Posts from — February 2008

A couple of weeks back, I outlined our interest in Electric Mill to public data projects , and an initial example of how A&E attendance figures could be presented. This is a good example of the data being available, but delivered in such a way as to make it kind of hard to get at. [...]

We are becoming pretty familiar with bloggers every now and then ripping into businesses that are providing poor customer service and poor customer experience. I’m talking here about someone that writes a less than complimentary blog post on a product or service; I am not talking about conversations and threads on an online forum, etc. [...]

Listened to a podcast featuring Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine on the IT Conversations network last night while out walking. His talk centred around his motivation and proposed proposed model for giving away his next book for free. This was a pretty painless 30 minutes for a quick whip around of the notions of free [...]

Public data and public information interests us a lot in Electric Mill. A good reason for this is that you will often find that government agencies, departments and other public bodies – while they may publish information – will normally do so in formats which while fulfilling duty, are not exactly easy to read, interpret [...]

A small piece of development work that we completed for a client in December 2007 threw up an unexpected problem. We developed a small PHP based application to enable staff to easily import and validate data from a Lotus Notes system through an administration console, while at the same time enabling the public to easily [...]

This paragraph, deep down in a Fast Company article questioning the fundamental reasonings behind The Tipping Point summed up the argument nicely : Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring [...]