Category Archives: Social Media

Technology for Marketing and the Holy Grail

Going round in circles. Marketing gets reinvented with the frequency of the seasons...

Looking at the pattern of posts on this blog over the last few years, I would appear to be a bit of a ‘Winter blogger’. I have a couple of theories for this…

The first is that I am a bit SAD – by that I mean being prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder – but other meanings could be equally applicable 😉 – and therefore presumably I feel the need to rant and rave during the winter months and then start to lighten up a bit when the sun finally decides to appear again.

The second is that my rants and raves during the long winter months set the brain cells working furiously and by the spring I have figured out how I wish to spend the rest of the year and remain focused on that until the nights draw in again and the dull winter weather reappears.

Now that the days are getting longer again and the sun is making an occasional appearance, I feel my need for winter ranting subsiding but I can’t let spring arrive without at least another big rant 🙂 … Continue reading →

Information Management and the Theory of Everything

Information Theory was fundamental to NTL's work on digital compression in the early 1990s and also key to me being able to design and produce this industry guide using the early versions of Photoshop and Quark

The first time I became aware of the work of Claude E. Shannon and the landmark paper on Information Theory he published while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s was when I worked for NTL’s Advanced Products Division and had to try to understand the principles of digital video compression to promote the company’s innovations in digital broadcast technologies.

Shannon’s Information Theory was absolutely fundamental to the encoding, transmission and decoding processes used to make digital broadcasting a reality. It also became clearer to me at that time that Information Theory sat at the heart of everything I was involved in following the transition from analogue content creation and publishing processes to digital processes, that had begun, for me, with the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s/early 90s and continued with the arrival and growth of the web.

Information Theory however is concerned with the mechanics of communication and the quantity and readability of the information transmitted. It is not concerned with the quality of that information, its meaning or its importance. For those processes we have what has become known as Information Management – as defined here by AIIM – a practice that has been going on in shifting forms for many decades now.

Continue reading →

The Three Bears – Revisited

I remember tweeting a couple of years back that I had reached 10,000 unopened emails in my Gmail account and asking if anyone else used their Gmail service as a bottomless dumping ground. From the response I received, it was clear that they do. It is, after all, a practice that Google has promoted by saying that you “never have to delete anything again” – so I don’t.

Contrast that with my work email account and having been in my current role less than a year, my Exchange mailbox has already exceeded its limits and I had to do some serious pruning the other day in order to keep on emailing. Despite the storage limits imposed (for sound financial reasons) the vast difference between Exchange and Gmail is still the tremendous speed and accuracy of the Gmail search returns and the inordinate amount of time it takes to search a work account that has a mere fraction of content. Continue reading →

I predict a riot!

I had an interesting blog debate with an ex-colleague and friend the other day about the role of social media in the events that have been playing out in the Arab countries of North Africa. The debate centred on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, being a catalyst for these events. My view is that social media’s role is being overstated, as many of us have seen this type of thing happen before in our lives and a long time before social media became prominent. I remember the world watching in amazement as a similar domino effect played out in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s at a time when the web was just a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. More recently, it has been recognised that social media has been turned against the Iranian people following the Green Revolution a couple of years ago, so I really think we need to assess the catalysts and aftermath of these events with the benefit of hindsight. (note:- here is a very good ‘middle ground’ perspective on this found by John Goode, my sparring partner in this debate and also an interesting BBC piece on ‘How revolutions happen’ )

I get a sense though that even within the next couple of years, the spiritual home of the social media behemoths, like Twitter and Facebook, will experience such a degree of change that the current events in the Arab world will pale in comparison. What will be interesting is how the US people, empowered, as it is believed, by social media, react to the events as they unfold around them.

Continue reading →