Archive for December, 2006
December 29th, 2006
The Christmas period has made me realise how much I’m addicted to online video. I didn’t miss email or even online news too much, but I couldn’t wait to turn on my PC this morning and check out the latest videos on YouTube.
I get the feeling I might not be the only one…
If you haven’t seen it already, the Justin Timberlake video of ‘A Special Christmas Box’ is one not to be missed. It is currently number four in the YouTube chart.
However, I am disappointed to see that The Guardian has abandoned its newsy style Viral Video Chart, in favour of a more mainstream consumer chart. It was a great idea to be ranking news and political videos separately, and I don’t know why they have abandoned it.
December 21st, 2006
It’s that time of year, when various media outlets review the year’s highlights. The best example I’ve seen so far is the TechnologyGuardian supplement, which features in the final print edition of the year, also available here.
It includes:
- The new 100 most useful sites, broken down by sector. Here are the top mainstream news sites by way of example:
- A review of the year
- A great article by Charles Arthur titled: ‘Why is it so much easier to use computers in films?’ Relating to usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s analysis of the top 10 usability “errors” in films.
My favourite quote from the article looks at Hollywood’s finest technology moment: ‘The most marvellous and jawdropping plot device, of course, remains that from Independence Day, when Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a Mac to the aliens’ starship, crashing it (and the aliens to the ground).’
Hooray for Hollywood…
December 20th, 2006
As the aftermath of Sam Sethi’s dismissal as UK editor of TechCrunch sets in, I couldn’t resist posting this cool slidebar summing up the sequence of events, courtesy of Tech Paparazzi.
Luckily, we haven’t had to wait too long for Sam and Mike Butcher’s return. Check out their new blog Vecosys here. It’s looking like it hasn’t taken them long to secure heavyweight sponsorship from the likes of 3i, Accel and Olswang!
Evaluating the success of Social Media
December 19th, 2006
I was interested to read Rick Wray’s Guardian story on the social networking bubble bursting.
The story relates to the cancellation of the Upload 2007 conference, which would have focused on the development and delivery of personalised content, due to lack of interest.
To be honest, I don’t believe the cancellation of this event necessarily points to a slow down in social networking. It could have more to do with a lack of understanding in Europe, as confirmed in the piece. Even if that isn’t the case, event organisation can be tricky at the best of times so there maybe many reasons why this event failed.
However, I do believe these questions need to be asked, and we should welcome an open and realistic debate on the future of social networking and, for that matter, social media. We should also consider that those closest to social media are not always the best judge of its successes or prospects.
On reflection, 2006 has been a landmark year. As Antony Mayfield points out, Google’s end of year Zeitgeist shows 8/10 of this year’s top searches are web, if not social media, related and we’re all Time magazine’s person of the year for using the Internet.
Very nice, but just as we shouldn’t read too much into the cancellation of an event, we shouldn’t get carried away with the perceived successes either.
2007 is sure to see a great many developments and perhaps even a new label for the sector, but isn’t that par for the course? Shouldn’t social media, by its very nature, continue to evolve and progress? If that means certain elements are improved or lost, so be it.
Perhaps I’m too close to it…
VNU to cut 4,000 jobs in European sell-off
December 18th, 2006
News has just broken that VNU has agreed to sell its European business magazines to private equity firm 3i. The sale is likely to result in 4,000 redundancies, in order to reduce VNU’s cost base by 10 percent next year.
UK magazines being sold to 3i are Accountancy Age, ComputerActive, CRN, Computing, Financial Director, Information World Review, IT Week and Personal Computer World. The online newswire VNUnet is also included in the sale.
Further details of the sale have been reported this afternoon by Reuters.
According to reports, the BME deal has been valued at €320m (£215m).