"the internet" in Weblog

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off… And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown into which I could paste feed urls. That means that the vast majority of podcasts, those further down the popularity curve (Long Tail anyone?!), will remain obscure. This morning it occurred to me that I might be wrong though.

The BBC is advertising podcasts on its World Service. News bulletins, documentaries, the works are all up for download. They were experimenting with this stuff when I freelanced for them 3 years ago but I just hadn’t noticed how completely they’d embraced it. With that sort of exposure, on a global scale, podcasts could be tipped (buzzword bingo!) into the mainstream far sooner than I was predicting…

I’ve been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its recommendation engine - I can click on ‘My feeds’ and be shown entries ordered by my likely interest in them, which suits me much better than strict chronology thanks to the time pressure I’m normally under.

But of everything I most enjoy the weekly Rojo Newsletter. It’s an edited aggregation of the weeks happenings according to the blogosphere. It exposes me to more stuff than I would see in a strictly pull system. I actually think it might be replacing Sunday magazines for me…

I don’t follow the news as closely as I’d like, thanks to time. Being a web professional I have to spend a lot of my weekly reading time keeping up to date with emerging techniques in my field. I used to buy the Sunday papers for a summary of the weeks events and I particularly like the Sunday papers’ magazines. The in-depth articles the magazine format offers help to bring me back up to date with the stories I’ve only followed vaguely. The Rojo Newsletter gives me an overview of what’s been going on but the web format gives me links to more and more and more detail, if I want it.

It’s hard to say how representative I am of other peoples’ reading habits but I can really see more people moving over to this style of news consumption.

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking… It’s a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren’t they reducing their artists’ saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What’s in it for them?

I remember being told by one of my friends that hardly anyone makes money from an indie single (unless you are Gnarles Berkeley) - they’re tools to help promote the album. Releasing a single requires a lot of effort: design, promotion, distribution. All for 500-2000 units shifted… It must be incredibly time consuming.

Now consider a podcast. It’s almost free to run and you have a base of subscribers from your target market receiving your music regularly. That must be the most cost effective album promotion possible. Consumers get some free music, the labels get some free promotion and everyone’s happy.

There are a couple of catches though. Where do they get these subscribers from in the first place? Some promotion is therefore required. Further into the future, what happens when podcasts have become a mainstream medium? Surely it’ll become increasingly difficult to get noticed as the big labels wade in with their hefty wallets. And finally, podcasts suffer from the same problem as RSS - pull technology reduces serendipidy. Why would you subscribe to a labels’s feed if you don’t know their music already?

So podcasts have their problems but the labels to crack them will have a year or more’s head start on the rest of the game… So far I’ve bought 4 albums after hearing singles on the Radio Subpop podcast and it’s not cost them anything to get me hooked.

I released a new article on Monday called Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids. As always, I’ve been watching its progress around the internet community very closely. Having done this a few times now I’ve noticed a very distinct pattern to the spread emerging.

Once the article was up on Content with Style I emailed a few people: css-d, 456 Berea Street, CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and a few others. No spamming, just a few personal emails to folk I genuinely thought would be interested in the subject. As it turns out, most of them were interested. Both Roger Johanssen and Alex Giron linked it up immediately and that’s when the fun started.

I kept an eye on the log files over the following couple of days… ALL the links in the first day were from CSS Beauty and 456 Berea Street, and that really is a testament to the following those sites have earned themselves. Even though the article only got linked from the side notes of each, the traffic was phenominal. Off the back of those two links Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids made it onto the del.icio.us Most Popular list, which, as I’ve seen before, proved to be the tipping point.

From the moment the article made that list, the traffic shifted. The Most Popular list feeds on itself - the higher up the list you are the more people see your article and the more people bookmark it. And on and on.

Over the last day the traffic has calmed down and the inbound traffic has diffused - now coming from personal blogs and forums. Some of these sites are far less subject-specific than the original sources.

This is only a very small example but it illustrates perfectly the idea of ‘thought leaders’ and ‘points of infulence’. PR and marketing people will already be well aware of this concept but though I have come across the idea many times I’d never really thought about it in a practical way.

This feels like a real democratisation of information to me. If your content is useful and/or interesting then it can gather a large audience very quickly with a little help from these ‘thought leaders’.

I’m told that this is how many Sun press releases are put out these days. The head of communications sends out an email to a handful of journalist acquanitances and if they are interested, they spread the word.

Communications departments should be paying attention…

When the JCB song video did the rounds a few weeks ago I was completely charmed. I watched it through several times, ordered the album and then spent a while browsing the Monkeehub website. That’s every marketing man’s dream! Not only did I buy the product I also spent time looking up others involved.

Now, I’ve bought albums based on videos before - I have a notepad that I carry around with me that has band names and song titles scrawled all over it, but I don’t think the experience has ever been this easy. Because I saw the video online, it was only a couple of short clicks to get everything I needed… Offline it’s more of a chore: I get distracted, something else comes along, whatever. This one medium approach is something I’ve never come across before.

Are we going to see more of this kind of thing? What is the audience of MTV2? I’m told it’s relatively small… The catch is that to flourish on the web either the song or the video have to be something special, so that rules out a lot of the major label signings. Monkeehub did an absolutely incredible job, perfectly matching the tone of both the music and the lyrics, and the song itself is great. I’m not such a fan of the rest of the album, to be honest, but my point is that the online promo did something I very rarely do: go straight out and spend my money.

I would dearly love to know how Nizlopi’s sales have done since that video started circulating.

So, Google vs Microsoft then? It sounds like this is going to be more interesting than I was expecting… The leader in findability and online advertising vs the leader in consumer platforms.

While I was setting up my brother’s computer a couple of weeks ago I had to unplug my desktop from my home network… Until that point I hadn’t really noticed how little use I have for a computer without the internet. I reckon that about 80% of the time I spend at my computer relies on an internet connection. Now I come to think of it, the ease with which I adjusted to my iBook bears testimony to this as well. Once I had my mail and internet connection set up, with a bit of synchronisation here and there, I felt at home.

So for me, and probably many others, useful computing depends on the internet. All I need is a few key apps and I can work on any platform…

My money’s on Google.

It’s a bit of a co-incidence but there appears to be a chap blogging the progress of the internet in China! Interesting reading… ChinaWhite.

I’ve not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn’t feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The ‘China writer’ has been sentenced to 10 years because ‘he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message’. Christ almighty! That must sit very uneasily with the conciences of those in the Yahoo boardroom.

And they’re not alone. If I remember correctly, Google allows the Chinese government to limit their search results and Microsoft also censor their MSN Spaces blogging service.

I suppose everyone has to decide where to draw the line and for Yahoo it was at the $1 billion mark. I don’t know how much the others cost.

Now, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, beyond the moral issue.

Firstly, I don’t understand how the Chinese government can do all this, technically. The resources they’re pouring in must be enormous.

Secondly, censorship destroys the single greatest (and worst) thing about the internet - there is information for everyone out there, no matter what they’re into. Working at Wordtracker has given me an insight into what people are looking for on the internet, and while most of it is legit, some of it really, deeply disturbing… And I’m quite laissez faire. Still, the internet, at its heart, is about putting folk in touch with other like-minded people. Without that, how much benefit do the Chinese people really get from the digital revolution that has changed the lives of so many?

Anyway, over at Wordtracker we call it ‘online behaviour’ and it’s a facinating step into cyber-sociology. The internet takes up so much of so many peoples’ lives but we know so little about what’s actually going on. I guess the Chinese have realised that and have developed the world’s first cyber-dictatorship.

UPDATE 4 June 2009: Apparently Hackney Council have updated their website and there’s now a full list of polling stations available as a PDF.

Right, I’m frustrated. It’s the Mayoral elections tomorrow along with voting for the European parliament and the London Assembly. There’s been a lot of fuss made about postal voting and the polling cards being overly complicated. To be honest, I welcome the opportunity to vote by post - it saves me a queue at least. It does deprive me of the experience of participating in democracy but I’ll get over it. And as for the voting papers themselves, I read the instructions, drew some crosses and that was that. Simple.

But… My housemate is voting in person. He asked me what on the surface appeared to be a simple question: Where’s the nearest polling station? So I hit Google for what I thought was the most sensible query. I then spent 20mins going around the various local authority sites including Hackney Council and London Elects, amongst others, only to be confounded every time. I found loads of information about the mechanics of filling in the forms but nothing about polling stations, save a phone number which will undoubtedly be busy all of tomorrow. I admit that I wasn’t reading particularly carefully but that’s what good site design is all about - allowing users to find information quickly and accurately. The Hackney Council site homepage didn’t even mention the elections and the London Elect site’s ‘How do I vote’ section lead me to a phone number.

I eventually gave up… I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t find something on the internet! It’s an absolute disgrace that this information isn’t readily available considering current voter apathy and limited attention spans. All it takes is a little bit of thought, a splash of planning and some consideration for the user.

Vodaphone have created an incredibly slick, high-bandwidth site to promote their R&D department’s work. They’ve used streaming Flash video (Comm Server), slick transitions, heavy media, large pictures… Everything! With broadband spreading, is this what we can expect from the internet in the future?