Blog guardian

Corporal Lachlan MacNeil of the 16 Air Brigade is taking part in a unique project run by the Guardian. He’ll be blogging his way through the next six months via text and video, mainly to give us “back home” the chance to see what life is like for a British squaddy in in Afghanistan, but also to give a voice to some of his troops so they can communicate - albeit one way - with their loved ones.

I’m more than a little intrigued to see how it pans out over the coming weeks and months. Other than a headcam I’m not entirely sure what the Guardian have kitted him out with, nor how the pressures of life under fire will affect the regularity of his posts, but if nothing else it should prove an interesting experiment.

I doubt we’ll see other social media tools put to great use in the Army: the idea of troops twittering their current location is probably unlikely.

Social media websites need to make money to live. Facebook does it by showing you targeted ads based on keywords of interest, but Phorm, the new centre for unmitigated digital evil want to explode that model and use it across the Web so that targeted advertising follows you everywhere. The Guardian say they won’t use it, but beyond what some are referring to as an illegal invasion of privacy, could a system like this work on an opt-in basis?

Attendees of the Birmingham SXSWi brain dump discussed the merits of Amazon’s recommendations, of which I’m a big fan, and to which my bank balance has fallen prey on many occasions. So how about a single website where all the buying decisions you want to make public can be discovered by others?

What if, when you sign up for a new ecommerce website you tick a box to say “share my buying decisions with x” (where x is a cool name for such an app), and when you buy your product, the site talks to the x API which records the sale and adds it to the stuff you like? Once you’ve received and played with your new product you can return to x (or to the original site) and rate the product very simply with a thumbs up or thumbs down rating.

When you login to a social networking site (or any other kind of site where you provide your email address), that site talks to x which brings back a load of tags which the site matches against its list of ads. It displays the ads, you see something you like, you buy the product. That purchase goes back into x and the cycle continues.

There’s an idea, now go and build it!