Martyn Walker

Uncommon Sense

Archive for the 'Buzz' Category

June 24, 2008

The power of crowds and communities

Corporations use advertising to persuade us to buy their products. They do not force us to buy their products but is it ok for them to give us the impression their product is the best or only one to buy?
That may seem like a ridiculous question but if you go to court and lie [...]

December 27, 2007

The Secret To Building An Online Community

If your website gets 100,000 unique visitors each day then someone somewhere will pay you something worthwhile for exposure to your community. So given that a secret to an online income is owning a community then how do you build one from scratch?
Is it Blogging?
It’s no secret that bloggers attract huge communities of readers. [...]

December 20, 2007

Going Sue Silly

As a software developer and owner of IPR you might think I would not be happy if my code and ideas were stolen and used for profit. You’d be right.
But what if someone writes their own code that improves my original idea? Why should I have any claim over that?
Progress depends on people taking [...]

December 6, 2007

Are The French Worth Listening Too?

I thought Ublog was a late comer to blogging only “making it” because of it’s French origins which meant slower adoption of new ideas from the English speaking world. Well, A country that insists on calling a computer an “ordinateur” to emphasise Frenchness is bound to get stereotyped.
“So even though he’s French, his advice, [...]

December 4, 2007

Do you have a poor online rating?

Continuing the theme of customer service I reviewed our own stats keen to make sure we were addressing the problems of our customers.
We ask customers to rate our performance on each enquiry. All they have to do is select a thumbs up or down and the system calculates a rating on 1 to 5 [...]