- Blog
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Gordon Brown – Presbyterian Hit Man
I’m impressed. I’m properly impressed. Gordon Brown’s night raid on the Liberal party was muscular shit-kicking, twenty-first century politics. It was never going to work but that wasn’t the point. I don’t think Brown ever actually expected to abduct Ashdown or Neuberger. His message was simpler. He was saying: “you’re nothing to me, you’re a…
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I like this
There are two phone numbers on Steve Johnston’s web site. One is an ordinary landline and the other a prominently-labeled premium rate (£1.50/minute) number. When I called him this morning I used the premium rate number. I did this deliberately, partly because I was kind of pleased to be offered the choice and partly because…
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More ID card hubris
I admire Liam Byrne’s effort to position ID cards as a great national institution. Really. Eight-out-of-ten for effort. My position on ID cards is similar in that I agree we should aim to position Britain as a pioneer and an innovator with regard to ID. Where we disagree is on whether we should be doing…
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Moral flexibility
I’m not surprised to hear that the Pakistani legislature has voted unanimously to condemn the Rushdie knighthood (nor that students who probably weren’t born when the book was published are burning The Queen in effigy in Islamabad). That was to be expected. I suppose most of those protesting have never read the book (I seem…
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Direct Line vs the comparators
You’re a consumer brand. You long for a better relationship with your customers. You’re not getting it, though. There’s always someone in the way, usually a retailer with a dopey EPOS system or, worse, a smelly broker (with a comb-over). Either way, these barriers are doubly frustrating. Not only do your various agents stop you…
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Wrong wrong wrong
I’ve been thinking about the 2012 logo. It’s pretty simple: you are all wrong (obviously I mean those of you who disagree with me). People have actually been phoning me up (well, Paul phoned me up and put his graphic designer wife on the phone) to tell me how wrong I was to defend it.…
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Channel 4 – more useful than ever
I’m very impatient this morning with the clueless and elitist response from mainstream media to Channel 4’s latest race row. Big Brother has provided C4 with two opportunities to tackle racism in Britain in the last six months and both turned out to be more effective interventions than any number of indignant newspaper editorials or…
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How do you select a web 2.0 vendor?
Option 1:Look in the Yellow PagesSend everyone a 22-page RFP (a Word document, prolly)Wait for responsesPick a winner. Option 2 (after you’ve lost patience with option 1, cos it’s rubbish):Seed the networks with a hyper-abbreviated graphical invitation to tender.Blog about it.Email all your mates (including Sam’s UKNM, natch).Twitter a bit.See what happens…
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Am I the only man in Britain who likes the London 2012 logo?
Since I left the office this evening and turned the radio on I’ve been so immersed in the (entirely predictable) torrent of nastiness, ignorance and cynicism coming from… well.. practically everywhere as far as I can tell… that I really wanted to take this quick opportunity (before I put the kids to bed – why…
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What’s wrong with eCommerce tools?
Why don’t eCommerce platforms behave like blogging platforms? Is it because the cool developers don’t want to work at ecommerce application developers? Is it because all the big ecommerce platforms started life the best part of ten years ago and can’t flip architectures just like that? Is it because the kind of fancy features you…