Nigel Whiteoak

Luxury brands and social media.

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:58:45 +0100

Luxury brands and social media.

Personal Styling Online

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:07:35 +0100

Personal Styling Online:

Good overview of online styling sites, making the parallel with Netflix.

No-one’s quite cracked the formula here yet. Personally I think data’s only part of it.

iPhone 6: the next iPhone?

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:32:47 +0100

Might Apple’s next iPhone actually be the iPhone 6? It will, after all, be the sixth iPhone:

1. iPhone
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone 3GS
4. iPhone 4
5. iPhone 4S
6. ????????

The iPhone 4 name made sense, because it was the fourth iPhone. The iPhone 3G made sense because, well, it was 3G.

Perhaps it will be the iPhone 4G, if, as rumoured, it’s a 4G phone. But if Apple go with sequence numbering, rather than a name based on its features, shouldn’t it be the iPhone 6, not the much touted “iPhone 5”?

(PS - I’m sure it won’t be, but thought I’d stake an early claim to some iPhone 6 SEO)

Gamification of Coding: Codecademy

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:42:27 +0100

Gamification of Coding: Codecademy:

This might, finally, get me learning to code again.

Now can someone please gamify learning to play Bluegrass banjo?

e(x)Bayers Doug Monro and Andrew Hunter launch Adzuna

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:36:00 +0100

Two former eBay colleagues today launched their next generation job ad platform Adzuna, offering ‘jobs in London, the UK and beyond’ and integrating some nice social features.

‘Adzuna Connect’ allows you to find out which of your connections work at the companies who are currently hiring: nice to see some social innovation in the recruitment space.

I was one of the nine

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:14:00 +0100

I was one of the nine:

More specifically, one of the six to complain about the BMI Business Class flights ‘offer’

Last year I played a game of Settlers of Catan with my friends...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 14:40:24 +0100

Last year I played a game of Settlers of Catan with my friends Sevitz and Marc plus comedian Dave Gorman at The Ship in Wandsworth. We asked Dave if we were to be the victims of a new book about playing games with strangers, but he denied it. Lo and behold about a month ago Dave Gorman vs. the Rest of the World hit the bookshelves. Here’s where I get introduced. I can’t really complain about the Kiefer Sutherland reference, but home counties? And chinos?

The Internet of Gatwick Things

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:43:38 +0100

Whilst passing through Gatwick airport recently, I was curious to see the airport using Internet of Things startup StickyBits to keep travellers updated on progress with building works.

Mappiness - Mapping Happiness

Sun, 08 May 2011 20:30:00 +0100

I stumbled upon this in the app store today, recommended to me via Genius after I’d downloaded the ‘Do Some Good’ app.

The folk at the London School of Economics behind the Mappiness app are trying to get better data on what makes people happy, using iPhones as data-logging devices to randomly record levels of happiness and the associated circumstances.

George MacKerron explains in more detail at the TEDxBrighton event:

Single points of failure

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:46:17 +0100

It’s somewhat ironic that two recent incidents have served to highlight how the internet, constructed and architected to provide a robust, fault-tolerant computer network has become susceptible to single points of failure.

Then Amazon’s cloud computing and storage service, EC2 fell-over, bringing down services like Quora, Foursquare and London’s Vzaar video service.

First a pensioner in Georgia reportedly managed to literally cut off Armenia’s internet access by hacking through fibre-optic cables with a spade.

On that note, I’m escaping the world of online for a week to get into the Lake District fells. I’m curious to see if Ambleside is showing the same love for Facebook as Argentina and the Yorkshire Dales.

Egosurfing: Google's Secret Weapon in the Social Wars?

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 23:10:02 +0100

In the Social war between Google and Facebook, might egosurfing prove Google’s secret weapon?

Google and Facebook are battling hard over the Social web. Google’s trying hard to catch-up to Facebook’s lead, tying 25% of all of their staff’s bonuses to the firm’s success in this space. With the launch of the +1 button, they’ve belatedly acknowledged the role that social is set to play in their core business, search. And yet, for +1 to be a success, it needs Google to make it truly social, both to help reliably detect spam and make the most of the data generated. Google needs to finally demonstrate that it can ‘do’ social, something at which it’s so far mostly failed.

But might they have a secret weapon in these social wars?

A Pew Internet study in 2007 found that almost half of all people ‘Egosurfed’: they Googled their own name to see what results appeared. I’d bet that proportion is much higher these days. Whether simple curiosity, or a desire to manage your personal brand online, knowing what appears when you search for yourself is basic internet hygiene.

On a recent Egosurfing trip, I noticed something I’d not seen before: my Google Profile page in the first page of results. And it wasn’t just true for me. Googling for Sevitz, and even my dad showed up profile pages in the first screen of results on searches for their names:

Might Google be boosting the ranking of Profile pages in search results to get egosurfers to visit them and update them? I know that’s what it made me do. That would be a bit, well, evil though, surely? So perhaps that’s a yes then.

This relies on people already having Profile pages, but it’s not hard to imagine a more evil version that prompts you to set up a profile for a name search if that’s you.

Google already has several of the key ingredients for a good social network. Google’s Picasa’s arguably a better photo sharing site than Facebook’s (even after the recent revamp); Google’s YouTube videos must be one of the most shared items on Facebook; data from Gmail could help them quickly construct the social graph. I still think they’re playing catch-up, and would still back Facebook to win this war, but egosurfing might help Google in the fight.

Do Some Good - Crowdsourcing Tasks for Charity

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:00:07 +0100

Do Tasks for Good Causes on Your Mobile in Your Spare Time

The March issue of Wired ran a story on Angry Birds, which included the amazing revelation that every day 200 million minutes are spent playing the game.

Imagine if just some of that time were spent doing something useful instead.

Turns out Orange has been thinking the same and launched the ‘Do Some Good’ app to help make this happen: volunteers give their time to do things like taking photos, mapping local areas and providing short translations. Think of it as a kind of no-fee Amazon Mechanical Turk for charities (although volunteers do have the opportunity to earn rewards). Or perhaps like a human version of the so called “volunteer computing” initiatives to pool PC downtime to solve complex scientific problems for the benefit of humanity.

I like it: nice to see technology being put to good use. It’s also a credit to Orange that innovation like this which we’ve come to associate with start-ups is happening inside a big corporate organisation.

Gamification of London Commuting: Chromaroma

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:30:00 +0100

Adding Game Mechanics to Oyster Cards on London Transport

It’s a tech-trend spotter’s wet-dream.

RFID? Tick.
Gamification? Tick.
Social? Tick.

Chromaroma brings game mechanics to travel on London Transport’s RFID travel card system, Oyster. Missions, mayorships, points, leaderboards: you’ve got them all here. And you thought commuting was a chore?

Schlepping round the Underground isn’t my idea of entertainment, but Chromaroma also includes my new favourite London thing, Boris Bikes in its data-collection service, so I’m signing up.

Chromaroma from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Internet of Things Helps Asthma Sufferers

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:19:15 +0100

Internet of Things Helps Asthma Sufferers:

The Economist runs a story about an application of the internet of things to help asthma sufferers. By connecting their inhalers and adding GPS, doctors can track usage and help to understand what drives asthma attacks.

Now that’s what I call a clever wheeze.

THANK YOU !
I've searched the web all day to find this for my FB Like buttons: {URLEncodedPermalink}.

I still have another Tumblr problem though, and maybe you could help me with it.
I'd like to force Permalink Pagination instead of simple pagination on the index page
OR, if it's impossible,
I'd like my Tumblr index page to redirect to the most recent post permalink page.

Is there a way to achieve this?

Thank you very much !

François Lévesque

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:20:08 +0100

Francois,

So not quite sure what you mean, but having looked at your site I think you’re trying to show a single post on each page, so want the forward/ backward links to point to the URLs of those pages rather than the page references (can see this being useful from an SEO perspective: nice idea).

I’m no expert here, but think the terms you’re looking for are {PreviousPost} and {NextPost}. The challenge you’ll have here though is that you need to be on a post page (rather than the index page) for this to work. Maybe if you set up a redirect from the index page to the current post?

Nigel

So Kansas City won Google's Fiber Contest

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:18:41 +0100

Congratulations to Kansas City for winning the contest to get 1 Gigabit Fiber connections courtesy of Google.

(Although as of writing, Google are still to update their homepage for this project with the result, which I find amusingly ironic given this is all about speed).

Would love to know what it’s like to surf on a Gigabit connection. Whoosh. My 50Mb line is a good improvement over my 20Mb connection, but I’m already hankering for faster.

It's not just Argentina. Facebook's taking over Yorkshire too.

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:00:00 +0100

After my holiday in Argentina, I wrote about how prevalent Facebook seemed to be: more prevalent even than the web.

Turns out that it’s not just Argentina. Whilst at home in Skipton this weekend it’s hard to avoid signs promoting Facebook pages.

I failed to snap the pub with the Facebook page QR code in the window, but here were a couple more I noticed in the next 5 minutes:

Stanforth’s Famous Pie Shop (which is actually quite hard to find on Facebook, proving that they haven’t managed to get search right yet):

The entrance to Skipton Woods (also harder to find on Facebook than I’d imagined. I’ve always known it as ‘Skipton Woods’, but the FB page is ‘Friends of Skipton Wood’ - Facebook didn’t expand to include the pluralisation when I searched for ‘Skipton Woods’)

+1 to Facebook

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:17:00 +0100

Or why I don’t Like Google’s new social recommendation button.

When Facebook launched their Like button, I wrote about how the weak signals provided by users Liking content across the web could prove a powerful weapon for Facebook in a looming battle with Google to help users discover content.

“Likes” could be used to infer significance in the way that Google had done for a decade with backlinks, but with some additional advantages over backlinks:

Over time, a far broader spread of the population has the potential to “Like” than is ever likely to create a backlink: the liking signals are thus more powerful
By knowing the identify of Likers, Facebook has a better chance to avoid the issues of spam that have become associated with backlinks and Google.
Having built out the social graph, Facebook is also able to use the preferences of friends to build on the raw ‘Like’ data.

Google’s clearly worried about this, and announced their ‘Like’ equivalent, the +1 button this week.

It’s a valiant attempt to play catch-up, and a huge hat-tip to Zuckerberg’s genius in extending the Like button across the entire web. But I’m not sure it’s enough:

Where’s the incentive for users to “+1” something? In particular I can’t fathom why a consumer would +1 a search result listing, presumably before even visiting the associated site. Unless Google can make Google Profiles a credible competitor to Facebook, I don’t see many doing this. Given their track record in social, neither do I see Google making Profiles a credible competitor to Facebook.
On the other hand, you can guarantee that SEOs, particularly those with the darker shades of headwear, will be all over this. The potential incentive of a higher ranking position means that non-average-consumers will attempt to game the system. This is bad for Google.
Without Facebook’s Social Graph advantage, it will be harder for Google to weed out +1 spam. Also, they won’t have Facebook’s advantage of being able to understand preferences based on connections preferences. Even if they were to use their Gmail data (which, presumably they won’t do after the Buzz debacle) there are still far fewer Gmail users than Facebook users.

Google’s best hope for success is via YouTube, their only real social success. They need to replace the thumbs up “Like” (!) button with +1, and start building the social graph between friends on YouTube who’ve never posted videos (rather than just subscribers to video channels). YouTube videos are probably one of the most shared items on Facebook: Google needs to attempt to capture this sharing directly in YouTube and cut-out the middle man. But given Facebook’s head start in mapping the social graph, this won’t be easy.

In short, I’m still backing Facebook to win this war: it’s going to be easier for Facebook to build search than it is for Google to build social.

(For the opposite opinion, read Tom Critchlow’s article on SEOmoz, which also explains +1 in more detail)

Virgin Atlantic bringing Gamification to VTravelled Site

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:38:47 +0000

Virgin Atlantic bringing Gamification to VTravelled Site:

Hat tip to Sevitz for bringing this to my attention:

Virgin Atlantic’s VTravelled site is set to get a facelift including the use of game mechanics, using technology from Lithium. This will include the awarding of Virgin’s frequent traveller miles (Flying Club miles).

The site’s set to ‘go on holiday’ on the 15th March, but I’d expect to see the new gamified site up shortly after. I’ll be interested to see what they cook up.

Yes, Facebook is now the Internet

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 13:37:40 +0000

I’ve just got back from a 3-week trip to Argentina, mostly getting away from the world of tech and enjoying the simple life.

One thing though that was hard to avoid was Facebook. Ryan Carson blogged last week to say exactly what I’d concluded based on my trip: Facebook is now the Internet.

I arrived in Buenos Aires and spent a few days walking around the city. The public parks in the city all have Facebook pages, and these are heavily promoted on the signs at the entrances:

Sign at Entrance to Plaza Vicente Lopez y Planes

Someone had even added a sticker to this sign, proclaiming that the guy after whom the park had been named “liked” this place!

Sign from Plaza General San Martin, with “Like” Sticker

And why not? It’s far easier to set up a Facebook page than to create your own website. No technical skills are needed and it comes with built-in community features.

I left Buenos Aires for Bariloche and had booked into a hostel. They handed me a registration form and I started filling it in: name, passport number, country of origin, arrival date, departure date … Facebook! They didn’t ask for my email address, or a phone number. But they wanted to know by Facebook page (and be my friend?). I declined.

Amongst fellow travellers, it also became clear that Facebook has overtaken email as the defacto contact method. People would ask you for your ‘Facebook’ as a way to keep in touch. Again, it’s easy to see why: sharing photos is a snip, messaging feels both more personal and less geeky than email.

Lastly, lots of small businesses would tout their Facebook presence and encourage customers to befriend them, like this glacier-trip firm in Calafate:

Facebook pages, not web pages. Facebook messages not email. Should we be worried about one organisation taking over the most common functions of the internet?