Sunday nights Sports Personality of the Year awards were one of several television events this year which Twitter users probably couldn’t avoid; with over 322,000 tweets mentioning the awards ceremony (either by name or the #SPOTY hashtag) on the day of the awards, 280,000 during the broadcast itself, peaking at just over 6,500 tweets per minute as Bradley Wiggins was announced as this years winner.

And, as with voting events ranging from the US elections to the X-Factor final (and our own look at the Mercury Music Prize), people are looking at how data from social media can be used to create audience insights. A reasonable hypothesis might be that the members of the public who were interested enough to cast a vote would be well represented by the Twitter users interested enough to tweet about their favourite candidates. Read More »

Always handy, the HPS Group has created an ‘HTML cheat sheet’ for digital marketers as an infographic that covers all the basics needed for formatting blog posts and email and making simple changes to websites without the need to get the developers involved.

So many people managing digital projects but don’t know their <p> from their <span> and can’t change the smallest fo things without having to call someone. If that’s you then take a  look at this infographic. HTML may look like gibberish at first, but once you know what you’re looking for it is much easier than you think to fix things.

As HPS says the key rule is anything inside triangle brackets is <code>, and everything outside is >visible content<. Every instruction or “tag” you open with <tag> has to be closed with </tag>.  The rest is all here. Read More »

Predicting the future of technology, even over just a few years, is mind-numbingly difficult. Science fiction writers and tech companies have tried and tried and, mostly, got it wrong. Why? One of the main reasons is that it’s far easier to imagine changes to existing things than entirely new things. But now and then something comes along and it all changes… Welcome to the world of “convergence technology” and “paradigm shifts”.

The concept of convergence technology is best understood by imagining the ultimate version of it – a device that just does everything. That’s pure science fiction, but take a look at your smartphone or tablet – it’s the best and most widespread example of convergence technology today. So what is convergence technology about, and why do we care? Read More »