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

I'm not sure if Gartner does 'rock star' analysts but Nick Jones generates more buzz than most. Today at Symposium he contends that: Your Customers and Users are Revolting!   First Nick nails his audience by describing the session as a maverick... Read More

I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the... Read More

Being slightly reclusive by nature, last week's Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit was one of the few times I spend much time with counterparts from other PR agencies. Microsoft has a strong hand of agencies supporting it, so its interesting to compare notes... 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

I once wrapped up a presentation about blogging and podcasting thusly: "What I've described to you isn't the future. Blogging is what people are doing right now. It's important to grasp this phenomenon as quickly as possible, because at the current rate... 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

Nice wrinkle ahead. Having built a community around a blog, you now will be able to interact with them via online conference call capabilities, or Skypecasts, as Skype would have us call it. ZDnet ran the story here yesterday. Curiously, I haven't... Read More

Must be getting crowded over in Second Life. No sooner had Sam Palmisano and IBM taken up residence, as described in BusinessWeek Online, than Silicon.com reports Michael Dell is joining them with his own Dell island (not sure if Michael has... 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

This weekend I was woken by my son.  Normally I just tell him to go back to bed and try to get back to sleep.  Saturday I sat up and asked him what he said."Dad wake up we've got to go and download the podcasts"  Even though I spend most... Read More

Two people are sitting in a living room recording a podcast. I'm at the edge of the sofa and using my "radio voice". My interview subject is a few feet away, sitting comfortably back and speaking normally. My iRiver recorder is on a small table... Read More

In his post Covering an Apple press event, Robert Scoble offers sage advice on how to get your coverage noticed. The bad news is that it requires a team of four to five people: "TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re... Read More

I got this message when I logged in to Facebook today: Best proposal EVER.... Read More

Steve Grant, Creative Strategist at Omnicom Group, went to the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo and had his mind blown. Steve's company, TDI, is the interactive agency of record for Nissan/Infiniti. Until now their product had to be cooler, faster,... Read More

My hands shake, my eyes are red and bleary. Yep, I'm an addict. I'm addicted to YouTube. While most people go home and plonk themselves on the couch and are happy for TV to spoonfeed them entertainment of the Big Brother variety, I'm upstairs on... Read More

This year's Media Guardian 100 list, which ranks the most important and influential in British media, contains few suprises. New media has continued its steady climb to world domination, with an increased impact on the annual... Read More

Via Digg For all you designers out there ... Read More

from OK/Cancel a cartoon titled "A conversation with marketing" ... Read More

In the mix of participants on this blog, I seem to represent the voice of the entrepreneur. I'm also an entrepreneur of a certain age and experience. Perhaps that why I loved the sceptical tone of Dead 2.0. Anyone getting a little too carried away with... Read More

Yesterday at their Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure their new cloud services platform and to support it, the www.azure.com site, which our team built. It's great to see a site which has such huge importance... Read More

Product, shmoduct. Earlier this year, the DeSantis brothers uploaded a conceptual ad for a non-existent Apple mobile phone, the iTalk. It may not exist, but it sure is pretty. And functional!Click here for the video (Via The Cult of Mac Blog)Tags:... Read More

I've been blogging less, lately. Of course, "less" for me might still be "an ungodly huge amount" for you. Why? Well, until now, blogs did the heavy lifting for nearly everything I wanted to do online. With blogs I could keep in touch... Read More

Reuters says Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions. Cullen said his findings were based on a typical Facebook user, earning an average wage, spending an hour a day on line. He then calculated the cost to companies if one person in every organization... Read More

Fig. 1. - The Cult of the Ball I and a few of my unsuspecting co-workers at Metia's Seattle office are attending Penny Arcade Expo 2007 (aka PAX) this weekend. If you see me, please say hello! (To me.) I plan to Twitter from the show. ... Read More

Wait, weren't MySpace and MTV just recently destroying the moral and intellectual fiber of the Republic? From Future Majority: Trumping even YouTube in interactivity, the forums will be held town-hall style in front of a live audience on yet-to-be-determined... Read More

I tend to have whatever I'm actively working on in my right-hand monitor, and everthing else in the left. At the moment, "everything else" includes a live feed of Justine Ezarik working on her laptop. Some thoughts: MAN, live Web video has come... Read More

Tech PR copywriter The Friendly Ghost has created a "relentlessly functional" tool using free Zoho Creator online database software. The Friendly Ghost Social Media Resource tracks PR social media knowledge, both theory and proof, and the Friendly... Read More

At Satisfaction anyone can list a company, product, or service on the site. Then other users can post their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Support comes from the Satisfaction community, though ideally the company in question will... Read More

CubeVoice...okay, CubeVoice is like Twitter, except you identify yourself as an employee of your company and carry on text conversations with your colleagues and interested outsiders in public. These conversations are aggregated and displayed in a Twitter... Read More

I'm a fan of Forrester's work in pushing forward the evolution of the marketing function, marketing operations and particularly the better use of technology. We both sing from, more or less, the same hymn sheet. Peter Kim has written up some... Read More

James Cherkoff on his Modern Marketing blog links to a PowerPoint slide which Jun Sato from Toshiba used while doing a presentation at MIT Media Lab.It show the number of creative commons licenses by country around the world.  What I find interesting... Read More

A few posts ago I compared Sun's OpenOffice marketing strategy to dropping leaflets into enemy territory. Not too long after that, Slate Magazine's "Explainer" column explored the mechanics of leaflet-dropping in "The Secrets of Airborne Propaganda Distribution".... Read More

Minority Report Originally uploaded by Wade Rockett. I've been away from the keyboard for a few days, showing my visiting cousin the wonders of Seattle. But I've not been away from technology: On Monday we visited the Microsoft visitor center where... Read More

Steve Rubel has a post about why marketers should think like VC's which references the ComScore top 50 digital media properties for 2001. This reminded me of an article which I read recently by Tim Bray titled Measuring the Web which tries to answer the... Read More

Ha! It took me a second to realize it, but Etsy's front page for today features art and crafts that reflect the dual themes of "snakes" and "planes". Nice.The Inside the Net podcast has a good interview with the creators of Etsy, with plenty to interest... Read More

After the huge success of TechCrunch.com, which now has more than 100k readers  - well done, they have launched a UK site which will be focusing on UK based start-ups.Sam Sethi will be editing the site.One page which stood out for me was the events... Read More

Today the Google Blog announced the launch of Google Code Search, which enables programmers to search publicly accessible source code. Neat idea.Some who've tried out the service have already discovered all sorts of fascinating results (such as passwords... Read More

I was burning the midnight oil recently, starting to write an important piece that was due in a couple of days. It didn't take long for me to realize that the job ahead of me would be much harder than I'd thought. Frankly, at that moment... Read More

Kara Swisher has seen Facebook and she is not amused. See The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It) and The Children’s Hour, Part 2: Can Facebook Apps Grow Up? (She never quite gets around to answering her question, saying... Read More

The San Diego area in Southern California is on fire. The latest I've heard is that 300,000 people have been evacuated. I lived in San Diego during the last big wildfire in 2003--it was a terrifying, tragic event, and only(!) 50,000 people were evacuated... Read More

Ike Pigott of the American Red Cross created a blog to provide media outlets with up-to-date information about the Red Cross response to the disaster. Ike didn't use proprietary software, deployed on the Red Cross network and configured by a developer... Read More

Um, hi guys. I'm on deadline, and I probably shouldn't even be blogging right now; but I wanted to tell you about a couple of things. First, you might be wondering how you're going to talk about Open Social to your agency's execs without sounding like... Read More

I'm back from Blog World Expo 2007, and ready to present all of my notes and thoughts about the event to you in a coherent manner. Hahahahahahaha! Oh, me. No, actually I returned to work to find several meeting requests in my inbox for writing projects... Read More

"The *only* thing Facebook is good at is being viral." - Julian Bond, commenting on gapingvoid "...the bulls--t that ensued verified my initial assessment: that maintaining Facebook would quickly constitute another job. Of which I already have several."... Read More

I'll be attending the Web Community Forum's event "Community building in the age of Facebook" on Wednesday and Thursday of this week in Seattle. Our little group of glamorous-but-deadly speakers and attendees is going to nail down this... Read More

You mean you haven't heard of Jonathan Coulton? C'mon! Surely you've heard his music on podcasts like the Little Gray Book Lectures, or Escape Pod.Or you've spotted his CafePress t-shirts.Maybe you've read his blog, where he collaborates with his readers... Read More

Recently, in a dead laptop battery on a plane moment, I was thinking to myself how has the drive towards technology and community affected marketing? Is there a formula or equation that I could devise to show this?I started from the commonly held view... Read More

The last couple of days finding out about the future of Silverlight have been great and I'm really pleased that we're at the forefront of this technology and the next couple of years should be exciting.Most of the information I'm not allowed to share... Read More

This slick Silverlight based Business Value Calculator has just gone live over on the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 site. It has earned a nice reference from Channel9, and there are some positive comments accumulating on Twitter too. Obviously,... 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

I enjoyed MIX again this year and some of the announcements especially around Silverlight 3 were great. The demo Jon Harris did of Sketchflow was fantastic and will allow us to continue to deliver better solutions to our clients.If Ballmer was there he... 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

If there is a prize for the best use of social technology in reinventing journalism*, then I reckon the Guardian is a front runner with it's crowdsourcing initiative to review MP's expenses, explained here. I'm impressed with... Read More

Last week we met up with Charlie Kindel - @ckindel - one of the Microsoft execs driving the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7) program. Our interest in WP7 is to use our Silverlight and .Net skills to build mobile experiences and apps for brands.... Read More

Engadget and Metro report on a story about about Casio selling it billionth calculator which is quite an achievement. 1957 - 01969 - 100,0001972 - 2,000,0001974 - 10,000,0001980 - 100,000,0002006 - 1,000,000,000The Metro article also lists Casio's Top... Read More

James Cherkoff on his Modern Marketing blog links to a PowerPoint slide which Jun Sato from Toshiba used while doing a presentation at MIT Media Lab.It show the number of creative commons licenses by country around the world.  What I find interesting... Read More

I've just come across the BBC's new beta site which is really cool. It allows you to customise what news sections you see and move them around how you like. ... Read More

We're doing more and more work in Silverlight and are part of the Microsoft Early Adopter program for this product. I think we're only just scratching the surface especially when you start to layer .NET functionality on top. While talking to a potential... Read More

I've just got back from holiday and being British one of our national obsessions is the weather especially while away. I came across an interactive weather map on weather.com which I thought was really cool. It allows you to zoom in and out viewing areas... Read More

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... Read More

I got my first chance to play with a Zune yesterday.From the quick look I had it seemed very good.  The screen was sharp, navigation easy but the bit that stood out the most was how it felt.  It had a really great texture which made it feel... 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

On Wednesday the New York Times had a piece on the unlikely but multi-billion dollar market for purchasing virtual goods for real cash - Asian Social Networking Sites Profit from Virtual Money. Yesterday the Guardian's Victor Keegan had a post... Read More

Normally I'd shy away from ever claiming a 'world's first' - someone, somewhere must surely have got there first? But in this instance we think we are on solid ground. Working with the team at Mediacom we have been busy putting the finishing touches... Read More

Something else for marketers and especially designers to embrace - data driven design. James Governor has a great analysis of the drivers behind Adobe's Omniture acquisition - Adobe Omniture: Data meets design. Here comes Google! if you are a marketer... Read More

Looks like everyone needs a healthy developer ecosystem these days (except Skype). Yesterday, Vivek Kundra, CIO of the US Govt announced their very own AppStore for government cloud services, called Apps.gov. Coverage here in the New York Times,... Read More

Having just returned from SXSW and MIX10, where geo-location, social technologies and user experience were all big topics of conversation, I arrived back in London to find Metia Labs has just finished the Near.me project. Near.me uses the Foursquare... Read More

With Christmas, or 'The Holidays' as we call it here in the US (strange for a Brit to get used to), fast approaching we wanted to make a WPF app to help celebrate.For all of you who love this time of year but possibly won't have a white Christmas where... Read More

Conversation Manager vs Community Manager by John Bell at Ogilvy. Microsoft: Back in the MIX. Developers, Developers, Developers Reprised by James Governor at Redmonk. B2B Sales Pros Turn to LinkedIn from eMarketeer. The Internet of Things by McKinsey... Read More

Fig 1. Social Graph Platform Wars by Dave McClure News from the Facebook Developers: "[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook... Read More

Okay, that was dorky. But I was just looking at the Web site for a musician who performs under the name A Fine Frenzy and was intrigued by how it ties together various types of social media. A lot of the site's content consists... Read More

After I posted about Twitter-connected citizens posting updates on the Iowa caucus, I talked about the event online (using Twitter, natch) with James Geluso, city goverment reporter at the Bakersfield Californian. I asked James if he'd write a guest post for... Read More

Remember how I said in my post yesterday that I was merely dredging up old news about Gizmodo announcing an iPhone? I am pleased to announce that IN REALITY I was plugged in to forthcoming events with an uncanny degree of perceptiveness that I can only... 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

Following on the heels of Steve in his recent post, I want to talk briefly about PR firm Edelman's entry into the online world of Second Life. (Executive summary: I like it.)Fig, 1 - Edelman's strangely foreboding SL headquartersIn my mind, I have a rough... Read More

Al Gore may have invented the Internet and Howard Dean may have discovered how to use it to organize supporters and raise campaign funds; but I think we're seeing Web 2.0's maturity as a political tool at the Web site of Tom Vilsack, Iowa governor and... Read More

Twitter and blogs are all a buzz about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (aka Kumo for project/product name genealogists). I'm no search engine expert, and haven't got any inside track until, like the rest of the public, we can get our hands on... Read More

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 basedMore videoStreamlined navigationno go live date as of yet  Tags: 10 Downing... Read More

Congratulations to the Virtual Event team here at Metia for their recent success in winning a Web Marketing Association Award in the Computer : Software category.Here's to many more.... 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

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 VistaTo what if Apple... Read More

If you are taking a holiday in one of the 27 EU states, then the European Environment Agency's Eye on Earth initiative enables you to checkout the water quality of the beaches or inland waterways near to your destination through its Water Watch site.... Read More

For the next couple of days I'm one of about 70 worldwide partners attending the Silverlight Partner Summit in Redmond.I recently shocked somebody from Microsoft when showing them around the office and pointing out the size of our dedicated Silverlight... Read More

Want to see a whole microsite experience squeezed into a teeny tiny banner ad? The Mass Effect 2 launch campaign is now live at MSN UK Gaming. What's all this about? See the previous post. World's first interactive and expandable banner ad (we reckon)... Read More

Today is World Usability Day 2006I've recently conducted a round of international usability tests on the intranet of one of our clients which was very interesting to see how the different nationalities viewed and used the same site.  Before I did... Read More

After the huge success of TechCrunch.com, which now has more than 100k readers  - well done, they have launched a UK site which will be focusing on UK based start-ups.Sam Sethi will be editing the site.One page which stood out for me was the events... Read More

Steve Rubel has a post about why marketers should think like VC's which references the ComScore top 50 digital media properties for 2001. This reminded me of an article which I read recently by Tim Bray titled Measuring the Web which tries to answer the... Read More

There have been some really cool announcements here at MIX - Silverlight 2, IE 8, Silverlight for the mobile being some of the most interesting ones.However the keynote today where Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer had a conversation will be one of the bits... Read More

Recently I've been doing some work around education and looking at how technology is changing the way which todays students learn and I came across this video on the 6clearning blog. One of the things I'm fascinated by is what these people will expect... Read More

At the end of last summer while lying by the pool I received a call from a client talking about a virtual launch that they were thinking about doing. They were in Seattle and I was on holiday in Spain and I didn't really think too much about it until... Read More

OK, so that's a deliberately misleading headline. But Steve's post on how to find free Wifi in London via the Londonist's Google Maps based site came hot on the heels of discovering our own client Wifi reaches into the Starbucks branch alongside... Read More

Steve Rubel recently commented that The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites. He's right but that's not the point of this post. His headline helped me draw together a couple of related thoughts. Namely, that The Future is Interactive, Not Online.... Read More

Who says good magicians never reveal their secrets? Today's Blogsmart news e-mail from blogging guru Dave Taylor gives subscribers a look behind the curtain, at how he crafts his writing for good search engine results.Dave Taylor (far left) at the 2006... Read More

An in-Second Life interview with millionaire landlord Anshe Chung at CNET's in-world headquarters was disrupted when a group calling itself "Room 101" caused a flurry of animated pink flying penises to drift through the room. Attempts to reconvene at... Read More

Visitors to the Dexia Tower in Brussels can use a touch screen at the building's base to control RGB LED bars attached to its 4,200 windows. The result is a dazzling interactive light and color display.From the Web site: "Once a composition is created,... Read More

Fig. 1 - Word upThe folks running the MySpace page of St. Pixels Church of the Internet noticed that their Main Man is using MySpace heavily. There are approximately 770 people participating in the site under the name "Jesus Christ", or some variant thereof.... 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

Adaptive Path cofounder Lane Becker is using Plazes to tell us where he is, or is very likely to be.Remember the old days when we used aliases on the Internet, and didn't share personal details with people online lest they track us down and murder us... Read More

Over at Information Week, Cory Doctorow points out that the Web is really, really good at humiliating companies that fail to perform as promised (computer techs falling asleep on customers' couches, rats in the kitchen at KFC, etc.). But how can companies... Read More

I'll be posting updates from the South by Southwest Interactive festival over the next few days. But there will be plenty of times when it's just not convenient to plunk down in a chair with my laptop and do a proper post. So like many attendees, I'm... Read More

Belatedly catching up with the news that apparently its now official - there is no profit in Web 2.0 and social media isn't a licence to print money. Isn't Web 2.0 a bit like rock bands, one or two become superstars, a few can earn a living at it, but... Read More

Word is that Gartner has now cancelled it's flagship Vegas and Barcelona Symposiums (Symposia?). Similarly, Salesforce.com has cancelled it's Dreamforce event. Not surprisingly big ticket events which incur substantial risk for hosts (venue,... Read More

A few months back we announced the PageLife platform for producing e-Magazines - or digital magazines - built using Microsoft Silverlight technology. So it is interesting to note a couple of pieces around the topic of e-Magazines. ReadWriteWeb has penned... Read More

It was my birthday last week. I’m well beyond counting but the number was significant in a nice way. Modesty prevents me from stating the truth, but the digits added up to six. I reckon I should let you do the maths. If you need another hint, how about... Read More

OK so everyone hates the 2.0 attachment, but also everyone knows what we - loosely speaking at least - mean by it. A couple of articles on the subject of enterprise 2.0 caught my eye in the past day or two. Bill Gates took time in his last CIO Summit... Read More

The designers and developers who work buried deep below ground in the Silverlight mines here at Metia have unearthed a rich vein in PageLife. Responding to some of our customers' requirement to explain their products or services via a structured, narrative... Read More

I was writing some text for a page on our website about Silverlight development and asked some of my team members for any resources that they use.These are the ones that they find most usefulSilverlight.netMSDNScott Guthrie’s blogUK Silverlight designer... Read More

                  As Twitter ends a creaky week of sporadic downtime, BusinessWeek has an article on Why Twitter Matters and explores the potential for it to emerge into a 'social media powerhouse'.... Read More

Branded search gets seriously weird. Dancer/singer/model/wrestler and, as Britney Spears' husband, tabloid fodder Kevin Federline has his own search engine. The hook: users win prizes.Figure 1. K-Fed dares you to search for PopozaoSays the site, "Every... 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

Leonidas from 300 has a MySpace page. It's a good page, featuring a video of the trailer, screensavers, wallpaper, and icons. So far this is standard stuff for a movie tie-in Web page; but the promotion also enriches the MySpace experience by gifting... Read More

As a regular listener to This Week in Tech and a frequent Twitter user, the news that TWiT mastermind Leo Laporte was abandoning the service amid talk of trademark infringement rocked a small corner of my online world.I can't see how someone would confuse... Read More

SF author Will Shetterly sparked a passionate discussion about how Web technology is changing the business of writing when he posted a rant by Dr. Howard V. Hendrix on a LiveJournal discussion board. Dr. Hendrix, the vice president of the Science Fiction... 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

Google's Social Graph API aims to automatically map the relationships between 'friends'. According to a Blogoscoped report, Google are claiming to crawl publicly available data on social networks or blogs (blogrolls and friend lists) which can... Read More

Not Google, who launched Google Health Beta on Monday this week. Check it out here. eHealth Insider has a report. Mashable has a review too.  Would I trust Google with my records? Sorry, no. Probably not Microsoft either, who have their... Read More

Selene Bowlby has written a post titled "15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have" which lists things every web site should have.Good Visual DesignThoughtful User InterfacePrimary Navigation Above The FoldRepeat Navigation In The FooterMeaningful... Read More

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... Read More

I like Best Buy's idea to create Remix, an API for Best Buy product line information and price data. Basically, third parties can now incorporate the data into their own service offerings, extending the reach of Best Buy into new channels and services.... Read More

Courtesy of an AOL video sharing site, here is a Microsoft UK promotional video - Stay Ahead in Your Own Way - used to promote their recent Virtual Launch Experience (VLE). It's good to see how different parts of Microsoft are promoting... Read More

                    Another virtual launch event held for Microsoft, here for OCS R2 - that's Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2.0. Joe Wilcox at eWeek's Microsoft... Read More

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... 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

Most people who work in the marketing arena are aware of how technology is changing what they do.  No longer is it acceptable for the marketing department of an organisation to act as a black box they must be able to demonstrate specific return -... Read More

Here is a new site Metia has built for Microsoft Dynamics which has just gone live. It's a great looking site, the team and - most importantly - the clients are all very happy. It's also - we believe - the first Microsoft website to be built and... Read More

Thanks to Guy Clapperton for pointing out this great post on the Online Journalism Blog. The consistency with which UK newspapers forbid links to their sites is amazing. I'd guess the in-house lawyers were all out on a libel case when the Internet 101... Read More

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft launched it's Worldwide Telescope which is really cool. I was playing about with it with my kids and they thought it was great.For those of you who wonder the center of the milky way looks like thisYesterday Google kept... 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

I've spent the last couple of days in Denver at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and outside the conference centre there was a big blue monster. Slightly different from Steve Clayton's version. On the subject of "Change the world or go home" I... Read More

Two people are sitting in a living room recording a podcast. I'm at the edge of the sofa and using my "radio voice". My interview subject is a few feet away, sitting comfortably back and speaking normally. My iRiver recorder is on a small table... Read More

In his post Covering an Apple press event, Robert Scoble offers sage advice on how to get your coverage noticed. The bad news is that it requires a team of four to five people: "TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re... Read More

I got this message when I logged in to Facebook today: Best proposal EVER.... Read More

I've been blogging less, lately. Of course, "less" for me might still be "an ungodly huge amount" for you. Why? Well, until now, blogs did the heavy lifting for nearly everything I wanted to do online. With blogs I could keep in touch... Read More

Reuters says Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions. Cullen said his findings were based on a typical Facebook user, earning an average wage, spending an hour a day on line. He then calculated the cost to companies if one person in every organization... Read More

Fig. 1. - The Cult of the Ball I and a few of my unsuspecting co-workers at Metia's Seattle office are attending Penny Arcade Expo 2007 (aka PAX) this weekend. If you see me, please say hello! (To me.) I plan to Twitter from the show. ... Read More

Wait, weren't MySpace and MTV just recently destroying the moral and intellectual fiber of the Republic? From Future Majority: Trumping even YouTube in interactivity, the forums will be held town-hall style in front of a live audience on yet-to-be-determined... Read More

I tend to have whatever I'm actively working on in my right-hand monitor, and everthing else in the left. At the moment, "everything else" includes a live feed of Justine Ezarik working on her laptop. Some thoughts: MAN, live Web video has come... Read More

I've just got back from holiday and being British one of our national obsessions is the weather especially while away. I came across an interactive weather map on weather.com which I thought was really cool. It allows you to zoom in and out viewing areas... Read More

We're doing more and more work in Silverlight and are part of the Microsoft Early Adopter program for this product. I think we're only just scratching the surface especially when you start to layer .NET functionality on top. While talking to a potential... Read More

Robert Scoble praised Microsoft’s telephone switchboard, comparing it with Google’s cumbersome voice mail system. Richard Sprague, the GPM of the Microsoft Speech Components Group, replied on his blog that Google can have an awesome switchboard like... Read More

I was just weeding out my inbox and came across a set of notes from SXSWi that I didn't know I took! As you might remember, I had some trouble taking notes because my laptop battery was only capable of holding 20 minutes worth of juice. Apparently I managed... Read More

Robert Scoble praised Microsoft’s telephone switchboard, comparing it with Google’s cumbersome voice mail system. Richard Sprague, the GPM of the Microsoft Speech Components Group, replied on his blog that Google can have an awesome switchboard... Read More

I was just weeding out my inbox and came across a set of notes from SXSWi that I didn't know I took! As you might remember, I had some trouble taking notes because my laptop battery was only capable of holding 20 minutes worth of juice. Apparently I managed... Read More

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... 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

In the third of our  series of tech podcasts, we talk with Martin Hingley, Founder of ITCandor – a company dedicated to researching the Information Technology and Communications (ITC) industry.   Martin and Richard discuss the world of Cloud... 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

Tech PR copywriter The Friendly Ghost has created a "relentlessly functional" tool using free Zoho Creator online database software. The Friendly Ghost Social Media Resource tracks PR social media knowledge, both theory and proof, and the Friendly... Read More

At Satisfaction anyone can list a company, product, or service on the site. Then other users can post their questions, complaints, and suggestions. Support comes from the Satisfaction community, though ideally the company in question will... Read More

CubeVoice...okay, CubeVoice is like Twitter, except you identify yourself as an employee of your company and carry on text conversations with your colleagues and interested outsiders in public. These conversations are aggregated and displayed in a Twitter... Read More

The potential of Facebook to be far, far more than a social network site for students is becoming more tangible every day. Forrester's Charlene Li has a great post here about Faceforce a third party application on AppExchange that enables integration... Read More

Yesterday I was invited along to an e-consultancy roundtable on the future of B2B marketing. Other attendees included a few marketing service providers like ourselves and a variety of online marketers from blue chip organanizations like Sony, Canon, PwC... Read More

The Wall Street Journal (here) and the FT (here) speculate that Microsoft is angling for an equity stake in Facebook. Charlene Li gives context. Steve Clayton poo poos the story. Obviously its all speculation. Curiously, the WSJ story is dated... Read More

Simon Pegg recently diverted from promoting Run, Fat Boy, Run to explain to Jonathan Ross why he was happy to be a geek (and why he definitely wasn't a nerd). Steve Rubel recently commented on the rise of the geek marketer. Now BusinessWeek reports... Read More

Today David Bradshaw commented in Ovum's Hotnews (its a great service, but needs a subscription, so no link) that the exuberant valuations being touted for Facebook are a good indicator that a 2.0 bubble could be about to burst. Unlike every other... 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

I was burning the midnight oil recently, starting to write an important piece that was due in a couple of days. It didn't take long for me to realize that the job ahead of me would be much harder than I'd thought. Frankly, at that moment... Read More

Google just bought Jaiku. Scoble reckons its a giant leap for Google who are prepping the next wave in social media. The comments thread on Scoble's article provides a nice snapshot of sentiment around different social network sites and tools. Next wave?... Read More

Kara Swisher has seen Facebook and she is not amused. See The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It) and The Children’s Hour, Part 2: Can Facebook Apps Grow Up? (She never quite gets around to answering her question, saying... Read More

The San Diego area in Southern California is on fire. The latest I've heard is that 300,000 people have been evacuated. I lived in San Diego during the last big wildfire in 2003--it was a terrifying, tragic event, and only(!) 50,000 people were evacuated... Read More

Ike Pigott of the American Red Cross created a blog to provide media outlets with up-to-date information about the Red Cross response to the disaster. Ike didn't use proprietary software, deployed on the Red Cross network and configured by a developer... Read More

Um, hi guys. I'm on deadline, and I probably shouldn't even be blogging right now; but I wanted to tell you about a couple of things. First, you might be wondering how you're going to talk about Open Social to your agency's execs without sounding like... Read More

More top metrics. Our interactive team has pitched in with a new project* they have just won. It has a target of one million users in its first twenty four hours after launch. That's a great target. But come back to me after it has been delivered. It... Read More

I'm back from Blog World Expo 2007, and ready to present all of my notes and thoughts about the event to you in a coherent manner. Hahahahahahaha! Oh, me. No, actually I returned to work to find several meeting requests in my inbox for writing projects... Read More

"The *only* thing Facebook is good at is being viral." - Julian Bond, commenting on gapingvoid "...the bulls--t that ensued verified my initial assessment: that maintaining Facebook would quickly constitute another job. Of which I already have several."... Read More

I'll be attending the Web Community Forum's event "Community building in the age of Facebook" on Wednesday and Thursday of this week in Seattle. Our little group of glamorous-but-deadly speakers and attendees is going to nail down this... Read More

Fig 1. Social Graph Platform Wars by Dave McClure News from the Facebook Developers: "[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook... Read More

Okay, that was dorky. But I was just looking at the Web site for a musician who performs under the name A Fine Frenzy and was intrigued by how it ties together various types of social media. A lot of the site's content consists... Read More

After I posted about Twitter-connected citizens posting updates on the Iowa caucus, I talked about the event online (using Twitter, natch) with James Geluso, city goverment reporter at the Bakersfield Californian. I asked James if he'd write a guest post for... Read More

This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program. One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees... Read More

I've just come across the BBC's new beta site which is really cool. It allows you to customise what news sections you see and move them around how you like. ... Read More

Richard Holway has a recent post: Are Twitters Twits? I wouldn't go that far - if it works for others great - but from a personal use perspective, Twitter hasn't really grafted itself to my lifestyle:workstyle yet. Why is that? These are the reasons,... Read More

Next up: pressure-sensitive toilet seats and LCD screens in the stall doors! Mark my words!(Photo by avlxyz, via Engadget) Tags: advertising, hand dryers... Read More

Anti-DRM activists at Defective by Design are making creative use of user-created product tags on Amazon to get their message out. The organization has begun tagging items that contain DRM with a "defectivebydesign” tag.Amazon provides pages for photos... 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

Nice wrinkle ahead. Having built a community around a blog, you now will be able to interact with them via online conference call capabilities, or Skypecasts, as Skype would have us call it. ZDnet ran the story here yesterday. Curiously, I haven't... Read More

Today is World Usability Day 2006I've recently conducted a round of international usability tests on the intranet of one of our clients which was very interesting to see how the different nationalities viewed and used the same site.  Before I did... Read More

Must be getting crowded over in Second Life. No sooner had Sam Palmisano and IBM taken up residence, as described in BusinessWeek Online, than Silicon.com reports Michael Dell is joining them with his own Dell island (not sure if Michael has... Read More

Following on the heels of Steve in his recent post, I want to talk briefly about PR firm Edelman's entry into the online world of Second Life. (Executive summary: I like it.)Fig, 1 - Edelman's strangely foreboding SL headquartersIn my mind, I have a rough... Read More

I got my first chance to play with a Zune yesterday.From the quick look I had it seemed very good.  The screen was sharp, navigation easy but the bit that stood out the most was how it felt.  It had a really great texture which made it feel... Read More

from OK/Cancel a cartoon titled "A conversation with marketing" ... Read More

Al Gore may have invented the Internet and Howard Dean may have discovered how to use it to organize supporters and raise campaign funds; but I think we're seeing Web 2.0's maturity as a political tool at the Web site of Tom Vilsack, Iowa governor and... Read More

Who says good magicians never reveal their secrets? Today's Blogsmart news e-mail from blogging guru Dave Taylor gives subscribers a look behind the curtain, at how he crafts his writing for good search engine results.Dave Taylor (far left) at the 2006... Read More

An in-Second Life interview with millionaire landlord Anshe Chung at CNET's in-world headquarters was disrupted when a group calling itself "Room 101" caused a flurry of animated pink flying penises to drift through the room. Attempts to reconvene at... Read More

Visitors to the Dexia Tower in Brussels can use a touch screen at the building's base to control RGB LED bars attached to its 4,200 windows. The result is a dazzling interactive light and color display.From the Web site: "Once a composition is created,... Read More

Fig. 1 - Word upThe folks running the MySpace page of St. Pixels Church of the Internet noticed that their Main Man is using MySpace heavily. There are approximately 770 people participating in the site under the name "Jesus Christ", or some variant thereof.... Read More

Remember how I said in my post yesterday that I was merely dredging up old news about Gizmodo announcing an iPhone? I am pleased to announce that IN REALITY I was plugged in to forthcoming events with an uncanny degree of perceptiveness that I can only... 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

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

Adaptive Path cofounder Lane Becker is using Plazes to tell us where he is, or is very likely to be.Remember the old days when we used aliases on the Internet, and didn't share personal details with people online lest they track us down and murder us... Read More

Over at Information Week, Cory Doctorow points out that the Web is really, really good at humiliating companies that fail to perform as promised (computer techs falling asleep on customers' couches, rats in the kitchen at KFC, etc.). But how can companies... Read More

I'll be posting updates from the South by Southwest Interactive festival over the next few days. But there will be plenty of times when it's just not convenient to plunk down in a chair with my laptop and do a proper post. So like many attendees, I'm... Read More

Branded search gets seriously weird. Dancer/singer/model/wrestler and, as Britney Spears' husband, tabloid fodder Kevin Federline has his own search engine. The hook: users win prizes.Figure 1. K-Fed dares you to search for PopozaoSays the site, "Every... 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

Leonidas from 300 has a MySpace page. It's a good page, featuring a video of the trailer, screensavers, wallpaper, and icons. So far this is standard stuff for a movie tie-in Web page; but the promotion also enriches the MySpace experience by gifting... Read More

As a regular listener to This Week in Tech and a frequent Twitter user, the news that TWiT mastermind Leo Laporte was abandoning the service amid talk of trademark infringement rocked a small corner of my online world.I can't see how someone would confuse... Read More

SF author Will Shetterly sparked a passionate discussion about how Web technology is changing the business of writing when he posted a rant by Dr. Howard V. Hendrix on a LiveJournal discussion board. Dr. Hendrix, the vice president of the Science Fiction... Read More

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

I'm not sure if Gartner does 'rock star' analysts but Nick Jones generates more buzz than most. Today at Symposium he contends that: Your Customers and Users are Revolting!   First Nick nails his audience by describing the session as a maverick... Read More

I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the... Read More

In the mix of participants on this blog, I seem to represent the voice of the entrepreneur. I'm also an entrepreneur of a certain age and experience. Perhaps that why I loved the sceptical tone of Dead 2.0. Anyone getting a little too carried away with... Read More

I'm a fan of Forrester's work in pushing forward the evolution of the marketing function, marketing operations and particularly the better use of technology. We both sing from, more or less, the same hymn sheet. Peter Kim has written up some... Read More

Yesterday I was invited along to an e-consultancy roundtable on the future of B2B marketing. Other attendees included a few marketing service providers like ourselves and a variety of online marketers from blue chip organanizations like Sony, Canon, PwC... Read More

Simon Pegg recently diverted from promoting Run, Fat Boy, Run to explain to Jonathan Ross why he was happy to be a geek (and why he definitely wasn't a nerd). Steve Rubel recently commented on the rise of the geek marketer. Now BusinessWeek reports... Read More

Today David Bradshaw commented in Ovum's Hotnews (its a great service, but needs a subscription, so no link) that the exuberant valuations being touted for Facebook are a good indicator that a 2.0 bubble could be about to burst. Unlike every other... 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

Google just bought Jaiku. Scoble reckons its a giant leap for Google who are prepping the next wave in social media. The comments thread on Scoble's article provides a nice snapshot of sentiment around different social network sites and tools. Next wave?... Read More

More top metrics. Our interactive team has pitched in with a new project* they have just won. It has a target of one million users in its first twenty four hours after launch. That's a great target. But come back to me after it has been delivered. It... Read More

This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program. One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees... Read More

Business week has an interesting article titled The 10 Commandments of Web Design. It lists these as Thou shalt not abuse Flash Thou shalt not hide content Thou shalt not clutter Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections Thou shalt not name your... Read More

Recently I've met with two people who are responsible for their corporate website marketing. One was from a pure play online financial brokerage company the other from a car rental company where most of their sales come through their website.They had... Read More

Ok getting it a bit better now. Randomness is part the deal. Yesterday's personal highlights were: Robert Fabricant of Frog Design talking about his notion of Augmented Mindfulness as a tool for engineering better behaviours in healthcare. Resonated... Read More

Metia has a flourishing SharePoint practice. They focus upon making SharePoint implementations more successful by improving end user experiences (designing better UIs); building bespoke tools and applications to improve the efficiency of collaboration;... Read More

Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World. I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage,... Read More

This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival. Live streaming wasn't an option, so instead... Read More

After Cloud, Cloud, CLOUD yesterday (ok, ok we believe you), today we got the consumer angle. The connectedness of the Microsoft 'Personal Cloud' story worked for me. In the office, IT make sure everything works, but at home I'm my own support desk and... Read More

Here's the formal release: Metia creates a ‘Rough Guide to the World’ web site for leading travel publisher ·         Interactive site uses Windows Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and Flickr to allow travellers to... Read More

Andrew recently presented at the UK launch of Silverlight 3. Looks like Microsoft's very excellent Channel9 were in attendance in the form of Mike Taulty, and grabbed a quick interview with Andrew and all the other speakers, here's the link. UPDATED:... Read More

There have been some considered and thoughtful posts on the implications of social media recently (and some silliness too). I like these two viewpoints for inspiring intelligent discussion on some of the practical issues arising... Read More

Being slightly reclusive by nature, last week's Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit was one of the few times I spend much time with counterparts from other PR agencies. Microsoft has a strong hand of agencies supporting it, so its interesting to compare notes... Read More

As Steve mentioned I’m at the Customer Reference Forum this week and will be presenting later on for newcomers to reference management about the infrastructure required to manage an effective program. This morning I was thinking about a theme to base... Read More

I don't think it's a stretch to say that blogging, once considered so strange and scary and geeky in a business context, has finally joined the mainstream in corporate communications. Wikis, though...no, those are too strange, too scary, too geeky... Read More

Teresa Valdez Klein of Parnassus Group will be giving a free Webinar entitled "Locating and Participating in the Online Conversations that Matter" at 10:00 a.m. PST on February 19th, with an encore presentation the following day at the same time. The... Read More

The potential of Facebook to be far, far more than a social network site for students is becoming more tangible every day. Forrester's Charlene Li has a great post here about Faceforce a third party application on AppExchange that enables integration... Read More

The Wall Street Journal (here) and the FT (here) speculate that Microsoft is angling for an equity stake in Facebook. Charlene Li gives context. Steve Clayton poo poos the story. Obviously its all speculation. Curiously, the WSJ story is dated... Read More

Richard Holway has a recent post: Are Twitters Twits? I wouldn't go that far - if it works for others great - but from a personal use perspective, Twitter hasn't really grafted itself to my lifestyle:workstyle yet. Why is that? These are the reasons,... Read More