The Best of 2008

I have just learned that this blog has been listed by Business Week who want to identify ‘the voice of innovation’. This is a great honour especially since most of my online activity hasn’t taken place here.

So I thought I’d sum-up 2008 here to provide a link through to where the action really is!

Blog post of the year
17/2/08 – Calling Jack Thursdon
This post was a real-time experiment in social networking set-up to demonstrate how social networking works for the benefit of the sceptics. It worked better than I could have wished.

David and Goliath where David is armed with social media
From 6/5/08 – Using Coca-Cola’s Distribution Muscle
This post was the start of the ColaLife campaign. This took a 20-year-old idea which had never achieved traction and applied the power of social networks to turn the head, engage and influence the behaviour of a global brand. The story got too big for this blog and now has its own blog here: colalife.org/blog.
We can distribute Coca-Cola to all corners of the World and yet 1 in 5 children die before the age of 5 in developing countries, that’s 4 a minute in Africa alone, 5,500 a day. They die from very simple causes like dehydration from diarrhoea. ColaLife wants to get Oral Rehydration Salts, and other social products, out to all the places you can buy a coke by putting them in Coke crates.
The progress made to the end 0f 2008 was nicely summarised in a BBC Interview broadcast on 27/12/08.

Soapbox post of the year
21/2/08 – Why I believe in Open Innovation
The motivation for this post came from a social event where I introduced my father to someone with power over me. This someone responded by saying I was mad in my belief in open innovation. Embarrassing but also inspiring!

ruralnet|online co-design
10/1/08 Planning for the next generation ruralnet|online
Using open innovation principles we set about re-designing ruralnet|uk’s online community, in the open and online. On 22/1/08 a new Drupal site was launched where the co-design process took place: ruralnetonline.org.uk. The culmination of the process was summed up here: Pulling insights together.

Insight of the year
2/1/08 – Turning the telescope the other way around
Before Web 2.0, online portals and ‘one-stop-shops’ seemed like a good idea. Now they look like you’ve got all your eggs in one basket. Now you can (and should) have your content everywhere eg your images on Flickr, your video on YouTube and Vimeo as so on. Then your website becomes an aggregator of all your stuff not the only place people can find you. So your website becomes the end point, not the starting point, of your web presence. This means that many more people will find you through the different content channels you are using and it also means you can re-use and re-mix your content in different places for different audiences. A hat tip goes to my friend Julian of Georgia Wonder for opening my eyes to this.

An interesting year. Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the years and been happy for me to build on their ideas.