nevada. Teaser pic below. But remember, back in June you read it here first. Tags: KFC, Aliens, Junk food... Read More

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is responsible for lighting the blue touchpaper on this trivia (but its Friday after all).  Scott's post here debated that Bill Gates would make a reasonable President of the USA. An idea that becomes less preposterous... Read More

The excellent Response Source gives UK journalists a channel to reach out to PRs and ask questions for stories, get contact info and occasionally fish for gadgets and devices (strictly for review purposes or competition giveaways, of course).... Read More

I like it when high tech gets wrapped up with the ancient. Freight containers washed to shore from the beached MSC Napoli have posed a moral dilemma for the UK. Local folk have asserted their 'privilege' to scavenge anything that comes to... Read More

Luckily, most crooks don't know.... Read More

Just back from the Government Leaders Forum (GLF) in Edinburgh. Hosted by Microsoft, the event brings together goverment figures from across Europe, including both technology policy makers and implementers. It may not quite be Davos, but when the coach... Read More

If one of your valued clients invited you to join his professional network on LinkedIn, you'd do it in a heartbeart, right? But what if he invited you to be his friend on Facebook? Or - even more potentially unsettling - MySpace? In OMG -- My Boss wants... Read More

Tom Merritt and Molly Wood noted on the Buzz Out loud podcast the rise of new Web 2.0 services and companies with names that end in "-le". They also called for the death of the term "mashup". But what would replace it? Someone suggested "blendle".... Read More

Mike Monteiro, creative director for Mule Design, has had it with unnecessary meetings. As reported in 43 Folders, he's creating "meeting tokens" to reintroduce the idea that everyone's time is a scarce resource that must be paid for if you want to consume... Read More

Wow, that sounds awfully dramatic; as if Steve should be smiling for the cameras and smashing a bottle of champagne across the blog's header. But if you're like me and use Twitter A WHOLE LOT, you'll be glad to know that you can now follow TNM's... Read More

This new t-shirt from Penny Arcade provides five appropriate responses to anything someone might say to you on the Web:    ... Read More

The invitations to the Seattle office holiday party came with Metia-shaped cookies by Cookies In Bloom. I strongly support this move by Metia to incorporate delicious baked goods into our corporate branding strategy.... Read More

Much has been said about the visual aspects of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' compelling presentations. However, no one has focused on his use of sound effects - until this video. Boom!(Via Gizmodo)Tags: Steve Jobs, Apple, public speaking, onomatopoeia ... Read More

Marketers looking for the Next Big Thing should check out Get a First Life, an exciting new interactive media platform in which users - or "people" - interact with physical objects using their own bodies. Many of First Life's more than 5 billion residents... Read More

If you're attending the South by Southwest Interactive festival this year, keep an eye out for the shifty character pictured below. From March 9-13 I'll be hanging out with the high-metabolism world dominators and arm-waving visionaries of the digital... Read More

"While you're on my blog please take note of the latest Twitter comment I posted about posting about my blog post about tumblr on tumblr and Twitter."How to be a Geek... Read More

A couple of recent articles caught my eye: "Marketing is the new finance" according to Google's chief economist in this AdWeek article. Google has a chief economist? VC tells agencies to get some serious tech creds, article in AdWeek again - creativity... Read More

After the success of last year's survey where almost 33,000 web professionals took the List Apart survey they're running it again.Take it here.Tags: A List Apart ... Read More

With all the controversy around Jay-Z's appearance at Glastonbury this year, I listened briefly to the news this morning to find out how he went down. The results - at least through the traditional channels - were disappointing. BBC sat on the fence... Read More

Virgin have launched what they're calling the Virgin Eye.Check it out here It shows which stories are being written about Virgin companies in a nice graphical manner. My favorite is when you have Beautify on and you see new stories arriving.The one thing... Read More

Last night – suited and booted – Metia London took our lovely client, Logica to the Institute of Sales Promotion awards, at the Park Lane Hilton. We were up for the Best B2B Campaign award, with our nifty, Logica Does it Better campaign. Across the... Read More

The McKinsey Quarterly has published a McKinsey Global Survey - How Companies are Marketing Online - you can read the whole article here. I found one table particularly informative - Exhibit six on this page of the report. What interested... Read More

Right now, visualization techniques and tools are areas where we are investing time. I was planning to post on this, and then everyone else beat me to it... Charles Arthur has taken a look at this subject in his Guardian techblog Charles also... Read More

Nielsen completed a global survey - 26,000+ consumers in 47 markets - which has confirmed that consumers place the greatest trust in... recommendations from other consumers. Well, we all knew that, but its good to have some more confirmation. More interesting... Read More

A naive question I know, but interesting to read that Richard Holway - formerly of Ovum and the eponymously named Richard Holway Ltd - now regards himself as an influencer not an analyst. And that he aspires to be a trusted influencer. I've paid... Read More

You see, all you scoffers and naysayers? Social media produces measurable results! Before social media: no jacket. After social media: jacket. That is a 100 percent increase in jacket presence. Now I wonder if social media can cause a sandwich to... Read More

According to Dave Hatch, a Research Director at Aberdeen Group, three of the top four marketers' priorities are to do with justifying their existence inside their own business, not whipping the competition outside in the marketplace. Even those... Read More

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on the new metrics now available to track the progress of the US presidential race, from Twitter followers to odds quoted by a bookmaker. Some of these methods wouldn't translate for a brand or a business but its is amazing... Read More

I'm just back from presenting at Customer Reference Forum Europe. This was the first gathering of customer reference professionals in Europe and was brought together by the illustrious Bill Lee who, as always, did a great job as host and facilitator.... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

Recently, the Weekly Geek podcast reported on this story from Ars Technica about Nielsen Media Research tracking video game playing habits. Nielsen will install a People Meter in participating homes that picks up videogame sounds, compares them to a database,... Read More

Technorati's Dave Sifry publishes the latest State of the Blogosphere commentary. Its worth reading. There's lots on growth, spam, splogs, etc, which is all good to know, but sort of taken as read - what surprised and / or interested me, was:... Read More

Steve Rubel opened up a discussion about the demise of the page view as the defining metric for online media sales. I agree. In a separate life, over five years ago now, I helped start up a successful community site that is funded through online... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

The My Coke Rewards promotion turns codes printed on Coca-Cola bottlecaps into GOLD! (If by "gold" you mean NASCAR hats and coupons for movie popcorn.)One day, I innocently posted a minor gripe about the promotion on my personal blog. I was astonished... Read More

Today the Reg has gleefully carried a great story on a farmer in the North of England who, for reasons best known to himself, carved the word arse into a field of crops (clearly the word arse doesn't get past our automatic censor, so... Read More

Not sure if that's a geographically accurate statement - Metia on top of the world - but its fun to see our new logo up at the North Pole. Our London office has been helping three friends of the company in their bid to raise cash for a male cancer... Read More

So the travelling army of Dutch football fans have been ordered to cheer on their national team in their pants by joyless FIFA executives. In by far the best story to have emerged from the early stages of the World Cup, Dutch brewer Bavaria (which... Read More

Members of Parliament may soon get to experience the guilty pleasures enjoyed by company office workers in meetings - IMing each other with gossip, or simply scanning the internet for something (anything) more interesting - while ostensibly they... Read More

Thanks to my colleague Tudor, we can share with you the latest fashion in England, Scubaheels. I have no idea where this image came from. But in case you aren't local to the south of England, we have had - and continue to do have - a few local operating... Read More

It's August. School has broken up. The customers are on holiday. The traffic is lighter. The floods are receding. And our British newspapers are full of stories like The Scariest Underwear Adverts, Pigeons Attack Venice, Fifty per cent of Drivers Cannot... Read More

The People's Daily Online reports that Chinese authorities have set up a summer camp to cure youngsters addicted to the internet. The report says: "According to research by Shanghai's youth affairs office, those seriously addicted to the web should receive... Read More

TV and film directors don't very often get the tech industry right, but last night I stumbled upon Riot On! on BBC4. Riot On! nailed it for me. It may strictly speaking have been about a mobile entertainment company - its the 'story' of Riot... Read More

En route to Heathrow this morning the sun was shining and all was well in middle England. The usual crew of Sunday afternoon business travellers to the US had a spring in their step. For another week their dream lives on. I even saw... Read More

Back from Seattle. I was going to post about the impact a windy day can have in the rufty tufty Pacific Northwest (too much of that nature nearby, I guess). But that seems churlish, when I now know that London's main airport needs two hours... Read More

I don't why I find this snippet interesting. The Raw Story runs a story on the cost a wiretap, or telephone tap to us Brits. Comcast will fix a wiretap for you at $1,000 to install, then its $750 a month to keep on eavesdropping. Not a bad margin... Read More

Mashable's list of top US election resources, reminded me of some thoughts I had on the subject of politics and online when I was in the US last week.  First, I was amazed how much media bandwidth the whole topic was already consuming, despite... Read More

It is my daughter's eighth birthday soon, I could run it by her... but I reckon she'll stick with a Hamster. Gizmodo unearthed the story.... Read More

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger links to a post about the difference between being 1st and 2nd on Google for a particular search term. "I can tell you that our site receives approximately 30k of visits on average per day from Google,... Read More

B L Ochman has an interesting post which links to the Logic+Emotion site and talks about how "blogs are what connect the community clusters".  One of the things that the post includes is this diagram where the green dots are the interaction between... Read More

from Communication Nation an image showing how the distribution of requests on Google.com changes through the day.You can read the whole  research paper this comes from here ... Read More

Our massive robot army.... Read More

From bopuc/weblog via Jason DeFillippo via 43 Folders. How's that for credit, Merlin? ;-)... Read More

I hate to interrupt the grownups when they're talking about implementing customer reference programs, but I need to take a moment here to discuss soda pop.I recently wrote that a throwaway post about My Coke Rewards on my personal blog had gotten a surprising... Read More

That's the headline which the World Advertising Research Centre site when talking about a report published by the American Association of Nation Advertisers. This report includes the following quote "Marketing accountability is still often an activity... Read More

It's not often that we post about what we do on a daily basis but sometimes there are things I just have to post about, they are also the things that normally that keep me from posting more regularly.Over the last few months we've been working hard to... Read More

Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg. While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans. Metia's Mobile Keepy... Read More

Supportive of the Scouts for helping out on the UK skills shortage by launching a new activity badge for PR, I found out they also have them for Creativity and IT (below), which goes some way to fixing our recruitment needs. And surely these... Read More

Strangely, one of our most popular posts ever was this story from Wade on Sun taking a swipe at Microsoft on their home turf by advertising OpenOffice on the local Seattle bus routes (see the number of angry comments the... Read More

Is it possible for a company to be evil and also play cricket? I thought I knew a lot about Microsoft but this Reuters story put a new spin on it (sorry). Disclosure: Microsoft are both a partner and customer, so if anyone wants to read anything... Read More

I was a bit disappointed by this piece in the Independent - Measuring PR success by column inches is old hat – welcome to a new analysis. I get the Independent at home, so think its generally a sound read. Apparently the breaking news is that Advertising... Read More

The development team in Metia Seattle has been exploring uses for Pivot, a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that let's users interact with large volumes of data. To bring Pivot to life, the team tipped in all the player stats for all the... Read More