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• Posted Reading the Telegraph costs the British economy £1.38bn to Blog
  "Churnalism is a form of journalism in which press releases, wire stories and other forms of pre-packaged material are used to create articles in newspapers and other news media in order to meet increasing pressures of time and cost without...
• Posted Recruitment in an online world to Blog
  We're recruiting at the moment.  That means trying to find the best people, and try to persuade them to join us - which got me thinking about how social tools are changing what has been the predominant IT recruitment model.Historically,...
• Posted We're looking for a systems administrator to Blog
  We're looking for an adaptable and enthusiastic person to join our Systems Administration team and help keep our internal and external systems happy and healthy.You'll be someone who has 1-2 years experience in the basics of Linux administration, and either...
• Posted Nested IF statements with Movable Type to Blog
  One of the - ahem - undocumented features of Movable Type is a certain estotericness about the way it interprets Boolean logic within template tags. That's a polite way of saying it's more-or-less completely unpredictable, which can lead to much...
• Posted We're looking for Rails developers to Blog
  We're looking for Ruby on Rails developers to join our growing team.   You'll need experience in building elegant, innovative and scalable RESTful applications, and ideally have an interest in social software and Web 2.0.   Some examples of some of the...
• Posted Office Manager to Blog
  We are seeking an experienced administrator to take responsibility for a range of areas including some Finance, HR and general Business Management. You will work closely with the Directors, our Accountants and other staff. You will need excellent computing...
• Posted Production Co-ordinator to Blog
  We are seeking a Production Co-ordinator to help effectively manage our stream of projects and resources. You will be a proven organiser with demonstrable experience in co-ordinating a multitude of dimensions simultaneously. You don't necessarily need experience in production...
• Posted Senior Ruby on Rails developer to Blog
  We are seeking a senior restful Ruby on Rails developer with demonstrable experience in building exciting and innovative applications. Ideally, you will also have a keen interest in social software, although that is not essential.You will spend much of your...
• Commented on Teenage Tweets
  I think you've hit on the key problem here - our experiences are completely different, and neither of us knows whether it's simply anecdotal, or an accurate reflection of reality. And it's a huge oversimplification to assume that *all* teenagers...
• Posted Teenage Tweets to Blog
  The news this morning is full of a report from Morgan Stanley on teenage media habits - written by a 15-year-old intern, it dismisses Twitter and describes online advertising as pointless.  Morgan Stanley seem to be promoting the report heavily,...
• Posted Rebooting Britain to Blog
  The great and the good of social media (as well as the rest of us) descended on the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London yesterday for Reboot Britain, a 1-day conference run by NESTA looking at "how the promise of...
• Commented on National Express miss the Cluetrain
  The wifi defaulting to Swedish always amuses me - it's because the firm that operates the technology is Swedish, and traffic from the trains goes out via their network connection. Google does an IP-address-to-location lookup when you hit their site...
• Posted What's an API and why do I want one? to Blog
  That's a question I was asked a few days ago by a client.  It's a fair question, too - there's no point in building features into systems unless they provide some benefit, so why would you want to spend time...
• Posted National Express miss the Cluetrain to Blog
  I'm a regular rail traveller on the East Coast Main Line, so when news of "innovative customer management technology" being deployed by operator National Express arrived in my inbox, I had to take a look.According to the press-release-masquerading-as-a-news-article in Computing...
• Posted Ruby on Rails explained (in something approaching plain English) to Blog
  There's been no shortage of "magic bullet" technologies over the years, and one of the hottest things in web development at the moment is Ruby on Rails.   At Headshift we're using Rails for an increasing number of projects, and we're...
• Posted Broken Buying to Blog
  At the UK Government Bar Camp last weekend, there was a lot of discussion in many of the sessions about public sector procurement - particularly IT procurement.Basically, it's broken.I was acutely aware of this before I turned up at the...
• Posted Unblocking the blockers to Blog
  Controversy over whether time spent on social media sites is wasted or productive is nothing new - anyone who's been around the block for long enough will remember similar discussions around email rollouts.  And no doubt there will have been...
• Posted The (white) elephant in the room to Blog
  Politicians and IT usually go together like fish and bicycles.   The story of public-sector IT in the UK is generally one of grandiose over-budget failures at the top end of the scale, and low-level outsourced inadequacies at the other.  The...
• Posted More than just a website to Blog
  One of the things that we try and emphasise when talking to clients is that a website is much more than it first appears. It's better to think of a site as an application in its own right, in...
• Posted Pointy-haired, or fluffy? to Blog
  A few posts ago I mentioned some models of human motivation that might help answer the question, "why would anyone bother contributing to social media?" The best known model is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but as several commenters pointed...
• Posted Government and Data 2.0 to Blog
  mashup*, who bill themselves as a "membership based community of executives, entrepreneurs and investors affected by and working within the commercial application of digital technology, products and services" put on an event last night looking at "Data and Government...
• Commented on Why do people contribute to social media?
  You're right about Maslow's theories dating from the 1950s - his original book on the subject was published in 1954, so the work itself would have dated from before then. It's interesting to speculate how many of his conclusions were...
• Posted Why do people contribute to social media? to Blog
  On the face of things, it's a tricky question - why would someone spend valuable time and effort contributing to something like Wikipedia? In a work environment, how can you persuade people to contribute their hard-won expertise and knowledge...
• Posted Social Leverage Points to Blog
  One of the advantages of working somewhere surrounded by really smart people is that you get to hear about what they think are really cool ideas. Tom Taylor's personal blog led me to a paper by Donella Meadows, late...
• Posted Quantity or Quality? Measuring Enterprise 2.0 to Blog
  One of the most common barriers to adoption of social software in enterprise settings is the perception that using social media isn't "real work".  Instead the term "social" in "social media" is seen as a synonym for frivolous and time-wasting.To...
• Posted HMS Bebo to Blog
  Via a link on the del.icio.us feed of Ewan McIntosh -  a social media specialist in the education sector - I came across this "profile" of a Royal Navy submariner on Bebo. I say "profile", because it's clearly been manufactured...
• Posted The Twittering Bridge to Blog
  Twitter has become something of a phenomenon - if you're not familiar with it, it's a cross between blogging and instant messaging, with a dash of SMS thrown in. You've got 140 characters to say what you're doing right now,...
• Posted Information hubs in a post-email world to Blog
  I came across an interesting summary article from MIT titled "In today's knowledge-based economy, it pays to be an 'information hub'", based on some research looking at email flows: "The researchers found that information workers whose strong e-mail networks allow...
• Posted Tom Taylor at LIFT'08 to Blog
  Our very own Tom Taylor presented at LIFT08 in Geneva this week, on the subject of using social software to encourage sustainable development. It's something that's close to our heart through our work with clients like Green Thing and NESTA's...
• Posted Six Go Mad On The Eurostar to Blog
  This week a group of six of us from Headshift Centrale took a trip to Geneva for the LIFT08 conference. Tom Taylor was presenting about some of the climate change-related projects that we've worked on (you can see his awesome...