In the last six months, we've seen uploads from mobile phones to YouTube jump 1700%; just since last Friday, when the iPhone 3GS came out, uploads increased by 400% a day.
And this one on the window itself:
I think touch to focus is the single most impressive feature of the iPhone 3GS. It's a beautifully simple way of giving you focus and exposure control without introducing a host of buttons and menus. And in terms of grabbing photos quickly in the field, it's exceptionally easy and intuative. The Olympics Site, Stratford from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.
Quite impressive, for a phone. If I had a Flip Mino rather than a Flip Mino HD, it would be right to feel rather threatened right now.
(Anyone interested in the Olympics site might find this blog an interesting read.)
Ah, the fuss around Digital Britain is growing, isn't it? And I don't just mean the report - I mean how Britain looks in a digital future. Events like a judge giving The Times approval to reveal the identity of an anonymous police blogger, or evidence being given to select committees seem to be marking battle lines between traditional media and the new breed of small, passionate upstarts.
I quite liked these posts written in reponse which give a glimpse into what the media future might actually look like. 853 cites existing south east London sites that need nurturing more than the traditional model:
There's already a variety of different types of community site - greenwich.co.uk has cash backing while volunteer-run Brockley Central has evolved quickly from its beginnings as a local blog. The daddies of them all are Brixton's Urban 75 - run for love - and London SE1, which also incorporates a print version of its local news site. These are what need nurturing, not the busted flushes based far from the areas they claim to serve. All have varying elements of local news, but all have the same stated commitment to their patches.
And Rick Waghorn covers some basic facts of new publishing in a marvellously entertaining rant:
Last time I looked, I had some c35,000 uniques, on average visiting three-and-a-half times a month and when they did, average 'engagement' time was the better part of seven minutes. Varied, by month; by the team's performance - January, when the transfer window opens, we have an absolute ball...
As will the football section of any 'ThisIsSomething' site... big, sticky content delivered online to a passionate, niche audience.
And once unbundled from the broad and damning brushstroke delivered by Ms Enders, those people deliver the kind of demographics advertisers like. I've got the British Army signed up on a 12-month deal; cos our core audience is 16-30 males. Bingo.
There's no rule that says the media that emerges from this transformative phase we're going through has to look anything like the media we have now.
I'm sure that for the majority of the country, events in Iran are not of grave interest, even if those desperate for CNN's Iran info couldn't get access to it. That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand. CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn't serve them very well anymore, and that can't be good for CNN.And it's worth checking out Richard Sambrook's analysis, too:
Social media can be a huge benefit in news coverage - not least it was one of the few ways for people in Iran to communicate with the west. But mediation by people who understand the story and don't have a particular agenda to advance is still needed to get a grasp of what has, and hasn't, actually happened and a measured sense of proportion. What was evident on Twitter this weekend was the accelerating effects of a continuous news cycle and appetite. Just as 24 hour news channels must stay on air with some kind of coverage, social media is even hungrier. And noise fills the void when events or facts can't.So. We know that people involved in breaking news can report in real time, from the ground of a major event. They don't need the mediation of journalists to spread their experience. And we know that people with access to those reports are reshaping their expectations of news organisations in the light of it. And we know that waiting hours before you respond to this is not going to meet audience expectations. So, what value can journalists bring to this situation? Ignoring it just isn't an option.
But Twitter client development is moving even faster than mobile platform development, with a new version of Tweetdeck for desktops and a brand, sparkling new iPhone version realeased this morning. Tweetdeck is many people's preferred Twitter app on the desktop, if only for it's ability to create groups and then view multiple different stream at once. It's major weakness has been the fact that you can only manage one Twitter account in it at a time. Well, that weakness is gone with the new release. I'm now tracking both of my active Twitter accounts at the same time, and that's a huge improvement in its usability.