Recommended Reading – 9th September 2010

The final group of links I think are worthy of your attention are below

• Paul Graham provides his perspective on Yahoo!’s problems. In part, he thinks they should have continued to think of themselves as a technology company and not a media company

• Dino Demopoulos has created an elegant perceptual map of location based services in terms of people/places and now/then

• Neil Gains has some good tips on how to frame questionnaires – clear questions provide clear answers

• Joel Rubinson has some good ideas in his post on brand building for the digital age

• Meghan Keane writes on e-consultancy about behavioural targeting, and how it needs to strike the right balance between usefulness and creepiness

• JP Rangaswami has a typical thought-provoking post on the nature of expertise and knowledge asymmetries in an online environment

• And finally, this Oatmeal comic succinctly portrays the reasons why working from home is both awesome and horrible

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Links – 8th March 2009

My recommendations for the past week include:

• Paul Graham on why he thinks social media has contributed to the death of TV. He makes some good points on the social nature of TV, but I disagree that synchronicity will fade away. TV will continue to prompt watercooler chat around shared experiences. If the watercooler is the workplace, then a show only needs to be viewed the previous evening – not necessarily at the same time. But if the watercooler is Facebook or Twitter, then synchronicity and real-time feedback still matter.

• Penelope Truck thinks we shouldn’t look to grad school as a way of mitigating the effects of the recession

• Adrian Ho looks at the role culture plays in companies and self-organised groups

• Farhad Manjoo doesn’t see Twitter killing Google nor Facebook

• Al Ries writes that consumers only love brands once they know them. In a competitive market, familiarity can be a barrier to switching

• Jeremiah Owyang proposes that companies should look to the social web for opt-in consumer information, which would remove the need for registration forms

• Tom Ewing explores the differences in rating music and films, and wonders what effects this has on accumulator sites such as Metacritic

• A recent study suggests that leaders emerge by talking first and often, but not necessarily making the best points

• And I’ve been adding some great Slideshare presentations to my favourites

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Links – 1st March 2009

Firstly, thanks to everyone that read, tweeted and commented upon my previous post on “Research vs Planning”. It’s dispersal backs up Ana Andjelic’s point on how word of mouth spreads through random spikes within overlapping spheres, and not through concentric circles of influence.

Reading material from the past week to consider include:

• Paul Graham’s new essay covers his learnings from Hacker News – many salient points for those interested in crowdsourcing

• Dougald Hine is looking for contributors to help mobilise the tech and social media spheres to provide resources for those adversely affected by the recession

• “Ethnography is not an in-home interview” – a great title, and a great post from Grant McCracken on why shoddy research is partially to blame for Tesco’s failings (to date) in the US

• Noah Brier muses on ratings systems, and how we each have our own idiosyncratic interpretations of them

• Are some brands, products and companies unsinkable? No matter how inferior or dated, they will carry on indefinitely? This look at Wimpy fast food “restaurants” would suggest that it is possible. Incidentally, I live 10 minutes away from a Wimpy and despite a nostalgic desire to visit for a lime milkshake, I haven’t yet managed it.

• A Business Insider post contains Videojug’s ideas on why web adverts should be more like TV commercials. Essentially, they argue moving away from the print notion of wallpaper ads to a TV notion of interruptive ads. This goes against the “engagement vs interruption” advocates, but that school of thought, in my opinion, is a slightly Utopian mindset that won’t scale to the entire marketplace.

• On a related theme, an Advertising Age blog wonders whether it is time to forget measurement in digital campaigns. A slightly misleading title, as it really refers to DR metrics, but a thoughtful post on how the internet has changed over the past 15 years, yet measurement hasn’t.

• And finally, a couple of interviews worth reading – Robin Wright in the Guardian, and James Murdoch in More Intelligent Life

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