Puffbox

On my to-do list for today: a list of ten reasons why you should be using WordPress. So helpfully, glancing through this morning’s RSS feeds… Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announces ‘a $29.5 million round of financing’.

The numbers don’t mean a lot to me, although apparently it’s ‘massive’. Much more interesting is the fact that one of the investors is the New York Times. CEO Toni Schneider also reveals: ‘we are also entering a partnership with the Times to expand their existing WordPress blogging infrastructure and to create new ways of connecting WordPress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers.’

Plus of course, at last week’s Crunchies awards, WordPress won both ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and ‘Best CEO’. That list is writing itself.

Quick update: did we know that About.com (ranked #141 by Alexa, whatever value you choose to put on that) is built on WordPress? We do now.

Wikipedia describes Loic LeMeur as a ‘serial entrepreneur’. Having built up and sold several French internet businesses, he recently left his senior job at Six Apart (Typepad, Movable Type, etc) to start a new video venture, Seesmic. And in a nutshell, it’s video-Twitter.

Overnight I got an invite to the ‘alpha’ version, and I’m afraid Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher hits the nail on the head. ‘Seesmic already has a number of UK advocates and users, but some have been less than impressed by its somewhat tricky interface, calling it crappy, buggy, bloated and just plain crap.’ Having registered this morning, I’m trying to get into it now, and I can’t. I’m staring at a black screen. Not good.

And here’s the problem. In another article today, Mike also suggests that Joost, the great hope for peer-to-peer online TV ‘won’t last the year’. He quotes a commenter on newteevee.com:

The main problem is that there is only very limited adoption among the user community. Far fewer people connect to the system than was originally hoped. Of course, this is mainly due to quality the content (or rather, lack thereof). It turns out that a lot of people download it once, then find out that there is nothing really good on there, then just never reconnect again. Or only sporadically, just to be reassured that there still is nothing interesting.

… which perfectly sums up my experience with the product. The excuse of being an ‘alpha version’ is no excuse. It didn’t justify Joost, and it won’t save Seesmic unless things get better, quickly – even if there’s a market for a video-Twitter… and personally, I’m not convinced. (How many video MMS messages do you regularly send/receive?)

Meanwhile, the BBC’s revitalised iPlayer is building up a decent reputation as a serious element in the BBC’s output. Not least with my two-year-old daughter: on several occasions recently, we’ve only narrowly averted a tantrum by having episodes of In The Night Garden just a couple of clicks away.

I think I’m bored of Facebook. There, I said it. I’ve spent too long wading through ‘Friend X just added pointless application Y’ notifications. I’ve joined countless groups, getting and giving precisely nothing other than an entry in my newsfeed, and a +1 to their membership total. That’s before we even mention zombies. Or superpoking. Or funwalls.

The only thing keeping me consistently interested has been the status updates. A steady flow of snippets from friends and contacts, which provokes the odd smile, an occasional insight, and regular ‘just so you know’ notes. I’ve got the RSS feed from my Status Updates page running in a sidebar on my desktop, and it’s a cute little thing which makes staring at a monitor all day just a little more bearable.

But I’ve taken the first step away from Facebook, by adding the TwitterSync application – and effectively outsourcing my Facebook status updates to Twitter. I actually signed up to Twitter exactly a year ago (give or take 24 hours), but only now is it entering my daily existence.

The official Twitter app for Facebook has the annoying habit of adding the words ‘is twittering:’ to the start of your Status Update; but TwitterSync doesn’t. I’ve been using it for a week now, and updating both sites simultaneously, and I bet most friends haven’t noticed.

Switching, of course, opens up all sorts of possibilities. I’ve tried numerous different ways to interact with Twitter. For now, my weapons of choice have been the Tweetr desktop application, built using the Adobe Air runtime; and the mobile interface via Opera Mini on my phone. (I quite liked the twibble app for S60 phones, but it only worked for me via wifi.)

And Twitter’s open approach allows for automated interactions. So for example, someone has written some code that sends details of any items in the BBC’s ‘mega stories only’ breaking news RSS feed to a Twitter account. So effectively, the BBC breaking news strap is your friend – and when it has something to say, it appears in your ‘feed’. (The same fella has done one just for Gooners too: cheers!)

Now of course, there are all sorts of reasons not to like Twitter. The jargon can be overwhelming initially; and it’s had reliability issues, not least earlier this week. But I’m now seeing it as the best bit of Facebook, done properly. And I kind of wish more Facebook friends were using it instead. I think that makes me a convert.

So I guess we know what big things Shane at the Telegraph was talking about (presumably?). The Guardian reveals that there are to be ‘seven new (online) TV programmes, including … a weekly political talkshow featuring Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe.’ And as the Telegraph’s Guy Ruddle isn’t shy about declaring, ‘It is political TV with bias.’ So… Doughty Street with brand names, then?

I must admit, I’d missed the fact that ‘As part of a resource reallocation, Telegraph.co.uk stopped its daily news podcast and its Telegraph PM pdf download at the end of the last year.’ But I’m not entirely surprised.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that podcasts will find it hard to bag a slot in most people’s daily lives (except perhaps for Tube commuters). But TV-via-broadband is definitely a goer. As mentioned here before, I’ve now got a Wii in the living room – and its main use has been as a big-screen web browser. Sitting down for a bit of YouTubing is becoming a regular event, and feels entirely natural.

Interesting to see ‘previously a-politicial’ NHS blogger Dr Crippen laying his political cards on the table, and joining the new multi-author blog CentreRight.com, a subsection of ConservativeHome. (Thanks Iain.)

Looking closely at the ‘about us’ text, CentreRight.com declares itself to be ‘a hub for the British conservative movement’ – note the small ‘c’. And I guess by some people’s standards, Labour are a centre-right party these days. But as an offshoot of ConHome, there’s no doubting where its political affiliations lie. Playing devil’s advocate for a moment… OK, so now we know Dr Crippen’s political ‘agenda’. It’s hardly a shock. But does it make him more or less trustworthy as a ‘front-line blogger’?

It probably shouldn’t. If you care about your work, if you care enough to blog, why shouldn’t you become more closely involved with those who may/will eventually run the NHS? (In that sense, it’s actually admirable: someone prepared to put his money where his mouth is.) But whilst his writing may not change, people’s reading of it may well do. Sad but true.