Category Archives: Media 2.0

02.17.07
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Open publishing – Something for nothing, three years on

Nearly three years ago, Lawrence Lessig released his book, Free Culture, both in paper and online under a Creative Commons licence which allowed derivative works. A few days later, a disparate group of strangers gathered together to take advantage of that licence and create an audiobook version. Astonished at being a part of that process, and excited by the possibilities it seemed to open up to me, I wrote a long essay entitled Something for Nothing: The Free Culture AudioBook Project.

I just reread it and, three years later I find nothing in it has dated. Larry was kind enough to let me interview him for my blog post, and his words ring true now just as they did then. I strongly recommend that all De Montfort students reading this spend a little time reading both the essay, and exploring the links in it.

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02.16.07
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The herd misses opportunities

Jeff Jarvis wrote this week that no one wants less reporting, and in his post he questioned the amount of reporting done and resources spent by different outlets all following the same stories. He pointed to the death of Anna Nicole Smith as an example of “wall-to-wall” coverage from too many journalists all saying the same thing.

I’ve been in the herd, more times than I’d like. I was one of the 1,400 journalists camped out on the lawn of the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana for the execution of Timothy McVeigh when only seven journalists were actually allowed in the death chamber. Journalistically, what value was added for the viewers and readers with so many journalists feeding off of the same thin gruel? In one of the more embarrassing moments professionally, I remember how a few hundred anti-death penalty protesters were surrounded by three times that number of journalists. As about 50 protesters sat in circle for a silent vigil on the morning of the execution, a ring of photographers, TV camera men and women and reporters pressed in on them. A few protesters left, gasping and distraught with claustrophobia.

And I watched last week, as the herd jumped on a leaked cockpit video showing two American A-10 pilots mistakenly attacking a British light-armoured convoy in 2003. One soldier, Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, was killed in the attack, and his widow was attempting to find out the circumstances of his death. The Sun had got hold of the video that British and American military authorities had said did not exist, and it was viewed more than a million times on their website.

Although I can’t claim to have followed the story exhaustively, I read several major newspapers’ coverage of the event and watched Sky. There was universal condemnation of the pilots with stories about ‘trigger-happy Yanks’, ranging from currently serving soldiers all the way back to British veterans who remember being mistakenly strafed by American pilots in World War II. The anger towards these two present day American pilots in the media seemed to feed off itself.

As an American, I found it difficult reading and viewing, especially because it laid bare the animosity that some in the British media and British public have towards Americans. Rationally, I can understand the source of some of that anger, but having strong ties to the UK and affection for the US, the deteriorating relationship is painful to watch.

As a journalist, I thought the coverage lacked balance. I found it long on commentary and woefully short on actual reporting. Moreover, I think when the media swarms it often does so in unthinkingly.

It misses many opportunities and, in this instance, I’ll point out one of them. My friend Chris Vallance pointed me to Joe d’Oen’s excellent podcast Fly with Me. Joe flies for a major American airline, but he used to fly an A-10, the same anti-tank aircraft involved in this incident. Joe’s podcast is outstanding, a really high quality piece of audio that would sit well in almost any professional broadcaster’s output. As a former A-10 pilot, he walked his listeners through the audio of the cockpit tapes with a calm professionalism and explains exactly what was said and its implications, giving the listener a greater understanding of the circumstances around the tragedy. It’s an excellent piece, and actually a more responsible piece of analysis than much of that published in the mainstream media. Why didn’t a journalist Google Joe and get him on air or get a quote from him?

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the internet as a whole. But these missed opportunities by the media aren’t down to a lack of column inches or airtime. In this instance, there was an overwhelming amount of coverage on this story. Too bad it was all the same.

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02.13.07
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Open publishing – A wider context

The temptation when you’re looking at a topic of open publishing is to focus on the case studies of people and publishers who are making works available online for reuse, but it’s really important to take a look at the wider context within which writers, publishers and booksellers are working and related issues such as DRM and piracy (which I will also address at length in another post). You can’t consider open publishing in a vacuum, despite the temptation to focus in on just that one area, otherwise you get just a fraction of the story.

Tim O’Reilly has a really fascinating and detailed post which does just that. He talks about the things he’s learnt being both a writer and a publisher. His lessons are:

  • Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
  • Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation.
  • Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
  • Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
  • Lesson 5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
  • Lesson 6: “Free” is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
  • Lesson 7: There’s more than one way to do it.

Tim examines each of these lessons in detail, but rather than attempt a summary, I recommend that you go and read his post and get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

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02.12.07
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Open publishing – Writing in an age of pirates

John Scalzi wrote a fantastic post in May 05 about the changing nature of a writer’s business model in an age where everything is easily copyable. A snippet to whet your appetite:

I won’t get into how much of my writing income over the last four years comes directly and indirectly as a result of writing on this site, except to say it’s six figures and the leftmost number is not a “1,” and not nearly all of it comes from book sales. This is not bragging (or not only bragging, shall I say); the point to made here is that an ambitious writer can use a non-commercial presence to generate a non-trivial amount of income. In my case, the content here, like the content on Penny Arcade, is un-pirateable; I don’t charge anything for it, and I don’t care if you send it along to whomever you like. But it brings in thousands of people every day, some of whom would probably spend money on Scalzi merchandise. Like, say, a novel, however it is published.

Or not a novel, actually — why not a novella? The market for novellas is very small right about now, because most publishers don’t like them; they don’t fit into the mass-market publishing paradigm very well at all. But if I don’t have to worry about my publisher’s production albegra, maybe I could sell one. Or not sell it at all — maybe I’ll post it up on the site with its run subsidized by an advertiser. I have eight to ten thousand visitors on a daily basis; think there’s an advertiser out there who might be willing to shell out for 100,000 ad impressions over the run of the novella?

Point is, in a pirate age, I think I still stand a good chance of continuing to make a very good income from writing. Since I don’t think we’ll get to a pirate age, this is even better news for me, because I have the advantage of generating writer income the old-fashioned way as well as in this new way. Multiple revenue streams are a writer’s friend. Now, get this: I’m not particularly clever, and I’m awfully lazy. If I can do this, pretty much any writer can. Yes, it does take time and effort to generate a readership (seven years, in the case of the Whatever). Tell me how this is different from publishing today.

Scalzi makes an excellent point: Just because business models are changing doesn’t mean either that the publishing industry will die, or that the writer will find it harder to make a living (bearing in mind that it’s already hard).

According to a report from The Publishers Association, in 2005, there were approx. 60,000 book publishers in the UK and Ireland, and about 1.6 million titles were available for sale, including 206,000 new or revised titles. The total value of sales was £2,768 million, and 788 million units were sold (giving an average price of £3.50). Consumer sales were £2,396 million for 2005, up 8% on 2004 (compared to a 3% increase in 2004 over 2003). Book exports were also up 3.7% to £1.41 billion, with the US the biggest market. Decide for yourself if those numbers indicate an industry in rapid decline, or one that’s healthy.

It seems pretty difficult to find up-to-date statistics on how much authors earn in the UK, but an old post from 2000 on the Dark Echo site says:

You think you should be able to make a living as a writer? A survey by the Society of Authors (U.K.) shows that dream may be even further from reality than we thought. An article published last Thursday by The Guardian/The Observer Web site BooksUnlimited (reported the survey — first of its kind in nearly 20 years — “shows that the universal creative dream of self-sufficiency through writing is receding farther than ever. . . Almost half British authors earn less than the £5,000 yearly minimum wage and three quarters make less than the national average of £20,000.” Only one writer in seven actually lives on earnings from writing. In other words, “You live better with toilet cleaner on your fingers than with ink.”

I can’t find the original article on the Observer site, nor an update version of this survey, but it’s still true to say that it’s bloody hard to make a living out of writing, whatever type of writing you do. But it is dramatically easier now to access to your prospective audience, to nurture a community of fans, and to benefit from a variety of income streams, such as advertising on your site or merchandise. Which means that if you get as much of your stuff as possible in front of as many people as possible by giving it all away, you have an opportunity to make money both directly and indirectly from your writing. For those who understand this, it could be said that it’s now easier to make a living as a writer, not harder – although it’s important to note that ‘easier’ is a relative term.

Again, though, we’re left with a lack of real hard data here. Do authors with blogs earn more than authors with out-of-date/static websites or authors with no web presence? Does an online presence only favour authors of specific genres? Do authors who give their works away online earn more than those who don’t, for authors at the same stage in their career and working in the same genre? (Although, jeeze, you’d have a hell of a job getting a meaningful statistical comparison out of that one.)

The problem, of course, is that authors and publishers generally don’t like giving away this sort of data, so ultimately we are left with only anecdote and experience to inform us.

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02.12.07
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Open publishing – Why do people publish books for free, and what about audiobooks?

When I think of ‘open publishing’, the first thing I think about is people like Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Tom Reynolds who have all persuaded their publisher to allow them to release electronic versions of their books at the same time as the physical dead-tree version. (More on those three later.) In all cases, this seems to have been to the benefit of the book, but to give your book away at the same time as you put it up for sale is a bit of a leap of faith. Why would you take that risk? It’s far from being a proven economic or promotional strategy.

I think Chris Saad gets to the heart of this very quickly, when he asks, Am I being heard? He says there is:

A fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to… the need to be heard. People just want to feel connected and understood.

At a very basic level, Larry, Cory and Tom share in common with me, you, and pretty much everyone else a desire to be heard, to be read, to have the things that we’ve laboured over appreciated.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, also confesses that he just wants to be heard (although he doesn’t seem to have published an ebook version of his book):

I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m actually delighted to see that my book has been pirated and is available on Bittorrent. (Presumably this is the audio book version, even though it claims to be an “ebook”, which I wasn’t aware existed. UPDATE. One file is the pirated audiobook, the “ebook” is actually this ChangeThis pdf of the original Wired article, which was already freely available).

My publishers want to make money, and I like them so I usually do what it takes to keep them happy, but in truth I just want to be read/listened to by the largest number of people. Leave it to me to figure out how to convert that reputational currency into cash–just get me in front of the biggest audience and I’ll do the rest. My agent doesn’t want to hear this, but I’d rather take a smaller up-front advance or lower royalties in exchange for more liberty in distributing free versions, because I think I’ll actually be better off in the end.

Anderson, however, tangles up a few threads in his piece, the first is a discussion of equivalence: ebooks are assumed not to be equivalent to books; digital audiobooks are assumed to be equivalent to CDs.

Reading an ebook isn’t currently a great experience. Specialised ebook readers are expensive, and most people don’t like reading on-screen, so the ebook is seen as not equivalent for a paper book, i.e. people are more likely to go and buy the paper version if they like the ebook. Thus it is beneficial to release a free ebook so that you can reach as wide an audience as possible, as you stand a good chance of converting ebook downloads to paper book sales.

Conversely, it doesn’t really matter whether you have an unlawfully downloaded copy of an audiobook, or the real thing, whether bought as a download or as a CD, because either way you are probably going to listen to it on your iPod, computer or other MP3 playing device. The assumption is that giving away ebooks encourages sales of paper books, but giving away audiobooks, or allowing unauthorised downloads, will cannibalise the sales of the legitimate ebook. This is exactly the same logic as used by the RIAA and BPI for suing file-sharers, and the rest of the music industry for attempting to slap DRM onto everything in sight. It’s a very compelling and sensible looking argument, but it’s based on unproven assumptions behind the motivations of the downloader/buyer.

We don’t have much real evidence to go on when looking at the cannibalisation of audiobooks by P2P versions. I’m not aware of any studies that focus on audiobooks. But certainly within the music industry the picture is not as clear as it at first seems. Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf compared real download data and real sales data (pdf) and found that downloading does not have a statistically significant impact on music sales, except in the context of the most popular songs, when it was shown to improve sales slightly. Could it be that the same might be true of an audiobook?

The other issues is the assumption, again promulgated by the RIAA and BPI, that every download of an unauthorised file, whatever it be, is equivalent to a lost sale. In fact, there are many different motivations and outcomes: Some people are nearly sure they want to buy the item but want to try it first, some people are curious and don’t know if they would buy but can be convinced, some people were never going to buy it anyway (so no lost sale as there was no intention to buy), and some people really are lost sales – they would have bought it but they downloaded it instead.

The question is not if some sales are lost, but if more sales overall are gained because of the free version? Providing a free version does not necessarily cannibalise sales overall, but instead acts as a promotional tool encouraging them.

Counterintuitively, there was a study last year that showed that people who downloaded the most MP3s also bought the most music. Sadly, I can’t lay my hands on a link right now but I’ll try to find it. Perhaps, as the audiobook market develops, this could hold true for audiobooks too.

Finally, there is an intimate relationship between a book and its audiobook version, and I don’t think that we really understand how users relate to both together or each separately. What makes a book compelling, and what makes an audiobook compelling are two different things, and my reasons for buying each different. I’m absolutely certain to be buying Neil Gaiman‘s next book, whatever it is and whenever it comes out, because I’m a fan and I love his stuff. I trust him, as a writer, to produce work that I enjoy. I would be unlikely, however, to buy an audio version of one of Neil’s books if it was read by Some Random Voiceover Guy, because for me there’s no incentive to do so (I don’t frequently listen to audiobooks). But an audiobook actually read by Neil, or by Lenny Henry, is a different kettle of fish because I already have an emotional involvement with the author as a fan of his, and with Lenny Henry by virtue of the fact that I saw him and Neil reading one of Neil’s books at an event I went to a while back. My motivation for buying that would not be a desire for any old audiobook version, but a desire specifically for Neil’s or Lenny’s audiobook version.

So when Anderson says that he can’t see the case for producing legitimate free audiobooks, he’s treating them as if they are wholly separate from the paper book or ebook, and as 100% equivalent, and I don’t think that we can say that with any certainty.

What really happens if you both sell and give away an ebook? What really happens if you both sell and give away music? Didn’t seem to hurt the Arctic Monkeys, after all. But until someone somewhere does a rigorous and balanced study to find out, we’re stuck with a bunch of poorly formed assumptions and music industry propaganda.

Right now, I’m left with more questions than answers. The publishing industry, though, is being pushed into experimentation in a way that the music and movie industries are not. Authors are forcing publishers to do things that might seem counterintuitive, and we’re slowly starting to figure out, through trial and error, what all this means. Still lots to find out, though, about this open publishing idea.

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02.11.07
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Open publishing – preparing a lecture for De Montfort

Last year I was invited by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger to go up to Leicester to give a lecture about the impact of blogging on writing at their Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. This year, I have a return invitation, not to lecture in person again but to be one of several guest lecturers contributing to De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media via a variety of online venues. I thought for a while about giving my lecture in Second Life, but decided that that might be a case of the medium obscuring the message with technical difficulties – if your computer’s not powerful enough to run Second Life well, it can a very frustrating experience. Instead, I’m going to be recording a short video which I will publish here on Strange Attractor and we’ll have a discussion with the students in the comments.

My topic this year is ‘open publishing’ and everything related, and in the spirit of openness, transparency and discussion, and with the realisation that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more than I do about this, I have decided to publish all my research here, as I go along. So you’ll get to see all my sources, my half-formed thoughts, my wrong turns and my wild goose chases – and you’ll be able to join in now, if you feel like it.

My video is due to be published on Monday 26th February, and I’m currently feeling like I really should have started putting this together before now, but them’s the breaks. Hopefully, if the wider community feels like joining in, we can pull together a set of links, notes and finally a video that will both engage the students and prompt a discussion about what all this social software and open licensing really means for the publishing industry.

A note of caution, though. I can’t say that I really have a clear cut idea right now about the shape of the video, so don’t expect this to be all that well structured! I’m also planning a lot of small posts, rather than a few big ones, so it might get a bit ‘stream of consciousness’-y.

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02.02.07
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Bad Flickr: No donut for you

The day before yesterday, I blogged about Flickr forcing users to switch over to using a Yahoo! ID to access their Flickr account, and the patronising email I got about it. I was not a happy camper.

Now the furore has developed, and Flickr/Yahoo look even worse. Maybe it’s just bad timing, but it seems there are three main issues running concurrently here.

1. The forced switch to a Yahoo! ID.
2. Flickr forcing graceless limits to friends and tags.
3. Yahoo! using ‘all rights reserved’ and ‘non-commercial’ Creative Commons licensed photos on their Wii page, for commercial gain.

Oh dear. What a mess.

The forced switch to Yahoo!
Flickr announced in 2005 that they were going to be shifting to the Yahoo! log-in, and in a BBC article from September 05, they reassured people that all would really be ok with this move:

“We care deeply about our community, and their worries are ours,” [Caterina] Fake told the BBC News website.

“But I think the fears are unfounded. As always, the proof is in the pudding. We’re tending to our knitting, and making sure the Flickr experience is as good as it’s always been.”

But mistrust of Yahoo! goes back a long way, and disgruntled Flickr members started the Flick Off group to protest. There are now 1533 members, counting down to the day when Flickr IDs will be turned off and some of them will quit Flickr for good. The official Flickr forum thread is currently running at 1681 responses, and still going strong. The issues people are worried about include:

  • Finding an available Yahoo! ID that doesn’t suck.
  • Hating your existing Yahoo! ID; or losing the password and being unable to retrieve it.
  • Hating the unpleasant and long-winded Yahoo! sign-up process, which includes questions some people find intrusive and objectionable. For an insight into this process, take a look at Chris Messina’s screenshots.
  • Intermittency of Yahoo! sessions – people like being permanently logged into Flickr and don’t want to have to keep logging into Yahoo! (This is supposed to have been fixed now, but not everyone is happy with the cookie-based solution.)
  • Concern that, in the UK at least, Yahoo! is wedded to British Telecom’s broadband service and that by tying Flickr to Yahoo! they are also tying Flickr to BT. This is not good – if you want to change ISP you loose your BT Internet email address, which would then invalidate your Yahoo! ID and cut you off from Flickr.
  • Yahoo!’s habit of tracking usage using cookies and other methods.
  • Fear that Yahoo! will terminate your account for reasons unclear or unreasonable, thus locking you out of Flickr.
  • Fear that your Yahoo! account will expire without you realising it, thus locking you out of Flickr.
  • The item in the official help page that says if you terminate your Yahoo! account, you will also terminate your Flickr account and delete all your photos (see below).
  • A perception that Yahoo! marketing practises are unethical and exploitative.
  • Fear that Yahoo! will screw with Flickr the same way they screwed with other sites they bought in the past.
  • Technical issues with the Yahoo! sign-in screen, such as it timing out and not allowing browsers to save the password.
  • Issues with different Terms of Service for Yahoo!
  • Confusion for people with multiple accounts of either kind.
  • A feeling that if one has signed up with and paid money to Flickr, one should not have to now sign up to Yahoo!
  • Problems with people losing photos and contacts after merging their Flickr account with their Yahoo! account.
  • Concern that people who have paid for Pro accounts, but who choose not to switch to Yahoo!, will lose their money.

I could go on – this list is just culled from the first two pages of the thread and, whilst it’s admirable to see some participation from Flickr staff, they don’t seem to be really appreciating the depth of feeling about this nor do they appear to be systematically answering questions. Are these concerns and fears legitimate? Some are minor niggles that aren’t all that big of a deal, some have already been addressed by the Flickr team, but some are deeply disturbing. For example, if you delete your Yahoo! ID, you will also be deleting your Flickr account, as the official help page says:

I’m going to delete my Yahoo! account. What happens to my Flickr photos?
If you sign in to Flickr with a Yahoo! ID and you then delete your Yahoo! account, you will not be able to sign in to your Flickr account. In the future, this will delete your Flickr account as well, including all of your photos, but currently your Flickr account must be deleted separately.

This seems like a really rather harsh policy. Are users really clear on this point?

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01.29.07
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Joining the Media 2.0 Workgroup

Names are strange things. You don’t always need to be able to define what a thing is to know it when you see it, but having a name for it helps you talk about it. That’s what happened with Web 2.0. We know what the 2.0 implies: change, development, progress, advancement. And we know how some people interpret 2.0 when smooshed together with the word Web: strong social components to web services and applications, agile development and the everlasting beta, networks of friends and co-workers, aqua-effect fills, rounded corners, and names with the letter E missing.

Once O’Reilly had kicked it off, the ‘2.0’ trend rapidly expanded, to Journalism 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Business 2.0, Office 2.0. You name it, it has a Version 2.0.

Even Media. Which makes sense, when you think about it. We’ve already had New Media, but it’s clear that New Media isn’t keeping up with the incredibly rapid development of the web and Web 2.0. New Media is antiquated, obsolete. Any business that pats itself on the back because they have some sort Head of New Media needs a kick up the butt and a lesson in Media 2.0.

So when Chris Saad invited Kevin and me to join his Media 2.0 Workgroup, we thought it sounded like an interesting opportunity to help give Media the kick it needs to get it moving in the right direction.

Chris doesn’t quite put it like that though. He says:

Media 2.0 is a term used to describe the emerging social media industry. Every community needs some help to grow. The long tail has a head, and conversation needs a topic. So in this spirit, we have gathered a group of people who are passionate about the issues of Media 2.0 to help propel and focus the conversation.

The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a combined feed (or OPML of feeds if you prefer) that we’ll be sharing with luminaries such as Ben Metcalfe, Jeff Pulver, Ian Forrester and Jeneane Sessum amongst many others. So go on, get it in yer aggregator!

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01.16.07
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Journalism students need new heroes

Shortly after I joined the Guardian, Neil McIntosh, our head of editorial development, came back from talking to a journalism class. He was shaking his head. The students, who will be the future on journalism, were living in the past. They aspired to be columnists and commentators for newspapers. They were uninterested in multimedia journalism and uninformed about trends that are rocking the industry. We both agreed. They need new heroes.

What brought this all to mind was a post by Mindy McAdams, who belongs in every journalist’s RSS feeds. She has some sage advice for students and her fellow journalism educators in a great post on how to land and keep a job in journalism. She rifles though recent announcements about layoffs at major newspapers and what newspaper managers are looking for in new hires.

Martin Stabe has a great post looking at the great blog dialogue that Mindy’s comments set off. He said: “Journalism students … seem to aspire to work in some newsroom circa 1973”. Martin’s posts links off to posts and articles by Howard Owens, Steve Outing and Paul Conley. Students and journalists who want to get up to speed with what is happening in the industry would be wise to go through these posts, subscribe to these journalist bloggers. They are at the sharp end of these changes, and they know a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

There was some talk about exactly what skills students and journalists need in to compete. Do they need to learn how to code? Do they need to focus on A/V skills? Do they need to learn Flash? I’ve always been very wary about suggesting too much investment in any specific piece of software. The industry moves too fast. Instead, I’d echo what Rob Curley says:

Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.

Damn, I wish I would have said that. I’ve picked up the skillset because of my mindset. I can only think of one instance when I said: “That’s not my job.” New tasks are always an opportunity to learn new skills.

Whenever I speak to students, instead of saying that they need to learn Flash, or Final Cut or Rails, I say you need to learn reporting, audio-visual storytelling and research. You don’t need to know how to do everything on your own, but you need to know what is possible and doable in this digital age. The software will change. The technology will change so most importantly, you need to be nimble and curious. Your degree is not the destination. It’s only the first step in your education. Never stop learning. Never stop stretching. Evolution and the occasional revolution is the only way to survive change.

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01.12.07
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Strange Attractor Podcast III: Web 2.0 myths, blog fuckwittery and Twitter

Suw and I have been away from podcasting for a while. It’s only been 107 days, Odeo tells me, since the last podcast. Erk. Sorry.

We decided to relegate Suw’s tried but tired £7.99 Tandy-special plastic microphone and get a nice Sennheiser. It was giving both Suw, and the mic, psychological complexes after interviewees (including our friend, Euan Semple), chortled at the poor thing. If we ever get around to having little podcasters, I’m sure it will return to service.


powered by ODEO

We begin the podcast by groveling and begging for forgiveness for not podcasting more frequently. Quickly moving on from self-flagellation, we restore confidence in our own superiority by rubbishing the Daily Mail (1:25), and a particularly shitty column on blogging. Listen to me put on my best crusty, faux-posh British accent. If you’re still listening, we move on quickly to trashing Forrester (2:28) and a pay-for report about this whole Web 2.0 thingumy. Suw was directed to it by a super-secret squirrel contact so she could rubbish it. She obliged. Then, having not had enough of rubbishing clueless online efforts, we make fun of The Independent and their ahem… blogs (4:40). Oh, newsflash! They have actually updated the ‘blog’. Hell, the Indy’s bloggers – and I use that term loosely – took almost as long to post as Suw and I have to podcast.

After a brief description of mushy pees peas at 7:40, we discuss the criticisms that clued-up journalist Martin Stabe had of the Indy’s efforts. And just to highlight a great blog post, I’ll mention the questions that Andrew Grant-Adamson thinks editors should ask:


1. Does it do anything which cannot better be done in another section of the site?

2. Does it develop the paper’s interaction with the readers?

3. Does it gain a valuable audience? (A particular niche, readers who are new to the paper etc)

4. Can you give the blogger sufficient time to blog successfully?

5. Have you chosen a writer or writers who have the aptitude to blog successfully?

From 11:37, we talk about Twitter. Suw Twitters about it as we podcast.

If you want to download this as an MP3, you can download it here.

Suw and I have plans to podcast more often. She says, optimistically, once a week. Maybe when we get a portable recording device. Any suggestions?