These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 27th through January 6th:

• Internet Retailing – recruitment – One sales manager and two editors please.
• Mind bites – a set on Flickr – Neat collection of illustrated aporisms and research findings – all dying to be powerpointed, but check the copyright since most are fully reserved. Pity.
• Mini / Pocket Journals by BookFactory – Lovely site – combining manufacturing with stationery fetish.

  Want custom notebooks or lab/engineering/record books? With personal imprint?

  European number – London 0208 – raises my hopes for new stationery in 2009…

• The Green Microgym – Portland, Oregon, USA – Human and Solar Powered – Adam Boesel – Personal Training – This is a great conjunction of a thought experiment (“why don’t you power the lights while you pedal the exercise bike”) with newly-available working technology with a business model (rewarding gym members with a variant on a loyalty card – the “Burn and Earn” card – which offers credits in return for hours, wattage etc).

  This will become the standard for all gyms – especially once costs reduce. Indeed, the cyclical capital refresh costs in modern chains are so high that this could even be affordable now.

• “In Utero” Tweeting?? [Gift Guide for the Twitter addict – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)] – Scroll to the pregnancy-belt picture and the “For Baby” title…

  In utero tweeting – Priceless

These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 18th through December 27th:

• nativeclient – Google Code – A further step towards the browser supplanting the operating system?

  While google’s Native Client plugin is still simply that, it’s clear that Google’s seeing itself in the middle of the information cycle: finding stuff (google search), reading stuff (Chrome qua ‘browser’), doing things (Chrome qua application delivery/manipulation engine) and now of course supplanting the (bloated?) intermediation of an OS sitting between the browser and the chip.

  While this isn’t going to supplant a developed OS any time soon (eg for musicians, accountants, corporate users, designers) it could make the Netbooks even more powerful: fat wireless, cheap chip, no OS to pay for, Google Docs for wp and storage, and then embedded chunks of functionality running ‘in browser’.

  More interesting by the day. And to think that we used to think that MicroSith was greedy in its ambition for WindozeEverywhere…

• DiSo Project – “Open, distributed, social” – building an open, interconnected and distributed world, with the first project built on top of WordPress.
• autonomo.us · Social Networking – Interesting and richly-referenced article on open data exchange, standards and players in social networking.

  From the folks working towards Free Network Services.

• The Snow Patrol : Criteo – behavioural marketing and merchandising services –
• Casino targets UK with discount e-tail site – “Discount” and “online” – interesting market entry approach from Casino, one of the world’s largest volume retailers. This will make the UK’s electronics market even more competitive.

  Gee-gaws and widgets aside, you need to have massive buying power to compete on price and this offering will bring DSG-esque levels of purchasing power to the UK.

  One to watch – especially with their launch offers…

These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 10th through December 12th:

• Small Flags – Joy! Here, in one place, all of the flags you could want ready for those i18n sites!

  A service to mankind. Manuel Giorgini we salute you.

• FixMyStreet – iPhone app. – MySociety are/is wonderful, and fixmystreet worked (I had some graffiti removed within a week and a courtesy call to check I was happy. From Tower Hamlets!?! Magic!).

  Now, they’ve put this wonder service onto the iphone. In their words:

  “I’m very excited to announce that the iPhone app for FixMyStreet is now live and available for download on the App Store (link opens the App Store in iTunes). You can now record a problem when out and about with your iPhone, using its camera and GPS, ready for checking and submitting to the council. Hopefully people will find this useful! :)”

  Awsome. The Social Mobile Geolocation-aware Web.

• Christmas on Oxford Street: Tinsel town – Interesting article in Retail Week – a wander down Oxford Street rating the Christmassiness and retail ‘pizzaz’ of the main retailers.

  I’m pleased to say that House of Fraser, one of my clients, performed well (ok, top 🙂 ) and it’s good to see the hard work behind the scenes bearing fruit on the shop floor.

  Highlight quotes include:

  “This really is very impressive. The decorations throughout the store are subtle and sophisticated.

  “The Christmas shop itself is excellent – great for inspiration and it feels relaxing. Price offers are subtly but clearly communicated. Crucially, House of Fraser is giving people a reason to come here and it is good at making people shop.”

  Festive feeling: 10/10
  Display and merchandising: 8/10
  Customer journey: 9/10
  Total: 27/30

• MailSteward – Maybe this is what I need to help OSX’s Mail.app deal with over 100k email messages? Sick of rebuilding the ‘envelope’ file (whatever that is)…
• Blue Microphones: Products: Snowball – Stephen Fry has one. Clearly I need to own one too.
• BusySync – Sync iCal and Google Calendar – from BusyMac – More fully-featured that Google’s iCal CalDAV sync offering – main benefits are: iPhone syncing, calendars appearing natively in iCal (not as DAV attachments to iCal), and support for shared/multi-owner calendars.
• WooThemes Demo – Typebased theme – Nice theme from the folk at Woo Themes.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 9th from 20:25 to 22:51:

• BBC NEWS | Business | Bratz loses battle of the dolls – Yay!!

  “Bratz dolls are facing removal from all shops after a US federal court banned parent company MGA Entertainment from making the Barbie rival.”

  I’m no fan of Barbie, but kudos to her for killing off the vile, rude, repulsive, disgusting, annoying, nag-bait that is Bratz. As a parent I applaud!

  Not sure how I’ll explain to the kids that restrictive practices on intellectual property, transfer of know-how and passing off came together in a glorious legal storm… Perhaps I’ll just repeat ad infinitum my current chant:

  “Daddy hates Bratz even more than High School Musical(s) 1 through 3”.

  RIP Bratz. We’ll miss you – not.

• Honeyshed – Reinventing Shopping for the Digital Generation – OMG! “Reinventing” as in “reproducing TV Shopping for the MTV Generation”!

  Er – a jukebox of flash/flashy video shot in that low-budget-but-not-amateur-but-not way, promoting products.

  Wow. Feel the quake.

  That said, a nice way for a small group of people to work a video+ webcast+ youtube+ affiliate+ yoot angle. Good luck to them.

  Cunning, yes: revolution? no.

• Domain Name Wire » News » Standard Tactics, LLC: How GoDaddy Profits from Expired Domains – The Domain Industry’s News Source – Ouch.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 4th through December 9th:

• BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Chinese girl gets ‘kiss of deaf’ – “Kiss of deaf”?? Best pun of the day. Puntastic!
• News | UK searches for online discount vouchers grows 133% – NMA – “UK internet searches for discount vouchers have increased by 133% over the past year, according to Hitwise UK.”

  Only 133%??

• tarpipe – Yahoo Pipes, but for publishing workflows into social media applications.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – December 2nd through December 3rd:

• Automoblox – I so, so so so soooo want these. Hand-made, modular, delectable model cars. Too good for kids! Or rather, for kids under 40.

  Awesome. Thanks to Suzanne for the pointer (but, tellingly, not an actual car as a pressie. Sob).

• Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows. – Screen-grabbing, sharing, thingy.
• BusinessGreen news, advice, reviews and blogs to help UK companies reduce their carbon footprint – New ‘green business’ title from Incisive Media

These my micropostings and bookmarks – November 30th through December 1st:

• Archie Grand – Another in the never-ending series of notebook fetish posts…

  Promises a lot: oversewn, nice size, good paper. That said, the joke of the cover title will wear over time and the notebook offers little other than plain paper.

  At the date of posting the promised opening of the site hasn’t happened, so I’m going to relegate this to the “promises much, delivers little” category.

  Still not seen anything to beat that Smythson 192 pages of featherlight paper – my beauty, my beauty!

• dispatches – New magazine launch: “serious photojournalism” – ie photos, journalism on ‘serious’ topcis.

  Good to see that nice typography, design and imagery are still to the fore and that people still see a commercial opportunity in quality journals.

  One to watch.

• The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide – Neat article of some helpful pointers to help any CEO through the dark times when your cash balance races market sentiment to hit the floor!

  My favourite is to imagine what your successor would do. Excellent thought. This is also relevant to serial ‘change agents’ who are forever helping to change and improve: how often to we manage our own businesses well enough?

  This is a more pithy variation on the ‘eat your own dog-food’/follow your own advice maxims – in a rather scarey moment of advance schadenfreude!

These my micropostings and bookmarks – November 29th from 17:25 to 22:14:

• Present&Correct – Color Planner – Another stationery fetish “find” – this time thanks to @offmessage.

  Quirky stationery and ‘making’ things – with an olde-worlde and European flavour.

• The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard – Thought-provoking short video about sustainability: challenging externalised costs and ‘designed for the dump’.

  Charming and engaging production. Lots to consider, especially when considered against questions of ‘craft’ and things that last as a result of value, good design and – importantly – ongoing in-life maintenance.

  Chilling to consider the questions of designed obsolescence, and discussions over building in breakage quickly enough to get more sales, but long enough not to destroy the consumer’s faith in the brand.

  Buy good shoes. Have them resoled. Style over fashion.

  Annie touches upon my pet hate: why throw away a £3k digital SLR just because the sensor’s out of date: why can’t I upgrade the sensor and the circuit boards? Sigh.
  Now, where’s my iPod?

• The Atoma Product Range – Sigh – another type of notebook to add to my stationery fetish mullings… Not quite the leather-bound Smythson featherweight paper, but more flexible and, ahem, affordable.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – November 24th through November 25th:

• ecommr: a collection of e-commerce interface and design elements – “ecommr is a website showcasing the best (and sometimes worst) in e-commerce design, with a clear focus on the individual elements that make up online stores. We break down retailers and focus on individual user interface elements in order to provide a gallery of inspiration for designers, developers, information architects, and anyone working with online retail. ”

  Found via @offmessage’s bookmarks.

• Westfield London passes 2 million visitors – 2 million visitors at Westfield.
• All The Rage – A delightful, quirky and interesting accidental discovery here: “All the Rage” is a “free, funny PDF magazine for unusual people”. I think they could also have said “by” unusual people.

  They further say “All The Rage is an entertaining, poorly-designed, non-trendy response to lifestyle magazines. For the mag, as for its readers, content has had to come before style. Print it out and leave it somewhere when you’ve finished.”

  This is certainly something to have alongside one’s copy of Monocle (!) and SlightlyFoxed.

  A lucky find, courtesy of the editor being on the friend list of a new contact on upcoming. Social media? Nah – ‘serendipitous media’!

These my micropostings and bookmarks – November 18th through November 22nd:

• EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing – Neat. Basic, but neat. I love SubEthaEdit (from Coding Monkeys) for its stripped-down text interface (like TextMate with colour) and co-editing, but find the sharing limited (eg bonjour, owner has to initiate the share).

  GDocs in the main collaboration tool nowadays, but the gWord app is far clunkiers that the gExcel version (where you can see all cursors and editing in apparent real time).

  This promised network + syntax highlighting + real-time-co-editing + neutral server and versioning.

• Christmas starts early as M&S and Debenhams launch sales | Business | guardian.co.uk – A fair article that notes the extent and depth of discounting on the high street. Clearly, it’s sensible to clear stock before Christmas at 20% off rather than having a stock mountain in January that you need to discount by 50% or more.

  However, this activity has two downsides:
  1) customers now see 20% off as a starting point for discounts and 10% not worth raising an eyebrow for; and
  2) customer realise just how much crap there is in shops – undifferentiated tat clogging shelves and also their houses!

  The challenge for retailers is not to out-macho the competition (the “beggar thy neighbour” approach) nor to try and bring cash forward, but to re-connect with customers on two bases:
  1) good, useful, desirable, quality goods, well priced, and
  2) the sheer joy of shopping – ‘retail theatre’ or entertainment if you will.

  Undifferntiated, mediocre rubbish is ever and always the same – irrespective of apparent discount.

• RC TRITEC Ltd. : Super-LumiNova® – In case, like me, you were interested in more detail on Super Luminova ‘luminous’ markings on watches… ta-daaa.

  A gentleman should always be familiar with the different colours, namely:

  C1 Colour “C1” for white
  C3 Colour “C3” for yellow
  C5 Colour “C5” for greenish-yellow
  C7 Colour “C9” for blue-green
  One night, in the dark, I’ll ponder why the C7 is called “C9”.