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Today’s Digital Consultant Links for March 29th

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.

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for February 13th

These are my links for February 13th from 10:29 to 11:44:

Warner Music to quit streaming online? – I'm not sure if this story just relates to New Zealand, but it's intriguing to see that Warners, the smallest of the 'big 4' record labels, is considering withdrawing from the popular yet profitless streaming space and setting up rival premium subscription services. This to me is a return to the segregated bad old days of 2002 when different labels got together to establish seperate e-tail services – all of which failed miserably. Punters don't care WHICH label a band is on (unless it's a specialist indie), just that the service is good, affordable and has lots of what they like. So unless Warners (a massively loss making company who may struggle to see it through this decade) can get other majors on board, this idea is dead in the water. We're building too many boats here with not enough passengers.
Dotty Mummy :A wry and humorous look at one Mummy’s struggle through life – Sometimes the internet can be a dark as well as uplifting place. I came across this lady's Twitter feed as people were asking about her on Twitter due to a suicidal blog and Twitter post. Thanks to a quick Twitter led rescue mission by one of her online friends, Dotty was rescued and taken to hospital after taking a lethal overdose. Her blog is heartfelt reading too: with little written to disguise her identity (which has led to her survival) she writes emotively about her life as a mother, battling depression and a marriage break down. Yet there's a downside: Dotty's disclosure of her difficult choices, and the comments made by readers criticising her, accelerated her path towards suicide. To me, Dotty's struggle symbolises the light and dark of social media: it acts as a life line for those without a voice, but can be a damning void of faceless hatred in the same admission.
Google Buzz Makes Gmail Social – If you haven't got it already, internet mega lords Google are trying to get a steal in the social networking space and microblogging status updates. Google Buzz is not disimilar to Twitter but sits within users existing Gmail system, and favours a 'closed' network of people you already email, thus being more like Facebook. I can't see this being the big killer app of 2010, however, there are probably uses for business-to-business communications from those who aren't as public or prolific as Twitter users. The big win: It sits where you already are (your email), no need to visit third party sites/services. The big lose: if you aren't using Gmail day to day, it's unlikely to take off, thus limiting its potential to grow.
Measuring Engagement is just another term for Measuring Relationships – Good article from a PR's perspective applying relationship engagement particularly within a social media context by applying Grunig's relationship theory. The advice is to measure not just the metrics but the move from 'lurker' to active participant and advocate in your different channels (this can be done quantatively, but I would think impossible to track individual's usage on multiple channels (and potentially unethical) but certainly aggregating changes in user behaviour i.e. new 'retweeters' each month or those entering more engaged programmes is positive for organisations or brands who wish to build long-term communities of interest.

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for September 11th

These are my links for September 11th from 02:06 to 17:36:

TweetDeck opens to MySpace, aims to become social media hub – Rather than another tech feature update – this is quite significant: TweetDeck are now enabling updates from Facebook and MySpace, thus becoming a social media aggregator (akin to Friendfeed), a key part of the web 2.0 – and future web 3.0 – experience.
Google planning micro-payments for publishers – An unexpected life-raft – Google are developing a pay-per-view style sytem for online content – but for the newspapers and big print-to-online producer, will it be enough to float a sinking ship?
500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for March 29th

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