Much has been written about methods of developing software - books and books and blogs and blogs. I love the writing and thinking of Steve McConnell, although some of his observations can be a bit gloomy (top 2 mistakes almost always or often stated are 1 Overly optimistic schedules 77% and, 2 Unrealistic expectations 73%)

And I subscribe to several blogs including Jason Yip’s which has some nuggety insights.

I was at Reboot this year where Eelco Rustenburg gave a great talk on Agile, Software, Management, India collaboration in which he spoke about the benefits of a more agile approach. During his talk something crystallised in my mind.

(more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on July 11 2008 under: Software development, Technology

I have some data. Not much. Just two rows and a few colums and I want to make a beautiful graph, turn it into a web-friendly image and put it on this blog.

How hard can that be? It turns out, way harder than it should be. One word aarrrgghh (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on July 10 2008 under: Technology

Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.

(more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on July 7 2008 under: Quality, Search, Social Media, Spam, Technology

According to wikipedia “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.

The second paragraph goes on “Social media use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video”.

(more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on July 3 2008 under: Consumer Generated Media, Public Relations, Social Media

Defining brand image as a multi-dimensional entity and working with individual dimensions explicitly has several important benefits, in both practical and conceptual terms.

If by watching a brand we mean the measurement and tracking of its image online, then we need a clear and operational definition of what a brand image is. We propose that a brand’s image is best construed as an aggregate of how that brand is perceived along multiple related topical dimensions. (more…)

Posted by Berkan Eskikaya on July 3 2008 under: Brands, Research, Technology

Alan Mitchell wrote in Marketing Week last week about online peer-to-peer marketing. The central theme of his article is that it is early days for Marketeers in this space and that the web and p2p or c2c communication is throwing up some answers to questions that haven’t even been asked yet.

I supplied Alan with some of the data he used for the article. I used the Superbrands top 100 UK consumer brands as the starting point and plugged them into Brandwatch and grabbed the data for a week. (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on July 3 2008 under: Reputation Management

I hear this question quite often: how is the housing market doing? Let’s try to answer that.

First, define what precise information you want to know: whether the cost of buying (or renting) a property is going up, or down, and by how much, in a particular area (say Brighton). (more…)

Posted by Fabrice Retkowsky on June 30 2008 under: Brand Matching, Quality, Spam, Technology

When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.

In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.

(more…)

Posted by Phil Newman on June 26 2008 under: Consumer Generated Media, Customer Engagement, Quality, Search, Spam

Using machines to understand text is a big part of what we do here at Brandwatch. And sentiment analysis is part of it. As wikipedia nicely puts it;

“Generally speaking, [sentiment analysis] aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic”. (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 20 2008 under: Quality, Sentiment analysis

Seth Godin wrote a moving post yesterday about worthiness. He writes almost as a stream of consciousness and makes some great points. I like the last one best

“The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”

Which leads to the question how good is good enough. How quickly should you release. In particular, this applies nicely to software. How many bugs are acceptable before making a release? Or what level of bug is acceptable to let through? (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 19 2008 under: Quality