Puffbox

Today’s papers are dominated by two surprising stories of political naivete.

I have no ‘inside track’; I’m just an ordinary guy who reads the newspapers. I thought the question of Simon Hughes’s sexuality was common knowledge. Like Charles Kennedy’s drink problem, there were plenty of nudges and winks about it in the Westminster sketch columns. I found it really odd when he came out (pardon the pun) with such a categoric denial in last week’s papers. Today comes the U-turn.

I genuinely don’t care if he’s gay or not. (Incidentally, I have yet to see the words ‘I am gay’ appearing between inverted commas.) But I do feel uneasy about him fibbing – or maybe even worse, playing with semantics – in the Independent last week, saying: ‘The answer is no, as it happens. But if it was the case, which it isn’t, I hope that would not become an issue.’ Of course he was going to get caught out. In a ‘Big Brother’ world of search engines and cameraphones, you have to assume that everything you do or say will be captured and can be easily retrieved. And rightly or wrongly, politics does not forgive those who U-turn.

I suspect George Galloway gets this concept, but took it a step too far. I can understand why he went on Big Brother: round-the-clock filming, live streaming, and unlimited opportunity to describe his political philosophy. He’s a lone voice among 646 MPs; he needs ‘the oxygen of publicity’. But if he thought Channel 4 was ever going to give large amounts of peak airtime to his considered opinions, he was very much mistaken. Miaow.

I didn’t mean this blog to become a wine review site, but following my Pinot Grigio taste test earlier this week, I spotted a bottle of Stormhoek Shiraz in Sainsbury’s last night, and – once again, calling it work-related – I decided to give it a try, on behalf of the blogosphere.

The initial smell when I unscrewed the cap was most promising: certainly the best wine I’ve sniffed this year (so far). I was expecting a really weighty red, just how I like it. Sadly, it didn’t follow through. Not a bad wine; in fact, perfectly respectable – but not exceptional. After the very impressive Pinot Grigio, it was a bit of a let-down.

As reported by the BBC: ‘A UK version of the social networking site MySpace.com is to be launched “within the next 30 days”.’ I guess it’ll be another scramble for the good URLs as soon as the door opens.

Lloyd Shepherd from the Guardian wonders how they will ‘localise’ the service, and how they’ll shift users from the US (and by extension, global) service to the new one. But if the plan is to base it on CD:UK, and the Saturday morning music show demographic, I can see it succeeding.

Boy bands in particular have a history of staying (largely) within their geographic territory. Justin Timberlake’s mates, *NSYNC were never quite as big over here as they were over there. From this side of the Atlantic, Westlife have had one single in the Billboard Top 20, and only at #20 at that!, despite the natural potential for an ‘Irish American’ audience. Boyzone and Take That didn’t do much better.

The future seems a little further away this lunchtime, when you read this open letter from Dan Gillmor, the guru of ‘citizen journalism’. I mentioned the other day that his Bayosphere project hadn’t ‘set the world on fire quite as we probably hoped’. I’d love to say I had an inside track on this landmark posting, but it was sheer coincidence (even though Dan used almost identical words!).

Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming… Long discussions with potential partners — including several whose participation would have been game-changing in a journalistic and business-model sense — didn’t pan out.

I concluded that I could do more for the citizen journalism movement by forming a nonprofit enterprise, a “Center for Citizen Media” where I could put my skills and passion for the genre to better use — looking at lots of disparate elements and connecting the dots… The dots I’m connecting include Bayosphere… No promises here: But if we can keep Bayosphere going in a good way we’ll work hard to make that happen.

He doesn’t exactly say ‘the dream is over’, but it’s there to be read between the lines. I’m genuinely disappointed myself at this news, even if I did call it 24 hours early. I met Dan a couple of years ago, and found him truly inspiring. There’s no doubt that he’s a brave man, and he’s certainly on to something here. It’s a pity this wasn’t the breakthrough moment. But – if I can summarise his list of lessons learned – we’re going to need a bigger brand, with a more clearly defined product, to lead the charge.

I think the most interesting comment in Rupert Murdoch’s BBC interview last night was this:

In twenty years time, everybody in the world is going to be able to get broadband, and express themselves on it.

Not ‘consume my Fox content on it’, not even ‘buy stuff over it’. There’s been a lot of debate over the last decade about whether or not Murdoch ‘gets’ the internet – well, in those few words, I think he’s put his finger on something absolutely critical. Yes, content is king, and yes, he owns a lot of the world’s content. The value of that content won’t drop. But suddenly you can appreciate why he spent £330m on Myspace.

User-generated content, though, is still evolving. Sure, Myspace can boast huge numbers of users, mainly angsty teenagers in my limited experience. (It gives me a headache – am I getting old?) My guess is that – as a brand – it will ‘burn out’ like a boy-band; little sisters don’t want to share the same ‘space’ as their big sisters. To everything, there is a season. I’m currently debating whether to move my personal photo galleries from my MSN Space to Flickr. Turn, turn, turn. In a word… Altavista.

How far do we stretch the definition of ‘self expression’, of user-generated content? Surely it needs to be something a bit more substantial than just a blogging platform. If pressed, I’d guess that we’ll see ‘personal areas’ becoming a regular feature of big content-driven sites. It’s easy to imagine a movie site where users can contribute their own reviews, sitting alongside ‘professional’ editorial. You would come for the Hollywood gossip; you’d stay for the community. I’m not ruling out the possibility of completely new ‘media brands’ appearing, as Ohmynews famously did in Korea: but let’s be honest, Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere project didn’t set the world on fire quite as we probably hoped.

One thing I will definitely correct him on, though: I already have a tablet-style device by my bed, and I do (occasionally) read my daily news on it – via Bloglines and a multitude of RSS feeds, rather than a single newspaper. Forget ten or fifteen years, as the BBC’s Jeff Randall speculated; it’s a lot closer than that.

• brandchannel Readers Choice Awards 2005
  Google is the ‘brand which had the most impact on us in 2005’. ‘Us’ is 2500 readers of Interbrand’s site, brandchannel.com – which may or may not be representative. The world’s favourite search engine is followed by Apple, Skype, Starbucks, and Ikea.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)
• MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Community websites top list of fastest-growing websites of 2005
  I’m getting old. I only have dim recollections of the name Piczo, but it’s the most visited site among UK ‘women under 18’, according to this. The whole myspace thing passes me by, too.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

Why isn’t this all over the blogosphere? Rupert Murdoch gave a lengthy interview to BBC Radio Five Live’s Jeff Randall on Sunday evening; you can download it in full from here. Below, I’ve transcribed the chunk about the internet business, which starts about 11 and a half minutes in.

Isn’t your empire about to be run over by the digital age? Are the likes of Google going to get you?

Not at all. I think we’ll probably be doing things with Google.

Really? Like what?

I’ve just had a lot of people at the Consumer Electronics Show, which is the biggest event of the year in America, when everyone shows off all their new inventions, and so on. There’s going to be so many different ways to look at a movie, read a newspaper or whatever. I think we’re on the eve, you know, of an era – a golden age for media. These, all these wonderful inventions are nothing if you can’t put something onto them. You’ve got to have content, and that’s what our business is: creating, or reporting news, and creating entertainment. And I think we’ve got to do more of it, and take advantage of these great opportunities ahead of us.

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In this week’s Soapbox piece, I wrote ‘what is a blog, if it isn’t a basic ‘content management’ application?‘ These days, as blogging platforms get smarter, the divide between ‘blog’ and ‘CMS’ is disappearing. Rapidly.

What makes Blogger or WordPress any less suitable than something like six- or seven-figure megaproducts like Vignette or Stellent? I’m not for one minute suggesting that the big-boy CMS products don’t come with extra functionality. But, when you consider the full cost, from purchase to implementation to ongoing maintenance, not to mention the time it takes to get them up – are you getting value for the extra money?

Take Blogger: if you’re comfortable with HTML, you’ll find it dead easy to design your own templates, including all the bits you want, and removing all the bits you don’t. So if you don’t want it to look like a blog, it doesn’t have to. WordPress goes a step further, letting you build hierarchies of ‘pages’, but designing and customising pages is a bit trickier. With both products, you get all the usual blog functions ‘out of the box’ – just as big corporate sites are trying to graft them onto their legacy systems.

As an example, have a look at world music magazine, Fly.co.uk. It certainly doesn’t look like a blog, but look a bit closer. The filenames are the real giveaway.

Big market-dominating companies don’t have a great need to promote themselves; big government departments don’t need to promote themselves at all. But a lot of managers or officials can see the problems created by poor (or even non-existent) communication, and get frustrated at their inability to make it better through the usual, official channels.

A blog, official or private, could be the cure you’re looking for. In a single sitting, you could be up-and-running with a website to air your news and views, sitting on a state-of-the-art publishing platform. Granted, big organisations often have problems with proliferating microsites. But one more, rather than making things any worse, could make things a lot better.

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Just a quick word to congratulate Spencer Kelly on his stewardship of the BBC’s weekly technology show Click, formerly Click Online. I’m not sure why I developed such a rabid dislike of his predecessor, Stephen Cole (who left the Beeb to join Al Jazeera‘s apparently delayed English-language station). I actually found myself fast-forwarding past his links, to get to the next report – oh, the joys of having Sky+! But Spencer’s a more natural presenter, whose interest in the subject seems genuine. Sorry Stephen.