Following on from Lou’s earlier post about Social Innovation Camp, I was intrigued by their proposition of ‘an experiment in using social technology for social change. I submitted an idea, which didn’t quite cut the mustard but did lead to my being invited along to help out. So on the weekend of 5th & 6th April I trotted off to join in on an event bringing together great ideas, a multitude of skill sets and an all pervading enthusiasm to prove that the web can be used as a force for good in the world.
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Jenni wrote this on 16.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Business, Interesting, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Web technology box
If you’ve been aware of OpenID for a while but hadn’t got round to setting yourself up with one, or perhaps hadn’t even heard of it, here’s a two-minute quick guide for non-techies.
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Tom wrote this on 15.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Internet, Web technology box
Blogging was never my specialty… until I used Wordpress to develop a blog for a client.
Wordpress is a Blog Tool and Weblog Platform.
Nowadays I love it! I wish I had more time to blog. I have a lot to say! :)
Back to the point… the new very much expected version of Wordpress 2.5!
I have just downloaded and installed my first version… I am so excited! Love to learn about new technologies and its updates.
What’s in it?
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Telmo wrote this on 07.04.08 – 34 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Free things, Internet, Social media, Web technology box
Having become somewhat disillusioned with the mainstream social network fair on offer these days, and having seen one too many targeted ads for my liking (yes, I like Guitar Hero/no, I don’t want to buy the T-shirt), I’ve been eagerly following the developments of BuddyPress, the Free open social network that’s powered by WordPress (MU version).
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Steve wrote this on 01.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Internet, Social media, Social networks box
Continuing on from my last post about Amazon Web Services, I shall now introduce you to the lesser known services they provide.
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Edward wrote this on 27.03.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
Good question; deserves big answer. Read more…
Ruth wrote this on 05.03.08 – 8 comments
It's filed in the Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Social media, Social networks box
The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.
Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.
Benefits of the new implementation include:
- More reliable tracking capabilities
- Lighter code
- Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
- New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
- Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25
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Telmo wrote this on 29.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Development, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Our sites, Strategy, User experience, Web analytics, Web technology, ebooks box
Developers love new toys and when those toys make it easier to develop and build exciting new solutions then we love them even more. When I first heard about Amazon’s new web services I was quite excited, releasing their internal tools and services to the public is a great idea that will hopefully benefit us all. In this series of blog posts I will introduce each service and give an overview of how we could use them and why we should be excited! I will first cover the big three.
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”
Translated, this means that developers can create ‘virtual machines‘ on Amazon’s server. Amazon makes it easy to scale the resources your application has on offer, so as your application/site becomes more popular and demands more computing power EC2 helps you enable those extra resources.
“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.”
Translated, this means that developers can store any type of file (images, audio, html files, office docs etc) on Amazon servers where it is kept securely. These files can then be accessed anywhere in the world quickly and easily via REST or SOAP interfaces. S3 was built to be scalable so much like the EC2 it will add and remove resources as an when it needs them.
“Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time… Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.”
SimpleDB as it says on the tin is a simple database, providing a lightweight alternative to system heavy databases such as MySQL or Postgres. SimpleDB likes to store ‘items’ within a ‘domain’, each ‘item’ can have many ‘attributes’ and each ‘attribute’ can have multiple ‘values’.
Here is the example table given by Amazon, as you can see each item can have multiple colours just like clothes in real life:
These items can then be queried much like a traditional database which means we can ask the database questions about its items and receive answers back, a query to retrieve all blue sweaters would look like (colour = blue INTERSECTION description = sweater), INTERSECTION acts like an AND.
If we add these three services together we have a very powerful platform on which to build new web applications. Now we know what each service does I shall give you a nice analogy of how they tie together.
Imagine a small pie shop that has a small but steady stream of customers, about 10 pie fiends per day. One of the pie lovers tells two friends about how great this pie shop is, they then tell two friends who then tell two friends etc etc, you know the story. Suddenly the little pie shop has thousands of customers coming from all over the place to get a taste of the now famous pies, however the owner of the pie shop is unable to cope with the demand, what they really need is a pie superstore! The next day they move down the road into the pie superstore and start producing and selling enough pies to feed a small army, everyone is happy… until the pie frenzy is over and the owner is left with too much pie making machinery, a huge lease to pay on the pie superstore and a smaller customer base of pie devotees. What would be ideal to match the dwindled demand would be a nice new pie convenience store, the owner ups and moves into a space where he can bake and store all his pies and still be able to cover all his overheads, once again everyone is happy.
As you can see, what the pie shop owner really needed was a shop that had ‘elastic’ walls. When the demand for pies was high they would be able to rent more pie making machinery and still have room to store them all, when demand was low they could return the machinery they weren’t using but still have room to store the already baked pies. All the luxury of moving into a suitably sized shop but without the hassle of having to buy and physically move all the equipment.
To move this into the online world, imagine a small Facebook application that only has a handful of users - the processing power, bandwidth and storage needed is going to be tiny. However, due to the viral nature of the web our small Facebook application could grow exponentially in a matter of days, demanding more processing power, bandwidth and storage. If we used traditional hosting then we may have to find a new host that can handle our demands (or pay through the nose for bursting our agreed bandwidth) but if we use Amazon web services then we don’t have to worry, our application can expand and contract as demand sees fit.
If you’d like to find out more then check out these links:
Amazon Web Services
Building Facebook applications on AWS
Next time we shall see what other services Amazon has exposed for us.
Edward wrote this on 25.02.08 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
‘War…[boom boom, bam bam, donk], what is it good for?’
Yeah brother. Well what about social media? [boom boom, dank dank, dom] Haaaaaa-bsolutely nuthin’...
(Or is it?)
This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. You see, I’m a bit crazy, a bit driven and I need to achieve. But I’ve been a bit like a rocket-jet without a steering wheel. I’ve achieved bits and pieces but at the highest and most important level, I’ve lacked PURPOSE.
Which has led me to question how I use my skills and especially those of the wonderful team we’ve assembled at Nixon McInnes. When such great people come together and gel, is it reasonable to allow them to work bloody hard in an interesting, fast-moving and fun area without occasionally stepping back and asking ‘are we really giving the world our very best here?’.
Isn’t that a responsibility I have to myself and my team, to check the reason why we’re doing what we do?
Another way to frame the same question is to look at our team, our skills, our knowledge and our passions and ask: what is social media *for*?
One thing social media can be harnessed for is improving how organisations conduct their marketing. This is our line of work, and we are building a good name and reputation for ourselves here. These days we tend to work with larger organisations and so our efforts can genuinely help our client’s consumers. So in a very very small way, we’re making a positive difference one project at a time.
But that’s not enough for me, and I don’t think it’s enough for our team.
I know you, dear reader, know this and don’t wish for me to patronise or come over all sandalwood and tie-dye (duuuuude), but this world that we live in has far greater problems than how to sell handbags. And so whilst as anyone who has worked with me knows I do have genuine passion for improving how big brands communicate with their consumers, I reckon I can recruit a whole new level of passion and energy for using social media to work on the world’s biggest and most real issues.
Here’s a few of the biggies off the top o’ me head in no particular order:
- Health
- Poverty
- Education
- The environment
- Politics & access to democracy
- Human rights
- Equality
You get the idea.
If it’s big, important, worthy and you (or I, more accurately) immediately pretend it isn’t there and wish it’d go away and stop interrupting your (my) thoughts about whether to buy the prawn or the roast beef sandwich, it’s probably on the list.
So this is pretty much where we’re up to, at the very start of this thinking and talking process as a team.
We’re absolutely not about to stop doing what we do, that’d a damn good plan B to tease us away from a Plan A that is currently fun and rewarding. But what we do is ever-evolving and adaptive and that is why we have survived and thrived over the years - and so we are about to start thinking about other things we can do in addition to our work harnessing social media for marketing. It’s another iteration of Project Nixon McInnes.
And please allow me to be very clear: this ain’t about Corporate Social Tickboxing either. This is about real differences made by harnessing our team’s unique blend of skills and experiences. And it’s not about not-for-profit necessarily. I guess the vision is of a blend of things: online communities, websites, applications & tools, channels, campaigns, resources, events (real world, even!) - whatever we feel can make a difference.
So here’s some questions for you, and I’d love to hear what you think.
- What do you personally think social media are for?
- Can social media be employed effectively to make even a tiny difference to these issues?
- What is it about social media that might help address these causes?
- Which projects or causes inspire, grip or otherwise distract you personally?
I look forward to the conversation now :)
Will McInnes wrote this on 08.02.08 – 12 comments
It's filed in the Business, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Social media, Strategy box
I keep hearing everyone say, ‘Facebook is a social tool, it’s not really for club promotion – myspace is what that was designed for’. Interesting. Sure, myspace seems to have all the record labels you could want, plenty of artists showcasing their music and great features for artists in general, but is it good for the local artist who wants to let people in his local area know gigs are occurring? Myspace feels very international, whilst Facebook feels local.
I have a myspace page, have done for a few years – and I have used this to publicise every gig I’ve played at, or have been scheduled to play at, showcase my music and act as a profile page. Whilst friends I know have responded to gig requests, it’s never really made any huge difference (that I can see) to those numbers attending the gig that are outside my friend circle.
I created a Facebook account a while back now, and decided to use the ‘events’ feature to publicise my gigs on Facebook. Much to my surprise, I had people I don’t know confirming themselves as coming, photographers asking for passes to take photos for the night, and generally much more of an online ‘buzz’ about the event than I have seen on Myspace for one my events.
I’d like to hear if anyone else has any similar experiences? Whilst Myspace may be the first place to look for gig details and information for the major players in the music industry, perhaps Facebook could work better for us local talents? It’s an interesting notion, that I’ve yet to see fruit properly, but the indicators for me, at least, are there.
Matt wrote this on 28.01.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Brighton, Interesting, Internet, Social media, Social networks box
