Puffbox

Seeing what our own premier is making of online video, I thought I’d glance at what les candidats en France were up to. And blimey – Nicolas Sarkozy really digs the 2.0 thing.

His campaign slogan – ‘together everything becomes possible’ – is, of course, tailor-made for the whole collaborative online thing, but even so, it’s quite startling to see him embrace it quite so fervently. Streaming Flash video all over his homepage, in a collection of structured ‘channels’. Prominent RSS buttons for new videos and new news items. A Digg-style ‘debat-sarkozy‘ microsite, built using French blogging platform dotclear, where he (or his team) will answer the most popular question of the day.

Over on the left, if you can find its unguessable URL (www.desirsdavenir.org) – Segolene Royal does a much more conventional web treatment. The bit they’re probably most proud of is the Flash-based ‘piliers’ (‘pillars’) manifesto, with her ‘seven pledges’ leading to some surprisingly long, rather heavyweight video clips. There’s plenty of video throughout the site (maybe too much), but it lacks the Sarkozy site’s sense of structure.

The one element that’s missing? YouTube. Sego is streaming her stuff from French equivalent dailymotion.com; Sarko’s looks like it’s a home-brew affair. Search YouTube for either candidate by name, and you’ll find plenty of material – most of it stuff they’d probably rather you didn’t see.

Arguably (and there are often arguments), Dave Winer invented blogs. And web services. And RSS. And podcasting. There can’t have been many more influential people in the recent history of the internet. Sometimes he delivers a solution which survives; other times, he plants a seed which grows into something different. His blog, for example, doesn’t include some of the elements we’ve come to expect from ‘a blog’ – but it’s still recognisably the same notion.

So when Dave goes to the trouble of mocking up a concept for TV news of the future, it’s worth taking notice. He describes a scenario we all know too well: ‘yes, I’ve heard that news story already, I’m bored of it… can we move on, please.’ Some will want all the background, others will just want to know the top line, others won’t care in the slightest.

His visual is pretty rough, and I don’t really see it working in practice – but the mechanism he describes is certainly interesting. A big story breaks; it gets its own ‘subject tag’; and all viewers get subscribed to it automatically. When you get bored of it, you unsubscribe, and you don’t see any more about it. Presumably unless it’s a big development, in which case the cycle begins again. (Dave’s mockup also hints at some more generic subject areas: and of course he’s right, it would have to be a combination.)

It’s a while since I worked closely with online video… and I’m not sure how valid this is, now that Flash rules that territory. But in the old days, to fire off a video stream, you first had to click through a ‘playlist’ file. So to set up a RealPlayer media stream, you pointed to a .RAM file, which pointed in turn to a .RA file. I’m pretty sure Windows Media files worked in the same way, with ASX files pointing to ASF media. Few people ever used this properly; each media file had its own single-item playlist. But the potential was there (in theory at least) to generate those playlists on the fly.

This playlist concept seems to have been forgotten. I don’t even know if it’s still built into the software protocols. But it would seem that the concept is primed for a comeback.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=Sb3kZLzH3FA]

I’m not sure what’s going on with the dates, but YouTube seems to think this video was posted on ‘April 23’, ‘7 hours ago’. Where I’m sitting, in southern England, it’s 9am on April 24. Referring to the comments I made some moments ago, that doesn’t add up.

So what’s the deal with that mock TV studio set? I said before that they didn’t seem to get it; now I’m convinced they don’t. ‘Doing things differently’ is not about doing a decades-old broadcast format (studio interview), but pushing it out via a new distribution mechanism (internet). Labour HQ worked out how to win the old game; and they did it so well. I saw Alastair Campbell up close a few times, and what a master he is. But – arguably because politics worked out the media in the 1990s – the game changed.

The irony is that Tony Blair is a genuinely magnificent communicator. I’ve spoken to him, one-to-one, and came away feeling charmed, engaged, connected. So what logic is there in forcing him behind two lines of defence: an interviewer, and such an ugly desk?  He does his best, as does host John O’Farrell. But it’s a million miles away from the rough-but-genuine experience of Webcameron.

And then there’s the political point about an unpopular Prime Minister, reportedly a few days away from resigning, leading this venture into new online territory. Why? Why am I listening to Yesterday’s Man, telling me about the last ten years, when I want to hear about the next ten? And preferably, from someone who’s going to be around then?

I’ve had a long and busy day, and I want to be in bed. But on 14 April, in a video posted on YouTube, Tony Blair announced that on 23 April, ie today, he would be answering questions from members of the public, posted on the party’s YouTube pages. On 21 April – that’s Saturday just gone, John O’Farrell – who is/was to be the intermediary for the interview – confirmed that ‘on Monday, on this site’ he would be interviewing the Prime Minister.

Well, Monday runs out in a couple of hours… and I’m not seeing any sign of it. Time is running out, Prime Minister. Ooh, that’s ironic. If you do need a fix of Blair video, the pm.gov.uk site has today posted a ‘recorded message of support’ for UN road safety awareness week. Night night, everyone.

I’ve only recently (re)discovered Shozu, the photo uploading program for your mobile phone. It’s a fantastic little application, which can upload to a load of different media-sharing sites… I’m using it exclusively for Flickr, but it also supports Blogger, Picasa, Spaces, YouTube, etc etc. Uploading is generally a one-click task, and the media-browsing capability (on my Nokia Series 60 smartphone) is at least as good as the built-in media Gallery.

Why mention it? Because among the pre-configured uploading services are CNN and BBC News. This is a free piece of software which makes it a one-click task to deliver your ‘citizen journalism’ efforts, in still and moving pictures. When it comes to witness reporting, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff writes about ‘the best email marketing he ever got‘, from a villa rental company. The most interesting part for me:

As Nikki Hooton, who wrote this email, told me, “The interesting thing is that we actually tried a much more “professional” looking format with a very nice visual element… but we discovered that people treated it like a mass mailer you might get from Amazon.com or another huge company. When we just use plain text and a photo or two, people consider it much more personal.”

(Of course, seeing the email pasted into Josh’s blog, you don’t see exactly how it came through in his email inbox – but it’s easy to guess.)

I’m increasingly convinced that we’re moving into a post-marketing world. This was a personal communication from someone who loves the holiday business, and makes an emotional connection with potential clients on that basis. It’s her enthusiasm stirring my enthusiasm. (That’s why a lot of successful blogs are successful: because it’s a raw outlet for people’s genuine passion.)

I’ve been using Linux on and off (mostly off) for ten years. Every so often, someone declares that it’s ‘finally ready for the desktop’, and I download a version or two, to test those claims. Today is the big launch of the new version of Ubuntu (v7.04 – as in month 4 of year 07), which has established itself as the most friendly face of Linux… and you know what? This might finally be it.

I’m writing this minutes after booting up from the live CD. It all worked first time: all Windows drives mounted ready for action, and even my Wacom tablet worked (which I think is a Linux first). They make confident promises about wireless networking too, which I haven’t tried yet, but was ultimately why I aborted my last Linux experiment.

The key, embarrassingly enough, may be the ultra-cute ‘desktop effects’ which are only offered as a ‘technology preview’, and aren’t enabled by default. If you download Ubuntu, enable them – trust me on this. The ‘wobbly’ effect as you drag a window is just gorgeous, not to mention the transparency effects, the minimise/restore animations… yes, it’s enough to win my heart already.

I’ve got a big empty partition on my hard disk, waiting for a distribution worth committing to. I can still think of a few must-have applications which would stop me switching away from Windows; but with Firefox and OpenOffice on board, that’s 90%+ of what I need covered. I’ll keep playing with the Live CD for now… but the day of installation may be at hand.

Announced today… Hitwise, purveyors of fascinating website usage data, have been acquired by data hoarders Experian. The price – approximately $240m. More here. Some interesting trivia within: Hitwise has over 1,200 clients, with its top ten clients only accounting for 5% of sales, and does 36% of its business in the UK.

The new Sky News site is finally live, and it’s an improvement. Mind you, having had basically the same site for six years, it had to be.

As you’d expect for any major site relaunch at the moment, it’s got lots of white, lots of grey gradient graphics, and some nice Flash/javascript effects. Reasonably close to the on-air look, without being overwhelming. Designed with a 1024×768 screen resolution in mind, so it feels expansive, but there’s actually surprisingly little content ‘above the fold’. (Or maybe that’s just because of this morning’s picture lead.)

The single best thing they’ve done is the way they’ve made video work with the stories, embedding it YouTube-style alongside, and delivering it in Flash. This should really boost the traffic to Sky’s video material.

On the minus side, there are (perhaps inevitably) A FEW TOO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS. I’m a bit disappointed they haven’t been able to do more with picture galleries, which were always a great traffic generator – I’d have suggested using Slightbox or something, easy to implement with an instantly richer experience. They’re persisting with left-aligned imagery on stories, which just doesn’t work in a dynamic page rendering environment.

But perhaps most disappointing of all is the continuation of their chaotic approach to blogs. Still hosted at Typepad, all on separate accounts, with some – but not yet all – migrated over to the new look. The new site’s page of ‘blogs’ omits the blogging efforts by the highest profile correspondents (Boulton, Brunt, Wilson), and most curiously, has zero mention of the ‘Viewpoint’ blog by viewers editor Paul Bromley… which hasn’t seen a single post this month. (Surely these haven’t been dumped? – most of them had fresh material posted yesterday.)

Instead, it heralds more new blogs – Europe correspondent Greg Milam; something called ‘Your Stories‘ which sounds like a promotional page for their email inbox, rather than a blog anyone would actually read; and an ‘Editor’s Blog‘ – kicking off with a post by someone who isn’t actually the Editor.

Overall – I think it’s a good site by ‘web 1.0’ standards. But it doesn’t do enough to lift itself into ‘2.0’, and as such, I fear it might be a missed opportunity. The web is increasingly about informality, speed, frequency, sociability. All of which should play into Sky’s hands, as a small but agile operation without the monolithic baggage of its main rival, the BBC. But the potential remains unfulfilled.