General Ramblings


5
Mar 09

What’s in a Name?

One of the first things you’ll do when you get your great idea is a domain name search… and experience the disappointment when you find it’s gone. But never fear, this is not the idea-shattering catastrophe it first seems.

This is because your clever name doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly strong counter-argument, that goes “…but, brand is crucial – look at how much all those big companies spend to make you remember their all important name!”. This is true, however before the names existed (outside of their inventors heads), they weren’t special because they weren’t attached to something anyone cared about.

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19
Feb 09

The Vicious UI Circle

The user interface is important. It is the ambassador for your system, your advertisement, your customer service rep. So you need to make sure it’s customer-friendly. Put simply, your system needs to do what people expect it to do. When I click on a link with a roll-over effect, it will take me to a different page. When I click on a button, it should trigger an action. So we stick to these standards, even if they’re not the best usability-wise, because we are creatures of habit and even little changes hurt.

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16
Oct 08

Free Tribes Ebook

Seth Godin’s free eBook is out. It’s a collection of case studies about tribes, which also happens to be the title of his new book. See my contribution, ‘Power to the Players’, about Steve Johnson and the Geelong Football Club.


4
Oct 08

A World Without Patents: Part I (Death of the Middleman)

There are many who speak out against patents and copyright. At Business of Software 2008, Richard Stallman explained very effectively why they don’t work in the software industry. At Cambridge Business Lectures, Cory Doctorow talked about its effect on the music industry. So what would happen if we waved our magic wand and removed all patents and all copyrights from the world…?

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28
Sep 08

Getting the Bell Ringing

“It’s the cat’s pajamas”

“It’s the what?”, I asked. “Why are the cats wearing pyjamas?”

At first I thought my friend was crazy. Then I realised that I had been living in under a rock and was the only one who didn’t know this phrase. It turns out that ‘cat’s pyjamas’ is a 1920s phrase for ‘a wonderful or remarkable person or thing’, or in Wikipedia’s more restrained language, something ‘beneficial’.

Later that week, I was reading a book on the train and it talked about a product being the cat’s pyjamas. Immediately, this phrased jumped out at me – not just because I now knew what it meant, but also because I’d heard it recently and it was familiar to me.

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20
Sep 08

The Wisdom of Crowdsurfing to France

My biggest problem with the internet is its size. There is so much information out there, but sometimes I just can’t find what I want. The companies who add the most value are the ones who deal with this. The obvious one is Google, who allows you a targeted way of searching for what you want. Another is delicious (who has finally removed those pesky dots from its name) which allows you to share bookmarks. But can we go a little further to turn the large quantity of information out there into quality?

The wisdom of crowds

While reading about a presentation at Agile 2008, I stumbled upon a theory by James Surowiecki, professing that groups can often make decisions that are better than those made by any single member of the group. Digg and Reddit already make use of this by allowing the collective web audience to highlight and vote up pages they find valuable. But why not extend this to all users and all pages, building it into the way we use the web?

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