Mark Griffin

This is the "next big thing" that IT people need to know about, and it's going to be a headache because the potential advantages are as big as the potential pitfalls. I would be really reluctant to see a core part of someone's business relying on Twitter, say, being available...

Fascinating report plotting the market value of the main social networking sites. Facebook comes out tops. Link to original article: http://griff.in/03

There are certainly some interesting suggestions in this article, but I can't say I agree with all of them. I think the main change is one not listed in the piece, and one that no business will welcome - it will force, oblige, coerce, bully, businesses into action if the crowd will it...

It may be called "New Media", but the same old rules apply. The smart way in essence is to survey what your key customers think it important, focus on that, and measure the results. Link to original article: http://griff.in/s

More fees for consultants, more work for webmasters, and yet another tick box you have to deal with to ensure your business is as visible as it should be online. I suggest you Google your own location and see what comes up on the map, and then Google your competitors...

Everyone's feeling the pressure of the economic squeeze, but not everyone is being smart about it. Even before government bail-out plans, there were cash grants, loans and awards to be had if you only knew the right places to look for them...

I have watched the latest developments in on-line advertising with some concern. The chief culprit, in my view, is the Flash movie...

This story will probably hit the papers any day now. An unspecified and dangerous loophole has been announced that will allow fraudsters to direct you to their own fake web sites even though you are using a genuine web address...

How many passwords can you remember? It seems we need more and more of them every day, and memorising a pin number for your one and only cash card now seems a lifetime away. Frankly I do struggle to remember a myriad different phone numbers, pin numbers, logins and passwords...

The are two factors that can conspire to frustrate an email marketer's efforts. One is the ease with which people can subscribe to an email newsletter, the other is the ease with which they can set their spam filter to block them...

You may find this hard to believe, but Sesame Street has been going for nearly forty years now. Even harder to believe is that I am a big fan...

They're hardly out of the tech headlines these days - Amazon - and they're back in them again with their latest offering, called "Amazon Video on Demand." I have to admit I like the name, I'm a big fan of stating the obvious and it's a much better name than calling their new service "Wendy," or...

There's a sort of morbid fascination about watching a successful business get it wrong, as eBay are doing now...

I bought twenty copies of this book when it was published in 1997, and gave them all to friends. Silly, really, I don't have a copy left to re-read which I would like to do now that I have been inspired by the piece below...

Many of my former colleagues at Cray should be very proud of their achievements when they read about the latest and greatest supercomputer announced today...

"The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes." Milton Friedman Oh, how little did he know. There is no force known to man that can stop a greedy government...

For some months now I've been watching PC prices falling to amazingly low levels, but a laptop for under £100, is it possible...

When you're sending out a mailshot to possibly millions of customers, it is so important to get it right when you give them a hot link to click on. Dell have just sent one out and I clicked on the "more details" link they provided and got a "page not found" error...

Next time you check your email and wade through the spam, pause, smile, and think of Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, it'll gladden your heart. They have just been fined a world-record $234 million by a court in Los Angeles for sending 730,000 messages to MySpace users. read more

Back in the Seventies, Monty Python lampooned the Special Branch in a well-know sketch in which Inspector Harry "Snapper" Organs announces that he keeps track of the whereabouts of notorious criminal "Spiny Norman" by reading the colour supplements (in the Sunday newspapers)...

Email has revolutionised communications in speed and utility, but we haven't yet come to terms with the speed with which we can fall into the many pitfalls. We seem to be a society that skim-reads everything, that wants news delivered in sound-bites, and that has developed a short attention span...

Viral marketing is the old-fashioned "word of mouth" concept, wired-up and electrified for the Internet Age. Compare a Mexican Wave with the old game of Chinese Whispers and you'll see the difference...

There's an interesting dispute going on in America right now over "who owns the news". The governing bodies for Major League Baseball and the National Football League, among others, have drawn up new rules for sports coverage which the traditional news media are up in arms about...