These are my links for March 26th through March 29th:

  • 10 Steps To Create The Ultimate Facebook Fan Page for Your Brand – Practical guide to building a brand/business page on Facebook: lots of fresh content, contests, discussions, and creating tab categories which effectively will create a 'micro-site' approach for your site.
  • Consumer rights briefing on UK Digital Economy Bill for MPs – If you haven't written to your MP yet about the Digital Economy bill, this text from Consumer Focus gives you a good brief on what to complain about. Parliament have only allocated a half day to debate this bill, which should have around 10 days of time to debate thoroughly, given its implications means that users can – without sufficient trial or right of appeal – be disconnected from the internet.
  • Why using the same status update is a bad idea – Interesting article by Blossing Brands on choosing status updates to suit your audience and purpose.
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These are my links for March 23rd from 09:22 to 23:16:

  • Scrolling and Attention – Jacob Nielsen, usability legend, with some very interesting research on user experience tracking in relation to below-the-fold content: 80% of users ONLY read what's above the fold, but some layout that encourage scrolling can still command attention.
  • 5 days until Mediacamp, Nottingham’s first barcamp for creative media March 27 – If you're not following me on Twitter (please do, I'm @susioneill) I may have been remise to inform you that we're once again hosting another Mediacamp in Nottingham this Saturday. It's a day long energised discussion, presentation and exploration barcamp to discuss all aspects of how digital media is rocking our world. I'll be experimenting with social reporting, capturing highlights of the day for our website www.creativenottingham.com, and hosting a session to talk about the CreativeNottingham project and our plans. <br />
    <br />
    The event is currently sold out – if you *really* want to come email me (susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk) and I'll see if I can help, otherwise they'll be live streaming of the main hall and live reporting on CreativeNottingham.com.
  • How to build Augmented Reality into your digital strategy – Augmented reality – building in a layer of digital information and content into real world places – is the next real innovation from the future that's already hitting our world through services like Google Goggles and Layar. This article talks about how you can bring AR into your brand's digital strategy.
  • Project Canvas is open and standardised – and great for consumers – The CEO of video-on-demand service Blinkbox counteracts Sky's claims that Project Canvas, providing a standardised broadband to TV service, will be bad for business. He counteracts that producers are aggregators will be able to delivery pay-as-you-watch programming and in will generative innovative 'apps' like for the iphone to provided added value services through the open network. I can't wait – this could be yet another exciting platform for technologies and video producers.
  • Creative funding database – Although I'm sure this is probably the same data as the funding database on Business Link site, this creative funding/business support from the excellent Creative Choices skills website works very well, it's easy to use and seems to be pretty comprehensive.
  • Conservatives’ ‘Cash Gordon’ web campaign backfires – And in the blue corner, the Tories have made a pigs ear of their latest venture to discredit Brown. 'Cash Gordon' site had a rent-a-crowd vibe, and was based on a back-end system used by right-wing lobbying groups against healthcare reform in the US. Trolls quickly hacked the site and used the unmoderated hashtag's on the site's display to make a disparaging remark or two. Well done Tories for going web 2.0, poor show on making such a #hashtag of it. Lessons learnt: although an election is a fast and furious thing, it's essential to allow time for user-testing of a site launch, rather than a very public flop.
  • Brown outlines advanced UK digital strategy – As we're all on tenderhooks for the notice of the UK election date, the parties are lining up their policies. In the red corner, Brown the encumbent plans to introduce two new bodies to advance the digital economy, An Institute fo Web Science headed up by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and a digital public service unit led by Last Minute.com founder and digital inclusion champion Martha Lane-Fox (one has to have double-barrelled names to succeed nowadays in government). Whilst creating two new quangos, Brown dashes against the rest, replacing 'first gen' e-government with an integrated MyGov portal (cue expensive new makeover). It will be interesting to see how the development of this policy unfolds, particularly in line with the forthcoming digital economy bill and whether this does progress through parliament despite public uproar.
  • Direct Marketing 2.0 – You are what you click – Net Imperative article briefing on how user insight and split-run testing can help to build better return on investment as part of a digital strategy. Some important lessons here like 'rubbish in, rubbish out' data sources, and the idea of an A-Z rather than A-B, testing iteratively all aspects of a campaign or conversion web page as an ongoing beta.
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These are my links for February 19th through February 22nd:

  • What women want… from online games – Summary of research into habits of women who play social games. In short: they like to play for a short amount each week, they don't want to pay, they still feel stimatised as 'coming out' as a gamer.
  • Blogging Innovation: Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing – An explanation of how different forms of crowd engagement can work, by filtering through experts or directly to an audience, and the relative merits of both.
  • HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready – Mashable article great for retail and 'real world' businesses on places to get listed and take advantage of the new phenomena of connecting real world places with mobile digital interaction, e.g. virtual loyalty cards.
  • There’s No Future in Digital Strategy… – Well I may as well pack up and go home then.
    Ah…
    …But there will always be a future for strategy in a world going digital.
    It's subtle, I think I agree. It's a business strategy for a 'going digital world' not just limited to the strategy for what we do using digital. And this fits perfectly with the ethos of what Digital Consultant do: helping you to succeed by building strategies for the digital economy. Voila.
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These are my links for December 1st through December 2nd:

  • Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway – I've been trying to get my head around Google Wave since I got an invite last week. (You can 'wave' at me if you like, username: susioneill). It's an interesting future trend of real time chat, linked with public chat akin with Google Group but for specific discussion. No doubt it will be useful in the future, but for now there are many teething difficulties with this 'early release' pre-beta version.
  • Creating a Digital Media Strategy – Five start-for-10 tips for a small business to create a digital strategy including remember POST (People, Objective, Strategy, Technology) when considering how to use social media.
  • In the thick of it: how the Digital Economy bill is trying to kill open Wi-Fi networks – An internet lawyer analysis how the Digital Economy bill and the recent prosection of a landlord for allowing copyright infringement through its free wifi may spell the death of public wifi. All not good news. Right to your MP about the Digital Economy bill before Christmas.
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These are my links for November 28th through November 29th:

  • Nott Tuesday December 8th – I'll be at the next Nott Tuesday event, the network for digital and tech companies in Nottingham, talking about plans for our website for Nottingham creatives: www.creativenottingham.com . See you there…
  • Happy ‘Quit MySpace’ Day – Oct 24 2010, online music expert Andrew Dubber believes should be 'quit MySpace day' – as the social network has failed to exploit its potential as the place every band in the world is, and provide the right tools for artists to monetize and grow their network. Interesting group discussion on other services and tools musicians are using.
  • Pub ‘fined £8k’ for Wi-Fi copyright infringement – The legitimacy of upholding the Digital Economy bill for downloading grows more complex, as a wifi hotspot own face fines over end-users downloading copyrighted material. This poses serious issues: if providers are punished, then libraries, business centres and enterprising spaces providing wifi services for business users will be less likely to operate, moving us further away from the pervasive internet or 'cloud' environment of the future.
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