Review of Friction.TV
Just reviewed this site for the JournalismEnterprise.com blog, run by Paul Bradshaw over at Birmingham City Uni. You can read the full review over there.
What do they say it is?
“Friction.tv believes that disagreement - or friction - is a vital element for a healthy debate, to reach new insights and to find out what’s really going on in society. We need disagreement before we can start to find some answers… an interesting and stimulating alternative to the sanitised, agenda driven mediocrity of the conventional mass media.” What do I say it is? A formulaic video publishing site that relies too much on the soapbox for its claims to be an alternative media platform
Read the full review on JournalismEnterprise…
BBC website: experiments in convergence
It hasn’t exactly crept up on me. I was aware of the BBC plans, as I was working on a similar design build at my last editorial management job. Ajax technology, the dashboard, coverging media, putting the user in control as the philosophy behind the new careers site, Creative Choices. But now the BBC changes are here, like a number of other people (and not all of us are naturally averse to change) I’m very unsure. No, I’m clear. It’s the turning back of the clock… the ‘room to breathe’…
I’m not talking about summer. As one of the most popular sites in the UK, a large percentage of the online audience will have noticed, and had a reaction to, the BBC’s new design. Reading the Sports Editor’s blog on how the changes have filtered down to BBC Sport the revamp is explained as a need to maintain pace with convergence:
Much of the talk in media and technology circles is around convergence, with the boundaries between radio, TV and new media blurring all the time. Audiences are entitled, and increasingly expect, to get the best mix of words, still images, moving pictures, audio and interactivity in one place, on a single platform. That’s what we need to be able to offer our users, which means updating both the look and feel and the functionality of bbc.co.uk/sport.
This makes sense for a big hitter as the BBC, and you can see the importance to the corporation of adaptation.
The Sports Editor has also done a welcome chronological montage of the major site changes over the last eight years, from yellow back pages and Web1.0 right bang up to date with new technologies such as AJAX for its drag’n'drop homepage dashboard, reminiscent of netvibes.com and iGoogle. The problems as I see them are… Read more
CNN sacks journalist… for keeping a blog
This is a shocker. Blogs gaining and gaining in power. Well, but then it is CNN.
The Google generation?
Being born quite a way before 1993, I don’t qualify as part of the Google generation: made up of Western-born individuals who have grown up with the internet, ‘a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web’. I can remember life before the web. It wasn’t bad. Travelling in 1994, no-one knew where I was for months, and there was no way I could regularly communicate back home. As I said, not bad.
A recent story at Pandia.com looks at a new report released by the British Library and JISC conducted by the CIBER center at the University College of London. It contradicts or at least challenges the belief, first put forward by Mark Plansky (coiner of the term ‘digital natives’) that:
today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Pandia.com notes that… Read more
Controlling your digital identity
Reading one of my regular neuroscience blogs and I picked up this story about QDOS, a site still in pre-register beta status, but which aims to give you “a starting point for managing and taking control of your online status. Be seen how you want to be seen.”
The premise is that consumers (i.e. users) should be more in control of their data, but in the world of Facebook and its ‘you can never leave’ mantra, we need to go further than this, and that users should have more say in their digital identity: how others see us; how others make us seen (do I really have 157 ‘friends’? The language is critical here). That’s based on some research they did: Read more
Baudrillard Pt2 for tonight
Got into a quick chat with a colleague after work tonight about the early days of the internet, and how people we now see as pioneers were at one point viewed as ‘computer criminals’. Somehow we got onto new media and capitalism and I talked about ‘capitalism as a code we can’t break’, thinking myself very original. Of course, Baudrillard was there first:
A revolution has occured in the capitalist world without our Marxists having wanted to comprehend it… This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalance to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code.
Quoted in ‘Baudrillard: A Critical Reader’, by Douglas Kellner, p.168. Tonight was obviously meant for a reflection on the hyperreal.
Get blogging
All journalism students should have a blog. That’s the clear message from the leading journalism bloggers and educators. For MAC 250 students the opening quote on this discussion should make you think about what to do after the module’s over. Take a look at Dave Lee’s blog as an example: the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade recently called him ‘probably Britain’s leading student journalist blogger’.
Make sure you read Neil McIntosh’s comment too: ‘blogs are the minimum’. Get your site up and running now. See where it takes you, well before you think about that journalism or PR job.
Is the internet an institution?
Went to the annual Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary last night, with Andrew Marr talking on the subject of ‘History and Journalism’. Was an entertaining hour, if not illuminating, except it was great to hear first hand that ‘If anyone tells you the government did not bully the BBC over the Hutton Enquiry, they are wrong, because I was on the end of the phone’. Marr spoke… Read more
Twitter goes Dossy
Was shown a new site earlier this week, Dossy, that’s developep a Twitter Karma application so you can see who you’re following and who’s following you–and then also who’s following your followers, etc, an on, ad infinitum.
A colleague (T) and I had a discussion: is this anything useful, or just a way for the media pack to massage egos? Probably a bit of both. Twitter’s a phenomenon and it’s going to be around in some guise for a while, not least because it’s a perfect fit with shortening requirements to communicate. I have a Karma score of 1, in that I have one follower (same colleague, in fact, T). I’m happy with that for the moment, until I gather some things to say in less than 256 characters (never been my strength).
It made T and I muse on the subject of speed (or I think this might have been from the Bagehot Lecture at Queen Mary, given by Andrew Marr, who talked about the change in media over the last 20 years, driven by ‘ever-decreasing attention spans’ according to Marr. Which came first…?). Media are becoming faster, both in terms of reaching the consumer, and in terms of production and bandwidth, spectrum; and with that speed, the message is shrinking in size.
MediaPost’s Mobile Insider summarized a key point last year when it read from new metrics that ‘the writing is already on the wallpaper: media sharing will be more important than media consumption‘. If that’s the case, which it looks like, with youtube.com et al, where does that leave the journalist?
Horizontal blogging
I recently discussed horizontal writing with Dean Whitbread, a leading British podcaster, who is involved in a project I’m managing at the moment. Horizontal writing he described as the process of ‘writing across the web’ through comments and posts left on other blogs and sites to drive traffic back to your message/site. There are a myriad uses of the terms ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ (horizontal and vertical marketing; vertical thinking) and they’re as useful here as elsewhere to define a particular, important, process for good blogging. The activity is important for bloggers who want to start making a living from web writing, whether that’s inside an institution/publication, or outside, to promote their own work.
Horizontal writing is then the leaving of relevant posts and links about your subject across the key blogs and sites that are talking about your message. The goal is to drive traffic back to your post. In the current project I’m discussing with Dean, where we are hiring a number of blogger advocates to write about and provide friendly (well-read) critiques of a new online careers magazine and information service for the Creative Industries, www.creative-choices.co.uk, this horizontal writing will become a key measurement of a blogger’s performance as an advocate for the projoect, not only their vertical wordcount. It’s something professional bloggers of the future need to know and get good at, as it will help them find paid employment.
