thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Thanks to all readers who arrive in increasing numbers each month traffic on this blog is growing fast. Most of you visit 2 or 3 times per month and read up about 4.8 pages each time. A little over 7% of you subscribe by RSS feed, (click here to try it -and select a reader) thanks for all of that. As always helpful comments are most welcome and you can also receive posts via email subscription as well.

Technorati are currently tracking 100.2 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. According to them we are in the top 400,000 and improving each week as more of you find our posts useful and link back, trackback or comment on what moves you the most.

The popularity widget in use at the bottom of each post. It adds up all the different types of read access modes and then recalibrates each time there is a new post. It is proportional so a score of 50% means half the readership of the the top post, in simple terms.

For example the all time favourite post is Creative Banking is Not an Oxymoron which includes views about Zopa, Prosper and Kiva and peer 2 peer banking generally. Every month it gets a huge number of reads and trackbacks and ranks in the top 2 or 3 even though it has been published for 6 months now. Creativity and industry futures are a recurring theme.

This blog was started in October ‘06 and traffic has been building steadily since then so popularity on this scale is based on those increased volumes. This means that some of the earlier posts would also become more popular if posted now, however I will leave you to discover those yourselves.

This is a table of the most popular posts in the past 10 months.

1 – 100% Why Alternative Energy Can’t Save Us from Peak Oil
One of the standard responses from Government and Oil companies when faced with the peak oil scenarios is to say that alternative energy sources will make up the gap and we shouldn’t worry. Wrong! This is Part 2 in a series on Energy futures and this post looks more closely at Chapter 4 of The Last Oil Shock, where author David Strahan goes through many of the the alternative supply solutions and checks the math and underlying assumptions. In each case the alternative is too little and too late to really help much at all. Continue »

2 – 91% Media Meltdown or New Era @ Dow Jones
The ongoing negotiations surrounding the sale of Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch offers a fascinating glimpse on the future of the media business. On one side Rupert is offering $60 per share which values the group at $5b when the 52 week low has been $32.16 which would be only half that which is partly why the takeover scenarios are so exciting. The question of mission “What business are you in?” is absolutely key. Continue »

3 – 78% The 10,000 hours rule
At the recent New Yorker conference, called “2012: Stories from the near Future” was a piece by Malcolm Gladwell on two ideas of Genius. The video link is here – but check the file size – it is 27 minutes long. What is fascinating to me about the speech, is how Gladwell tells the story with his historians ear for detail and uses it as a learning observation on problem solving styles. Continue »

4 – 72% Media Chess – Murdoch Style
For all the reporting on the planned $5b buy of Dow Jones there doesn’t seem to be much insight into how Murdoch can make the numbers work. In a post last week we decided that it was likely that adding TV and some of the group synergies with online properties controlled by Fox had to be part of the answer. The weird thing is people seem to treat this like rocket science and that somehow Murdoch is a magician. In my view it is much more simple than that. Continue »

5 – 65% How to Survive Peak Oil by Acting Locally – 7 ways
A key benefit of the book, The Last Oil Shock book by David Strahan, is found in the last two chapters in which he recommends a series of local and personal actions for urgent changes needed to survive this major threat. In a chapter called “Pass-notes for Policy Makers” the book makes a broad recommendation to prepare as much as possible for the coming crunch by changing our consumption behaviours and managing our exposure to the main risk factors. Continue »

6 – 58% Creative Banking is not an Oxymoron
Or alternative title – “How to amplify relationships & build trust in banking” using the power of of social peer networks. About 5 years ago I wrote about the potential of the web to change the finance sector in new and exciting ways. The example at the time was Grameen who pioneered microfinance loans in Bangladesh which was set-up by Muhammad Yunus. Since then Yunus has won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Part of the thinking was to be able to use technology to amplify relationships and be able to deliver a level of trust outside the conventional wisdom of the day. Continue »

7 – 57% Successful Business Growth 101: Applied CRM
The most successful businesses that I know follow a clearly structured sales methodology and a detailed plan to get there. It shouldn’t be too surprising that in order to get to a big sales goal there are a whole series of much smaller structured activities that need to be followed through. Here are some outlines on key learnings from many years of successful marketing and sales campaigns. 1. Define Objectives Typically a business will select a CRM because they want new customers or new business. Continue »

8 – 55% Creative Visualisation of numbers
A key challenge for policy makers is how to tell a compelling story with numbers. It is not easy to visualise the impact of change in a meaningful way—but help is now at hand. Ironically it doesn’t come from the business intelligence (oxymoron alert) community—it is more the result of being able to add graphical tools and creative vision to the core data. Continue »

9 – 52% Green futures and the last oil shock
At school my daughter is a very excited member of the Enviro Explorers who aim to treasure the environment while many of us parents drive them to school in huge gas guzzling cars. How shortsighted is that? Incredibly it seems that despite 30 years of rising environmental awareness we still haven’t been convinced to significantly change our energy consumption behaviours. In a video presentation on sustainability Alex Steffen makes the good point that we are currently using up enough resources to use up 5 planets worth (or more) and that the way that those resources are being used is also very unfair and extremely difficult to change. Continue »

10 – 51% Government procurement gets realpolitik
At last, we seem to have a Cabinet Minister that fully listens to advisers and the public. Full kudos to David Cunliffe who is one of the key government ministers to really understand the most significant issues in his portfolios. Even better, he “gets” the shape of realistic outcomes for a knowledge based future as well as driving the Telecom broadband shake-out for example. The broadband smackdown quite possibly has the single largest impact for future business on our “small rock in the Pacific (Thanks Rod). Continue »

This table is not dynamic at this stage and so the % numbers will over time be different to the actual numbers under each post. Thanks for your interest. Updated: 27th August 2007. There isn’t much of a gap between some of these for example no 11 is only 1% behind and in my opinion is a key post that you should still read.

11 – 50% Creativity & Innovation Linked
We have been watching a DVD on the life of Leonardo da Vinci which featured animations of some of the machines that he designed about 500 years ago. A remarkable life for a remarkable man – full of amazing insights. My 5 yr old daughter recognised some of the machines because we have seen working models at the museum a while back. We have a deal in our house, that; when we get videos out she is allowed 1 kids DVD and 1 documentary so we can both enjoy learning about new topics. Continue »

Update October ‘07 – Unfortunately with version changes and a site rebuild the combination of this particular plug-in no longer works – but I will keep reviewing and at some point will rerun the numbers.