Who is in control of your brand?

Personal privacy has become a hot topic for Facebook, however, full anonymity is the ultimate in privacy and creates some interesting human behaviour. The biggest anonymous community is 4chan.org an image board, inspired by a Japanese image board, 6 or so years ago, created (apparently) by Christopher ‘moot’ Poole.

“Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there’s a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it.” Christopher “moot” Poole

4chan is the source of many of today’s internet memes (two you might have seen are Lolcats & Rick Rolling), only 6 years old the site gets 70m visitors per month, producing 700,000 posts per day. It’s a force to be reckoned with. In April last year the community hacked the Annual Time 100 Poll to get ‘moot’ to number 1 spot AND coordinated the top 21 first names to spell out ‘marblecake also the game’ (lost more on this here). The community also use their power for good, in Feb last year a young guy posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube, the community didn’t like it and using a number of techniques the had figured out his name in 24 hours and the guy was arrested in 48 hours.

Unusually, moot recently spoke at TED explaining the ‘case for anonymity online‘ this 11 mins is a fascinating insight into an unusual yet gigantic online phenomena.

The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet “memes” it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power — and price — of anonymity. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 11:24)

Do you regularly visit 4Chan, or have you heard of it before? Is it good, bad or otherwise?

I had dinner last night with 3 people who worked in different digital agencies, each of us realised we had slightly different versions of project management at our agencies – from Agile(ish) to standard waterfall. We saw the pro’s and con’s of both and how each process could apply to different projects and clients differently.

Although, being the one who had experienced Agile (ish) I could relate to both, much more easily than they could. I realised that we do have a broad Waterfall approach to project management but in the early and late stages of the project a more Agile approach is used, which rapidly speeds up the project development.

I happened to stumble upon this Ted Talk this morning, which illustrates some really interesting principles and how they effect team success. You may have heard of the concept of the Marshmallow Challenge.

Some of the things I got out of it were…

• Having 1 plan with no trial & error was less successful
• Mixed skilled teams were more likely to succeed
• Kindergarten children naturally use Agile approach
• Kindergarten children were on average, nearly the most successful