Lovely magazine article, setting out the fascinating history of the A-Z map.
When Phyllis Pearsall, born 100 years ago on Monday, got lost on her way to a party in 1930s London, she set about designing her own street map of the capital. The result – the A-Z – has become a byword for city atlases across the UK.
Having heard the interview with Stuart Rose this morning on the Today programme I nipped over to the website to ‘listen again‘ in order that I could bring the news of M&S’ internet sales to the readership of InternetRetailing.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, at my scoop! Since 0755 BST Stuart Rose has been ousted and replaced by Philip Green…
🙂
I’m assuming that this will be corrected soon, so in the meantime here’s the fuller running order so that you can enjoy the fun of stumbling across this for yourself.
Andrew Edmunds | London Restaurants | Fodor’s Online Travel Guide
Who’d have thought it? Fodor’s, voted Most Trusted Brand by the travelling American Blue-Rinse Saga set (ok – I made that up) getting UGC so, so, so wrong…
I was inviting a friend to my favourite restaurant in all of London Town and – he being new to this parts – thought I’d send him an interwebnet link, entered “andrew edmunds” into google.
The Fodors review seemed the nicest but, upon looking at the site, I find the contribution of “Fernando Hemmingway from The Land of Confused Ducks”. Promising.
I’ve grabbed the entry (in case anyone from Fodors reads this) but it’s reproduced below – with full apologies to anyone who gets sacked as this is parsed by your firewall’s content filter…
The Cream at Andrew Edmunds Isn’t the Only Thing Being Whipped!
Posted by Fernando Hemmingway from The Land of Confused Ducks on 05/22/2006
I was delighted with this restaurant, until I discovered that it was actually a gay bar. I was raped several times by various people, including the head chef. I can only pray he remembered to wash his hands before preparing my meal!
UGC is all well and good, but while the consumer (joker, mendacious troll, saboteur) may _generate_ the words, you don’t have to accept them! It’s your brand, Fodor, look after it!
Now, let’s hope that they have the confit of duck on the menu next week…
Welcome To Dogster, Where Every Dog Has A Webpage!
Having just taken issue with whether social Web2.0 mania had gone too far, I now have to eat Numble pie.
It’d only be more funny if it were called “dogstr” and listed your pooch’s favourite bookmarks…
Interesting post on the vibrant e-consultancy.com blog by Gareth Knight. Gareth’s tired of the obsession with ‘add a blog’ or a ‘social dimension’ to software when there’s so much more to Web2.0 than that. He says:
I wonder if this is because the people who drive solutions to business problems are the managers and CEOs, whilst the people that create and implement new technologies are techies who are scratching an itch they have for something that they can’t already do. The techie is motivated by challenge, whilst the manager is motivated by ROI – simple paradox, but this I think is what is underscoring the situation at the moment.
While I share some of the frustration at oversimplification, I don’t accept the characterisation of the problem. My comment, on their site, reads:
Nice post, however I don’t think that the proposed Dilbertian opposition (ie marketing and CEO woofties versus the Grand Viseors of Truth, technochrats etc) is correct.
Rather I think we’re seeing the latest (but not the last) incarnation of a twofold fascination: 1) human beings desire to communicate with/at others; 2) human beings obsession with commenting on 1.
You could replace “social software” with “My Home Page”, website, instant messenger, texting, the first wave of business flirting (Friendster, Orkut, Ryze), self-promotion (ecademy, linkedin) and now Bebo and MySpace.
All of the systems, ironically, are proxies for human contact so – here on e-consultancy – I’m predicting that we’ll move beyond ‘proxy contact’ for Web3.0 and have truly social approaches. I’ve applied for a bizmeth patent and will be marketing this revolution under the SayingHello i’theStreet [tm] brand. You never know – could work!
In the meantime all of this pseudo-social communication/broadcast/posting activity (more heat than light, even on a good day) simply gives tired brands the veneer of communication and engagement. The real question for brands is how to distinguish substance from form and to engage in a dialogue with customers. To miss this opportunity is to demote a customer into a ‘purchaser’, with all of the consequences for business sustainability that entails.
Posted 22:10 14 Sep 2006 by Ian Jindal
This is a great resource! The “Floating paper aeroplane” is my current fave since the folded-back nose adds some ‘heft’ for good, strong throwing, as well as some resilience given the inevitable crashes.
Study well, all dads who need to take their paper plane skills to the next level…
Drivers give helmeted cyclists less room�|�Oddly Enough�|�Reuters.co.uk
Worrying findings – especially as I’m about to start a cross-London bicycle commute in October…
I’ve always been skeptical of a helmet’s value in a crash – I remember some earlier designs increased the risk of twisting your neck in a fall – but have worn one on the basis that some additional protection is always welcome and so that my visibility in traffic is increased: a bright white helmet stands out more than my head (although the hair’s getting whiter by the month…).
Maybe the blond wig is the way to go though… Worrying!
I’d had a fiddle with Google Analytics when I managed to get on the early trial, but I’d never really bothered to put any work into it. Why? Well, the traffic on the blog was low (me, my mum, a few mates) and I wasn’t really that interested in doing anything else. Running Analog every now and again was enough to see that the traffic was increasing and that there were some very odd things attracting traffic… For example, the main search terms for August is “Lazy Town”, finding the piece I wrote on the most excellent CBBC series. Next are searches for a friend who’s a playwright, and finally a gaggle of ecommerce, retail and web2.0 related queries. My name (sob) doesn’t feature in the top searches.
This shows that it’s the content – its relevance and quality – that determines visits in this search-engine world and so I thought it was high time to understand a bit more about the behaviour on my web site. What people look at, where they came from and which bits of content are “working” and which not…
Google Analytics’ open-to-all announcement came just as I’d worked out how to edit the Movable Type templates without coming out in a sweat. A simple line of code inserted at the end of a template, a quick rebuild and then a wait of 24 hours until there are some stats.
After years of looking at Analog reports the javascripty interface, attractive reports and considered selection are both a treat and an education. I can see now why the analytics vendors have some concerns, although in honesty this is not going to push Coremetrics out of a large enterprise. For smaller users though this is a real boon.
I’ll continue my learning and report back “in due course” on what I’ve learned.
When taken alongside Blotter this week has delivered a couple of steps forward in visualising activity and ranking of one’s website.
I just love this image! Very belatedly now added to the photo gallery it’s at last there to share.
On 9 July (yes, MONTHS ago!), Ian and Karen (of birthday fiesta fame) arranged a picnic in Victoria Park. In typical Worley-Wall style this was no shrivelled crust event, but rather the usual feast. These cakes were a total hit and had our girls’ eyes out on stalks. They scoffed their way through the plate full, with Alice particularly appreciative of the ‘constructed arch’ of green and white dolly mixtures (just visible in the background). Belated ‘thanks’ for a great afternoon!
Now, I love Meebo. It’s a real life-saver when working behind corporate firewalls that block IM traffic (and where the HTTP filters haven’t yet got round to block the meebo.com domain!). In addition it saved my bacon when my favourite IM client, Proteus, went and died on the Intel MacBookPro…
So – that’s good enough then. Except they’ve gone and done something very clever: embedding a chat window as a widget in your blog or other web site.
Details of the widget are here
I’ve written about some of the implications for retailers in this article on InternetRetailer.info
but one of the interesting points I didn’t cover is the way that you can be alerted to visitors (who are in your buddy list) passing by your website. Neat.
Of course this won’t please those who are paranoid about their movements being tracked, or who are sneaking a peak at a friend’s website, but then again I doubt that these people would have Meebo accounts anyway.
For my part I see it as a further step in the ‘conversational web’, where a website or blog is used as a hub or contact centre for an asynchronous conversation – by links, comments, email and now IM.
Someone remind me what a telephone is for?