These are my links for March 29th from 01:03 to 01:35:

  • Taking The Tablet: 15 Ways Publishers Are Re-Imagining The Magazine – Great set of video and text articles looking at how publishers are creating new work and experiences for tablet readers (including Adobe AIR and iPad) which provide rich, multimedia ways for users to interact with texts and advertisements to create enhanced experiences which complement the high value and branding associated with the magazines. The aim being not merely to provide content but experiences which can be monteized.
  • The Democratization of Video Content Creation – Visible Gains, the monetizing video service, sing the praises of cheap, portable HD cameras like Kodak Zi6 and Flip as a source for creating competitive advantage in the organisation: "buy handheld high-definition cameras and distribute them to your best spokespeople and writers. Today’s evolving marketplace requires that you create compelling content to engage your clients and prospects. These are wonderful tools that jump-start the process." My own HD camera weapon of choice is the affordable Kodak Zi6 (c.£70), an HD camera recommended to me by several video bloggers. With free edit software included, there really is no excuse needed to star video blogging and reporting on what your business does.
  • Mediacamp Nottingham: social reporting from CreativeNottingham.com – Yesterday I was live reporting the Medicamp Nottingham (a digital media barcamp) event for my online community site CreativeNottingham.com. This was my first experiment in 'social reporting' – using online tools to capture and disseminate an event. Our experiment was all about real-time reporting – capturing as close to live reports as possible. This included using 'CoverItLive' to live blog key talks (which were updated in realtime on the website), very quick event reports (my the end of the day I'd worked out how to report, photograph the room and upload the blog post by the end of each session), short audio and video interviews with speakers and delegates and photographs uploaded throughout the day. We used our community website www.creativenottingham.posterous.com as a repository for media content. A good (tiring) day, lots of lessons learnt as to how to do it better next time.
  • Does The Times’s New Paywall Add Up? – June 2010 (presumably after the election) will see a landmark event in UK online publishing: The Times will sit all their content behind a paywall costing online readers £1 day (the same cost as the print edition. Ouch). Commentator Nick Thomas at Forrester Research looks at the economics, which is likely to see a reduction in readership to a tiny 60,000. The Times believe the niche, commited readership will still attract quality advertisers. This is a significant event as other news publishers will be likely to either follow suite or move to freemium based models (under discussion for The Independent) embracing building larger pools of readers and online audiences. Murdoch may be a brave fool with this move, yet he may also have hit on a way to change the online economy – force those who value to pay.
  • Women in TV: the missing 5,000 – A shocking report from the Edinburgh TV festival showing that 5,000 women left the TV industry last year, versus 750 men. The festival's panellists irated the audience by suggesting freelancers should pull themselves together, whereas many women feel the inflexible working practices mean that women are simply forced out of the industry when they want to start a family. The TV crisis is unlikely to see any major changes in working practices but hopefully sparking a debate will put the issue at the forefront of agencies like Pact and Skillset.
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These are my links for March 23rd from 09:22 to 23:16:

  • Scrolling and Attention – Jacob Nielsen, usability legend, with some very interesting research on user experience tracking in relation to below-the-fold content: 80% of users ONLY read what's above the fold, but some layout that encourage scrolling can still command attention.
  • 5 days until Mediacamp, Nottingham’s first barcamp for creative media March 27 – If you're not following me on Twitter (please do, I'm @susioneill) I may have been remise to inform you that we're once again hosting another Mediacamp in Nottingham this Saturday. It's a day long energised discussion, presentation and exploration barcamp to discuss all aspects of how digital media is rocking our world. I'll be experimenting with social reporting, capturing highlights of the day for our website www.creativenottingham.com, and hosting a session to talk about the CreativeNottingham project and our plans. <br />
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    The event is currently sold out – if you *really* want to come email me (susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk) and I'll see if I can help, otherwise they'll be live streaming of the main hall and live reporting on CreativeNottingham.com.
  • How to build Augmented Reality into your digital strategy – Augmented reality – building in a layer of digital information and content into real world places – is the next real innovation from the future that's already hitting our world through services like Google Goggles and Layar. This article talks about how you can bring AR into your brand's digital strategy.
  • Project Canvas is open and standardised – and great for consumers – The CEO of video-on-demand service Blinkbox counteracts Sky's claims that Project Canvas, providing a standardised broadband to TV service, will be bad for business. He counteracts that producers are aggregators will be able to delivery pay-as-you-watch programming and in will generative innovative 'apps' like for the iphone to provided added value services through the open network. I can't wait – this could be yet another exciting platform for technologies and video producers.
  • Creative funding database – Although I'm sure this is probably the same data as the funding database on Business Link site, this creative funding/business support from the excellent Creative Choices skills website works very well, it's easy to use and seems to be pretty comprehensive.
  • Conservatives’ ‘Cash Gordon’ web campaign backfires – And in the blue corner, the Tories have made a pigs ear of their latest venture to discredit Brown. 'Cash Gordon' site had a rent-a-crowd vibe, and was based on a back-end system used by right-wing lobbying groups against healthcare reform in the US. Trolls quickly hacked the site and used the unmoderated hashtag's on the site's display to make a disparaging remark or two. Well done Tories for going web 2.0, poor show on making such a #hashtag of it. Lessons learnt: although an election is a fast and furious thing, it's essential to allow time for user-testing of a site launch, rather than a very public flop.
  • Brown outlines advanced UK digital strategy – As we're all on tenderhooks for the notice of the UK election date, the parties are lining up their policies. In the red corner, Brown the encumbent plans to introduce two new bodies to advance the digital economy, An Institute fo Web Science headed up by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and a digital public service unit led by Last Minute.com founder and digital inclusion champion Martha Lane-Fox (one has to have double-barrelled names to succeed nowadays in government). Whilst creating two new quangos, Brown dashes against the rest, replacing 'first gen' e-government with an integrated MyGov portal (cue expensive new makeover). It will be interesting to see how the development of this policy unfolds, particularly in line with the forthcoming digital economy bill and whether this does progress through parliament despite public uproar.
  • Direct Marketing 2.0 – You are what you click – Net Imperative article briefing on how user insight and split-run testing can help to build better return on investment as part of a digital strategy. Some important lessons here like 'rubbish in, rubbish out' data sources, and the idea of an A-Z rather than A-B, testing iteratively all aspects of a campaign or conversion web page as an ongoing beta.
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These are my links for February 15th through February 19th:

  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • Radio DJ Pete Price targeted by fake blogger – Interesting story from Liverpool: a blogger poses as an opinionated radio journalist to garner more publicity for his 'rants'. Assuming some one else's identity on line is (I presume) a crime, but it's an interesting form of direct action – e.g. people setting up MySpace, Twitter accounts etc. passing off as celebrities.
  • Two-screen TV: terms of engagement – Article in Broadcast, the TV industry magazine, on 'two screen tv' – the idea that you can have an interactive presence to a TV show during live broadcast, by presenting online games, tools and features for the breaks and to encourage users to participant. An interesting case study of Channel 4's 'surgery live' – a week long surgical screening experiment where users asked questions by Facebook and Twitter.
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These are my links for January 4th from 11:28 to 21:31:

  • West Midlands police talk on social media – Very interested to hear this talk from a recent Connected Nottingham seminar with West Midlands police – their online strategy rocks! It's all about cool cop videos, crime detection and prevention and getting people to see the good work the police do.
  • Six Social Media Trends for 2010 – More interesting future-gazing on the year ahead in social media (like we can in any way predict it!) with some things I've also mused may become big: location services, user filtering (esp to filter heavy users), and social media moving to mobile devices (due to corporate limitations on social media, coupled with the rise in affordable mobile data).
  • The Decade in Management Ideas – Trust Harvard Business Review to offer up this very high-end 'noughties' list of the top trend in Management Ideas – IT/web stuff features strong e.g. Open Innovation, IT as a utility and consumer feedback.
  • Why you will regret using Vimeo – Vimeo is a video-hosting website that's like a sort of grown-up version of YouTube with slightly less slack comments. I was previously suggesting to clients to use it for business channels, but this post has put me off – any content in any way linking to a commercial product, or embedded onto a site serving advertising, may break their terms of service. Looks like Blip.tv may be better option.
  • A man walks into a bar – Interesting article on some of the issues facing B2B websites using the analogy of a bar "Delivering Excellence in Ethanol Combination Services' – it advises to look at bringing the offline sales team into the online marketing process and avoiding bringing jargon into the website, or trying to hide your services from competitors. B2B websites are not a poor cousin of consumer websites: they can bring in far more revenue focusing on higher-value personal interactions.
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These are my links for December 28th through December 30th:

  • It’s the end of TV as we know it – The Register's tech-focused view of broadcasters Project Canvas – which should demo at Easter and sell in summer (unless Sky/Murdoch succeed in fighting it and the BBC's involvement), this could herald the mainstreaming of IPTV (internet on-demand television delivered by web to computer or TV sets) which also leads to the end of broadcast TV (I think this will be a slow rather than immediate decline over several decades).
  • Is the Tipping Point Toast? – Got sent this link by author Guy Kawasaki who believes 'nobodies are the new somebodies'. This is nearly a year old but a must-read article: it rebuffs Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point' theory that marketeers need to target the influential, however, scientific research as shown that crowds are as easily influenced by each other as the supposedly influential, with connection between peers and friends more significant than the 'celeb Twitterers' etc. Important (if not depressing) lessons for social media marketeers.
  • Social Media for Audience Development & Community Building – Very good article by video journalist Documentally giving examples of approaches and technologies for how a theatre production could use social media, and how it can be used as a means of communicating and collaborating with audiences.
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