I am a huge fan of Lee and Sacha leFever’s work at Commoncraft.  Why use lots of talking heads when you can explain technology with a cracking script and some very simple and clear 2-D animation?  They have perfected the use of the sound bite sized video as a powerful educational tool. And I dedicate this film of theirs to the worried couple who approached me after a seminar last year and said ‘We’d love to have a website just like you’ve described, but we’ve been told that the Internet is already full and we’re afraid we have left it too late’.

Fascinating dialogue at NESTA about the future impact of Social Media between newly anointed Twillionaire Stephen Fry, Biz Stone (founder and CEO of Twitter), Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn ably chaired by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA. Stephen Fry’s recent spat with a Twitter follower, who found him slightly boring, is forgotten.  Humble memo to Stephen Fry – You can’t have Wildean wit every second of the day, the law of averages means that you are bound to twitter something pretty boring occasionally. Relax and don’t take it so personally.

As the web continues to offer up free tools for publishing (Wordpress), blogging (Blogger), SMS (Twitter) and video (You Tube) the opportunities to publish content and build your own audience have never been greater. One person who is well worth listening to on the phenomenon of the new media is Clay Shirky. Clay is the Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme, teaches and consults on the social and economic effects of the internet and is the author of ‘Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organising without Organisations‘. My two favourite quotations of his are: “We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love” and ” “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” If you haven’t time to read the book, here’s the video!

Teenagers eschew newspapers

A report on how teenagers use technology, written by a 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley, created huge waves of interest in the city when it was published in full on their website. If you want to know what technology is hot and what is not for the teenage community, check out his full report. This may be a slightly irrelevant thought, but why is a fifteen year old working as an intern at Morgan Stanley in the first place and not out enjoying football with his mates?  In fact they are probably ahead of the game.  Alex Linde wrapped it up neatly in his blog -What if you want to know what’s going on in the world? A newspaper is now nearly the worst way of finding out.

* Newspaper – what the editor thinks was important yesterday.
* TV – what the director thinks is important today.
* Blog – pretty much everything that happened today.
* Twitter – what’s happening right now.

Female Blackbird singing

If you are running an ecommerce store, then Sitemaker’s twitter stream offer some excellent daily tweets with their ‘e-commerce thought for the day’. Here is an example: When using technology on the website, don’t forget the commercial reality, basically it’s still just people shopping. How easy it is to forget that very simple truth! One of the most successful footwear e-commerce stores Zappos looks a bit clunky on the screen, but that is because it is totally customer focussed. Customer feedback, You Tube videos, Twitter stream, Live customer support – it has the lot.  But they haven’t done too badly – they have just been brought by Amazon for $928 million