Robert Freeman’s whole Media, Business and Technology thing. Sorted.
The one above probably won’t win any awards
Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab is pointing out a very clever strategy the Huffington Post has used to discover which headlines get the best clicks.
It’s been A/B testing in realtime. Half the users see one headline, half see a different one. After a certain amount of time, the headline which has got the most clicks so far becomes the one that everyone else sees.
That’s smart.
Incredible bank screw up, but innocent party is sued. Be afraid.
Mediapost reports that a California judge has ordered Google to release the ownership details of a Gmail account user, and deactivate the account.
A bank in Wyoming wants the details because it has accidentally emailed personal financial records to this Gmail address. It then emailed to try to get them deleted, but didn’t hear anything.
So, just a few issues here then:
I wouldn’t respond if a bank I’d never heard of started asking me to get in touch. That’s called Phishing.
Why was the bank emailing unencrypted files around the open internet?
What would have happened if they had posted the material to the wrong physical address? Would they send the police round to change the locks?
Why should an innocent party lose access to their email in this way?
Definitely not the end of this story yet.
Get in quick or lose HD on Freeview
OFCOM are currently requesting comment from stakeholders in the UK’s digital terrestrial TV network. As tax and licence-fee payers, that’s most of us.
They are being asked by the BBC to authorise a change in the way the new high definition multiplexes are operated to allow for the use of encryption.
I’m not a fan of this plan, many others aren’t either, including Tom Watson MP and other vocal bloggers.
Encrypting HD-DTT risks stunting the growth of high-definition in this country and threatens to criminalise anyone who’s using any sort of non-standard cheap-and-cheerful reception equipment (which by law you are required to have a TV licence for). If you’re using open source receiver software, you can kiss that goodbye should this change go through.
What amazes me is that OFCOM published their letter on the 3rd of September and want comments back by the 16th. Err, that’s today!
That’s 9 working days to get comments in on a proposal that has far-reaching ramifications on the way the system of TV distribution works in Britain. Does this indicate that OFCOM doesn’t grasp the serious implications of this change, that it just writes to the ‘industry’ and allows such a short time for responses?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good background to why this request is being made.
And if you’re still reading this today, get some comments off to
Andrew.Dumbreck@ofcom.org.uk
The best person to keep your data safe might be you
Matthew Knell writes about how he used to keep his photos on Kodak’s online service. He trusted them so much, he doesn’t have the originals to many of his pictures anymore.
Now Kodak are charging for their Photo Gallery and the choice is stark: Pay up or your photos get it.
“Stupid to put my photos exclusively in the hands of a brand I trusted? Perhaps. But I believed the hype and trusted Kodak to do the right thing with my content — forever. These were my photos, my data, and I had confidence that they would do the right thing. These were my Kodak memories. I had five years of trusted transactions with this company.”
Interestingly Kodak’s site in the UK still appears to have the original storage policy. But this is likely to change and this won’t be the last freemium service to start charging.
My favourite online video editing system, Jumpcut closed yesterday. This was innovative, collaborative and almost certainly ahead of its time. The ability to remix video simply and quickly is a big loss to creative brains.
And the real shock? Jumpcut was part of Yahoo. It bought the site in late 2006. I thought this was a very positive move and that the investment would secure Jumpcut’s longevity.
But forever can be a very short amount of time.
And how!
Paidcontent have reported that the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK are setting up their own Bittorrent tracker server to enable people to search for their content and share it amongst themselves.
What this means is that they can release much higher quality versions of their programmes and it won’t cost them any extra to distribute them. It also means that their content starts to become self-organising as the viewers and listeners can link and tag and store the stuff they want.
Already dedicated viewers of some of the material released are producing their own subtitles to translate the programmes into english, known as ‘fansubbing’.
Having your own tracker is also a great idea because it allows you to be free with your content and still retain some control as the tracker server will be accruing some vital statistics about what material is shared, when, by whom and how widely.
Maybe in the future NRK won’t even need it’s own archives, as the material will all be distributed throughout the computers of the good people of Norway. (This is clearly fanciful, it will never happen!)
I can’t help thinking that someone in the BBC is thinking that they’ve been beaten to a great idea. But why not make a start by putting every BBC Schools programme broadcast last year on a P2P network, accessed by the BBC’s own torrent tracker?
No print, no radio. Is new media solely where the money is?
Google said its move into print and radio ads would perk up media sales. It hasn’t happened.
In fact with the closure first of their print ad business, and now radio ad sales, Google leaves the market in a much worse state than it found it.
(Perhaps WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson was right when he suggested that Google ‘devalues everything it touches’?)
TV ads still seem to be on the radar, but Business Week explains why this plan might similarly struggle.
Up till three weeks ago there was speculation that Google would hang onto radio sales.
Google bought the radio automation company dMarc three years ago, agreeing a total price of over a billion US dollars, although only $102m changed hands initially.
The idea was to sell inventory quickly and easily with a much more detailed reporting structure, bringing new advertisers into a radio ad market which was already on the slide in the States.
Radio Business Report has some insight from a former dMarc customer: The original pre-Google system, while selling ads more cheaply than they could themselves, was very effective. But Google made changes to the sales method without consulting the station and revenues collapsed.
Is this just a simple development mistake? There seems to be value in these forms of selling, but only if the media owner and the advertiser can talk to one another.
Ironically, it seems as though in an online world where disintermediation is the mantra, and something Google has previously championed, the very thing which caused this failure was Google’s attempts to be the middleman.
But perhaps Google’s exit is a long-term strategic decision, rather than a short-term response to the current recession.
If so, what do they know about old media sales that we don’t?
