UPDATE: A Sea of Opinion

Posted on | January 3, 2016 | Comments Off on UPDATE: A Sea of Opinion

Hi everyone – hope your Christmas and New Year’s break was enjoyable. 🙂

In one of my posts from early last year, I decried the way many marketers abuse their in-bound content, by refusing to keep commercial messages separate from their various opinion pieces. 

It seems that various peak industry bodies are starting to make more noise about the problem, with the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK  releasing a very useful set of transparency guidelines for their members to follow.

The Communications Council here in Australia also has a similar code of practice regarding social / online content standards (uploaded – ironically enough – only a few days after my original posting).

Both guidelines are reasonably comprehensive, and put similar emphasis on the need for total transparency and a visual demarcation between your opinion pieces and promotional content.

Some industry commentators are arguing that these guidelines don’t go nearly far enough, and their should be greater legislation to protect consumers.. but this is a totally moot point in my view frankly, as both the ACL (and the Retail Trading Act before it) both have very clear provisions against misleading representations in published materials of a commercial nature, and have done so for decades.

Obvious as it might seem, it still bears repeating – just because your message might be only 150 characters long, that doesn’t mean it can’t get you in a heap of trouble if the commercial context around it isn’t clearly defined.

It’s a message worth engraving above the screen of every mobile phone: If you share it, you’re liable for it!

(…and yet the trolls still thrive. It’s astounding.)

Quantum Computing part IV: …Man, I HATE it when I’m right!

Posted on | December 11, 2015 | Comments Off on Quantum Computing part IV: …Man, I HATE it when I’m right!

Hi folks.

Following on from my last post on D-wave and Quantum computing, it turns out that announcement from Google was all about the one-hundred-million-times performance boost their new D-Wave computer has shown over a standard computer (with a single core).

To put that in perspective, first you need to imagine an optimization problem that takes a standard 4-core desktop computer 10,000 years of constant running to solve! (… a bit like ‘Deep Thought’ in the Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy books).

Then, you need to imagine this 10,000 year problem…. being solved in less than 1 second, … by one single processor, in one single computer (…eat our dust Intel!)

Social media has since gone absolutely bonkers over the subject, and it’s currently trending on Facebook like no-one’s business.

For those who came in late, here are a just few links to peruse:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/google-nasa-our-quantum-computer-is-100-million-times-faster-than-normal-pc/

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/625828/Google-Quantum-Computer-NASA-D-Wave

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544276/google-says-it-has-proved-its-controversial-quantum-computer-really-works/

And in case you missed my previously linked introductory videos, here’s another one for you.

…So what does all that mean for the rest of us, now that D-wave have been vindicated, and have indeed invented the world’s first quantum computing mainframe.

Frankly I have almost no idea what comes next – and neither does anyone else. To be honest, it’s a bit like a caveman asking “so what use is this stupid “wheel” thingy REALLY going to be for me?”

We simply can’t conceive of what the limits of this new technology might be, …because we have no equivalent in our history to compare it to!

The one thing I can tell you is that from this moment forward, there is very little existing encryption technology on this planet (that I currently know of) that can be thought of as truly secure.

As I’ve said ad-nauseum for years now, one of the best things that quantum computers (in their current format) will be able to do is deconstruct cryptography. Not even the 2048-bit encryption in use at banks and data centres around the world will be safe for very long, given that these suckers can crack such codes in less than a heartbeat.

The future has arrived people.

In case you were wondering – this is what the start of a technological revolution looks like.

Actually, that’s  an inaccurate comparison – this coming revolution will dwarf every previous period of growth and change in human history – including The Industrial Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Enlightenment and The Renaissance.

Whatever happens from here on in, technology and its application is going to become unrecognizable…. and things are going to change at an unprecedented pace.

Quantum Computing and Cloud Storage: those clouds are starting to look ominous…

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | Comments Off on Quantum Computing and Cloud Storage: those clouds are starting to look ominous…

Hi everyone.

I’ve been talking about the opportunities / challenges / threats of both quantum computing and cloud computing on and off for a few years now – and it looks like things are starting to happen on both fronts… which is both exciting, and utterly terrifying.

Let’s start with Quantum Computing. For those who came in late, I first posted about Quantum computing three years ago, with my most recent post being made earlier this year. (NB: There’s some great primer videos about Quantum Computing and how it works on TIME’s website – with a more in-depth article being posted on WIRED’s website last year).

Moving back to the present, the reason for the quantum leaps in my excitement levels (pun definitely intended)  is the latest developments that have been happening both at D-Wave, and at Google.

D-Wave is a company I’ve been keeping my eye on for a while, but I hadn’t blogged about it before, because I (like every other industry observer) wasn’t sure if D-Wave was the real quantum deal or not – no one was really sure if these processors really were using super-positioned electrons as logic bits (see the above linked primers for a detailed explanation of what this means).

Anyway – there’s been a a few announcements recently that have my qubit-sensitive ears all a tingle.

Firstly, D-Wave recently announced the commercial release of a 1000+ qubit (supposedly) system, their most powerful unit yet.

Secondly, Google apparently has already acquired one of these latest D-Wave units earlier this year (Google acquired one of D-Wave’s older 512-qubit systems last year and have been running tests on it ever since).

Thirdly, apparently Google are going to make a ‘watershed’ quantum computing announcement this coming December. Google (like most tech companies) make announcements of new technology all the time… but for them to say specifically a ‘watershed’ announcement in Quantum computing in particular… well that’s a pretty bold move on their part:  if this announcement isn’t a genuine watershed moment in the field, they they’re going to look pretty stupid. The release doesn’t say whether or not they are referring to D-Wave or some other Quantum Computing research, but given Q-Wave has a 10 year head start on most of its competitors patents-wise, most likely the announcement will be about D-Wave in some form or another.

The US government research center at Los Alamos has already ordered themselves one of these new D-Wave systems for further research and “national security” reasons. And of course when I say national security,  I really mean cryptography – which is what these qubit-enabled computers are currently best at after all… which brings me nicely to the second half of this post, which is all about good-old cloud storage and cloud computing.

For the record,  cloud computing is nothing new – its a technology that’s been around as long as the internet itself… it’s only very recently that cloud computing (aka: file transfer protocol) has gotten consumer-savvy, sexy and cryptographically-secure during transmission, and thus morphed into cloud computing as the average person knows it today.

Apart from the previously-stated threat to cloud storage / cloud computing that Quantum computers present, there’s been another spanner thrown in the works, in that the EU has taken serious umbrage with the data security and privacy standards set by US law.  Read the linked article to see why this might affect us here…and then also ask yourself what exactly is social media if not cloud storage for your most private information.

Come to think of it – I’m trying really hard to think of a popular social media or cloud-storage platform (in this country) that doesn’t have its corporate HQ in the US… and I’m coming up a blank: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Instagram, Google +, Drop-Box, Google Drive, iTunes, OneDrive, Four-Square, MySpace, Flickr, Steam, DeviantArt, Bebo, Patreon, Tumblr… all of them based in the US and bound by US data privacy laws.

I’l say it again folks, because its not just paranoia – cloud-based storage for all you private information, is only a good idea insomuch as your data is encrypted and protected.

And if the announcement Google make on December 8 is what I think it will be, and that their tests show the D-Wave Quantum computer is the real deal… then I strongly urge you to do the same as me, and start winding back on the amount of sensitive personal and business data you keep in data-centers located within US jurisdictions – and fast!

I’ll leave you with a sobering thought, and an incredible quote: Part of the current justification people have for accepting their internet-enabled reduction in privacy is that “there is simply too much data,  from too many people, for any one person, organisation or government to keep track of it all”… and once upon a time that might have been true.

But according to Dr David Deutsch of Oxford University:

“Quantum Computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical (ie: normal) computer longer than the age of the universe to solve.”

In my opinion, online cloud storage only has about three to five years left of reliable data security thanks to its heavy-duty encryption. After that, all bets are off.

Ode to a Google Web-Bot Part 3: In for a penny…

Posted on | March 30, 2015 | Comments Off on Ode to a Google Web-Bot Part 3: In for a penny…

Hi everyone.

As per my musings in an earlier post, please find attached a copy of the original “Ode To A Google Web-Bot” for your reading and down-loading pleasure. Click on the thumbnail opposite to view a larger version.

The second (edited and expurgated) version is still with the original post that accompanied it – I have decided to leave this second version up for public viewing as well.

I reflected long and hard on making this original, cheekier version accessible once again. While it will always be my favorite, there were a number of brand-equity considerations I had to ponder before I could decide whether or not to re-post it.

I will go into these considerations in my next post in a few days time, as they provide a good illustrative example of some of the relevant factors in your brand’s approach to, and evaluate of its tone and manner decisions with its content. Given the enormous potential for both benefit and harm that tone-and-manner can impart to your online communications, it’s high time I covered the subject in greater detail.

Hope life is being kind to you folks, I’ll see you again in a few days.

Cheers! 🙂

Cloud Computing has Storms Ahead Pt 2: You can’t stop progress…

Posted on | March 29, 2015 | Comments Off on Cloud Computing has Storms Ahead Pt 2: You can’t stop progress…

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how the rapid rise of Quantum computing poses a serious threat to the future security of internet transactions and cloud computing models.

Since that time there been more than few hacking scandals (using regular old silicon-based processors) to help throw more weight behind my concerns… though to be fair, in that post I also said memristor-based memory would be widespread by last year… that prediction at least was way off.

In regard to memristors, HP have not yet brought that tech to market, but meanwhile they continue to put renewed effort into The Machine, the radical new computing model that this technology will enable… so clearly we will hear more about memristors in the near future one way or another.

While all this was going on however, other high capacity memory storage formats have come along to challenge Flash memory. SSD computer storage is about to get a lot bigger! (Yay! 🙂 )

Keep an eye on this sector, as it’s a potential disruptive influence on cloud-based business models.

Turning now to Quantum computing again, the same researchers who cracked the q-bit back in September 2012 have since been able to manufacture a device from silicone components, making it compatible with modern manufacturing processes. Remember what I said about quantum computers being able to break 128bit encryption easily?… it’s now more true than ever!

Fortunately for all of us, additional work on cryptography is also taking place to hopefully (and I mean hopefully) negate some of the predicted effects all this new code-breaking tech will inject into the international data-security marketplace – and trust me, nowadays EVERYBODY is in the data-security marketplace in one way or another. Additional privacy legislation here at home, coupled with the growing presence of the internet of things, means that data-security is everyone’s concern.

I know I’m stating the obvious when I talk about the need for computer and data-security nowadays… but it never hurts to give a gentle reminder or two (there are still people out there who have no idea how to create a proper secure password, as well as those somewhat deluded individuals who even more dangerously DO have a secure password, but choose to use the same passwords for everything without any variation).

With the above thought in mind – I thought I’d share with you a little gentle reminder of just how prevalent hacking activities really are nowadays – pay attention now, this should be fun.

Attached below is a list of the Lockout Log for this website, which contains all the IP addresses that have tried (and failed) to hack into this blog since its inception in 2011 (…608 lockouts and counting!).

For those who don’t know what an IP Address is, it’s a unique identifying code that acts as a “residential address” for a computer connected to a network. If you have a computer / tablet / phone that is connected to the internet, then that computer has a unique IP address, so that other computers can find it.

 *****

I can assure you the list below is real, unaltered and every IP address within represents numerous genuine attempts to gain access to the administrative areas of this blog, by trying to guess my password. Please note at least one of these IP addresses has received 19 lockouts – which represents up to 76 separate attempts to hack my site from one IP address alone… who knows… maybe they’re still trying, but are now hiding their identity better. Far as I can tell, the IP address in question – 64.34.173.227 – is just a stone’s throw away from Ashburn, Virginia, home one of the most important internet networking hubs in the US, and is wind-assisted spitting distance from the Pentagon. Feel free to draw your own conclusions…. I’ll just be here hiding under the rug, taking down the license plate of that dark van across the road… XD  lol).

 *****

I’m not trying to drift into crazy-conspiracy-theory / tinfoil-hat-land here folks. I include all this information only as food for thought. Most likely these are all just amateur attempts to hack my site. If someone really wanted to hack my blog (and they knew what they were doing) then it wouldn’t take them very long to do so, and I might never know it had happened.

Feel free to run an IP trace on these addresses for yourself if you wish. Oh and BTW – for obvious reasons, this list of IP addresses might not be up for very long. I AM kind of poking a bear here by listing them – but stuff it, I’m putting them up anyway.

…long list, isnt it? (It’s nice to be popular… 🙂 )

Moral of the story: Please always make your passwords decent ones, and don’t re-use them anywhere! It’s the most basic step you can take in keeping yourself safe online.

And don’t rely on the cloud to keep your most important data safe… you never know who’s watching, or what they’re trying to do… Isn’t that right Mr. 64.34.173.227?

Happy selling folks, but keep an eye on the clouds  – there’s a nasty storm coming sooner or later.

A Sea of Opinion

Posted on | March 27, 2015 | Comments Off on A Sea of Opinion

How do you measure opinion?

And by you, I mean YOU – the person who owns the eyeballs scanning these words.

How do you – personally – manage the oceans of opinion the whole world is currently floating on?

With the rise of digital media, has come a tsunami of opinions.

You probably have a number of blogs that you follow regularly. Hopefully mine is one of them.

You have friends you trust. And you talk with them in person, through social media, by SMS, IM, email, online bulletin boards (…remember them?) – whatever your preference.

You listen to your bank manager and accountant, your lawyer, your relatives… They share their opinions – and if you trust the person, you listen, right?

But what about all those other opinions? All those third-party recommendations and opinions that we are supposed to be able to listen to, and rely on… but DON’T, and CAN’T?

How do you judge the worth of those opinions?

If you have a LinkedIn account, you know EXACTLY the opinions I mean.

Those friends of friends, and contacts of contacts – people you may have heard of in passing at some time or other, who bombard your subscribed LinkedIn groups with one posting after another, all of them peppered with personal opinion.

Or how about industry-specific websites, that have you on their email marketing lists? How much do you respect and listen to those opinions that flood unbidden into your inbox?

Sometimes you might read an isolated article that’s interesting or relevant… but the rest you dump straight in the recycle bin…am I correct?

I raise this subject, because a lot of marketing-communications activity is based around the quality of our in-bound content… and in-bound content is increasingly being tainted by hidden commercial agendas.

With MarComm promotional content, it’s getting harder to tell what is an honest, impartial opinion – and what is really a hidden agenda, masquerading as professional perspective.

We are all drowning in marketing spin! So at what point in time, does it all become too much?

The inhibitive effects of excess choice on decision-making is a well-understood phenomena. Basically, humans are often paralyzed when confronted with excessive options.

Before we can make any kind of decision, we need to be able to weed out many of those possibilities that are making choice difficult.

Then once we have a manageable number of options, we employ whatever means we personally prefer, to whittle down those options (but then again – that’s just one model of the decision-making process I’m referring to. There are more than just a few of those to choose from as well)

It seems no matter how you cut it, when confronted by excessive options, before a human can make a decision, first they have to decide how they are supposed to reach a decision, on the best way to make a decision.

And mind you – that still doesn’t take into effect the fact that in most cases – we do not have enough reliable access to sufficient information to decide rationally…

…so sorry Ayn Rand – there is no such thing as fully-rational or enlightened self interest anymore, when it comes to most decision making… and unfortunately, that also includes deciding whom you can trust.

So I ask you again – how do you measure the value of an outside unsolicited opinion, when its becoming increasingly difficult to separate marketing spin, from helpful insight?

I don’t have an answer for you sorry. The only advice I can give you is you must ALWAYS be utterly and completely honest when expressing yourself professionally.

The world can’t afford any more uncertainty or confusion – it leads to consistent skepticism, and eventually to pervasive mistrust.

Take my advice and follow my lead: ALWAYS tell the brutal truth when asked for your opinion – even if it costs you a sale.

If nothing else, you will be remembered for your honesty.

Given the information age is a myth, and the disinformation age is the reality, complete and utter honesty has never been so valuable.

But you know… that’s just my opinion.

Good luck everybody. 🙂

Ode to a Google Web-Bot Part 2: An interesting request…

Posted on | March 22, 2015 | Comments Off on Ode to a Google Web-Bot Part 2: An interesting request…

Hi everyone. 🙂

I’ve had a few requests now for me to re-post the original, cheekier version of my Haiku protest to Google.

Frankly I am severely tempted to do so, but also a little hesitant.

I’ll sit and reflect on those requests for a while, and make a decision shortly. Stay tuned…

Ode to a Google Web-bot (…as written by an irate word-smith).

Posted on | March 16, 2015 | Comments Off on Ode to a Google Web-bot (…as written by an irate word-smith).

Like a lot of writers – I have a covert love of poetry, and an overt love of language.

Like a lot of marketers – I have to accommodate the minutiae of Google’s inscrutable whims into my work, whether I want to or not (…Google is now so powerful, if I want to reach my audience then I no longer have any say in the matter…a perturbing thought frankly).

And like a lot of free-thinking individuals – I sometimes balk at terms being dictated to me, and blindly yielding to the wishes of others… especially if I’m convinced at the time that those wishes are utterly wrong.

Some years ago, whilst in the midst of wrestling with these disparate forces, I decided to cram them all together into a creative work of protest – a whimsical and irreverent series of Haiku, dedicated to SEO copywriting in general, and what it was doing to the English language. (At the time, SEO writing was often bloody awful! Thankfully Google ranking algorithms are far smarter than they once were, but that’s another post.)

Most of the observations in this work are still very relevant when creating marketing content, so for the sake of education, posterity and my persistent delusions of poetic grandeur, I have posted the work below. Click on our bespectacled, type-writing friend to view a larger version.

As the work was mainly written out of spite towards Google’s ranking practices, I have decided to remain true to that original spirit. The text has been embedded into a jpeg, and is deliberately NOT machine-readable by search-engine Web-bots. ( Sorry Google – this one is for human eyes only, and if you don’t like it – bite me! 😛 )

Feel free to copy, share and re-post this image as much as you like… just please leave the copyright and branding notices intact. While the writing within isn’t necessarily my best, they’re still my thoughts and feelings there on the page, and I’d like them to be contributed as such –  even at the risk of being quoted out-of-context.

I still live in hope that one day, Google might impart its content-ranking algorithms with a greater appreciation of written satire, metaphor and colloquialisms in general. That way, web pages could be ranked not only via keywords and content, but also by how well they were written. Then maybe grammar and eloquence would matter enough for online literary standards to improve, and for linguistic invention to be valuable enough to attract a premium once more.

I’m really not much of a poet, but most of the haiku are downright cheeky and I hope you get a giggle out of them – like all Haiku, they’re designed to be spoken aloud, so the rhythm of the words becomes more obvious. Writing them was a highly cathartic exercise, and helped to brighten-up a really crappy day. 😉

Enjoy!

EDIT: I’ve made a bit of a blue here folks, so some further explanation is in order.

There are two versions of these haiku – I have included the less mischievous version above for your reading pleasure. The other one is longer, cheekier, and was originally intended solely for personal use, but I shared it with a couple of online sources in error (…as it’s almost identical in appearance to its twin, I uploaded the cheekier version by mistake).

The action was completely inadvertent on my part (Pro Tip – always keep alternate versions of artwork in  a completely different folder 🙂 ) and it might be either detrimental or beneficial to my intended aims. It may go viral, it may pass unnoticed, it might not have been seen yet by anyone, it might have been seen by everyone, people may love it, people may hate it… there are no guarantees one way or the other. Personally I far prefer the cheekier version, but I was not completely convinced that a milder version wouldn’t be the more prudent choice.

Both versions of the Haiku are obviously tongue-in-cheek, so hopefully people won’t misconstrue my intention with the cheekier version.

This is going to be interesting… stay tuned for further updates.

Broken link is now fixed… Sorry Mr Morris!

Posted on | March 9, 2015 | Comments Off on Broken link is now fixed… Sorry Mr Morris!

A very quick thanks to all the folks who let me know the Kelmscott Chaucer link was broken… it has now been fixed, you can download a copy here.

Please note, the first nine or so pages of the PDF have been left deliberately blank – the good stuff starts shortly thereafter. 🙂

PORTFOLIO: New Examples Of Our Work…

Posted on | March 9, 2015 | Comments Off on PORTFOLIO: New Examples Of Our Work…

For those who have been wondering what else I’ve been up to over the last few years, you can find a more recent copy of our creative portfolio on our corporate Behance page.

Feel free to wander over and have a gander for yourself.

(NB: Behance is a website dedicated to creative individuals, and to creative expression in general. There are some magnificent examples of great work from around the globe, in every category from Advertising and Graphic Design, to Architecture and Special Effects. A wonderful source of inspiration for anyone who pursues creative excellence in their work Enjoy! )