The Obvious?

Facebook meets Noddy thanks to Watchdog

Great article mostly about the "artifice" of television.

[via my Dad]

OpenSocial

Google pulls together interesting bits of the social networking puzzle in a way that appears to open up but retains enough “control” for them to get the benefit from making the effort. Imagine if someone like the BBC did that for broadcasting.

The call centre customer manifesto

We think it is grossly unfair on call centre staff - the very people charged with dealing direct with your customers - to leave them with no power to think or act for themselves. It leads to depression for them - frustration for the customer.Senior managers - do something about it. Or start answering the phones yourselves.

Faster Future

You can sign up for David Cushman's call centre customer manifesto here in Facebook.

BiF Video

The video of my session at the Business Innovation Factory in Providence RI recently is up. I use the royal "I" more than I like and have rapped my own knuckles as penance but there are more background stories about what we did at the BBC than I usually include in my workshops if you are interested.

I guess I had to buy it ....

Humble Pie

I have just finished reading two Scott Adams books, God's Debris and The Religion War - two of the best books I have ever read. They were recommended by one of the participants at a Corporate IT Directors' workshop I did. Given my previous sweeping generalizations about IT people my judgement is clearly not to be trusted.

I take it all back .....

.... video on the web is a wonderful thing......

Lloyd and his Uke

Creative inflation

Watching Robert Scoble on Seesmic, describing his ideal studio I pondered a number of things:

Is it inevitable that dealing with moving pictures draws people into wanting more complex set-ups or is that just due to TV grammar as we know it?

Do boys have to play with toys and will the apparent demands for more complex technology always draw them into more rather than less kit?

Will I ever understand the desire for video on the web? Maybe it's having worked in TV and radio for so many years but give me text and hyperlinks any day.

Corporate listening

A line in another Stuart Henshall post (I am so glad he is back to blogging again) got me thinking:

If you want a conversation to really take hold in a company you have to teach the CEO how to listen.

It got me wondering how much listening Mark Thompson is doing at the BBC at the moment and then I thought that if he was then it would be "corporate listening". The sort of listening managed by internal comms departments that is meant to make you feel reassured but in fact makes you very scared.

Summit on the Future of the Corporation

I'd love to be going to this if only it was happening closer to home but as Stuart Henshall says:

So…. great. Can I watch via video? Will it be blogged? Poptech can take electronic questions. Who’s going to record all this? Will it be on a wiki? Will neat visual records be kept and uploaded to flickr? How can this dialogue spill out into the open world? Will there be media there? Is blogging allowed? I cannot help it. I simply equate, blogs, wikis, social networking, real-time communications, identity services etc with how organizations approach the future. You cannot talk about the future of the organization without addressing tools that every college student is immerse in, uses and manages their life and social interactions around. Similarly you cannot look at the future without considering all this power in the palm of your hand. Organizations don’t need walls anymore. I truly believe in open source, leveraging community, and embracing and encouraging conversations…