The alliterative headline to this piece was one I submitted for my latest article on TechCrunch and was somewhat prosaically replaced with ‘The limits of social influence? Big Ben is influential on… drugs’. Still you can’t win them all and while the piece was all about the so-called measurement of influence through social networks, it [...]
social networks
The 1992 vision of Mondo 2000 was right and wrong, but also true
I picked up my copy of Mondo 2000 – User’s guide to a new edge (Thames and Hudson 1992) the other day. What an optimistic and anarchic place the soon-to-be digital world was then, and indeed for the next few years. Fax machines were vogue, mobile phones were still big and barely anyone was using [...]
Why Klout is a flawed model
In the 80s and early 90s, journalists on pop magazines (myself included) were driven by who was going to be attaining what position on next week’s charts. We would have an idea as the midweek positions came in. The current positions and the future positions helped us think about which pop stars to put on [...]
2011 – the year that social networks changed my life… again
Two more hours to go and then the screens in my life will flicker and I will pull the plug on them. No more laptops in bed, no more smartphone tomfoolery and hopefully not even Absolutely Fabulous on the telly. Furthermore no logging on to Twitter, Google +, Linkedin, Facebook and all those pesky networks [...]
Man Utd challenges Facebook with new social media network
Manchester’s Number Two football club, Manchester United has announced it plans to launch a global social media network. In partnership with digital agency SapientNitro, the club will roll out the network over the next two years to Man Utd’s alleged 660 million fans. The network plans to ‘tap into the Asian market’, where TV coverage [...]
Facebook foreplay leads not to satisfactory climax
Facebook could be confused with the manual that comes with a new mobile/car/robot. There’s so much it can do but most people are so happy that the bloody thing works they never look under the SIM/bonnet/metal testicles. Believe me, it’s better that way. Over the past 12 months I’ve spent more time with Facebook than [...]
YouTube unveils its new superhero, a bullied Australian student
Earlier this week so-called graphic footage emerged of an Australian 16-year-old fighting back against a bully after being repeatedly punched in the face. The video was filmed by the bully’s consorts and it seems the bullying of this boy was an everyday occurence. It was only when the ‘victim’ threw his tormentor to the ground [...]
Malcolm Gladwell hits the ‘dipping point’ on Twitter
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, the bouffant New York journalist writes about the 10,000-hour rule and how so-called outliers or geniuses are not born, they just have to do the time. He cites other factors and happenstance in how those 10,000 hours turn into influence and by all criteria is a fascinating approach to what [...]
