I used to do it a lot, quite often they were there “just to brighten the page up” but mostly they were pointless. I’ve recently started using mobile broadband and get frustrated when people stick huge images on web site so maybe I just carried that thinking across and am being more considerate.
Or it could be because I am still learning WordPress and the Typepad platform I used before was easier (for me) to insert images 
I do love the way the web is moving - I’m now a full-time convert to Mahalo, why not add me if you sign up to the social bit of it (you can find me here). It does nicely show how the world is moving on and our measurement of trust is changing. I wrote back in September about trusting your Pod, or group of “knowns” (you can read my original post here) and with the emergence of social bookmarking we can see that take another step. I recently joined Diigo, which offers a way to not only bookmark pages but also annotate those pages both for yourself and for anyone who trusts you.
You can see my profile easily and see what I have saved and tagged, or at least the public version of what I have tagged. Diigo call it social annotation which is an interesting concept as it opens the world, and specifically the corporate world, to semantic trust. I keep harping on about e-PR but I wonder if KFC know that I have commented on their “dietary guide” in a less than positive way? The reality of this open (trust) network is that the large corporate animals either better be on their best behaviour or better keep their eyes wide open.
(Thanks to Dan Otterburn for putting me onto Diigo)
I’ve been a little quiet on here over the festive season so I just thought I would wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2008. I’m back in posting mode now
I’m been keeping online diaries for years, long before it became known as Blogging and I was an early adopter in paying TypePad for a professional blog platform (2004). Up to now I have written just for me, but I’m starting to get comments and so I’m becoming a bit more serious about it. I’ve just come across a post from a Canadian Blogger called Eric about How NOT to be a successful blogger. It made me chuckle and is one of the best posts I’ve seen this year - definitely worth a read.
See if you can count how many mistakes I have made. I got to 9 and gave up. Oh, well, I’m learning and will get better hopefully
I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth.
We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence. Old marketing is dead - we all pretty know that by now - and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow.
If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bull-shit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.
This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a measurable RoI for it!
When Blogging falls down
I heard a colleague the other day talk about the rise of corporate blogs that are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts at selling or pushing products and ideas. This is bad, but I maintain a blog and it is done with the commercial intention to attract interest in my company, its platform (VITES), services and surrounding products. So how can Flog (flogging-based blogs) exists in the same space?
Well, I thought it was nothing as simple as the aim - it is the tone, the intention. I am honest about what we do and how we do it and I have been blogging on and off since 2003 so I kind of grew up with it.
I do hope that some of the big boys get it wrong and fall flat on their face as they hide behind blogs and pretend they are trying to widen consumer understanding or “handing their brand over to the common man” - it’s all tosh and the agency world is still struggling to work out how to leverage this new communication medium.
I love this open world, it rocks
