Adriaan Bloem's Blog on Digital, social, and content management
Perhaps you’re thinking about adding some “2.0” to your site or intranet, to obtain that great user generated content (UGC) — but where do you start? You start with commenting, of course. No blog would be a real blog without it. And most kinds of social & collaboration software wouldn’t be considered very social (or … Continue reading “UGC, 2.0, and Commenting Services”
As you may have noticed (I hope), I wrote a book this year. It’s not an epic volume, more of a novella than a novel; except, of course, it’s entirely non-fictional. I’ve written analytical books before, but trying to distill a few decades of experience into something readable was a different challenge. And now it’s … Continue reading “Why My Book Is Free”
Are you ever ready to launch a new product or service, or to set a new update free into the wild? After all the time and effort in brainstorming, planning, designing, and building, you have to decide to go live. But is it good enough to go ahead? The painful MVP This is where we … Continue reading “MVPs, Achilles, and Conquering Product Launch Paralysis”
Streaming video in the Middle East at a good quality, without buffering, is still much harder than it should be: there is no real central point in the region to serve everyone from, so in most cases the streams will run through Europe. The throughput has been increasing (the actual bandwidth to the countries), with … Continue reading “Streaming Video: Would you do a stop-over in Frankfurt, on a flight from Dubai to Oman?”
Fact of life in technology: smaller companies get acquired by large ones all the time. If, like me, you tend to favor best-of-breed solutions; where you’re an important customer to a medium sized company; and get to influence the roadmap – this is a problem. Suddenly, you’ll get an email: “We’re proud to announce”, some … Continue reading ““I’m sorry, but I never signed up to be your customer”: when your supplier gets acquired”
There’s a lot of alphabet soup in online and digital. One distinction that keeps confusing us is between CMS and ECM. What’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? How is it different from Content Management and a CMS? And does it have something to do with Star Trek?
It’s an interesting question: what is social media, anyway, to a modern professional? As a hectic work week was dwindling to an end on Thursday afternoon (Dubai work weeks are Sunday to Thursday — starting on Sunday is still weird, but starting the weekend on Thursday never gets old), I was chatting with my colleague Fouad Massoud. … Continue reading “Social Media in One or Two Words”
If you’re running an online business, it’s one of the worst things that can happen: your site could fail or your app could break. And you’ve probably heard of the famous Silicon Valley mantra “Fail Fast, Fail Often”, but that’s definitely not what you want your servers to do. How do you avoid this?
Did you ever come across someone who seemed to know everything? An expert in not just one thing, but many things across different disciplines? Who not only stunned you with a wealth of trivia, but also all the applicable anecdotes, and the relevant facts to almost anything that would come up in conversation? I’m sure … Continue reading “How to be an Expert in Absolutely Everything”
First, let’s be clear: I really like Hadoop, and not just because it’s named after a yellow toy elephant. But over the past few years, “Hadoop” has also become an almost mystical term, happily sprinkled throughout marketing brochures. So, to be fair, it’s not Hadoop that is the problem — the problem is about Hadoop … Continue reading “The Problem with Hadoop”