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.

Wired backgrounds the story.

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.

Radio-on-your-mobile learns lessons of 2 generations ago

The National Association of Broadcasters in the US, is trying to interest more phone manufacturers into including FM radios in their handsets. I’m amazed this hasn’t been a priority earlier, radio listening is increasing, mostly on devices that aren’t traditional analogue radios.

The NAB initiative is keen to see antennas included within the handset, so people can listen with wireless headphones. Most FM radios currently require wired headsets, as it’s the wire which is picking up the signal.

I’m instantly thinking of the 60s revolution in radio when transistors brought in pocket-sized radios and a fleet (literally) of new radio stations offered new listeners greater choice.

Will this happen again? With integrated antennas in phones, are we likely to see groups of people lying in the sun, in a park, chilling around their phone? (I almost hope not, seeing as I already get this on the top deck of London Buses!)

I don’t think so.  Here’s why. Radio hasn’t worked out a way to make their content as transparent and accessible as the on-demand kind. It’s too linear. Online I can tell a great deal about what I’m listening to. MP3 devices are full of extra metadata to rate and order the content on them.

Listening to the radio, when you’re used to the alternative, is a bit like flying in the dark. I don’t know what’s coming next, and I’m not sure I like that.

I listen to loads of audio downloads of radio programmes. That’s about having what I want, when I want, and what I’ve selected is a known quantity, even if I don’t know the exact content when I download it.

Interestingly Apple have never included any radio tuner on their devices. I’ve always wondered if online listening apps like Last.fm would be quite as popular if there was a default radio tuner already onboard.

Maybe not. I can’t say I listen to the radio on my Nokia that much. Apart from anything, the audio’s pretty terrible and I’m used to crystal clear digital sound nowadays. And when I’m out and about I tend not to be idly listening and I always have something downloaded and ready to go on either my phone (normally news and current affairs, because I can download on-the-go) or my iPod (usually stuff that won’t date so quickly).

Britain’s temporarily backtracked on having more DAB services.  But I’m all for them, but not as linear radio. New DAB should be essentially a data loop of content on various channels. When you’re in within reception, your phone just starts downloading the programmes off the air, depending on the preselections you’ve made.

It could all be done faster than real-time. It should all come with current text information and metadata which your phone captures as well. I download lots of RSS headlines … they could just come straight to the phone.  Like Ceefax, but digital, wireless and mobile.

Live streams could be carried too.  You could be interrupted by important live news, like travel and traffic info) while I’m listening to something pre-recorded. Like the way RDS works in cars, having opted-in, your phone swaps your headphones over to the live stream when an update is going out.

The swinging 60s pioneered shared, accessible youth media. Technology was the catalyst. I can’t help but think we’re missing an important lesson from two generations ago.

At least not in this form

The Sun have started up an online radio show, Sun Talk and it’s now been running just over a week.

I can’t see it lasting.

Let’s qualify this. I applaud any newspaper’s efforts to meet the challenge of winning new audiences in digital spaces, but you don’t do that by merely matching what your analogue competition does. To stand out and stay ahead, you need to leapfrog your competition.

Sun Talk sounds like a standard analogue radio format pushed on the web.

It’s very linear. Three hours realtime, and the ‘listen again’ is one big block of three hours too.  There’s no way to skip to bits that might interest you specifically, even though the Sun list some highlights text in their player console.

The audio-drag bar doesn’t even give you any timing so you can’t see how far along the programme you are, even if you knew where to jump to.

Given that this is not traditional radio, part of the online effect is that you tend to get more people listening on-demand than live. But the show isn’t structured in a way that means the Sun can take advantage of this, by packaging segments up and offering them discretely.

The show needs to have the podcast listeners in mind, more than the live ones, but this is currently round the wrong way.

The jingles are fun, but again very old radio and I think they’ll get on your nerves after a while, particularly as there doesn’t appear to be any dynamic compression, so the levels constantly jump up and down.

Amazingly there’s no interaction between the website and the audio show, witnessed by the fact that Jon Gaunt references stories in the paper … (actually *in* the paper, you can see him pick it up in the studio and read it)

“Did you see that story in the paper? Go out and get it if you didn’t!”

I don’t need to go out and get it Jon, I’m on the internet. I can surf to the story, if you send out some data streams with the audio, or just stick a link to the story on a page, or in the player perhaps?

Equally I smiled when Jon broke into a guest’s answer to remind people who he was and what they were listening too, as if I’d just been tuning up and down the dial and happened across him.

There’s a huge banner on my screen with that information!

Who’s listening? Internet chatter is strangly muted. There’s a spike on launch day and then very little. Apart from a great wrap of the first programme from John Plunkett, the blogs are quiet – this can’t be good.

What it good about this project is it gets the Sun journos used to producing, regularly, more than just a newspaper and website.

However, listening to columnist after columnist gets a bit boring, particularly when the Sun, the paper, is positively alive with interesting and fun material. The Sun in audio format, this is not.

Radio’s a great medium to experiment in because it’s so cheap, but hugely competitive because there are so few barriers to entry.

It’s daring because many of the core group of Sun readers wouldn’t be online radio listeners, so maybe there’s a new audience to attract here.

Yes, it’s a good exercise in brand extension, but it’s not a way to make money, and in this form, it’s not really doing anything innovative … yet.

The illusory magic of television can be just that

Graham Johnson writes about the difficulties of trying to produce TV on a limited budget. We don’t see enough first-hand accounts like this.

In the current environment, will these experiences get more common?

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?

I was on BBC Look East last night, commenting on the news that a teenage girl was sacked 3 weeks into her job, for telling her Facebook friends that it was boring.

This certainly isn’t an isolated case.

I think that if you’re 16, putting a status update saying that you’re bored is exactly the same as leaning over to your friend in a cafe and saying the same thing. Employers should bear this in mind, but also new employees have to realise that the rest of the world doesn’t work like this yet.

The other important thing is social networking privacy.  Put those settings up to maximum and don’t add people that you don’t know.

Friendship is something to be earned, it’s not something you give away at the click of a button. As you get to know someone more, then you can release some of the privacy controls and let them know a bit more about your life.

Although I have to say, what’s this young lady doing on Facebook? Get over to Plurk!

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?