UserDriven

Userdriven Product Development

"You have to love this sweet, satisfying machine," wrote David Pogue in his New York Times review of the Squeezebox. The sweet machine in question is a $300 device that lets audiophiles take digital music from their computer hard drives or from Internet-radio streams, and play it with impressive clarity on high-end speakers in their living rooms. "Its creators have sweated so many details, you want to hand them a towel."

Ah, but who actually did that sweating? Not just the handful of engineers on the payroll at Slim Devices, the startup that makes the Squeezebox. The player, which has sold an impressive 50,000 units, is largely the brainchild of its customers around the world, who have done much of the vital engineering and design work--for free. They've been motivated by their passions--for great audio, for cool products, for the art of engineering--and also by the satisfaction of being admired and relied on by a global community of their peers."

(Ears Wide Open - Slim Devices - Open Source - Technology)

del.icio.us tagometer

Nice, but not yet fully baked... del.icio.us tagometer

A little more baked: FeedFlare Gets Even More Del.icio.us

UserDriven Branding

"BuzzMetrics maintains that blogs and their attendant message boards and forums are tuning forks for consumer sentiment that threaten to upend traditional branding efforts. An influential blogger can undermine a brand faster than any grapevine ever before encountered in the marketplace, as the computer maker Dell discovered. The company’s level of service and quality was denounced by bloggers this year, and the complaints found broad exposure when one popular media site added its critical voice.

At the same time, positive word of mouth magnified by the Internet can be a boon, as Toyota discovered with its hybrid Prius sedan, which has been praised by admirers on sites created just for that purpose.

“There are winners and losers,” said Paul M. Rand, a partner and the global chief development and innovation officer at Ketchum Public Relations. “Companies adapt or go to the bottom. Consumer-generated content on the Internet is a complete disruptor. It forces companies to work smarter and listen harder. Consumer-generated content on the Internet is a complete disruptor. It forces companies to work smarter and listen harder."

(Brands for the Chattering Masses - New York Times)

Leslie Louise Harpold

Leslie - goodbye and thank you and may it all come true for you, the thread that runs so true.

Giving Holiday Cards

The power of thinking differently about holiday cards: Seth's Blog: The check is in the mail

Second Thoughts on Second Life

Second Life: A story too good to check - Valleywag

The end of World of Warcraft?

The lameness of World of Warcraft—and what to do about it. - By Chris Dahlen - Slate Magazine

NYTimes gets with the times

"The New York Times has decided to let users post stories directly from their site to Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine. As of Monday, the paper will embed links to all three sites to most of their online stories... Although you could always manually add The Times stories to news sharing sites such as Digg and Newsvine before, the capability to do it directly from the story means that The Times is paying attention to where its stories are shared, who reads them, and, more importantly, what they are saying about them. Currently, The Times offers limited ability to comment on its stories. The world of readers’ comments can be brutal (believe me, I know this first hand), and by dealing directly with the sites that facilitate this, The Times exposes itself to far more reader interaction than they have ever had before." (Techcrunch - New York Times Surrenders To Social News)

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From the-next-legal-minefield department

Techdirt: Is Linking Or Embedding Infringing Content Illegal?