A Weekly Round-Up of Stories from the WWW

This weeks Xava blog is a collection of the 4 stories that made me think the most. I found that these stories engaged me at different levels and desrved to be shared for different reasons. The stories range from the scary yet exciting to ranting to philosophising. These are purely my thoughts on 4 topics that are out there for you to read. I would encourage a discussion on any of the topics as writing a long blog is not the answer but engagement with my readers is.

• Irelands Digital Economy is still largely ignored by Irish businesses

  
  Image taken from a snap shot of the Dana Strong Video at Irish Digital Economy uptake
  Perhaps one of the most scary things I read this week has to be this article on Silicon Republic regarding the state of the Irish Digital Economy uptake.

  The total size of the digital prize is just under €12bn which is enormous for this economy.

  Dana Strong of UPC states that transacting online is not just about selling to the customer online but that it includes buying online or keeping an eye on the supply chain online.
  
  If the current trend continues and the Irish consumer continues to buy online but from site from outside Ireland, the Irish economy is set to lose out on a potential bounty worth €12B!

  If you could have a small slice of that figure, wouldnt that make your life extremely comfortable? So take the first step and bePresent on the internet with a website. But dont stop there, work on getting a proper digital marketing strategy into your business plan from Day 0. If you are a small business just starting out, talk to Xava to see how we can partner together and work on a digital strategy for your business.

• WordPress Tricks

  Have you ever wanted to setup wordpress theme templates or child theme templates and thought about writing smaller parts of a template so you can reuse them everywhere? Have you figured out how to do it? If not, take a look at this article on get_template_part.

  This article is an excellent summary of how to use get_template_part() to modularise your WordPress template and how you can exploit it to make your template truly personalised.

• Internet Explorer 8 – WHY?

  I have been working with a lot of clients for their website design. Halfway through the design phase, the client will complain that the website is not looking the way they thought it would on thier computer. Inevitably, I find that they are using the dreaded Internet Explorer 8 web browser. And guess what, the website CSS has to be rewritten to fit the archaic limits of IE8.

  While I accept that Microsoft is not dropping support for IE8, companies like Google will not support it across their platforms. So why do people still use IE8 – I have no idea why as it does not support CSS3 or HTML5 (partial support only). To truly get modern and effective websites, people have to stop using IE8 and make our lives, as webdesigners, a little bit simpler.

• Socialstructing – What is that?

  In The Nature Of The Future: Dispatches From The Socialstructed World, Marina Gorbis argues we are moving away from the depersonalized world of institutional production toward a new economy built on social connections and rewards–a process she calls socialstructing. Along with the exciting opportunities to create new kinds of social organizations–systems for producing not merely goods but also meaning, purpose, and greater good–there is a possibility that this form of creation will bring new challenges, new inequities, and new opportunities for abuse. We need to understand the potential disadvantages of socialstructing as well, if we are to minimize the potential pitfalls. The following is an excerpt from the book, available April 9.

  New economies built on social connections – I think that this statement is a bit obvious. The human society has been built around social intractions – thats why it is called society. I know that the digital age and social media is all about building online social connections but we have been doing it for centuries. The digital media just diminished geographic boundaries.

  Towards that end, we need to understand and exploit digital media but word of mouth, social interactions and reputations have been the cornerstones of human civilisations and growth for millenia. It is not a new thing that has suddenly hit us with the advent and growth of the internet.

  We talk about digital reputations being the currency of the future but reputations have been our currency for centuries.

  Genghis Khan will forever be known as a fearsome warrior – well before we had electricity

  Mahatma Gandhi will forever be known as the pacifist, strong and peace loving leader that he was – well before we had the internet

  Sir Isaac Newton will forever be remembered for his upside down thinking (for his time) – well before we had social media

  I think that we have an excellent oppurtunity in the digital age to expand our horizons beyond our geographical boundaries and share with people from different worlds but to state that we have a new concept of socialstructing is taking it a bit too far.

  Read the full blog article at – Your Reputation will be the Currency of the Future