Internet Psychologist
The latest articles from Internet Psychologist and Business Academic, Graham Jones
People often swap web site names between each other. They tell them to their friends, neighbours, colleagues and so on. Think how difficult it would have been for Google if their web site name (domain) had been something like “www.automatedsearchenginesystemnotrelyingonhumaneditors.com”. And what about people who try to recommend web sites …
Back in January I suggested that the blogging company Six Apart was going to be sold. A representative of the company soon contacted me and told me that I shouldn’t read too much in the reports I’d read and added a comment to my blog entry. However, today I read …
Experts frequently fail to get things right. History is littered with so-called experts who predicted things totally incorrectly. The boss of IBM famously said there would only ever be a need for a handful of computers. Ha..! So, why should we believe the “experts” at Ofcom and BT who tell …
Old people – that is those aged over 19 – use email frequently. But teenagers hardly every use it; instead they are into instant messaging, big time. Although there is a marginal increase in email usage amongst teenagers, the vast majority still prefer instant messaging. Indeed, a week or two …
Marketers always seem to be reinventing the wheel; no sooner do they come up with a “great new concept” than they ditch it in favour of some “good old fashioned” marketing. Perhaps it’s just me – but I reckon marketing is pretty simple and straightforward stuff; it’s marketers who appear …
You know when you have “made it” when you are front page news – particularly if that front page belongs to the Wall Street Journal. Facebook is the subject of a major article on the front of the Wall Street Journal, arguing that perhaps we can let other social networkers …
I am sitting in my hotel room in the USA watching a fascinating CNN program which is a “debate” between the Republican leadership hopefuls. What is interesting is not what they are saying – usual political flim-flam that doesn’t really answer the questions. Rather, the interesting bit is what is …
Most people don’t use Internet technology well. Fewer than 2% of people who access the web, for instance, actually subscribe to RSS feeds. In spite of environmental concerns, millions of emails and web pages are actually printed out, rather than read on screen. As for using social networking tools, or …
A lucky 500 Londoners have started taking part in a trial using Nokia phones to pay for tube journeys. Essentially, the phones use similar technology to the widespread “Oyster card” that many people in London use to pay their underground fares. Barclaycard is launching a similar card that will pay …
Still, in spite of being around for ten years, people dismiss blogging as futile, unecessary or in some way “amateur”. Far from it – some of the most successful web sites in the world are based on blog technology. Amazon, the BBC and Facebook are all derivatives of blogging. But …
Bloggers often find it hard to locate information to write about. Indeed, at blogging workshops I run, people often say they run out of ideas for their blogs. Well, if newspapers ran out of ideas they’d soon lose money…! So, where do newspapers get their ideas from? Other media – …
American commentators reckon there is a recession just around the corner. And one of the people quoted, economics professor Nouriel Roubini, believes that the financial difficulties could be greater than anything we have ever seen before. Such prophets of doom make for great headlines, but they are forgetting one thing. …
How many times have you ventured into an online store, only to find that you can’t get as much information about a company’s products or services as you would like? Only yesterday I wanted to know if my new video camera could take certain memory cards. Was that information in …
My son Elliot was 8-years-old yesterday and today we had a big party for 26 of his friends. It was a Harry Potter theme party with a wizard magician who kept all of the kids “spellbound” for an hour…! So what has all this to do with Internet Psychology? Well, …
Shoppers online must be a pretty confused bunch of people. After all, we clearly want to shop online – the graph for items purchased on the Internet is near vertical; we just keep buying more and more stuff online, day in day out. That is shown by recent research for …