Mediolana’s Facebook page has barely been published, but already it is chock-full of material – including an extra-large version of the new ‘ambient’ advertisement featured in yesterday’s post.
At 871 x 494, this is Facebook cover territory; a plethora of similar content will be released in the weeks and months to come. Watch this space for more information!
Filed under Marketing, Media, Study Guide, Weapons of Mass Instruction
#Indonesia capital beats #NYC, #London and #Tokyo with >2% of all urban #tweets; #Bandung ranks sixth, #Riyadh tenth tinyurl.com/bs23nqk—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) August 02, 2012
Filed under Media, Technology
To the more curious of this blog’s readership it may well be a case of preaching to the converted, but we would like to use this post to extend a tentative invitation to all those perusing these words to head across to mediolana.com, where the penultimate wave of web development is shortly going to be commenced by our Mediterranean team. Observant surfers will already note that our corporate website – constructed using über-fashionable content management system Drupal – is more than beginning to take shape, with the website equivalent of a pizza base now firmly in place.
Building a website is something that has been very easy for much longer than most people think: way before the world had ever heard of WordPress or Facebook fan pages, web hosts and ISPs alike were promising to hand prospective and actual users of the WWW a viable online presence in a matter of minutes: portals such as FortuneCity and GeoCities – the names of both echoing the bright lights of what was, for most people, a brand new medium – made mass access to digital publishing a reality in the mid-to-late 1990s.
But now – as then – to construct something of real economic value and durability is an entirely different proposition. Fashionable fonts change seemingly by the week; corporate images transmogrify almost as easily; and usability and the ability to update a website, arguably the two most important considerations of all in this context, are often relegated to the status of an afterthought. Months of planning, testing, amending, rethinking, scrapping, redesigning and reinstating are practically essential if one is to make something meaningful. We’re nearly there!
Filed under Business, Technology
A Mediterranean country that straddles two continents, today Egypt added a new dimension to its strategic value: democracy, or to be more precise, its first ever presidential election which historians are likely to judge as worthy of bearing the label ‘free and fair’. With over 50 million voters eligible to indicate their electoral preferences over no less than two days of balloting action, it is no exaggeration to term this one of the most significant occasions in the Middle East’s modern epoch.
One of the more intriguing aspects of this contest is the enthusiastic use of technology in the campaigns of the various presidential campaigns, with the social networking sites that played such an integral part in the downfall of the previous incumbent very much to the fore. The candidature of frontrunner Dr. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh – a former senior member of the somewhat unwieldy Muslim Brotherhood movement who has forged a unique electoral umbrella including Tahrir Square revolutionaries, Coptic Christians and disaffected Salafis – was to our mind particularly eye-catching, but not necessarily for obvious reasons.
Yes, at the time of writing Dr. Aboul Fotouh’s Facebook page has an eye-watering 540,000 ‘likes’, a figure high enough to make almost anyone familiar with the exceptional slog involved in obtaining even a handful of such approvals incandescent with jealousy; yes, his Twitter following:followers ratio of 1:237,860 is something that appears beyond even our own collective appeal.
But even Dr. Aboul Fotouh’s Internet presence is not flawless.
As evidenced by the above picture, he has forgotten to change his Joomla! favicon, meaning that the world at large can see that his traffic-heavy homepage is built using one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems. Could some open-source governance be too much to expect from the physician who could possibly be the next president of Egypt, and who has been publicly endorsed by one Wael Ghonim?
Filed under Political Science, Politics, Technology
#Facebook valued at US$104.2bn as investors 'swamp' #IPO; will have FB symbol on the #NASDAQ, trading begins on Friday tinyurl.com/csf8nbl—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) May 15, 2012
#Facebook's App Center not tied to #iOS or #Android; apps will work on any platform within social networking giant tinyurl.com/bvyxov4—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) May 10, 2012
Filed under Business, News, Technology
For those who take their productivity in front of a screen seriously, RescueTime – a programme immortalised in Timothy Ferriss’s 2007 classic The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - is something of an essential. Registered users – an entry-level, comprehensive version is free to all those who submit their e-mail address – get access to an application that logs and categorises every second of time that is spent at one’s PC, and then engenders a panoply of useful data that can be utilised as a motivational tool.
Indeed, the idea that being confronted with the fact that one’s life is being lost to viewing a friend of a friend of an acquaintance’s three year old photos on Facebook can serve as a catalyst for change has arguably never been more powerful. Away from certain authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, the liberating effects of social media are rarely obvious; most users appear to be trapped in a universe of insubstantial trivia that rarely matters beyond the moment the status update or photograph has been posted. The fact that access to this universe comes at a punitive price – as of September 2011, the planet was collectively spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, with Twitter handling 1.6 billion requests per day – needs to be acknowledged and addressed by all those who have ambitions beyond passive consumption and active inertia.
Yet we at Mediolana feel that we should point out an important aspect of RescueTime that we think will be overlooked by all but the most zealous and imaginative users: the time spent on an activity is not actually the only significant indicator of its distractive potential. Our CSO has regularly clocked outstanding scores on RescueTime – even in comparison to the other members of the presumably clock-conscious RescueTime community – but did not feel completely satisfied with his allocation of attention resources.
This is because in the era of browser cookies and auto-completed website URLs it is possible to spend minimal time on distracting websites while simultaneously devoting a disproportionate amount of concentration to them: flicking in and out of e-mail, Twitter, and Flickr may involve nothing more than a couple of quick keystrokes, but it is a behaviour which can destroy any pretensions to productivity a person may once have possessed. This is not to say that being more productive than 68% of users and spending 72% of one’s time in the top 10% of RescueTimers is meaningless – far from it – but it is not necessarily the elysian ‘Nerdvana‘ that it appears to be, either; in this sense, the quite brilliant RescueTime is as necessary as it is insufficient.
Filed under Psychology, Technology, Weapons of Mass Instruction
With September breaking daily readership records and October looking on course to do the same, we at mediolana.wordpress.com – the official blog of Mediolana Limited – have never had it so good. But far be it for us to stand still: new pages, features and further forms of electronic integration will be rolled out over the course of Q4 2011 and Q1 2012. There may also be news of one or two other special projects – stay, as they say in the industry, tuned!
Filed under News, Weapons of Mass Instruction
Google + reports 'insane demand' for accounts; aesthetic slightly reminiscent of Gmail and Facebook tinyurl.com/3asm3gf #Google #Facebook—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) July 03, 2011
Filed under Culture, News, Technology
