chris dalrymple - blog

As of 5pm today I shall be jetting off to the warmer climbs of Morocco - Marrakech to be exact and a well earned (even if I do say so myself) break.

Rather depressingly, the last time I actually left the country was about 3 years ago when I went to Paris. So I'm attempting to turn over a new leaf and get away from the office (and a PC, and my phone) a little more often.

My sendoff this morning however has so far comprised of calling WebFusion tech support trying to find out why the hell our server is down. Again. Bastards.

Blogging again in about 2 weeks.

Labels: holiday, morocco, webfusion

Found via Sixty Second View is the interesting stat that almost half of brand marketers are planning to use social networking to promote their brand in the next year, say JupiterResearch.

Now, big fat pinch of salt aside, this is an interesting stat for the sole reason that if there are that many marketers looking to promote themselves through social media, then where in the hell are they all? - I honestly can't recall seeing any efforts of big business, record labels aside perhaps, to social media to interact with me.

One of the problems I can see is all these good intentions are often abruptly halted by the raft of legal advisors most large scale organisations employ. Couple this with how much of an unknown quantity this relatively new medium is, as well as the relatively difficult job markers can face trying to track any ROI, and it's (almost) understandable that people are reticent to get involved.

I know from personal experience that without a considerable buy in from the business, these things are very difficult to get off the ground and even more difficult to prove worthiness, but unless companies start to embrace social media now, it's going to be way too far down the line to do anything effective. It takes open minds at the top, as well as within the marketing deparment to make things happen.

Labels: jupiter research, marketing, socal media

Just a quick one (and pretty late off the mark, but better late than never), but Alfie at Moblog decided to be incredibly charitable (some would say foolhardy or just plane stupid), and have his chest waxed for comic relief.

You can see the end result here, including nipple waxing, and donate here.

I spoke to him the next morning to be relianbly informed that "my chest now has hundreds of tiny inflamed welts". Alfie Sir, I salute you.

Labels: al4ie, charity, moblog

Just looking at Emily Chang's post about putting together all of her online output into one data stream and it's a great concept.

It's led to some great links being dropped in the comments - it's amazing how many good tools there are for collating your online life into on page/stream. Also a little scary given possible privacy concerns, but hey, you put it out there you deal with the consiquences.

For sheer novelty value alone, I particularly liked 30 Boxes' 30 Boxed which overlays all of your feeds onto a calendar showing when they were first posted. You can see mine here. I really like the idea of being able to skim through my online life looking at the bookmarks I found, the comments I made and the photos I took on any given day (could I be any more egocentric?).

If you go on and register, you can add any diary information you want and you get a rather snazzy virtual home page, task lists, the whole lot (as a side note, why in God's name are businesses still using the horrible Outlook when there's so many great web based alternatives out there?).

Suffice to say there are a good deal more web apps which need exploring:
SuprGlu
Yahoo Pipes
Touchstone
SlifeShare
Jaiku
Gregarius

Labels: 30 boxes, data streams, rss, syndication, xml

Just Web 2.0.

Or something equally apt. Just listening to NickW's latest podcast where he talks about, amongst other things, how 'microbrands' are nothing new, it's just now there's a snazzy name and a lot of buzz about the whole concept (and for the record Nick, I don't like Gaping Void either).

Well, I think that's pretty much the same all over the web tbh. Virtually everything out there has been done before, it's just now there's a new implementation, a bit of snazzy ajax (which incidentally has been around for years in itself - now it's just been rebranded), and people are all over it again.

What suprises me though, is how little ability people seem to have to predict the success of these trends. Take Twitter (and I *promise* this is the last time I'll blog about that bloody site) - a lot of people are downplaying it, writing it off as just another childish fad which people will grow tired of. Well wasn't the same thing said about blogging?? And IM? And probably the whole Internet?

My point being (and there is one somewhere here. If you dig deep.) that it's easy to be cynical about this stuff. And with all the crap that Web 2.0 generates it's probably wise to a certain extent. But maybe we're too concerned that we'll get burned by the latest toy that we miss the wood for trees. And that's why we need the early adopters to get drawn into the hype so that we can join in when in looks sensible and safe. But maybe we should just hold our breath and dive in every so often.

Labels: microbrands, twitter, web 2.0

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter at the moment (I think in no small part thanks to the excitement around it at SXSW), and just to stand out from the crowd, I will too.

It's definitely the Marmite of web 2.0 applications. A lot of people love it (or at the very least are addicted), but a good many are looking down their noses and tutting loudly at it (so maybe more like crack than Marmite).

If you don't know then Twitter sits slap bang in the middle of the 'cool web 2.0 ap' category - basically a way of telling the world what you're doing at that moment (with the immediacy being at the core). It's a nifty little tool, highly addictive to boot, and doesn't look like it's going away fast.

It's evolving too - whilst some people are using it firmly for it's intended purpose of answering the quesion 'What are you doing', there are a great deal who are using it as a kind of blog meets IM - publicising your latest thoughts via short, IM style messages. This is encouraged by the functionality which pings you with all the latest twitters on your friends list via IM (gmail chat in this case) or on your mobile. You can then reply to these twitters (the format of using a '@username' to direct a twitter at someone seems to have developed, e.g. '@distinctly: stop talking about what you had for tea'), opening up a dialogue.

What this does mean is you have to be more particular about who's on your friend list than, say, your bloglines subscriber list, as the updates are more intrusive and more frequent than a feed reader. Nick W seems to have picked up the Twitter ball and run with it recently - along with Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and a good few others he's twittering(?) with a lot of good links, as well as pointing to new posts on his Click Influence blog.

Dave Winer points out a good use for this - working on group projects. Being able to constantly, and quickly let people know what you're woking on seems like a great use for the tool, especially if the team isn't based in the same room. I'm sure there are lots of other uses too, it will just take a while for them to be found.

What's clear is there's plenty of room for this to evolve beyond it's original intention (although I'm sure it's makers will claim they had this in mind all along), but in this way there are a lot of similarities to blogging, after all isn't one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of that medium 'who wants to read about what someone's just had for their tea'? There are always going to be comments you don't want to read (the public timeline gives some perfect examples), but it's when the right people get hold of it that these things come into their own.

But then I could be wrong. The novelty of the immediacy of Twitter may have just kicked in and I could well be bored of it in a few weeks (days? hours?) time. This could be entirely correct.

Labels: sxsw, twitter

Over the last few weeks I've been inspired to have a re-jig of this site, and get back into some 'proper' blogging again.

Seeing the great and good of the blogosphere jet over to SXSW, and the continuing innovation of websites like Twitter (which I'll get on to in a second), has for some reason made me want to blog again. This time (hopefully) writing something people will actually want to read (jeez, now there's a novelty).

Oh, and it was also a really good excuse to try out Blogger after they came out of beta. Thoughts so far, really very good - a hell of a lot better than the 'old' blogger anyway. With categories and everything! woo!

Labels: blogger, blogging