Author Archives: Ian Delaney

Age of Social Network Users

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 19, 2010
New data from Pingdom on the age of social network users confirms the rumours. They are mostly quite old, or they lie a lot about their age. The smallest group of people using social networks is the 18-24 age group, which rather confounds the idea that these sites are for young people. Across the board, only [...]
Posted in social media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Book Review: Blogging to Drive Business

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 18, 2010
Many thanks to Pearson Education for sending me two recent books about blogging for review. The first of these is Blogging to Drive Business by Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt. It seems that Eric has written the more business and strategy-centric chapters, and Rebecca the more practical information about blogging. This is a slim volume [...]
Posted in blogs, business | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

My Wordpress Plugin List

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 17, 2010
I claim no expertise, but I have tried and tested a lot of Wordpress plugins on this blog and the following remain on my ‘essential / must-install’ list. I have provided links to each of the plugins, so you can find out more. But if you want to try them on your own site, it [...]
Posted in blogs | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Influence and Virality: A Primer

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 12, 2010
How do things become ‘viral’ on the Internet? And what exactly do we mean by ‘influence’? Marketing and PR people want their messages to spread in the most effective and efficient way possible, and so these questions have received a great deal of attention, particularly in recent years, as we’ve seen the rise of ‘viral [...]
Posted in feature, social media | Tagged , , , | 28 Comments

Mass Media Trends for the Tweenties

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 9, 2010
A presentation I wrote for a meeting today about where our media are heading in the next 5-10 years. It doesn’t make a lot of sense without my accompanying narrative, I realise. Nonetheless, I wanted to keep it safely bookmarked and you might enjoy a round of Powerpoint-Karaoke against it. Also, no image sources are acknowledged [...]
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Hell Freezes Over: Google and the Super Bowl

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 8, 2010
While the UK slept last night, it appears there was some sort of sporting tournament across the Atlantic and that the world’s most-used search provider advertised its search capabilities and new(ish) browser. It’s quite a nice advert, telling a (cliched) story in an original manner with a clean style. The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and [...]
Posted in media, web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Real-World Objects as Infographics

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 4, 2010
via fast company. I LOL’d but then realised literacy of infographics and data visualisations has become mainstream. Which makes me even happier. I do hope that that the pilot and crew don’t need to consult the diagrams in order to get their plans into the sky. The airline is Kulala, based in South Africa, with [...]
Posted in stuff | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Taming the Spirit of the Times

By Ian Delaney | Published: February 4, 2010
On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative. Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary – if depressing – reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not [...]
Posted in feature, media | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments