Mark Kermode BBC video blog

Every so often you get to be involved with a project which is not only professionally satisfying, it also resonates with your own personal obsessions. Kermode Uncut - the newly launched BBC video blog - has been one such project, marrying my passion for blogging with my fan-boy enthusiasm for the film criticism of Mark Kermode. Long-standing readers of this blog will know that I listen religiously to his weekly Radio 5 Live film review podcast with Simon Mayo (see My media consumption diet) and that his wife was my one of my tutors at University (see 8 random facts about me). Suffice to say, I didn't have to think for long before taking Nick Cohen (Multiplatform Executive for BBC Knowledge) up on his offer to help shepherd the project through its initial development phase.

So, why a video blog (or, if we must, vlog)? Well, anyone's who seen or heard Mark's review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will understand how much of his reviewing is in the delivery and what a missed opportunity simply sitting him down at a keyboard would have been (excellent though his writing for Sight & Sound and The Observer is). It also felt like an opportunity to innovate with the BBC's blogging platform. With the possible exception of the Blue Peter blog (which Wikipedia credits as the BBC's first video blog), the BBC's blogs have been predominantly text-led to date, which was also starting to feel like a bit of a missed opportunity for an organisation which knows a thing or two about creating compelling video content.

Video blogging first started genrating buzz back in 2005 (aided and abetted by the launch of YouTube), but is still to go mainstream in the way that text blogging has, despite a few high-profile successes (e.g. Rocketboom, lonelygirl15). My hunch is that this may change in the coming 12 months as mobile video cameras continue to improve and sites like Seesmic, Qik and Kyte get users more comfortable with talking direct to camera (interestingly it was the Beeb that did much to pave the way for video blogging with Video Nation).

Certainly the typically more intimate, authored tone of a video blog is a good fit for Mark as this wonderful post on his past experience of the Cannes Film Festival demonstrates.

Props to: Nicholas Jones, Stevan Keane, Hedda Archbold, Nick Cohen, Claire Cook, Neil Bramah, Al Boley, Aaron Scullion and anyone else I've forgotten (as I invariably do).

Apple TV + iPhone = games console?

As Wired's recent article on the fierce rivalry between leading gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo illustrates, no-one likes to be pipped to the (blog) post. So, it was with some frustration that I fired up my feed-reader this morning to discover that Daniel Langendorf from ReadWriteWeb spin-off last100 had posted an op-ed piece entitled 'What if Apple re-enters the console gaming market through the iPhone?' covering much of the same ground as a post that has been kicking around in my drafts folder for the past couple of months entitled 'Will Apple's next play be gaming?'.

However, whilst Langendorf joins the dots on Apple's likely play for mobile gaming with the iPhone / iPod Touch (check out the video of SEGA demoing Super Monkey Ball for iPhone if you've not already seen it) and speculates that they might follow it up with an "integrated game console for the living room - either a new product or the next iteration of the AppleTV", he doesn't connect the two, which in my mind is where the really interesting play is.

What the iPhone lacks as a domestic gaming platform is a big screen and what Apple TV lacks is an appropriate controller. Put the two together, connected via WiFi, and you've potentially got a Rolls Royce Wii (admittedly, with a price tag to match and you probably wouldn't want to throw your iPhone around the living room the way you do your Wiimote). That said, the potential of the iPhone as a controller for a secondary console is pretty interesting to my mind, combining the accelerometer of the Wiimote with the touch-screen of the Nintendo DS to theoretically provide a motion-sensing two-screen experience (e.g. tilt device to steer plane, stroke screen to target missile). Multiplayer would just be a matter of your mates whipping out their iPhones, selecting your WiFi network and joining the game, with information relating to the status of their on-screen avatar displayed privately on their iPhone.

So, do I think this is likely to happen? Er, probably not. Despite his well-earned reputation as an innovator, Steve Jobs is a 'softly softly catchee monkey' man at heart, as his initially cautious approach to introducing video to the iPod demonstrated. That said, he's due another bite at the gaming cherry after the Apple Pippin... In the unlikely event that it does come to pass, you heard it heard first ;-)

The word on the web: 7 keyword trending tools

Unquestionably one of the most powerful ways in which products and services get promoted, word-of-mouth is not only notoriously difficult to generate; it's also very hard to measure. Pre-digital, finding out how 'talked about' your brand was meant arming yourself (or, more likely, a costly market research agency) with a pencil and clip-board and trying to find a representative sample to quiz, either by phone, mail or face-to-face. The arrival of email made contacting a large number of potential respondents much cheaper, quicker and easier but still relies on self-selecting individuals and only captures claimed, rather than actual, behaviours.

And then Google happened. For the first time, a small but significant slice of the world's interactions were being indexed and made searchable. The first tools to mine this data were somewhat limited in scope; Google Zeitgeist (launched in 2001) presented a small selection of top ten lists and charts of popular search queries, which tantalised the stats geeks amongst us with what could be discerned if open access to the database was granted. We had to wait five years, but in May 2006, Google did exactly that when it took the wraps off Google Trends, which enables users to chart trends for the search terms of their choosing.

Whilst knowing what keywords people are searching for is useful (and an important success measure in its own right), it doesn't necessarily directly correlate to how much your brand is being talked about. Fortunately, a new breed of products is emerging which focus on tracking keyword usage on blogs and in other community spaces. Icerocket's Trend Tool, Trendpedia, Technorati charts and Nielsen's BlogPulse Trend Search all attempt to trend word usage in the blogosphere, whilst the recently launched Facebook Lexicon collates keyword data from people's Facebook Walls and Twist charts keyword recurrence on Twitter.

The potential applications of these keyword trending tools are already myriad and my suspicion is that they are just the tip of the iceberg. Obvious next steps include mashing up the existing data sources to provide both aggregate and comparative trends across the various forums/services (e.g. Facebook users talk more about X than Y, whereas Twitterers talk more about Y then X) and beginning to contextualise the mentions to make more qualitative assessments (e.g. X % of keyword mentions were in a positive context, Y % were negative).

Below is a sample chart for each of the services I've mentioned, illustrating some of the interesting possibilities for this data in different market sectors.

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends



BlogPulse Trend Search
http://www.blogpulse.com/trend



Technorati charts
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/01/77.html



Icerocket Trend Tool
http://trend.icerocket.com



Trendpedia
http://www.trendpedia.com



Facebook Lexicon
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon



Twist
http://twist.flaptor.com

TV character blogs

Interesting discussion at work the other day about fictional TV characters blogging which prompted me to do a quick trawl of the web for existing TV character blogs, the results of which are below, ordered by launch date. Whilst UK broadcasters are only just starting to dip their toe in this particular pool, a couple of the US networks have really embraced the concept. NBC was first out the gate in February 2005 with Nigel Blog but it's ABC which has been the most prolific to date, launching ten character blogs since October 2005.

So, the $64,000 question: do they work? Well, that depends on your success criteria. For the commercial TV networks, the bottom line is ad revenue and that means getting eyeballs to your blogs (or their RSS feeds) either to generate direct revenue from online ad sales or to increase engagement with the associated show and shore up its on-air audience. Hard numbers for these blogs aren't easy to come by as most of them are hosted on sub-directories of their parent network's site (of which more later). For those with their own domains, monthly uniques range from the low thousands to a peak of 25,000 for Robin's Daily Dose (see below chart from Compete).



As to whether these blogs pass muster on editorial merit, opinion seems very much divided. Steve Rubel describes character blogs as "a complete waste of time because a character is not and never will be human", although his comments seem mainly directed at marketeers, prompting a intelligent response from Rok Hrastnik on the marketingstudies.net blog, arguing that blogs are now reaching a more mainstream audience who don't care about "the rules" as defined by the early blogging adopters and just want to be entertained.

Assuming that your persuaded that there's either financial or brand building merit in creating a TV character blog, what are the other decisions you need to make before launching your blog? Here's a quick run down:

1.) Which character to choose

The most common approach is to pick a relatively minor character who is able to proffer observations on the key players without threatening the main thrust of the narrative (e.g. Joe the barman in Grey's Anatomy). Probably the most notable exception to this is Hiro from Heroes who has emerged from a large ensemble cast as one of the most popular characters in the series. Another thing to bear in mind is how plausible is it that this character would keep a blog? Whilst blogging is undoubtedly becoming a more mainstream pursuit, there are still some characters who feel a more logical fit for the medium.

2.) Who's going to write it

Pretty fundamental this one, the most obvious choice being the writers of the show's broadcast scripts who are used to writing dialogue for the chosen character. Potential pitfalls include a lack of enthusiasm/engagement from the writers who are used to writing teleplays for sizeable primetime audiences; agreeing a remuneration rate agreeable to all parties (lack of precedent) and how to handle comments (see point 4). Alternatives include a writer more comfortable with blogging but unconnected with the on-air writing process; the actor who plays the character on-screen (Judah Friendlander writes Frank Talk, Masi Oka contributes to Hiro's Blog and Rainn Wilson regularly scribes for Schrute-Space); or, if you really want to go out on a limb, a bunch of superfans (not sure anyone's gone down this route yet, although I think it would be fascinating to try).

3.) Frequency of posting

The frequency of posting differs wildly on the blogs surveyed below, ranging from the regular-as-clockwork weekly posters to the extremely sporadic. The issue here is managing users expectations and encouraging repeat visits (especially important when that most basic of blog features, the RSS feed, has been omitted). A related question is whether to continue blogging whilst the show is off air, increasing costs but potentially maintaining audience engagement between seasons. The recent WGA writers' strike forced many of the below blogs to cease updates for the duration, resulting in some creative explanations for the bloggers' absence: "Joe and I have been on a hunger strike for several weeks so I haven’t had the strength to blog" (from Grey's Anatomy's The Nurse's Station).

4.) Whether to enable comments

Often cited as one of the fundamental ingredients of what makes a blog a blog (along with reverse chronological entries, permalinks and subscribeable feeds), comments present an interesting dilemma for the authors of character blogs. On the one hand, you have comments which threaten to shatter the carefully constructed narrative universe by alluding to its artifice. On the other, you have comments which seek to engage directly with the character. Dealing with either is fraught with difficulties (do you pay the author to respond to comments in character?) which is why so many character blogs either ignore comments or switch them off altogether.

5.) Where to host the blog

There appear to be three main options when it comes to deciding where to host your TV character blog. One is as part of your TV network site which has the advantage of piggy-backing on existing infrastructure and Googlejuice but demands a greater suspension of disbelief amongst users as the artifice of the blog is made all the more apparent by the surrounding network livery. Another option is a dedicated domain name (e.g. http://www.jessandtess.com/) which can help to maintain the artifice that this is a genuine blog and feels pretty essential if you are going to show the URL as part of the on-screen drama (see point 6). That said, most of the below sites with a dedicated domain name have heavy network branding which arguably counters the main benefit of an off-portal URL. A third option is to use a third-party intermediary such as MySpace, which worked pretty well for FX with The Carver (http://www.myspace.com/thecarver) - 68,000 friends and counting.

6.) Whether to reference the blog in the on-screen drama

Not easy to do in a way that doesn't feel forced, weaving a TV character's blog into the on-screen narrative is another interesting call. Finding a way of rewarding users who are reading the blog with extra insights, without penalising those who aren't is a difficult balance, although somewhat easier in the wake of shows like Lost and Heroes which achieved this masterfully (see earlier post on Why Heroes raises the bar for multiplatform media).

Anyway, enough rambling, here's my round-up of existing TV character blogs. Let me know in the comments or on your own blog if you've come across any others or have a strong opinion about the merits (or otherwise) of TV character blogs.

Nigel Blog
http://blog.nbc.com/nigelblog/



Show: Crossing Jordon
Network: NBC
Active: February 2005 - March 2007
Comments: Yes

Schrute-Space
http://blog.nbc.com/DwightsBlog/



Show: The Office
Network: NBC
Active: September 2005 - present
Comments: Yes

Dave's Diatribe
http://www.didyouseethelights.com/



Show: Invasion
Network: ABC
Active: October 2005 - May 2006
Comments: Yes

Natalie's Blog
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/monk/webexclusives/blogs/teeger34.html



Show: Monk
Network: USA
Active: January 2006 - September 2007
Comments: No

Margene's Blog
http://boards.hbo.com/blog/Margenes-Blog/700000143



Show: Big Love
Network: HBO
Active: March 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

The Nurse's Station
http://www.seattlegracegossip.com/
og/Margenes-Blog/700000143



Show: Grey's Anatomy
Network: ABC
Active: April 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

From the Desk of Detective Sergeant David Gabriel
http://alt.tnt.tv/closer/blog/



Show: The Closer
Network: TNT
Active: June - July 2006
Comments: No

Hiro's Blog
http://blog.nbc.com/hiro_blog/



Show: Heroes
Network: NBC
Active: September 2006 - June 2007
Comments: Yes

The Emerald City Bar
http://www.emeraldcitybar.com/



Show: Grey's Anatomy
Network: ABC
Active: October 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

Barney's Blog
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/how_i_met_your_mother/community/barney_blog/



Show: How I Met Your Mother
Network: CBS
Active: March 2007 - present
Comments: No

Frank Talk
http://blog.nbc.com/frank/



Show: 30 Rock
Network: NBC
Active: March 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Creed Thoughts
http://blog.nbc.com/CreedThoughts/



Show: The Office
Network: NBC
Active: May 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Jessica's Reflections
http://www.jessandtess.com/



Show: One Life To Live
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Robin's Daily Dose
http://www.drrobinscorpio.com/



Show: General Hospital
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Kendall's Hart to Heart
http://www.kendallhart.com/



Show: All My Children
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

McCallister & Me
http://blogs.abc.com/mccallisterandme/



Show: Brothers & Sisters
Network: ABC
Active: September - October 2007
Comments: No

"Hmmmm" by Randy
http://blog.nbc.com/randy/



Show: My Name Is Earl
Network: NBC
Active: September 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Toxic Shark
http://www.toxicshark.co.uk/
Show: Casualty
Network: BBC
Active: October - November 2007
Comments: No

Cam's Blog
http://blogs.abc.com/camsblog/



Show: Big Shots
Network: ABC
Active: October 2007
Comments: Yes

Marmaland
http://blogs.abc.com/theclog/



Show: Carpoolers
Network: ABC
Active: October - November 2007
Comments: Yes

Confessions From The Front Desk
http://blogs.abc.com/dellsblog/



Show: Private Practice
Network: ABC
Active: October 2007 - November 2007
Comments: Yes

Beta invite giveaway

Thought I'd share some beta invite love. If any tickle your fancy, contact me with your email address via either Gmail or Twitter (fabricoffolly on both). And if you're interested in returning the favour, I'm still after a FFFFOUND! invite :)

UPDATE: FFFFOUND! invite now received (thanks Matt!) Will try and keep the below updated as the number of invites ticks down.

Fire Eagle
http://fireeagle.yahoo.net
Geo-location sharing service
Remaining invites: 0

Grooveshark
http://www.grooveshark.com
Music-sharing community
Remaining invites: 4

Iminta
http://www.iminta.com
Social aggregator / lifestreaming service
Remaining invites: 9

Livestation
http://www.livestation.com
Live TV & radio desktop player (PC only)
Remaining invites: 7

PMOG
http://pmog.com
Browser-based multi-player online game
Remaining invites: 2

Socialthing!
http://socialthing.com
Social aggregator / lifestreaming service
Remaining invites: 41

Encyclopedia Britannica offered free to "web publishers"

Neat idea from the Encyclopedia Britannica who must have finally got bored of only ever being cited as an example of how established business models have been undermined by the internet and the cost of failing to respond to that change quickly enough (see below chart for headline traffic comparison with Wikipedia).



The scheme is called Britannica WebShare and is described as "A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles".

I signed up (here) yesterday afternoon giving this blog's URL as my "Web Content Site" and by 10pm had received an email confirming I had been granted access. It's not 100% clear what their definition of a web publisher constitutes although the registration form has a disclaimer at the bottom stating "This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify" and the FAQ advises that "If you go online and start a blog with one post just to get a free subscription to Britannica, we may say no".

In addition to unlimited personal access to the Encyclopedia, the WebShare initiative also encourages publishers to share the love by linking to individual articles which readers can access without being able to then move laterally through the site. So I can point you at this recently added article about Beck, which you can access, but to browse further you'd need to register for your own account.

They've also hopped on the widget bandwagon, offering embeddable 'clusters' of thematically grouped articles - below is their US Presidents widget (full list of available widgets here).



Whilst it may ultimately turn out to be too little too late for the EB, it's encouraging to see an 240 year old publishing company implement a fairly major rethink of its strategy and open up its content to the very people whose Wikipedia contributions have contributed to its decline.

My only criticism would be how poorly (if at all) the pages render in Firefox and Opera on a Mac. Sort it out guys.

Social media as popularity contest

The results of Mike Butcher's 'who will be BBC FM&T king' poll on TechCrunch UK got me thinking about the extent to which popularity dominates behaviours around social media online, for, as Jemima Kiss intimates on the Guardian's digital content blog, the final list is more of a reflection of the relative online profile/popularity of people publicly associated with BBC Future Media, than an assessment of their suitability for the job in question. Which is fine and probably what you'd expect from a poll on a tech blog such as TechCrunch.

What's interesting to me though is how this overt popularity contest is an example of a much wider trend within online social media. Let's start with Facebook, where the number of 'friends' you have is not without consequence. As Robert Scoble pointed out at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, this is partially due to the fact that the quality of your experience on social media sites is, up to a point, determined by how many 'friends' you have (i.e. no friends and it's not a whole lot of fun).

However, at least for some users, the number of 'friends' they have has acquired a far greater importance as a signifier of their status or popularity. When Facebook was first taking off in the UK, I remember seeing a number of status updates (perhaps a telling phrase?) trumpeting the passing of a major friend milestone or bemoaning their inadequate friend count (although researchers were predictably swift to ascertain that "while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate 'too many' friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure" (see Guardian article).

Of course, it's not just about raw numbers. The roll out of Facebook's developer platform enabled third-party developers to tap into the long-tail of people's popularity neuroses. It's no accident that amongst the most popular Facebook apps are Top Friends, Compare Me, Circle of Friends, Friends for Sale, Hotness and Best Friends. Compare Me is a particularly fine example, sending you regular email updates to inform you that you've just jumped two places in the sexiness rankings but dropped one against funniness or appending a list of your four most kissable friends...

Whilst the drive for popularity might be most obviously manifest in thoroughbred social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, it is also present, albeit less conspicuously, in sites where social objects (e.g. videos, photos, bookmarks) are nominally the focus. Similarly, the prominence given to 'number of followers' (interesting terminology again) in Twitter is instructive, as is the existence of services such as TwitDir and Andrew Baron's recent (abortive) attempt to auction his Twitter account (with followers, naturally).

Whilst on one level, social media's obsession with popularity is just a mirroring of the basic human dynamics at work in any playground or office, there's something about the measurability of online popularity which is particularly seductive. Whilst the social pecking order of a real-world group may be well understood, it is rarely made explicit, unlike online communities where public rankings are a stock in trade. The same harsh assessments of people's desirability have been silently taking place in bars and nightclubs for years but without the results then being posted up on the wall, as they are with online stalwart Hot or Not and its legion of imitators.

The trend certainly looks set to continue, not only because it taps into a very basic but powerful element of human psychology (ego!) but also because it adds a competitive and potentially addictive element to sites which consequently increases their stickiness and grows advertising revenue. Everyone's a winner! (except, that is, for the losers...) (Ok, I'm just bitter I didn't appear on the TechCrunch list ;-)

Photo: Shahid Sarker. Used under licence

The mixtape reborn

A couple of weeks back, whilst visiting my parents, I ventured into the loft above their extension (basically a repository for all the crap I didn't want to bring with me to London after university but wasn't yet ready to throw out). In amongst the old computers, Whizzer and Chips annuals and back issues of PC Format I found a shoebox of cassette tapes, a good proportion of which were mixtapes, some from friends, some from ex-girlfriends, some of my own composition. Whilst I now lack the means to play them (having bid farewell to my hi-fi separates in a concession to the protocols of cohabitation), I couldn't quite bring myself to part with them just yet because of the instrumental role (no pun intended) that they played not only in my musical education but also in my emotional development during those formative years.

So, what's the modern analogue - sorry, equivalent - of the C60 mixtape? Well, if a couple of new startups get their way then it'll be the, er, mixtape...

Muxtape
http://muxtape.com


Only two weeks old, Muxtape is the brainchild of New York-based web designer Justin Ouellette and has been generating a fair amount of heat on Twitter and in the wider blogosphere. It's Flickr-esque both in its pared down design and ease-of-use, although it lacks some fairly basic functionality such as embedding and you can only upload a single 12-track mix against each username. Unfortunately it's real USP (allowing you to upload MP3s from your own collection) is also likely to prove its Achilles' heel once the copyright lawyers catch up with it. Here's my mix of 10 awesome tracks you probably don't own but should: http://fabricoffolly.muxtape.com - get it while it's hot there.

Mixwit
http://www.mixwit.com



Just one day older than Muxtape, Mixwit is hoping to sidestep the legal issues by pulling in its music from the wider web via SeeqPod and SkreemR (you can choose which to search via a dropdown). Whilst the catalogue of these search engines is potentially limitless, tracking down the exact version you're after can be a time-consuming and frustrating business and listed tracks are frequently 'no longer available' when you come to add them to your mix. On the plus side, your mixes (represented as a cassette tape, 'natch) can be visually styled and easily embedded. If Muxtape appeals to the geek elite then this one's more for the kids.

Other options include Mixaloo (which I reviewed in my latest round-up of new (to me) music apps) and the Fuzz Mixtape Creator (a.k.a. the Deck-O-Rator - no, really). Alternatively, if you're too lazy to pick the tracks yourself, why not make a request to the 'robots' powering the Tiny Mix Tapes Automatic Mix Tapes Generator or enlist the help of your friends using the Project Opus Mixx Maker Facebook app.