eBay generates extra cash for Brits

Britons made £8.5 billion last year by trading goods online, according to a new survey. The research, by Orange Broadband, said UK citizens made an average of £341 in 2005 through auction sites such as eBay.

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Posted 10 July 2006 18:39pm by Chris Lake with 0 comments

Using Web 2.0 to harness innovation in your organisation

Web 2.0 means different things to different people, yet it isn't just about the web, but is also about how your organisation works. Think intranet, as well as internet. Does your organisation work in a 2.0 way?

At the moment there seems to be three primary focuses around Web 2.0:

1) there are the technologists who are figuring out new technologies (there are many libraries and frameworks out there already).

2) there are the marketers and entrepreneurs, who are trying to figure out how use new 2.0 technologies and principles to generate profits, or help empower consumers (call them business people for now) in some way.

3) and finally, there are the users, who are increasingly using and enjoying the results of these new technologies. 

But how does all that filter into your organisation in a useful way, feeding into your own innovation cycle?

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Posted 28 June 2006 16:07pm by gareth knight with 6 comments

IAB's new research initiative misses the point

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has launched its latest initiative to understand more about the online behaviour, in a bid to provide advertisers with “a holistic understanding of what, where and how people are accessing the internet”.

The Holy Grail for the IAB is to provide “a single online planning currency” for marketers, to help them “plan their online brand campaigns against traditional media”.

The IAB has teamed up with National Readership Surveys (NRS), which will add an online element to the 3,000 face-to-face interviews it does each month with random consumers: “Areas covered in the study will include; demographic information, frequency of internet usage, where people are going online and how they are accessing the internet - for example by PC or through mobile devices.”

The trouble is, I don’t think this is what online media planners need...

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Posted 27 June 2006 15:01pm by Chris Lake with 2 comments

RSS strategy - full-text vs partial-text, round 2

In an article about RSS earlier this week I explained that there is no single rule of thumb when it comes to your RSS strategy.

A number of experts have suggested that the only sensible way to embrace RSS as an organisation is to launch full-text feeds, allowing RSS subscribers to read the whole story (or other message) within their RSS feed reader.

Yes, full-text is the first rule of RSS. But rules are there to be broken. Full-text simply doesn’t work for everybody, for a number of reasons.

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Posted 15 June 2006 13:14pm by Chris Lake with 0 comments