Will Corke's digital gallimaufry

Here’s today’s weekly email from Car Magazine (probably the most respected of the ‘serious’ monthly automotive titles in the UK).

You can’t miss the Facebook and Twitter logos; hell, they’re bigger than the editor! 

The promotion of a Twitter channel in this way is a significant step, and one that is probably ready to be called a twend (ha!).  The ‘kerb appeal’ of Facebook is much more obvious than Twitter whose brilliance only becomes apparent through use.  So it might be that 2009 will be the ‘twyear’ (geddit), as those driven to twial Twitter (sorry, I’ll stop now) by Obama, motoring videos and whatever other bait politicians and publishers are dangling at the time, become regular users and advocates.

How many UK Twitter users are there?  Well it seems there are approx. 4 million globally, and that 10% of these are UK based.  So about 400,000 compared to 12 million Facebookers in the UK.  A minnow a present, but undoubedly already a dream audience if you’re interested in early adopters and influencers.

Car has been one of the most adventurous titles in the UK in its attempts to reinvent content distribution and business models for the digital news age.

A couple of years ago they took the step of turning the print publication into a long article only, comment, analysis and ‘home of good writing’ in a distinctive size format: meanwhile the news, data tables and other types of content that is rendered out-of-date too quickly now by the print lead-times of a monthly, was migrated online.

It was a brave step that I really admired at the time (though there was a bit too much advertorial in the magazine itself), but which, presumably, didn’t work that well, as the approach now seems to be a hybrid strategy, where some content is online only (video, obviously!), and some print only, with a certain amount in common to the two main channels.

Woolworth’s marketing team of 4 face the axe. 4! Perhaps if they’d invested a bit more in marketing there’d still be a Woolies. http://poprl.com/8lb

There’s a piece on Brand Republic published yesterday:

“NEW YORK - Google has denied that it is working on a plan to speed up the delivery of its own content, which could end the way that all traffic on the internet is treated the same.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Google has approached cable and phone companies in the US with a proposal to create a fast lane — for its own content.”

The subject of ‘net neutrality’ (as far as I understand it, the principle that all the lanes of the information superhighway travel at the same speed, without a class system) is complex, and potentially a very big issue indeed for the future online landscape.

But as for the general principle of Google’s ‘neutrality’ as far as the services it delivers to consumers, excuse me while I utter a hollow laugh of epic proportions.

I’m old and ugly enough to remember the prognoses for the internet in 1995, when search engines like Alta Vista and Lycos were the new stars (alongside AOL). The soothsayers and prophesy merchants were keen to tell us all that the search engines would inherit the earth (and, for once, the seers were right).

The burning question was this: how can you monetize the traffic on your search engine without losing objectivity; because surely the traffic and the objectivity of search results were inextricably geared to each other. With hindsight it seems that these qualms were overestimating the intelligence of the US (and perhaps global) public…

So, a few years later, in the late ‘90s, GoTo/Overture invented key-phrase driven paid search, Google ‘borrowed’ the idea a year or so after that, and the rest is corporate history.

Did the masses desert Google once a commercial auction started to determine the content of the results pages? Did they hell! Quality Score be damned, the reality is that – for a lot of key vertical sectors like finance in particular - the paid results often delivered (thanks to the realities of the digitally-enabled open market) more relevant results than the affiliate dominated ‘natural’ search results on the left hand site of the page.

So, would Google ‘ditching neutrality’ be a worthy news story? Do me a favour, the concept of neutrality being the life blood of a search engine died in about 2000.

And as a footnote: I’m struggling to marry up the word “Google” and the phrase “its own content”… Not last time I looked it isn’t. Any of it.

The generous Joanna Burton brought a tin of Quality Street into Harvest’s Soho office this morning.

A couple of hours later, the combined efforts of 40 people had left the tin looking thusly:

Clearly the blue ones (coconut) and the golden brown (toffee) are out of favour with the Harvest Digital demograph.  Nestle, I hope you’re paying attention.

The death a few days ago of Oliver Postgate (obits) has prompted an

For me, it is not just the TV programmes that have stayed with me from childhood (my favourite is the surreal genius of the Clangers, whose fluty sing-song voices still echo in my memory), I aso loved the books, in particular Noggin the Nog, before the sing-song of Postgate’s own voice became familiar to me (you can hear him here, and enjoy some Noggin while you’re at it).

After the TV industry had cast Postgate and Firmin aside (cry Scandal!), OP ventilated his opinions and creativity on his website.

Reading an article on his site written by Postgate in 2003, where he compares the way he and Firmin worked with contemporary production methods, it struck me that P&F had a lot in common with the homebuilt, low-budget approach of some of today’s YouTube stars like Simon Tofield’s Simon’s Cat (several of whose delightful animations have already had over 5 million views).

Postgate, writing about his heyday in the ’60s and ’70s: “…we were thrown back on the real staple of television: telling and showing a good story, carefully thought out and delivered in the right order for stacking in the viewer’s mind”.  And also from the same article, another passage which must surely be largely true for Simon Tofield…  “we were lucky enough not to have time or money for lengthy conceptual meetings. All we could do was try to turn out two minutes a day of film that was fun to watch and hope to pay the bills. It was a happy time.”

Oliver (sorry; Mr Postgate), for those of us who love your work, it still is a happy time, and always will be when we visit the Clanger planet, or Noggin’s kingdom.  Thank you.

When I heard a report about Sark’s first democratic election on BBC Rad

In dramatic terms, it’s got the lot.  The quaint old-fashioned local lingo - elected representative are called ‘Conseillers of the Chief Pleas’, dramatic scenery (of course) and to top it off a pair of business tycoon brothers (twins, media barons but reclusive, it gets better and better) who have been riding roughshod over local opinion (allegedly)…

Now today the drama is moving into the final reel as the Barclays withdraw their business interests on Sark, putting 140 people out of work; a almost unreal number for a community of 600.  The brothers B had warned they would do this if they lost out in the election, an un-democratic approach surely calculated to infuriate the voter.  A BBC TWO report is here (video). which includes an interview with the Barclays’ candidate and representative on the island.

Back in November, when BBC News reported on the upcoming election, an academic political analyst from Plymouth University, Adrian Lee, commented “Moving away from a previously essentially feudal structure to a fully democratically elected Chief Pleas, there’s bound to be a great deal of interest.  In particular I suspect that [any potential] questions about undue influence, lack of fairness or lack of transparency, will get a very significant publi

Sounds like he knew what was coming.

No doubt there will be many more twists and turns in this story, but for now at least, it seems that as far as the Barclay brothers are concerned it’s a case of goodbye and good luck.

I tweeted yesterday about Kosmix : Taking a look at http://www.kosmix.com/ - the new Google? Purleeesss. Describes itself as “beta-ish”, which is quite charming.

First result of this was a polite tweet back from a Kosmix staffer; the second time in a day that this has happened to me (the other instance was Yuuguu).  Clearly monitoring and responding to Twitter references is now becoming standard for forward-looking companies, as it should be.

The New Statesman published a good review of Kosmix yesterday: “it’s like the portals of old remade for a Web 2.0 age.”

Anyway, I’ve had a bit more of a play with Kosmix now, and searching (sorry, browsing!) within topics where I’m familiar with Google results and other methods of search did deliver a few unexpected and useful results.  As Iain Simons says in his review for NS, the execution is elegant, and it does feel mature already in a way that Cuil didn’t when it hit the market a few months ago.

In a recent tweet I was wondering where it was I had read news of a site that connects runners with the elderly and needy on their running routes.

@markrocky helped me out; the good gym, a brilliantly simple idea that could really work.

Oh, and where I read about it was in a blog post by Andy Hobsbawm of Green Thing, about Social Innovation Camp (‘social technology for social change’), which sounds like it was a fabulous event. Andy’s post explains the Good Gym concept rather better than their current website does; perhaps he should help out.

The last two or three weeks have seen a flurry of news stories about redundancies in the digital agency world.  After years of 30-40% growth this is undoubtedly a chill wind in the industry.

When the going gets tough… the recruitment ‘consultants’ get on the phone, and email, and phone, and etc.

So the volume of email and phone calls from ‘placement’ ‘experts’ (sorry if my quotation marks make me sound a bit jaded, but I am) has leapt upwards with each piece of grim news.  And judging from the agents’ approaches, it seems - unsurprisingly - as if trade press coverage is lagging the tough reality.

As far as Harvest Digital Ltd is concerned, we are (in the general atmosphere of uncertainty) more than a little reluctant to pay recruitment fees of ~20% to get people through the door.

So here’s some advice to all you newly out-of-work digital specialist looking for employment (and Harvest IS still hiring); go after the companies you want to work for, and go DIRECT.  The commercial argument for the employer is a big part of this of course, but any candidate who shows some initiative, by tracking down her or his next employer of choice (or at least by pretending they are the chosen employer) will have a double advantage.

I’ll sit back and wait for the CVs to roll in…  jobs@harvestdigital.com

Twitter entry 8th Dec 08: Interflora sues M&S and flowers Direct for trademark infringement on adwords; a test case post-Google’s policy change? http://poprl.com/7Yj

Update 9th Dec 08 : Latest from BrandRepublic.com suggest this really could be the test case.  I suspect others who have issued legal warnings will wait to see how the Interflora suit plays out.

Last night I went to an event put on by Tomorrow’s Company at the East India Club in St James’ Square, a Victorian palazzo built as a club for officers of the East India Company in 1849.

The do was held in the Smoking Room, but of course there was no smoke and no East India Company officers for that matter, so Tomorrow was under discussion surrounded by a host of yesterdays.

The incongruousness of the venue’s history (and dress code - ties please - for that matter) was nicely referenced in an opening address by Tony Manwaring of T’s Co.

The first speaker was Bill Becker, the Exec Director of Obama’s eco planning team (PCAP - Presidential Climate Action Project).  Bill gave us a crisp and compelling whistle-stop tour of the arguments for immediate and long-term investment in the Green Economy.  On this occasion, there was a strong sense that he was preaching to the converted, but I still found it fascinating and quite impressive to experience ‘close-up’ a member of the Democrat central team which will finally get to implement their policies next year.

Also, I hadn’t properly understood before just how central ecologically driven planning is to Obama’s policy platform.

The second speaker, equally on top of his game, and another high-level operator well used to the international conference scene, was Pavan Sukhdev, research leader of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative (as well as, by way of diversity, holding down a job as Head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets business in India), who had an immensely engaging and persuasive way of making the case for a wholesale re-engineering of the world’s view of economics, using concepts like ’Natural Capital’.

Under the gaze of a battledress-suited Sir Winston, Pavan welcomed Obama’s USA into the eco-fold, reminding the room that, in Churchill’s words, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.“  To remove any chance of smugness among non-Americans present, we were reminded that the UK’s usage of renewable energy is still less than 2% (well behind most of the rest of Europe).

All in all a great event; sadly I couldn’t stay for the music, food, drink and general festivities which looked set to run on for some time.  And on a more serious note, it is enormously reassuring that such able people as Bill and Pavan are devoting themselves to all of our future.