Blancmange sieving? I'm probably labouring the metaphor, but a further thought on the blancmange leveraging post. I just did one of those online, multiple choice surveys. This one happened to be for United Airlines' frequent flyer programme, specifically the membership pack they...

Zopa and credit crisis Monevator left a comment here that led me to his interesting reflections on experience as a Zopa lender - and speculations about what will happen in a crunch.The biggest issue for me is Zopa has not yet been tested in...

Lessons from a spatula Yesterday, I was told a delightful story about the paediatrician and analyst, Donald Winnicott. Winnicott was a pioneer in thinking about how mothers and babies relate and how that affects the child's development. He talks about a spatula game. He...

Social banking Antony Mayfield has an interesting post on specualtion that social banking (things like peer-to-peer lending) could account for 10% of all retail lending in a couple of years. This comes via Jason Gardner, blogging with refreshing honesty from within Lloyds...

No more grand narrative? After Sean let fly at the market research business, I'm pleased to see Piers doing the same for the trendspotters. For me, there's a message linking both: can we get away from putting our faith in magic feathers and soothsayers?...

Social objects and magic feathers I'm an enthusiastic participant in the whole "social object" conversation. (Hugh crystallised it first here.) I just want to add a caveat before we all get carried away, and talk about Dumbo. In the film, Dumbo stops believing he can...

Language pitfalls Mark Earls writes about the pitfalls of language. In particular, he looks at how European languages emphasise objects doing things to other objects. Other languages are much more into processes. I think one manifestation of this is the word "brand"....

Podcast: marketing, bananas and more Last week I had a great conversation with Hugh Macleod and Mark Earls (author of Welcome to the Creative Age and, more recently, Herd.) We talked about lots of stuff loosley related to Marketing 2.0, especially social objects and how...

Coalitions of the willing I used that phrase back in February. I think it's a good way to describe a way of thinking about how to respond to what's created by Web 2.0: you can't control it, you need to manage people as if...

Bored at Berkeley A tweet from David Smith led me to this post by Alan Cann. Alan shows this soporific video; it's from an extensive range published by UC Berkeley on YouTube. I feel a bit guilty picking on this particular lecturer as...

The Thunderbird Six Syndrome Hugh's latest includes this observation:A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with somebody very high up the global Digital Advertising foodchain. He was telling me about how once he was pitching for a ten million dollar account with...

Rock in a hard place There's been quite a scare over the Bank of England providing emergency lending to Northern Rock bank. Out of curiosity, I wondered how my building society, the Chelsea, might be responding online. High on the home page was the link...

Virgin flight PSFK's report on the first Virgin America flight from LAX to SFO makes it sound pretty good....

When corporate blogging gets tough... Johnson & Johnson are suing the Red Cross over the use of the Red Cross. Ah, good morning Mr Bull, may I show you this large red rag? Well, actually they're suing because the Red Cross is licensing other for-profits...

In praise of inconsistency Brian Oberkirch likes this post by Umair and so do I. Like them, I loathe the notion of one-word-equity. The other day, James highlighted the wisdom of Etsy's Robert Kalin, which feels way more sane and humane. Here's Kalin:There is...