Definition – ‘to mutter’; “A barely audible utterance, especially in dissatisfaction or irritation”. In other words: something spoken, very quietly, so quiet that you can hardly hear it, it might not be exactly clear who or what it is about, It’s not exactly a fully formed complaint, it’s not written down (so it can’t be […]
Dig Hill 80, Wijtschate, Belgium. How mass collaboration changes everything.
Please have a look at this video from BBC Breakfast about the Dig Hill 80 an archaeology project at a World War One site in Wijtchate, near Ypres, Belgium. I visited the site two weeks ago and I’m still deeply affected (in a good way) by the experience. The video gives you a sense of what […]
Astroturfing: Is Grass Roots Opinion Real or Manufactured?
I’ve had a fairly typical week of FaceBook. The usual requests to ‘like’ the page of an organisation or group and share posts (that will bring me “great wealth and world peace”). I usually ignore them all. However I didn’t ignore one this week. I pressed ‘like’ because it was from my friend Mark who’s […]
Can You Really Trust Social Media in a Crisis? The Rise of Troll Farms.
Way back in 2008 I read ‘Wikinomics’ by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, and it pretty much changed my life. At the core of Wikinomics was the idea that the large-scale collaboration of people online, was going to change everything we do. The ‘phrase d’jour’, was Web2.0; used a lot at the time to describe […]
The Ladder of Inference. Climbing Down from Expert Bias
The Ladder of Inference is a concept developed by the late Harvard Professor Chris Argyris, to help explain why people looking at the same set of evidence can draw very different conclusions. The difference comes from the idea that, based on their beliefs, people ‘choose’ what they see in amongst a mass of information. More […]
Dunbar’s Number 150, Perfect for Christmas Card Lists and Twitter Friends
It’s that time of year in our house when I dutifully read all of the Christmas Cards before they are dispatched for recycling. There are literally 100’s of them. “How can there be so many?” I ask my wife, who controls everything Christmas related at home, with ruthless military precision. “There are only supposed to be 150, it’s […]
Googlewhacking: a great example of digital ephemera
Hands up if you know what a Googlewhack is? I’ve recently re-aquainted myself with the term after discovering the 2005 book “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure”, during some pre-Christmas house painting (an ancient and compulsory tradition my wife assures me). Basically a Googlewhack is what happens when you put two words in to Google, click search, […]
The Listening Service. Busting Jargon, Including People and Improving the Tweets
The Party Blower An effective Jargon Buster As used by Barod CIC I go to lots of conferences and seminars. The result of this, (apart from the addiction to buffet food) is that I now speak a different language – ‘Jargy Jargy’ or Jargon, “the specialist language for a specific activity or group of people” (I’ve […]
Be. More. Human. The Killer App v Designing Out The Idiot
Huge thanks to Mark Schaefer for the midweek boost at Academi Wales Summer School. It was a fantastic gallop through ‘everything you need to know about social media marketing’, there’s a great graphic of the presentation at the end of the post. Its the third time I’ve seen Mark speak and as previously; he […]
Conversation is action… because… we learn when we talk.
It always pleases my wife when I quote Elvis, so here goes….. “A little less conversation, a little more action please”. No hidden meaning there, so lets move on, swiftly. Well, as it turns out Conversation is Action, Pam Luckock told me at a Working With Not To event recently. This comes as a huge relief, as I […]
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