freemium

Digital Consultant links for April 15th through April 16th

These are my links for April 15th through April 16th:

Election 2010: what the manifestos promise for media and creatives – Here's one to interrogate your election door-steppers with: what the three main parties will do for the UK's creative industries. There's some reasonable differentiators, particularly in Lib Dem/ Conservative pledge to (perhaps) diminish or cut the Regional Development Agencies. Some hopes still on the horizon for a (too little too late) games industry tax break.
Is ‘free’ finally falling out of favor? – Sad news today that Ning, the social network tool that lets anyone set up a niche social network in a few minutes, is adopting a pay or leave model. It's sad: I'm sure a lot of the networks I'm in will go (even a small cost is not always easy to achieve) and the critical mass Ning had with setting up one account to access multiple online communities, particularly in the non-profit space, will whither away. But it's also more symptomatic that this 'poster child' for web 2.0 free communities cannot survive endless free lunches: with Meetup.com steeling a march on real world communities by charging annual fees, we may now start to see the gradual 'pay or die' monetisation of many online services.
5 Ways to Reduce Social Media Distractions and Be More Productive – Some help we all need right now! Productivity tools to avoid getting carried away with 'real time' data (from bank accounts to social networks) just because it's there.

These are my links for November 27th from 18:48 to 18:51:

How to Make $55,000 by Giving Away Your Work – Interesting economic article about New York animator Nina Paley, showing what incomes she made from other sources and revenues by distributing her films for free online. For a no-budget, emerging artist it shows that there is an economy in generating content to promote yourself and your art, but equally $55K is a pitiful return on investment on a film – not taking into account what the production costs are and time.
Survey uncovers the nation’s favourite websites – Interesting survey of 2,000 UK web users shows which websites they are using. In social media, interestingly Facebook is far more used than thought – with 74% actively using the site, against just 4% using MySpace and Twitter respectively.