Puffbox

There’s something really interesting going on here. First, Scoble quits Microsoft. Then, Om Malik – not someone I read myself, but I see the ripples, if you know what I mean – announces he’s leaving his day-job to live off his influential blog. Now this from Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing at The Guardian:

I think the last two to three years have seen an explosion in ideas – and I think that phase is over. What started out as vague concepts and half baked ideas in the blogosphere have now become standard fodder for every media exec in town. Some really believe it. Others just mouth the words as if it was a speech in Greek they’ve learned off by heart. But the overall message is pretty much the same. It’s not that new ideas aren’t going to pop up – just that there’s already a huge backlog between the things that we are all talking about and what we’re doing. The net result of this is that those of us who work within media organisations – even those of us who like nothing more than spouting off in public – have to shut up, pull down the shutters and start delivering stuff.

There are a heck of a lot of people out there saying the same thing. Myself included.

I posted something about this a while back… the BBC was planning to let us access foreign broadcasters' commentary during World Cup games, but it fell through. Thanks to Ben Gallop at the BBC for responding to my query as to what happened:

Simon, as you say we were planning to run foreign commentaries for some of the big games on interactive TV. The prospect of listening to a Brazilian gooooaaaallll or getting an authentic American take on the World Cup had a lot of appeal.

However, having gone a long way down the line with this proposal (including announcing the fact on the website – oops), in the end we were scuppered by rights restrictions.

So I'm sorry we weren't able to offer you the chance to check out some Trinidadian or Aussie commentary – but we'll try to sort something out for future tournaments.

Ah well. Maybe next time, eh.

A great new addition to the BBC News site is the 'Most Popular Now' page. A very pretty Flash app, or a more boring HTML page, tells you which stories on the site are attracting the most clicks (and from where). You can browse through top-level data for the last seven days too, if you click on the 'around the site' tab.

There's a mini-version in the right-hand margin of all (?) News stories, showing the 'most read' and 'most popular' stories. Isn't there a risk this could skew the figures? If you make it easier to find the most popular stories, more people will click on them, which keeps them at the top of the 'most popular' list. It could all be a bit self-perpetuating.

What do we learn? BBC News readers have the same fairly low-brow interests as the less reputable sources. Alongside continuing interest in Iraq and Israel stories, we have Big Brother, a cat chasing a bear, and 'rethinking the clitoris'.

Ex-BBC man Euan Semple is right. It's pretty shameful for the BBC to use a picture of a glum Bill Gates on their top Technology story (which is a bit mad in itself), reporting Robert Scoble's departure. Granted, the initial choice (a cropped screengrab) wasn't great, but it's not as if a quick scan of Flickr wouldn't have found hundreds of usable pictures (and, admittedly, some very definitely not), many of which were actually taken yesterday. Not a great choice, on the day the BBC celebrates its Webby – with a TV package, no less.

Update: they've gone back to the screengrab. Less bad, but still bad.

Today’s Dilbert cartoon is neither fictional, nor exaggerated. When I worked at Microsoft, I noticed an amazing phenomenon, driven mainly by the fact that everyone had wifi-equipped laptops. People would tap away merrily on their keyboards, and you naturally assumed they were taking notes of the meeting. More often, though, they were on MSN instant messaging – sometimes with people in the same room.

I remember one particular instance where we were negotiating commercial terms with a potential supplier… and in addition to the conversation ‘above the table’, there was a silent conversation happening amongst our guys via MSN, agreeing tactics on how to get the best deal. New technology just gives us so many new ways to be rude.

I'm genuinely shocked that Microsoft should have lost the services of Robert Scoble – described by the Economist as the company's Chief Humanising Officer. Scoble is rightly seen as the 'poster boy' of blogging, giving us an insider's view of the world's biggest software company, warts and all. In many respects, he defined the concept of 'corporate blogging'. In fact, he did actually write the book on it. But all this will soon come to an end, when he moves to Podtech.net, a startup company 'dedicated to podcasting'.

You can read all sorts of things into this. A confidence crisis following delays to the release of Windows Vista, originally Scoble's particular evangelical remit – he isn't the only person I know to be leaving a very cushy job at Microsoft just now. Or perhaps, it's a midlife crisis for a man in his early 40s. Maybe he felt he'd done all he could with Microsoft. Or maybe there's a serious future to podcasting after all. (I remain to be convinced!)

Regardless, it's the end of an era. Microsoft needs a new 'friendly face', urgently. And podcasting suddenly got interesting again

Last time I mentioned photo management software, I came out in favour of Picajet. There’s a lot to recommend it – but one major catch. Although there’s a facility to export all your photo information as XML, there’s currently no ability to import it again. So, let’s say, if you’re forced to reinstall Windows, and you think you’re being clever by backing up all your Picajet data, so that you can restore your exact position after the reinstallation… well, you can guess the rest.

Which brings me back to (guess who) Google again, and Picasa. The one huge thing in its favour is that it stores things like tags (or, if you like, keywords) in the photos themselves. So if you lose your Picasa data, you’re fine, as long as you didn’t lose your photos too. I still don’t find myself warming to Picasa… it’s surprisingly difficult to locate the photos most recently added to your library, for example. But so far, it works.

I’m spending a lot of time just now looking at the metadata (descriptive information) which gets stored in digital photos. It really is amazing how much your photos know about themselves… and how much potential there still is, since the metadata specification allows for the inclusion of GPS data, if your camera can produce it. Your photos will be able to put a dot on a map showing precisely where they were taken, and (even better!) the direction the camera was facing at the time. Wow.

Tagging, though, remains a pain. Which is why it’s worth keeping an eye on people like riya.com who have in auto-tagging. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I hear good things about their system for automatically recognising people’s faces (once you’ve ‘trained’ it).

This sounds unfeasibly clever… and yes, pretty cool too. Software will listen to the sound in your room, work out what you're watching on TV, and deliver relevant content from the web. 'And, all of this would be done without users ever having to type or to even know the name of the program or channel being viewed.' Blimey.

As if to underline the point I made yesterday about the insanity of the Telegraph’s new ‘slow news’ policy… the Guardian announces its plan to do precisely the opposite.

The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a “web first” service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper. The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for “once-a-day” publishing.

I can’t help feeling this is an odd area of debate, though… it illustrates just how far we haven’t come in this  new media revolution. How could they rationally justify sitting on an article for several hours (or more?) when it has been written, subbed, checked, signed off, the lot?

We’re seeing all news channels encroaching on each other’s turf. Broadcasters are producing written stuff, print media are moving into broadcasting. It’s all just content, guys. There’s no such thing as a cycle… the world keeps turning, the news keeps happening. The only thing we should be beholden to, is the news itself.

Still nothing on the Telegraph Upload blog, incidentally. 🙁