Media Monkey

Integrated Marketing Campaigns

2011-11-21T13:50:00.002Z

For everything people have been saying about John Lewis' new TV ad, it's interesting seeing what's live for digital advertising at the moment:

Not quite as interesting!

Six ways you can support the Guardian | Info | guardian.co.uk

2011-07-23T23:00:00.000+01:00

Seems slightly desperate, but it's a good idea.

------ from www.guardian.co.uk, via Google Reader
Subscribe to the Guardian and Observer before the end of this month and pay only £5 per week for our seven-day package – a saving of 45% on the cover price

How to Install Google&;#39;s Note in Reader Bookmarklet in iPad&;#39;s Safari

2011-07-16T16:15:00.001+01:00

Great - this does work!

------ from www.passwordincorrect.com, via Google Reader
If you want to install in your iPad's Safari a Google's Note in Reader bookmarklet, just in case you really need to share something from your mobile browse

How the Cable/Willetts market in higher education ended up inflating fees

2011-07-13T23:22:00.001+01:00

Some nice quotes to remember

------ from Left Foot Forward, via Google Reader

Remember all that lovely spin about how higher education tuition fees of more than £6,000 a year would be rare?

“Mr Willetts gave warning that universities should only charge maximum fees only in ‘exceptional circumstances’.” – The Daily Telegraph, February 21st 2011

“People keep citing £9,000. You know, £9,000 should be the exception not the rule. If you want to go through the £6,000 barrier you are going to have to jump through a lot of hoops.” – The Independent, December 5th 2010

“Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD): ’One of the worries out there is that all universities might end up being allowed to charge £9,000. What assurance – what rules, what guarantees-can my Right Hon. Friend give that “exceptional” will mean “exceptional”, and that £6,000 will be the limit for most universities in the country?’

“Vince Cable: ’That is a highly pertinent question in the light of the experience of the last government, who had a two-tier system. There was a migration of all universities to the top of the range. They operated, in effect, like a cartel, and that must be stopped.’” – Hansard, December 9th 2011

Well, it’s all turned out rather differently.

As the BBC reported this morning:

More than a third of England’s universities have had their plans to charge £9,000 for every course officially approved. Some 58% will be allowed to charge £9,000 for at least some courses in 2012, said the fees watchdog the Office for Fair Access.

One major reason why is that universities fear students will price as shorthand for quality, so resulting in universities actually competing to raise prices. As Left Foot Forward reported recently, the Vice Chancellor of De Montford University, Professor Dominic Shellard, told his student newspaper that DMU will charge £9,000 next year because:

“…whether we like it or not there’s a correlation between what you charge and people’s perception of quality. We’re quite ambitious as an institution, we want to go well beyond this notion that we’re a post-92 institution. It was a reflection of our ambition.”

We are fast heading towards a two-tier higher education sector where potential employers will ask applicants “did you go to a £9K university?”; strangely, senior Liberal Democrats said they changed thier minds on tuition fees due to the need to reduce the deficit.

Yet, with government paying fees up front and institutions competing to drive prices upwards, we have a recipe for increasing government debt, at least in the short term.

Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen

2011-07-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

WANT

------ from Boing Boing, via Google Reader

It's probably the level of concentration required, but these kids do not look nearly as excited about what they are doing as I think they should.

For the last two years, University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student Arthur Nishimoto has been working on this incredible-looking video game based around a multi-touch interface. According to the YouTube page, the game:

... explores how a real-time interactive strategy game that would typically rely on complex keyboard commands and mouse interactions be transferred into a multi-user, multi-touch environment. Originally designed for use with TacTile, a 52-inch multi-touch LCD tabletop display, "Fleet Commander" game play has been ported to
EVL's 20-foot wide multi-touch LCD wall, Cyber-Commons. "Fleet Commander" uses Processing, an open source programming language.

There's more about the game's development at Nishimoto's website. Also: In before the Orson Scott Card jokes!

Video Link

Via Golem.de and Carl Wirth

Used bike ad is slightly militant

2011-07-13T23:02:00.000+01:00

Awesome

------ from Boing Boing, via Google Reader

"Anyone buying this bike for a "fixie conversion" will be shot."

(Via Kent Peterson)

Google working on a marketplace for advertisers to buy and sell your data

2011-07-12T18:47:00.002+01:00

This might be fun. If we can get some gold standard demographic data being fed in, things could get much more interesting.

------ from VentureBeat, via Google Reader

Google is working to create an online exchange where digital marketers can buy, sell and trade data on individuals, according to an Ad Age report.

Google deflected many questions we had about the service with a single, short statement.

“We’re working on a few initiatives with partners to improve the way that users, advertisers and publishers manage third party data, but there’s no single product or timetable,” according to a spokesperson.

Former DoubleClick executive and current Google VP Neal Mohan echoed that statement.

“If our vision is a comprehensive one, it needs to contemplate data in addition to ad inventory,” Mohan told AdAge.

A person familiar with DoubleClick’s internal workings told VentureBeat that an imminent product launch is not in the works. At this point, Google still has much to do before it can introduce one or many products that can deliver this type of service to marketers.

The move could help Google re-establish itself as a powerful and innovative force in advertising. But it also could gain scrutiny from privacy advocates that are nervous about such a large scale of user data being traded.

The exchange, which AdAge claims is known internally as “DDP,” will connect marketers in such a way that they can sell wide swaths or small fragments of audience data to each other. It will also work with Google’s DoubleClick server to help online publishers sell their data just as they would sell ad space. The exchange will compete directly with companies that already sell user data like Targus Info, Claritas and Catalina Marketing.

The report notes that data providers plan to strip out identifiable information when they sell user data, but because Google will be connecting companies at such a large scale, the project will likely receive a close look from privacy advocates.

Berin Szoka, president of tech policy think tank TechFreedom, said the concept of this data marketplace is a great idea for helping ad-supported publishers. But he notes Google would do well to implement the product with strong privacy controls.

“Google has the potential to do this in a very privacy friendly way,” Szoka said. “The company has already built considerable transparency into how ads are served. Extending that framework to how data is exchanged could be a big win for privacy, especially if such a market facilitates enforcement of existing self-regulatory commitments. Doing this correctly is the best way for Google to prevent further government involvement.”

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

How digital detectives deciphered Stuxnet, the most menacing malware in history

2011-07-11T23:56:00.002+01:00

LOTS of detail about the Stuxnet virus. Brilliant to see Wired and Ars working together!

------ from arstechnica.com, via Google Reader
It was January 2010 when investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency realized something was off at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran. Months earlier, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran—to sabotage the country's uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear weapon.

Update: NOTW Redux? News International Registers 'SunOnSunday' Domains

2011-07-09T14:59:00.003+01:00

Well done that 'cyber squatter'. Not sure what the value of paying people to buy a domain is anymore.
Can see that they may be buying these domain names to prevent spoofs of their site rather than because they want to launch a separate paper on the Sunday. Would it even need to have a different name?

------ from paidContent:UK, via Google Reader

Update: So now the mystery has been solved. Some time late today, the ownerships of the domain names thesunonsunday.co.uk and sunonsunday.co.uk flipped to News International, having originally be registered to unnamed parties. The domain thesunonsunday.com and sunonsunday.com are still registered to unnamed parties. In a meeting with News of the World staff today, Brooks reportedly discussed the future Sun on Sunday by name.

Meanwhile, subscribers to the NOTW.co.uk, which was put behind a paywall last year, were emailed today detailing that this Sunday would be the final edition of the paper. Access to the site “will be open to the public for free for our final edition on Sunday 10th July.” Those subscribers with outstanding credit will get a refund.

Original post: Yesterday, amid the shocking news that News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). would be shutting down its prized Sunday UK newspaper News of the World amid phone hacking allegations, some commentators started to gather around another fact: the domain names TheSunOnSunday.co.uk and TheSunOnSunday.co.uk had been registered only days ago. So was that part of parent News International’s tactic to resuscitate its Sunday publishing operation before losing its audience—the biggest of all the UK Sunday papers—to competitors? Some believe not.

A teardown of the registration, courtesy of the Online Journalism Blog, points to some reasons to think that this is just the work of your average, opportunistic cyber squatter:

—The who.is registrations. The who.is pages describing ownerships of the .com domain and the .co.uk domain are registered to different companies (.com to Webfusion Ltd in Leeds, and Mediaspring, also in Leeds). But both were filed on the same day, July 5, 2011, and both list http://www.123-reg.co.uk as the referral URL. The OJB post notes that News International usually uses CSC to register its domain names, rather than a site like 123-reg that is geared to small businesses and individuals.

—Then these is the issue of details on these companies. The co.uk domain, for example, is listed to a “UK individual”. It would “be odd for big corporation to withhold info on whois record”, the OJB notes. And it could be considered “Whois abuse” if it was found that a major corporation was masking as an individual in registering a name. (Although if the current allegations are to be believed, hiding facts is possibly not something unfamiliar in these parts.)

We have contacted Webfusion in Leeds to see if it can clarify why the name is listed to it and will update this post as we learn more.

Does the above mean that guesses about News International making a new Sunday tabloid (and therefore lessening the pain of needing to can NOTW) are entirely wrong? Not exactly. Extending a six-day publication to a seven-day schedule had been something News International was already mulling before this scandal broke this week, and may well end up doing—regardless of what name gets used.

The news of the domain name registration and speculation over what that meant had gone a bit media-viral by last night, with groups like CBS (NYSE: CBS) News, the BBC and even BSkyB’s Sky News (partly owned by News Corp, which is trying now to gain full control of the broadcaster) noting the domain and/or referring to News International’s plans to launch another UK Sunday tabloid.

Related

Murdoch At The Center Of The Story -- But Not In Control

News Of The World's Closure Brings Abrupt End To One Murdoch Paywall

News Corp. Seen Weathering Tabloid Scandal Despite Black Eye for News Int.

News Corp's Bid For BSkyB Up In The Air Again, May Blow Up

James Murdoch: 'Sullied' Tabloid Will Close Sunday

Update 2: Hacked Off Public May Derail News Corp Over Dowler Scandal

David Cameron apologises, but for the wrong thing

2011-07-08T15:18:00.000+01:00

Very good points here.

------ from Bagehot's notebook, via Google Reader

TWO DAVID Camerons held a press conference this morning in Downing Street. The first was assured and compelling, and pulled off the difficult task of jumping ahead of the news cycle and setting the agenda for what comes next in the ever-widening scandal involving tabloid phone-hacking and the alleged bribery of policemen.

This Mr Cameron did a whole series of smart things. He admitted that leading politicians had spent several years ignoring the signs of widespread misconduct within the British press because they were anxious to have the support of big press and media outlets. He included himself in that camp, and apologised. He promised that in the future relations with leading proprietors, editors and journalists would have to become less cosy if public trust was going to be regained. And he came close to cutting his ties of friendship and loyalty with Rebekah Brooks, the embattled chief executive of News International and former editor of the News of the World, the Sunday tabloid at the centre of the storm which is to be closed this weekend for good. In his own Falstaff-Prince Hal moment, this new, less cosy prime minister noted press reports that Mrs Brooks had offered her resignation (though some at NI deny this), and said:

…as I have said, it’s not right for a Prime Minister to start picking and choosing who should and shouldn’t run media organisations. But it has been reported that she offered her resignation over this. And in this situation, I would have taken it

He announced that there would be a public inquiry chaired by a judge and taking evidence from witnesses on oath. He said it would address three questions. Why did a first police investigation into phone-hacking, conducted in 2006, fail so abysmally? What exactly was going on at the News of the World? And thirdly, what was going on at other newspapers? Independent police investigators would also probe allegations of bribe-taking by police officers, he said.

He announced a second inquiry into a completely new, independent system of press regulation, moving away from the current system of self-regulation. He declared, correctly, that the current Press Complaints Commission had been "absent" during this greatest of scandals. A committee of the great and the good seems to loom.

Then, alas, there was a second David Cameron on display today. Tense, tetchy, defensive and red-faced, he offered a wholly inadequate explanation of why he had hired as his press chief Andy Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World arrested this morning to be questioned about what he knew about phone-hacking on his watch and the alleged corruption of police officers.

Again and again, Mr Cameron returned to the same formula, saying that he had given Mr Coulson a second chance, but that regrettably that second chance had not worked out. He suggested that Mr Coulson had done the decent thing by resigning from the News of the World in 2007 after the jailing of that tabloid's royal correspondent and a private investigator for phone hacking. Mr Cameron had sought assurances and received assurances that despite that resignation, Mr Coulson knew nothing about the wrongdoing in his newsroom. The prime minister revealed that he had commissioned a private company to run a background check on Mr Coulson.

Alas, he said repeatedly, it had not worked out, though—and Mr Cameron kept stressing this, as though frustrated that we hacks could not see the importance of this point—"no one has ever raised serious concerns about how he did his job for me."

This was a wretched defence. Worryingly, if Mr Cameron's tetchiness was at all sincere, he cannot yet see this. Mr Cameron has a big problem, relating to his decision to hire Andy Coulson in 2007, as his director of communications in opposition. He has a truly huge problem relating to his decision to take Mr Coulson with him into government in 2010 as Downing Street director of communications, after the Guardian and other papers had already raised serious allegations about Mr Coulson, notably in 2009.

Talking about giving Mr Coulson a second chance, and how he paid the price once by resigning in 2007, does not help at all. Mr Cameron is not a probation officer, worrying about the rehabilitation of offenders. His responsibility, when hiring Mr Coulson, was less to probe Mr Coulson's past troubles than to assess the present-day suspicion that Mr Coulson is a liar. The problem is that all working journalists with experience of any daily newsroom (including me), simply never, ever believed Mr Coulson's defence that he did not know how his own newspaper was landing some of its juiciest scoops. It was not just an implausible explanation, it was an insult to the intelligence.

Half the political editors and reporters in the room this morning knew of people who had warned Mr Cameron and his closest aides that hiring Mr Coulson was a grave error. Some of those in the room had probably passed on such warnings themselves. That explains the sense of real frustration on the side of the press: this clever man at the podium was defending a nonsensical argument.

If Mr Cameron had not hired Mr Coulson, this whole sordid saga would be mostly about the past, and acts that took place under a different government. By hiring Mr Coulson, this saga is squarely about Mr Cameron's judgement.

Here is why this all matters, and why it is not going away.

1. Mr Cameron was peppered with questions today about what he knew and when did he know it. He was asked if he knew that the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had warned his aides about specific, serious allegations involving Mr Coulson that had yet to emerge. He was asked if he had been warned or knew of the existence of emails apparently showing that payments were made to corrupt policemen by the News of the World. He told us he did not know about those emails, and more broadly told us he wasn't given any "specific, actionable information" about Andy Coulson and wrongdoing.

Such questions are only going to increase in number. Mr Cameron is going to need a good, reassuring answer for every single one of them.

2. Mr Cameron's image as a decent, honourable man, his personal brand as the ultimate guarantor that this is a new, moderate Conservative Party, is on the line now.

The most revealing moment of the entire press conference for me came when Mr Cameron was asked a question about whether this was a moment of reputational damage to compare with Tony Blair and the Iraq war. In answering that this situation was not like the Iraq crisis at all, Mr Cameron—off his own bat—said it was also nonsense to compare it with money for tobacco advertising.

That was a reference to a smaller, earlier scandal involving Tony Blair and Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula 1 boss. That affair blew up very early in Mr Blair's time in office (Mr Ecclestone had given a donation to the Labour Party in 1997, and months later, the new Labour government proposed giving Formula 1 a lucrative exemption from a ban on tobacco advertising. Though there was no suggestion of impropriety by Mr Ecclestone, there was a big fuss, and in the end, the donation was repaid). At that time, Mr Blair used his post-election honeymoon aura to downplay the allegations of favours being bought, saying that voters knew he was a "pretty straight sort of guy". Later, as public distrust of Mr Blair grew, the moment would come to be seen as a symbol of the disenchantments that lay ahead.

Was the Ecclestone reference a slip of the tongue? Or a revelation about what is seething within Mr Cameron's brain, as he grapples with the first big threat to his own image, so central to his project of detoxifying the Tories? Is Mr Cameron worrying that this is the moment people start to question the idea that he is a pretty straight sort of guy?

Anti-PowerPoint Party

2011-07-05T21:33:00.001+01:00

Nice

------ from Google Reader
The Swiss Anti-PowerPoint Party has been founded to ban the use of PowerPoint: "According to the APPP, the use of presentation software costs the Swiss economy 2.1 billion Swiss francs (US$2.5 billion) annually, while across the whole of Europe, presentation software causes an economic loss of €110 billion (US$160 billion). APPP bases its calculations on unverified assumptions about the number of employees attending presentations each week, and supposes that 85 percent of those employees see no purpose in the presentations." The party's founder has -- not coincidentally -- written a book about PowerPoint's evils (he recommends flip-charts instead). (via /.)

Zynga’s board earned millions in 2010, IPO reveals

2011-07-04T22:34:00.006+01:00

Gosh. They've done quite well!

------ from VentureBeat, via Google Reader

Massively popular social gaming company Zynga today filed for a $1 billion IPO along with some staggering numbers, including that the company had already earned $90 million in profit in 2011. The filing also revealed what sort of compensation the executive board earned in 2010.

The biggest highlight regarding pay on the sheet is that Executive VP Owen Van Natta, a Myspace veteran, earned an enormous $43 million in 2010. Most of his pay came from stock and option awards, but he’s surely not complaining.

CEO and founder Mark Pincus only earned around $520,000, but that number is misleading as Pincus sold $110 million in shares last year and owns 16% of the company.

Another major number on the board belonged to Steven Chiang, co-president of games, who racked up nearly $29 million in total compensation. Then there’s CFO David Wehner, who earned around $18 million.

The eye-popping chart is below:

San Francisco-based Zynga generates its revenues from its Facebook-based games like FarmVille, CityVille, and Empires and Allies. Each successive game has become a hit and users happily purchase items inside otherwise free games, generating tons of cash.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. Our sponsors include Qualcomm, Flurry, Greystripe, Nexage, Tapjoy, Fun Mobility, TriNet, Zong, Spil Games and WildTangent.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Compared to Zynga, Groupon is run by a bunch of clowns

2011-07-04T22:28:00.001+01:00

Good points, well made. Though I think it&;#39;s only fair to point out that GroupOn is throwing money to get scale before Google &;amp; co chomp it down.
Although Zynga faces some competition, none of the current gaming giants look capable of challenging their space in the near future.

------ from Google Reader

Social games maker Zynga, the developer behind smash hits like FarmVille and CityVille, filed for an initial public offering on Friday. It is one of the largest initial public offerings expected this year, alongside group-buying site Groupon.

But the way the companies are run, and how efficiently they generate money, couldn’t be any more different.

Compared to Groupon, which has enormous administrative costs and is hemorrhaging a lot of money, Zynga is a ruthlessly-run, well-oiled machine. The social gaming company has kept its administrative costs to a minimum and, while it hasn’t kept up with Groupon in terms of revenue, has been the most profitable company to file for an initial public offering this year.

Zynga has since become a Facebook distribution powerhouse like no other game company. That makes it a lot easier for Zynga to generate revenue, since a percentage of users usually pays for items in otherwise free games.

The company has delivered hit after hit to Facebook. Zynga’s latest social game, Empires &;amp; Allies, is another hit for the company. It attracted more players than FarmVille, its first breakout hit, in just 25 days. Empires &;amp; Allies is gaining new users at a rate of a million a day and 8 million a week now, according to AppData.

Here are a few significant differences between two of the most hotly anticipated IPOs this year:

Revenue: Groupon brings in much more revenue than Zynga. The group-buying site brought in $713.4 million in 2010. The company brought in $644.7 million in the first quarter this year, up from $44.2 million in the first quarter last year. By comparison, Zynga brought in $598 million in revenue last year and $235 million in revenue in the first quarter this year, up from $101 million in revenue in the same quarter a year earlier.

Profit: The biggest difference between the two companies is that Zynga is profitable, while Groupon has lost a lot of money. Zynga made a $90 million profit in 2010. It made a profit of $11.8 million in the first quarter this year, up from $6.4 million in the first quarter of 2010. Groupon has consistently lost money each quarter except for one — the first quarter of 2010, when it brought in an $8 million profit. Groupon lost $456.3 million in 2010 and $6.9 million in 2009. The company lost $146.5 million in the first quarter this year.

Marketing Costs: Compared to Groupon, Zynga spends very little on marketing. Groupon spent $263.2 million on marketing in 2010 and $208.2 million in the first quarter this year. Zynga spent $40.2 million on marketing in the first quarter this year and $114 million in 2010.

Selling, General and Administrative Costs: Groupon has enormous administrative costs that make up roughly a third of its operating expenses. Groupon spent $233.9 million on administrative costs in 2010. The company has spent $178.9 million on administrative costs in the first quarter this year, compared to $4 million in the first quarter last year.

By comparison, Zynga’s administrative costs only make up a fraction of the company’s total costs. The company spent $32.3 million on administrative costs in 2010, or 7 percent of its total costs. Zynga spent $27.1 million on administrative costs in the first quarter this year, or 13 percent of its total costs that quarter, compared to $16.5 million in the first quarter last year.

Groupon currently has 661 employees in North America and 2,895 international employees. As of the end of May, Zynga had 2,268 employees.

Filed under: games

Speculators unburned

2011-07-04T19:23:00.001+01:00

Good point. Open auction is probably a very bad way to prevent speculation. Though not sure what the best way to do it would be.

------ from Google Reader

IT HAS been almost two weeks since the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced it would release 60m barrels of oil from its member governments’ reserves, apparently in response to “ongoing disruption of oil supplies from Libya”. How is that working out?

If the intention was to reduce prices in the medium- or long-term, it has failed. The price of Brent crude fell $5 on the announcement but has rallied since. The price of West Texas Intermediate (mainly produced in America) is trading higher than before the IEA announcement (see chart).

If the intention was to punish speculators, there is also cause for concern. Some speculators who were long oil may have lost big, but only those whose long positions were due for delivery in the few days after June 23rd, when the price was significantly depressed.

In the meantime, the IEA releases have created an opportunity for another potential speculative play. Some IEA members, including Japan and Britain, released their reserves directly to industry. Some even released refined products, such as diesel or jet fuel, which is only of use in specific industrial settings. In contrast America released 30m barrels (half of the IEA total) of unrefined crude, to public auction.

Oil traders are free to bid for it. And it seems they did. The Department for Energy says its auction was heavily oversubscribed with bids from more than 90 parties. For reference, there are 148 refineries in America, but most are owned by a few major players such as Exxon, who would do the actual bidding.

Traders who anticipate the oil price will rise, and have the capacity to store oil, can buy physical stocks now, and sell oil forward. As long as the price rises enough to cover storage costs, they will turn a profit. If a trader was able to purchase West Texas Intermediate—the oil held in America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)—at the spot price on June 24th, they would already be sitting on a tidy profit.

OMFG: Google wants to buy Hulu after all (sorry, Yahoo)

2011-07-04T19:17:00.000+01:00

This would be very interesting

------ from Google Reader

Google has begun preliminary talks to acquire video-streaming service Hulu, according to unnamed sources in contact with the Los Angeles Times.

Last week, Hulu took steps to put itself up for sale by retaining investment banking firms to facilitate a potential acquisition. The company also concluded deals with its media partners and owners to extend licenses to stream exclusive film and television programming through the service — a necessary move since Hulu’s value is heavily tied to its library of content.

Hulu’s exclusive television content has attracted more than 600 major advertisers, including Nissan, McDonald’s and Johnson &;amp; Johnson. The company is expected to rake in $500 million in revenue from ad sales and fees from its premium subscription service.

Despite its financial success, Hulu’s various owners — which include Comcast, News Corp., Disney and Providence Equity Partners – rarely see eye-to-eye on which direction the business should pursue. Selling Hulu is a very attractive option since it would allow each media company to pursue its own content streaming strategy.

The news of Google’s interest in buying Hulu is contrary to earlier reports that explicitly stated that the search engine giant was not among the list of potential buyers. Reportedly, Yahoo was the first to make Hulu an acquisition offer. Both companies have declined to comment on that report.

These reports could well spark a bidding war over Hulu. Both Yahoo and Google could benefit from the acquisition of such a large library of exclusive programming from NBC-Universal, Fox, ABC and Viacom.

For Yahoo, adding Hulu to its fleet of services would allow the company to extend even further into the online video market. The company purchased social television startup IntoNow in April and lost a bid to acquire movie website Flixster (along with Rotten Tomatoes) in May. Rumors have also circulated that Yahoo would like to replace its current CEO Carol Bartz with Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar.

Yet, Google could arguably leverage Hulu to greater effect. The company has been largely unsuccessful in its attempt to add popular licensed content to its YouTube video service. Acquiring Hulu would give the company a foot in the door to Hollywood as well as a team of people to manage relationships with movie and television studios.

Google and Yahoo are hardly the only companies who would benefit from acquiring Hulu. If social networking giant Facebook or streaming-video service Netflix were to join the bidding war, things would definitely heat up fast.

Filed under: Business and Technology, deals, media, News, social, VentureBeat

Fancy A Pint? Ten Top Pubs To Try. And A New Website.

2011-07-03T17:56:00.004+01:00

This looks fun!

------ from Google Reader

The Fancyapint team have been busy. Not only have they been out tasting beer, testing bar staff and reviewing pubs, they’ve been working on a website makeover too. It’s now easier to find good pubs in the area you want over at new look Fancyapint.com. Disagree with their verdicts? Add your own review to the site.

This month’s top ten recommendations don’t include anything further south than Bermondsey but they’ve spanned the city with a recommendation for Hammersmith out west and Walthamstow out east.

By Stuart Cox

- Dean Swift Beer House (Bermondsey)

Good range of beers and the food’s not bad either

- Ain’t Nothin’ But… The Blues Bar (Soho)

One of our favourite live music venues in Soho

- William IV (Walthamstow)

Brew pub and home of the excellent Brodies Beer

- Old Eagle (Camden)

Genuine, friendly local boozer, with a good mixed crowd and friendly service

- Ye Olde Mitre Tavern (Farringdon)

An old favourite, and very historic, haunt with a landlord who knows his beer and how to keep it.

- The Draft House (Bermondsey)

Still a great bet for decent beer and good food

- Windsor Castle (Notting Hill)

A fine old pub with a rural feel in Hotting Hill – and a lovely garden

- The Masons Arms (Regent’s Park)

Decent pub off the beaten track, another old favourite

- The Queen’s Head (Brook Green)

Large beer garden, large interior and Fuller’s range of excellent ales

- The Gunmakers (Farringdon)

Titchy, but perfectly formed real ale pub in Clerkenwell

It’s all about going to the pub at Fancyapint.com

Puritans and Lady Godiva: why two justices voted to uphold California&;#39;s video game law

2011-06-28T10:16:00.007+01:00

Yet more fantastic articles from ars. Nice point from the courts about narrow definitions for laws.
They do make a good point about the difference between obscenity and violence too.

------ from Ars Technica - The PC Enthusiast's Resource, via Google Reader

Justice Samuel Alito doesn't have a whole lot of love for the video game industry.

In some of these games, the violence is astounding. Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters, and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed. It also appears that there is no antisocial theme too base for some in the video-game industry to exploit.

Read the comments on this post

'Hot News' doctrine gets a body-blow

2011-06-27T17:02:00.003+01:00

Wonder what the equivalent law is here?

------ from Boing Boing, via Google Reader
Electronic Frontier Foundation copyright attorney Corynne McSherry has news about Barclays v FlyOnTheWall.com, a case that asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on whether the "Hot News" doctrine could be applied in the digital era. "Hot News" is an obscure corner of law that lets newsagencies treat publicly available facts as property and prevent others from reporting on them for a set time.

In Fly, the court heard argument that FlyOnTheWall.com was endangering the business-models of several financial recommendation services that provided stock-tips by reporting on those tips as soon as they were published. The court's decision is instructive:

The adoption of a new technology that injures or destroys present business models is commonplace. Whether fair or not, that cannot, without more, be prevented by application of the misappropriation tort... The Firms are making news; Fly, despite the Firms' understandable desire to protect their business model, is breaking it.

The court found in Fly's favor, and ruled that the "Hot News" doctrine is even narrower than previously thought, and can only be applied in true "free riding" cases where one news-entity is copying a competitor verbatim -- Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers and the other plaintiffs aren't news agencies, they're news. Their stock tips are newsworthy. When Fly reported on them and undermined their profitability, it was tough noogies (an incredibly underused legal concept, IME).

EFF was amicus on the case, and filed comments with Citizen Media Law Project and Public Citizen asking the court to find as it did. Other amici who took the defendant's side included Google and Twitter.

The "Hot News" Doctrine After Fly On the Wall: Surviving, But On Life Support

&;quot;Hot News&;quot; doctrine gets a body-blow

2011-06-27T17:02:00.002+01:00

Wonder what the equivalent law is here?

------ from Google Reader
Electronic Frontier Foundation copyright attorney Corynne McSherry has news about Barclays v FlyOnTheWall.com, a case that asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on whether the "Hot News" doctrine could be applied in the digital era. "Hot News" is an obscure corner of law that lets newsagencies treat publicly available facts as property and prevent others from reporting on them for a set time.

The adoption of a new technology that injures or destroys present business models is commonplace. Whether fair or not, that cannot, without more, be prevented by application of the misappropriation tort... The Firms are making news; Fly, despite the Firms' understandable desire to protect their business model, is breaking it.

The "Hot News" Doctrine After Fly On the Wall: Surviving, But On Life Support

Unbelievably racist ad via South Africa.

2011-06-20T13:12:00.002+01:00

Wow

------ from Google Reader
(click ad, via) An ad for matches, for chrissake. This appears to be a real ad, part of a new campaign by Y&;amp;R Johannesburg. From the agency press note: &;quot;As the layers of attempted conversation starters are rejected they are literally struck from the page, leaving the same mark as a struck match would. We incorporated the same style into the linear illustrations to make them appear that they had been drawn by a match.&;quot;
OK, but that doesn't explain why the black man in this ad isn't beating the living shit out of cartoonishly-insensitive white boy. Playing angel's advocate, I guess you could argue that this ad is trying (horribly) to "strike" a blow against racism. But I don't think a match company should be taking up that cause in its advertising. Previous racist South African ad: Apartheid humor used to sell bronzer.

AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out « News

2011-06-18T18:59:00.007+01:00

Think I need to get hold of this aol document

------ from thefastertimes.com, via Google Reader
Think I need to get hold of this aol documeneed to get hold of this aol document

------ from thefastertimes.com, via Google Reader
Think I need to get hold of this aol document

LOCOG Censures Use Of ‘2012’

2011-06-15T12:37:00.007+01:00

Hmmm - good old lawyers!

------ from Londonist, via Google Reader

Or should that be 20**? The Great Exhibition Company have been told by Games organisers that using the year formerly known as 2012 in their forthcoming Great Exhibition could result in legal action.

LOCOG cite the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 which is supposed to prevent any unauthorised association between the 2012 Olympics and other people or businesses. Stratford’s Café Olympic fell foul of the same regulations earlier this year. In the case of The Great Exhibition Company, LOCOG claims that ‘2012’ is now synonymous with the Olympics.

Fortunately, the cinematic catastrophe-fest starring John Cusack has escaped LOCOG’s attention. As have the 42,451 books listed on Amazon with the-year-after-2011-but-before-2013 in the title.

Photo by suburbanslice

Visualizing Progress in the Canadian Grand Prix

2011-06-14T08:08:00.003+01:00

Look suspiciously like the rowing bumps race maps...

------ from Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media, via Google Reader

The official F1 site provides this visualization of the position of the drivers on a lap by lap basis through the race.

With a little more work (or a little eye strain on your part) you should be able to see the progress of Mr. Button.

Updated: iCloud: Just A Lot Of Hot Air When It Comes To Streaming?

2011-06-07T12:43:00.002+01:00

Think that the limits of the cloud will actually be quite good for Spotify. Once people get used to the idea of no longer physically owning media products, streaming will become a little more popular.
Especially once it includes video content too.

------ from Google Reader

In the stream of announcements made today at the WWDC, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) may have dismantled more than one business model in its wake. “Sh*t” was the one-word response from Marco Arment, founder of the reading app Instapaper, when the curtain came up on Reading List from Safari. He later wrote he did that partly for comedic effect, and even posted a longer response claiming he was “tentatively optimistic” about what Apple’s free service would mean for his business. One other area that may not have been impacted quite as much as people thought it would be? Music.

Specifically, today we heard that the iCloud music service, iTunes in the Cloud, will let users do more with their iTunes digital music than they have been able to do before—synching and accessing it across devices, uploading all your music (not just those tracks bought from iTunes) quickly through a digital matching service, and making it all work wirelessly anywhere, rather than by docking to a central hub in the home.

But one thing that users will not be able to do—yet—is to stream that iTunes music. From Apple’s description it appears that the primary aim of iTunes in the Cloud is storage: music will be stored locally rather than delivered from a remote location. And the basic service—as it appears now—focuses on a users’ existing music library, rather than around subscriptions to services that deliver music over the airwaves, the basic paid business model behind the streaming services.

On one hand, this spells good news for the Rhapsody/Rdio/Thumbplay/Spotifies of the world: Apple will not be competing directly against them, it seems.

And how do these streaming companies view the new service? One company in Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, told mocoNews in a written response: “To download all your purchased music for free to multiple devices? About time! Especially as my computer crashed last week.” (And yes, it was a Mac.)

Asked whether he thought a play-anywhere model would mean fewer people opting for streaming services, Ek was also unequivocal: “We believe music should be connected. People want to discover more music. Not just [listen to the] same music.”

But looked at a different way, Apple’s new iTunes in the Cloud service could also spell bad news for these same companies: many of the streaming companies have so far failed to attain a critical mass of subscribers. Some, like Thumbplay, have even gone to the wall for it.

If Apple launching a streaming service would have been a vote of confidence in that business model, then does Apple deciding not to launch one mean a vote of no confidence?

Part of the backstory, as told by bloggers citing sources close to negotiations, was that Apple had just about secured deals with all four major record labels to launch a streaming service. That no streaming service materialized today could have meant those streaming deals didn’t get secured after all. Or that Apple never intended for them to.

The sheer growth of the iOS and iTunes platforms—today Apple said that there are 225 million iTunes accounts worldwide, 200 million iOS devices, and 15 billion music downloads, making it the world’s largest digital music retailer—means that Apple’s new iTunes service, even without a streaming element, will change the game for how other companies will make digital music accessible by consumers.

But that absence of music (and video) streaming also gives existing streaming players—as well as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN)—the chance to live to compete another day.

Related

WWDC 2011: Our Full Coverage

@ WWDC 2011: iTunes Match Scans For Ripped Songs, Links With iCloud

@ WWDC 2011: Apple's Free iCloud; Cloud Docs, iTunes In The Cloud

Clouds Gather Over iCloud In Germany: Apple Faces Antitrust Complaint

Universal Said To Ink Music Deal With Apple Ahead Of iCloud Debut

Sony Reportedly On Board For Apple Streaming Music Service; Universal Next?

Which credit card companies will let you buy marijuana?

2011-06-02T13:10:00.002+01:00

Can imagine some good ads for this!

------ from Google Reader
Christopher Maag of credit.com reports on the credit card companies that let you get stoned now and pay later.

"The issue of purchasing medical marijuana is an emerging issue, and we're continuing to look into it," says Jim Issokson, a spokesman for MasterCard.
Visa and Discover also allow people to purchase medical marijuana in states where it's legal. Citing the fact that marijuana-medical or not-is still illegal according to federal law, American Express does not allow its customers to use its cards for pot purchases of any kind.
"It is our policy to adhere to the federal law in such matters," Bradley R. Manor, an AmEx spokesman, told Smartmoney.com.

Want to Charge Weed? What Credit Card are You Carrying?

What Are the Most Impressive Views Astronauts See In Orbit? [Video]

2011-06-02T00:03:00.002+01:00

If you want your kid to be an astronaut, start showing them this film repeatedly!

------ from Google Reader

This high definition short is a fascinating document. Narrated by NASA's Dr. Justin Wilkinson, it shows a tour of planet Earth as seen by astronauts, explaining what are the places that they first focus on while in orbit. More »

Google Offers is the business plan behind Google Wallet, and it’s live tomorrow

2011-06-01T13:41:00.002+01:00

Nice idea

------ from Google Reader

While demonstrating their new mobile payment product Google Wallet today, Google executives offered some insight into how it will make money.

Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt gave the demonstration with Google vice president Stephanie Tilenius at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Users should be able to tap their phones against compatible point-of-sale devices and use the app to make payments. They should be able to use the Wallet app to redeem offers from Google’s upcoming deals product, Google Offers. Schmidt and Tilenius said the Offers will be the real moneymaker for Wallet — in fact, Google doesn’t plan to charge a fee for the app or for transactions.

They also emphasized that they see Google Wallet as something that isn’t limited to Google’s Android phones (although that’s where it works for now). Wallet is an app that should hypothetically work on other smartphones, Schmidt said: “There’s no intent to favor any one platform.” Does that mean we’ll see Wallet on iPhones, Windows Phones, and BlackBerrys anytime soon? We’ll see.

As for Google Offers, Tilenius also announced that the first deals will go live tomorrow. As previously announced, the program is starting in Portland, and it will expand to San Francisco and New York later this summer.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

Tags: D9, Google Offers, Google Wallet

Companies: Google

People: Eric Schmidt, Stephanie Tilenius

Statstock

2011-05-12T12:37:00.000+01:00

Speaking at IAB's "festival of stats today"

Exciting!

Little kids and memory

2011-05-12T07:17:00.002+01:00

Interesting experiment. Seem to remember reading somewhere that the childhood memories often return in later life too. Might be an interesting follow up!

------ from Google Reader

Most adults don't have any memories from before they were age 3 or 4. That's certainly true for me. My earliest memories that I can accurately place in time come from when I was 3, just before Return of the Jedi came out. I'm pretty sure that my earliest memory is watching the Death Star explode on TV, followed closely by memories of a vicious preschool playground debate over whether or not Darth Vader was actually Luke's father. (I got that one wrong. I totally thought he was lying.)

But a Canadian study suggests that this limit to how far back grown ups can remember doesn't apply to kids. A group of 100 children, between the ages of 4 and 13, were asked to describe their earliest memories. After verifying events with parents, researchers found that the youngest kids could recall things that happened when they were as young as 18 months old.

But, when the same kids were brought back two years later, those memories had faded. Their earliest memories were now different, later events. And the kids couldn't recall their previous early memories even with prompting. The researchers are speculating that our brains may encode memories in different ways during the first few years of life than they do later on.

BBC: Children can recall early memories, Canadian study suggests

Via Mark Changizi

Image: Unpacking My Brain, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0)

Star Wars-Osama Bin Laden-New York Times parody/mashup

2011-05-12T07:10:00.002+01:00

Fabulously geeky

------ from Google Reader

Galactic Empire Times.

(Via Dave Itzkoff)

BBC News - Redundancy rules could be relaxed, says government

2011-05-11T17:48:00.002+01:00

Love the mixed message. We're going to make it easier to get rid of jobs so that we can create more jobs...

------ from Google Reader
Rules governing levels of compensation for workplace discrimination, and how long firms have to consult staff over job losses, are to be reviewed.

Installing MySQLdb on Snow Leopard

2010-03-21T20:56:00.003Z

This is completely useless if you don't want to install a connector between Python and MySQL on a Mac.

If you did need to and didn't want to spend hours searching for how to do it - this is the solution (after a stupid amount of time looking on and off over the last couple of months).

Spent ages trying to install this component on Snow Leopard.

Firstly - Snow Leopard removed one of the old gcc compilers (needed to build the package). This needs to come off the installation DVD.

Secondly - MySQLdb has the wrong config path in site.cfg. You need to change it. It's in /usr/local. You need to tell it the path to the mysql config file (in bin inside the mysql install directory).

Thirdly - there's something necessary called an Arch flag. Don't know what that is.

Fourthly - MySQLdb is calling the wrong version of gcc so you need to correct that.

Therefore instructions are:

Download latest version from sourceforge.

Next modify the config path (fuller instructions here:http://www.mangoorange.com/2008/08/01/installing-python-mysqldb-122-on-mac-os-x/?cp=all).

Now go into the relevant directory through terminal and:

sudo python setup.py clean
sudo ARCHFLAGS=’-arch x86′ CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 python setup.py build
sudo ARCHFLAGS=’-arch x86′ CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 python setup.py install

Overly complicated but worked in the end.

Found the instructions in the comments halfway down the article linked.

Fairy Dust

2010-01-18T22:27:00.002Z

“The e-book is a beautiful, beautiful dream, that newspapers will be saved because people who weren’t prepared to pay for content on one screen will magically decide they will on another screen. Maybe the tooth fairy will drop nuggets of gold on the newspaper industry as well!”

Really liking Paid Content - nice blog about internet publishing in the UK.

Photo from dreamglow

The Media Decline Continues

2009-07-23T22:42:00.004+01:00

New quarter, new proclamations of pain from traditional media owners. Many of them are seeing significant declines in their precious advertising revenues.

The problem, as articulated by 'Free', is that advertising was once a scarcity market. It was a market that was defined by a lack of supply. I've lost count of the number of briefs that use the words 'cash-rich, time-poor'.

The implication we're using in this case is that the people we're targeting don't consume much media. They will only see our adverts in a couple of places in the rare times when they're not working or doing aspirational things.

Clients loved it. We loved it. The media loved it. It was even and recycled and sold back to consumers: here and here among the 11.2 million results in Google. Consumers loved the idea that they were so important they couldn't be bothered to engage with stuff that wasn't either fun or self improving.

Our entire industry was then wrapped around this problem. Fickle people need clever strategies for finding them. Media agencies will sit there and come up with cunning ways to reach them. Publishers will dream up shiny media vehicles that are tailored to these people. The agencies will come up with a way to value the audiences that publishers own. The Publishers will then find ways to 'reach' that audience that will turn out to be particularly costly.

Problem is that we've gotten a bit too good at finding solutions to this problem. The internet has been a fantastic leveller in terms of media consumption.

In the old media world, one could argue that the only way to reach a 'high flier' was to buy ads in the FT, maybe the economist and possibly get some posters around Canary Wharf. You wouldn't find them watching Pop Idol or at least the wastage you'd see in that buy would make things a bit pointless.

Now a whole host of companies have come along trying to find ways to get to those people. We can identify them from registration data across Facebook and LinkedIN. They will be reading the business sections online across the Guardian, Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, CityWire, Interactive Investor, etc.

This worked for a while but at some point some more clever people came up with ways to identify these people across the internet. Now we can use tracking technology to find regular readers of the FT \ business sections \ heavy online purchasers. Once we've found them, we can target ads to them wherever they are. For the price of one placement in the FT, we can get ten when that person's reading up on the latest gossip on HeatWorld (they still indulge their trashy side too).

The targeting change hasn't fully hit the media landscape yet. We've yet to nail the exact places our ads are going to be appearing in. Testing of the effectiveness of the targeted ads hasn't come back with solid enough results.

What's certain is that once the recession has ended, publishers who rely on pushing high rates for their 'premium' audience are going to have difficulty pushing their rates back up to where they were before the recession.

Image stolen from Big Huge Labs

Daily Mail 'Beats Guardian'

2009-07-23T14:09:00.003+01:00

You'll probably see this kind of story being repeated across the press for the next couple of days.

This is because the ABCe have now changed access to their report so that normal people can't access them without registering (and being an employee of a member company).

The Daily Mail has somehow managed to add an extra 5 million readers in the last month. This is more than adding all the people who live in Birmingham. It's a bit unlikely to say the least.

Looking at the actual certificates, the Daily Mail's gone from 7.974m UK uniques last month to 8.316m UK uniques this month. That's an increase of 400k, which is 5%. That's good but definitely no the 19% that Brand Republic are reporting.

The increase has come from international traffic.

By UK traffic, the position is currently:

Guardian - 10.211m
Daily Mail 8.316m

Guardian wins.

Brand Republic - AgencyDMG takes search analysis beyond 'last click wins' model - Media News - Brand Republic

2009-07-16T14:54:00.000+01:00

Surprised these people manage to get this into the industry papers. This kind of technology's been around for at least three years.

Never heard of AgencyDMG, but it's quite a good name.

Digital Brain:Search also sounds like proper fancypants technology. Hopefully it lives up to the name.

Newspapers Trying To Evolve

2009-05-29T13:30:00.003+01:00

Will be interesting to see if there are any anti-competitive actions out of what this group of newspapers are planning to do.

So the American guys are getting together in Chicago to go through what they can do.

Our European guys are getting together in Barcelona to discuss their digital problems. Would have thought they can webconference that!

My own opinion is that there's room for a couple of large news providers to function but not room for all the ones that currently exist. Some are going to have to explore different ways to do what they do, and stomach a huge drop in their earnings.

Got Published!

2009-04-26T21:31:00.002+01:00

After a long period of not having time to actually write anything for this, I recently got hte chance to write an opinion piece for our industry mag, "Media Week".

The subject was sparked off by an article by Rupert Murdoch talking about the fact that free content will not endure.

My edited opinion is below. Wrote it in about three hours so it doesn't detail everything I wanted to.

Essentially I think charging is unavoidable for most news sites. I think the bit they add value to are the opinion sections rather than the news sections (many people write news, few people write opinion that people agree with).

The future news site will select relevant news stories from various sources and then add in their own opinion. You'll have to pay to see the opinion but the selection \ filtering will be free.

That's what I think anyway. Grand writing here:

Looking at newspapers' current print-focused businesses, it's almost enough to cheer bankers up.

Their traditional market is drying up, attacked from the internet, the BBC, TV and freesheets. The inescapable problem is that papers make as much from the cover price than from advertising. But there's simply not enough money to support the number of online news sites.

Fantasy football or crosswords do not provide sufficient money either. Charging will come about or the number of news sources will have to reduce significantly. Charging users will be painful and needs a good micro-payment system, which doesn't yet exist.

If an easy way of paying a couple of pence per article can be implemented, then charging will happen successfully. Subscription will be a struggle, but giving users options is always the sensible way to run.

'Pre-historic Viagra' found in Siberian mammoth DNA could boost your sex life and let you live longer | Mail Online

2009-02-12T13:26:00.000Z

Does anybody ever fact check?

Just a quick Google search shows this "Anatoli Broushkov" seems to have appeared within the last twelve hours on Google - nothing is older.

There's no journal publication being mentioned, nothing with any detail on it...

Seems a completely random thing to test the bacteria for too.

Good news of the day

2009-01-27T09:30:00.000Z

Blue line is 'Redundancy' and red line is 'recession'. Running just for the UK.

Ouch!

Sprout getting Confident

2009-01-15T10:30:00.000Z

Sprout Builder Pricing | Sprout
Gave the Sprout Builder a go a couple of months ago (might have been a year!). I was very impressed with its abilities, though I don't think I've got enough design experience to create anything useful.

I like seeing that they're confident enough to start charging. It will be interesting - I've seen some agencies charge as much as £20,000 for building a Widget. I'm not sure what they used to build it but the fact Sprout are now willing to create solutions directly for agencies means we may see some slightly more realistic prices for Widgets.

My own opinion is that, while free is good, quality is better. Paid for apps tend to be more usable than those that are free. The most usable (in my opinion) are the ones that are paid for by advertising since they have to bring people back to using it.

Once more agencies are using tools like Sprout (rather than just randomly building from scratch) we could see some better Widgets appear.

What's True?

2009-01-08T20:32:00.002Z

I'm increasingly thinking the best solution for the Israel vs Palestine problem would be a big games tournament, using an obscure board game that none of them are likely to have played.

Decided to have a read of some of the things which are happening. It's quite interesting in some ways.

Public relations
Although many of the recent wars (or probably more accurately 'sustained airstrikes') have featured some PR, this one has even more. The decisions that the military and government are taking are talked about in terms of the propaganda effect they are trying to achieve.
They are doing well in terms of keeping Hamas' rocket fire in the frame, though in some ways I'm quite impressed with their ability to keep firing despite the efforts that Israel is putting in.
An own goal though would be the IDF's YouTube channel. It reminds me hugely of one of the parts of Call of Duty IV.

IDF hitting Gazans:

Call of Duty hitting Randoms:

I honestly think this kind of video is pretty awful for their public relations as it highlights the asymmetric nature of the conflict. It's people using little Mortars against robots. They're not going to win...

Sourcing Information
The most interesting thing from this conflict is the issues with information are being brought to bear. I was watching the C4 news this evening and an IDF spokesperson was seriously questioning whether the Red Cross was actually a credible source against that of the IDF. For me it highlights the questionable nature of all the information we are receiving about the conflict.
The IDF's youtube channel disturbed me as it's all action fully removed from context. It's just people talking about how someone is a terrorist with no proof. This blog makes a good point that the IDF makes mistakes (that's not to say that the red cross never does either!).
It made me think about many of the facts going on here. We hear all the time about Hamas missiles landing on Sderot. There are some issues around facts here:

Is Sderot an illegal settlement?
Was Hamas firing these before the ceasefire stopped?

Both sides of the conflict have different views as to the veracity of the claims above. It is quite interesting as it brings a point as to what valid data is and what it could look like. This is the kind of site that is talking to us about the attacks on Israeli soil. Al Jazeera is more than happy to report on what's happening to the Palestinians.
I'm not going to go anywhere near the question of what was at Sderot before Sderot arrived.
The problem is that people have very blinkered views as to what is going on. They all throw conspiracy style theories out about what's happening in the disputed areas. Video is about the only thing that can't easily be doctored (photos are very easy to change) but video robbed of context is problematic.

Traditionally us Brits have trusted the BBC, but in recent times most articles are simply rehashes of AP information about other people's reports. Even if they were in, both sides would be accusing the BBC of bias. American networks can't be trusted but neither can the Arabic ones. It's difficult, the only ones I really believe are the Chinese Media as I don't think they care either way...

For the internet, distrust of the media is actually a good thing as it will hopefully educate people to look at more than one source when investigating what's going on. This will increase the number of pages looked at and give us poor little media planners more choice in titles to use.

Unfortunately for media owners increased cross readership with other titles means that their site do not offer a unique readership and it makes it easier for us to 'buy around them'. In turn this will reduce the total number of potential outlets for news.

Internet Explorer users warned to change browser over security fears - Times Online

2008-12-16T16:57:00.000Z

Internet Explorer users warned to change browser over security fears - Times Online: "A spokesman today estimated that one in 500 internet users had been affected."

1 in 500 is stupidly high when you've got billions of people using your system. This is the kind of thing that can actually destroy people's trust in the internet.

Hope they manage to solve this quickly. If more people switch browsers, we should see these sort of problems become less frequent - someone would have to find a way to compromise firefox, IE, chrome, opera and safari (plus numerous others) in order to get to 1 in 500. If there are 600 million internet users (a stat I remember seeing recently), then we're talking about 1.2 million people being compromised. That's stupidly huge.

I hope the spokesperson was just being wrong and meant that 1 in 500 may be affected...

Me being Slow

2008-12-03T13:45:00.002Z

Founders of Google looking Geekys somewhere

It's taken me a long time, but I finally got around to reading the paper Google's founders wrote when they had their search engine up and running.
I haven't seen a similar example from any other startup where their actual process of starting up is written up in so much detail. Obviously it is still quite biased as it is an academic paper which will naturally try to talk up the achievements of the authors.
Just seeing what they did though does impress me. They came up with:

The whole concept of crawlers
A new way of storing files on disks
A programme that could understand web pages
The pagerank idea (and more importantly the implementation)
Storing the index in a flexible manner

Much as we all hear about the company, it's very interesting to see how it all started. Right from the start they were looking to create a platform rather than just a search engine. Quite scary really.
Also interesting to see they wrote the initial crawler in Python. Been playing around with this recently and it's good to see the best in the business are using this too.

Pre Budget Report

2008-11-25T23:34:00.002Z

Was quite pleased with the announcements yesterday. More tax on people earning stupidly large sums of money. Less VAT. Quite good really.
Only problem is that I can forsee having to make some custom changes to lots of random things in order to accomodate the changes.

Anyway. Here's a nice Wordle view of the speeches from Darling and Osborne.

Darling first:

As you can see he was talking about lots of rises and changes, hence percent becomes one of his bigger words. Most interesting is the use of the words 'Government', 'help' and 'support'. Pretty much gets his meaning across.

Mr. Osborne was slightly more negative:

Lots of the word Chancellor, which is quite standard for the nature of the House of Commons debating style. Lots of 'recession' and 'tax' in there. ALthough the policies have changed, it still Tories talking more about tax burdens and Labour talking about funding public services.

We'll see where things go in the future, but the most telling thing back was the best day for the FTSE 100 ever. Obviously Darling can't take full credit for that, but it definitely didn't do any harm.

A new Christmas

2008-11-17T23:36:00.004Z

We are spending large amouts of time seeing bad news about the economy. It's still not clear if we're at a point where the economy is going to improve or if we're at a point where it's just going to continue to get worse.
The newspapers constantly serve us up news that tells us that things are going bad. The bank's own random surveys tell us that people are pessimistic about the future. Companies are laying off workers in their droves (according to reports) and hgue names are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
However the genuine figures I keep on seeing are not too bad at all. My clients are all going to spend more on online advertising next year. We are forecasting more internet sales. We are seeing problems from too much competition and the possibility that other people may be cutting prices more than us.
It's a confusing world. As deflation rears it's unknown head, we face an interesting world where the assumption goes from 'buy it now' to 'wait until it is cheaper'. That's not a world most marketers here have faced before. The usual immediacy message of 'SALE' is now not as effective.
We've been facing this problem with Christmas sales for the last couple of years - consumers have known that shops were going to cut prices towards the end of the season, and the shops have had to. This Christmas may see the first bucking of the trend.
Retailers have been pessimistic about their forecasts for Christmas this year. They worry that people will be stockpiling cash \ unable to lend for presents. This means they assume consumers will be spending less on Christmas. Shareholders are demanding that companies hang onto cash rather than investing it in stock. Therefore they haven't bought as much inventory as they normally do, meaning it is possible that shops will sell out.
What will happen then?
We won't see obscenely large January sales
We will see larger queues in shops
These two things will be fantastic for the retailers.
Lack of large January sales mean the retailers will hang onto more margin, making them more profitable businesses. This will in turn enhance shareholder confidence in them (something which is sorely lacking at the moment).
Larger queues in shops will be fantastic for me as it will encourage more people onto the internet. It will also be fantastic for shops as for once they will be able to recycle some urgency into their customers. There must come a point of 'sale fatigue' and I'm sure I've hit it. If I see a shop I like with a sale, I just don't bother popping in as I don't think it's siginficantly different from normal operation. I'm sure other customers are similar.

Overall a sold out Christmas (but not necessarily a good one in terms of total revenue for the shops) will improve matters on the high street. If they can't sell their inventory, expect January to be fantastic for bargain hunters, but the retailers will take a couple of years to recover.

New Things

2008-10-31T08:13:00.003Z

I went to the Economist's Innovation Awards last night. It was held at the Science Museum, which was a fantastic venue for the awards - surrounded by random world changing inventions. They had a fondness for pointing out the world's first Telegraph machine, but there were lots of interesting props around the building.
Most award ceremonies I go to do not really award based on things that have a real impact. However this one did.
The winners also gave a little speech. Most of them, admittedly, were along the lines of 'thanks for the award but I couldn't be bothered to turn up'. One of the people who gave a proper speech was Jimmy Wales.
His point was that he didn't invent anything, he just used existing things in a new way and that's what innovation is. That's exactly what these awards were about. Thinking about it in this way, there's very few major world changing inventions that have come about in the last twenty years.
It's hard to think of any examples. The ones I would usually think of:

Mobile Phones (more than twenty years old)
LCD screens (more than twenty years old)
Even the web is more than twenty years old (I'll take Mosaic as the starting point)
Search is older than twenty years (Altavista was the start?)
Hybrid cars are from the 70s

I suppose we could count Ajax or some rubbish like that, but those don't feel like things that have changed the world. Hopefully this lack of innovation is just due to the cycles involved in bringing new technology to consumers.

We're due something properly new. Hope it comes soon!

(image from Zinkwazi's photostream)

Burying the bad news

2008-10-22T10:21:00.000+01:00

Home Retail warns of tougher times to come

I suspect we'll start seeing this kind of results reporting in the next couple of weeks. All the bad news companies have been burying for a while will suddenly come out with the bosses washing their hands and moaning about the current economic climate.

"Oh no, the business I bought for £900m is now worth less than half? Damn this credit crunch!"

Not my job to go through these reports but I suspect that there'll be a lot of extremely pessimistic write downs that will be miraculously turned into profits next year.

The Chief Execs who wrung their hands at the evil global markets today will then take all the credit for their cunning skills in turning their loss last year into huge profits. They'll then hit their targets and make loads of bonus money.

Good work if you can get it!

Bring on the feminists!

2008-09-26T16:05:00.001+01:00

Bring on the feminists!
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Like the way the Londonpaper describes these women as: 'some of the most influential women in the world'.

Mrs. Brown - influential because she is married to Mr. Brown
Mrs. Palin - influential because she got picked by John McCain
Wendy Deng - influentil because she married Rupert Murdoch

Where's Merkel? Pelosi?

Corporations Avoiding Tax

2008-09-23T13:55:00.002+01:00

Was going through some old banking stuff today and found this old story:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/369b723e-6a52-11dd-83e8-0000779fd18c.html

Basically it's a story from an old FT article describing how Merrill managed to cook its books in such a way as to avoid paying tax for a couple of years.

Wonder what will happen now that Merill has been bought. Does this transfer so that Bank of America doesn't have to pay tax too?

Boring question I know, but I think we should find ways to stop letting the multinationals get away with this sort of cheating...

Am loving Gapminder at the moment

2008-09-23T13:21:00.003+01:00

I love making these charts and playing with them. Check this one out:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pV6F9EDiLs6CD8ofaUKM7Fg

You can really see the deaths of HBOS and B&B come to life!

Don't know

The Canaries

2008-09-07T23:50:00.003+01:00

For a long time I've accepted that the industry I work in carries a price for the interest and excitement we get from working in it. The ultimate issue is that we are the canaries of the economy. The first and easiest thing for any company to cut is their marketing budget.
While I am insulated to a significant degree by working on the internet which should remain relatively safe from the accountants, I do see a large amount of pain in the marketplace at the moment. This is particularly true for sites dedicated to brand advertising.
I was feeling guilty about the way we have been able to negotiate deals with them, driving huge discounts from the prices they usually quote. Having seen some of their ploys to get out of it (example: Telegraph), I'm not feeling so sorry.

We spend lots of time telling people not to compromise their brand for short term gain in these sorts of climate. The Telegraph sales team also tells people. They're not the only ones. We'll see more editorial integrity go down the toilet in the short term.

Looking forward to seeing the Economist's celebrity column...

Obama vs McCain

2008-09-01T13:48:00.002+01:00

Have been playing with Google Spreadsheets. This is a look at the marketplace between McCain and Obama within the Iowa Electronic Markets. I was playing with the GapMinder button to see what we can make the data look like.

I think it looks good, I think I could make some good charts for my presentations with it, but I suspect it would have to be within the Google set of stuff rather than in a 'proper presentation'.

New Acrobat Site

2008-08-03T19:11:00.002+01:00

This is quite exciting. I like the fact the font is called 'Minion'. Might try and use this to send stuff to people as I don't think Adobe owns any companies that I would regard as direct competitors.

Can't see an easy way to use Styles though, and I do find that one of the things within Word that is actually well implemented. You'd have thought Adobe's record of Illustrator, Indesign and Photoshop would mean that they'd be concentrating on the whole design aspect.

Would be interested in seeing some functions that aren't in Word. However as a free alternative, can't complain too much!

I think it does succeed in looking nicer than Google's offering, but I'm pretty sure this is less easy to use. Maybe if they manage to include some way of doing a tie up with Yahoo! so that Doc files automatically come here, they might see some traction. Also needs to look at using Facebook connect so that people don't necessarily have to mess around trying to find ways to sign up to it. It's still quite easy to sign into, but I don't see it as being particularly fun. Another login added to the huge host of ones I have!

Google Website Trends

2008-06-21T11:46:00.001+01:00

2008-06-21_1137
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Noticed that Google have changed their trends project to include websites.
This is a really good move as it gives us access to numbers that aren't solely based on Comscore or Hitwise's slightly suspect methodologies.
However Google haven't been entirely transparent about their own.
The above little bit of the graph shows the other sites that people visit from the Guardian.
The most interesting bit is that the site that's most visited is atldmt.com. This is due to iframe tags that must sit somewhere on the Guardian, serving people's ads from Atlas.
This shows some of the technology that Google is using. If they were collecting data purely from searches, they would not see this. The only way they could know that people were receiving traffic from atldmt.com would be if they were tracking where people went through some kind of tool that intercepted and monitored their webtraffic.
Now just look on your own explorer window and see if you have the google toolbar. If you have it, you've got a little friend who could be reporting all your web views back to Google central.
Google do disclose the fact that they monitor 'anonymous usage statistics'. The fact that they also track other websites that you visit means that they are keeping hold of who is who and also keeping a history of your web browsing.
This data is now easily and quickly searchable within the trends interface. It won't be long before they're offering me ways to target you through the adsense platform.
There'll be an uproar when that does happen, but I strongly suspect there's a beta test looking at how it works right now.

Music

2008-06-10T21:45:00.003+01:00

“When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

Nice quote from one of the founders of the piratebay.
He has a very good point though. Music is now worthless. More music exists than you could possibly listen to. Why should you buy new music?
Before we go off into "freeconomics", it should be remembered that the rights-holders have an incentive to maximise their profits. They want to preserve the status quo.
its a little like DVDs. A cheaper way to distribute films comes along, so they nark prices up. Downloading is no different.
Last-fm offers a zero cost distribution platform coupled with a zero cost Marketing platform. Problem for the record companies is that the profit will be lower due to lower revenue per recording.
My opinion is that the recording companies need to appreciate they need much lower costs in order to operate in the new Environment. Why employ salespeople to sell something that is individually worthless?

Google Health

2008-05-20T12:07:00.000+01:00

Went to a presentation on Friday that included the phrase:
"The battleground will be over our data"

Google are definitely continuing the offensive. Here's Google Health. Why not trust google with the details of your various illnesses? Allow Google to know what's wrong with you and then serve you ads in relation to this.

Google say:
"Certain features of Google Health can be used in conjunction with other Google products, and those features may share information to provide a better user experience and to improve the quality of our services. For example, Google Health can help you save your doctors’ contact information into your Google Contact List."

At the moment Google place our adverts against words that are not necessarily relevant to what we are bidding against. This means that Google is using it's own information to decide that the ad is relevant. If you are an advertiser, you can see the results of this within the query report contained within adwords. There will be some words you appear against that are not remotely relevant.

We discovered this working for a previous client whereby we were appearing against competitor's keywords despite the fact we'd never entered bids against those keywords.

I suspect Google Health will allow Google to begin putting these adverts in front of people who will be searching on related terms, but will give Google a justification to put more specialised ads (with higher effective CPMs) in front of people who it knows will have an interest in the relevant drug \ product.

It's cunning, but if people don't realise what Google are doing, they will never notice. The perfect crime? We'll see.

In general, the public will happily exchange their privacy for specific benefits. This case shows a good example where the public are merrily engaged in this exchange.

Poor Gordon

2008-05-10T11:40:00.002+01:00

The Economist has done a particularly good cover this week. One of those times where a picture does say a good number of words!

7p per gigabyte

2008-05-06T12:12:00.003+01:00

The internet moves ever onward. As many of the commentators are beginning to point out, we are moving inexorably towards a point where storage of data and computing power are essentially free.

The fact that developers are being offered storage at this sort of price indicates that we will see more and more things being stored all over the place. Why store something on your PC hard drive, where it is vulnerable to corruption when you can store it online too?

Apple's time machine product has shown that consumers can see the benefit of having a well designed backup solution. I suspect it won't be very long before we'll be seeing a similar product that backs up your data online and then serves you adverts based around the content that you are uploading.

As with all other products along these lines, we will be seeing some people moaning about their loss of privacy. However I think the majority of the population will be willing to sacrifice privacy for ease of use.

I would be willing to put a bet on that we will see a consumer friendly version of time machine appearing on the internet reasonably soon. The question is how deep they'll be willing to go with their profiling of users.

New Buzz Measurement Tool

2008-04-16T20:19:00.002+01:00

Really nice little tool from facebook mimics Google trends. However the facebook one analyses comments and wall posts across the entire facebook platform.

Shows the command facebook have over their data. If they are able to develop this further we will be starting to see targeting of their ads getting tighter and tighter.

Already we expect to be able to target web users based on the interests they have implicitly shown by visiting particular categories of sites. Soon I'm sure a network will find a way to link information with sites like facebook.

It isn't far way at all as Drive are already offering a combination of targeting through linking their network inventory with your messenger \ msn profile. This is a very effective development as the infomration contained within the msn profiles has been shown to be quite true.

Yahoo's purchase of Blue Lithium means that they will probably find a way to copy Drive and implement the same kind of targeting based on Yahoo profiles.

Imagine what would be possible if one of the social networking sites went out and bought a network - facebook's user data being exploited across the internet!

I think once the general public know the extent of the data we use, there will be a small outcry. Although debates are being had about the ways in which we use personal data, it does seem to have gotten to silly levels.

Inspiring Little Piece

2008-04-03T16:37:00.002+01:00

Really nice little piece. Think it could change earlier as the delivery is reasonably flat.

AARP did the ad which is why the voice is a rather annoying sounding Yank...
From Serendipity Book

Neutral Reporting

2008-03-31T23:45:00.002+01:00

Good old Journos continue to work hard in order to find stories. Will be fun to see who actually posted this up. Could be practically any of them.

Actually an interesting site that hosts it: Starnow.

This is the kind of site that takes a good niche and exploits it. At the moment some little (very little) publicity and PR agents will take people suffering family crises and try to sell the story. Someone at my old job appeared in the Sun talking about their allergy to Essex (actually to pollen but there we go).

Glad the internet has made it easier for these people to go direct without any evil PR people between!

Beautiful

2008-03-24T00:16:00.000Z

Microsoft throws in the towel on search?

2008-03-05T23:16:00.002Z

Interesting looking picture from the setup of the new internet explorer from Microsoft. One would have thought that the main way MS would try to make money from any new internet explorer would be by integrating their search as closely as possible to the browser.
This way they could make money from the inevitable sponsored links that would be clicked on. They would also create some loyalty with their search engine by doing this. One would hope that their search engine is good enough that some people would become enamoured of the search engine after using it.
Maybe they do realise that the majority of the early adopters use Google (and probably firefox). They have incorporated some functionality that will allow firefox users to download their bookmarks and all the rest of it.
Still, seems interesting to see some Microsoft people admitting that they have essentially lost the search wars. Spending more of their time and money on their display side (especially messenger) would be more profitable. Also it may make more sense if they are buying Yahoo! as even Yahoo! currently has more market share than windows live search.
Might give IE8 a go tomorrow, though I suspect it'll make all our IE based systems not work. Was very disappointed to find both Atlas and Adazzle don't support firefox. Also was disappointed at the number of popups involved in the various systems I'm using. Where's some kind of workflow engineering!

Funding Content

2008-01-31T23:27:00.000Z

An announcement was made today saying that content makers were going to be given a share of Google's advertising revenue from the advertising that appears within the videos they made. This definitely sounds like the beginning of something new.

At the moment the whole revenue structure of all kind of video broadcasting \ hosting relies on the media owner purchasing content and then displaying it to their audience. The content maker takes risk in creating the content, but the media owner takes more risk in deciding to use it on their own media platforms.

This model makes sense when the available media space is limited. A TV channel can only cope with a couple of hours worth of prime time content. They have a limited number of hours in which to show their content. This means they have to choose the best possible editorial in order to keep their audience (and therefore money).

Another factor in broadcaster's favour is that they are the ones who employ a sufficiently large salesforce in order to be able to effectively sell their audience to advertisers. Individual content producers will never be able to profitably employ a decent size salesforce.

The new media model however allows the creation of some disruptive businesses. Youtube has the potential to make themselves one of these. Google has invested heavily in their salesforce and can therefore sell their own audience extremely effectively. Youtube is now offering content providers the benefits of their salespeople.

Although the old model had an indirect link between audience size and reward to the content creator, the new model has a direct link. This should allow the content creators to put more time and thought into how relevant they can make the programmes to their actual audience, rather than to the broadcaster's impression of their own audience.

I'm sure more companies will pop up that will give content creators better deals than youtube. They are also going to have to fight against the old dinosaurs who are falling over themselves to shout about the technical abilities of their new platforms.

Media fragmentation is going to get even sillier as people watch different media at different times. The only effective mechanism of supplying them with the ads they want (in order to make the media free) will be through an automated sales team. Selling hundreds of channels will be difficult for our poor overworked sales reps. We're going to need a computer to do it.

Our only hope is that someone will invent a decent system for this before Google gets there.

Blogs Alive, Kicking and Growing

2008-01-16T14:28:00.000Z

All the reviews I've seen of 2007 seem to feature facebook rather strongly. This is probably quite accurate as they did have a pretty fantastic year. This time last year people thought facebook would be worth about $1Billion now many seem happy with a valuation around $12Billion. If the valuation was proportional to newspaper articles it would be even higher.

Before the newspapers begin knocking down the poster boy they tried to build up, how about the poor little kid who got completely ignored during the 'social revolution' of 2007?

Poor little blogs were pretty much written off at the start of last year. Many news sources were showing that hte number of new blogs being created was slowing, the number of people posting on the already created blogs was also reducing.

This much was probably true. What people weren't looking at, however, was the number of people READING these blogs.

In terms of absolute gains, Wordpress have had a fantastic year. Their traffic figures, according to Comscore, have rocketed up by about 700%. The y axis is thousands of monthly unique users:

The growth has been consistent throughout the year, bringing Wordpress into the top 30 in terms of UK traffic. All this traffic is looking at the hundreds of thousands of blogs within wordpress.

It's not just Wordpress though, Blogger has also had a fantastic year with steady and consistent traffic growth. Guido Fawkes' intrusion into the national consciousness last year was one of the many blogger blogs to actually make it into the mainstream in the UK.

The thing about all these blogs is that they are fragmented. Their branding is minimal and focused towards people who want to write rather than design. Therefore it is quite easy for them to sneak under the radar. Blogger can easily slip through as most industry metrics tool will aggregate the blogger listings into Google's.

The stats themselves paint a picture of blogs as being in extremely good health, quietly increasing their traffic and readership. I'm sure at some point someone will figure out how to make a large amount of money out of them and then start shouting about it. Wordpress and Blogger could definitely make some money out of the page impressions they see in front of them, but they may then lose many users. It's always going to be tough.

Would be interesting to see how many blogs with actual traffic feature adwords or equivalent on them. It may also be possible that many of the blogs are actually affiliate sites taking advantage of the free hosting.

Whatever the answer to the above questions the blogging sites are succeeding in growing their traffic so one has to assume that a decent level of interest exists.

This growth is against static growth for the major established opinion providers such as the Guardian. I think I need to do some graphs that will show the number of sites people look at has grown.

Belong

2008-01-07T14:59:00.001Z

Great advert. Really shows what a bit of imagination (plus regulation) can do. Would be good to see some stats on beer market share to see how these guys have done since the new lots of beer.

Don't think BMB will win an award but hopefully they've done something to the sales.

Perfection in an ad

2008-01-02T18:27:00.000Z

Really can't fault this ad:

This is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about measuring engagement and all the rest of it.

The wonderful thing about working for a good brand is that they have some kind of feedback effect. The better the brand is perceived, the more good things you can do with it.

If this was tried for any of innocent's competitors, it wouldn't feel the same. Somehow the overall good feeling for the innocent product keeps on flowing for this particular ad.

IF you think about it for a couple of minutes you can think of objections to the actual product - is the fruit organic? Is it actually that healthy for you to have this concentrated does of fruit?

It doesn't matter though because the feeling of healthiness they've injected into purchasing the product overcomes any rational objection. Even the price!

Good work by whoever did it. Will have to find out who's covering them.

Great Advert

2007-12-15T13:35:00.000Z

Haven't seen the ad in the UK, and it does use the UK only name for it.

Follow up from this one which I do remember seeing:

BBH continue to do good work. Shame they didn't feature a gorilla!

The Voucher Codes are Spreading

2007-12-15T11:28:00.000Z

The Guardian seems to be finally picking up on a trend that has been expanding this Christmas.

Vouchers are really coming into their own as a form of luring customers to a store. It remains to be seen whether they are effective at really making the stores money, but I think there's definitely been a higher profile accorded to the stores which have put time and effort into pushing these discounts.

The problem with vouchers and discounts is that they product some problems further down the line. A shop's "hero" products are generally ones that are heavily in demand. These will sell out and make the retailer a tidy profit whether they discount them or not. With discount vouchers these products will disappear quickly and at a discount, whereas the products which are usually discounted towards the end of a season will still be there.

However some of the discount codes are structured in better ways - enforcing a minimum spend is one effective way of doing this. Although the retailer probably loses out in terms of margin, the minimum spend makes sure the revenue stays at a decent level.

Another argument for the voucher codes is that it attracts new customers, some of whom will hopefully become regular shoppers. This will always be true but some would question if a discounted sale is really the best way to begin a relationship with a consumer.

One problem we are experiencing on the internet is that some affiliates are exploiting these codes mercilessly. Retailers already pay their affiliates a commission from sales. If the customer also uses a voucher code the sales that are driven may actually become unprofitable. Even more problems arise if the merchant's tracking system doesn't allow you to know if the affiliate's sales used voucher codes.

Overall voucher codes are a good thing for the internet as it makes people spend more time online before shopping and puts an incentive into them doing a bit of research before going out into the streets. The question is whether the discounts do anything actually useful or valuable for the retailer. I don't think it does.

Picture stolen from ewar_woowar's photostream

What You Can Fit in a Page These Days

2007-12-09T23:45:00.000Z

Was having a quick think about what the next thing is likely to be. I think we're going to see lots of effort being put into making our lives easier. I think what we will see may get called 'RSS 2.0'.
The main thing is that we will see more things stripped of their context. One of the ideas behind 'Web 2.0' was that text can be separated into content and formatting. I think this year we will see this extended into websites. The basic idea behind a website is that you go there and get a service. Many content based sites are becoming familiar with the idea that they can still make money if they allow people to know what content is on their site before they go there.
This will be extended across all the other web services. Email, Social Networking and other things I can't think of right now will fit into the RSS model. I think someone (probably someone new) will come along this year with an RSS reader that is easy to use.
The problem with RSS as it exists at the moment is that it's complicated. Hopefully someone will find a way of making it simple. This will definitely help things along. One stat I would like to see is how many people are actually using RSS. It's not something that will come through the advertising we do, it's something the publishers need to start telling us.
Many of the new businesses getting funding at the moment are focused around the idea of altering webpages that already exist. This is particularly focused on facebook apps at the moment, but the open application platform will allow them to be extended across other sites. All of the major companies have now setup platforms from which portable applications can be delivered (facebook, Yahoo!, Google and Apple). Mozilla is also working on Prism, a browser which will make some webapps indistinguishable from normal applications. The web will creep further into people’s lives.
Basically by the end of this year there will be a program or web service which will exploit this. It will be able to tell you what appointments you have that day, what the headlines are across all the media you regularly read, who’s poked you on facebook, what your favourite band have done on Myspace and which of your TV shows is on tonight. This is all possible with existing technology right now, we just need someone to make this popular.
If the privacy debate doesn’t really happen we will be technically able to deliver adverts for beer to someone who is going to the pub tonight or shampoo to a girl who is staying in to wash her hair.
More sites will use the portability of aggregator sites to make new revenue streams, we should get used to things like the Sun’s deal with Brand Alley and all the major portals’ deals with Uswitch and Moneysupermaket. There isn’t going to be a place to hide from being sold to.

If you are genuinely interested in getting told about deals to do with what you want, advertisers aren’t going to wait for you to check your email – they will tap into your widgets on your desktop. The amount of integration possible between sites and programmes will mean that the line between spyware and legitimate advertising will blur. There will be some fun levels of targeting possible and we need to be ready to exploit it as soon as it comes out.
Should be fun playing around with all the new toys that come along. As always it'll be a good couple of months before anyone does anything with them!

Title Image shamelessly stolen from wonder wombat's photostream

Anchorman Fest

2007-12-09T16:44:00.001Z

Went to a fantastic event last night. It was called the Anchormanfest. It was exactly what we wanted. People were dressed as appropriate characters from the film. There was also bowling. Scotch was also available which probably explains why my head hurts a little right now. It's impressive how much of an impact Anchorman has had on popular culture. It's kind of the 'life of brian' for our age. Although Blades of Glory came close to Anchorman I don't think it had the same level of effect. I know very few people who are still quoting those films. Anchorman lead me onto many other films from Ferrell and co. I think it could easily be used as the basis for a viral, if we could get clearance. Sent from my iPhone

Polar Sympathy

2007-12-09T13:45:00.000Z

The polar bear does seem to be generating lots of sympathy at the moment, and this sympathy is being ruthlessly exploited.

It's a nice marketing ploy to get people to sponsor animals. Nice and fluffy and able to look amazingly cute. This works as a device to get people to donate money.

The ad above plays on all of this to get people to sponsor an animal. Great interactive way to get people to pick up on the message that climate change is making things worse for many animals across the globe. I do think Attenborough should get some credit for the original idea for this advert, but I doubt he'll get it!

The thing that gets me though is that the website doesn't explain how you adopt a polar bear. You pay at least £2.50 a month in order to "adopt" it. What does this mean?

In my own thoughts you can't own a wild animal. Once it is owned it is a domestic animal, though admittedly it doesn't automatically become tame. If you adopt it, does it stop being wild (and therefore an illegitimate target for the world wildlife fund)?

If it isn't adopted, how do you know which animal is being looked after for you? What do they do for it?

I think the gift pack is a good idea and I'm sure the donation will be useful to the WWF, but the advertising is slightly misleading because your money is not going to the specific cause that you would expect from the naming of the product.

Of course I am getting my information from a cursory inspection of their website, but this website should be their opportunity to show how much work goes into caring for each of the 'adoptees' and it doesn't.

Overall it's a great advert but I think they could have been more open about what the money is actually going towards.

amapedia home page

2007-11-30T15:56:00.000Z

amapedia home page

Brilliant idea by Amazon.

They've setup their own version of Wikipedia that seems to revolve around the products within their site. They've cunningly put it on a fully separate domain from their shops.

The trick is that they now get two listings within Google. One for their shop and one for their 'nice' site explaining all about the book but not in a "selly" way.

Of course it has nice convenient links for you to go and buy it on Amazon no matter what you write in the copy.

It'll be interesting to see if any companies copy it. It'll be difficult to get the critical mass to push some content into it, but getting two places on the top page in Google is definitely worth it.

More Vouchers = Bad Christmas

2007-11-26T13:55:00.000Z

Gap warns consumers over hoax email vouchers - Brand Republic News - Brand Republic

Brand Republic ran a stroy this morning about some fake vouchers which were floating out there in the online world.

There seems to be a growing surge of online vouchers floating around. In the last week I've had vouchers forwarded to me from GAP, Selfridges, Carnaby Street and Wagamamas. The many newspapers are mentioning people like Threshers.

I remember reading about couponing in a business book. It's all about identifying people who are willing to pay but are put off by high prices. Give them a relatively difficult but straightforward means of obtaining a discount and they'll buy. The effort these people go through then means that the free spending people who wanted the product at the higher price anyway still pay full price. Hey presto, everyone's happy.

The problem is when too many of the high spending people get a hold of the discount voucher. The internet makes it very easy for vouchers \ promotional codes to be spread around in areas where the retailer or producer doesn't necessarily want them to be. Before you know it a discount meant for friends and family appears all over town.

Obviously the majority of retailers will put some crafty T&Cs on the voucher to ensure that they don't end up bankrupting themselves with this sort of offer. However the customer experience in this sort of situation will be quite bad. You've gotten the consumer's hopes up and then dashed them.

Branding considerations also need to come into play. It's nice to see your brand being sought after, but people shouldn't perceive your product as cheap or a bargain (unless you're talking about Tesco Basic). A brand's value is in two things: Amount of people who want it and the amount people will pay for it. Apple's trick is not just the fact that everyone wants their products, it's also the fact that they're willing to pay almost twice as much as the nearest competitor.

Most retailers are fully aware of the potential risks involved with giving out these voucher codes. The current vouchers available show the fact that retailers are a little more worried about Christmas than normal.

All shops have something to gain by saying that Christmas will be bad (helps lower expectations for their quarterly reporting and allows them to not look greedy over the christmas period) but they very rarely do anything about this pessimism until later in the season. This season people seem to be slashing all over the place before all the decorations have gone up.

Good thing is that if they're desparate now, they'll be more desparate later. Might be worth postponing the Christmas shop!

Threadless: No Longer Rootless

2007-11-21T15:52:00.000Z

Threadless: From Clicks to Bricks

Threadless are opening a store. Can't think of many other situations where an online retailer has opened a real world shop...

I'm sure there are examples - I can imagine many family stores started life as an eBay shop. I just like the way the Article talking about this in Business Week made it sound really hard and difficult!

Web retailers are often unprepared for the costs of running a store, including rent, payroll, and utilities.

These sound suspicously similar to the bland pronouncements from the usual crew of consultants and 'experts' cooked up for this kind of article.

Do they seriously imagine that people won't realise they have to pay rent on a shop? That staff are free? That no-one will charge them for electricity?

While I know some people are a bit stupid you'd think by the time someone is successfully running an $11 million dollar business they might know how to pay rent.

The guy being quoted, Jim Okamura manages the Chicago office of a "Global Retail Consultancy". I bet he charges a good amount per hour. I wonder how much he would charge for that advice.

It's all based on his

Jim has 14 years of consulting experience focused on the retail industry, including strategic planning, branding, consumer behavior and multi-channel project work.

I imagine those 14 years have been well spent.

The Value of Digital Citizenship

2007-11-12T23:28:00.000Z

I am a firm believer in the existence of a Digital Community. I think that both people and companies who make their living on the internet owe something to the great beast that has spawned so much in the past ten or fifteen years.
Some of the things I do, of which this blog is the main thing, is contribute small amounts of content to the overall beast, in the hope that it will one day prove useful to somebody browsing on the internet. The vast majority of people on the internet are using it for benevolent purposes and I believe you have to trust in the good intent of that majority.
I saw an interesting idea today. If a website has been setup to defame your brand (example), it is possible to find ways to make that website disappear from Google.
The company who came up with the idea were strongly advising against this rather extreme tactic, but it got me thinking.
The problem is that most brands and brand managers want to control their brand on the internet. That doesn't work anymore. You make a brand and then release it to the public through advertising. Now it used to be that the only feedback people got about your brand was from their friends, the media and your adverts. Now there are many regularly visited places that can give people independent views of brands and companies.
This has spawned whole movements above and beyond those that used to plague nestle - the amount of effort to setup the movements has decreased hugely so the number of movements has increased. Mild hate campaigns can be setup with ease and spread quickly across a whole host of forums and social networks on the web.
In the face of this, many executives will ban any use of their brand, company or even logo in anything that could conceivably end up out of their direct control. This is silly. If you want people to actually take some time to build a relationship with your brand, you need to show them that you trust them. You need to give them the opportunity to complain. You need to be happy to show people that you are an open company.
Obviously you need to address the moaning, but that's the point. Letting the moaning happen is not a choice. Stopping the moaning is very difficult. Putting your prices up will never be a decision welcomed by your customers, but it's sometimes necessary. Explaining why the prices have gone up will help your cause. Explaining why powdered breast milk can sometimes be useful for parents will help.
Letting people make their own minds up is something that brave brands do because brave brands are confident that they have the best product. Trying to control the conversation is something that brands do when they have something to fear. If you have a problem ask for ideas from your customers. Show them that you listen.
Bit rambling. I think I've made my point, but I don't know what it was.

Facebook didn't kill the internet!

2007-11-07T09:31:00.000Z

Facebook's Big Ad Plan: If Users Like You, They'll Be Your Campaign - Advertising Age - Digital

AdAge report from the press conference where Facebook touted their new ideas.

Beyond the simple things (that Bebo have already been doing) around making sponsored profiles, Facebook are doing something that's actually interesting to marketers and to facebookers. The idea of being able to tell your friends when you've listed something on eBay should be quite useful - extending the reach of personal advertising of this kind.

The idea of Amazon reviews being posted onto facebook is useful too - this is a true use of an opensocial schema. The idea behind it seems to be that facebook should act as a node \ aggregator in the parsing of internet data about our friends. If facebook is notified that you have posted something to the internet (that you are willing to share), facebook will then inform your friends. Facebook sees it's role as combining Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, Amazon and eBay into a navigable interface.

Should be interesting to see how many people facebook can get to use this system. I think this will be of most interest to the smaller retailers who will get the chance to let people know that people shop there. IF you see that your friends are shopping somewhere, you will trust the shop more and therefore hopefully buy from them.

Might be an interesting way of growing some of the smaller players on the internet.

Old Guardian Stuff

2007-11-05T13:46:00.000Z

Nice ad from the Guardian proving their ethical credentials (and also showing off their reasonably comprehensive archive).

I'm surprised there's little been done by the whole historical crowd to pull out and aggregate this data. I'm sure Google will get there at some point quite soon...

Ad Tracking Rebellion

2007-11-03T15:49:00.000Z

Uh - Oh!

The idea that advertisers can target people's behaviour on the internet has allowed many companies to become big. The size of the tracking has been increasing in recent months. There are rumours that facebook's new ad announcement on Tuesday will involve a large degree of tracking consumer's behaviour across other sites.

This will definitely rile the privacy advocates, who will be quite disturbed by the idea that facebook's database will be usable across the whole of the internet. The privacy controversy will deter some people from using facebook as much.

It should be interesting to see what evolves from this. Trust is an extremely important thing for social networks - we share a large amount of data with our social network providers. Although many people are willing to share the data with literally everyone, even more people want to limit the data sharing and control where it ends up. How many facebook profiles are shared with everyone?

I don't actually know what the data says but I'd bet that a good proportion are not shared.

I personally believe that facebook is going to come up with a funky way to advertise on their own site. If they do propose an external network model, we'll see some problems arising for many of the other companies that use almost any kind of behavioural targeting.

One quick look at the largest networks reveals many of them collecting large amounts of information on people using cookies. Tacoda (now owned by AOL), Blue Lithium (Yahoo), Adviva and many others will be exposed. Already around 8% of webusers employ some kind of cookie deletion software or some kind of cookie blocker. Increases in this will not make our job any more fun.

Google will remain smugly aloof (at least until they own Doubleclick!) as their model relies entirely on ads relevant to searches, not who the people are.

Sony slowly getting there

2007-11-02T14:20:00.000Z

Sony Gets It Right. The New PS3 Ad. « Agency Spy

Rather than focusing on a brand that is rather mysterious, Sony are finally shouting about the features of their box of tricks.

Still not sure they've quite beaten the gears of war ad that the Xbox 360 had earlier in the year - that one definitely did something different for me. I think the Gears of War ad was the first time I considered that the new generation of consoles were doing something other than having slightly better looking graphics.

Ultimately, the success of a console depends on getting good games. I don't think the console makers have done enough to produce exclusive games as of yet. Not having GTA IV exclusively will hurt Sony, and Helo 3 boosts the Xbox. Heavenly Sword looks rather generic beat em up and I am yet to see a game on the PS3 that I actually want to play.

Prism - Start of Something New?

2007-10-30T14:13:00.000Z

Prism
Absolutely brilliant idea from the people at Mozilla (the company that makes Firefox). They've put together a cunning programme that will take individual websites and make them have their own window.

What's the point?

Basically it makes webapps better by removing the browser 'clutter' at the top which makes the whole thing look like a webpage. The plan is that you won't be able to tell the difference between using Google Docs and using MS Word or something like that.

When this is finished, expect to see it become an integral part of Google pack. It'll work with other software too, I'm sure Zoho will be all over it too. This Web 3.0 that everyone's talking about may actually be Desktop 2.0. Let's make a buzzword generator to cover it all off...

How to promote a museum

2007-10-25T15:15:00.000+01:00

Flickr: Victoria and Albert Museum

Really nice idea from the V&A.

Nice bit of interactivity and also encourages people to label their photos when they put them on flickr.

Would be interesting to see if anyone has gotten around to collecting stats on what they've been up to but I doubt that they have. Nice marketing idea that hasn't cost anyone much time or effort.

Will definitely post some pictures up there from next time I visit.

Child Copyright Violator

2007-10-25T11:55:00.000+01:00

Inside the Mind of a 9 Year Old File-Sharer | TorrentFreak

Nice little interview with a junior filesharer. It is interesting thinking about all these kids who are growing up with very little concept of how to obey copyright law.

The key is that people are going to break the law if it's easy and pretty much consequence free. There's a whole host of software out there specifically designed to make it easy for you to cheat and to make it easy for you to hide what you're doing.

The quality of the IT work by the rights holder is pretty much abysmal so you can be sure that the nine year olds are going to be able to stay one step ahead of them (by using software written by other people). The studios do seem to be seeing the light in regard to this, but there is still some work to be done.

Ideally (for us!) the perfect solution will be a subscription to a free service that will randomly insert ads in between songs, or in the middle of videos. I think the majority of people will be comfortable downloading something that is convenient, easy to use and reliable in exchange for a couple of adverts.

Overall I think we can succeed in changing behaviour if we replace free with free. We won't if we replace free with pay options - Bittorrent won't disappear and will always be the default option for many people.

Facebook vs Myspace Round 95

2007-10-23T15:46:00.000+01:00

Really good article going through the various methodologies used to compare traffic across lots of different sites.

Summary is that there's been a little controversy in the States where the standard measurement (Comscore) decided that Facebook had actually lost users and market share in the previous month. Obviosuly this didn't quite chime with the current levels of hype and hysteria around the product.

Something's going on!

It highlights the difficutly of getting good numbers from the larger websites. In the UK we have settled on measurement from ABCe, these numbers are slightly better than the majority of other numbers shown. However, there is still scope to game these numbers and the publishers have a huge incentive to do so. ABC numbers in the press world are often artificially boosted using a range of different methods.

Facebook is definitely not alone in finding huge discrepancies between the (genuine) numbers that they see and the (estimated) numbers that the panels produce. The problem is finding the genuine number. We as advertisers and agencies do not wish to make decisions based on numbers provided by salespeople. Publishers are rightly aggreived when decisions are based on numbers which do not represent their situation.

It's difficult to find a solution and it would be a mistake to think any other media has comprehensively solved this. The ABCe is a welcome development which will hopefully grow larger in time. I'm sure someone somewhere is working on something even better, but we'll have to settle for some kind of slow industry standard in the meantime.

Cheeky Monkeys

2007-10-21T23:13:00.000+01:00

Was looking through to find out who was using radianrss to subscribe to this blog, and what the hell radianrss was.

Did a search on google and got this

Google obviously thought that I meant to search for radiators. What's interesting is that it threw up search ads for radiators. It would be interesting to know how many of our ads are appearing against terms which bore VERY little relation to the words that are being searched for. Seriously - radianrss is quite a different mess of characters from radiators...

It's a good way for them to inflate their revenues still further.

Analyse This

2007-10-21T23:05:00.000+01:00

Google ratcheted the quality of their analytics product up by another notch this week.

They have now included two core features into their analytics engine - internal search and event tracking.

Internal Search
They are now able to track people's search behaviour on individual sites. This isn't the hugest new feature for the majority of users on this product. However, any internet retailer will find this hugely useful as it will show how easy the site is to navigate in 'last resort' terms.
I haven't seen any evidence to support my view that search is usually the last thing people use to navigate within a site, but I believe this to be the case with the majority of stores. Only a store with more than roughly fifty products should feel the need to push their search function. All other sites should consider their site design and find ways to guide customers to the right destination without needing them to explicitly tell you what they're after.
For those that do have large numbers of products, it gives an insight into products that are important to customers. It can give an idea about rapid changes in popularity of generic ranges of goods. Admittedly we already have access to which product pages people are looking at, but searches should do some of the categorisation for us.
It will also open up possibilities in terms of measuring the performance of the search pages - tweaks will now be more easy to appreciate.

Event Tracking
This feature would have made a real difference when we were working on Jellyfish. Basically it allows things to be tracked when they don't involve a new page being loaded. Jellyfish was a particular problem since the page only tracked as one URL as far as google analytics could see. Event tracking should mean that we will be able to look at the performance of flash and ajax parts of sites.
More visibility is crucial here and I'm surprised it's taken this long for Google to put in a fix to this problem. Web 2.0 is fast becoming obsolete in terms of jargon, to be replaced by web 3.0 - surely this will then be supplanted by web 3.1 and then maybe web 95?

Anyway, Google are showing us that they're going to continue putting effort into analytics. It will be interesting to see what they come up with once the acquisition of doubleclick is complete. Their tracking system will be really comprehensive then!

Sony Gets Ready to Sell

2007-10-08T21:41:00.000+01:00

As everyone knows, gamers are not spending as much time as marketers would like looking at adverts.

Sony seem to have picked up on this theme. In order to make themselves pick up on the potential profits, they are now hiring people to make this happen.

Seems strange that it's taken almost a year to get this sorted out. Large numbers of people already use their systems on a daily basis. Sony control the interface and are also heavily involved in the coding of many of the titles that are released. This means that they can ensure that the adverts are as loud and intrusive as Sony want it to be.

Users will obviously be rather annoyed if the advertising is overly intrusive, this will interfere with their experience. However, they'll probably accept the advertising if it gives them something tangible.

It will be interesting to see how they manage it. At the moment games advertising seems to focus on getting very unobtrusive ads across the game. I suspect Sony will be able to find ways to get bigger and better ads sneaking into the system. Loading screens could definitely use some expansion, and there are usually a good couple of screens within a game that spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of gamers' faces.

Some of the solutions even offer branded characters within the game, though I think this would be a difficult thing to dynamically insert into the code. I'll look forward to hearing from Sony.

Microsoft Health?

2007-10-07T14:31:00.000+01:00

Ars are reporting that Microsoft are in the process of establishing a private system of health records that you can easily take between doctors. It's a really good idea. The NHS are currently spending £12Bn to do just this. Somebody should have told them!
There will be some slightly geeky people who will post a link to this repository from their facebook pages. This will be a little odd, but possible.

This product follows a long trend of people giving sites more and more personal information. There are already services within the US that will look after your bank account for you (Wesabe) and we all know how much info people put onto their facebook and myspace pages.

I read an interesting article (though unfortunately I can't remember where!) comparing web application providers with Banks. Basically you're asking them to store your information and the relationship is entirely founded on trust.

We're still not quite at the point where we can define what we expect from a company in terms of trust - we definitely don't want them to make the information publicly available, but people seem comfortable with some information going to advertisers. If you ask people if they want to share their information, they'll say no - but people are easily swayed by the offer of free services.

I think the evolution of the relationship between application providers and the public will end up hinging on the trust issue. We still haven't seen anyone mishandle privacy in any major way. It will be interesting to see what people's reaction to a mishap will be. Would we see something analogous to a bank run?

Let's wait and see what happens if google accidentally publishes the wrong thing.

Free Trend Continues

2007-10-01T17:21:00.000+01:00

Chris Anderson wrote a book about the ‘long tail’ last year (for those of you who haven’t heard that phrase please ask someone in search!).

His next book takes the idea further, from small logistic costs to minimal logistical costs. In other words, what happens when there is no distribution cost and how certain things which we currently pay for (and value) could possibly turn into something free.

His initial predictions are coming true already - Radiohead are releasing their new album in exchange for a 'fair price donation'.
Newspapers are currently fighting among themselves to pull down the subscriber 'walls' within their sites. Good article here

Decent Advert from ITV

2007-09-27T13:03:00.000+01:00

ITV seem to be trying to make people notice their programmes a bit more.

I like their latest outing - caught it on the front page of the Guardian:

It's quite rare to see people being brave with online advertising. There seems to be tendency for clients to sit behind the creatives with a whip shouting "More Flashing! More Text! Why doesn't it say 'click here!'" Glad to see someone's experimenting to see if intrigue can drive some interest to the site.

Obviously it has been tried before, but there's a good whack of investment behind it - homepage of the Guardian is not cheap.

Gordon Brown's Favourite Phrases

2007-09-25T23:49:00.000+01:00

Although Swivel is one of my favourite sites at the moment (currently being overwhelmed by the Economist's daily chart news story), Many Eyes from IBM supplies some fantastic options for analysing text content. Unfortunately it does not yet offer embedding.

Have a look at the two pages I created analysing the text of Gordon's Speech:

First a normal tag cloud

Secondly a text analysis that shows the way certain words were used.

Quite useful way to get to the heart of a long speech. Could be useful for a presentation - turning a long argument into bite sized slides?

DoubleClick Launches Site-Side Mobile Ad Management, Advertiser Version in Development DoubleClick Launches Site-Side Mobile Ad Management, Ad

2007-09-24T23:21:00.000+01:00

Here we go...

Finally we're seeing the big boys start to take mobile seriously. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I've been using Opera's mobile browser in recent weeks and I've been hugely impressed. It converts normal pages (not flash) into pages that are digestible on the mobile. They've also made a good interface that allows the pages to be navigated easily.

There is a slowly rousing argument that there should be no need to develop more than one site for any major media owner - the phone should be able to translate the site's content into a readable format. The problem at the moment is that there's very little in it for the sites - what do they gain from allowing people to read their content, for free, with ads being automatically stripped out.

Hopefully doubleclick's solution will allow sites to begin receiving money for the effort they put into developing their mobile sites. There is more and more content being accessed on the move. Google have put a good amount of effort into helping with local navigation. All the networks have good quality portals with sports results, simple news and travel information.

At some point soon there will be GPS systems which will also be reasonably usable browsers - this should allow passengers to find internet enabled content around their destinations and current locations. Mobile internet isn't necessarily limited to phones, there is plenty of room for location aware uses. Laptops being used with identified and registered hotspots will allow sites to begin to deliver customised content.

My own opinion is that the level of customisation available will not be fully taken up by the vast majority of advertisers in the beginning. Too much customisation will scare and alienate consumers, while the amount of effort and technological development required will put the majority off the investments needed.

However, DoubleClick, Google and their competitors will hopefully take much of the work out of delivering adverts on these platforms.

We'll see what happens!

Hours of Thought

2007-09-24T23:09:00.001+01:00

Manny
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Saw this in the tube the other day. Think it's in Holloway Tube.

Fantastically targeted product, placement and creative.

I'd be surprised if much thought was put into the advert to be honest, but they didn't need to. The story pretty much writes the advert. They've just taken the back of the book and put it into the poster.

Then, to add to the brilliance of the poster, they've added a competition to win some shoes. Simply awesome.

I suspect this has been made directly by the client, and well done them!

Old School PR fails to attract people to website

2007-09-21T07:15:00.000+01:00

Some idiot from Howto.tv seems to be trying to get some free publicity for their website. They had the original idea of running a survey to find out people's attitudes to things on the internet.

This had the wonderful effect of finding out that people don't like popup ads. Very surprising. Somehow (I suspect a fancy lunch was involved) the survey managed to find its way into the Guardian as an aside within their business section.

They were very lucky and the article included the name of the site. This was then let down by the fact that their rubbish site has had no search optimisation whatsoever. Therefore it was difficult to find, and the site's listing on google just gives T&Cs.

I think more people would be able to find them if they did a bit of advertising. This might annoy the sort of person who will fill in an online survey, but at least it will be remembered.

Generic PR

2007-09-20T00:41:00.000+01:00

It seems strange that a small project the size of Jellyfish can end up having such a range of people commenting on it.

To be completely fair to natmags, it was a small concern. They have a total staff of around 1,500 in the UK. Eight of them were directly involved in the launch and continuation of the Jellyfish project.

This has generated a decent amount of inquiry from people interested in the magazine industry.

The immediate verdict seems to be that the email delivery system was suspect, due to unconfirmed rumours across the industry.

I think, as someone who was there, I can safely say that there were a number of different reasons and pinning it down to one reason is more than slightly artificial.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to market a site. Jellyfish had healthy strategy and implementation across the entirety of the project but did not manage to gain enough traction with the target audience.

The main lesson is that the web is all about unique content which is refreshed often. Jellyfish did not fit either of those two criteria and so died reasonably quickly.

Does anybody have an example of a non-daily web publication working well? (Apart from Popbitch...)?

Yahoo acquires online collaboration suite Zimbra

2007-09-20T00:35:00.000+01:00

Interesting move from Yahoo!

The net will be abuzz with news how Yahoo! is trying to get into the whole web 3.0 desktop \ web app delivery nonsense.

Basically Yahoo! is trying to stay within touching distance of Google. To be fair, Zimbra's application suite was more than slightly better than Google's, with the presentation app in particular stronger by far than anything else I've seen on the market.

We do have to remember that Yahoo! is still struggling in a variety of different ways, not least their inability to extract a decent value out of the inventory they are currently selling. For some reason they are concentrating on competing with networks to offer extremely cheap inventory whereas they should be leaving the networks to scrap over remnant inventory and spending their time selling their more upscale stuff.

I've still never had a salesperson try to sell me any of Yahoo!'s genuinely innovative sites - flickr, del.icio.us and the like. Yahoo! has proved adept at purchasing companies but it has yet to prove itself with the most important phase - the exploitation.

The slow decline of Lycos

2007-09-14T16:41:00.000+01:00

For anyone who was wondering why Lycos has been slowly declining in performance in recent years.

It used to be that about.com and imdb were just sidetracks for Lycos' UK sales offering. They now seem to account for more than three quarters of Lycos' traffic. Although Lycos is beginning to focus a little more on providing content, it is starting to struggle.

My own opinion is that portals will become less relevant in the future. As more offline content providers begin to move online, people will seek out better content from them. Once people know where they can receive the news \ information they want, the only portal they need to visit will be their search engine.

The growth among portals is relatively static at the moment. This graph shows where they are:

Microsoft did something to messenger in January that I think has something to do with the spike in traffic. It also did some suspicious things to their daily visits.

I think that within a year we'll begin to see the larger portals start to show signs of decline. You can't be all things to all people, and the social networks will replace the portals as the homepage of choice.

Are we Geeky Enough?

2007-09-14T15:16:00.000+01:00

Had an extended discussion last night with some people from my agency about Geekines.

Are we, as an agency, geeky enough. Considering that we specialise in digital media, there seems to be far too little gadget worship and far too little interest expressed in some of the things many people are wasting their lives doing. This is definitely not an agency specific problem.
Media owners seem to focus on giving us entertainment that wouldn't be out of place for Lawyers or general people. Obviously everyone wants to watch Wimbledon or something but only one media owner ever offered us a night out at NAMCO (which was awesome).
There is a general lack of blog reading, rss usership and other proven signs of geekiness. While I understand that our industry needs to understand all sides of the spectrum of digital usage, it does worry me that some people do not know what digg is. Our sales people sometimes genuinely have no concept of why their users are spending large amounts of time with their sites. The people selling me a particularly engaging music service did not and do not have their own accounts.
We need to find a way to find people in the industry rediscover the joy of experiencing a new product, regardless of whether it's any use. Gadgets and web services are always good, no matter how pointless. Twitter may be incomprehensible to most of us, but very few people have tried it.
As digital media planners, we're being beaten by some of the offline account planners. They're no longer just saying 'lets put up a myspace profile' they're actually spending time in the digital environment. If we don't put some effort in they'll be the ones guiding the advertising and therefore the money.

The Mail Grows On

2007-09-03T00:44:00.000+01:00

I have completely missed the rise and rise of the Daily Mail. Since they did their relatively soft launch about a year ago, they've seen a steady rise in their UK traffic figures.

Comscore shows the region they're currently in:

Of course the wonderful work our team did on the Sun has paid dividends in terms of driving traffic to the Sun - it's now receiving the most traffic of any news site in the UK.

The real surprise is the Mail though, when we look at relative growth rates, the Mail is just about growing faster than the Sun. They are only three percent below the rate the Sun's been seeing.

Some makes sense as the core audience for the Mail is only coming online at the moment. However, this is unlikely to be the only reason for the drive. I suspect there has been some in-paper advertising going on, but it would definitely be interesting to find out some more info.

One of the obvious areas of growth for them has been their daily visitors:

Many of the papers use their daily stats as a key metric - they relate it directly to their daily circulation. On this measure, the Mail actually beats the Times and the Telegraph at the moment (their visitors are obviously coming back on more days than their competitors).

The Sun absolutely cleans up on this one at the moment, which gives a graph I suspect we'll use in the next awards entry! I won't put it into Swivel, but they're approaching double the Guardian's number.

Overall I think we're going to see the Mail attempting to wield a little more influence in the coming months. As much as I hate to say it, but I think we're going to have to spend some money with the Mail...

Media Monkey

Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Six ways you can support the Guardian | Info | guardian.co.uk

Seems slightly desperate, but it's a good idea.

How to Install Google&;#39;s Note in Reader Bookmarklet in iPad&;#39;s Safari

Great - this does work!

How the Cable/Willetts market in higher education ended up inflating fees

Some nice quotes to remember

Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen

WANT

Used bike ad is slightly militant

Awesome

Google working on a marketplace for advertisers to buy and sell your data

This might be fun. If we can get some gold standard demographic data being fed in, things could get much more interesting.

How digital detectives deciphered Stuxnet, the most menacing malware in history

LOTS of detail about the Stuxnet virus. Brilliant to see Wired and Ars working together!

Update: NOTW Redux? News International Registers 'SunOnSunday' Domains

David Cameron apologises, but for the wrong thing

Very good points here.

Anti-PowerPoint Party

Nice

Zynga’s board earned millions in 2010, IPO reveals

Gosh. They've done quite well!

Compared to Zynga, Groupon is run by a bunch of clowns

Good points, well made. Though I think it&;#39;s only fair to point out that GroupOn is throwing money to get scale before Google &;amp; co chomp it down.Although Zynga faces some competition, none of the current gaming giants look capable of challenging their space in the near future.

Speculators unburned

Good point. Open auction is probably a very bad way to prevent speculation. Though not sure what the best way to do it would be.

OMFG: Google wants to buy Hulu after all (sorry, Yahoo)

This would be very interesting

Fancy A Pint? Ten Top Pubs To Try. And A New Website.

This looks fun!

Puritans and Lady Godiva: why two justices voted to uphold California&;#39;s video game law

Yet more fantastic articles from ars. Nice point from the courts about narrow definitions for laws. They do make a good point about the difference between obscenity and violence too.

'Hot News' doctrine gets a body-blow

Wonder what the equivalent law is here?

&;quot;Hot News&;quot; doctrine gets a body-blow

Wonder what the equivalent law is here?

Unbelievably racist ad via South Africa.

Wow

AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out « News

Think I need to get hold of this aol document

LOCOG Censures Use Of ‘2012’

Hmmm - good old lawyers!

Visualizing Progress in the Canadian Grand Prix

Look suspiciously like the rowing bumps race maps...

Updated: iCloud: Just A Lot Of Hot Air When It Comes To Streaming?

Think that the limits of the cloud will actually be quite good for Spotify. Once people get used to the idea of no longer physically owning media products, streaming will become a little more popular.Especially once it includes video content too.

Which credit card companies will let you buy marijuana?

Can imagine some good ads for this!

What Are the Most Impressive Views Astronauts See In Orbit? [Video]

If you want your kid to be an astronaut, start showing them this film repeatedly!

Google Offers is the business plan behind Google Wallet, and it’s live tomorrow

Nice idea

Statstock

Little kids and memory

Interesting experiment. Seem to remember reading somewhere that the childhood memories often return in later life too. Might be an interesting follow up!

Star Wars-Osama Bin Laden-New York Times parody/mashup

Fabulously geeky

BBC News - Redundancy rules could be relaxed, says government

Love the mixed message. We're going to make it easier to get rid of jobs so that we can create more jobs...

Installing MySQLdb on Snow Leopard

Fairy Dust

The Media Decline Continues

Daily Mail 'Beats Guardian'

Brand Republic - AgencyDMG takes search analysis beyond 'last click wins' model - Media News - Brand Republic

Newspapers Trying To Evolve

Got Published!

'Pre-historic Viagra' found in Siberian mammoth DNA could boost your sex life and let you live longer | Mail Online

Good news of the day

Sprout getting Confident

What's True?

Internet Explorer users warned to change browser over security fears - Times Online

Me being Slow

Pre Budget Report

A new Christmas

New Things

Burying the bad news

Bring on the feminists!

Corporations Avoiding Tax

Am loving Gapminder at the moment

Good points, well made. Though I think it&;#39;s only fair to point out that GroupOn is throwing money to get scale before Google &;amp; co chomp it down.
Although Zynga faces some competition, none of the current gaming giants look capable of challenging their space in the near future.

Yet more fantastic articles from ars. Nice point from the courts about narrow definitions for laws.
They do make a good point about the difference between obscenity and violence too.

Think that the limits of the cloud will actually be quite good for Spotify. Once people get used to the idea of no longer physically owning media products, streaming will become a little more popular.
Especially once it includes video content too.