For me, the stand-out presentation was the case study regarding the launch of Virgin America, a new internal airline for the States and part of the Virgin group. It was founded in 2004 and started flying in September 2007. How come the launch took over three years?

As the presenter, Alex Hunter (Virgin’s Head of Group Online Marketing), pointed out, you might imagine that this would be a piece of cake. Virgin is a massive international brand. The group’s Virgin Atlantic service is well-known for being good quality and reasonably priced.

Not so. In some respects, the brand’s fame worked against them. The proposed launch met with loud protests to the US Department of Transport from the existing internal carriers. Virgin was a foreign company, they argued. Allowing them to launch would directly damage US businesses. It appeared (quite rightly) that a lengthy fight would ensue.

Virgin was hamstrung in two ways during this period. They couldn’t unveil the new planes’ impressive features and specifications - for all they knew, they’d be completely out-of-date by the time they launched. Nor could they use Richard Branson as a brand ambassador - his nationality was exactly the reason for which they were facing problems from the DoT. Also, money was more of an issue than you might imagine: they had already bought the planes and empty planes are a very expensive liability.

Legal fencing, defencing, shilly-shallying and fence-sitting ensued, for months. Finally, on December 26 2006, the DoT delivered its verdict: Virgin America would not be allowed to fly. This was a black day for Alex and the company. To that date, the Department had never reversed its decision on such a matter.

So Virgin decided to take the fight to the (metaphorical) streets.

They submitted a time-lapse video of one of the planes being painted to YouTube. Over the weekend, it garnered 200,000 views and found its way to the front page of digg. It wasn’t an especially remarkable film from a technical perspective, though at that time, there was nothing like it (all their rivals have since copied the idea, apparently).

They launched a blog called Let VA Fly (now defunct), unveiling all the sophisticated new features on their planes. At this point, they felt they had nothing to lose, so they might as well. They included an online petition, and forms which would create and send a correctly worded and legally valid complaint to individual users’ representatives, senators and the Department of Transport. Technically, it was a fairly simple site, based on open source Wordpress software. But it did the job.

Perhaps because the incumbent US internal airlines are so very terrible and anything better sounded like Nirvana, perhaps because it was pitched as a classic David and Goliath story, the blog was a great success.

They decided to launch a competition to let readers name the first eight planes, then capitalised on this by specifically inviting blogosphere celebrities and idols, Stephen Colbert and Cory Doctorow, to name two (Air Colbert and Unicorn Chaser, since you asked). They created T-shirts and gave them away. They put one of their planes into the San Francisco Valentine’s parade.

Perhaps crucially, they managed to get other online communities to do much of the marketing of the site, and driving people to sign the petition and send form letters, for them. The site or posts on the site hit the front page of digg eight times. Realising that community was clearly sympathetic, they invited Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht to film their diggnation video cast on board one of the grounded planes, driving scads of geek traffic to the site. Later paid and unpaid spots on diggnation worked equally well.

In total, 75,000 letters were sent to the authorities and 30,000 people signed the petition. It was enough. In September last year, the DoT reversed its decision and the service took off.

According to research conducted across a number of projects, one percent is a lot lower than the truth, though these figures vary quite considerably depending on the nature of the site, as you’d expect:

What does this graph mean? It means that on flickr, for example, 95% of the photos are uploaded by 2% of the users. On del.icio.us, that figure rises to 62% of the content being created by 10% of the users (NB: www.delicious.com works equally well, fellow mis-spellers). A site that was very participative would be in the right side of the graph. One that was more inclined towards the creation of content by the few and consumed by the many would be in the top left. Since the horizontal scale only goes up to 12%, and the highest-scoring sites only get 10%, it suggests that for all these sites, the idea of co-creation between all the members of those communities is a myth.

Good. If I go onto flickr to look at photos, then I don’t want to be assailed by holiday snaps or stag-do’s. I want to see work created by people who are passionate about and very good at photography. The sort of people who carry around a camera all the time, and upload dozens a week. The trouble is that the leading photographers are self-appointed, but it appears to be the case that on flickr, the people with the passion and commitment to contribute on a very regular basis also happen to be quite talented.

There’s also another point to be made about volume. I use flickr a bit: but I only take about 50 photos a year, though, so I’m most certainly not part of that 2%. However, I would consider myself a contributing flickr user - the graph sort of suggests that you have to be in the 2% to count. And I don’t think you do. If I produced one article for Wikipedia, then I wouldn’t be part of the 2.2% shown as the data point on the graph, but I’d still be a Wikipedia contributor. Volume isn’t the same thing as engagement or identification with a site or service.

So this one percent rule. It’s more or less true, if you’ll allow that the difference between 1% and 10% is fairly academic. But the thing is that it’s not actually as important as it seems at first sight. If the one percent suddenly left to go to a different site, then the 99th percentile would simply become the new one percent. They’re all using the sites, with a long-tail decline in most cases when it comes to the volume of their contributions. Where a developer or publisher makes their money would determine where they put their effort. If they charge for publishing, like flickr, then making it easier/faster/better for those people, the two percent, to upload and work with their photos would be important. On an advertising model, keeping the other 98% percent coming back would be more important: that might actually entail making sure the two percent are happy and contributing away, of course.

The other thing is that the one percenters are changing all the time. Good blog entries with original thought that appeals to my tastes and interests probably account for about 10% of whatever is in my feedreader at any one time. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 10%, so I can’t just unsubscribe from the crap blogs. The likes of digg and delicious and other media aggregators can do a rough job of separating the wheat from the chaff, but because ‘the average digg user’ has different tastes to me, it doesn’t really work. Other apps such as thoof, particls and rootly claim to be able to edit the news depending on what you actually read, but they haven’t won my trust not to miss really interesting items - often, an item is really interesting because it’s unlike everything else you’ve read recently.

Had a quick try - it worked for the BBC’s and e-consultancy’s partial feeds. Slightly erratic results sometimes, though, such as with the Guardian’s feeds.

I was unlucky enough for my Tablet PC to crash and lose my notes from the session [my own fault]. What follows is from memory. Forgive the consequent ‘notey-ness’.

Digg will support OpenID. The emergent portable, open ID system recently given support from Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! will also work on digg.

Digg will never pay moderators to check for false/lame stories. Rose doesn’t believe that is a workable - or rather, scalable - model for the system. The moderation, he thinks, needs to mirror the community to have any meaning. “Policemen every five steps won’t make any difference,” as Rose (probably) said.

The discussion pages will allow the upload of links and ‘other’ media to support stories. This will also be a part of the story validation system, whereby proponents and opponents of a particular claim can upload evidence to show this.

Digg can already spot spammers easily using their statistical data. 100 user accounts that all agree with each other on everything is easily spotted, for example. He showed us these rogue stories appearing on a graph available internally to the company and swiftly being buried. Rose did not state whether the managers of digg take any action in these circumstances. My impression was that he was saying that they do not, because users are more than able to detect spam stories and bury them.

Digg is working closely on making users’ data work better for them. In the not-too-distant future, it will be able to recommend friends to you on the basis of your common likes and dislikes, and also upon their geographical location. It will also be able to personalise the ‘upcoming stories’ queue to show stories you are most likely to be interested in.

On the flip side of that, digg will be able to personalise the people you interact with and do not. Rose hopes that this will counteract the effect of “900,000 people being in the same room and, of course, they aren’t going to get on”. Or, as a delegate put it: “people on digg are assholes”.

Rose confirmed that digg is actively mining users’ attention data in order to implement these changes. He professed ignorance of APML, but “there are a couple of engineers deeply into this stuff” back at digg HQ.

Digg will imminently introduce a ’smart’ digg-this button for blog and website owners. A single line of JavaScript will detect whether or not a story has been dugg already and advertise the number of diggs a post has received.

A Flash toolkit is in the works that will allow site owners considerable flexibility over displaying data from digg on their own sites.

Generally speaking, great conference so far, but lack of internet access today means I’m still catching up. More news tomorrow, I hope.

Brian Clark is a tremendous blogger and copyblogger is a tremendous blog. You’d hope so, really - the guy is a copywriter and devotes his blog to passing on the tips of the trade. Really valuable information for anyone involved in writing at any level.

This week, he’s been holding a poll on whether or not he should use the term ‘linkbait’ any more. This post is my vote. The gist of the argument is that if we agree that ‘linkbait’ is simply compelling content, then we shouldn’t be using what sounds like a disparaging term for it. The new word for this stuff is ‘viral copywriting’, which would have sounded even worse a couple of years ago, but now sounds very cool.

My vote on the issue is to continue to call “linkbait” what it is. Linkbait-y blog posts are not ‘compelling content’. They are deliberately written to get people to strongly agree or disagree, and then write about them on their own blogs or submit them to social news engines like digg and reddit. They have titles like ‘10 Reasons Why Microsoft Vista Will Ruin The Company’ or ‘iPhone Heralds End of Humanity’. That’s the sort of thing you see on digg’s front page every day. It gets people excited.

But in my view, it’s not at all good news for the quality of writing on the web. It makes people want to write an article people will link to, rather than the article they were really able to put together. Probably these would have titles like ‘4 Reasons I Don’t Fancy Upgrading to Vista’ and ‘Why I Probably Won’t Buy an iPhone’. The truth is normally banal; deal with it. Linkbaiting, on the other hand, drives people to extremes and it gets in the way of the truth.

Getting linked to is generally a good thing from a Google and a profile perspective; hitting the digg front page feels very nice (I expect). However, when someone forces themselves to write something they probably wouldn’t do otherwise solely in order to achieve these aims, they’re probably not being true to themselves. I think that’s more important. It’s the difference between writing and copywriting.

Technorati: blogging, blogs, writing

“What we’re talking about is a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately at earlier and earlier ages,” said Nancy Robinson, vice president and consumer strategist at Iconoculture, a Minneapolis company that tracks consumer trends for consumer giants like Nestle and Sony. “If you asked someone 10 years ago about the necessity of a cell phone for a 5-year-old, they would have laughed and walked away; now you can buy that at Target.”

Think of Generation We kids as a product of Generation Xers–a demographic born roughly between the years of 1961 and 1981 whose influence over pop culture peaked in the ’90s. Parents of Gen We are not only savvy about media and advertising, they’re also comfortable with technology. They’re taking those skills into parenting, encouraging their offspring to understand that with technology, the kids can be in control.

Technorati: communications, culture, youth

• Outside In: aggregates local news and provides forums, etc.
• Parkmatch: social networking for parking spaces (yes, really).
• Front Porch Forum: email your neighbours.
• Placeblogger: aggregates local blogs.
• Peuplade: Parisian neighbourhood network; not a launch, but reported on by the BBC.

Suffice to say that local is hot. So there may be some nervousness greeting this news story from the Washington Post about the troubles at the, yes, hyperlocal social networking site, Backfence. The site received $3mn in funding in May 2005, but doesn’t look like it’s going to earn any of that back in a hurry:

Media analysts agree that many readers are looking for hyperlocal content, but they say most citizen-journalism sites aren’t mature enough to tap into the lucrative local advertising markets.

“Realistically, it’s going to take close to 10 years for the business models to be there and for there to be enough advertisers willing to give money to hyperlocal start-ups,” said Vin Crosbie, managing partner of Digital Deliverance, a Connecticut media consulting firm. “Backfence’s problem is that it was too early.” [...]

[Co-founder Susan] DeFife said Backfence sites [13 in total] had sold 550 ads to local businesses since April and got 2 percent of community members to register. “We were making significant strides,” she said.

I can see why very local social networks might seem like a great idea. The BBC story about Peuplade was very inspirational. However, like the analyst says, it seems like it will be some time before such sites are able to make much money on the basis of advertising. At the same time, this social media approach certainly seems like a great way forward for local council websites and a way for them to demonstrate their usefulness.

Technorati: hyperlocal, social networks, website

So what? you may well ask. Well, it will apparently allow companies to very swiftly measure the impact of any release because any links to them in the blogosphere will be catalogued automatically. Compare this to what you might do using Google - “link: twopointouch.com/some_article_page” doesn’t produce the results chronologically and can’t follow email or RSS distribution. It’s similar to embedding an RFID chip into a press release. You can tell where it is at all times. No-one’s mentioned it, but it seems very much like a competing service to Technorati’s other big PR deal over the last couple of months, Edelman’s Story-Maker-Upper Social Media Release engine.

I’m not an enormous fan of either Technorati or PR Newswire, to be honest, but I think this is a great move. It’s strange: I was talking to Mike Butcher just the other day and we were discussing how citizen journalism has made professional journalism a lot tougher than it was in the days of print. Cut-and-paste from a press release and change a few words? (You know you’ve been there, old school hacks). Busted in seconds thanks to this sort of service. Great stuff. Now you have to do proper reporting and phone the guy up. And the other guy who disagrees with him. And then write your copy from scratch. It’s good news for journalism as a profession. The upshot is that the public get better news. You can turn round to your publisher or editor and say, “I need an original take on this story - otherwise it’s useless”. In an era where the production of ‘content’ is viewed as easy and cheap by many publishers, and where civilians are producing stuff that’s just as good (and better) than many of the pros, I’m hoping that the production of valuable content starts to become recognised once more as time-consuming, tricky and requiring a certain amount of training and skill. There is no longer any way to ‘fake it’.

In a deeply ironic twist, PRNewswire.com uses frames and so I can’t directly link to their press release. (doh!) Consequently, I’ve cut and pasted it below.

NEW YORK, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ — PR Newswire, the global leader in commercial news distribution, and Technorati, the authority for citizen media, today announced that for the first time readers of press releases can track online conversations in the blogosphere directly from press releases on http://www.prnewswire.com/.

This marks the first time Technorati has entered into a partnership with a commercial news distribution company, and will help to establish a strong link between two of the most important tools in the communications mix — announcements via press releases and reactions from bloggers.

All individual press releases distributed through PR Newswire will now include a ‘Technorati’ button, linking readers to a search result page hosted by Technorati that will display a list of blogs discussing and linking to the news release, and relevant excerpts from those blogs. Once on the search result page, the reader can set up an automatic watch list on Technorati to notify them when any new blog posts are published.

“Press releases have the power to initiate and inform important conversations in the blogosphere, while many bloggers are great accelerators and influencers of public conversation and opinion,” said Dave Armon, chief operating officer of PR Newswire. “This partnership joins together two leaders in the communications industry to offer an unparalleled service to both issuers of news and the readers who follow them. Issuers now have a means to track direct blog response to their press release using the most established and innovative blog search facility available, while readers of these news releases will gain broader context for the news by reading how these public influencers are responding to it.”

The Technorati link is available when viewing press releases from PR Newswire’s public Web site, http://www.prnewswire.com/, which receives more than 1.2 million unique visitors a month. All PR Newswire releases will carry the Technorati link at no additional cost. Technorati is a free service, requiring only registration by users.

“Often, the kernel of any robust conversation on the Live Web is a press release in which something significant or interesting is announced,” said David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati. “By using the new Technorati button on PR Newswire, folks can instantly see both immediate reaction to announcements and the accelerating conversation, all in real time.”

Visitors to any press release on PR Newswire’s public Web site can also access RSS feeds of press releases categorized by industry and subject, and post press releases to both del.icio.us and digg, two influential social networks.

By a 2-1 ratio, Americans say they would rather watch an old-fashioned TV evening news report’s coverage of an event than the sort of “citizen video” that has become increasingly popular. [...]

But the poll shows a generational divide emerging: One out of four younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) would prefer the video over conventional news coverage.

Republicans and Democrats by a 7-3 ratio would prefer an evening news report, while independents were slightly more willing to choose a citizen video.

By starting with the 2:1 ratio, the lead suggests some sort of victory for the mainstream, but also begs the question, ‘what about the other third?’ You’ll notice that the figures don’t really add up, too. Two-thirds of Americans would prefer a traditional broadcast, yet the generational divide shows that a quarter of youtube-savvy younger people prefer online video? Seventy percent of supporters of the mainstream parties prefer a mainstream report - thirty percent of those prefer what, then?

We’re missing the key statistic. What proportion of Americans would rather use online citizen-sourced media for their news?

There’s a whole lot of blurred lines here, of course. There are citizen videos on mainstream news sites. There are mainstream videos on Web 2.0 sites like YouTube. Blogs comment on newspapers; newspapers run their own blogs and source stories through the blogosphere. The logistics of such research are horrendous. If you get your tech news from digg, for example, you aren’t really eschewing mainstream media since most stories link back to mainstream sources at some point. But then again, you are because you aren’t using USA Today or similar as your portal. This isn’t some sort of competition, of course, but even these vague results show that the blur between mainstream professional journalist and dilettante enthusiast no longer really has any meaning.