I've been wandering about today in sort of a "credit crunch" mentality. Being made redundant has, as with many people, made me incredibly careful with money. This has led to me taking longer and longer to decide on relatively simple purchases. So far, so rational.

The irrational part has been ...   more »

A great, short and very pithy post by Broadstuff has really cheered me up, in that they have gathered empirical data on the viral uptake rate and the decay of that rate in a real 'viral meme' (the "25 things" meme on Facebook). The more of this we get, the better we will be able to tune Andrew Chen's excellent little formula, probably using some of the techniques I went through in six parts before (here). Nice to see marketing catching up with biology.   more »

Short amateur video creation. An interesting concept. You make a short video, say 30 to 90 seconds long, and people watch it, then they tell their friends to watch it, and suddenly you are famous and can give up the day job. Why does that not happen more? The only metric that ultimately matters to the consumer is "was that the best use of the 60 seconds I devoted to it?" if someone has made something that is "better"(*) to watch then they get the attention, and that drives the onward recommendation engine and before you know it, that "better" video has 6m hits and you have 600 (from your 1st and 2nd circle friends only, usually). What is the solution?    more »