I smiled at this the other day -”Software Developers: The New Rock Stars of Marketing” - it comes from the article  ’Out of the Box’ published a few weeks ago in the UK Financial Times, that talks about the role of technology in marketing in the new media age. The smile is because this is pinned up [...] [ more ]

Recently I was fortunate enough to meet with David Pullinger from the UK governments Central Office of Information (COI), who are driving our government’s citizen engagement strategy  and mandating the policy around which government must adhere to. It was an incredibly absorbing meeting as we took a fast ride around all elements of where a citizen [...] [ more ]

I admit I am a big Google advocate, I have spent a fair amount of time at their cool European HQ In London, at partner events and I even coded the first shipped iteration of our Google Search Appliance Connector (thankfully now looked after by proper developers!). Also, I admit I’ve only spent a few [...] [ more ]

Harvard Business Review: Chances are that at some point in your career you've been asked to implement a strategy that was developed by someone other than yourself. A manager's job is to implement that strategy, and to be sure that her team, unit, or department executes well. But what if you believe the strategy you've been asked to implement is flawed? Complete [ more ]

By Alex de Campi Valentine: An original supernatural thriller set during Napoleon’s retreat from RussiaImagine a graphic novel series, released every month simultaneously in 14 languages and across all major wireless platforms (Kindle, EPUB, Android, iPhone), hopefully soon via the web and, eventually, in collected print editions. Every month, you pay 99 cents and get 70-75 screens of action, adventure and suspense. In its first fortnight after launch, in the difficult final weeks of December and with no marketing and without all our distributors yet on stream, the first episode had 5,000 downloads — of which English was in the minority. (There were over 100 downloads in Irish, which [ more ]

Another big question that comes up every couple of weeks when people start developing websites with the RedDot CMS Open Text Web Solutions Management Server is this one: How should I integrate my CSS code into the CMS? And the answer is fairly easy to give and even easier to remember: Don’t do it. Do NOT integrate your CSS code into the CMS ! It took me several projects to actually reach encounter this epiphany. It’s not worth doing it. And there are several good reasons for not doing it. And I will share them with you, more than happy to discuss it. Since last year I suggest the following procedure for every project I come across: Remove the CSS templates and related images to [ more ]

A couple years ago, Jeff Whatcott introduced to me the concept of a social publishing system. Within minutes after reading his article, I knew I wanted to expand further on his idea of social publishing and discuss the potential impact social publishing would have on content management systems. During this time period, Andrew McAfee was continuing to observe the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 into the normal day to day business world. From these two moments, I couldn't help myself from dreaming of the opportunities I had before me to learn more about social publishing and collaboration tools. I have waited for almost two years for the right time to start a new website that focused on [ more ]

A few months ago I read Lukas Mathis’ through provoking essay “Designers are not Programmers” where he makes the case for a separation between designers and developers. To summarize his argument, thinking about implementation details distracts the designer from the user and results in applications (and websites) that are easy to build but hard [...] Related posts:Tale of two developers Angie Byron, has wonderful post on approaches to contributing to... Designing for Drupal Nica Lorbor, from Chapter Three, has a great post on... Iron CMS George DeMet, over at Palantir, has thrown down the gauntlet.... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts [ more ]

Here are my App Gap posts for January. In addition to the Fast Forward blog (see side bar for links), I am writing in another Corante blog, the App Gap, The posts began toward the end of January 2008. [ more ]

This is the day of the Super Bowl and I want to wish the best to a very remarkable team that has lifted a wonderful city. When I was in New Orleans this week at Webtrends Engage I saw [ more ]