Puffbox

I mentioned yesterday that The Spectator magazine had started its blogging efforts by ‘buying in’ a couple of existing blogs. But there’s something very odd with their technology: if I look at the RSS feeds for the two guest blogs (Stephen Pollard and Clive Davis), both are showing all items as having been published on 5 May 2007. Check your calendars, folks… that’s tomorrow. The Coffee House blog’s feed avoids the problem, by having no dates whatsoever.

(All the feeds have a curious ‘rss.txml’ filename, which I’ve never seen, and no ‘generator’ tag to identify the publishing system being used. Anyone recognise it?)

Intriguing to see what’s happening over at The Spectator, which has just ‘bought’ two blogs: Stephen Pollard and Clive Davis. Both have abandoned their former blogging arrangements, here and here respectively, to blog exclusively under a Spectator banner. (The magazine has also launched its own ‘house blog’ this week, called The Coffee House.)

Pollard is relatively well known, I suppose, in the right circles – and has a Technorati rank of 22,560, which is decent but not stellar. On the other hand, I’m afraid Clive’s is a new name to me… and his former blog barely scraped into the Technorati top 100,000. (To be entirely fair to Clive, he did also have a Blogger-based blog, but that only just scrapes into the top 900,000.)

Initially, it seemed an odd thing to do. Neither blogger has a huge audience, so it’s not going to boost traffic significantly. Potential SEO benefits, perhaps. But on reflection, it’s a perfectly natural move for a publisher. They already pay columnists to produce articles to appear in print; I guess this is an identical arrangement, albeit with a higher turnover of content. It’s what magazines do. Whether it’s right for websites? – that remains to be seen.

When the Telegraph announced it would allow people to have their own blogs under the Telegraph banner, I wasn’t the only one to wonder if people would be prepared to abandon their own former blogging platforms, to join someone else’s. Clearly the Spectator has found a way to do it; but I wonder what commercial terms they’re talking.

I have plans of my own for this blog in the not too distant future; but if any news organisations want to offer me loads of cash to transfer to their servers… it’s not too late for me to reconsider those plans. Click here to start the bidding. 🙂

When I attended last month’s Open House event at the Telegraph, I mused (during a chat with David Wilcox, posted on Google Video) about the status of journalists:

I just wonder if someone really had fire in their belly for a subject today, would they feel a need to become a journalist? Is journalism in itself as attractive and glamorous a career as it was five or ten years ago? (With blogging) I’ve got a platform to say what I need to say. And in many respects, I respect the people who don’t work professionally as writers, as communicators, as PR – because I want to hear from the people who ‘do the job’.

(By the way – having just done it, let me say it’s a very odd experience to transcribe your own words..! Sorry about the repetition of the word ‘respect’ there. Terrible.)

Shane Richmond, who straddles the two camps in his role as leader of the Telegraph’s blogging efforts, offered one (very valid) point in response: ‘when you phone people up and say “I’m calling from the Daily Telegraph”, stuff happens.’

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I’m very interested to see this week’s article in the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, in which he notes:

In the midst of the Virginia Tech story, I was at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas, where two talented video bloggers – Zadi Diaz, of JetSet, and Amanda Congdon, ex of Rocketboom – both refused the title ‘journalist’ because of the baggage it brings, the expectations and demands. They don’t want to be on that side of the gate. They insisted – not unlike the Virginia Tech witness-reporters – that they are merely doing their own thing. They just want to be linked.

The only way (news organisations) can expand is to work cooperatively with witness-reporters, community members, experts, people who publish on their own, finding and sending readers to the best and most reliable among them. How? Via the link.

One of my current jobs is writing for BT’s Broadband Office blog, with an item or two each day about how small businesses can make best use of the internet. It’s a group effort, and I tend to cover the non-BT angle: things like website development, SEO, recommended blogs and freeware.

With all the effort going into online video at the moment, I wanted to experiment with some ‘point and shoot’ interviewing, following the example of Robert Scoble and Microsoft’s Channel 9. I got an invite to BT’s business showcase in Covent Garden last week, and interviewed a few of the exhibitors. The first example is now online: a short chat with Ivan Croxford, who’s the man behind BT’s new ‘social network’ for businesses, Tradespace.

It’s very amateur, and very rough. The picture is shaky, and the sound isn’t always great.  In my defence, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and was filmed on a mobile phone (albeit a fairly new one). On that basis, I’m actually really pleased with the results. I’m convinced that this approach to communication is a winner: Ivan is a nice guy, with obvious passion for what he’s doing. No copywriter could capture that.

I’d love you to have a look and tell me what you think of it. I’m hoping to persuade BT to let me do some more of this; and yes, next time, I might even bring some proper kit.

I’m quite impressed by the daily SNP-TV video broadcasts being put together by the Scottish National Party. Its presentation is clearly trying to mimic the ‘mainstream’ (national) news channels, with a presenter in the studio, reading her ‘autocue’, and a ticker along the bottom. And I don’t think it handles that inherent contradiction, treating itself as TV (nominally neutral) whilst pushing a particular party position (not at all neutral). A much more conventional approach than, say, Webcameron – but reasonably successful.

I also note that Labour’s Ed Balls has done his own ‘your questions via YouTube’ broadcast: with the sleeves rolled up, and a chatty, cheeky style, it’s just so much better than the staged Tony Blair interview of last week. Perhaps they’re learning. It’s a shame the audio’s slightly out of sync (although nowhere near as bad as this recent John Reid piece). The LibDem video stuff, sadly, is dominated by Ming Campbell, who comes across as a kindly – if somewhat manic – grandad. Patronising rather than engaging, I’m afraid.

You might have seen in the press that Gordon Ramsay is to front a new ad campaign for BT Business (a client of mine). It’s a brave choice at first glance, but having spent yesterday attending an invitation-only exhibition of their business services, it makes good sense.

The message behind the campaign is ‘do what you do best’ – and leave the rest to us. It’s a sober reminder to those of us in this business that whilst we love ‘flexibility’ and ‘possibilities’, most people don’t feel a need for it, and could find it an obstacle.

Take, for example, their new BT Web Clicks service. You pay a fixed price, and BT guarantees to bring a fixed number of visitors to your website using search engine advertising (ie Google). My immediate reaction was ‘why? Surely the great thing about Google ads is the fact that you can edit your ad’s text, tinker with your bids and budgets, etc etc?’ But the product manager made a convincing case that most ordinary small businesses don’t have time for all that, and probably aren’t all that interested anyway.

It’s a mark of Google’s success that businesses want to be in there… but they don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to do it for themselves. ‘Pay X, get Y, and leave the how? to us’ is a very simple proposition – it’s basically what Yellow Pages or the local paper does. Businesses are used to it.

Same goes for the BT Workspace document sharing and collaboration product. If it sounds like SharePoint, that’s because it is SharePoint. But they’ve made a deliberate decision to remove large chunks of the customisation ability. Why? Because users don’t want to be faced with a blank screen and/or a list of options. They want to log in and go. Sure, they might be able to tweak a particular template to their exact needs… but is it really worth it to them? BT seems to be betting that ‘plug and play’ is what businesses are looking for – and they make a convincing case.

I’ll say more about the BT Tradespace product later, as it merits a piece in itself. But to continue this train of thought… it isn’t the best blogging tool out there, it isn’t the best photo sharing site, and it isn’t the best mapping service. But it’s more than adequate at all of these things… and it’s all done for you. Yes you could mash up your own hybrid site with APIs, plugins, a bit of PHP, a bit of Javascript, and so on. But again, in the real world, would you?

It’s all too easy for those of us in the web business to forget that flexibility is a double-edged sword. We love it, because we have the knowledge and energy to use that flexibility. It’s digital DIY, if you will. But a lot of people – possibly even the majority – find flexibility an obstacle. They would rather someone told them what they need, and probably did it for them too. And BT wants to be that ‘someone’.

I know it’s neither big nor clever… but this tiny fraction of Google Maps made me laugh. Don’t click if you’re going to be offended by profanity.

Over at the Telegraph, Shane Richmond has a sneak preview of the forthcoming ‘My Telegraph’ feature. A few immediate thoughts… It’s very pretty indeed. I think it (more or less) delivers on my ‘blog of comments’ concept, with a good bit more besides. Very interesting to see the MyBlogLog-style ‘network’ element.

Although it’s certainly an interesting idea, the one part I’m not convinced about (yet) is the Agreement Index. I was quite surprised to see the extent to which the ‘hardcore’ users (based on the sample who attended the recent Open House event) were classic ‘Telegraph people’. I’m not really expecting this site to be a hot-bed of debate – which is both its strength and its weakness. I’ll be surprised if most blogs don’t rate around the 60-70% mark for Agreement. If you don’t fit the mould of a ‘Telegraph person’, I just don’t think you’ll want to blog here.

Incidentally, in case you miss it – Shane reveals a little extra in one of the comments: ‘Photo rights can be notoriously tricky online but what happens if you blog for a publisher who already owns the rights to lots of photos?’ I’m very glad to see this… but as I wrote over a year ago, I expected it to come first from the world of sport, which controls its photo rights even more strictly. There are potentially huge implications to this.

A new report from the Pew Institute (PDF) tries to pin down why Wikipedia is so popular: the sheer volume of material, sheer convenience and search engine friendliness. Actually, I’d add another reason, which is driving a growing proportion of my visits to the site: Wikipedia as pseudo-search engine. If I’m looking for the primary source for something – be it the official site for something or other, or the primary reference document – it’s invariably included among the Wikipedia page’s external links. With people wising up to SEO at differing paces, I’m occasionally having trouble finding that primary source among the first few pages of Google results. Wikipedia rarely disappoints.