Simon Julian

This one from Business and Leadership – FaceBook and Bebo are now apparently the most popular social networking sites for mobile surfers. See article here

Really liked this one, it was worth a read

6 Steps to kill your community, plus another seven bonus ones!

Areeba put together an Aggregated blog for Open Text a few weeks ago that is now up and live, really worth a look as if you are interested in what is going on in the Enterprise 2.0 space there is some great thinking going on here.

And it is a pretty awesome site too, if I don’t say so myself!

Yes, I am proud of it too

The Open Text Conversations aggregated blog

Have been doing some more reading and thinking about the content architecture role tonight as I sit here and read discussions around ECM and some of the commentary on Bloom and social marketplaces.

I really like the idea of the Content Architect, it makes sense and it is a concept that I can easily understand. Kyle McNabb’s post from Feb this year “The Emerging Content Architect role” is a good read on the topic. But I have an issue on this that I need to get past, and that is the firm view that the idea of a Content Architect (and the Content Resource department, which is another concommittant concept) are great from a theoretical perspective (and an aspirational one!) but maybe not so good from an implementation perspective.

Some similar themes in this one as well that are worth a read.

Let me explain through background…

Many years ago there was the webmaster. Invaariably noone knew where to put this strange individual who knew many interesting things about websites (Marketing, IT, the car park, who knew?). But they knew they needed one. Now there is the content architect, and as with many a wonderful corporate website the CA will be shuttled back and forth between Marketing, Corporate, IT etc (maybe even the car park) without anyone really knowing where they should sit.

And that is why Organisational strategy is important. Unless you can actually look at real change in the organisation and restructure around the organisation’s core knowledge (read content), the Content Architect (and the Content Resource department) will live out on the edges like the webmaster did, without the proper ability or authority to effect change and without the corporate mandate.

Selling the value proposition is always going to be the most difficult thing here, and without all levels of the organisation seeing the value for themselves in this role and in the effective centralised/distributed management of organisational knowledge it is very hard to accept that this type of role will be quick in coming…

Reading this:

Success In Failure – Episode 1: 7 Lessons Learnt From Letting Donttell.com.au Expire

Very well worth the read and I wanted to point it out as there is a lot of good that many clients can get from the 7 lessons that Scott Middleton has put together here. In a lot of ways the first one I think is incredibly pertinent as far as the way that many businesses go at digital and their online presence – Scott is talking particularly start-up but I’m going to take the premise and apply to everyone – if you are not able to be 2010% passionate about your online business then it pays well not to get into the space!

Chris Lester, (MD at Areeba) and I were talking about this tonight and agreeing that many online versions of offline businesses that we see are lacking in passion and don’t inspire or add value – it seems in many cases that where an offline business has gone into the digital space with the wrong view of why they are there or a lack of vision for the space they get it wrong and end up showing a real lack of passion and value.

Reading a post by Cameron Reilly called “When Faith Kills” – worth sharing

I’m reading tonight about the case of Dale and Leilani Neumann, an American couple who let their 11 year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neuman, die…

Reading this article “How is Twitter like Crack” – I can only agree with all of this, absolutely a good take on the addictive nature of Twitter! Although I’ve managed not to fall into any of these traps (as yet anyway!)

My friend Adam from SharpSushi released this one not long ago – like it!

So I read this one yoday – worth having a look at and of course I got to this via someone posting it on Twitter – how ironic! This is off the back of one of the Project Managers at work removing Col and I because we both Tweet too much and we both have Twitter and Facebook hooked up!

Perhaps I digress…

The ‘Buying Friends’ piece of this really got me – suddenly ideas of going out and cybersquatting on all the permutations of Nike, Adidas and General Motors (well, maybe not GM, they’re only one step above AIG at the moment and we al know they’re stinky, so not worth much on the cybersquatting scale.

I remember a few years ago (picture me sitting on a porch in a rocking chair, add the shotgun if you like) when cybersquatting was all in vogue – I bloody missed out then because of ethics and morals. This time I’m ready, Twitter, here I come – I’ve got this year’s Brand survey and I plan on using it!

Nice to find Mr Hitching on the interwebs after not having spoken to him for a while. We worked together at Lonely Planet. Good times (well, some of them anyway!).

http://hitching.net/