The Tube Map re-drawn on foursquare’s terms
Posted: May 28, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 CommentI am, like many in social media circles a little addicted to foursquare. That is, except when I get booted out of mayorship of the local pub by a guy checking in at 8am (i checked it was closed!).
There have been some great examples of campaigns using foursquare over the past few months, the excellent Jimmy Choo CatchaChoo and the Starbucks and Dominos Pizza ‘loyalty’ schemes to mention a few.
However, what really got me excited was the first really nice infographic map (is that a term) of the data accrued by our London transport check-ins. Its paints a nice picture of what areas are trending, and where the new media agencies are based. I can’t believe that despite my frantic check-ins I didn’t manage to get Bethnal Green on there!
Thank you Techcrunch (Source: http://eu.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/Foursquare-Tube-Infographic-Non-Pie-v2.jpg)
WordPress vs WordPress – A Facebook ‘like’ fail, and the battle of .org and .com
Posted: May 28, 2010 Filed under: Blogging 1 CommentBeing from a media/advertising rather than tech background I made the choice (not that actively) of using a blog provider that made it easy for me to write add images and post.
There are so many out there, from Posterous and Blogger, to TypePad and Tumblr all offering a load of usually free capability. They all purport to make the whole process easier, understanding that the hardest bit of blogging is writing the content.
Of the few I have tried I really like the functionality of both WordPress (.com) and Posterous but I am frustrated by the fact that I cannot employ the tool of the moment, the Facebook ‘like’ button. Coding has never been a strong point, even inserting pics can be a trial, but the more I try the more I realise that the self hosted blogs offer you the real opportunities to get you noticed and get your content spreading socially. Services like the ‘like’ button and TweetMeme are essential and for the moment off limits. The conclusion is that migrating to WordPress.org seems like my only option, but I wish this had all been made clear at the start!
Lesson learned: choose a blog host that matches your aspirations.
As for the ‘like’ button, its causing a storm for good reason, bringing the social functions and sharing capabilities of Facebook, to the wider web. Its a great opportunity for Facebook to build up a much more in depth profile of users tastes, all at the click of a button, not even on Facebook but on the site you are already at. Sharing your preferences with your friends but not causing you to have to leave the site you are on, ‘fishing where the fishes are’. Added to this the psychological barrier of becoming a ‘fan’ now seems prohibitive compared to the flippency of clicking a ‘like’.
Over 100,000 sites that are purported to have added ‘like’ functionality in the first three weeks of release, one of the best examples of the ‘like’ button is on the Levis website, US only at the moment!
A week is a long time in audio
Posted: May 11, 2010 Filed under: Audio | Tags: audio, AudioBoo, future of audio, future radio, futures, Hackney Podcast, Mixcloud, Playdio, podcast, podcasting, Sony Radio Awards, Soundcloud, Spotify, we7, we7.com 1 CommentIts definitely time for a mammoth blog post after at least a week of inactivity! And its audio themed, debating the following points, think of it as three for the price of one:
1) What we should make of Spotify’s new features
2) Is the podcast dead?
3) Is a fusion between Spotify and podcasting the best way round the music rights issues that have crippled podcasts.
Spotify is often criticized for being too niche, an exclusive club if you like, one in which hardcore ‘muso’ members make up a majority of the traffic. This is a criticism I heard from two execs at we7.com, who describe the service’s audience as solely early adopters (as a negative thing!), versus their broader more mass market platform they espoused. And I think the we7 execs were right to a certain degree. Anyone who has hankered after an invite will tell you that it can be surprisingly difficult to get one, especially in the early days (although this is to manage growth), and the more in depth features like label search, that really bring it to life, are always more likely to appeal with ‘serious’ music fans. Add to this the fact thats its an app rather than a website (and the implications foe those who work in a firewalled ofice) and I guess you could say that it is indeed for the more ‘serious’ of music fans.
The new social features on Spotify, seem to appeal to those who have the impetus to trawl through friend’s playlists, compiling the perfect mix-tape or subscribing to others. Again though I am not sure that these updates make it truly ‘social’. I mean that its still all about the music, there’s little chat or opportunity for interaction, ecept through Facebook accounts linked in. I guess that makes sense as that’s the forum for these sort of interactions but would it have been too much to ask to allow us to attach a message to tracks we send to fellow Spotify socialites. I’m also struck by how few of my friends have actually updated their Spotify and at the latest count only 20 of 350 or so of my FB friends are getting on board.
As for the second point, I have read a lot of posts recently about the death of the podcast. Certainly, podcasting as a term has lost some of the buzz it has enjoyed over the last 5 years, especially in advertising, but this isn’t to say the form is dead. The Sony Radio awards last night gave one of their their top awards (gold no less) to the Hackney podcast and its definitely worth a listen it is truly fantastic. And that goes for the rest of the nominees and the other great pieces of audio out there, bringing laughs, taking you to places in your mind you haven’t been before. Maybe its just the term podcast that is dead, in fact even the Sony’s aren’t using it referring to them as internet programmes. What we are witnessing is a broadening of the term, and we are eventually witnessing a dissolution of platform terminology, what we are essentially talking about in all these instances is audio. If we think in these terms we can include the raft of servces that have ‘stolen’ the buzz from podcasting, AudioBoo (which you can vote for in the Smarta100 list), or services like Mixcloud or SoundCloud.
Moving seamlessly on to the third point, there are also new possibilities for the traditional authored radio show to superceed the podcast through services harnessing online juke-boxes such as the aforeentioned Spotify and we7. The digital distribtor Kudos Records has come up with Playdio which will get around the current restrictions on the use of music in podcasts (limited to 30″ at present). They will essentially be playlists with spoken tracks acting as DJ voice-overs either side. The really clever thing is how they pay for production, which is ‘per stream’ of the voiced link. Services like these add value to these new audio services and although its in its infancy, they already have Phil Jupitus (recent 6music DJ) signed up.