Given the immense popularity of social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.is, Digg and Reddit, it’s somewhat surprising that the larger Internet portal sites have not made serious efforts at providing the same sort of socially-driven, crowdsourced nerve centers that could potentially create millions of daily page views - and the accompanying advertising dollars.

Google Bookmarks has not really caught on, and Yahoo Bookmarks seems more like a follower playing catch-up than the latest cool place to find out what others are reading.

Microsoft is finally getting into the game. A few days ago, John Martin, Microsoft’s Lead Evangelist for Server & Tools Online, announced that a new service called Social Bookmarks will be released as a preview in the coming weeks (note that the word “beta” is not used).

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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see this?

There are a lot of methods available for eliciting brand associations from consumers but few as instantly revealing as the Freudian-like free association. Since consumer behavior is such an integral part of creating a brand’s promise and marketing strategy, using a little psychology to see what the first descriptive word is that comes to mind can be very instructive to marketers. Companies spend a lot of money on marketing, but ultimately, a brand is what people think it is.

Brandtags.net shows randomly selected, well-known logos and asks users to come up with the first descriptive word or phrase that comes to mind.

Many top brands should take note – there are some pretty unfavorable associations (and as this is online and anonymous – many cases of potty mouth!).

I thought I would open by commenting on the UK’s 2012 Olympic logotype, designed by the renowned branding agency Wolff Olins. Here is a logo that in my opinion is an example of an unattractive piece of design. No doubt creatives spent weeks or months developing it but I suspect that they wrote the sales talk to fit the logo, not designed the logo to fit the event! The jury is out on that. But since all the hype, this has become an extremely recognisable and individual brand for the UK Olympics in 2012.

So why has a piece of bad design - actually quite ugly and not representative, in my opinon, of the Olympic games- become so recognisable? My belief is that it is due to the hype surrounding it. Without the hype and PR, this logo is nothing. As a brand it is going nowhere - as dead as the Norwegian Blue parrot. What does this prove? It proves that a brand without marketing, without PR and without notoriety, is just simply an image with no association. Just a mark on a page.

In conclusion bad logo, great hype - memorable brand. Something to think about?

WordPress 2.5 was released 30 days ago, and its first upgrade, version 2.5.1, followed 27 days later. Because WordPress is one of the most (if not the most) popular blogging solutions for individuals and businesses who host their own blogs, this release has been significant.

The overhaul to the WordPress backend is extensive; it’s easy to get lost at first and anyone who has used previous versions of WordPress for some time will instantly understand the importance of usability in design. Much of what my eyes remember seeing and my hands remember clicking has moved. Thirty days later, this still bugs me to some degree, though much less so. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, NTT DoCoMo announced that it had a fresh new logo, and that this new design will become the public face of the company from July 1. I hadn’t been aware that DoCoMo was in any desperate need of a new logo, but given that the company has recently fallen below 50% of the mobile telephony market share in Japan, getting a facelift seems like an effective way to generate PR and buzz. What current problems with the DoCoMo brand is the new logo intended to fix? Speaking at a press conference, President and CEO Masao Nakamura had this to say: Read the rest of this entry »