Mike Schorah

A throwaway comment in yesterday's post needs further explanation: I wrote, " we can be pretty much uniquely identified by our browser settings, our search history, or the computer hardware and IP address combinations that we use " Firstly, part of the rationale behind Gmail and Google's purchase of YouTube and Blogger and other services, now also Google+, is to get us to login - and stay logged in - as we surf the web and use our browser. That way our interests can be matched to our identity to learn what we might buy if it's advertised to us. Facebook, too, has that nice, convenient "Keep me logged in" checkbox that's 'On' by default. Part of their strategy to get other sites to offer a connect with Facebook option, or to allow people to login using their Facebook id, is to capture an ever more rich picture of what users do on the Internet when they're not  on the Facebook home site. However, it's not even necessary for users ...

A fab insight: there's a difference between our identity revealed through what we click in Google search listings; and how we choose to portray our identity through the photos, links and status updates we share on Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere. I don't want all who know me to see what web searches I'm conducting, even if they're nothing more private than my discovery of business opportunities. I have a somewhat private identity, a set of interests revealed through what I click. Through Facebook and LinkedIn, I'm somewhat consciously forming a persistent public persona - and Facebook users are fairly evidently aware of that through their choice of photos and status updates. They are intentionally shaping the way the world sees them, even though Facebook's CEO is on record as saying that he thinks the existence of a private identity represents a lack of integrity. We perceive a Google search to be anonymous (even though we can be pretty much uniquely iden...

I'm reading The Filter Bubble  by Eli Pariser: sit down at a couple of computers with a friend; both search for the same term in Google and you'll see different results. Or both check Facebook and see how different your news feed looks, even though you share many of the same acquaintances. Pariser notes the rise of Internet personalisation, sold to us to help us filter the gigabytes of data created to flood our awareness each day. But warns that by reinforcing what I already think and believe, the Internet which was created with a hope of breaking down barriers will instead build up stronger walls, imprisoning us in an individual silo of self-awareness. The 'Filter Bubble' is increasingly so tightly personalized that we are essentially alone in our views. Next, the filtering is invisible - none of us knows why the Google algorithms make the selections for us that they do. Finally, we don't choose to enter the bubble - Increasingly we have no ability to opt in ...

'Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.' I like that definition of game playing by the late Bernard Suits. But I focus too much on the 'unnecessary' - I see too many necessary obstacles to be overcome to choose to engage in something as apparently frivolous as a game and, rather boringly, I often choose not to get involved in the game to start with. Yet games have much to teach us about life and business. All games share four common traits, according to game designer Jane McGonigal: A goal Some rules A feedback system Voluntary participation  And we can see these traits at work in much of the rest of life, too. For example, businesses most definitely have goals, even if they're of the rather tame 'make a profit' kind. There are rules, which we sometimes see in their absence or when ethical codes are broken as at Enron or the News of the World . Certainly business has a multitude of precisely measured feedback sys...

I got a couple of reminders today about what's important: The chief executive at a client told me he thought we'd saved them about £100k ($160k) and 18 months. First thought: how nice to be told. Second thought: wish they'd paid  us £100k! Next thought: what's vital is that the client gets value for money and feels that the relationship is worthwhile. What matters is not what  I  think but what the client thinks and wants, even if in some situations we think they're 'wrong' or could get even better results by tweaking their approach - we should still do it their way, at their pace! Then, I responded to a LinkedIn request and saw one of my contacts had written, "People don't buy from websites or emails, people buy from people." Absolutely right! In the emphasis on e-everything that we get from the Twitter people I follow, the blogs I read - and the stuff I write - it's really easy to be bamboozled into forgetting the personal touch, an...

"If you make G+ (or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Tumblr any other service that hosts your conversations and other "content") your primary online presence, you are in effect giving away something enormously valuable. You are giving your contributions to the emergent global conversation to a company that values you largely as a contributor of data it can then turn into money." Read the rest at The Guardian . As I said last week at #DigiTalksChelt, if you're not paying for your Internet service then you're not the customer, but the product that's being sold ! The problem is that, for now, most users just don't care: it's too important to them to jump on board with the latest thing (Google+), to feel that they're not missing out on their friends' action (Facebook), to be part of the uber-cool info flood (Twitter) or not risk missing an opportunity (LinkedIn) ... By the time that users realise that it is massively more profitable t...

The interaction lives on: so many 'conferences' are traditionally set up as one-way show-and-tell broadcasts. Social media turns the tables and makes them truly a place to confer. #DigiTalksChelt is set up as a regular meeting on technology, design and ideas on digital media. The organizing team uses Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn and a bunch of other social media properties to draw a crowd of fifty or so industry specialists keen to lift their eyes from the keyboards for a couple of hours every couple of months. It's a chance to think more generally and interact with others who have insight. Three speakers or so introduce their subject and the audience gets to interact with questions during, after, and over drinks breaks during the evening. But the #DigiTalksChelt hashtag provides a means for folk to comment during the event; and afterwards; and over subsequent hours and days, even though the crowd disperses. Last time round we got a web-delivered pitch on HTML5 and ...