These my micropostings and bookmarks – November 27th through December 13th:

• [Editorial] “Purchandising” – This in my Editorial from the November issue of Internet Retailing Magazine. Also available as ‘digital print’ via the November digital edition.
• Exclusive: Foursquare’s New Partnership With PepsiCo Takes Focus Off of Places | Fast Company – Interesting development. Using the ‘location stream’ to aid the targeting of adverts and promotions, even if not necessarily related to that intersection of space and time. 

  A next stage must surely be the sale/exploitation of sentiment and attitudinal information…

• How a Personality Test Designed to Pick Astronauts is Taking the Pain Out of Customer Support | Fast Company – Very interesting read and shows the combination of psychology, business rules, linguisitic planning and the computing horse-power to deliver in real time.
• Kickstarter – “We’re the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world”.

  Crowdsourced funding. Nice.

• thefridaynightakeout – Geurilla cooking, local quality produce meets entrepreneurship and pop-up approach.

  “I’m a freelance cook based in east London and I’ve worked for a number of years in London at restaurants such as The River Cafe and Moro. I’m starting a once a week takeout which will happen in the London Fields, Shoreditch, south Hackney areas. Every Friday I will cook a casserole style dish (or two) depending on whats in season and what produce looks good. The blog will feature whats on the menu for the friday night. I can take requests by text or email from early in the week. Produce will come from a range of sources, such as Leilas shop, Ginger Pig, Bensfish, Riverford organic, McKanna meats. I deliver between 5 and 7.30 on the friday evening and the food comes cold, it just needs to be warmed up. Each main course will be between £8.50 and £9.50 depending on what i cook. There will be a vegetarian dish available for £7 on request. frank.hannon@btinternet.com or text/call 079 043 84019”

These my micropostings and bookmarks – October 4th through November 22nd:

• The Best of Artisan Cosmetics | Fast Company – “If you wouldn’t eat your bath and body products, you’re using the wrong stuff”
• Comet boss believes less-is-more philosophy will beat Best Buy | Business | The Guardian – Nice article on the response of Comet to the “Big Box” and discount-led approach of Best Buy.

  Hugh Harvey, MD, said “Today the role of the internet is to provide the catalogue and the role of the store is to provide the experience of the showroom – almost like a department store. We have made the transition from an out-of-town shed operator to an out-of-town store and our fit and finish is much different to how it was.”

• Helzberg – I Am Loved – Interesting new site, powered by Bazaarvoice and their Stories system. Note the way that UGC and stories are being edited into TV/broadcast video stories to amplify the intersection of customer’s stories and brand values.
• China’s Homegrown Luxury | China International Business – Intersting article, courtesy of the business of fashion blog, on this rise of indigenous, craft-inspired luxury in china. A glimmer of the future today…
• Literature and Latte – Links – Stupendously useful and informative page on writing tools, word-processing and screen writing. All that I need now is an idea 😉
• Fashion 2.0 | Provenance? There’s an App for That − BoF – The Business of Fashion – Nice piece on the important of provenance and (as we non-luxury folk would say) “transparent supply chain”.

  Cute to see the app angle, although people like Icebreaker make this available via their “Baaacodes” on their websites. Not sure that there’s a sufficiently compelling call to fire up an app, but the trend is a positive one.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – September 12th through September 21st:

• The First Department Store – History of the department store – link courtesy of Michael Ross.
• Digital photo prints and stickies, canvas prints and free digital photo sharing – Could this be the replacement for the much-loved and sadly-lamented Panther Imaging? Dev and scan at a reasonable price…
• Cajon Drums – DJM Music Ltd – Saw a busker playing/sitting on one of these Cajon drums. Felt an irrational desire to find out more about them (eg their name for a start). Now I have a further desire to own one… 😉
• GSMA and comScore Announce UK Launch of Mobile Media Metrics ~ GSM World – Statistics on UK’s use of mobile – minutes, pages viewed etc.
• SALSA Vaya Frameset :: Frames & Forks :: Frames – Road/Touring :: Triton Cycles –

These my micropostings and bookmarks – August 18th through September 2nd:

• Net Promoter Scores by sector (The Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Blog) – Useful piece on the NPS scores by industry sector, from the 3.2m user-base that Bazaarvoice’s clients reach.
• Welcome to FashionStake. The revolutionary online marketplace for fashion. – Interesting site that allows customers to ‘invest’ in a collection and shape its progress. A step on from customer-mediated selling (eg ThisNext) or launching directly to customers via social sites, this approach merges fractional ownership with an ‘angel’ approach (eg WineAngel).
• Conversation Home | Nordstrom.com – Nordstrom does conversations/stories – social commerce meets high-end retail.
• Top 10 Politico Tech Blunders, From the Internets to the Google | Fast Company – Delightful. Jokes aside, a humbling reminder of the jargon related to the web, and if course the fundamentally complex underpinnings. This ain’t no digital book.
• DANNY LYON: “The End of the Age of Photography – Part II” (2010) – Wonderfully intemperate rant by a wonderful photographer against the evils of the digital age: not seeing, not keeping, not remembering. Touching on the archive aspects, the behavioural aspects and some personal recollections. Tempting to fully agree, but there’s a whiff of reactionary thinking, plus a lack of options to move forward, rather than moving back… The thought of children just erasing a lifetime’s digital works is as chilling as a cherished library being send to Oxfam or for pulp…

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 18th through August 6th:

• 22 Michaels: How we tripled our sales using YouTube – Good article on capitalising on Haul Video
• Toshiba brings texture to touch (video) — Engadget – Tactic feedback on a touchpad.
• Compete | Compete – Hitwise meets Alexa. Some useful info free, especially the site to site comparisons.
• Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex | Video on TED.com – Tools evolve more slowly than skeletons, trade is 100,000 years older than farming… stimulating presentation on trade and sharing as the root of human progress and innovation.
• Apple’s Real Achilles Heel – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review – Apple is a 20th century company dressed as a 21st century one.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 28th through July 17th:

• Twitter’s Ascension in Japan – Thomas Crampton – Twitter = mumble, the liking for blogging anonymously, and a haiku-esque brevity all help Twitter fare well in Japan. Neat article.
• Slow fashion: forever yours | Life and style | The Guardian – A new trend towards not having trends? 😉

  Attractive-sounding approach – neo-classics and perennials – emphasising quality and fitness to purpose over the ‘wastefulness’ of fast fashion… Difficult to see this as more than a curated ‘new trend’ to replace the justificiation each year of buying a ‘new twist on a classic’, routine, however the trend to a mixed, eclectic approach is certainly interesting.

  Can’t help thinking, however, it’s just called being a grown-up rather than 18 years old, and sad to see that we’re now calling a ‘mixed price-point’ assortment “egalitarian”… the revolutionaries at the barricades were not after the right to mix Hermes with Bic, or to storm the Bastille wearing Converse as well as Laboutin!

• Insert Batteries Any Way You Like With Microsoft Instaload | Fast Company – Great idea. Even though it’s been a long time coming, it’s something to enjoy just of itself.
• Organic Magazine Theme – Nice wordpress organic theme…
• High Line 2 Sneak Peek: Lounging Lawn, Flyovers, and the “Chelsea Thicket” | Fast Company – Nice article and sneak peak on activity at The High Line in NYC. Really inspiring and a wonderful experience within the ur-city of New York.

  Thanks again to @tlittleton for advising me to visit 🙂

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 28th through June 28th:

• The Ultimate List: 300+ Social Media Statistics – Erk. 300+? Social Mediaites sure love their statistics about social media… and then put them into such purty videos too!
• Nice-looking and configurable twitter ticker (eduVoyage: Ruby on Rails Development) –
• MILLENNIALS AND ENTERPRISE2.O « Futures-Diagnosis – Quoth Norman in considering this myth, as a prelude to Enterprise2.0

  “The myth of digital whizzkids

  The myth of the digital whizzkid needs to be challenged for four reasons:

  First, because it mistakenly assumes that young people effortlessly adopt digital technology into their lives because they are into the technology;
  Secondly, because the myth of digitally savvy children is actually an expression of adult confusion about how to conduct their relations with children, which has little to do with children’s relationship to the new media;
  Third, because it flatters children instead of critically engaging them in a quest to engage more fully with the technology itself; to understand the science and mathematics behind the magic of the digital world;
  Fourth, because by reducing adults to the level of children in need of expert guidance, it infantilises serious questions regarding collaboration in the workplace.”

• Brian Skerry reveals ocean’s glory — and horror | Video on TED.com – Wonderful underwater photography, with a tough message.
• iPhone vs. Android | Nielsen Wire – Some nice, current factoids on usage and demographics between iPhone and Android users. Nicest of all a section on the respective desires to stick with their OS on their next phone…
• If the past is a palimpsest, what are we? | MetaFilter – Recovered and fabricated memory…

  “happiness is more important than truth” in evolutionary terms.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – April 30th through May 23rd:

• web based CRM software – online contact manager – absoluteBUSY – Interesting-looking hosted CRM solution. Works well and quickly on a Mac and the structure looks neat. Can’t see how to import/export though, nor how to operate with other systems of feeds, but logged here so I can find it later.
• Facebook Leaks Usernames, User IDs, and Personal Details to Advertisers – Very clear deconstruction of how FB passes user information – username, city, age, gender – to advertisers. It’d be a simple problem to resolve globally, so must assume that this is part of their plan?

  Thanks to Antony for pointing this out.

• The Biggest Challenges for a Conference Program Director – Monique gives a lucid view on the challenges for a conference director, articulating well the balance between a conference that people want to attend and the marketing thereof. Rings many bells.

  The format of the video interview is neat too (apart from the sofa – yak!) – brief video, with the key points in text below.

• Etacts – Social plugin for gmail. Tracks contact activity, sets reminders, logs conversations, mass mailing and more.
• BBC News – Today – Audio slideshow: Eye examination – Really nice slideshow format.
• How Renting, Not Owning an iPhone Could Have Saved Gizmodo: Expert | Fast Company – Common sense, interesting angle and well-written to boot.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – April 22nd through April 24th:

• ‘Skinput’ – BBC News – Sensors turn skin into gadget control pad – Following from the Patti Maes ‘Sixth Sense’ presentation at TED here’s further work on ‘bio’ input methods – this time us skin.

  Any technology with a good pun deserves to succeed 😉

• Almost Genius: The Cardboard Box That Fits Anything Perfectly | Fast Company – Elegant and efficient packing.
• Reboot: Puma and Yves Béhar Spend Three Years Designing Super-Green Shoebox | Fast Company – Great design – sustainable, elegant, ruthless and stonkingly desirable. The box is nicer than the contents 😉
• Augmented Contact Lenses Cover Your Eye with a Screen of 100s of LEDs | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World – This is an update on the contact lenses I covered in my Future of Digital Marketing keynote.

  I said 18 months for progress – they’ve achieved more in I predicted, and in half the time.

• The White House unleashes AdWords against Wall Street | Econsultancy – “Imagine for a minute that you’re the president of the United States and you’re trying to make the case against Wall Street. What’s the best way to do it? As the president, you have almost unlimited access to the traditional media, but that’s not always enough today.

  So U.S. president Barack Obama, whose use of the internet arguably helped him win the presidency, isn’t relying on the mainstream media to promote his Wall Street reform agenda; he’s using Google. And he’s going straight for the jugular by bidding on topical keywords related to embattled investment bank Goldman Sachs.”

These my micropostings and bookmarks – March 14th through April 8th:

• Thin and Bright: Rosco LED LitePads | B&H Photo Video Pro Audio – Something else for the “must get some soon” list…
• Atom Activity Base Schema (Draft) – Starting point to document and define the fields and data formats in an ‘activity-based schema’ to support lifestreaming etc. Consider alongside APML and microformats.
• 6 Thoughts About Location Madness – Marshall Kirkpatrick on RWW with thoughts on location-based services and whether they’re the new new thing…
• Category Templates « WordPress Codex – Really useful page describing how WordPress selects which template to use for an archive listing, and how to add a custom template for individual categories. We are using this to create ‘microsites’ of categories on internetretailing.net. Well-described.
• SnowValley – “Thank you for your order pages” Gallery – A gallery of 134 “Thank you for your order” pages from their 2009 christmas order/checkout/delivery report. Nice.