Monthly Archives: October 2009

Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web

By October 30 2009, 9:36 am 1 Comment

Mashable has a good trending piece on things to watch out for on the real-time web, chiefly: collaboration; analytics; search; and ecommerce.

Real-Time Collaboration

Whether you’ve had a play with Google Wave or not there is a lot of talk about it and other online services (this includes Twitter as it continues to develop) can help grow how business work together collaborative and really change the way they do business. It is a bold claim, but the potential is huge with some talking about how Wave and other similar technologies have the potential to replace “email, instant messaging, forums, wikis, blogs and even traditional publishing outlets — combining them into something we can only begin to imagine. In other words, Google is building Web 3.0 inside Google Wave”.

Bernard Moon, MD of the Lunsford Group, who wrote the piece says he sees it as the tip of the iceberg: he talks about companies being able to make real-time changes to products and designs and much more.

Real-Time Analytics

As the flow of real-time data increases so will the services and applications in this space. Moon talks about a crowd sourced mobile map and traffic information service called Waze in Israel and how that has become effective by initially needing just 0.5% of the population to work. It has since launched in the US.

This came up at Media140 where David McCandless, Information is Beautiful, gave an interesting presentation on bringing together data and images. The marrying of those in real-time has so much potential. Google has Google Maps Mobile Navigation on the way that appears similar to Waze whereby “connected users act as sensors and provide live, real-time traffic information and even data updates”.

Real-Time Search growth

Well it is really happening now Microsoft and Google have moved in. Looking at Bing and seeing tweets appear there is going to be very useful. Google will add its own take any day now. Have you played with Bing Twitter beta?

Moon talks about how this could offer opportunities for business using that real-time search around big events such as the World Cup or Superbowl. Monitoring such streams could easily allow highly targeted ads to be displayed alongside these real-time search results delivering exactly what people are talking about.

Real-Time Ecommerce

The one I know and have read least about. This is on the way, Moon mentions a company called Apnoti that indexes real-time pricing for consumers in the US and Germany. It allows consumers to take advantage of price changes on various ecommerce sites.

People talk about this one but some of the examples he uses such as how it could offer competitive advantage for perishable goods whereby the grocer with fresher fruit can theoretically charge or sell more by providing real-time freshness data. Maybe. But you can certainly see it working for sale of tickets and events.

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A Huffington Post for Europe

By October 29 2009, 11:21 am 2 Comments

A Huffington Post style start-up news site is up and running in Germany with plans later for an English version apparently in the pipeline.

Techcrunch reports that German Web 2.0 figure Lukasz Gadowski, who was previously behind online t-shirt firm Spreadshirt.com, is one of those behind online publishing venture that is going to be a kind of Huffington Post in Europe.

It’s called The European. Yes, the same name used by Robert Maxwell for his newspaper way back when, which was later revised and died several times under Andrew Neil and the Telegraph Group’s Press Holdings. The last incarnation of that was when Neil relaunched The European as a website. It didn’t last long. That was, of course, way before blogging.

Techcrunch reports that the site has/will have more than 20 journalists and possible contributions from the likes of European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, German car producers association’s president Matthias Wissmann or bishop Margot Käßmann.

Chief editor Alexander Görlach, who holds 50% of the company alongside Gadowski, reveals traffic is rising (from first day numbers of “5,000 readers and 30,000 page impressions”) and that first month revenues are three times bigger than originally scheduled in the business plan.

The Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau recently said in an interview that it had ruled out European versions despite being approached: “It’s not an international strategy, almost every week some pretty big organization would like to partner with us,” Hippeau said.

The UK is its biggest market and it is surprising that no one has tried a Huffington Post here (and they have ruled it out themselves).

Clearly, the market is a lot smaller and a lot of our newspapers have great blogging operations, but that said it feels like there is a gap there for an uber blog or two.

Unless after the demise of the likes of Shiny Media and other blogging operations there really is no money out there for what could be an expensive blogging operation to start-up.

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Media140: personality and social media – do you need one?

By October 28 2009, 1:28 pm 5 Comments

The panel I chaired at Media140 in London felt like it could have run and run (it almost did) as the question as to whether “brands need a social media personality to engage consumers” or not sits at the heart of what a lot of companies are trying to do on Twitter.

If you get this wrong you fall flat and fail. Drew Benvie, managing director of 33 Digital (@drewb), said that getting that personality right was incredibly tricky, which is why there is so much “fake and fail” out there. He said that it comes down to how you use that personality and that it should come from both the brand and its people”.

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Print: kind of like the Titantic says New York Times publisher

By October 28 2009, 10:08 am 1 Comment

It can be horrible getting caught on the hop and you find yourself answering with an off the cuff comment, which is what happened to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr who came up with this nifty analogy for newspapers and, errrm, the Titanic.

New York Magazine were the guys on the spot. All they were asking was for a few tips for young people who want to go into journalism given the job market?

This apparently first elicited a laugh (I’m guessing a kind of nervous laugh as you might if you were about to make a lot of journalists unemployed).

“Um, what I would tell them is the industry is in the midst of a massive transition. But the core of the fundamental job is critical. We have to re-create ourselves, but the heart of what we’re going to re-create is still journalism. The way people get information is changing, but the need for information will remain constant.”

Then came the stuff about the Titanic. Yes, that’s right the big ship that sank with terrible loss of life (was he thinking of journalists?). To be fair he could have used any ship to power his analogy and, really maybe one of those still floating ones would have been better.
 
“The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy? What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?”

Apparently it wasn’t icebergs and being a sinkable kind of unsinkable ship. No it wasn’t any of this it was trying to beat aeroplanes. He explained, carefully it seems, that even if the Titanic had make it to New York it didn’t matter as it was still doomed (but at least floating) as the Wright brothers had taken off 12 years earlier and invented the plane.

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Associated hits reset button as London Lite set to close

By October 27 2009, 1:25 pm 2 Comments

Associated Newspaper’s statement this afternoon that it is likely to close London Lite, hits the reset button for newspapers in the capital. We had three papers for almost three years and now we are back to square one.

With the Evening Standard going free earlier this month it was only a matter of time before London Lite was closed.

Associated says “it has entered a period of consultation over the future of London Lite, its free London evening title, which may result in closure”.

I don’t think there is any “may” about it. It is tough for the 36 staff, but the future of London Lite and its employees looks sealed to me.

Steve Auckland, managing director, Associated Newspapers Free Division says that “despite reaching a large audience with an excellent editorial format, we are concerned about the commercial viability in this highly competitive area”.

I’m sure they have been concerned for sometime, but with theLondonpaper gone there is no reason for it to be.

I don’t remember the last time we were here with the London Daily News versus the Evening Standard aided by the resurrected Evening News in 1987, but it looks like that in London, history repeats itself. That’s twice within the last few decades we’ve had three London papers before reverting to one.

One thing is clear we will not (as they say) see their like again. This really is an end moment in the evening/afternoon paper market in this rapidly changing media landscape. There’s obviously still lots happening in other areas of the free market with Shortlist (its women’s magazine: Stylist - isn’t that due any day now?), City AM and TFL issuing its tender for the Metro slot.

In such a busy and competitive market it is a surprise that they lasted as long as they did, but it was an interesting battle to observe.

The free paper was a great experiment and what is perhaps most interesting is that while both London Lite and thelondonpaper are gone, they have left us with a legacy of a free Evening Standard against a desire by the rest of the industry to charge for content.

That strikes me as fascinating. Particularly given the most recent ABC figures for newspapers in the US this week that show the dire state some are in.

I’ve read and heard a number of people talk about the future of the Evening Standard and how they see the logic and the long term viability of it as a free title. Time will tell, but oddly I miss it as a paid-for title. I’ve barely seen it since it went free when previously I could pop out to the news agent outside 174 Hammersmith Road and get my copy, but no more.

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"Twitter: Unpoliced playground for paedos"

By October 23 2009, 8:22 am 1 Comment

There was I under the impression there were not a great deal of teens on Twitter, when the Sun sticks on its front page this morning that the micro blogging service has become “a free and easy hunting ground for paedophiles seeking to lure kids for sex”.

The tabloid claims that it uncovered this as part of a wider investigation into abuse of the ultra-successful blogging website.

It says that pornographic pictures of young girls are also freely available.

The Sun says it was shown an online conversation between a group of youngsters that had apparently been infiltrated by a pervert who asked a 13-year-old boy, who had posted a photo of himself and his sister on Twitter:

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Labour Party website not found so lacking (after all)

By October 21 2009, 2:56 pm 9 Comments

There’s some research out this week saying that the Labour Party’s policies scored poorly on Google search. This would be an issue demanding urgent attention if the research had not been skewed.

An election is rolling into view. It’s going to be very interesting. Digital will no doubt play a key role in that fight and examining how well the political parties are prepared can be informative, but what has been served up this week by research firm Tamar is too basic and mechanical to be of real value. It failed to dig deep and showed the weakness of robotic research in terms of search.

Tamar’s Political Search Index was designed to workout how easy it is for voters to find official policy information from the mainstream political parties online via Google and party websites. The results show the Labour Party trailing badly behind the Conservatives and the others.

It found that for a number of key policy areas including defence, environment and pensions, no content from the Labour Party’s website Labour.org.uk appears in the first five pages of Google results.

On initial examination that could be quite damning…but Tamar’s research only hold’s up if you search for the term “Labour” and “defence” or “Labour” and “environment” if you happen to search for “Labour Party” and either of the above then the results are at the top and thus rendering null and void Tamar’s conclusions.

Here’s the thing: “labour” is a term to describe giving birth and workers and so when it comes to search any half smart person isn’t going to combine the terms “labour” “tax”, or “labour” “hospitals” as this like Tamar says returns useless results. However, using the term Labour Party makes more sense and returns more intelligent/useful results (the aim right?).

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Game changer: Facebook Connect

By October 20 2009, 1:52 pm Leave a comment

More evidence if you needed it of how powerful Facebook Connect can be from HuffingtonPost.com, which has used it to help recently surpass WashingtonPost.com.

I was looking at it recently as part of our social media strategy and how we might use it and while HuffingtonPost.com is in a league of its own in terms of the vast traffic it generates what it does has important pointers, I think, for others.

While some have queried the of what the Huffington Post has achieved CEO Eric Hippeau in an interview on PaidContent yesterday makes a good case for why it is more than noteworthy.

“It wasn’t so much the Washington Post—by the way, it’s also the LA Times, it’s also the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Of the big national newspapers, there’s only two our size that are still bigger than we are: USA Today, which is a very different audience, and the New York Times, which will always be a big brand and very well read and well respected. We’re not in a race with the newspapers. We’re not in a race with anything in particular. Our goal is to establish the brand that defines news and opinion on digital platforms.”

And how it did that is interesting, from a political and commentary blog to a pretty much all singing all dancing news site (let’s side step the issue of content scraping/oversharing for today), with sport, culture, books and business all being added not to mention its regional editions across the US (Chicago, New York and Denver).

All this is helping it according to comScore hit 6.8m uniques in September. That’s up a whopping 50% year on year.

How, in part at least, it has achieve that is through its much talked about Social News with Facebook Connect, which it only implemented in August (Huffington Post and Facebook Go “Social News,” With Connect on Steroids) and allows readers to create a personalised social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post as well as comment and share content easily with Facebook friends.

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Brown boosts his social media reputation

By October 1 2009, 12:35 pm 2 Comments

It isn’t all bad news for Gordon Brown. Those chumps at News International (my word of the day) might have dumped him, but his keynote speech at Labour Party Conference did much to improve his social media reputation and hit back at some of the negative coverage.

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