Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo. A bit of background over at the Adaptive Path blog.

I dig this infographic+voiceover explanation of two different approaches to brand. I think it highlights the need to focus on people as opposed to message, which of course gels with my line of thinking…

The only thing that I’d add is that perhaps there’s more to the “designed brand” than just “look & feel” – organisations still need to understand what they are aiming for in order to engage their people around those ideals.

In this sense I think the design of a brand is still a little bit “inside out”, although I think this should be informed by the people outside the organisation to ensure that it’s aligned with their expectations and motivations.

I don’t think Josh or Brandon are suggesting otherwise, just pointing this out as it’s not made clear in the video itself.

Thankfully the Eskimos recorded the event so I don’t need to do a write up ;) [Note: the link in that post is currently incorrect - correct link below the vid in this post]

Although Michael’s talk focused on offline organising, it was still inspiring and informative to hear, even for an online geek like me.

Check it out:

DE Talks: Michael Masserman and Grassroots Community Organisation on the Obama Campaign from Digital Eskimo on Vimeo.

This TED video hit my iPhone over the weekend – more info at the Siftables page and on David Merrill’s page at MIT. I found the concept engaging enough, but the applications that the David, Jeevan and their collaborators have developed are exceptional.

The excitement I feel around this technology is similar to what I felt when I first saw Jeff Han present the multi-touch interface at TED. It didn’t take long for Han’s ideas to reach the mainstream through the iPhone. I wonder how long before we’ll see Siftables translated into a commercial product?

The solution is quite simple (for anyone that’s comfortable with a little PHP) – it requires a very small update to the wp-includes/formatting.php file. In the wpautop function, there is a line that starts with $allblocks = '(?:table|thead| (it’s line 66 in the file that ships with WordPress 2.3.2).

The fix requires updating the line to begin with $allblocks = '(?:object|table|thead|.

A simple fix, but frustrating if you don’t know where to look. I’m not sure why this hasn’t been fixed in the WordPress code-base, but hopefully this simple patch will help if you’re experiencing this problem.

And don’t forget – you’ll have to apply this patch each time you upgrade WordPress.