Puffbox

Sky News has jumped on the podcasting bandwagon, so far offering one weekly video download (the ‘7 Days’ roundup of ‘And Finally’ stories, as seen on Sky News Active) and one weekly audio download (an Adam Boulton audio column). It’s all a good start, and to be welcomed. But there are issues.

The ‘7 Days’ video is a whopping 60MB download for 12’23 of content in a relatively modest 320×235 resolution, even at a full 25 frames per second. And it’s a very odd choice to offer the file in M4V format: great for iPod owners, maybe – but hopeless for anyone else. As far as I can tell, you won’t be able to play M4V on Archos or Creative units. Most of the common PC desktop software players won’t like it either. The only one I’ve found which accepts M4V so far is VideoLAN… and how many people have even heard of it? (Thankfully, the audio file from Adam Boulton is in universal MP3 format.)

If it were up to me – and granted, it isn’t any more – I wouldn’t have gone live without having an alternative feed for a more common format. DivX AVI or WMV, probably. It can’t be any extra effort to encode the same source file a second time. I reckon I’d also have tried to cut the file size down a bit… if this is intended for iPod use (and in M4V, it must be), I doubt many people would notice if you cut the frame rate by half. 60MB is a hefty chunk of capacity to give to a single file. Sport needs full frame-rate, news doesn’t.

I was planning on saying something about the free (as in ‘no extra charge’) SkyByBroadband service, which also launched yesterday… but it still won’t let me register. Something seriously wrong with its password validation, I think.

Did Santa dish out iPods to the UK establishment this year? Suddenly it’s all gone multimedia-crazy. After Downing Street’s video diary comes David Cameron’s ‘exclusive seven-minute broadcast for transmission through The Daily Telegraph’s new podcast service’, and now the Sun’s ‘history-making podcast‘ with Tony Blair. To be fair, the Guardian has been doing this for years – and hey, I was serving up downloadable audio myself whilst at the Foreign Office, back in May 1997. 🙂

The Sun’s 4’29 piece is like listening to an early Beatles album. It’s all George Pascoe-Watson in one ear, all Tony Blair in the other. Blair sounds anything but natural… and it does grate when he welcomes ‘the Sun campaign to help its readers identify those people causing real trouble in their communities.’ I don’t mind seeing this in print, but I really feel uncomfortable hearing him say the words.

As for George Pascoe-Watson, whose elevation to Political Editor is probably the main reason for doing this (on both sides)… is it me, or does he sound too ‘broadsheet’, too ‘establishment’ to be doing audio for the Sun? I’m not asking for Chris Tarrant or anything, but it’s in complete contrast to the language in his write-up of the interview:

TONY Blair last night urged Sun readers to ‘shop a yob’ — as he unveiled a huge crackdown on thugs who make decent people’s lives a misery. Mr Blair — speaking to The Sun in the first ever internet ‘podcast’ by a Prime Minister — vowed to help YOU declare war on anti-social behaviour.

Are these true podcasts? No on both counts. The Telegraph is simply a downloadable MP3 file. At least the Sun offers some RSS… but with a filename ‘tony_podcast.rss’ – and note both the first-name terms, and the singular ‘podcast’ – it doesn’t promise a lengthy series. Am I being too pedantic? Podcasting is as much about the distribution as the product. If it isn’t a series, and it doesn’t come to me automatically via RSS enclosure, it isn’t really being ‘cast’ to my ‘pod’.

Oh… and I’ve just heard that Sky News has started offering ‘podcasts’ of a sort. Full coverage later.

I’m usually a fan of Jakob Nielsen‘s analysis. But this seems barmy: ‘the cost of ownership for “free” software can easily exceed $1M/year in an enterprise setting.’

His starting point is reasonable – that ‘text-box ads accounted for 0.3% of the users’ gaze duration’ in recent testing. This becomes 11 seconds per day, or 44 minutes per year; and extrapolating on the basis of average salaries, and allocating a percentage of overheads, and factoring in the average time spent on the average website – we get a total figure of $1.2 million per year for a company of 10,000 people.

All this from a calculation of ’11 seconds per day’. I probably spend 11 seconds per day coughing and/or sneezing. I certainly spend longer than 11 seconds per day glancing out the window, or going to the toilet. I don’t think either is creating a productivity crisis. Or perhaps I’m being naive: if I attach myself to a catheter, I don’t need to leave my desk to take a pee, and we even save on the cost of cleaning a urinal.

Text-box ads have their place. Paid search placement shows that a company is prepared to put its money where its mouth is; and the process dictates that it has explicitly identified appropriate keywords. Arguably then, paid results may be more relevant than natural search, and more valuable as a navigation device. You can’t just dismiss them as a hindrance like this.

Dave Winer is the godfather of RSS. His blog won’t be to everyone’s tastes. You might find it too personal, too stream-of-consciousness. But he has a habit of hitting nails square on their heads. Written yesterday:

Microsoft wins by doing the 2.0 upgrade to their competitor’s meat and potatoes. It happened with Digital Research, Lotus, Apple, WordPerfect, Novell and the most famous of them all, Netscape. They all forgot about their users. It’s happening again with Google.

People seem genuinely gutted that Google didn’t announce an own-brand PC / ‘cube’ / operating system at the big CES event in Las Vegas last week (although DW rightly notes that it was a ‘non-denial denial’). So many people wanting a touch of the Google magic in the hardware department. A ‘bundle’ of seen-them-before software products, a video download service, a new copyright-protection headache? B-o-r-i-n-g!

It’s a sign of the underlying goodwill towards the brand, that so many people came away disappointed. We wanted them to come riding over the horizon, a ‘white knight’ to challenge Windows. But Google is a big corporation now. Perhaps it’s impossible to maintain that revolutionary spirit when your shares hit Wall Street. The market would rather see a steady stream of mundane announcements, than an occasional flash of genius.

We may look back at this as the start of the backlash.

Today I uninstalled Apple’s Quicktime player. For whatever reason, I couldn’t make it release ownership of the MP3 filetype. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s just luck. But I’m having too many bad experiences with Apple products lately: iPod Shuffle, iTunes, now this. Thankfully, there’s something called ‘Quicktime Alternative‘ which seems to do everything I need it to do.

And with a quick tweak, the ever-reliable Winamp can become a Quicktime-compatible video player. Once you’ve installed Quicktime Alternative, click on Options > Preferences > Input plugins. Highlight ‘Nullsoft Directshow Decoder’, then press ‘Configure’, and add ;MOV to the end of the ‘extension list’. I love Winamp… never lets you down.

If you’re running the website for a large organisation, the HR department has probably become a close contact in the last year or two. HR managers are typically social creatures: they talk to each other a lot, they read HR business magazines, they attend conferences. They spread stories of how one company or another slashed its recruitment costs; they hear pitches from e-recruitment solutions providers who promise the earth.

But recruitment is a two-way street: each side has to sell itself to the other. Candidates need to impress their potential employer; but the employer needs to demonstrate that it’s a good place to be. If you’re serious about attracting the best candidates – bear in mind that The Best Candidates are probably in touch with lots of different recruiters. Why should they pick you?

Your e-recruitment function may be the first personal contact that a candidate has with your organisation. It’s all they can judge you on. Here are five tips to help your website make the right impression. (more…)

There’s something very interesting happening with online video at the BBC News website. I’ve found two examples today of long, unedited interviews being posted as supporting material to the day’s biggest stories.

How long? Well, a typical ‘packaged’ TV news report is somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds. The typical live interview with a guest is roughly four minutes. But today on the website, there’s an interview with education secretary Ruth Kelly on school reform, clocking in at a big 5 minutes; and a chat with senior Liberal Democrat politician Vince Cable about Charles Kennedy’s future, a whopping 7 minutes (and 3 seconds! woo!).

This is a brilliant development for news video – I’m only surprised it’s taken so long. (Particularly since I talked about something similar when I worked at Sky News a good few years ago.)

The biggest difference between online and broadcast news is that online is driven by the user’s choice, not an editor’s. If I go to a news website, I click on the stories I want to read. If I watch a TV bulletin, I see the stories which an editor thinks I would or should be interested in.

Let’s extrapolate for a moment. I go to the BBC News website, and I see a headline. If I click on it, that’s a deliberate signal that I’m more than casually interested in the subject. If I then click on a ‘video’ link, and wait while it buffers etc, and watch the considerably less-than-HD quality pictures, I’m saying that I’m very interested in the subject. In which case, why not give me everything you’ve got?

This is a win-win situation. The interviewees can talk naturally, without worrying about placing ‘soundbites’. The viewers get all the depth they could want. The journalists get to show off their interviewing technique.

And of course, the BBC doesn’t have to worry about editing the footage afterwards. In these two examples, there’s no attempt to make a ‘properly produced’ interview: no cut-away shots to the interviewer, no ‘nodding dog’ cuts to cover up an edit. There’s actually something quite underground about pointing a static camera at an interviewee, and pressing ‘record’.

Joe Wilcox’s Microsoft Monitor weblog is always a good source of intelligent thought on our industry’s dominant influence. Looking ahead to Google’s big news on Friday, which now probably isn’t a Google PC, Joe says of competition between MSFT and GOOG: ‘Software is sticky. Right now, search is not… Stickiest software is the operating system, and that’s Microsoft’s Ace in the hole.’

He’s right, up to a point. But I’m ever more impressed at the scope for Firefox, plus extensions, plus broadband, plus ‘Web 2.0‘ projects to negate the need for an operating system (per se). I recently discovered Meebo, which gives you an Instant Messaging experience within your browser (and works remarkably well). I’ve used Writely when I haven’t had a word processor handy. I store all my bookmarks at del.icio.us. We’re all comfortable with email-over-the-web, via Gmail or Hotmail or whatever. Saving things to your hard disk just seems so old-school.

I’ll tell you one thing that is sticky, though – password storage. The more Web 2.0 sites I sign up for, the more I’m accumulating usernames and passwords. Give me a rock-solid, reliable, trustworthy way to store those, and I suspect I’ll be tied to your solution for life.

• Meebo
  Instant messaging in a browser context – absolutely fantastic, if you don’t have access to IM software on a particular PC. Like, you know, if your employer expects you to do some work.
  (tags: web2.0)