Puffbox

I had heard whispers about this, but now it’s out in the open… Sky News has b-i-g online plans for the next general election, whenever it might come. They’re currently offering a PhD scholarship at City University in ‘Citizen Media / User-Generated Content’, with a specific role in mind:

For the first year of their PhD the appointee will work closely with Sky News on an innovative project to recruit several hundred “citizen journalists” to report on the next UK general election campaign. The project aims to allow contributors to do more than simply give their opinion; instead they will be expected to write stories, take pictures and possibly record video.

 

The appointee’s role would be to work closely with Sky News to recruit suitable contributors, mentor them and guide them in creating the right sort of content, and manage their contributions. … For approximately 4 days a week the appointee will be based within the Sky News website operation, and will also work with the Sky News Election campaign team.

In other words – Sky’s killer idea for general election coverage is to hand it over to the bloggers. It makes a lot of sense to me: politics works on blogs, and the public is disillusioned with conventional political coverage. Sky has wisely spotted an opportunity to become the home of political blogging in the UK… and should look for ways to develop the kind of community interaction that can keep it interesting. (I won’t say any more for now…)

Applications to be in by 31 August, but be warned: the £13k salary is not guaranteed after the first year. Er, I guess the lucky winner had better hope Gordon isn’t planning an early election. 🙂

There’s something faintly surreal at the lengths Helen Boaden goes to, to rebut Iain Dale’s claims that the BBC was biased in its reporting of the weekend’s Tory red tape review. If you wanted evidence of how ‘proper’ media is taking bloggers seriously, here it is.

Sadly Sky News reporter Derek Tedder’s experiment in Twitter-driven journalism seems to have been short-lived: there’s been nothing from him since mid-yesterday afternoon. Press Gazette’s Martin Stabe has plenty of additional detail, including a few quotes which Sky EP Julian March probably should have polished up before handing over. I certainly don’t remember ever using the phrase ‘tits and arse’ in the weekly traffic reports I pioneered during my Osterley days.

Actually… we don’t seem to have an updated Sky web video bulletin since last week. Full marks for experimentation chaps, but it’s starting to smack of attention deficit disorder.

Over the weekend, I finally took the plunge and installed Ubuntu Linux on my still shiny-new laptop. Contrary to Microsoft’s promises, Vista hadn’t made me go ‘wow’, not once. It was taking ages to boot up, and I really don’t like its networking functions. With virtually nothing on the new laptop, certainly nothing I needed to worry about losing, it seemed like the right time to try something risky.

Just as well: the Vista C and D drives were destroyed by the partitioning process. So I’m now using a Ubuntu-only laptop, as opposed to the dual-boot machine I had intended.

So far it’s an enjoyable experience, but I do want my Vista setup back – after all, I did pay for it. Like most Acer machines, my laptop came with a hidden partition, which should let me reinstall the factory Vista setup painlessly. Except it won’t. I’ve got a support call in with Acer HQ, but my guess is that since the hidden partition has swelled up from 2GB to 56GB, I need to repartition again.

Of course, Dell would have to pick today to announce the availability of pre-installed Ubuntu machines in the UK market…

Some fantastic experimentation going on at Sky News, with reporter Derek Tedder microblogging from the Heathrow climate change camp. He’s sending a steady stream of concise updates via an account at Twitter, with photos being uploaded to a Sky News account at Flickr. It looks like he’s using a Nokia N73 cameraphone, and twittering via IM.

This is precisely the kind of innovation Sky should be doing: free to do, using widely available tools, and on a story which (for now) won’t have any major impact on anything or anyone. If/when it all kicks off, presumably at the weekend when ‘direct action’ is threatened, it could really come into its own.

Oh, and incidentally… I note the Flickr account has been active for ages; and until now, appears largely to have consisted of uncredited viewer-submitted photos of the recent flooding. Which is as clear a breach of the Flickr community guidelines as I can imagine:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.

This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.

At the present time, with 36 of the 37 pages being other people’s flood photos, I’d say that qualified as ‘primarily’. Danger, danger.