Coleen hasn’t tweeted since 10th Feb, and her last message was ominous:
Hopefully she’s just busy looking after Cheryl.
Coleen hasn’t tweeted since 10th Feb, and her last message was ominous:
Hopefully she’s just busy looking after Cheryl.
Not sure if this is note-worthy or not, but since it might be I’d thought I’d mention it – MSDN lists Internet Explorer 7/8 under the “Operating Systems” category, whilst 6.0 is under “Applications”.
Trivial I know, but it didn’t happen by accident. Someone (probably a whole committee) sat down and made a conscious decision to put IE in the O/S camp.
Screenshot below:
Following on from my previous post (which was published today but written last week), I’ve just read the follow up to the secretlondon story here - “How to build a website in 48 hours for £3,000”.
It’s a snappy title, and I love the energy, enthusiasm and general Web x.0 crowd-sourced kool-aid of it all, but I can’t help but point out that whilst they’ve accounted for every last bagel the biggest cost is missing – the people. It’s fantastic that they managed to harness the ‘crowd’ to get 40 people willing to give up their weekend, but my back-of-envelope calculation of their hidden cost is as follows:
By my reckoning, if they’d commissioned an agency to build it, it would have cost somewhere between £60-100k to build, not £3k.
I’d really like to understand what the people involved think, and how they value their time. We’ve all given up our free time at some point or other to help out friends / neighbours, but what’s interesting in this case is that they are helping to build something from which, I presume (perhaps unfairly), other people will benefit financially.
When Tiffany appears on the cover of Wired as the new Martha Lane-Fox, how will they feel? And do they care? Are they shareholders in the new venture?
[Update] I found this in a blog posting - “we weren’t started by a company — we’re a community, and secretlondon is all of us” – so apologies to those on whom I cast aspersions.
I’ve had a post on crowd-sourcing in mind for a few weeks, but I couldn’t quite work out what I wanted to say (other than it being all the rage). I’ve been talking to a number of clients recently who have expressed interest in getting closer to their customers.
Then I came across this article on a startup called secretlondon - http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/startup-to-launch-after-secret-london-facebook-group-amasses-180000/ .
Once I’d recovered from the irritation of seeing someone succeed before they’ve got their first job, I decided to take a look, and as an example of the power of crowd-sourcing it’s quite interesting.
The idea came out of a Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=259068995911), and the founders are now looking to build out a dedicated website (http://secretlondonblog.onefinestay.com/)
They have used 99designs to outsource the design of the logo (http://99designs.com/contests/36703).
They are starting the site development by publicising how they are intending to build it (http://secretlondonblog.onefinestay.com/2010/02/03/first-steps-for-the-tech/), and appealing for help from the community (and being quite successful to judge from the comments).
And finally, the source code for the site is on GitHub (http://github.com/timjdavey/secretapp), and therefore public.
There’s basically nothing private or proprietary about it – it’s even more Wikipedia than Wikipedia – even the idea has been open-sourced.