July 2010 Archives

The Bad:

KPMG has found that 81% of UK "would go elsewhere for content if a previously free site we use frequently began charging". Only 19% would be willing to pay in the UK, while globally (the same research looked at consumer behaviour in a range of countries) 43% of consumers are willing to pay for digital content.

Retrofitting a paywall? Probably not gonna work.

The Good:

They are also more willing to have data collected if it would result in lower content costs. "48 percent of UK consumers would be willing to accept profile tracking, up from 35 percent in the 2008 survey." Publishers and marketers need to take care though as 90% of consumers also expressed concern about their privacy and security online.

Interesting possibilities there, especially in niches, if explored with care...

The quotes above are both from Kevin Anderson's rather deeper analysis, which is well worth reading.

Time for some links:

• One of the most consistent themes I hear when talking to journalists around the country is frustration with the web publishing CMS they have to deal with (especially if they've ever used any blog platform). In that light, this post about the BBC's new web CMS makes for fascinating reading, both through what they're doing and through the fact they blogged about it publically. I suspect that a culture that allows such blogging is laikely to produce a better piece of kit...
• Another trend I see amongst some journalists is an almost obsessive pride in not understanding technology. Kevin makes an interesting case for a more data-centric view of journalism that should give pause to such folks.
• Martin's look at how well (or more often, not) digital coverage of the World Cup has survived down the years is thought-provoking. There's a surprising amount of value in them there archives...
• And Nature's using OpenSocial. I'm very interested in this, and you're probably not, but it's my blog so "nyah".

I saw a lot of buzz overnight about Apple not allowing magazine subscriptions on the iPad, and OMG how is the iPad going to save us now? Steve, you have betrayed us!

Except, well, that's simply not true. You can buy subscriptions to publications on the iPad - I have ones to The Times, The Spectator and a photography magazine. There are various routes for selling those subscriptions, and one that's specifically disallowed. Here's John Gruber to explain:

Here's the difference, I think. With Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, users set up and create their accounts on the web, not within the iOS apps. The WSJ app requires a subscription that doesn't go through iTunes, but you create, pay for, and manage that subscription on the web. Judging from Kafka's description of the Sports Illustrated situation, it sounds like Time tried to add its own direct billing subscription system within the Sports Illustrated app itself.

Gruber makes the very valid point that all this OMG! PANIC! would go away if Apple would just clarify its rules, though...

The good people at journalism.co.uk have published a short list of who they think (with some input from their Twitter followers) are the journalism and media innovators of 2010. This list, which I suspect is a response the very boardroom-heavy Media Guardian 100 list from a couple of weeks back. 

There's some absolutely great people on the list, including several I count as friends, and, helpfully, they've included a Twitter list of the people involved, so you can follow them.

Oh, and I'm deeply flattered to be included in the list, in what I can only imagine was some sort of clerical error. ;-)

Handy little addition to Youtube I spotted the other day: you can now specify exactly the width (or height) of an embed code for a YouTube video. This has been niggling me since the service upped the default width to wider than the column size of this blog. I had to manually work out the height and width and modify the embed code, which was a complete pain.

Simple addition, but it'll make life so much easier.

In the future, all news will be reported with unlikely CGI animation...

I’ve been very busy with community-related stuff since I got back from my hols.

For one thing, I’ve also been taking a long, hard look at the attempts of gaming company Blizzard to retrofit social networking concepts to its massive online game World of Warcraft. You can see my analysis of that over on my WoW blog, but be aware that it’s written in a very gamer-centric way. I think it’s an interesting model of the dangers of getting community wrong as a corporate entity, in a way that many publishers do when they try to add “community pixie dust” to their existing content sites.

Talking of retro-fitting, I’m finding the efforts to recreate blogging in a social network’s image fascinating. Six Apart have been banging on about this for a while, and the new Typepad is very much a blog-centric social network. But it’s been displaced in traffic terms by one of the new social-centric blogging platforms, Tumblr. Posterous is going though huge growth, too. (Rather ironically, in many ways these services resemble evolved version of Livejournal, the very first blog platform I ever used, back in 2001).

I’ve got a gut feeling that the wheel of innovation is turning away from the self-install blog platforms (of which WordPress is the predominant example) towards the hosted services. Posts like this are becoming more and more common:

Personal yak-shaving over the weekend was mostly tidying up a bunch of non-SVNed WordPress installs that were woefully out-of-date (for various values of woeful) that were busy guilt-tripping me. Next time, it’s hosted software all the way (Tumblr, I’m looking at you).

And has been interesting seeing Posterous rather cheekily marketing itself against most existing blog platforms with posts and e-mails like this:

We’d be crazy to declare war on WordPress. It’s the most popular blog platform in the world — gazillions of bloggers have custom WP installations with plugin functionality that Posterous won’t touch anytime soon.

But WordPress isn’t for everyone, a fact supported by the thousands of WordPress users who have switched to Posterous in the last two weeks. So we thought we’d let some of them tell you why they switched.

I’m seeing more and more interesting new launches on hosted platforms, and I have some thoughts I want to explore about how publishers can work alongside the networked communities on these services (hello, New Yorker on Tumblr. And to test and explore that, I’ve been busy signing up for, and reactivating accounts:

One Man’s Social Blogging

You can find me on:

• Tumblr – TinTumblr
• Posterous – One Man & His Posterous
• Typepad – Roaming Originals

Feel free to follow me on any of those networks if you play there, too…

Google thinks fashion bloggers understand social media better than those covering other industries. So one of the world's most powerful companies is tapping the brains of some of the world's most powerful bloggers in order to get a better sense of how they consume and use media. Google is calling the program GStyle.