Amusing Ourselves | Content blog

Joost headed for the dead pool

john, July 1, 2009

It would seem that online video site Joost is heading for the deadpool (in my experience the adoption of a white label strategy is generally an acceptance of defeat.)

Michael Arrington’s analysis of Joost’s failings focusses on the personalities and the technology, and he may well be right, however, I think he misses the main reason why Joost failed - the content simply wasn’t good enough. If they had great content, I’d have held my nose and kept running the client on my machine. As it was, I deleted it after finding that there was almost nothing I wanted to watch.

Arrington compares Joost with YouTube, which to my mind is not entirely fair as the sites aren’t really comparable, however, it is fair to say that YouTube users overlook the technical limitations of the platform in order to get to the content, and as Arrington rightly points out, YouTube has benefitted greatly from allowing users to embed video.

Anyway, hindsight’s a marvellous thing, and I’m sure it won’t be too long before the founders of Skype and Kazaa return with something compelling. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if it has more to do with communications and less to do with content.

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Twitter, content sharing, chewed postcards and the Dresden Dolls

john, June 26, 2009

Web metrics analyst Hitwise reports on the rise of Twitter in the UK. It’s now the 38th most popular site in the UK with a 22-fold annual increase in traffic, etc, etc. None of which should come as much of a surprise to anyone with half an interest in digital media.

However, what for my money is more interesting is Hitwise’s analysis of Twitter’s clickstream traffic, which reveals that 55.9% of clicks out from Twitter go to content sites - blogs, social networks, news sites, etc., with only 9.5% of Twitter traffic going to e-commerce sites. (Google in the UK sends 30.7% of its traffic to e-commerce sites, while Facebook sends 14.7%).

It would seem that for the moment, that Twitter is, amongst other things, a significant content sharing service.

And this chimes with my own experience: at a very rough guess I’d say about 70% of my Tweets share content - either my own blog posts, retweets, or things I think my friends might like.

This doesn’t mean that links to content predominate on Twitter, as I’m sure you’re aware, Twitter is full of ‘Social Media experts’ and ‘SEO gurus’ pumping out direct marketing tweets with links to e-commerce sites. But that’s the beauty of Twitter - unless I follow them, they can’t market to me, and I won’t see, let alone click, on their links. (Personally speaking, I think there’s a group of about 100,000 social media experts all following one another, and sending links to one another that they don’t click on. A massive social media circle jerk in other words.)

Which is not to say that you can’t make money off Twitter. I came across this post about making money from Twitter today about the enterprising singer of American ‘dark cabaret’ act the Dresden Dolls, in which they claim to have made $20,000 on Twitter in the last month, by, amongst other things, chewing postcards and selling them to the highest bidder.

Try and explain that to your average social media expert.

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Tweetminster - aggregating political conversations

john, June 23, 2009

I discovered Tweetminster yesterday as I followed the election of the new Speaker of the House. Tweetminster is a relatively simple idea - it aggregates and publishes Parlimentarians’ tweets (though it would seem that the eventual winner, John Bercow, doesn’t yet Tweet).

And there’s value in this, because without spending time following every Twittering politician (assuming you know their user info) there isn’t an easy way to aggregate this kind of info in Twitter.

Personally speaking, I think we’ll see more places publishing aggregated discussions - pulling together feeds from across the web, possibly filtering them and republishing them in aggregated form.

(On a side note, I really love the site design and UI, which is not something I say much about many sites associated with Government.)

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Google IO - Canvas, Web Apps and HTML 5

john, June 18, 2009

The Keynote address at Google IO outlines Google’s view of technical developments on the web. Which, if you can’t be bothered to watch the video, is all about HTML5, pixel level control of the browser with the Canvas tag, Javascript, CSS and the DOM, bringing the power of native apps to the browser, video tags, SVGs and Web Workers.

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Newspaper aggregation and the political demise of the English squirearchy

john, June 17, 2009

I recently did some consultancy work on the shift to digital for a large newspaper, which is why I was particularly interested in this recent post about content aggregation and the newspaper business by Nico Flores at On Demand Media. The crux of Nico’s argument (one to which I subscribe) is that the real value of newspapers is their ability to aggregate content, something that wasn’t necessarily apparent when they were confined to print.

However, as Nico points out elsewhere, there are some powerful forces that make it difficult for newspapers to adopt a new aggregation-based model, in which they produce only a small amount of content themselves.

Personally speaking, I think there’s an additional problem, i.e. newspapers are much more than content distribution businesses, they’re an important part of our structure of governance - editors, journalists and proprietors have had significant power and influence over our political and cultural lives. Newspapers are powerful institutions - which is probably why their fate is of so much interest, and why the move to a more open and inclusive model proves so difficult.

In the late part of the nineteenth century Tory grandee and serial Prime Minister Lord Salisbury dismissed Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail as “a paper written for office boys by office boys.” Five years later those same recently enfranchised office boys swept Lloyd George’s reformist Liberal party to power.

A similar epochal change is happening to our media and if newspaper businesses don’t embrace change and find ways of creating open platforms and including new voices, then they will suffer the same political fate as the squirearchy represented by Lord Salisbury.

I’m not suggesting that any of this is easy, or that newspapers will suddenly become irrelevant, but I do think that there will be significant benefits for the content providers (be they broadcasters or newspapers) in the UK that embrace a content aggregation model.

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The Guardian datastore

john, June 12, 2009

The Guardian Datastore is an excellent resource, where editors source and collate data (often as Google docs spreadsheets), which readers can then use to create their own mashups and visualizations. Amongst other things, they currently have the latest data on MP’s expenses, world booze consumption and two centuries of bio diversity data from Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbriger explains why data and the Guardian Datastore matters.

Also, the Guardian Datastore is running a competition for:

1) The best user experience for understanding meaning in data, and
2) The best tool for web developers to build other things with data.

It’s worth pointing out that the Guardian Datastore is relatively new, and there are some issues, however, I think it’s a great step in the right direction, and another example of why the Guardian leads the way with it’s transition to digital. (Open, hackable platforms, two way media, Clay Shirky, etc.)

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Interactive storytelling part 1: audio slideshows

john, June 2, 2009

Interactive storytelling on the web - I’m specifically thinking about audioslide shows - has a bit of a chequered history, it’s often been touted as the next big thing, but few content providers have really embraced it. There are cost issues - Flash development isn’t cheap, and then there’s the bandwidth to think about, but the same issues apply to online video, and, from a personal perspective, I think that well-made audio slideshows can have as much impact as online video: image quality is almost always better, and the audio is usually more focused.

There are other reasons why it’s worth doing audio slideshows: interactive content, like video, attracts much higher CPMs, and production costs are falling - tools like Vuvox and Soundslides or even jquery and content slider obviate the need for expensive Flash developers, so ROI now looks much better.

Anyway, enough blah, here are a few of my favourite audio slideshows and audio slideshow producers:

Bombay Flying Club : The Afghan Diaries
The Bombay Flying Club is two Danish and one Canadian multimedia journalists, who, in my opinion, are leaders in the field of interactive storytelling.

The Whale Hunt
Jonathan Harris’ Whale Hunt is often talked of more of as art than reportage, however, I think it sits well here as it tells the story of a Whale Hunt conducted by the Inupiat Eskimo family in Barrow, Alaska.

NPR’s Skidrow
An audio interview of one of the residents of LAs skidrow with associated images from NPR.

Chucking Out
Chucking-out time in UK pubs.

Evidence of my Existence
Finally, just in case you thought all of this multimedia journalism was terribly glamorous, photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo talks frankly about his career and the toll it has taken on his personal life. (Contains some graphic images of the dead and dying.)

In the next post in this series about interactive storytelling I’ll take a closer look at the tools used for capturing and publishing the content using in multimedia journalism.

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David Lynch - The Interview Project

john, June 1, 2009

David Lynch’s Interview Project launches today. The idea behind Interview Project is simple, David Lynch and his team travel the US interviewing people they come across. And that’s about it: in essence the Interview Project is just a big, unstructured oral history project (though it does remind me a little of the field recordings of American folk songs made by John Lomax and Alan Lomax.)

The David Lynch Interview project has only just gone live - there’s only one interview up at the moment - so it’s a little early to judge its success or otherwise, however, I think it’s a great example of someone using the internet to create and disseminate content that wouldn’t be considered by most broadcast networks as well as letting people who ordinarily have no voice tell their stories.

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Soft cities: parsing the city with Flickr and Yahoo Pipes

john, May 27, 2009

I spent the weekend hacking around with Yahoo Pipes and Flickr, and in particular the new badge/widget feature in Yahoo Pipes.

Softcities is the result: 12 different keyword streams of Flickr images of London. And while it doesn’t really scratch the surface of what Yahoo Pipes can do, I think it’s fairly interesting.

You can also use the badges feature of Yahoo Pipes to add maps and lists to a site, and you can of course export data in JSON, KML, etc, but that’s another story.

For the moment softcities is hosted on this domain, though I intend to add more cities and maybe even move it to a separate domain in time.

n.b. the title’s pinched from Soft City, Jonathan Raban’s classic portrait of urban life.

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Juice sidebar

john, May 20, 2009

The Juice Firefox extension allows you to highlight unlinked text, which when dragged a little serves a Google search (or Twitter, etc) into a sidebar. Written down this sounds a little convoluted, however, when you’re browsing it’s extremely useful. (It reminds me a little of Ubiquity, but the ease of the mouse-based interaction is easier than remembering keyboard shortcuts.) Juice also does lots of other things which are explained in the ubiquitous screencast.

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