I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting. The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly [...]
February 23, 2010
Finding this video so quickly after yesterday’s post proves something. More on making money from media content, even though people can get it for free. Mike Masnick of Techdirt describes the ways Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have created a profitable business from their music, after they sacked their record label in 2007. In [...]
February 22, 2010
I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of selling media content when people can get something more-or-less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad [...]
February 9, 2010
A presentation I wrote for a meeting today about where our media are heading in the next 5-10 years. It doesn’t make a lot of sense without my accompanying narrative, I realise. Nonetheless, I wanted to keep it safely bookmarked and you might enjoy a round of Powerpoint-Karaoke against it. Also, no image sources are acknowledged [...]
February 8, 2010
While the UK slept last night, it appears there was some sort of sporting tournament across the Atlantic and that the world’s most-used search provider advertised its search capabilities and new(ish) browser. It’s quite a nice advert, telling a (cliched) story in an original manner with a clean style. The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and [...]
February 4, 2010
On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative. Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary – if depressing – reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not [...]
February 1, 2010
In mitigation of my not being able to think of anything interesting to write about today, I shall pass on several thousand words by other people, published by The Society of Digital agencies (SoDA). It’s a survey and editorial on what members of the society think 2010 holds for digital media marketing. It’s a 70-page PDF, [...]
January 20, 2010
I want to remember this: (via Swissmiss), the CMYK embroidery project. CMYK embroidery is a hand-made printing process, based on computer generated halftone screens. Images are halftoned according to conventional screen angles: Cyan 105, Magenta 75, Yellow 90 and Black 45. Dot screens are the transformed into cross-stitch screens, printed on paper and marked for embroidery. I [...]
January 20, 2010
When people were asked where they found out about news stories in a new Pew Research Center project, their answer was old media, predominantly newspapers. This is the headline table: Sector From Which New Information Reported (Six Key Storylines) Sector % of All Stories Print 48% Local TV 28 Niche media 13 Radio 7 New media 4 Source: Pew Research Center, January 2010
December 21, 2009
The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks: The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers. via FT.com / UK – [...]
August 6, 2009
We call the Internet a place. We go to sites. Marketing people talk about destinations. But that’s rubbish. The Internet is with me, and increasingly with most people, all of the time. It follows us as we go to other places. Increasingly, it helps us to navigate those places. You have probably seen it already, but [...]
October 15, 2008
Just watched Be Kind Rewind on PirateCity. In the interests of research, I tested an illegal video service that streams movies for free. The quality is fairly poor – somewhere between YouTube and Vimeo. And not ideally, I watched this widescreen movie in 4:3. Jack Black seems a lot slimmer nowadays. As I am sure you [...]
March 9, 2010