Post 21: Cricket and the push/pull of the information age

August 10, 2009 in Computers, Freelance life, Sport, Web 2.0

I’m a cricket fan. I adore the longer form of the game.
Part of me understands that a game which spans thirty hours over five days is anachronistic and I see why some say Test cricket is dieing. It’s easy to see the logic that asserts that condensed forms of cricket tailored to the hectic demands [...]

Post 20: Will SEO homogenise English?

August 6, 2009 in Globalism, Search, The future of journalism, Traffic, Web 2.0, Work

I had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and, as often happens these days, the topic turned to getting more traffic for web sites.
One of my colleague’s foremost requests was for me to stop using British English in my writing, and to stop applying it to stories we source from our content partners.
The reason? “Virtualization” [...]

Post 13, 2009: Events need to get over the artefact, too

May 11, 2009 in Ranting, The future of journalism, Web 2.0, Work

I’ve written several times before that I try not to attend real-world press events. They are nearly always overly-long and contain too much marketing-speak, so are not often particularly good uses of my time.
I’ve been thinking about why, and I think there are some hints in the decline of newspapers.
The thing about newspapers is that [...]

Post 12, 2009: Twitter means journos always have react quotes

April 24, 2009 in Web 2.0, Work

Maybe I am dense, but while writing a story this morning it hit me – I can now get instant reactions on almost any topic or issue via. Twitter. A quick search, a few cut and pastes and …. bang! … the voice of the people, fresh from the Net can adorn any story.
I slipped [...]

Post 10, 2009: Some reasons why Twitter is and is not the new e-mail.

April 20, 2009 in P-aaaaargh!, Web 2.0, social networking

I’m getting a fair few Direct Messages and @messages from Twitter friends – and folks like PRs.
They’re using it as an alternative to conventional messaging tools like e-mail.
Is it a good idea?
Perhaps, because Tweets are:

Short! (mercifully so compared to many emails)
Intimate, thanks to Twitter’s rules it is very hard to spam someone
Deniable – Email is [...]

Post 3, 2009. Mnemonics

February 12, 2009 in Freelance life, Search, Web 2.0, Work

I was writing a document yesterday and found myself thinking about which phrases it contained that I would one day use to find it using Google desktop search.
In the past, I imagine I would have thought about the name or been more careful with the folders I saved the file into.
Now my whole thought process [...]

Post 70:08 Social networking saves my bicycle

November 24, 2008 in Bicycles, Web 2.0, social networking

Last week my nicest bike, a road bike with carbon fibre forks,  was stolen.
I rode it to the station, locked it on a bike rack and … when I returned it had gone.
I parked it there because it is 10 metres from the entrance to a train station and in full view of a shop. [...]

Post 69:08 Globalism schmobalism

November 11, 2008 in Globalism, Web 2.0, Work, social networking

A few months ago, a large software company invited me to the USA for one of its events. I would have flown at the nice end of the plane and been entertained grandly for the duration at a cost of $15,000-$20,000.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked the local outpost of the vendor for a [...]

Post 64:08 Hi PRs – thanks to my new experiment you can send me ALL THE PRESS RELEASES YOU WANT!

September 12, 2008 in Freelance life, Web 2.0, Work

For more than five years, I have asked vendors and their PR companies not to send me unsolicited press releases.
I don’t really need them and I was sent so many, they became an irritant. Most are drivel.
So I decided to do without them.
I’ve had to be a bit prickly about it, but I think the [...]

Post 61:08 The other way user-generated content is killing quality journalism

August 29, 2008 in Web 2.0

This is NOT a rant about bloggers being sloppy journalists.
But I think user-generated content has a lot to do with the problems publishers like Fairfax are experiencing.
Here’s why.
In the good old days of journalism, publishers effectively operated three business. One was a journalism business, which kind of broke even from display ads. One was production/distribution [...]