Using Web 2.0, Steve Jobs and the iPhone as prime examples, Bruce Nussbaum in Businessweek argues that rather than just employing designers, CEOs should be designers.

Over the last few months we have been working with the search engine marketing and optimisation company Latitude on a variety of projects. One of the most unusual was a brief to commission photography for two meeting rooms and the reception area in offices on New Oxford Street, London. Latitude wanted something to make their offices more interesting, to stand out from the typical. They didn’t just want the usual bland corporate art - they wanted something bold and unique to them - something that reflected that their offices lie between Soho and Bloomsbury. They didn’t want the usual postcard style images of these grand old areas of London, they wanted something that paid homage to the true rich character of the areas.

To this end we spoke to Fiona Campbell, an award winning photographer who we felt would do well to eke out the unusual and different. She spent a good amount of time researching the idea, and decided to talk to some of the characters of the area. (more…)

Wordpress, a wildly popular open-source blogging and simple content management tool, is 4 years old. Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer, but very much not the owner or only developer, discusses the development of Wordpress and people’s expectations of him being a ‘Web 2.0 trailblazer’.

Twitter has recently been taking off, as Jack Schofield notes on the Guardian Technology Blog. Twitter enables groups of people to be in constant contact with their social group by sending tiny text messages to the Twitter site, such as “I’m getting on a train to Hampstead” or “I’m watching the football”. If you still don’t understand what I’m on about, take a look at this graphic on Mashable. Frankly, it sounds like my worst nightmare - even worse than having a Blackberry. I am in contact enough with the world through this blog, Messenger, iChat, email, the phone, Skype and even when I actually talk face-to-face with people. That said, I would not be surprised if this time next year I’ll be texting to Twitter from my Blackberry about how much I was mistaken.

“Poor usability is the main reason behind the limited adoption of Google’s services such as Gmail and Google Talk, according to Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo.” Computing.co.uk discusses how removing features encourages user adoption.

Yahoo! Pipes, a truly innovative, but complex, web application was launched recently and has gained a lot of attention on the web. Read/WriteWeb has a great article exploring the ideas behind it - and the way the web can be seen as a database.

Small, cleverly made and grandiose Web 2.0 ‘propaganda’ video that captures the excitement of the internet past and present.

The art of writing news headlines is changing due to SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. There will be less ‘Gotcha‘-style headlines and more literal lines like ‘British Navy sink Argentine warship’ that search engines can understand. This exposes a deep difference between print and television’s strong visual/design element and the string reliance on text on the web. The visual element of news would be a shame to lose on the web after it’s long history offline. It will be interesting to see the future of search in terms of video and photography, and a better understanding of meta-data so it can rely less on the blunt instrument of headlines and pure content text.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! discusses how web communities scale. Yahoo! should know after all, as they’ve spent a fortune creating and buying a plenty of social sites. Found via Subtraction.

Most companies will never have to deal with the kind of traffic MySpace gets - they now get up to 40 billion page views a month (although the meaning of these numbers are contested in various quarters). This is the story of how they technically dealt with such growth.

Our friends at Provokateur have started blogging - they’ve even managed to get Gordon Brown to leave a comment. Maybe.

Business Week discusses the influence of Apple as a design standard for other companies. See Nintendo, Motorola, Microsoft, BMW, Adidas, Lacie… and most companies we come across.

Everyone else is talking about it, so we will too. Here are our 12 initial small observations…

1. It appears that it has a beautiful, flexible and refined UI.
2. It makes all other phones look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
3. It makes the iPod’s interface look clunky, awkward and unrefined.
4. That said, in reality, making a call, starting a text message and entering my calendar on my Sony Ericsson k800 is efficient and fast. It will be interesting to see how fast the iPhone will be to do the same.
5. The iPhone doesn’t offer any actual features that other phones don’t already offer. Will the interface and ease-of-use sway people to switch to the iPhone. It worked with the iPod, but lots of people bought Motorola’s RAZR despite its’ interface.
6. Your fingers are going to be moving and tapping a lot, rather than sticking mainly to a small area like most phone’s joystick. Will this become annoying?
7. The virtual QWERTY keyboard used for typing looks possibly awkward without real buttons.
8. In the future I’d like a tiny Apple phone that does the basics well, and an iPhone without the phone element (i.e. a very slick iPod).
9. Developers should be given a clear path for making applications for it. Apple is currently saying that this won’t happen, but a range of games, VOIP and Office-type applications immediately spring to mind as great features they may not deign to make, but would be a natural fit for the iPhone.
10. While much of the functionality and interaction has been patented - it will be interesting to see how Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, etc. will react to this. Can they in time before the iPhone launch? This is much bigger, richer and arguably better competition than the iPod’s original competitors.
11. The iPhone’s web browser illustrates how well mobile interfaces are beginning to deal with pages that are larger than their screen. Designing a website for all shapes and sizes is not necessarily something we will always need to do.
12. We want one.

Brandchannel has some suggestions for how brands should deal with bad publicity online in blogs, forums and elsewhere.

FoxLand has had a fantastic first 5 months. We’d like to thank all our clients, friends and anyone that has helped, advised or warned us. We’ve done a whole pile of work, had very little time to work on our website, met a load of great people and been generally surprised at how much has happened in such a short time. In particular we’d like to mention Provokateur, Daikin, Current Biodata, Zebra Crossing, Faculty of 1000, Olivant, Itochu, Attiva, NHS Alchemy, Macmillan Cancer Support, Spy Design, Fortismere School, Copper, Coochi, Olly Blackburn, Chloë Lederman, Fiona Campbell, SU, Martin Beckett, Scholz & Friends, Leslie Mello, Jack Dunning and anyone else we may have forgotten (apologies). Here’s to the next (already very busy) 12 months.