Linked Data – unlocking the internet

It’s easy to associate the word data with numbers and spreadsheets, and if you have a deep-rooted fear of maths, as I do, it can be pretty scary. For me, it’s been made aesthetically less scary and more enticing by beautiful data visualisations but coming to terms with data and its signficance isn’t just about pretty representations, it goes much much deeper. As Tim Berners-Lee says in this talk – “Data is relationships”.

Pay what you want

Radiohead did it first, and it was a huge success, proving that even given the chance to get a free ride, people would be willing to pay for quality. It seems that with the economic climate as it is, savvy companies are following suit. Little Bay restaurant in London is giving diners the chance to choose how much they think their meal is worth throughout this month, and I recently read about the Ibis hotel in Singapore offering rooms in a similar way.

The future of the Internet?

I’ve recently discovered Spotify, and I think it’s brilliant, it turns your laptop into a full-on jukebox with hundreds of thousands of songs in its library. It also allows you to make playlists and then share them with friends. Most importantly, it’s completely free to use if you don’t mind putting up with a radio-style ad every few songs and if that upsets you, you can sign up for the $10 a month service and avoid them.

Where my buddies at?

Despite the rather annoying voice over harping on about what her “buddies” are up to, this demonstration of Google Latitude shows it to be a pretty cool application. When Phil first told me about it, my initial reaction was complete aversion to the idea that I could be tracked 24 hrs a day 7 days a week, Jack Bauer style, but the fact of the matter is, you can switch it off when you need to. This does fit in pretty nicely with our predictions for this year – a furthering of the “never be alone” mentality.

Our Predictions for 2009

Joel

We wanted to write a post that discussed what was going to be big in 2009 in the world of Advertising and we came to realise that whatever we predicted would be something that’s already been said years past.

We could say, for example, that mobile’s going to be huge this year, and it probably is, but let’s face it that’s been said before. We could also say that social networking’s going to hit a new level and that newspapers are going to struggle to survive; been said hasn’t it?

So, we decided we’d go deeper and talk about where we’re at in terms of how we’re interacting with each other and what implications we think that this is going to have.

Sleeveface

I found these records and I think they’re brilliant. Firstly, “Raiders of the Pop Charts”, no comment necessary, and secondly, Bruce Willis with “The Return of Bruno”. I didn’t know that Bruce “Yippie Kai Aye” Willis was so multi-faceted: