Archive for the ‘Media’ Category
A suggestion for Muti May 4th, 2008
I just started submitting stuff to Muti again and I thought I’d see what happens when I submit a duplicate post so I re-submitted the Iron Man/Audi ad post. When I submitted it I got the following message:
My suggestion is that where submit a duplicate link, there should also be a link to the item being duplicated so I can either vote on the already submitted item or check out the original link and decide whether to submit anyway. Just a thought.
Technorati Tags:
muti, submissions, duplicate, suggestion
Posted in Sharing, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
Print media: more of a generational thing May 3rd, 2008
Every so often a story about how print media are dead surfaces and depending on your take on factors like declining newspaper circulations and who you work for, you either agree or you don’t. One thought about the future of print media is that it will become a niche luxury item (thus giving hope to big media and advertisers that they can still tap the wealthier readership).
What isn’t in dispute is that circulations are in decline. The problem with print media is that it is just so wasteful and very much out of touch with the current pace of technology. As the New York Times put it in 2006:
Newspaper circulation has been in a long, slow decline for decades. But the pace of loss seems accelerated now, as the industry tries to adjust to the steady migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet.
I can’t imagine things have improved much for print media since then. There has certainly been a fair amount of discussion about how to survive this shift to digital media and a number of industry pundits have boldly declared that one or another technology will become the dominant platform for the content presently printed and which all those people out there clearly still want. After all, there will always be a place for quality journalism and writing. I agree although I think it is important that mainstream media realise that they are content creators almost on a par with bloggers, podcasters and other not-so-mainstream content creators. I am starting to wonder if the distinction between the content I could get from, say, The Times or Mail & Guardian and the content I can get from the likes of Ivo Vegter, Robert Scoble and Read/Write Web is fading fast to the point where I place as much (and often more) value in what I read on a blog than what I read in a mainstream publication.
Another issue is that actual print media is so wasteful and cumbersome. All that paper being printed and distributed across long distances over periods of time that could render the news obsolete before the publication arrives. Why not save the cost of all that production and the trees that were sacrificed for the idle pleasure of rustling pages and explore digital alternatives which can be so much better for the rainforest?
(Image credit: 02.Newspaper.DupontCircle.WDC.30mar06 by ElvertBarnes published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)
Although the hot platform at the moment is your mobile phone (lots of mobile phone users translate into more advertising bucks if only mainstream media could figure out how to monetise all those little eyeballs), I see the future of media (mainstream, not so mainstream and downright on the bleeding edge) being on a variety of devices feed by RSS and its successors. Ok, this isn’t exactly breaking news but it does help if the big media people take a look at this issue from the perspective of an end user. Have they actually tried to read feeds on a mobile phone that doesn’t cost R7 000 and have a large screen? It isn’t a pleasant experience.
Instead media should be available on whichever connected device you prefer. My personal preference is a tablet device of some kind (the one I dream about and which no-one has manufactured yet) or some iteration of what the iPhone could be. I want a large enough screen to comfortably read the feeds I have subscribed to and remain mobile where I want to be and also continue my reading on my large LCD monitor when I return to home base. Still not exactly news to most people but the point is that the focus should rather be on making the content available in a relative platform agnostic manner using a standard technology that can distribute that content (again, RSS works well here).
This isn’t to say that big media has to give up its subscriptions and squeeze more out of their advertisers. I noticed that the local publications whose feeds I subscribe to publish truncated feeds which force me to visit their websites to read the full article. This drives me nuts. I use a feed reader to read my feeds, not to link to web pages. I would pay a subscription fee to have receive the full articles in my feeds and I would even tolerate a relative innocuous ad if it means I don’t have to open yet another tab in Firefox or NetNewsWire to read the article. This option would mean the ability to add a password protected feed (presumably) and given the demand for this those feed readers that don’t support this functionality soon will if they are worth their salt, so to speak. I subscribe to Fortune magazine and it would be fantastic to be able to subscribe to a digital edition and receive full articles in my feed reader. Of course the second part to this fantasy experience would be a device that makes my content portable enough that I can meaningfully consume that content just as easily when I am at a coffee shop as I can at my desk with my MacBook (it would also be great if my preferred feed reader - NetNewsWire at the moment - would allow customisable media download options for offline reading).
That content could be formatted in a variety of ways and a nice example of this is a new feed reader which has recently been released and which is called “Times“. This newsreader aims to change the way we read our news in a digital format:
Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.
Although I think Acrylic Apps is missing the point a little with Times, it is still a fantastic example of how news and feed fed content in general can be presented to users. It doesn’t all have to look like this:
Feed fed content could include news feeds, blog feeds, ebooks, podcasts, music … whatever. The range of devices could be just as diverse and could include existing devices such as the iPod Touch/iPhone, mobile phones, Internet tablets, laptops, large LCD screens and future derivatives of those devices. In fact, I think a worthwhile exercise for a major publication is to investigate distributing a decent RSS enabled panel device to its subscribers (perhaps subsidised by a 2 year subscription like the mobile phone networks) and updating those devices over the Internet with the latest issue or latest articles rather than delivering print editions.
Print media may not be dead just yet but it isn’t getting any younger. Digital platforms far surpass print media in terms of immediacy and freshness of content and the growing trend towards digital consumption means that it is becoming more and more expensive to produce print editions of these publications. Why would I buy a newspaper except to paper my floors in case my puppies need to pee? I certainly don’t need to read a newspaper to find out what is going on in the world. I can do that online and in many instances, I can get better information on the Web. What about you? When was the last time you read a newspaper to find out what is going on in your world?
Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeds, netnewswire, rss, print media, newspapers, digital media
Posted in Devices, Feeds, Media | Comments (1)
Video on Flickr! April 9th, 2008
There have been rumours that Flickr might get into the video business too after being so successful with photos and these rumours have been confirmed! If you are a pro (in other words, a paying user) you can post small video clips to the site. I like the way Flickr sees these short video clips as “long photos” …
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and ‘soon’ is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.
90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of life to share.
Will this service replace your regular video services? Probably not, but it does add another option for those short clips you’d like to include with photos rather than go and post them to some other location and try string them all together.
(Source: Laughing Squid)
Technorati Tags:
flickr, photography, video
Posted in Media, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Exciting improvements for Ning users March 22nd, 2008
Ning is a great way to set up a niche social network, pretty much on the fly. These networks look great and are pretty customisable and flexible. A great example of a nicely implemented Ning network is Huddlemind (check it out if you haven’t already and are interested in “collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through education”. Anyway, I just watched this video which reveals a couple more improvements to Ning which make such a big difference:
Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators
When I see stuff like this I find myself wondering if there is a network I can create …
Technorati Tags:
ning, features, updates, huddlemind
Posted in Design, Sharing, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)
Flurry of tweets in FriendFeed March 18th, 2008
A couple people have complained about the sheer volume of Twitter posts on FriendFeed. Stii has joined a growing call for people to remove Twitter from their FriendFeed profiles to ease the constant stream of content. I’d tell you who else has echoed that call except I would have to wade through about 157 000 tweets from the last few days alone.
Although I can understand the frustration many people share when all they want to do is catch up on the meat of their friends’ postings and interactions on the social web through aggregators like FriendFeed, I don’t share the call for Twitter to be removed from these aggregators. I don’t think that adding your Twitter stream to these lifestreams is the problem. Twitter posts are part of your social media experience and have as much a place in there as any other feed.
The problem is more how Twitter is being used. Twitter is not a chat client. It may have a way to respond to tweets and even have a loose conversation but that is not its purpose. We (and I include myself here to a degree) have been using it as a kind of IRC and I can’t help but wonder if everyone else who has the misfortune to be following prolific Twitter users is tempted to just cancel his/her account altogether when a mad flurry of inane comments and chirps (excuse the pun) start flooding the Twitter stream.
If you want to ease the flow in lifestream services like FriendFeed then the solution is pretty simple: stop using Twitter like a chat service. It doesn’t work well as a chat service at all. One big reason is that replies are not threaded so if you are not watching Twitter religiously you will miss part of the conversation. Instead what you have is a virtual field of soapboxes where people shout at each other from across the room, hoping that someone will respond and some noisy conversation might just take shape. If you want to have a conversation, Twitter is really not the best place for it. Try Jaiku, Pownce or even the comments sections in FriendFeed, Pulse or some other lifestream service. Or (and here is a crazy idea), have a group chat using Skype, Google Talk or something similar.
Like … hello?!
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, twitter, noise, messages, better use
Posted in Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (4)
Thoughts on FriendFeed and lifestreaming March 15th, 2008
ReadWriteWeb has a post comparing FriendFeed to a competitor still in private beta, SocialThing! (I don’t think it is really a comparison post because there is very little information about SocialThing!). I signed up for FriendFeed a week or two ago and it is a great lifestreaming service and does a couple things that appeal to me. For one thing there is a commenting feature which makes it possible to comment more meaningfully on items that may not have commenting features built in natively (a good example is Tumblr which lacks a commenting feature or even services like del.icio.us which are perhaps less about discussion and more about one way sharing). One benefit of something like FriendFeed which I think I have started taking for granted is the following:
FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends’ content even if you don’t have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they’ve elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they’re a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It’s in this feature that its real power lies.
With all the excitement about FriendFeed and the lifestreaming’s sudden uptake, it is important to bear in mind that lifestreaming has been around for at least a year or so in the form of services like Jaiku and, more recently, Plaxo Pulse (there are ongoing upgrades and improvements to Pulse so be sure to check back there often if you use the service and consider signing up if you don’t already).
I’ve been talking about lifestreaming for a while now and there seems to be a looming tension between content centralised on a single site (whether that be a blog, wiki or personalised/niche social network) and content that is distributed across a number of lifestreaming services. I have had most of my content streaming into Jaiku, Pulse and FriendFeed for a while now and I am curious to see whether the distributed model gains traction and I will start receiving comments on my comment in those lifestreaming services rather than on the source services? Certainly with content sources like my tumblelog, that is pretty much the only way to comment on posts (at least until Tumblr adds commenting).
If this shift does happen then we will probably see new advertising models emerge with the drop in page views and attention paid to the source sites generally. I am not sure how you would monetise a lifestream being run through a 3rd party service. Perhaps a revenue share option?
Another issue which I want to explore further is content licensing on lifestreaming services. There doesn’t seem to be much attention given to this at the moment but it is an important issue for people who, like me, license their content under something like a Creative Commons license. The services’ own terms regarding how content is to be licensed on their site will be important because they may seek to override a user’s own content licensing preferences. In fact, this will be an issue regardless of whether users retain all rights under copyright or they license their content under specific licenses. Either way, I’d like to see these services facilitate these licensing options.
I see lifestreaming becoming more prominent as services like FriendFeed become more popular and as that happens, it will be pretty interesting to see how advertising models shift and how people manage their content in this context.
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, jaiku, lifestream, pulse, lifestreaming, socialthing, readwriteweb, advertising models, page views
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, Sharing | Comments (2)
Yahoo! embraces the Semantic Web in a big way March 13th, 2008
I am not sure if anyone has taken a look at this in much detail (I haven’t), but it looks like a pretty significant step …
Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
Stii, any thoughts?
Technorati Tags:
yahoo, semantic web, search, open architecture, open search
Posted in Companies, Search, Semantic Web, Sharing | Comments (2)
Springleap is sprung … March 13th, 2008
Eric Edelstein asked me to take a look at an exciting new project he is involved in called springleap. I’m a little new to springleap so I got in touch with Eric and his partner, Eran Eyal, to chat about springleap on Skype. Here is the transcript of our chat:
And now for the interview. You will note that it has been edited down a little but just to remove some fluff (largely my own). The interview is pretty long so I have shifted some of the conversation to an extended section (apologies).
2008-03-13
Paul Jacobson:
17:05:41
Ok, baby with mom, let’s chat about Springleap
17:05:53
fantastic
17:06:01
what would you like to know Paul?
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:35
Everything
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:44
what is Springleap, where did the idea come from?
17:07:22
Well - Springleap is an empowerment initiative for South Africa
Paul Jacobson:
17:07:57
ok, sounds broad …
17:08:26
ranging from the cotton manufacturing trade, through the garment manufacturing industry to the retailers and all the amazing talented artists who deserve a platform for exposure
Paul Jacobson:
17:09:08
so basically bringing clothing and local artists together?
17:09:31
Eric and I opened the doors to eSquared Fashion 2 years ago and our business model was to scour the world for amazing artists producing original desings on 100% cotton
17:09:41
specifically with an emphasis on Asia.
Paul Jacobson:
17:10:09
Yeah, Eric mentioned it to me when I met him last year
17:10:19
TO answer your question Paul - yes : in a way that has never been done before.
17:10:26
Basically..
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Design, People, Sharing | Comments (2)
Huddlemind.net: a niche social network March 11th, 2008
You are going to hear a lot about Huddlemind’s new site in the coming days (if not already) and for good reason.
Huddlemind.net runs on Ning, the fabulous and easy to build and customise social networking template/platform. What is great about Ning is that it is basically a social network in a box and what Dave Duarte, Huddlemind’s founder (or at least one of), has done is create a niche social network using a freely available tool. In Dave’s words:
It’s a network for people interested in collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through Education.
Through it we hope to directly connect members with other leading thinkers and doers in business education.
It is also a space to explore questions and issues of importance around business education, teaching methodologies, and learning technologies.
I think it is fantastic. I have been thinking about Huddlemind as an ideal platform for anyone wanting to establish a community orientated site for a little while now and while I had a couple questions about things like domains and ease of use, Huddlemind pretty much clears those issues up for me.
I played around with Ning a little while ago and discovered how easy it is to add Google Gadgets and all sorts of other customisable bits and pieces. I didn’t spend too much time because I didn’t see the value of having my own social network (do I even have that many fans??) but there is tremendous potential here. Maybe I should play some more …
Oh, did I mention Ning is part of Google’s OpenSocial?!
Either way, Dave has done a great job.
Technorati Tags:
dave duarte, opensocial, social network, ning, huddlemind, niche
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Pownce has more to do with email than Twitter March 9th, 2008
I use most of the new social web services that come out (at least the more popular ones) at least once. I have active accounts on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce and I have found it a bit difficult to consistently stick to one service so I have been using all 3 in varying degrees. Not too long ago I used Jaiku almost exclusively until I decided to rather use Jaiku as one of a couple lifestreaming services I use (others include Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed).
I have tended to use Twitter as my primary “status” service and I have a bunch of contacts on Twitter already so it makes sense to keep using it. That being said, I really like Pownce (good design gets my attention) and I would like to find a place for it in my online repertoire that makes sense. A number of people cross-post to Twitter and Pownce simultaneously and if you see Pownce as a glorified Twitter then I suppose that makes sense.
Pownce and Twitter are both services I enjoy using and which feed into my lifestream services which are, in turn, intended to be convenient points of contact for people who want to keep tabs on what I am doing, saying and creating. So it doesn’t really make sense for me to have two identical streams of content running into my lifestreams.
At the same time there is tension between Pownce and Twitter and the groups of people who regard their preferred service as the better one. I can see how people could think that Pownce is a Twitter/Jaiku competitor (I certainly did for a while) but I don’t believe that this perception is accurate. Pownce’s competitors, if anything, are email and perhaps even tumblelogs although Pownce is really more of a messaging platform than a tumblelog lite. I listened to an interview with Pownce founders Leah Culver and Daniel Burka earlier today because I really wanted to get to the real business model as a way of working out where Pownce fits into my toolkit. I recommend the interview because, in it, Leah talks about her vision of Pownce and it isn’t to replace Twitter. It is a pretty flexible messaging service and given a number of suggestions that IM is going to replace email as the preferred communication tool of choice, Pownce as a messaging platform makes a lot of sense to me. So you can use Pownce as a Twitter-style tool but try thinking of it more as an email-style tool.
Heck, people are even using Twitter in ways that it was not intended to be used. Twitter is designed to answer a single question: “What are you doing?”. It isn’t meant to be a general chat service but because of features like the @ reply thingy and even direct messages, that is what it is used for daily. Me? I’d rather open an IM session for a chat. At least then I can better track what people are saying to me.
Anyway, you can find me on Pownce here. Feel free to connect to me.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, messaging, chat, intended use, leah culver, daniel burka
Posted in Lifestreaming, Sharing, Tools | Comments (3)