Anthropological Studies have shown that it’s difficult to maintain stable social relationships with groups larger than 150 people. That limit being a direct function of neocortex size, apparently, our brains can’t conceptualise stable inter-personal relationships with large groups of people.

Are we so narcissistic as a society that we strive to value ourselves by the numbers of ‘virtual’ friends we have? The whole time ignoring privacy and security.. Recent events notwithstanding, do you honestly believe that within the ‘virtual social circle’ you have painstakingly built that all your ‘friends’ have your best intentions at heart? What about so called ‘friends’ of your friends, the third party freaks that given default Facebook options can see your personal details.

Sure, Facebook has sufficient options that allow a savvy user to filter out freaks, no argument there, however, how many people on your friend’s list do you honestly believe are capable of understanding the ramifications of Facebook’s complex privacy settings. Add to that Facebook’s regular changes to their privacy settings and the average user has no hope of maintaining stealth from the freaks.

Think about the personal information you are currently divulging on your Facebook profile page, chances are you’re divulging your date of birth, mobile number, place of work, interest, etc. Certainly enough information for a freak to build a detailed profile which can be used for nefarious means or worse, as was the case recently.

Should you delete your Facebook account?

Recently, several groups have pushed for a large scale deletion of Facebook pages, there’s even entire websites dedicated to it, with countdown timers ticking down to ‘D’ day. Given Facebook’s continued lack of respect for your privacy, one has to argue they have it coming to them..

“Facebook has 500 million users, so what if a couple thousand paranoid hermits delete their accounts, Facebook won’t miss them.” I hear you say, I tend to agree with you in the short term, however, I feel that in several year’s time when Facebook has become the new MySpace we’ll look back to this time and realise that it was the beginning of the end for Zuck’s megalomaniacal visions.

No matter where you stand on the argument that Facebook is becoming the new MySpace, I urge you at the very least to delete your personal information from your Facebook profile page. Let’s face it, your ‘real’ friends already have those details.

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on computer security

Here’s a link to the presentation.

Powerpoint presentation on productivity

Productivity tool Links:
www.rememberthemilk.com

www.evernote.com

www.livescribe.com

connect.microsoft.com/site94

www.dimdim.com

www.rescuetime.com

www.lifehacker.com

www.gtdagenda.com

In order to protect the innocent, I can’t name my unsuspecting client, nor will I name the marketing company who duped them into spending a large sum of money on an ineffective marketing campaign.

Here’s how the story played out…
My client approached several marketing companies to craft a campaign for a new product launch.
The marketing company that eventually won the job provided a mail campaign to 10,000 leads which were sourced from a rented list.
The marketing company GUARANTEED 25% conversion rate back to the website. (Bells start ringing at this point for me)

So off they went, arm in arm, skipping down the yellow brick road, singing songs about a wizard, life was grande, sales were going to skyrocket…

Over the course of the next week, the client in fact measured in excess of 3000 clicks back to the website.. An astounding 30% conversion rate from a DL card.
They made 2 sales..

Upon querying the marketing company they were met with all sorts of excuses…
“Obviously, there’s something wrong with the website”
“The colours you used on the landing page were not conducive to selling”
“Copy is bad”
Blah, blah, blah…

Enter Max..
We took a look at the web server logs and noticed some very interesting anomalies, in excess of 95% of the clicks originated from IP Addresses outside of Australia. Surely the marketing company couldn’t have been that stupid, i mean heck.. I can buy clicks which emanate from within Australia, why would these morons buy clicks from Baltic states?
Summary:
Client blew $20K on a marketing campaign that was ill conceived, ill managed, poorly executed and included metrics that were questionable at best.

My advice to anyone who’s thinking of engaging a marketing company that guarantees any sort of conversion rates back to your website is to do your due diligence, speak with clients of the company and see what sort of hard conversion rates they got. Were the clicks legitimate clicks or were they purchased from one of the many suppliers who offer that ’service’..

As pretty as that looks it’s probably only going to be plausible for feature articles, production costs would prohibit content providers from delivering such slick content on a regular basis. Future digital publications will contain static and dynamic content, the dynamic content being reserved for feature articles and closed sections and static text to fill the remainder.

We’re definitely at the precipice of interactive publications, whether this will benefit humanity and save the content providers from the brink of disaster remains to be seen. I’m certain that like me, you’re waiting for your interactive, scratch and sniff version of the sports illustrated swimsuit calendar.

In a year that will be defined by tablet PC releases i’m going to fight my urges to splurge on the iPad and hold out for HP’s Slate.

My logic for the decision is based on HP’s open standards as opposed to Apple’s walled garden. The video above emphasizes Adobe’s Flash and Air support on the HP Slate, which will be sorely missed on the iPad. Coupled with the fact that HP will be running a derivative of Windows 7 means I can load basic business intelligence applications I already have.

Anybody who owns an iPhone will attest to how annoying the lack of Flash support is. Granted it’s no showstopper, I can surf the web notwithstanding Steve’s decision to forgo Flash for support of the App Store. Games are the highest grossing items in the App Store and casual gaming is one of Flash’s strengths. Will we see Flash support in future iPad / iPhone updates? I think the market will determine that. There’s a horde of new Tablet PC’s about to be released, you can bet all of them will support Flash and Air in some incarnation.

Microsoft Courier may set the cat amongst the pigeons once it’s formally announced, the courier is a dual screen tablet aimed squarely at the journaling set.. In a perfect world, I would have a HP Slate as my sitting on the lounge surfing / reading device and the Courier would replace my diary and notebooks in my laptop bag.