Posted by Danny Whatmough on Oct 31, 2008
Here is our round-up of this week’s interesting bits and bobs:
Missed anything?
Posted by Danny Whatmough on Oct 28, 2008
There is a great post over on the BBC Internet Blog, in which Adam Hutchinson reveals the work he has done examining how BBC viewers consume and share media:
“In early 2008, we studied how people find, play, personalise and share programmes across different devices and services – like BBC iPlayer, Sky+, YouTube, peer-to-peer and traditional TV and radio. We discovered what is important for people and what problems they face. “
As has already been seen to some extent, the growth of digital technologies radically increases the number of ways in which we are able to consume all types of media and, through it, information. TV is a good example of how this is happening in practice, but there are similar trends occuring everywhere. And, as Adam discusses, this very neatly moves into obvservations around social technologies and how we share and broadcast information ourselves to our friends, peers and even strangers.
As Adam highlights, one of the major developments is choice. Whereas previously all our TV viewing would likely have been focused around only a few channels, now we have vastly increased options, not to mention PPV, Sky+ and the iPlayer to name a few. This choice exists online too with the exponential increase of information sources, from blogs and news portals to social media and instant messaging.
Added to this is the ‘democratisation of media’, through which we are encouraged to broadcast our own thoughts and feelings far and wide and ‘engage’ in conversations and discussions.
The way in which we link all these different actions is something I find really fascinating. Are we more likely to share a blog post through social media as opposed to news we read in a newspaper through word of mouth? Do we prefer to consume certain types of information through specific media channels?
As Adam states, the really exiciting element is when ‘the media’ starts to use this information to change the way they operate and improve the user experience. And from a PR viewpoint, this also has obvious, far-reaching implications and considerations.
I’m off to an event tonight looking at the future of newspapers, and I expect that some of the themes explored here will be debated there in more detail…
Posted by Kate Solomon on Oct 27, 2008
Do you know what happened to the last PC you got rid of? Whether you took it to be recycled, donated it for reuse or sold it on, there’s a chance its final resting place is actually in a smouldering heap in a developing country.
The WEEE directive, intended to prevent our e-waste from being dumped in landfill sites in the UK, has led to some enterprising law-breakers taking the problem to a whole new level. E-waste cowboys are dumping shipments of trash computer equipment in countries that don’t have the facilities to deal with it:
• Just one in four of these PCs actually work at time of shipping
• The toxic fumes from burning PCs cause health problems
• Children paid to scavenge through dangerous materials
We’ve been working with IT charity Computer Aid International to raise awareness of and hopefully find a solution to this problem with a wide-reaching new campaign and our first government e-petition.
The real problem is that the government has brought in an ambitious directive to bring the UK’s e-waste stream under control, but has little resource dedicated to policing it – with enough support, our petition can help bring about a change to this.
So do your homework before taking the first disposal option available for your obsolete computer equipment and join our campaign for action against this toxic trade by signing the petition here.
Posted by Danny Whatmough on Oct 24, 2008
I was away last week so this post contains two weeks-worth of interesting bits and pieces from around the web!
Missed anything…?
Posted by Danny Whatmough on Oct 22, 2008
 
The blogosphere and twittersphere has been murmuring today about an article on Wired written by Valleywag’s (Silicon Valley’s notorious gossip website) Paul Boutin.
In the article, Boutin claims that blogging is dead:
“Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”
I’ve written on this topic before [Boutin cites the Calacanis drama too]. And I think – again – Boutin is missing the point. Sure, media organisations, professional journalists and even ‘professional bloggers’ have jumped on blogging bandwagon and are now churning out posts all over the place, but that in itself does not diminish the power of blogs and ‘amateur’ bloggers. [The use of 'professional' and 'amateur' is clunky because of connotations associated, but I think you get the point]
Of course, when there were fewer blogs and fewer bloggers, it was easier for bloggers to be heard on a wider scale, but was this a good thing?
Now, I am a big fan of Twitter, but Twitter, Facebook et al work in different ways. Brevity is often good, but I rarely find myself musing on a 140 character Tweet in the same way I would on a thought-provoking blog post.
Blogging works best when the writer is focusing on a particular niche that they are passionate and knowledgeable about. And when you discover a network of bloggers discussing a niche that is of interest to you, then that can be very powerful and exciting. Professional bloggers are not as interested in ‘niche’ because the area of influence is not big enough.
We shouldn’t be naive enough to think that blogging (or at least ‘amateur’ blogging) will be around for ever or that is it even yet hitting mainstream, but I [still] don’t think it is dead or dying!
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