By PromptBoston

December 29th, 2006

Twitter to woo web users

Twitter to woo web users

If I were to bet on which Web 2.0 site is going to be 2007’s YouTube, I reckon I could do worse than pin my money on Twitter.

At first glance, Twitter doesn’t look like much. The idea is that you type into a box what you’re doing right now, in 150 characters or fewer. If you have friends on Twitter, you can see what they’re all doing right now too. You can send in updates via a browser or by SMS, and you can receive updates from friends by SMS as well.

If you don’t have any Twitter friends, you can still view the ‘public timeline‘, a constantly updating kaleidoscope of ephemeral statements uttered by ineffably cool people who probably all run web startups in fashionable enclaves of San Francisco.

Yes, Twitter is the kind of site for which the adjective ‘solipsistic’ was invented. But despite (or probably because of) that, it is totally compelling. It takes the ego-trip of blogging, the popularity contest of MySpace and the social convenience of text messaging, and distils them into one simple site where you can prattle away about your fascinating life while spying on the cool people, collecting new and exotic friends, and organising your social engagements. What’s not to like about that?

Twitter’s 2.0 credentials are impeccable: it’s a by-product of the Obvious Corporation, a company run by Blogger founder Evan Williams, and whose primary product is Odeo, an aggregator of podcasts and web radio stations. Expect the by-product to have eclipsed the main product by this time next…week, probably.

tags: twitter | odeo | evhead

By PromptBoston

December 22nd, 2006

Time picks you as its person of the year

Time picks you as its person of the year

Time magazine has named you its Person of the Year for 2006, putting you in the same league as Hitler, Einstein, Stalin and – until its advertisers protested – Osama Bin Laden.

But before you go rushing off to update your CV, start a war or invent your own special theory, let’s see if it was really you that Time was thinking of. For the 2006 Person of the Year title hasn’t been given to any old ‘you’, but rather those of you who have contributed to the global media revolution that is Web 2.0.

In Time‘s own words, this year’s Person of the Year is anyone who “made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. [Who] blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. [Who] camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.“

For all its bandwagoneering (Wired, for example, hailed the users as the driving force of the ‘new’ Web way back in August 2005), Time has a good point. Its Person of the Year title is bestowed upon the individual or individuals who had the most impact on the media agenda in that year. And while there are plenty of individuals who (for better or worse) dominated the political, social and environmental stage in 2006, it was the bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and amateur reviewers who continued to turn the whole concept of ‘the media’ on its head – to the extent that even old media behemoths like Time have no choice but to acknowledge defeat and join in the fray.

And for that, ‘you’ should be justly proud.

tags: time magazine | person of the year

By PromptBoston

December 15th, 2006

Blog Digest 2007: not better than the real thing

Blog Digest 2007: not better than the real thing

Publisher Friday Books has come up with a zeitgeisty stocking filler: a book of ‘the best writing from the Web’ of 2006.

The Blog Digest 2007 claims to be “the ultimate anthology of blog writing from the last twelve months“. Compiled by Chicken Yoghurt blog author Justin McKeating, it rounds up some readable and entertaining blog entries from better and lesser known bloggers and sorts them into cheery festive categories like War, Death and Politics.

If, as the book claims, there are now seven million bloggers in the UK, it should find a ready audience – if only among people who want to find out if they’re in it. But by isolating blog posts from their original medium, the book effectively destroys what the editor himself considers to be so special about the blogosphere: its interactivity.

“The comment function on your blog allows [readers] to leave messages agreeing or disagreeing with your [post],” says McKeating, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his book prints blog posts without their comments. “This creates a dialogue that becomes part of the article. The piece changes constantly and becomes almost a collaborative work.”

The ability to chat with bloggers and their commenters is indeed something that sets blogging apart from the established media, creating a conversational environment where all voices can be heard. A book of the year’s best blog posts may provide some light diversion while the turkey digests, but for a real flavour of what blogging is all about, we recommend you save yourself GBP8.99 and hang out in the blogosphere itself.

tags: friday books | blog digest 2007 | justin mckeating

By PromptBoston

December 8th, 2006

Pirates: not all bad

Pirates: not all bad

Gordon Brown pledged to crack down on music piracy in his pre-Budget report this week, saying that prison sentences of as much as ten years could be introduced for persistent online and offline sellers of illegal music.

But while the music industry claims it is losing 20% of its annual revenues through piracy, its relationship with the pirates is far from clear-cut. The big record labels may not like to see dodgy copies of the James Blunt album being flogged at car boot sales, but many smaller labels see some pirates not as enemies, but as friends.

Take the explosion of ‘mp3 blogs’, written by music fans about their favourite artists. Every post includes one or more mp3s that the bloggers upload for readers to download – free of charge, and in infringement of all known laws of copyright and distribution.

While a few mp3 bloggers have received cease-and-desist notices from music industry lawyers, many more are receiving more welcome correspondence in the form of preview albums and tracks, and implied licence to make these tracks available free of charge to their readers.

mp3 blogs are becoming an important – and free – marketing channel for the ‘long tail’ of non-mainstream artists and indie record labels, by promoting them farther and wider than each individual label’s marketing budget could possibly achieve.

For the moment, record labels and mp3 bloggers exist in symbiotic harmony, but this may soon change with the increasing popularity of ‘mp3 blog aggregators’ like Hype Machine, which let people search the entire mp3 blogosphere for free music. Hype Machine is starting to look more like the old Napster every day, and that can’t be a good sign for either the music industry or the mp3 bloggers.

tags: music piracy | mp3 blogs | hype machine

By PromptBoston

December 1st, 2006

Sumo TV launches 'world's first' user-generated TV channel. Not!

Sumo TV launches 'world's first' user-generated TV channel. Not!

In the glitzy world of Web 2.0, attention spans are short and memories shorter. How else to explain the claim made this week by Cellcast that it has launched the ‘world’s first’ user-generated television channel?

Cellcast’s brainchild Sumo TV started broadcasting in the UK on Monday, on Sky channel 146. Its unique selling point is that it selects and broadcasts popular home-made videos uploaded to its www.sumo.tv site, and rewards the video creators financially for each video selected.

In doing so it is setting itself apart from rivals YouTube and MySpace, which have yet to start remunerating amateur videomakers for the traffic they bring to the sites. Setting quality issues aside – the most popular videos on the sumo.tv site at the time of writing include women stripping, punching each other and wrestling boys to the ground – Sumo.tv is taking an interesting approach by transferring ‘new media’ content to an ‘old medium’: the television screen.

But is it really the world’s first user-generated TV channel? Fans of 1992 film Wayne’s World will recall that it affectionately satirised American public-access television, popular in the 1980s. Like Sumo, public access allowed ordinary people to broadcast their own amateur television shows to cable viewers. User-generated content has been around a lot longer than some Web 2.0 proponents appear to think.

tags: cellcast | sumo.tv | wayne’s world