Analyse This

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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...

Pride

Adverganza in the US came up with an interesting point yesterday. Why don't we sell ourselves as an industry more?

The ONS had to point out the disproportionate contribution us advertising and marketing bods made to the UK economy. We, as an industry, lead the world in terms of adapting to the changing face of media and advertising.

At the same time, our government seems to lead the world in making up new things were not allowed to advertise and new times that we're not allowed to do it in. Advertising pays for people (and children) to experience culture and information that they would have to otherwise pay for. At it's best it is a force for equality and change - letting people know about things which they would otherwise be unaware.

We always have special things to point to, but I think there are a couple we should be proud of:
Organic food - scientific crap but still a source of greenery unequalled so far
Ending animal testing - protesters get so far but once the body shop got going everyone else followed
Jamie's School Dinners - a TV ad campaign \ PR stunt ended up making the government change policy
Drink Driving - another case for advertising proving able to change people's opinions
M&S - advertising gave people a reason to revisit the shop, saving a british institution

Obviously we're not perfect at all points, but we have shown that we can act responsibly - the ASA is a good case study. In the end we are all rational actors and have huge amounts at stake to ensure that our brands and our agencies have long term futures. We are not about to put all that at risk for the sake of short term gain.

the fruits of imagination: Online research under fire

This article tells us about how internet research is not to be trusted.

The methodologies involved in all forms of marketing research always make me a little bit worried - there's very little hard measurement.

You might run back to the client with a graph showing a 20% uplift in purchase propensity. This sometimes can mean that after seeing your ad three more people out of twenty ticked the 'very likely to' box rather than the 'quite likely to'.

What does that actually mean?!


Marketing research numbers have always been more than slightly dodgy and a similar problem exists throughout the research community - we will only ever get a certain type of person to respond to the research. We need to be careful that we don't end up tailoring all our ad output to the tiny part of the population who will respond to the questionnaire.

What could be interesting is if focus groups also picked up cookie ids from DART \ Atlas. This might then allow us to do focus groups with the knowledge of what ads they've been exposed to on the internet.

Not sure how easy it would be to get hold of this data, but it would definitely be interesting.

Overall I think the way people see a brand shouldn't be reduced to numbers that can be compared with other brands. Brand recall and unprompted awareness are silly metrics to be using.

I think the way people see different companies and brands varies depending on the kind of relationship. For example, Zara and BP are completely different and the idea that any metric could be shared between them is a little bit hopeful.

My Street

Just an amusing photo I found showing my street on Sunday. The beautifully placed stain is nothing to do with me!
Parkhurst road isn't too bad at all once you see past the prison at the end of the road. There are a couple of decent pubs in the area and it's not too far from anywhere. It's relatively rare that there is any dried vomit at all. To be fair, I think I saw more dried vomit in Cambridge than I ever have since. We'll see what Bethnal Green is like later on in the year!

Jellyfish Magazine R.I.P.

Really gutted that Jellyfish has been stopped. Although I can't remotely blame the people making the decision for deciding that the investment had grown too risky, I do feel that this is an idea that will work.

The difficulties involved in trying to make this sort of site work were eventually insurmountable. We'll all be looking on with eager eyes at what Monkey Magazine report on their ABCe number this month - the 'word on the street' is that the site is going to have seen a significant drop.

As is always the case with websites, they don't spread easily - I feel that if we'd put this website in front of enough people, it would have taken off like wildfire. It's the first project I've been involved in that hasn't been a success and although I feel I made a positive contribution overall, I suspect it will always be a frustrating experience. I think I put a lot into this project, a good weekend or two of my time was poured into this project.

One day I think I'd like to give the publishing \ media owner side a go. Although they continually take pretty large risks, there is a heady atmosphere involved in working for these organisations. The sheer amount of belief and determination of the staff on Jellyfish will stay with me for a long term.

I hope I get the chance to be involved in another project like this - I only got involved at the halfway point. I think we could have been slightly more useful from the beginning.


For those that read it, I hope it will be remembered fondly. For those that didn't, I hope you feel that you missed out.

Myspace is getting desparate

Logged onto Myspace for the first time in a while just now and saw this interstitial. Hope it's going to go OK - Courtney's just about to leave to see what she can do for these guys. I think they're starting to realise they need to up their game slightly.
I'm surprised that Myspace still don't seem to have taken the time to make customising people's profiles easier. You'd have thought that this could be a winner over facebook, if the customisation was straightforward (and nice looking!).
We'll see how they manage. July's numbers should be out soon and I suspect we'll see facebook really starting to eat into them in the UK.

Stuck for an Idea?

Cunning little viral from the states.

Just a spinning idea wheel, but I think it's been well put together. Definitely going to give this a play next time I have to make up a strategy!

(Found through Agencyspy)

Google subsidises MySpace

As part of being a company that's listed on the stock exchange, Google has to report to its investors on the potential risks to the company. In their most recent filing, they provide the usual detail on the financial risks involved in running their search engines.
Obviously there are potential problems around killer competitors emerging or people turning completely away from Google branding. The most interesting paragraph, surprisingly, is the following:

Payments to certain of our Google Network members have exceeded the related fees we receive from our advertisers.

We are obligated under certain agreements to make non-cancelable guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to Google Network members based on their achieving defined performance terms, such as number of search queries or advertisements displayed. In these agreements, we promise to make these minimum payments to the Google Network member for a pre-negotiated period of time. At June 30, 2007, our aggregate outstanding non-cancelable guaranteed minimum revenue share commitments totaled $1.66 billion through 2011 compared to $1.17 billion at December 31, 2006. It is difficult to forecast with certainty the fees that we will earn under agreements with guarantees, and sometimes the fees we earn fall short of the guaranteed minimum payment amounts.

In August last year, Google were celebrating a deal with MySpace that provided $900m worth of advertising to them. They've also signed major deals with eBay, AOL and some other large sites globally.

In their enthusiasm for getting these exclusive deals, it does look like they've overpaid. It definitely implies that they were working to some assumptions that must have been extremely wrong. Signing deals for over $1 billion that don't make you money looks a little silly.

Brain as a sex organ

Interesting theory that the brain evolved as a sex organ. Although the methodology in the experiment doesn't look very robust, it does come up with some good results.

I like the fact that women aren't willing to risk anything to be heroic and I particularly like the way charity is portrayed.

I'll have to get working on a bit more conspicuous spending...

Londonist: Could This Be The Most Alarmist Standard Headline Ever?

Nice shot. Definitely could have done with some fleeing - had a hole in my shoe yesterday and got home with some very soggy feet indeed. Did win a pub quiz though so it wasn't all bad!

Meeting my hero

There's very few times that you get to kneel down next to your hero. I got the chance today. And got a great book too!
Well worth a quick walk!

Really clever advert

Actually it might not be the cleverest advert in the world, but I do think it is quite cunning.


No idea who the company is nor what they do. To be honest, I don't really care that much as their product isn't something I'm able to buy. Good to know what they're doing though!

Found through Big Secret Pizza Party

A World Without Advertising

I was talking with someone today, talking about ad blockers. These are programs that block the advertising that appears on pages.

The argument was that ads annoy users, therefore they will block them. I was coming back with my usual point about the fact that people are willing to block adverts using free ad blockers. However, they are very unwilling to pay a regular price for blocking the adverts.

Walmo was also talking about how people understand how adverts fit into areas where they feel they are getting content for free, but that they don't expect to get advertising in 'their' space such as Myspace or facebook.

Thought I'd do the maths behind it, to see how much advertising pays for each user.

If we assume that there are three tiers of sites: Quality (e.g. Guardian \ Economist \ Hemscott etc), Entertainment (Sun \ Handbag \ BoingBoing) and Social (Google \ Facebook \ Yahoo! Mail).

We'd be willing to pay more for the quality sites because we feel they're giving us something of value. I think people would be unwilling to pay for things like Google or Facebook because they're seen as piggybacking on other people's content. If they had no choice at all, they definitely would as they're all pretty much a necessity for using the internet in the way we currently do.

If we assume that Quality sites are able (at the moment) to acheive a yield of around £8 per thousand pages - that's 0.8p for every page you view. If you compare this to a newspaper, with around 100 stories on average, that's 80p so quite valid in terms of pricing.

We'd expect entertainment sites to be cheaper. Let's say a yield of around £4 per thousand pages - that's 0.4p for every page. You'd expect an entertainment paper to be shorter than a newspaper, so that's the equivalent of around 20p for a paper.

Social sites fill our sights with adverts. I'd guess the ad yield for these sites (apart from Google) to be around £0.75 per thousand pages - if they're lucky!

Looking at Comscore, the average user sees around 3,500 pages a month. Assuming you look at 65% social, 25% entertainment and 10% quality pages.

This works out to a nice and round £8 a month additional money to pay for the content people look at. The problem is that this then needs to be distributed fairly and equitably between the sites. People need security to know that evil criminals aren't stealing their accounts. Any business doing this sort of deal would open themselves to all sorts of complications. They'd probably charge an additional 25%, taking the charge to a nice round £10.

Now I don't think that's a huge sum to ask people to pay for - if advertising is such a problem ask people if they're willing to pay £10 a month to not see it. If they are then maybe you've got a business idea.

I think sites would be much more interested in solutions that would stop them having to bow to the pressures they get from people like me. Unfortunately it would also involve me losing my job. I wouldn't like that!!

Ultimately as an industry we need to ensure that we don't annoy enough people to the point that £10 a month seems worth paying to get rid of our 'works of art'. I think we should be able to cope.

PS In comparison, the IAB estimate current online ad expenditure to be in the region of £2billion. This, when divided by current internet users of 31 million, gives £64 a year and therefore £5.37. This is slightly different. However, the IAB use PwC to guess their numbers, so I'm going to trust mine because I've put more rigour in than just employing some bean counters to ring round a couple of big media owners and ask them how much they made this year.


(Picture mercilessly stolen from trangress)

Bye Bye Blair

One of the (few) advantages of working in Victoria is that it's relatively close to Westminster. That's why there's never much tube traffic on a Monday as the civil servants take advantage of flexi-time...

Therefore, when I read the itinerary of Blair's final day, I realised it was more than possible to wander up to Downing Street to see the final moments in person. A short walk and I was outside the center of power.

There was a definite mood that this was an 'event'. Ugly protesters tried to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. They were by no means only protesting the war, there was a wide range of causes displaying their badly made placards. Strangely enough, people still seem to blame Blair personally for the war in Iraq. Do they really think he could have stopped the war?

The event, for the general public, was made much more difficult by the police. They pushed everyone a LONG way back from the gates of Downing Street, under the pretext that they had to swing the gates back. They pushed us back about fifteen meters from the entrance of Downing St, which was much further than made sense from the opening.

It's a shame that security considerations now mean that such distance must be kept from 'important' people. Hopefully at some point we will try and have a little trust that the public won't try and kill famous people too often!

Anyway, the police stopped me from having a good view. But I managed to be among the few people cheering and applauding Blair as he finished his ten years in office. He gave a little wave from his car. I can imagine that he's got the BEST feeling in the entire world this morning. Nothing at all to worry about for a couple of days.

Well done Tony Blair. He will be missed (at least by me)

Small bars, many people

Went to Lab bar again last night. Seem to have been going there more often recently, I think more people have discovered it, though it's been there for a couple of years.

I don't know if it's me getting older but it seemed overly crowded last night. If you're going to have a very trendy bar that becomes popular, I think you should look at restricting the number of people going in to it!
Unfortunately this results in places like Mahikis and Pangea which then become magnets for socialite types who want to show everyone how 'important' they are.

Personally, I believe in hunting down new and funky places - this helps to keep things simple. It also avoids too much crowding.
I suspect I'm going to experience more bar crowding when I start working in Soho, but hopefully it'll also give me the chance to find the new trendy bars before they get too busy.
Also, I'll be quite close to the Sanderson which doesn't seem to get too crowded (the wince-inducing prices scare most people away!!)

Google Moves a Step Closer to World Domination

Sometimes Google comes up with something extremely surprising. In fact this does seem to happen more often than with almost any other company in the entire world.

This week's surprise is Google Gears. It sounds pretty innocuous - it will allow web apps to work when you're offline. The first app is very exciting, it lets people use Google Reader when they're offline. I think this is fantastic and will make my next couple of train trips far more interesting as I can read my feeds rather than the newspaper.

However, the important development is that we will be able to use Google Docs offline (I assume). We will be able to use Google Writer instead of Word, Google Spreadsheets instead of Excel and the forthcoming Google Presentations instead of Powerpoint.
At the moment, Google's offerings are not as good as Microsoft's, but they're free while Microsoft's cost a large amount of money.

We'll see if this does make a huge difference to people's usage of Google services, but I can see it being beneficial. The only problem is that Google will now become a software supplier. I think there'll be a couple of people using this Google Gears product to hack into people's computers at some point - it does seem to give people rather a large amount of access to their computers.

It does look like it will be possible to accomplish almost everything on a computer without leaving Google's own sites. Probably not a good thing!!

Let's hope Ask's information revolution actually happens.

Rise of Facebook

I've been to a couple of different parties in the past few weeks where everyone is talking about Facebook. It's quite interesting seeing its evolution from an equivalent of FriendsReunited to a genuinely useful tool that people are using to organise their lives.
I was planning to meet up with someone this weekend and was sent a Facebook event rather than an email or a phone call to sort out the details. Allen and Overy recently suffered an internal revolt when their IT department decided to block the Facebook's website. There was a swift backpedal and the lawyers are back to manically facebooking each other.
The thing that confuses me is why this didn't happen with Myspace or Bebo. They both emerged (in the UK) around a year to a year and a half ago. They swiftly took over many people's lives and had them organising their lives around the websites. However, these sites didn't win over my social circle so I always felt a little left out.
Whole books have been written on network effects and how things like social networks can evolve. I can't be bothered to think about why they succeeded. Instead I'll draw a couple of pretty graphs.
This one shows the growth of Facebook against those of its competitors.

As you can seem Facebook is doing a good job of catching up, but it's still a huge distance behind Myspace and Bebo. It'll take them a good six - nine months of current growth. Worrying for Piczo is the fact that they've actually lost audience in the last month. Things are not going to go well for them if they can't fix that soon.
A quick look at the younger people shows Piczo in even more trouble:

Facebook has already overtaken Piczo and is halfway towards catching Myspace and Bebo.

A good thing to notice on this graph is that Bebo and Myspace are neck and neck for the umber one social networking spot. This should be noticed by all the brands competing with each other to see who can spend the most on Myspace - there's a couple of different places to spend that money...

The 'hidden' rise of Bebo and Piczo shows the importance of having good measuring tools in the internet - you can't see what other people are doing online. A website is usually less exciting than the last episode of 24 and so gets talked about less. The current measurement systems still leave large amounts to be desired.

We'll see what Google or Tacoda will offer us when they get round to sharing the piles of data they are sitting on - I suspect there'll be some interesting nuggets within them.

What I do for a living

It's always uncomfortable when someone tries to boil down effectively what you do. I was at a house party the other day and everyone seemed to be telling me that their job was very important and involved 'strategy' and other managerial sounding words.
I could go for the generic explanation of what I do. It would involve words like 'strategy', 'clients', 'direction' and many other buzz words. I could probably put the '2.0' suffix onto any of them to make myself sound even more grand.
Explaining my job to people who don't work in the industry is always difficult because it hasn't existed for a very long time and the definitions of what we do haven't really filtered down to most other people. Most people probably don't really care about what it is that I do.
They might notice the adverts on their screens while they're surfing the internet, but they probably don't appreciate the time and effort put into making them move their mouse to hit the 'close' button.
My favourite explanations are below:

"I make the Internet free"

Obviously this isn't entirely true, but it does have more than a couple of grains of truth. Adverts from my company appear in front of almost every person who goes online in the UK. I don't think many of those people paid the sites which provided the free content they were looking at.
There's a huge number of online services beyond news which are funded by the advertising we place - social networking, webmail, RSS readers, search engines...
Without the ads we place most people wouldn't be able to find a single useful things on the web. We'd be stuck with the BBC's website and whatever people are willing to write and pay to host.
We're capitalism's friendly face and probably the people who've allowed some of the most life changing technology into your world.

"I make rich men richer"

I think anyone who isn't a doctor or self-employed does this for a living. In my case, I work for a company which is owned by a group of people who I see on occasion. They are all men and I have seen figures which show exactly how much richer I've made them.
Even civil servants help by making the whole system work and therefore maintaining the framework which allows these rich people to get richer. I don't mind because one day I hope to join their number. However, there's a huge number of people who also have a similar plan...

"I get poor people to buy things they don't need with money they don't have"

Unfortunately one of the problems with advertising is that the most susceptible people to it are the poor. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, people who were rich make themselves poor by buying all the things advertising tells them to. Secondly, poor people are easier to sell hope to. Give them a loan and they'll find many things to spend it on.
As many a social worker will tell you, it isn't usually spent on things they actually need. More often than non it'll be things that the telly told them they wanted.
Luckily, most poor people haven't invested in getting themselves the internet so most of the things we sell are for slightly more upmarket consumers.

Ultimately, I really enjoy my job and I think one of the things that would make a job less interesting is being able to explain it. I think the thing I can take away is that every now and then I get to do something new. Something no-one else has done before and something other people will copy at some point relatively soon.

Topical!!

Topical!!
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords.

Went to Legoland yesterday.

Among the many worldwide scenes that they have recreated in Lego, this picture of Downing Street seems to have been updated by someone sneaky!

Mourning

Extremely bad news today with one of my favourite people in the entire world deciding to resign.

Just turned on newsnight and seen an interesting debate with two utterly defeated people discussing his 'legacy'. Charles Kennedy and Michael Howard attempting to criticise what Blair achieved in office.

Maybe he did bad things but I have extreme doubts that any of the opposition leaders would have had the ability to do things better or even particularly differently.

Seriously - can anyone honestly imagine Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy actually sitting in Downing Street?

Someone's Opinion on my Industry

(image from digitalgrace)

Amused by one of the comments towards the end of this gentle moan at advertising:

Dylanwolf

May 7, 2007 10:31 AM

"I'm with Salfordian on this one.

In our society advertising and marketing is the "elephant in the room" that no-one speaks ill of. This monster rapaciously soaks up enormous piles of money, resources and skills in order to fart out a thirty-second add showing yet another shiny silver car morphing up an empty, snaky mountain road. Who cares - brand image is an entirely specious fabrication.

Let's gather up our own flaming brands and storm the citadels of the advertising agencies. We should take no more.

These self-aggrandising leeches of society award themselves preposterous wages, stinking bonuses and regularly preen themselves in champagne award ceremonies. Smear them in the products they push and stick them on a pyre, I say.

Roy, when are we as a society going to properly remunerate social workers, carers (you know the list!) etc with wages commensurate with the value of their work?"

It seems strange the amount of invective generated by putting adverts in front of people. Especially when they're probably exactly the same people who would kick up a fuss if the media they consumed suddenly cost money...
I think the media needs to be a little more honest with their consumers. I did like a service that the Guardian offered a while ago - you paid money and the site came with no adverts at all. This scheme had to be dropped because less than 50 people took it up (the Guardian was then being read by over 9 million people).
People like moaning more than paying.

The Gillette Fusion War on Terror

Beautiful skit by Stephen Colbert. Love the idea of sponsoring the War on Terror.

Hospitality

Hospitality
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords.

Went to Hospitality at Herbal last night - fantastic atmosphere and music.

Cyantific played a great cheese fest.

Blu Marten then destroyed the place with some fantastic music that navigated the border between music and noise in just the way I like. I was happy!

Rejected Petition

Hi,

I'm sorry to inform you that your petition has been rejected.

Your petition was classed as being in the following categories:

* Party political material

* Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government
policy

If you wish to edit and resubmit your petition, please follow
the following link:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SirWillFerrell/AJuACRBGTFh2AjfiIhA6Le3

You have four weeks in which to do this, after which your
petition will appear in the list of rejected petitions.

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'Give Will
Ferrell an honourary Knighthood, and make the viewing of
Anchorman compulsory for all schoolchildren.'

Many people in the UK have recognised a need for young people
to have a role model.

We, the undersigned, believe Will Ferrell to represent all that
is good about life in general. His attitude to life and acting
exemplify productivity, hard work and people skills.

Anchorman has gained international recognition for portraying
equal opportunities in the workplace. We believe that if more
people in Britain used the values and attitudes Ferrell
displayed in his role as Ron Burgandy, the UK would be a better
place.

Although he has not yet loaned the labour party any cash, we
are sure some of his earnings from 'Blades of Glory' could be
diverted to a suitable account.

-- the ePetitions team

Flying

Sometimes it's possible to get very bored of queues. Airports seem very happy with the idea of making people wait. There's loads me people just standing around patiently waiting. Workers stand around patiently not doing anything. I'm not patient so I fidget. This makes me look unusual so I get searched. Fun.

The 'Information Revolution'

I was on the tube this morning and I noticed an ad for the 'information revolution'. Wasn't entirely sure what it was, nor who it was for.

This intrigued me, so I remembered the URL on the advert and had a look at the site when I got home. It annoyed me as I don't like letting those creative types know how successful they were at their cunning cross media approach. In my opinion, I'm only interested in it because I'm a geek.

The site purports to be telling people about the dangers of relying on only one information source. It features interviews with 'real people' and some unsourced facts about the peril we are exposing ourselves to.

Although they don't explicitly say it, they are arguing that you shouldn't just use Google to do your searches - you should diversify.

I strongly suspect that this site is a cunning attempt by Yahoo! or Ask to subvert people into changing their searching habits. The site doesn't have any adservers tracking activities on the site, and there is nothing overtly associated with any brand.

The only clue that something is weird is the search box in the bottom right of the site.Seems unusual to put them in alphabetical order...

I ran a WHOIS on the URL (a technique for finding who owns the website) and found it registered to a little company called Profero. One of my best friends, Lydia, works there and therefore I know that it's a digital advertising agency.

A quick look at their client list shows that they have both Yahoo! and Ask. I'm not sure this is the kind of thing that Yahoo would be willing to sign off - they're a bit overly corporate and this seems quite brave. Therefore I think it's Ask Jeeves looking to change people's behaviour.

It is a good site, but I think it falls just short of where it needs to be. There's no controversy, there needs to be more emphasis on the bad things that could happen if we all used Google.

Getting in trouble with the legal department is difficult, but it does need to make some statements that show it's some kind of movement rather than a corporate site. Maybe make up a term about 'information pollution' or some catchy name for a homogenous infrastructure.

Might keep an eye on it to see what happens!

I wandered lonely as a bus

I had the unfortunate luck to fall asleep on the way home tonight. It reminded me me how far away some parts me London are. I went through places like Wood Field, palmer's green and other bits of Enfield... It was a worrying reminder that Enfield is a good half hour drive away from real civilisation. Sleep at your peril!

PS3 takes on Second Life

Fantastic move by Sony \ Playstation.

I love the idea of having a 'virtual space' for PS3 users. Hope it will result in some funky new things, both for players and for evil corporate people like me.


I can imagine this morphing into some kind of virtual ad space. I think the key will be to resist being overtly commercial. We had a presentation from Bebo the other day who said it was important to be seen 'as part of the community'.

Personally I think the important thing is to show members that the advertising is giving something to them.

Advertising is expected on a free platform - the majority of people understand that someone has to pay for the service. The key is to get the balance between awareness and annoyance. Ads need to be positive, and be a reward for getting the consumer to do something.

I love the idea on this service that certain things will be unlockable. obviously the initial rush will be to extract money (kids are willing to pay for mobile backgrounds, why not virtual T-Shirts?). However, I think the best thing will come from earned rewards. What if people who have completed a certain game then get some kind of obvious identifier?


World of Warcraft shows the lengths some people are willing to go to show off their 'prowess' at playing games. The home space for the PS3 users could easily morph into that. Competitions could be run, with the winner getting a large statue in one of the communal areas (sponsored?).

If Sony can recruit a good team capable of running this area effectively, it could easily become a very strong community. It could even end up representing something very valuable for Sony?

Spotplex - Next Big Thing?

Really interesting site I just found out about from the regularly excellent Data Mining blog.

This site has the potential to give us some numbers on the 'blogosphere.'
At the moment, the only effective measurement on blogs is through Technorati and Nielsen's Buzzmetrics. Spotplex is offering the ability to measure actual readers (or at least page impressions).

It'll be interesting to see how well this service does. It has the potential to compete with both digg and google analytics. While it is doing this, it will enable us good ol' advertisers to work out how many people are reading these blog things, and give us some fantastic graphs to show what people are actually looking at.

Can't wait till this gets integrated with Swivel!

Cunning

Quite amusing little thing showing the power of a little marketing.

An 'exceptional' piano player called Joyce Hatto was well known for her quality of playing. Can't see any mention of her live performances here, but she had a good number of piano CD releases.

Unfortunately when people put these into their PCs, the computers would think they'd put a CD of someone else into their disc drive.

Turns out her recordings were suspicously similar to those of other artists.

Lesson is - if you're going to copy something, change the length of the CDs, the computers can't catch you then!

Fantastic Pictures

Really impressive little doodle from some American guy. Usual hippy terror story with lots of stuff against all the silly things Americans do (and us smug Europeans too!)

Really like the one of the mountain view made up of SUV logos.

My brain

Just got one of those brain training games. This is the result me giving it a go while very drunk... It does come out slightly better when I'm sober!

More Videos

Web 2.0 Explodes, Mind-Expanding Video Shows Who's Teaching Who - Gizmodo

I don't know who it was who made this video, some professor of something made up.

However, I have now seen this video appear on Information Aesthetics, Boing Boing, Slashdot, "Talent Imitates, Genius Steals", Lifehacker, Telegraph technology, Pocket Lint and Slashdot.

I'm not sure how valuable the video is, but it's definitely shown the power of blogging. Despite all this publicity, it's only received 150,000 views (t time of writing).

Digital Ethnography sounds slightly made up. I do hope there's not too many gullible students paying good money to study trends in youtube and what happens on world of warcraft.

Basically, KSU seems to have come up with a cunning way to make money. I don't know what you can do with this degree they've made up, but I know I'd be extremely reluctant to employ someone who'd spent £10,000 on a degree that looks very questionable in value.

Anti Hippy Movies

You know video on demand has come of age when Wal-Mart starts offering it.

In their characteristically brash manner, they've managed to annoy geeks everywhere by supporting neither Firefox nor Mac users.

Pricing is supposed to be the same level as DVDs. However, they haven't offered the option to burn the movies to a (TV watchable) disc. Which means it won't be that useful to people here in the UK.

I would be that there's also some kind of protector thing to stop us watching them. It does strike me that the $20 download fee is less than the current cinema price in central london.

Google's "Masterplan"

Nice little video by what looks like some design students. Really reminds me of the graphic design which was part of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Their concern centres on the privacy issues around Google.

This blog is written on Google software, they can see what I search for (personalised search), what I read (Google Reader and Google News), and even what files I look at (Google Desktop). This will translate into a very detailed picture of me.

Google's performance shows that the majority of people are willing to accept services in exchange for a loss of privacy. It is quite impressive how much information Google currently has on me, but I am quite comfortable with that. There have been no examples of Google abusing privacy so far (that I am aware of).

As with all web services, Google are acutely aware that their competition are only one click away. If you even think that there's a small possibility that Google could do something that would make your life worse, you're going to go to the competition. Hopefully Google will keep that in mind when they're being tempted to abuse their data.

Search Engine Share

I was reading something about the most recent Microsoft results, which managed to point out that Microsoft has lost market share in the last year, despite their well publicised launch of search services. This was an American article, so I thought I'd have a quick peek at how they've been doing.

If we look at the current performance in terms of unique users, they're not doing too badly. This is based on the Windows live search page, and compares their growth vs Google and Yahoo. The scale is relative to the average over 2006 - couldn't get Swivel to index it relative to the beginning.


When you look at the absolute numbers, the performance isn't too bad either:


However, once you look at this by page impressions (or number of visits), you see that Microsoft have completely failed to make any sort of dent into Google. It's quite scary when you look at it. Google is in green at the top, MSN and Yahoo are lurking at the bottom.


The differentials in the share of page impressions swing to hit them even harder once you look at revenue. My own experience is that Google sends through people who are slightly more likely to buy. This means we are willing to pay slightly more for their adverts.
This extra margin means that Google are making around ten times more than their nearest competitor. This is a mark that would usually attract the interest of a regulator in any other industry. However, this dominance has been achieved by having a better product.
We'll have to wait and see what Yahoo! manages to do with their new system, 'Panama', which will be launching in the UK later this year. They'll need some good luck too.

Interesting Move

Spam is destroying the internet yet again...

Wikipedia is probably one of the most tempting places to put Spam - you can edit it however and whenever you like. There are few controls in place to stop abuse.

It'll be interesting to see what Google do from this - I would expect that a large amount of certain websites receive much of their ranking due to links originating from Wikipedia. If Wikipedia sets it so that Google ignores the links, then they might disappear.

We'll see what happens, but should be good to see if Google begins to work on ways to exclude random spam links while including genuine links to relevant articles.

Nazcan Lines

My parents have recently gotten back from their holiday in Peru.

My Dad was lucky (and brave) enough to manage to get himself a flight in a little Cessna over the Lines. He got a good view:


It's always impressive to see these lines, reminding everyone how crazy people can get with religion sometimes...

Also one of those endless Alien conspiracies. I'm sure David Icke has some interesting theories about how those lines got there.

Of particular interest was this photo:


This shows a Whale with a 'trophy head' - these were shrunken heads the Nazcans kept on their belts in order to show how cool they were. Kind of their equivalent of iPods...

The area I highlighted in red (it wasn't radioactive or anything), is some old time graffiti.

I've blown it up and enhanced it here:



The text seems to be pretty much 'Hernrn(?) was here.' Sophistication was still a little way along the line. Would be interesting to find out when it was done!

Religous Social Networking

As a rule, some things are not going to sound cool. The advertising industry faces this problem on a regular basis. How do you make toilet paper cool? How do you make people care enough about which toilet paper they're going to use?

Luckily, a new Jewish social network has solved this problem. If you use a the word 'Kool' in the name of your site.

Honestly - I thought mis-spelling cool fell out of trendiness in the eighties.

Also, social networking should be about connecting with your own friends, and then gradually expanding it out. Limiting yourself to a particular group of people is rather closed minded, and indicates that you're only able to make friends with people who are extremely similar to yourself.

This isn't the only religous one, someone's setup MyChurch.org and also muslimspace.com.

The problem with social networking sites is that they are very cheap to setup the technology, the difficulty is in getting people to use them. Leveraging existing communities looks like a good idea. However, it has to be done very well.

Myspace succeeded by lassooing the trendy kids - music + teenagers + customisation. Facebook managed it by being exclusive and playing up to kids who'd just joined university. Piczo grew around the idea of sharing photos. Not sure what Bebo did, but I'm sure it didn't grow by associating itself with religon.

Religon is all very well and good for attracting people of a certain age. The question that has to be asked: is religon really an effective marketing tool for people under 25? I think the lack of 'Jesus Cola' shows that it is. In fact, the only religous brand I can think of is 'Quaker,' which I think has slowly died since Nestle bought them about ten years ago.


PS. I'm sure Jesus Cola actually exists, but it's definitely not of a size to register against the Cola giants.

Aljazeera

Didn't know that Aljazeera had redesigned. Their new site is really impressive in terms of ease of use.

The pictures really make it look more like a website - the current designs of the 'broadsheet' papers in the UK seem to try and make their websites look more like 'information resources' than proper websites.

It always confuses me to a certain degree - the newspapers spend significant amounts of money on sending journalists out to get pictures of what's going on. Then they put stories on the web that are mainly text. I admit that there are bandwidth costs involved, but these costs are reducing as time goes on.

Put some pictures up!

I look forward to seeing what the Guardian manage with their upcoming redesign.

Good cartoon blog of someone moving to London

RIDICULOUS Holiday in London
Found it on Russel Davies' blog, the story of a girl looking for excitement and adventure. She can definitely draw!

Media Predictions

I've just been reading Deloitte's Media Predictions.

It's a good piece of fluffy PR from some consultant(s) who should have been gainfully employed preventing things like this.

Some of the article reads well and contains predictions which wouldn't look hugely out of place in a horoscope. However, throughout the article, jarring conclusions suddenly appear, supported by nothing more than thin air.

Having read this, I thought I would take it apart. Partly through my envy of my Deloitte friends' inflated paypackets, but mainly because I dislike fluffiness. Fluffiness is OK from creatives and from hippies, but management consultants really ought to do better.

So we begin:

User Generated Content

The report's overall point is that the majority of blogs and social media is utterly rubbish to the point of being boring. They also notice the fact that your average blog will not attract the majority of the billion readers on the Internet. They are concerned that the lack of quality makes it difficult for anyone to make money out of it.
This conclusion misses the entire point of blogging and social media. Some bloggers are looking for an audience. Most are not. For me, blogging is part diary, part writing practice. This post is an attempt to write a detailed and coherent case against a detailed and coherent article. I don't care if someone is reading this or not.
Some blog services are able to extract subscription money out of their users.
Deloitte can only see things through their involvement with old media - they can only see the revenue available for established media owners.
Established media owners trade on the reputation that their media brand has achieved. They hope that the trust created by their relationship with their readers viewers users will be worth additional money to advertisers. They also hope that the audience consuming their media will be worth money to advertisers. If they're lucky, they'll be able to get their audience to part with money for the service. Their problem is that blogs have small, undefined audiences. Their relationship with the authors tend to be personal, or information driven.
Ultimately this model won't work for blogs. Subscription won't work, because computing power and data storage are commodities. Commodities which are falling in price at a scary pace. The cost of showing this text is currently less than 0.000002p (these are commercial terms from a quick google search). Ad yields are probably around 0.02p per page view (assuming a CPM of £0.20). It doesn't take much sense to see that there is money to be made if you can build a good system. A good service should be able to make significant amounts of money if it is free.
Google, Wordpress and the social networking sites have turned the established media business model on its head. They provide services to consumers, at no charge. Users are happy to concede the indignity of having adverts imposed on their content in return for being able to publish for free. Google have even managed to make this last term optional, and share the advertising revenue with the user.
As any vaguely competent management consultant should be able to tell you, large profits from this will require large volumes. MySpace has 130 million users at the last count. 130 million multiplied by any of the above numbers will result in a large number.
Deloitte's assertion that "UGC could be used to enhance the loyalty of an established media format, such as a television show" is correct, although misses out the fact that this is already happening (Courtney worked on a good example)

Overall, Deloitte misses the fact that blogs can and will become a major revenue spinner. This could be because the report is aimed at established players, who will have difficulty implementing the technology necessary to run blogging services.

Broadcasting

Deloitte argue that 'participation' is going to become more important to Television. Allowing the audience to interact and feel that they can make an impact on events in their shows should increase loyalty. Telephone voting will allow the stations to recoup the crippling decline in television advertising revenues. I don't have a problem with their section on Broadcasting, though it is very woolly.
Basically, the article can be summed up as saying 'Participation is not amazing, but it can be good if done well.' How is that a prediction?
My own opinion on this, since it is safely outside my area of expertise, is that television is not dead. Broadcasting still has a long way to go, as the report points out in all the other sections, a huge amount of people are comfortably spending the majority of their media time in front of the television.
The problem is that they are, increasingly, watching different programmes. This is the factor which is hurting ITV so much - their ad revenue declined by around ten percent this year, which is not a good things for them!
It must be tempting to give up on the challenge of attracting loyal audiences by pursuing the lowest common denomination and trying to rely instead on revenues from telephone voting. However, this will not last in the long term. Eventually audiences will tire of spending large amounts of money on these telephone lines. Government action will hopefully come into place which will force the television companies stop extracting money from population groups which are not affluent enough to continue throwing relatively large amounts of money at mobile phone numbers. The practices for extracting money extend further into gray areas each month, ITV recently got into trouble for charging people £1 an attempt at connecting to their hot-line for one of their cash cow late night programmes.
The alternative should be to concentrate on supplying fewer programmes with greater quality. This will be difficult for ITV with their significant public service constraints. It is almost certain that these will be removed at some point in 2007, providing ITV with the chance to compete more effectively. Hopefully their new CEO will inject a bit of much-needed creativity into their programme makers.

News

Deloitte make the stunningly insightful prediction that "print media companies are likely to make increasingly diverse and creative use of both paper and pixels."
They also advise that "Publishers and other media companies should create a balance between paper and pixels."
I think that this was the point where I realised that Deloitte weren't going to make any actual predictions in their research paper. I'll have to make my own.
I think 2007 is going to see the rise of the 'global news-source." The web provides companies the chance to greatly increase their distribution with little additional cost. Once again, Google is responsible for the change in news consumption. News aggregators are becoming more common - allowing people to immediately see the breaking news, and removing the journalism from news. The New York Times actually said that they were scared of what was developing from the 'death of the editor.'
I think we are already at the point where the UK's quality newspapers have more Internet readers than daily sales (apart from the independent). I predict that all the UK newspapers will have more monthly unique users than daily circulation (another example of the problem of measureability).

Internet Retailing

Deloitte talk about Chris Anderson's book on the 'Long Tail' too. Actually, I think they didn't read it - someone just explained what it was about and they had a stab at using that explanation.
They miss the entire point of the book. Take this quote:
"The vast repositories of content available for sale over the Internet may struggle to sell even a tiny fraction of the volume generated by blockbusters."
This, after waxing lyrical about the opportunities offered by niche products. Depends how many products you offer - the book's point was that if you it costs the same to list 10,000 products as to list 1,000,000 products, you'll be able to make more money.
If 10% of the products listed sell only 0.1% of the top product, you'll still see those products combining to give 1,000 times as many sales as the top product. There will also be less competition for the niche products, meaning higher margin.
They then talk about the recommendation system:
"While one customer's purchase may consist of a couple of CDs in the same genre, another customer may well be collecting gifts for a wide range of friends and family. So the purchase history for one may make little sense for anyone else with a different combination of friends and family (in other words, potentially everyone in the world)."
Have these people used Amazon?! Recommendation systems are not solely based on purchases. Last.fm and Pandora are providing services that look at what you listen to, and then give recommendations. This will completely eliminate the problem they gripe about. Amazon and other retailers get around the gifting problem by offering gift wrapping, and the chance to tell the system what doesn't interest you.
Recommendation systems are about exchanging information, it's not a one way system. This is another area where Deloitte are stuck in the old media age.
Overall Deloitte have missed the fact that Internet retailing is about lowering costs, NOT generating higher volumes. Once low costs are in place, high volumes will come.

Measurement

Deloitte rightly point out that there is no easy way to compare different media. The advertising industry has been discussing this since the 1960s and probably even earlier than that. Predicting that we'll be still be discussing this in 2007 is like me saying people will still be playing football this year.

Video on Demand

"Video-on-demand may leave you waiting" is the title. It completely misses the fact that VOD is already deployed in more than two million homes in the UK right now, through cable television operators. For Deloitte, VOD is only possible through the Internet. The fact that video files can come from almost any source doesn't seem to influence them. This, to me, is an error that can be corrected just by looking on Wikipedia. I hope that there's no-one in Deloitte working on any of the big IPTV projects.


I'm bored and can't be bothered to continue. I think the overall review has missed the incredible rise of social networking in the last year. I think it has the potential to make the Internet an even more important part of people's lives. The new Apple TV is the first step in the Internet's march from the office, to the study, and now to the living room. Mobile Internet won't be huge this year, but the iPhone has the potential to take widespread Internet use on the move.

2007 is going to be different, exciting and I'm looking forward to getting involved in some of these shiny new things.

Stephen Hawking, astronaut?

Beautiful bit of marketing.
Stephen Hawking is a man very committed to the exploration of space and all that sort of Jazz. It'll be interesting to see how much value Branson gets out of this.
At the very least you'd expect some extremely interesting news articles.
While reading this article, I saw and advert for one of my clients. Tacoda seem to have put me within their 'interested in sport' audience segment. Either that or their 'interested in dieting' segment. Technology obviously isn't perfect.

Snap!

It must be a difficult job writing these headlines. Posh and bucks is too tempting to ignore. But also too obvious. Bet someone got a kicking for this though!

Yum Yum

Healthy as ever. I've worked at least a million hours in the last couple of days. According to this I've definitely consumed at least 150% of the RDA today.

PR about PR

It's always good to hype yourself, as any PR firm will tell you. It must have been quite a quiet day for them to manage to get this featured in the trade press.
Quite interesting as this is the kind of thing you would expect from a "Naked" rather than a PR firm.
One of those nice ideas that seem completely obvious when they happen, but would have actually taken lots of effort to convince the client to pay for it. Only worth it if it generates some of this PR really.
Wonder if it was aimed at media types so that they were likely to be advertising in it rather than to get people to watch the show...

Nuclear Nations

Was reading an article about how Iran is a couple of years away from creating a nuclear weapon.

There seems to be large amounts of contradictory information about Nuclear Weapons. If a 'rogue state' is involved, the sources talk about how difficult it is to make a nuclear weapon - they seem to need to build nuclear power plants first.

When they're talking about terrorism, it suddenly becomes very easy. There's this article from the BBC telling us that basically anyone can make a nuclear bomb, with a couple of important caveats.

Which one is true? How can Iran be two - three years away from a nuclear weapon if all someone needs is a bit of nuclear waste and a bit of chemistry training?

Personally I think the danger from nuclear weapons is exaggerated. If we set off many across the world, there would be a huge disaster. However, one or two bombs wouldn't cause much damage (on a global scale).

Also, why bother keeping them. It may all be a cunning trick. As the important people tell us, we need nuclear weapons so that we can credibly threaen to use them. In order to acheive this goal, all we need to do is convince people we have a nuclear weapon. Convincing people we have a nuclear weapon would be a good use of £10bn...

"Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman"

Just finished this book. Read it very quickly even though it's a relatively long read - think it was just because it was very interesting.

Richard Feynman was considered one of the top minds of the last century. Reading this book, you'll get an idea why. Obviously, as an autobiography it does bring to the fore how great he thought he was. He never really goes into detail about his achievements, so it's tough to know details about what exactly it was that he achieved.

This book really blows stuff like Freakonomics out of the water in terms of thinking differently. I think the fundamental reason Feynman stood out was a combination of the persistence he asked the question 'Why?' and his ability to obtain answers.

'Why' is a fundamental word that should really be used more often. Ben Goldacre's wonderful 'Bad Science' column in the Guardian fulfils the modern day version of Feynman - asking awkward questions of what Feynman calls 'Cargo Cult Scientists.'

Asking the right questions of quacks and trash peddlers should smoke them out pretty quickly.

I often get frustrated at work when people give presentations that aren't necessarily backed up by facts. I too often put up charts without properly sourcing them. I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed in society in general.

Too often newspaper report only the findings of a study. It's amazing how often they won't actually tell you which journal the research is appearing in. They often won't even include who the authors are. I often moan about the number of headlines revolving around 'cancer risk' in newspaper stories. The old method of ignoring stories with quotation marks in the headlines needs to be followed more rigorously.

In summary, I remembered the Feynman lectures from my physics course and it's refreshing to find out that there was a genuinely interesting (if sometimes tipping towards the insane side of eccentric) person behind them. Well worth a read if you're looking for some popular science stuff.

Fantastic

For anyone who doesn't like the Daily Mail nor the Evening Standard, here's a great little thing.

Managed to get it to say "Londoners fear Ken fiasco." Wonder if that's what the headline writers actually use - will have to see if I can see a similar machine at the Sun.

Heat - George Monbiot's New Book

I do hate George Monbiot on many levels. He has a very strong 'holier than thou' attitude to almost all of his campaigning issues. He very rarely gives people credit for trying. "You may have saved one million dolphins, but you still don't pay your migrant workers a living wage".

This book is a vision of how to deliver an almost Carbon Neutral Britain (and world) by 2050. It's very ambitious and very interesting. Once you get past his first two chapters, it's quite a good read. It should be used as a model for people wishing to make a point about anything campaigny. Everything he refers to is sourced, he talks through his calculations and he is good at actually using decent numbers.

Overall, there were some interesting ideas which I'm going to have to check out:

• DC Power Lines (a new, more efficient way of moving large amounts of electricity around)
• Passive Houses (extremely well insulated houses which don't need heat)
• Peer to Peer National Grid

The Peer to Peer National Grid sounds the most promising. The majority of energy inefficiency in electricity generation is due to heat escaping. This could be harnessed by putting small scale generators in each home. THe power transmission lines would then allow energy exchanges between households.

My main problems with his book is that the assumptions used to postulate that we need to reduce a carbon emissions by 90% seem slightly ropey. He goes out of his way to criticise a group of people for not being fully trained in science, but then talks about a wonderful paper by someone who wasn't trained in science (one page later!?).

To be fair though, this is a good effort and worth a read or two.


Here

Harryhausen

The original special effects guru. Impressive what could be achieved with a stop motion camera, a projection screen and large amounts of plasticene.

Learning - Crip on a Trip

Title of the programme seems to have been done by a Sun subeditor...

Sounds like an interesting show.

What's next?

Tourettes on Tour?

Spastic spend with plastic?

Midgets play with Widgets?


Possibilities are endless

The next deputy PM

A very rare example of a Lib Dem being able to use numbers well.

Amusingly, Stephen Tall (random Lib Dem from Oxfordshire) has managed to twist a press release supporting Harriet Harman for deputy PM into a case for Hillary Benn.

I think everyone is convinced Hillary Benn is a nice guy, but he still seems a little obscure to me.

The other question many people must be asking is "What does the deputy PM actually do?"

It always seemed to be a job for someone who couldn't be trusted with a 'proper' cabinet position. Michael Heseltine needed something grand without too much potential to mess things up. John Prescott needed to the same treatment.

We'll see if Hillary Benn can manage to achieve anything in the position.

Gates Goes Green

Microsoft, the company geeks love to hate, is going to make itself eligible for the award of greenest company on Earth. It would be churlish to ask why they haven't done this before - energy inefficiency is mainly a product of computer manufacturers rather than Microsoft.

It's an interesting idea that it's possible to save that much energy without putting too much effort in. 100 million computers seems to be quite a low estimate for the number of computers in the world - I seem to remember seeing a stat that there were almost a billion computers in the world.

Anyway - we'll see if this actually adds something to the computer or if it just makes the computer constantly try to turn itself off when you're not looking.

Social Suicide Suits

I love my industry. Selling things to people who don't need them.

What's a good example?


This link.

I would love to go into a shop and try and get someone to sell this product to me.

Why is this man now Minister for Science?

'pioneering work on hypothermia, Old and Cold: hypothermia and social policy'

Now that sounds like good science.

Admittedly Lord Sainsbury wasn't much better, but at least he'd been in a position before government to appreciate how important Science is to modern life.

I don't believe a sociology lecturer is the right person to be in charge of Britain's research budget.

New degree reflects music's digital direction

Coventry University is setting up an 'e-music degree' - a degree in how to distribute and promote music online.

How can you do a degree in how to upload stuff to MySpace?

Where do the teachers come from - the internet has been a mainstream medium for around six years, maximum. Who can claim to know more than the people who have grown up through the system?

I doubt the contacts that Coventry University offer their prospective students are very strong - MySpace UK has about thirty staff, up from one at the beginning of the year.

Looks to me like a waste of time for whoever does it. Their best option is to ignore the course and use the student loan to fund their time making music.

The internet is a good distribution option for good music . Student's time would be best spent learning how to make good music rather than learning how to distribute the end product. I also think it will be tough for any university or teacher to show people how to make good music. If you're composing, you've either got it or you don't (in my opinion)