Here’s a couple of posts which become more useful when you read them in concert:
That’s the poacher and the gamekeeper covered…
Recently in Publishing Category
A neat quote that encapsulates where the divide between new and social media lies:
Adriana says: "I divide between old and new media on the one hand and social media on the other hand. New media is just digitalised old media. Social media are tools like blogs, tagging, podcasts, wikis etc that facilitate communication. It is by its nature interactive and I especially like the social aspect of it."
Kristine Lowe, quoting Adriana Lukas.
I've been following Darryl of 853's blogging for years now under his various guises, and once in a while, he comes out with some absolute corkers. This has been one of those weeks.
Yesterday he posted a great dissection of the, uh, questionable choice that the News Shopper, the south east London paper, made for its letter of the week:
Yes, that'll be the one that calls gays "perverted". That's worth a prize, isn't it? I wonder what Webster's Pen Shop thinks about its products being used to reward such an unpleasant little rant? It's someone else's opinion, but it's the News Shopper's choice to reward that opinion with a prize.
But what makes this even more entertaining is the response of whomever is behind the @newsshopper Twitter account, as detailed in his latest post:
@darryl1974 You are so way off with so many of the things in your blog entry, particularly regarding our website, it's impossible to begin.
News Shopper
NewsShopper
Hint: that's not the way to handle criticism.
Update: I think this post hits the nail on the head about what journos on the News Shopper probably think is going on - and why they're wrong. Stirring up controversy like this is not good journalism.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Last night, it pushed out an update to its iWork office apps suite, which added the ability to create ePub documents to its Pages word processing and page layout app. ePub, for those who don't know, is the open ebook standard that lies behind the iBooks store on the iPad and iPhone, as well as numerous other book readers.
That makes the entry cost for ebook creation under £60, according to the latest price for iWork '09 Retail
on Amazon. You can sell the ePub format directly, and have people be able to use it in iBooks or any other reader that supports the standard. Or you could sell it directly through the iBooks store. Of course, ePub makers were already out there, but the general opinion was that they were clunky and hard to use. Pages, as you might expect from Apple, is a very slick and intuitive piece of software.
on Amazon. You can sell the ePub format directly, and have people be able to use it in iBooks or any other reader that supports the standard. Or you could sell it directly through the iBooks store. Of course, ePub makers were already out there, but the general opinion was that they were clunky and hard to use. Pages, as you might expect from Apple, is a very slick and intuitive piece of software. The eBook landscape just changed.
I've long found that posting in irritation can get me into trouble, so I've sat on this post for most of the week. But really, I've had enough now. The social media backlash is in full swing, and, frankly, if you didn't see this coming, you haven't been paying attention.
It started with linkbait expert Techcrunch poster Paul Carr shutting down his social media presence, but really gained momentum when Leo Laporte of the TWiT network realising that the majority of his microblogging activity was having no significant impact whatsoever.
Inevitably, most web tech is built by (surprise!) technologists, who are themselves often attracted to shiny new things over the established things of the past. That cadre of bloggers-turned-social media gurus who once sold us on the virtues of blogging have been flitting from service to service in search of the next big thing that they can evangelise. But increasingly, they've been wrong about the coming success stories. From FriendFeed (sold to Facebook, largely abandoned) to Google Wave, they've been trying to tempt us to follow them to the New Thing and abandon the Old Thing. And most people haven't obliged.
Indeed, as Alan points out, pretty much what these "leading voices" are doing is reflecting what less obsessive neophiles have been doing since the start: building on the existing utility of older services, rather than replacing the old with the new. And even then, people will only use those services that they see a clear, simple value in. FriendFeed and Wave were geek tools, not ones that would see mainstream adoption. And a good proportion of those web neophiles have no antenna at all when it comes to sensing what the mainstream will enjoy.
Continue reading The Dangers of Web Neophilia.
The observant might have noticed the arrival of the new, official, Tweet button and a more compact Facebook Like button on this here blog a few days ago. I tend to use OM&HB as a testing ground for things we could roll out onto our blogs at RBI, and in that spirit, I added the buttons to one of the lower traffic Caterer blogs, just to see how it went.
As it turns out, not too bad at all:
Admittedly, the fact that it was a post about the mighty Pizza Burger (mmmm…Pizza Burger) probably helped.
(Aside: One of the handy things about running our blogs on Movable Type is the ease of dropping stuff like this into the templates and republishing, just changing one of the hundreds of blogs we run off the same install. Tempting and lovely though the plugin route is, it involved testing, rolling it out to the pool of servers, updating it, and warning everybody publishing blogs off the server pool that a new plugin is going in. )
Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be offering the buttons to each of our markets, and it'll be interesting to see how much effect they have, if any, on traffic volumes. Everyone seems to be using them these days, but do they really have an impact?
Judith Townend, she who has given up life at journalism.co.uk for PhDing, is running a survey around media law and online publishers/bloggers. Help academia flourish by filling it out, if you'd be so kind...
I had cause to visit the brand new Apple Store in Covent Garden this morning; my AppleTV had developed the blinking amber light of death, and a visit to the Genius Bar was in order. 20 minutes later, it had been swapped out for a new one, and I was off to the Procter Street office. And I was happy. I love my AppleTV. I love being able to watch home movies easily on my HD TV, to be able to buy the video content I want, download it and watch it, and enjoy video podcasts from the comfort of my sofa. However, I know that such download/streaming services haven't hit the mainstream, yet.
However, the feeds I'd been catching up with on my iPad were full of the news that a brand new version of the AppleTV, to be called the iTV, may well be on its way, based on the iPhone OS (or iOS, as we should be calling it now), with apps and all. And that, in turn, reminded me of the Google TV effort on its way. Connected TV is here, and every effort is being made to push it mainstream. And what are the consequences of that?
Publishing, as a business, has been pretty slow to adapt to the mobile internet age. We've built entire corporate infrastructures based on two-channel publishing: print and the web. But devices that can access the internet are proliferating rapidly, and I suspect we're moving towards a genuinely multi-channel age. And are we anywhere near ready to cope with some of our content being on internet-enables TVs?
Clearly the BBC is thinking about this, but then it has something of a head-start in the TV area. But it is, itself, a content company, that's trying to adapt to a multi-platform strategy, just like the rest of us. And here's the idea they're pushing towards:
You can find the whole thinking behind what they're planning on the About The BBC blog.
Now, clearly some of these moves are being driven by the BBC's strategy review and the need to drive down costs. But I cna't help find the clarity of what they're doing appealing - start to reorganise around content types rather than output types (TV and radio are still in the chart, but you can think of them as video and audio entertainment content, and the pattern becomes clear).
As the devices that people use to access content start to diversify, this seems like the only sane approach, otherwise the days of the web team fighting with the print team over a story will seem like a happy, bygone era, as multiple channel teams each fight over a story.,..
