Hyperhappen

Faster than a speeding bullet

If you are even remotely tech-savvy, it would have been hard not to have noticed the latest challenger on the web browser playing field: Google Chrome has recently launched in beta. Chrome speeding bullet It would be even harder to miss the fact that Google had to make a rapid and very public climb down over the wee matter of transfer of copyright ownership that snuck into the initial T&C’s and set the web alight with blogger furore. Ooops.

Microspace desktop management is no longer the future, and as we multi-task and multi-tab galore,Google Chrome is set up and ready to faciliate this and primed for a steady increase in the adoption of cloud based applications. Whether it will transform the way we all browse the web or really make us all more productive is debatable, but a new interface to play with is always fun, even if it so far lacks some of the plug-ins and functionality of its rivals, and there’s no denying it’s astoundingly quick.

Have a go.

Posted by: Fiona at Jellybean mix time on Monday, 15th September 2008 (0)

The Ministry of Truth

Old meets new. Quill and ink diary writing meets blogging. History and literature combine in the digital age.

big brother

Long before Big Brother became linked with reality TV, George Orwell’s 1984 enthralled me. Published in 1949 this vision of the future was way ahead of its time. I read it in 1984. There was no evidence then of the Thought Police in my world, and original thought was to be aspired to, not locked away in Room 101.

First it was Samuel Pepys diaries being published online with its glimpses of 17th century life, now George Orwell’s diary from 1938 is being blogged daily. Some of it is mundane but charming (70 years ago today they also had very heavy rain and yesterday the first Beauty of Bath apples were ready), but I’m all signed up for the RSS feed and a glimpse into the life of one of our great authors.

Posted by: Fiona at Almost elevenses on Tuesday, 12th August 2008 (0)

A word in your ear

The word of mouth marketing industry is growing fast. Where has this development come from and where might it be going?

The 100GB internet - blimey

Crawler 100GB per second internet.

Fast.

Gosh.

And it runs on the already common 10GB cables.

Check out: Click: Internet 2.0 on the iPlayer.

Posted by: Ben at precisely 2 o'clock on Wednesday, 6th August 2008 (0)

Are you Ning-ing yet?

Facebook? MySpace? So 2007. What do you get if you cross the simplicity, fun and easily extendable functionality of Facebook & the levels of design customisation possible on MySpace?

Ning . Social networking 2.5. Ning VP

The era of personal digital brand management is upon us. I want more control of what I portray to whom and how.

So whilst you can already lock down your Facebook profile so your Mum can’t see the photographic evidence from that tequila party, and Flock helps you see all your social network updates in one space, having more creative control of your personal brand identity online was inevitably going to be next on the wish list. And that’s where Ning comes in. You don’t have to be a code-writing nerd to set up a fully functional and customised “brand me” webspace on Ning in just a few minutes. Get in touch with your inner creative side and try it!

Little wonder then, that as Techcrunch recently reported, Ning’s founder Mark Andreessen
has been invited to join Facebook's board of directors.

Posted by: Fiona at beer o'clock on Friday, 1st August 2008 (1)

Ways of skinning a cat

I recently finished Steven Pinker’s excellent ‘The Stuff of Thought’, which Should I have kept my mouth shut? amongst other things made me think about taboos and advertising.

Eg:

I can think of three ways the ad industry has tried to sell bog roll (by ‘sell’ I mean build a brand, as opposed to accept that a category is commodity-driven). The most famous involves a cute puppy; a second uses a cute toddler; a third uses a bear. Puppies, toddlers and bears: all socially acceptable ways of broaching the… err…. defecation taboo.

Toilet paper maybe an extreme example but perhaps there are other categories where the number of brands is constrained by the number of ways of talking round a taboo…

Posted by: Sam at pre-lunch on Friday, 25th July 2008 (0)

Email overload? Program your own email snooze button