Internet world 2007 – too many suits, too much noise too little insight

I’ve been at Internet world for the last two days and if I’m honest, I have been a little disappointed. I know the majority of it is free and as such you have to endure the chalk strip suited sales monkeys and semi naked models pimping their wares but for me the balance was all wrong.

Earlier in the year I attended FOWA 2007 and the two events are like chalk an cheese, true neither had wireless but really that was the only similarity. FOWA had interesting and insightful speakers, talking from personal experience (yes there were a few sales pitches but they were kept short and didn’t pretend to be anything else).

Where as Internet world, has thus far been vague and I can’t help feeling that many of the speakers were more interested in trying to win new business than engaging in the debate. Web 2.0 as you might expect was the buzz of the event yet the majority of speakers seemed unaware that social software has much greater implications for their business models than it does for software architecture.

One guy who stood out like a sore thumb was Loic he was sharing his personal experience of a very different business model.

1) build a good product that services a genuine need
2) open it up to the public
3) invite criticism/ideas
4) take criticism/ideas on board build a better product/relationship with people
5) cycle on a daily, weekly or monthly basis

traditional business model
1) build a product we think is good (behind close doors)
2) heavily promote and advertise it (because we know its shit but we have spent too much on building and we need ROI)
3) Employ a PR firm to bury any negative feedback

I don’t think the suits were listening.

OrangeAid, no colours but some preservatives.

I was reading Russell Davies blog today while in a meeting that only partly held my attention. He was asking for someone to blogify an image for The Sumatran Orangutan Society fund raiser, so I gimped it (see below).

“It’s got very funny people and it’s a very splendid cause. You should go.”

You know what I just might ‘cos they have Bill Bailey and he’s a very funny/hairy Klingon of a man.

Check out the eventful entry for details.

The easter bunny is a lorry-jacker

There have been some serious easterness going on in the teletubby garden at holiday extras.

It all started with the company dishing out easter eggs earlier in the week, very generous I thought until I sat down to watch crime watch. Now I wouldn’t suggest for a second that these eggs were hot, for a start the chocolate would melt but it makes you think.

Today’s festivities have included an easter egg hunt; an egg roll, similar to cheese rolling but with eggs … obviously. Then there was the grand finale the most eastery thing of all eastery things, more eastery that the easter bunny in his special bunny slippers dishing chocolate eggs to a gaggle of easter chicks in a field of daffodils …

…

…

…

Yup, you’ve guessed it, the paper areoplane competition !!!

and people say we have missed the meaning of religious festivals.

Tony Blair is a womble !!!

A Friend of Mine Trev is an avid AFC Wimbledon fan he has taken be to a number of games and I have always been stuck by the community atmoshpere, the football’s not that great sometimes but you can tell that for once it’s about the game and not the money.

Anyway the other week he dropped me an email

“Yes, I am still ranting about the FA and their totally disproportionate
punishment of AFC for an admin error. (For those of you I haven’t managed
to bore stupid yet … docked 18 league points and ejected from 2 cups for
not ticking a box on a form when registering a retired professional from a
pub team – his last pro club was Cardiff City thus requiring an
International Transfer Certificate) “

I promptly signed the petition and emailed my MP Ed Davey who to my surprise replied

“Thank you for your most recent email. I am pleased to inform you that I have
signed EDM 992. Please go to
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=32720&SESSION=885

…to see the entry for my signature.

I will also, following representations from many other AFCW fans, be writing
to the FA after consulting with other MPs in SW London to see if a combined
representation can be taken.

As a Kingstonian supporter, I am only too aware of the disproportionate way
that non-league clubs are treated by the FA compared to higher-league clubs.

I can think of many local clubs in the Kingston area that would not survive
if they were penalised in a similar way. So it is important to make a stand.

I wish AFCW all the best in this fight.

Yours sincerely

Edward Davey MP”

I doesn’t end there now Tony Blair is getting in on the act in the commons http://www.itmustbedons.com/media/audio/PMQ_210307.mp3

So if you have read this far, give the small clubs your support. Wimbledon are not the first club to be screwed over by the FA with this stupid rule but hopefully they might be the last.

All you have to do to help is put your John Hancock on this.

I’m being stalked by Paul 0′Grady

This is quite an unnerving experience. When I worked near tower bridge I would see Mr O’Grady on the odd occasion walking about and didn’t think anything of it. I mean, it’s London there are television studios all over the place and you do see celebrities once in a while.

But I don’t work in London anymore; there aren’t any television studio’s nearby, so you don’t expect to see Paul O’Grady hanging out in the Waitrose in Hythe. I know he is a human being too and has the right to roam free, I just wish he would stop following me about

The smoking monk part duex

I found this on the interweb to other day

“The ghost of a monk is said to haunt Overlook hotel. The monastery that originally stood on the site was destroyed by fire, but a monk was still trapped inside. One of his fellow brethren risked his life to rescue him and, as a result, died from the injuries he incurred. As well as the ghost of the brave monk, sounds of chanting have also been reported on this former holy ground where the monks held their ceremonies.”

This all seems to tie in with what I know already, including the fact that the site dates back to 1181. Couple this with the first sighting or sorts last week.

Delbert was telling me that the other day in the kitchen he felt a really overbearing presence directly behind him, he likened it to ‘being caught red handed doing something weren’t supposed to be doing’.

This is itself is kind of unremarkable you would say and I would agree…..

Except, a few days later when Delbert was recanting his tale to Dick Hollarann, he had got as far as saying he had felt the ghost when Dick butted in ‘yah yah’ he said ‘don’t tell me you were standing just over there in the kitchen and you felt someone was standing behind you’ … he was point to exactly the place Delbert had been.

The Smoking Monk

I got back late last night to find Susie the Secretary tittering on a dinning room chair with her fingers firmly jammed in her ears and a high pitch dog whistle emanating from a small box on the wall. The noise filled the reception, creating a hearing experience similar to being welded to speaker at a Motorhead concert, not that I have been to a Motorhead, I’m too young.

It seems the source of the noise was the fire alarm, we stopped the sound couldn’t smell any smoke and so crisis over went on our merry way.

2:36 am and I just out of my skin at the sound of klaxons (not the band) I spring out of bed grab the largest only torch I can find and run out of the door to investigate. I then walk back in and put my trousers on, I decide if I’m going to tackle a band of hotel furniture thieves, then I’m not going to do it in my pants.

Properly attired I walk though the hotel entering the lobby I can smell smoke. I move on into the older part of the hotel and I’m instantly hit by the drop in temperature.

I check the lights … they don’t work.

Undeterred I carry on into the darkness guided only by torch light and an amazing lack of common sense. As I round the corner into the darkest part of the hotel my torch goes out (tick another horror movie cliche off the list) in the distance I can see Danny and Grady twins having a crafty fag out the window.

Damn that was scary … I’m just glad it wasn’t the Smoking Monk I keep hearing about.

Conversation marketing, I hope not

Jim Byford has been sharing his concerns about the recent Technorati and Ogilvy alliance concluding ” will this move encourage others to create more enlightened and thus open models of ‘conversation marketing’ services to deliver linkage and thus value between people”

I have seen many businesses getting excited about web 2.0 but they still have the view that it is just another channel they can broadcast through and spend the majority of their effort trying to identify how can they shoe horn the company message into the conversation and best manipulate this new medium.

This is approach is destined to fail and probably damage brands. The biggest challenge for existing business is an internal one. Business needs to view social media not as a sales tool but a method for meaningful dialogue with the public, through which they can better understand customers needs and respond to them.

Hard sell or loaded conversations will be regarded quite rightly as spam. Companies need to remember communities are usually organically grown with their own ecosystem and etiquette that has evolved over a period of time much greater than the recent hype; wading in with thir size nines will destroy the delicate balance and possibly the medium itself.

I think there is a positive role that business can play in these communities but they need to tread carefully be open and transparent and deal with that fact that it won’t always go their way.

Today we are a much more informed consumer, we don’t need people to tell us what we want; we know what we want we just need someone to help us find it.

In the tool shed

I re-visited the tool shed mainly out of curiosity about the chest freezer. I still can’t get my head around why you would need a large chest freezer in a tool shed when there are about 10 others in and about the hotel.

Anyway I took another look and no body parts … not even a finger.

Only in the mind of a geek

On hearing about my current accomodation Dan’s response was …

“But as a programmer you wouldn’t get stuck in the trap that Nicholson
did. You could just write

10 Print ‘All work and no play makes Neil a dull boy’

20 Goto 10

And then just nip off down to the pub and miss the lunacy, mayhem and
ax murders.”

Well it made me laugh