Oct 31, 2005
Hi all, apologies for being offline for a while, but wilma has left me without power for the last week. I’ve spent the last few days camping out at malls and starbucks trying to get my batteries charged. It is quite shocking the level of devastation from what should have been a minor storm, but it seems that several tornados touched down a couple of hundred yards from my house. Cars were flipped over and stacked in parking lots, trees are down everywhere, large air conditioning units were lying in the street, and roofs where dismantled everywhere.
Oct 22, 2005
The Design Management Institute is a venerable institution that has been trying to elevate the visibility and influence of design in the realm of business for many years. It has some fantastic conferences, and a great journal publication, but it seems slow in leveraging new technologies, and leveraging the intellectual capital of its community.
The DMI has created an Innovation Blog, but without some drastic changes and added features I fear it will not become as influential or as useful as it should coming from such a great institution. Here’s a link to the blog: DMI Innovation Blog
If the DMI actually created a blog, that was contributed to by a dozen or more of its active members it could well become a hugely influential voice in the blogosphere on many strategic design topics. But it continues to falter, it’s latest blog, that is actually positioned as an adjunct to it’s international conference, fails to implement the most basic blog functions, or follow any “blogging best practices”. The three most heinous errors are:
- Commenters don’t get a link back to their own website
- Commenters email addresses are exposed to harvesting
- No permalinks or trackback
And of course because they havn’t got trackback or permalinks they don’t know i’m talking about them right now, although that might be a good thing.
Anyway, I love what the DMI stands for I just wish they could leverage their resources a little better.
Oct 13, 2005
In it’s continuing transformation from a usability company to a product company 37signals.com has just released http://www.writeboard.com, an easy to use wiki.
Just to try it out i created a new writeboard here experiencecurve sandbox, the password is “curve” feel free to join in and test out the functionality. One of the wierd things is that i can’t figure out how to create a hyperlink to a new wiki page. I find it hard to believe that they would impliment a wiki without one of the most fundamental wiki features, the wiki link.
A new writeboard has been created for you:
experiencecurve
http://123.writeboard.com/d055c947f33a6b1b1/login
Password: curve
-The Writeboard Crew
Oct 7, 2005
local.google.com is now out of beta, and blends local search, google maps and advertising. So “local” gets “maps”, and “maps” gets advertising. This is a hugely important step as the competition heats up to grab the local advertising market. More and more people are turning to search engines as opposed to the yellow pages.
Google Melds Local Search and Maps - MarketingVOX
Oct 5, 2005
Upcoming.org, a kind of social software, wiki like, folksonomy based, event website, that i’ve blogged about before has just been bought by yahoo.
I’ve got to tell you yahoo seems to be getting the jump on google for some of these aquasitions IMHO. so far yahoo’s got flickr.com and upcoming.org, google got dodgeball.com.
Yahoo Buys Upcoming.org to Bolster Local Search Ôø? MarketingVOX
Just a note on acquiring these small, blogcentric, social software apps, is that they are really easy to integrate, relatively speaking. The oracle buying peoplesoft is a freaking nightmare from a software integration standpoint compared to yahoo buying flickr for instance.
