Memex 1.1

This morning’s Observer column…

Is there such a thing as a ‘win-win’ situation? Journalistic cynicism says no. What the phrase usually means is that some people get more than they deserve and others get less - but not so little that they scream blue murder. The big puzzle about the ‘ground-breaking settlement’ announced last week between Google and its legal opponents, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, is whether it really is - as all parties claim - a victory for everyone…

The Bookseller magazine picked up on this piece and posted a good summary.

TechCrunch snippet about a kind of retrospective twitter service.

Memiary, a site built by developer Sid Yadav over the course of a weekend, is looking to help you remember what you’ve been doing with your life. The site is a micro-diary, offering a private place to fill in your thoughts and takes only a minute or so to fill out every day. Blogging fills this role well enough for many people, but most of us aren’t comfortable with sharing the most personal details of our day-to-day lives with anyone who stumbles across our webpage. And most of us simply don’t have time to fill out longform diary entries, so the short text snippets work well.

Getting started is simple: enter an email address and password, and you’re presented with five text fields asking what you’ve done today. Fill those in, click the checkbox next to each one, and you’re done. Each of those daily activities is saved in a log, which can be browsed through later. At this point the site is very barebones (understandable because of its short development time), but I’d like to see more ways to input my daily activities, such as through a SMS message…

James Cridland has some interesting reflections on the dilemmas facing BBC bosses following the Ross/Brand fiasco.

When a high-profile radio presenter leaves your station, it often poses a particular point of dissent between the website editor and the station management. “I want him off the website”, the edict will inevitably be. “Delete every single image of him.” And that’s understandable. But, sometimes, not the right plan.

During my time managing the content of the Virgin Radio UK website, I had a number of these events. Presenters came and went; some under a £75,000-Ofcom-fine-shaped dark cloud (hello, Jon!), some after a period of much publicised absenteeism, and some because they wanted to move to a different station…

Interesting essay on Strategic News Service.

A new generation is about to seize the reins of history: the Millennial generation. Born between 1978 and 2000, the Millennials currently include 95 million young people up to 30 years of age – the biggest, most diverse age cohort in the history of the nation. In 2016, they will be 100 million strong and positioned to dominate the American political scene for 30 to 40 years.

The Millennial generation has already begun to emerge as a powerful political and social force. They are smart, well-educated, open-minded, and independent – politically, socially, and philosophically. They are also a caring generation, one that is ready to put the greater good ahead of individual rewards. And they are already spearheading a period of sweeping change.

For our new book, Generation We: How American Youth Are Taking Over America and the World Forever, Eric Greenberg sponsored a major research study into the characteristics of the Millennial generation. It was conducted by Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications, one of the most respected research organizations in the U.S., and included both extensive oral and written surveys and a series of in-depth focus groups. The Greenberg Millennials Study (GMS) offers the most detailed portrait available of the attitudes and values of today’s youth, and we’ve supplemented it with extensive research into other indicators of the behaviors and beliefs of the Millennials.

The GMS began with an in-depth national survey of 2,000 individuals of mixed gender, aged 18 to 29, conducted from July 20 to August 1, 2007. The study also included a series of 12 geographically and demographically diverse focus groups, conducted during the first week of December 2007. Each group focused on a particular demographic subset of the Millennial generation.

Taken together, the 12 focus groups captured a unique cross-section of various slices of the Millennial pie and provided some vivid personal stories and testimony to flesh out the more general observations made possible by the broader survey.

This research revealed that the Millennials are very different from Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, and are now creating a new politics in America.

More grist for the view that blogging is alive and well…

Blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks, a new study finds. Blogs create a conversation and trusted resource that influences purchase decision.

The study, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company, looks at the evolving influence from the reader’s perspective. “What we wanted to do was look at the reader’s side of the coin, look at reader patterns and how people are reading blogs…and drill down into the content impacting other media platforms,” said Valerie Combs, VP of corporate communications at BuzzLogic.

Readership of blogs is on the rise. JupiterResearch noted a 300 percent growth in monthly blog readership in the past four years. Readers look to links and multiple blog sources to extend the conversation: 49 percent of blog readers, defined as someone who reads at least one blog a month, and 71 percent of frequent readers all read more than one blog per session. Multiple blog sources offer more opportunities for consumers to see blog ads. A quarter of readers say they trust ads on a blog, compared to 19 percent who trust ads on social networking sites.

Advertisements on blogs are an opportunity for marketers to reach consumers. The findings said 40 percent of people reading blogs have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; and 50 percent of frequent blog readers say they have taken action. Of those actions: 17 percent have read product reviews online; 16 percent have sought out more information on a product or service; and 16 percent have visited a manufacturer or retailer Web site.

“More and more publishers are become extremely savvy understanding the game and becoming better at monetizing, which is great for the advertiser as well,” said Combs.

This morning’s Observer column…

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

If you believe the enthusiasts, it’s nothing less than our old friend, the paradigm shift…

There’s been a preposterous media fuss about a silly piece in Wired that was so off-beam I first thought it must be a spoof. It read like one of those pieces one finds in ‘lifestyle’ supplements. ‘Blogging is soooo yesterday’ was the general drift. It opens thus:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

It looks as though the author of the Wired piece doesn’t know that blogging, like everything else on the Web, is subject to a Power Law distribution. This is an old story — remember Clay Shirky’s lovely essay on the subject many moons ago? But the operation of a power law says nothing about the rest of the distribution — the main part of the blogosphere, which seems to me to be as lively and as valuable as ever.

Now comes a splendid piece by Mick Fealty, onlie begetter of the wonderful Slugger O’Toole blog.

During last year’s Northern Irish election campaign, the one resource that had experts feeding from it time and time again was the anonymous blog, Sammy FB Morse has a posse which delivered 18 constituency guides unsurpassed in their quality and depth by anything the Irish MSM could reproduce.

Absolute numbers matter much less than the quality of the engagement. Though one is likely to follow the other, numbers are not always a pre-determinant of a good blog, and neither is a good blog always guaranteed good numbers. And as Niall Harbinson points out, the mainstream media is not always the best place to draw readership from.

Slugger is a case in point. In absolute terms it is large in Ireland, tiny in the UK. Yet in terms of penetration of its base market, Northern Ireland, Slugger has stolen a march on all other UK political blogs.

Slugger may be cross-party and multi-denominational, but over the last six years the blog has fumbled its way into a political mission of its own: making politics in Northern Ireland work. That means avoiding the dysfunctional relationship that blogs and newspapers have with politicians elsewhere. The increased political decentralisation that we see everywhere is, at least in part, the product of a media that is obsessed with the politics of personality, gossip from the “Westminster Village” and a focus on politics rather than policy.

Right on.

This is an interesting development for those of us who follow the decline of push media.

Online and DVR audiences for the three Tina Fey skits on “Saturday Night Live” spoofing Sarah Palin were twice the size of the original television audience, according to data released Friday by Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), a provider of consumer behavior and audience exposure data to media companies and advertisers.

Among all the people who saw at least one of the three SNL sketches, 33% watched it on television during the original broadcast and a staggering 67% watched after the original broadcast either online or on a DVR.

“This is the first time we’ve seen delayed viewing numbers this big,” said Amanda Welsh, head of research for San Mateo, Calif.-based IMMI. “Usually it’s the other way around, with the overwhelming majority of viewing occurring during the actual broadcast.”

Interesting comment by Peter Preston on the BBC’s Business Editor, Robert Peston.

On both sides of the Atlantic, destitute bankers are looking round for someone to blame. ‘Did the media spook the market?’ asked Tina Brown’s new website (thedailybeast.com) on day one. British political journalists, testifying to a Lords committee, said Peston had ‘played an instrumental role’ in the story. And the Daily Mail, of course, took to the warpath, demanding: ‘Does this BBC man have too much power?’

One answer came fast from the Mail’s own political editor, talking to their Lordships. ‘More power to his elbow, if he’s the journalist leading the charge, good for him,’ said Ben Brogan warmly.

But pause, for a moment at least, and take cautious stock.

The Peston tale that spooked the City last week wasn’t even a broadcast to begin with. It started as a blog. Peston is prolific, blogging continually between studio shuttles. He can write three or four quick blogs a day, telling the net world what’s going on. It’s a brilliant service, where one thing goes with another. He’s a voracious newshound. The BBC has special salience and special clout. All that training comes specially trustworthy.

Yet the wire grows higher and higher. Blogs don’t go through anxious committees of editors, pondering deeply. They are self-publication, performed at the double.

Their speed is part of their attraction, and we’ve reached a stage where one man at his terminal can rain billions over Britain.

Here’s a really neat mashup.

Word Magazine readers have been busy building a map showing where iconic album cover photographs were taken.