Jeremy Pepper reporting on the Forrester conference. I think this ladder metaphor is deceptive as it all starts with a company learning to listen.

Jon’s post linking to another by Dave Pollard reinforces the changes required to wire organizations for the future. I think the core problem is… you can now learn faster about almost anything outside the company than within… A fact that has been long true for marketers.

“This is what OAuth does, it allows the you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User). While OpenID is all about using a single identity to sign into many sites, OAuth is about giving access to your stuff without sharing your identity at all (or its secret parts).”

“Want to be a better trend watcher? Our top 5 tips” Great overview.”…. “1. In the near future, probably January 2008, we’ll add a full blown ‘resource center’ to these pages, with titles and links to every magazine and blog we regularly track. For now, some quick thoughts on blogs (which we are most often asked about): to find blogs on any topic, industry or trend, just use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. To really start weaving, get Google Reader, Bloglines or any other RSS aggregator and amass feeds from every source you want to track.”

“But what the research team found intriguing is the differences in what news outlets wanted to share with users via their RSS feeds. The fact that most of the news outlets did a good job of continuing to send archived material through their feeds…”

“I’ve also begun anecdotally hearing how departments in some large organizations are recommending that employees create Facebook profiles. And this is pointing to the burgeoning trend of businesses learning how to successfully leverage social networking platforms to achieve business goals.” Yep use the tools your employees are already using.

A great article on the new challenges to product design. Some excerpts:

“Thus, whereas once the value of an object was self-evident, its utility communicated by the outer form, the value of today’s objects often comes in hidden, computerized form: the GPS unit in a luxury sedan, the motion sensors in a doll. Traditionally, the concept of “intuitive design” meant offering the user an immediate understanding of features and functionality; a toaster should look like a toaster. This immediate understanding is no longer possible, nor even desirable, by means of form alone. It’s not hardware vs. software but instead the object versus its story…. This is the new virtual nature of the thing.” And so we must improve the connection between industrial design and software interface, allowing the virtual story to augment – and in some cases supercede – the clarity of meaning once communicated by the object form itself.”

“The future of product design is, indeed, convergence. But it is convergence of a scale much broader than hardware and software working together; it is a convergence of information and object, of politics, ecology, and business, of human being and technology.”

An excellent overview of what Norman Lewis presented at MobileCamp London. I’ve added this blogger to my newsreader.

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

After blogging today on Marketing being the problem at Skype I find Hugh identifying the same problem at Microsoft.