DaxThink: Digital life

Egypt suffered a weekend blackout from the Internet and some phone systems after their under water cables were severed. The cause is yet unknown but its not an unprecedented incident, ship's anchors being the common cause.

Made me think though, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw purposeful activity like this as a tactic in war. Information is key, and people have become accustomed to knowing what's happening in times of conflict. Whilst it is highly unlikely that an army is reliant on public cabling, it would certainly add further disruption to a country already under pressure.

Happy Christmas thoughts!

You have to admire Apple and their ability to generate buzz around their products. There are more leaks from the iPhone team than from the British Government!

I really hope this one is true, the future launch of the iPhone Nano. Read the full report here. The source is a company called iDeal who have apparently been accurate with their previous iPhone predictions. The picture shown here is the iPhones in protective silicon jackets, apparently the scoping of which was the cause of the 'leak'

Please Santa...

I have been working a lot lately with Lego (as a client, not just sitting in a room on my own building with bricks), immersing myself in the brand and its values wherever possible.

As such, colleagues send me a lot of things Lego-related.

Thanks to Antony for this contribution - 20 Classic Hip Hop Album Covers recreated in Lego.

Featured left is the 1985 King of Rock album by Run DMC.

My personal favourite recreation in Lego is Eddie Izzard's Deathstar Canteen routine. Utter comedy genius.

I was listening to the radio in the shower this morning (apologies if that creates horrible visualisations in your mind), when the news came on. One of the lead stories was about a new security risk online caused by a flaw in Internet Explorer.

The official advice given by the BBC was to 'switch browsers' until the problem was fixed. Given that changing user behaviour in this way is a hard thing to do, once a switch is made it is unlikely to be undone. Also, it is unlikely the BBC will run another radio story in a few days to say 'the problem with IE has been fixed, please switch back'!

Google Chrome usage is pushing the 1% mark currently (highly dependant on what source you use), IE has dropped below 70% and Firefox is at 20%.

With shoppers flooding online to fill their Christmas stockings, and security fears still lingering, could this be the best Christmas present Firefox and Chrome could wish for?

We will have to see what Santa delivers.

(Analogy stretching?)

Google has gone festive and added strings of holly to its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Does this mean anything? No not really, but it made me feel festive this morning!

Great presentation from Google.

UK ISPs regularly filter the online content that we access.

I don't know if I have been living in a bubble of naivety for my online life, but when I learned this was happening on a continuous basis I was shocked.

Cleanfeed, setup by BT in 2003, is an ISP-level filtering system that operates on the 'edge' of web traffic and had to be added to all UK ISPs by the end of 2007 in a compulsory move. It provides a way for chosen content to be blocked from the UK 'public'.

The motivations for Cleanfeed are good - to provide a way for ISPs to block access to child abuse content - but it's the existence of such a system itself that makes me nervous.

We do not live in a country that is going to face a situation like the 'Great Firewall of China' where mass content is filtered for political control and gain on a regular basis, but with all measures of control a line has to be drawn and the questions are who gets to draw that line and where will that line be?

In the case of Cleanfeed, it blocks URLs as determined by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charitable organisation by registration, but one that also receives the majority of its funds from the ISPs themselves. An exercise in industry self-regulation, but a dangerous setup?

The IWF reviews online content based on reports from the public, the police and IT professionals and submissions can be anonymous; it is acting as the hotline for the UK of 'suspicious' online content.

All of this is reasonable, and as a father I am glad to hear that extreme content (particularly of child abuse) has the potential to be filtered away. But in reality, how effective can a body like this be? The IWF says it can add 60-70 new URLs every week, not a bad number given its staff of 7, but surely wholly ineffective - it's been a while since I coded but I could build more than that in the same time frame.

A body like the IWF must surely exist to give the Daily Mail readers of this world a way to sleep at night. But if that's the decision then let's do it properly and give it enough capability to be more effective. File-sharing programs and Ian Clarke's Freenet provide easy ways to bypass the filtering for instance.

Personally I am more concerned about what this might mean for the future and how much restriction will be placed on us a populace - the reality will be somewhere in between our setup today and China. Control systems only get tighter. As an example, Cleanfeed will move beyond its child pornography remit by 2010 and start filtering out 'extreme pornography'.

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What started this thought was an article today about Cleanfeed being 'activated' to block a Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer, an album by a German group called the Scorpions. Their album cover contains a naked underage girl and was deemed as child pornography, and therefore blocked.

(The album cover shown here is the alternative, cleaner version issued in several countries).


If you are on a UK ISP right now, chances are you won't be able to view the page at all. Due to the way Cleanfeed works (by filtering the traffic from the page through a proxy and removing the illicit content) Wikipedia had to block large proportions of UK traffic from the article completely as it was hurting site performance.

Interestingly, our Internet connection at work seems unfiltered.

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One final thought - spare a moment for the individuals who work in all aspects of law enforcement and regulation that have to spend their time reviewing child pornography and image of abuse. Horrendous job, but without them we would not have any regulation in this area and would not be able to prosecute those involved in its production.

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[UPDATE]
As an example of the difficulties in drawing the line, I recommend an article on The Register which highlights the problems of where to draw the line and who is doing the drawing:
Reg readers in the dark over extreme porn - Local police clueless too

Having worked in eCRM for quite a few years of my career, it's rare that I see an email marketing campaign that really makes me thing 'wow'.

Yes there are lots of things that can be critqued about this (for instance it doesn't really make sense unless you load the images), but Sponge Group have done well here.

They have one key message and it's driven home in a nice creative (and seasonal) way.

Great subject line too... "Access Denied"

To what seemed like a storm of controversy I wrote a post about Phorm saying it wasn't that evil (!). But I wonder what is really going on there at the moment.

Norman Lamont appointed to board? Read more here.

After a long absence decided to get back into the world of Twitter and suddenly remembered how addictive it is. Great to be in touch with so many smart and interesting people that I work with and know, but has the potential to eat up vasts amount of time!

Also, as 2 colleagues discussed on Twitter this weekend, Twitters main weakness is the issue of volume versus quality.

But looking past that, I will be twittering for a while. Come follow me at twitter.com/daxhamman

Big news, big changes... but big impact?

Read the experts opinion here:
Google SearchWiki - What does it mean for brands?
Google Searchwiki being Tested

I logged in and wrote my first comment on Friday. I did a search for 'Dax' and wrote a comment on the Wikipedia definition result saying "not all of us are stock exchanges!" and gave a link to this blog.

Interesting to see if it stays, gets moderated, has any impact on anything at all!

Yawn. Old news? Perhaps.

Yahoo produced the Close The Loop report and Atlas followed with something similar, now been updated (?) and branded under the Microsoft Advertising name, find it here.

Most clients I talk to get that both channels assist each other but either don't get why or haven't seen it work for them yet. I always look for synergies in display with all media plans and it doesn't take a lot of time to ensure a media plan has maximum benefit on other channels.

Consider the following:

• Use search re-targeting
• Diversify a media plan and look for opportunities in email blasts, text links and advertorials; all can lead to content that is findable and therefore appear when a user searches
• Research the funnel, understand what questions your target audience are asking themselves at what stage of the buying process, then use display and paid search in combination to talk to all needs
• Use the terms a brand is ranking for in natural search in the creative
• Memorable terms in the display creative should be covered in paid search strategies