Are social media friends your real friends?

A friend of mine posed an interesting question the other day on Twitter. To paraphrase, what she said was ‘If you’re friends on Twitter, are you friends in real life?’. In other words, if you have a network of friends on social media, but have never met some of these people face-to-face, then can you […]

Are freelancers the future of small business?

I made a big decision a month ago. I decided to stop the hybrid freelance/agency employee existence I’d lived for the past two years and to become 100% freelance. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly, by any means. Turning your back on a regular salary is never easy to do, but having spent two […]

Real-time Twitter, or predictive algorithms? The choice is yours

Twitter is allegedly about to make a BIG change to its timeline function. Gone will be the real-time experience of tweets shown in chronological order, and in will come algorithmically targeted tweets, shown for their relevance to the user, rather than when they’re posted. And the twittering classes seem less than enamoured with this proposed […]

Might as well face it, we’re addicted to screens!

Mobile is great. I love my Android smartphone, I love my Apple iPad and I love the fact that I can be connected to the online world wherever I am at any time (well, as long as there’s a phone mast or some handy wifi in the area). But are we spending a little too […]

Welcome to the digital world – Part 2: The illusion of choice

The digital world is here. And as I talked about in Part 1, digital has changed just about everything we take for granted in the modern world. Our everyday lives revolve around the internet, mobile networks and the ability to communicate and consume online. Digital has completely changed our expectations of the world. We […]

Welcome to the digital world – Part 1: Instant solutions

If you take a look at how we live our lives now, it’s hard to imagine an existence before we had digital. So much of our everyday life revolves around the internet, mobile networks and the ability to communicate and consume online. In such a relatively short space of time, digital has changed EVERYTHING. Digital […]

Working from coffee shops: The top three challenges

When you’re a freelancer you tend to spend a lot of your time hanging around in coffee shops, using the free wi-fi and gradually becoming addicted to flat whites. But it’s not all macchiatos and muffins when you’re a coffee shop worker (CSW) – when your local coffee outlet is also your office there are […]

Owning your experience – a revolution in how we consume music and art

As the dust settles on another Christmas, I got to thinking about the presents my family and I exchanged this year. There was a time, not so long ago, when the vast majority of those gifts would have centred around three things: music CDs, movies or TV shows on DVD and heavy, hardback copies of […]

Somebody pick up the phone – why music shouldn’t be background

As someone who hot-desks in several different offices, and as a regular commuter on trains full of business people, I’m often subjected to other people’s dubious choice of phone ringtone. Now, we all want our ringtone to be individual – there’s nothing worse than a phone ringing and three people around the meeting room table […]

To press, or not to press: placebo buttons and pedestrian crossings

I was talking to a friend last week about pedestrian crossings – yes, I’m that fascinating. I’d noticed recently that an increasing number of people will stand at a pedestrian crossing waiting to cross the road, but won’t actually press the button to make the lights go red and stop the traffic. Odd, I thought. […]