Like Dr Johnson’s walking dog, the most interesting fact about David Cameron’s new video blog is that it exists at all. It’s pretty nice, some early tech glitches (registering crashed Firefox on a Mac) but overall obviously well designed in a 37 Signals/Don’t Make Them Think style.
The lesson for my party, Labour, if there is one, is that Cameron’s obviously prepared to take some quite significant risks with his web brand. Letting the great unwashed in to comment on things is one such risk (although obviously there are going to be huge moderation gates between posting and the live Web, but I can’t check that due to registration grinches). Another is being brave enough to put up a site with the badge “beta” on it, which might not mean much to those of us involved in the day-to-day Web, but it’s my experience that the concept of putting up something that is even in a small way “unfinished” frightens the pants off most people.
I don’t believe for a minute it’ll make a difference to any future general election. I still believe that Gordon Brown will beat Cameron easily, if only because there is no strength in depth at all in the Tory ranks, and we webheads are kidding ourselves if we think we hold the key to electoral success. They didn’t in the US, and they won’t here. So the significance of Cameron’s blog is attitudinal, and that might be his personal tragedy - by grasping at interesting and potentially game-changing straws, Cameron highlights the paucity of his party’s political idea base. He may be blazing a trail, but it won’t lead him personally to Downing Street.
This is just a thought, but is the MySpace music community so vibrant because official band sites are so appallingly Flashtastically bad? Because people just want to, you know, talk to each other and share stuff without having to sit through some incredibly intricate Flash animation which a Shoreditch refugee knocked together last week.
And are record company execs curating MySpace sites because they can launch them quickly, with no budget, and with bags of functionality that Shoreditch design agencies can only dream about?
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Transport for London’s new traffic site, showing congestion, roadworks and CCTV. Amazing.
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Genius remaking of the Matrix trailers….with Muppets.
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Good stuff from Cutts, including some interesting observations on how human action and interaction will continue to manifest itself in search results.
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Google official statement on their approach to copyright protection. It does rather beg the question “why does anyone have a problem then?” without giving any concrete response.
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Did you know….that every fifth mile on a US highway has to be perfectly straight so you can land a plane on it?
UPDATE: Almost as interestingly, this is garbage (see comments). And through the miracle of PageRank and HTML, I have added an infinitesimal amount of additional weight to this garbage by posting it. I’ll get me coat.
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the immersive experience put The Simpsons across the various FIM properties. I’m not sure how it paid off for the premiere but 1.4 million streams of the first seven minutes of the premiere episode were served in three days. At MySpace, users left the s
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Research firm eMarketer forecast online ad spending will rise 26.8 percent this year to $15.9 billion
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“The way it works is simple. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third).”
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“Let’s say that you think Facebook will get to 10bn page views a month shortly. Let’s give each page an effective CPM of $1. Then that’s $10mm per month in revenue. I am not sure if I should add the Microsoft deal to that number or not. I’ll hedge and say
This is really interesting, and I don’t pretend to even begin to understand the implications of it:
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us reports 1 million users - post Yahoo! growth tops all of Digg
Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter just posted to the del.icio.us blog that the service has registered its 1 millionth user. Schachter says that number has more than tripled in the last 9 months. The company was acquired by Yahoo! ten months ago, in December of 2005.
Digg, by comparison, reported last month that it has a half million registered users. While del.icio.us came online in late 2003, Digg launched in December of 2004. That means that del.icio.us had 300k users in its first two years and Digg has 500k in its first two years. The impact of the Yahoo! acquisition has also been big, though - with del.icio.us gaining more than 600k in the last 9 months.
What’s interesting to me is that Y! hasn’t really given Flickr and del.icio.us the full network push. I think both brands have been very well protected and nurtured - the biggest evidence of that being that all the key players behind them are still Y! employees, as far as I know.
When I say “full network push” I’m being deliberately imprecise. Obviously there have been bits and pieces of integration. But MyWeb, for instance, has been integrated into search, while del.icio.us hasn’t. And it still doesn’t say “del.icio.us” or “flickr” on the yahoo.com homepage.
So how do we explain this dramatic growth? Is this just standard network effect stuff, or is there something about being under the umbrella of a major company that allows entities like this to thrive? I don’t know the answer, but maybe someone does, and it’s well worth discussion.
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Tells you how accurate the weather forecast was for a particular zip code. I imagine the accuracy would be terrible in Britain!
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Round up on Federated, BlogAds and AdBrite.
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“Basically the cornerstone of Celtic identity is that they are not English. However, to try to base that, as some do, on an idea that is not far beneath the surface that Celtic countries are somehow descended from a race of Celts, which the English are no
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“Whenever she tries to promote herself, it falls flat. Books, records, movies, etc. don’t work for Paris. Because she’s actually a platform. Like Digg and YouTube.” Paris Hilton as attention platform for major international brands
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Two blokes go into a bar. One, in a broad Northern accent, admits to taking a few thou here and there when signing the occasional football player at the local club he manages. The other, in a broad Russian accent, admits to stealing national assets from his own nation, hoodwinking and threatening locals out of their share of assets which by rights belong to the nation (ie, them), and stealing a major national sport from beneath the noses of its own audience.
The local policeman, a sanctimonious old geezer know to be subject to a financial incentive or two of his own, comes in and opens an investigation into the Northern bloke. The Russian buys the pub, turns it into an expensive Italian bistro, and employs a surly-looking Portuguese with a nice coat and a dodgy haircut to run it.
English FA to investigate claims Allardyce took bribes - Yahoo! Sport UK
