Off- and Online

If you’re a media company, or a publisher, and you look at “Big Data”, chances are you’re not talking about something like the 25 Petabytes produced annually by the Large Hadron Collider. The visitors of your sites or the users of your apps may be a large group of unknowns to you; but you’re not trying to find a Higgs in a haystack. You’re likely thinking about a lot of data; but is that really Big Data? Continue reading ““Visitors”: between Big Data and CRM”

It’s been two years now since I graduated from being “regular visitor” to “permanent resident” in the Middle East. In the digital space, it’s an area of huge potential, and that’s of course what attracted me in the first place. It’s tempting to say the region is a few years behind the state-of-the-art in the U.S. and E.U., but that’s an oversimplification. In many ways, it’s just….different. Continue reading “Managing Content in the Middle East”

I’m getting a bit tired of generalisations about generations. Categorisations like Baby Boomers, Generation X, Y, Z, and Millennials have a habit of turning into useless simplifications. Especially if it’s then implied that this means we’re now going to need some sort of YOLO for enterprise apps. Continue reading “The Myth of the Millennial”

In today’s global economy, you won’t get away with running your site in just one language. “Oh, let’s stick to English, everybody can read it” is not really an option. Do you want to take your visitors seriously; or better, want them to become customers? Address them in their own language. But how would you handle this in your site? It’s harder than you might think. Continue reading “How to manage sites in multiple languages”

I really like Quora. They have managed to avoid turning into another chaos like Yahoo! Answers; and the style is very much like that of a modern, more social forum, with a very knowledgeable community. Yet, some topics still get inundated with the same question (in various guises), over and over again. The content management topic, for instance, is where everybody goes to ask “what is the best CMS for…” (insert a specific task, company, or vertical). If you really think that’s a simple enough question, read this. Continue reading “What’s The Best CMS?”

I happen to know quite a few people who can spend hours (even days) talking about ontologies, taxonomies, and tagging. I had a great chat once with the guy that coined the phrase “folksonomy”. But nothing quite explains the issue as well as getting a barking ticket. Continue reading “Taxonomies, Tagging, and Barking Tickets”

So you’ve worked hard and you’ve now got 2 million Facebook fans for your page. Or you managed to reach 700K followers for your Twitter account. And you can show that’s 20% more than last year, so that’s totally awesome! Everybody’s happy with you. But what’s the actual value of it? Continue reading “How much is your audience worth?”

It’s the hype of 2012: Big Data. Somehow, everybody wants it, and if you don’t have it, at least you’re discussing it. Of course, as with any buzzword, there’s a slight problem: what exactly is this Big Data that everyone’s going on about? Or are we just lumping in everything together, with all the vendors and integrators just jumping on the bandwagon? Continue reading “What is Big Data?”

In 2012, suddenly, it seems, it’s finally sinking in that mobile is going to be really, really big. And that mobile sites are therefore really important, and you should get your site ready for mobile, too. (Or you should create an app, though I’m still skeptic about most apps.) To me, the interesting thing here in the Middle East, is that mobile is not just “going to be” big, it might already be bigger than the old web (as we used to access it on PCs). In fact, most new users will probably skip straight to the mobile web.  Anyone in the region needs to strongly consider a “mobile first” approach — because if it doesn’t work on mobile, your site is pretty useless. Continue reading “In the Middle East, Mobile is bigger than huge”

Once upon a time, I was teaching a class in information technology (and Internet) for law students. Each week, they’d get an assignment, which they had to send in through our e-learning system. It so happened that one day, one of my students did not submit his essay; so I asked him why. “Because the system was down,” was the excuse. This was funny, as at the time, I was also responsible for this particular system. Not only had there not been any downtime; with a few clicks I could also see this student didn’t even try to log on that week. I remember the guy becoming quite red in the face: he had never expected to be called on his bluff. Continue reading “Stop blaming “the system””