Working in the technology industry means I am constantly subjected to a barrage of assaults on the English language. But few make me shudder as much as “gamification”. 

“That’s not a real word!”, I hear you protest. And I’m with you on that (and so is my spell-checker). Unfortunately, many leading lights of the social networking scene don’t agree. 

Wikipedia describes gamification as the use of game design technique and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to ...

Read the article

Many years ago, I was in a bookshop waiting to pay for something (a book, I suppose). The people ahead of me in the queue were asking the assistant to search for a book, and she was failing to do it “because the system is down”. Nothing particularly strange about that – I can usually guarantee that any time I contact a call centre I will get some sort of apology for the system being down, or running slowly.

But what was particularly memorable about the bookshop incident was the way the shop assistant assumed that the customer would accept this as a valid reason for...

Read the article

Well, OK, maybe yours isn’t. But it has become very clear to me that many of the success stories you read about social projects in companies use the word “success” very generously.

I’ve come across two examples of this recently. I won’t name names because it wouldn’t be fair, and because I don’t believe that this phenomena is limited to these two examples.

Example 1:

A 6,000 user network which apparently reflects the 90/9/1 “Participation Inequality” effect described by Jakob Nielsen.

If 90% of the contribution to your network comes from ...

Read the article