I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.
The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover …read the rest of this article

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 – 162 pages which includes …read the rest of this article

As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day – 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair.
One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, was ‘maximising your downtime’. This …read the rest of this article

If you need the history – I had a big problem with the company (blogged here), which was resolved the day after I wrote a post about it on this site (blogged here).
A lot of people might see this as a victory for blogs and bloggers. I’d agree, sure. But, on reflection, I think it’s more of a victory for …read the rest of this article

Fake Steve Jobs is rather more concise than me:

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Public Relations in the Web 2.0 era? A new white paper has been produced by Squiz in association with Text 100 PR called Communications 2.0. It’s available here (registration required).
The paper discusses what Web 2.0 is, how businesses might adopt some of the approaches it brings, how their PR will change as a result and ends with a ‘manifesto’…

To practise …read the rest of this article

A great article in the FT this week by Sarah Murray (behind their paywall) about the power of the internet to make consumers powerful broadcasters. It ends with four quick tips for companies planning to join the social media space:

See what’s out there. New services can help companies analyse their online reputations. Blog-focused search engines such as Blogpulse or Technorati …read the rest of this article

Get ready for a new acronym (or is it a mnemonic?): SLATES. It’s used to describe the building blocks of Enterprise 2.0 applications. The expanded, expensive report based on Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0? essay introduces some new ideas around the subject (free excerpt here).
But what is SLATES?* According to Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s this:

SLATES describes the combined use of …read the rest of this article