Recommended Reading – 26th February 2010

I’ll try to make this type of post a weekly occurrence. My previous link updates were quite unwieldy, so I’ll try to limit these recommend reading posts to around five items.

Ten movie recuts – because it shows how perspective is dynamic and how, through editing or otherwise, we don’t necessarily see the full picture

A couple of posts on Google caught my eye – this book review looking at Google’s business practices (One thing they don’t do is ask for permission) and this Wired piece on their famous algorithm, and how it gives them their competitive advantage

87 cool things is a presentation that Google made last year, showing innovative ways that people have used their video and maps services – both entertaining and useful.

I admit to being pleasantly surprised, but the OK Cupid blog is very informative, and has some great posts on analysing the information it receives from its users. This particular post looks at profile picture myths to see what type of picture is more likely to prompt a response from another user. On a data note, this website is packed full of really useful MS Excel tips

Similar to a post I linked to last week, this post on job interview questions to ask planners is applicable beyond the advertising industry – the questions are penetrative and potentially very illuminating.

sk

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Links – 1st February 2009

Part 2 of the Good Stuff, following on from links yesterday to top articles on insights, marketing and advertising, online video and music.

Social media

I haven’t yet read it but I’m sure it is brilliant: danah boyd’s PhD dissertation

The Vitrue top 100 social media brands of 2008 (with methodology included)

Charles Frith provides an excellent case study of how brands shouldn’t engage with social media. Whether the person was officially representing Miller or not, he got pwned.

A Wired journalist experiments with various geo-aware applications and finds out that they are not all that they are cracked up to be

Mozilla have proposed a free, crowd-sourced usability tool which sounds, from this at least,  fantastic

Technology and the internet

One one hand, Kevin Kelly argues that ownership may soon be a thing of the past, and that access is far more important. Bodes well for tools such as Spotify.

But on the other, Jason Scott argues against the Cloud, as it can’t be trusted to safeguard your “possessions”

John Willshire lists several free tools that can be very useful in tracking online consumer behaviour

Discover Magazine offers a counter-argument to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article. Through outsourcing the effort required for recall, Google can in fact make us smarter. Not sure I necessarily buy this, but interesting nonetheless

Business and ideas

A great interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan, in the (UK) Times

Henry Blodget’s plan to fix the New York Times includes cutting costs by 40%, raising the price of the print edition and – controversially – reconstructing a walled garden for premium content

John Willshire (again) live-blogged the recent PSFK ideas salon in London, and it is well worth a read

Copyblogger has six ways to get people to say yes

A lovely story of a designer recounting his experiences with notebooks. I’ve recently started using a notebook for more than transitional note-taking, but it remains to be seen whether anything useful will come of it

My Favourite Business Book – crowdsourced opinion

And, as always, I’ve been posting slightly more miscellaneous links to my Tumblr blog, which in theory now has comments enabled through Disqus.

sk