We were extremely busy at work during November and December, so I spent a few hours over the holidays catching up on blogs which I follow.

Here are some of the better posts:

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Are you a robot? Introducing No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA Google do some very clever stuff sometimes
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: The four steps to appiness About pp deep links and how to use them
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google Public DNS and Location-Sensitive DNS Responses Akamai and Google’s partnership on DNS
• GDS blogs round-up | Government Digital Service Some further interesting links in there
• Who likes whom in the Middle East? Key players & relationships I’m a big fan of Information is Beautiful, and their art is becoming more important in the business world. This one is shows how to visualise a much more complex dataset
• IP TV Times: Face The Video Interesting comments and financial calculations about the war on user generated video
• (Subscription £) Breakfast briefing: Retail news on Asda, Next and retail prospects for 2015 “Asda chief executive Andy Clarke has said he has never seen the level of profitability fall so quickly in the supermarket sector as over the course of the last year” and Next’s Chief Executive commenting on the pricing emotions of Black Friday
• City Link’s army of self-employed workers count cost of business failure City Link’s failure is an symptom of consumers wanting free, or very cheap delivery costs. I commented on this article, which then spawned a further debate.
• Pixel Art Tutorial I’m a frustrated designer (the frustration is my lack of skills), but I love reading articles like this
• Virgin America Boarding Pass A clever observation on Virgin America making the most out of print-at-home-or-work boarding passes
• CIO: could you be the next Linwood? How John Linwood, the BBC’s former CTO, won an industrial tribunal for his sacking – essentially because he was hired to carry the can for a doomed project
• The definition of insanity? Why CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) and CIO (Chief Information Officers) don’t get on, and why it’s getting worse
• You’re building what?! More bad CIO decisions Buy vs build in the new digital world (clue: there needs to be an unyielding decision to build!)
• A CIO is only as good as their management team I’ve seen this a few times – a great CIO (or head of technology) in an organisation where the rest of the management team don’t want to understand the technology, and think the CIO can solve it alone. It doesn’t work.
• What can CIOs expect in 2015? Will more CIOs come from non-IT backgrounds? Some good thoughts in here
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Retailer banking: it’s just not the same What a great article about banks and retailers
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Will Bitcoin replace SWIFT? I commented on this post – Chris Skinner described some experiences of people’s Bitcoin perceptions which I’ve also seen
• Finextra: Bank of England turns to Twitter and Facebook to help set interest rates A good example of why social media is important to every industry
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Why is a strong payments system important? One of the great side effects of the recent payment disruptors is that we are going back to basics and asking fundamental questions about why we need payment systems.
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: Wrappers, replacers and reformers are all targeting banks A clever analysis on the three types of challengers in the financial services world today
• The Financial Services Club’s Blog: The criticality of humanity in banking digitally I commented on this post because Chris writes that digital banks need to ask some core questions. I believe the most important one is whether a digital bank can make more profit than a traditional one
• Quiz: what does the average UK household spend its money on? A light-hearted quiz about UK expenditure. I got 2 out of 10. I’ve printed out the results and will be testing my wife later…
• Business birth rate soars to near 10-year high Is this because we’re post-recession?
• Christmas computer game releases help inflation edge higher As a parent it doesn’t help that inflation is rising because computer games are rapidly increasing in price
• brainmail.nowandnext.com/brainmail_issue92.txt Always a good source of stats. Some good news for animals:

    1 in 8 adults in the UK are either vegetarian or vegan.
    Among people aged 16-24 the figure rises to 1 in 5.
    Ref: The Week (UK)

• Internet of things: Blackett review – Publications – GOV.UK I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m proud our government investigates leading edge technologies.