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

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.

Channel 4's Big Art Mob

More good web stuff coming out of Channel 4 in the form of Big Art Mob - "a collective effort to create the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art" and part of the wider Channel 4 Big Art Project. Users are encouraged to upload photos (or videos), captured using their cameraphones and tag their location so they can be added to a national map. All the usual Web 2.0 staples are there including comments, Google Maps integration and tagging (though no ratings - presumably they decided art is above ratings). With the exception of some rogue HTML tags on the About page, it's a pretty slick implementation - the functionality of the take-away widget (embedded below) is particularly nice.



Related fabric of folly posts:
JPG Magazine & Picture This
Photo Friday
The joy of Creative Commons

QR Codes - not just big in Japan?

Until a couple of weeks ago QR Codes were very much on the periphery of my attention radar. Then some of my colleagues working on the BBC Programmes BETA hit on the ingenious idea of automatically generating a QR Code for every BBC programme (just add /qrcode to the end of any programme page URL to view - more from Tom Scott).

Since then, QR Codes seem to be everywhere I turn. First I caught up with the news that The Sun newspaper has notched up 11,000 registered users for its mobile QR service, launched on the 5th December in The Sun's inimitable style (see below image). Then, today, Silicon Valley Insider revealed that Google is planning to sell newspaper ads with QR codes. Whilst only a fraction of handsets currently have the requisite decoding software installed, Google have a convenient Trojan horse in the form of Android (The Sun is directing readers to download the i-nigma reader).

You can generate your own QR Code of a URL, phone number, SMS or using free text (up to 250 characters) here. The above QR Code is of this blog's URL.


Image: The Sun

Personalised music magazine from your attention data

Thanks to Tristan for alerting me (via the BBC's Radio Labs blog) to the ultra-cool idiomag, which creates a daily personalised digital music magazine based on your listening preferences. The homepage invites users to enter either their two favourite artists or, more excitingly, their username from one of a host of popular online music services (Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, MyStrands, MOG, MySpace and Bebo are all supported) from where it pulls in details of your musical proclivities.

I opted for Last.fm as the primary custodian of my musical attention data and I have to admit that I found the resulting magazine pretty compelling. My first 'issue' served up Billboard.com news articles on Eels and Radiohead (complete with embedded video), a Junkmedia review of a Beck gig, a Wikipedia article on Indie Pop, a Ben Folds photo gallery (sourced from Flickr) and a LOSINGTODAY review of Kaiser Chiefs' single 'Loves Not a Game (But I'm Winning)'.

Presenting the content in the style of a print magazine (complete with page turns), is a smart move on the part of idiomag as it makes the personalisation much higher impact. We have become used to personalisation in the digital space but personalised print media has a residual novelty value (example) because the cost of print runs was once so prohibitive.

Throw in some standard Web 2.0 functionality (Love it, Bin it, Archive it, Email it to a friend, Share it on Facebook etc.), a couple of revenue streams in the form of interactive advertising and links to buy (from 7digital) and the obligatory Facebook app and your looking at rather a slick package. Time will tell whether the content is consistently compelling enough to warrant a daily visit although today is unlikely to be my last. Nice job guys.

Related posts:
Next generation music discovery
New (to me) music apps
New (to me) music apps - part two

US TV networks wake up to distributed distribution

It's been interesting to chart the major US TV networks' evolving approach to online video distribution over the last couple of years. Below is a rough timeline of activity from 'the big four' (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox) which shows the shift from paid-for iTunes downloads and broadcaster-hosted streaming services in 2005/06 to increasingly distributed models in 2007. This change is also reflected in recent proclamations by some of the networks' big cheeses (pasted below the timeline) who seem to have finally woken up to the fact that the internet is a network and that big audiences in this space come from allowing wide distribution of your content, not forcing users to come to you (although as Jeff Jarvis points out on the excellent BuzzMachine, these noble sentiments don't always translate to actions).

12th Oct 2005 - ABC shows made available for download (for $1.99) via iTunes
5th Dec 2005 - NBC shows made available for download via iTunes
1st May 2006 - ABC launches free (ad-supported) video streaming service
4th May 2006 - CBS launches 'innertube', free (ad-supported) video streaming service
9th May 2006 - Fox shows made available for download via iTunes
8th Jun 2006 - CBS shows made available for download via iTunes
1st Oct 2006 - NBC launches 'NBS Rewind', free (ad-supported) video streaming service
22nd Mar 2007 - NBC and News Corp announce what will later become Hulu.com
18th Apr 2007 - NBC creates the National Broadband Company to distribute video
12 Apr 2007 - CBS announces its 'Interactive Audience Network', distributing shows through numerous partners
18 Jun 2007 - Fox partners with Brightcove to offer streamed, embeddable video
31 Aug 2007 - NBC ends contract with iTunes
4th Sep 2007 - NBC shows to be made available via Amazon Unbox
19 Sep 2007 - NBC launches 'NBC direct', free (ad-supported) download service
20 Sep 2007 - ABC begins free (ad-supported) streaming via AOL
21st Sep 2007 - Fox gives away free seasons premieres via iTunes

“If we really want to compete with big aggregators like Yahoo and Google, we need our video in as many places as possible,” (Randy Falco, president of NBC, quoted in the New York Times, September 2006)

“We can’t expect consumers to come to us. It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.” (Quincy Smith, president of CBS, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, May 2007)

“It is critical that we embrace the Internet as a distributed medium that promotes engagement with users, wherever they are on the Web” (William Bradford, senior vice president, content strategy at Fox, August 2007)

In defence of PowerPoint

Only two contributions seemed to meet with widespread audience approval at last month's MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit. One was Lord Puttnam voicing his concern over the educational deficiencies / moral vacuity of video games (somebody buy that peer a copy of Everything Bad Is Good For You); the other was Emily Bell's promise that the day would be "practically PowerPoint free". Whilst only the former elicited a round of spontaneous applause, the latter certainly prompted a sigh of relief from a roomful of seasoned conference attendees.

What struck me about the audience reaction to these two contributions is just how easy it is to fall into the trap of blaming the medium for the message. Neither games consoles nor Microsoft PowerPoint should be held responsible for the proliferation of poor quality content. They are simply two forms of media which (like the the printing press, the television, the Internet and, for that matter, all other forms of media) can be used to create products of wildly varying quality.

On the basis that video games aren't short of articulate defenders, I will focus on the not inconsiderable challenge of speaking up for PowerPoint, for which the knives appear to be well and truly out. It's been bubbling along under the surface for a long time (see Wired's 2003 polemic PowerPoint is Evil) but the PowerPoint backlash is now in full swing. You could of course argue that the products of a multi-billion dollar software giant neither need nor deserve to be defended but I'm a firm believer in everyone receiving a fair trial (or maybe it's just a perverse desire to defend the indefensible).

The nub of my argument is that bad PowerPoint presentations are the fault of the creator and/or presenter not the software. Put simply, most of us don't know how to use PowerPoint effectively. One of the most elementary errors is replicating the content of the verbal presentation in textual form (usually as bullet points but sometimes, dear God, in full). This was highlighted by a recent piece on The Register, Official: PowerPoint bad for brains, which reported the findings of a team of Australian researchers that the human brain is ill-equipped to process the same information presented verbally and visually at the same time. What is extraordinary is that, like much research, we already know this (by virtue of having sat through such tedious presentations ourselves) and yet show little sign of implementing that knowledge.

Of course, reading out your slides is just one of a litany of common PowerPoint misdemeanours, which include wildly inappropriate use of clip art, illegible font sizes and gratuitous animation to name but three. So, what's to be done? A few years back I ran a training session at work called 'How To Sex Up Your PowerPoint' which included some tips for avoiding death by PowerPoint. Below are my '8 golden rules'. It's notable that they are mostly just common sense (PowerPoint seems to engender a curious leave-taking of senses amongst even the most intelligent of presenters). So without further ado...

The 8 Golden Rules of PowerPoint

1. Plan your presentation before opening PowerPoint

The first thing most people do when they hear they have a presentation to give (after the weeks of procrastinating), is to fire up PowerPoint and start knocking out some slides. This tends to result in 84-slide presentations without any discernible structure. Force yourself to write down answers to these two questions:

- What is your objective for the presentation?
- What key messages do you want your audience to take away? (ideally 3, but definitely no more than 7 as people can only hold 7 things in their brain at once)

It might seem ridiculous but you'd be surprised how often you get half way through creating a PowerPoint presentation and forget what you're trying to achieve with it.

2. Exploit your colleagues

Not in a general sense of course, but when it comes to sourcing images, audio, video or facts and figures don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you've taken the time to plan the presentation you'll know roughly what assets you're going to need and can fire off a few emails asking people for their help in finding them well before the presentation is due. Don’t be afraid of reusing slides or assets (yours or other peoples). If someone has already made a slide which illustrate your point, don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s easy to feel that PowerPoint presentations are like wedding outfits – you have to have an entirely new one for every occasion. You don’t – at the very least you can wear those shoes again. That said, you mustn’t forget Rule number 3…

3. Be ruthless

From when you are first planning the presentation to when you do your final run through, ask yourself "does this slide enhance my point?“. If it doesn't, change it so it does or get rid of it all together. Visuals can be distracting, especially when the alternative is listening to someone talk, so don't use them for their own sake or because it took you ages to build. Chances are they’ll come in handy later on.

4. Be consistent

There are few things more disconcerting in a PowerPoint presentation than fonts which change size, colour and location for no particular reason. Keep your headings the same size and in the same place. The easiest way of doing this is to copy and paste a slide and change the text. If you have a series of screengrabs, keep them the same size and in the same place. Using templates can also help consistency as can the Slide Master.

5. Keep it simple

Chances are you will know a great deal more than your audience about the subject on which you're presenting and its easy to misjudge the amount of knowledge you are assuming or the amount of geek-speak. A very complex presentation can actually be more boring than a simple one. Visually, try to use a little text as possible on the slides and avoid using text smaller than 28-point as your audience won't be able to read it. Don't be afraid of continuing a series of bullet points over two slides (assuming you've already edited them down as far as possible). If the second greatest PowerPoint crime is reading out verbatim text to an audience then the greatest is pointless animation. Try and avoid using animation unless it illustrates your point. We've all sat through presentations where all you can focus on is the hideous slide wipes.

6. Illustrate your points

They say a picture paints a thousand words and they may just be right. An image can make a point more simply and more effectively and be more memorable. However visuals can also be distracting so be sure to apply Rule 3 (Be Ruthless) to your use of images. Also consider using audio or video - a well chosen piece of media can be very powerful. Also, it breaks the monotony of one person talking. Try to use examples which will resonate with your audience, which brings me onto Rule 7…

7. Talk to your audience

Be sure to tailor your presentation to your audience. It’s easy to reach for an off-the-shelf presentation that you’ve used before but your audience will usually be able to tell. Of course, it’s not only what you say but also how you deliver it. Try to talk to your audience not your PowerPoint. It may feel a bit weird at first. Use prompt cards if necessary. If you are going to give out handouts, do so at the end.

8. Rules are there to be broken

The final golden rule of PowerPoint is that rules are there to be broken. Having said earlier on that a presentation should only aim to convey no more than 7 messages, I’ve just tried to give you 8. So, I guess they’re more like guidelines than rules, but 'golden guidelines' doesn’t have the same ring to it…

Postscript: In an attempt to put my PowerPoint where my mouth is, embedded below is a presentation which I created to accompany my post on Key technology trends for 2007. Unfortunately the font (Cooper Black) got lost in the uploading...

Born to pun: Is the advent of digital precipitating the death of creative titling?

If once is an accident, twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then I've noticed a trend over the last few weeks concerning the impact of digital on the titling of media content.

First up was a fleeting discussion in the 'Democratising content in the user-in-control era' session at last month's MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit about the impact of online search on headline writers (predominantly journalists and bloggers). Ben Hammersley suggested that the best headlines as far as search engines are concerned are those which adopt the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin approach (e.g. Scottish Cup result: Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic), which runs counter to the puntastic tradition of tabloid journalism in the UK which has given us, amongst other gems, the oft-quoted Sun headline 'SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS'. Not what you'd call Google-friendly.

Next came my girlfriend's reaction to my suggestion that we give BBC flagship Sci-Fi drama Life on Mars a go, which was along the lines of 'I don't much fancy a drama set in space' (its actually about a time-travelling policeman). The arrival of multi-channel, on-demand television (plus countless other media options) presents us with so many choices that we don't have time to thoroughly research each one. Instead, we must increasingly decide on the basis of title alone. This was confirmed to me by a piece of audience research on another BBC drama series, Spooks, in which a respondent claimed they'd previously avoided the series on the basis that they'd assumed it was about ghosts (the series was retitled MI5 when it was shown in the States).

Finally came a presentation from Leigh Aspin, Interactive Editor for BBC Radio 4 at an internal BBC event, in which he explained how the "clever, sometimes cryptic" titles of some of the station's programming were making it difficult for listeners to find the content of interest to them in an increasingly crowded on-demand media space. The example he used was a programme called 'Out of the Ashes' which the audience sportingly volunteered would most likely have been about cricket. The programme's original title was in fact 'Foot and Mouth: Five Years on'.

So are we destined to endure a mediascape dominated by channel Five-style Ronseal programme titles such as When Pilots Eject, The Woman Who Lost 30 Stone or Selling Houses Abroad (that last one's actually a Channel 4 programme, shame on them) or, to borrow a phrase from NatWest, is there another way?

I believe there is another way, but its not a quick fix. Part of the solution was outlined by Leigh in the remainder of his presentation, which focused on how richer search and navigation can be facilitated by term extraction run on programme descriptions. In other words, your programme can still be called 'Out of the Ashes' if the keywords pulled out of the programme description and flagged to you (and search engines) include 'cattle' and 'foot and mouth'. Similarly, your punning tabloid headline need not change if the correct metadata can be extracted from the article and supplementary contextual information.

Another weapon in the fight against tedious titling is the power of social software. The title of a YouTube video clip or a Flickr photo can be as inventive as its author's creativity allows as my main routes into the content will be via recommendation or tags, not by title.

These are baby steps that we need to start taking towards equipping our content for the digital age. The giant leap is the semantic web, which promises to deliver a greater understanding of the content of digital media, without getting tripped up by the idiosyncrasies of language. If and when the semantic web can start delivering on this bold promise remains to be seen. In the meantime we may well see a shift in media titling away from the cryptic and the punning towards the more functional and descriptive.

MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit 2007

Somewhat belatedly (thanks to avalanche of day-job work) below is a distillation of my notes from last Thursday's MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit. Rather than summarise the whole conference (which would no doubt duplicate much of the Guardian's own blog coverage) I've picked out some of the key themes and stats. So, with a nod to John Crace, here is the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit 2007 digested:

The 10 key themes

• We continue to overestimate the short-term impact of technologies whilst underestimating their long-term impact
• Underlying audience needs remain unchanged (information, entertainment and communication)
• Media companies need to focus on the impact of technologies on user behaviours rather than getting hung up on the potential of technologies
• 'Old media' has lost its stranglehold on distribution. In response, media companies need to work out what they do best/uniquely and focus on that, then form partnerships (with both amateurs and professionals) to do the other stuff
  
• Communities are not the same as audiences and require engagement not just eyeballs
• Editorship is important in the changing media space. Journalists will always be needed but the ones who will survive/thrive are those who actively listen to/engage with communities
• Young people don't care about brands/only care about brands (no consensus on this one)
• The industry's current approach to user-generated content and rights is to take down content if someone asks you to
• On-demand consumption of broadcast content won't overtake live consumption anytime soon, although on-demand listening/viewing will increase and live audiences will continue to decline
• Revenue models are still uncertain in the changing media space. What mix of ad-funded, subscription and free content will work best?

The 10 key stats

People invariably bandy stats around at conferences. Below are ten which caught my attention (with attribution).

• The Guardian's podcasts are generating 1 million downloads a month (Emily Bell)
• Reuters employs 2,400 journalists and has an estimated audience of 1 billion people each day (Geert Linnebank)
• Second Life has almost 5 million 'residents' (Justin Bovington)
• 25,000 businesses are trading within Second Life (Justin Bovington)
• The average age of Second Lifers is 33 (Justin Bovington)
• Habbo Hotel has 74 million player characters and 7 million unique users a month (Timo Soininen)
• 1 in 5 people surfing the Internet are listening to radio at the same time (James Cridland)
• 47% of mobiles sold in the UK in the last year have had an FM chip in them (Natalie Schwarz)
• Feedburner serves 21 million feeds to 14 million unique users each day (Steve Olechowski)
• Last.fm has 15 million unique users a month (Felix Miller)

The 10 key buzzwords

• engagement
• distribution
• content
  
• brand
• on-demand
  
• community
  
• blogging
• syndication
• "dead tree version" (i.e. printed)
• multi-platform
  

The 10 key namechecks

• Second Life
• The Guardian
  
• Twitter
• Google
• YouTube
• BBC
• Channel 4
• Sky
• Reuters
• BT
  

My media consumption diet

With nods to Jeremiah Owyang for kick starting this meme and James Cridland for alerting me to it via his blog, below is a rough approximation of my media consumption diet.



(chart created using Zoho Sheet)

Web

The web is undoubtedly my main media channel (maybe because it encompasses all of the below in one?). Excluding work access, I reckon I stack up around 18 hours of web access a week, which probably breaks down something like this: reading blogs/news feeds (5 hours), trying out new sites (4 hours), writing this blog (4 hours), emailing (2 hours), searching for information (1 hour), Flickring (30 mins), buying stuff (30 mins), selling stuff (30 mins), website design/maintenance (30 mins).

Estimated time spent per week: 18 hours

Music

Having parted company with the bulk of my CD collection last year, the vast majority of my music listening (excluding radio) is now done either via iTunes or on my iPod. According to last.fm I've listened to 11,355 tracks since registering at the end of February 2005, which works out just over 100 tracks a week. Assuming a average track duration of 3 minutes, I'm averaging around five and a half hours of music listening a week. Factoring in the listening which last.fm fails to capture I reckon the actual figure is nearer 7 hours a week.

Estimated time spent per week: 7 hours

TV

As previously posted, I don't watch a great deal of live TV, with DVD boxsets and downloads accounting for the vast majority of my TV viewing. It also fair to say that I have something of a penchant for US drama. In the past 12 months I've plowed through assorted seasons of Lost, House, Desperate Housewives, 24, The O.C., The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under and Entourage. For my money, the standout UK series of last year was Planet Earth which just blew me away.

Estimated time spent per week: 7 hours

Radio

It's a dilemma whether to count ambient radio listening as, like Mr. Cridland, I work in an office where the radio is always on. In terms of active radio listening then its Jonathan Ross on Radio 2 on a Saturday morning, Stephen Merchant on 6 Music (via the BBC Radio Player as I'm not normally near a radio on a Sunday afternoon) and snatches of the Today programme as I get ready for work. Excluding ambient listening I reckon it's around 5 hours a week; including, it's probably more like 35.

Estimated time spent per week: 5 hours

Books

I have something of a famine or feast mentality when it comes to books, depending on whether I'm on holiday or not. I read 18 books last year but almost none of them whilst in this country. Last year's reading list was predominantly a mix of contemporary fiction (Rupert Thomson, David Mitchell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Patrick Neate) and media geek must-reads (The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Everything Bad is Good for You). Assuming an average reading time of 6 hours per book, I spent 108 hours reading last year which works out at just over 2 hours per week.

Estimated time spent per week: 2 hours

Newspapers

I buy The Guardian on Mondays (for the Media supplement), Thursdays (for the Technology supplement) and Saturdays (for the magazine and The Guide). I occasionally get caught without something to read on the tube and pick up one of the London freesheets but invariably feel dirty afterwards.

Estimated time spent per week: 2 hours

Films

Films are an enduring passion of mine although I try to only see films I think will be worth the investment (which I guess is why 30 of the 40 films I saw last year appeared in my films of 2006 list). Of that 40, I watched 23 at the cinema and 17 on DVD. Assuming an average running time of 2 hours (the days of the 90 minute movie are all but gone), I spent 80 hours watching films last year which works out at one and a half hours per week.

Estimated time spent per week: 1 hour 30 mins

Magazines

My long-standing subscriptions to Q, Sight & Sound and PC Format all fell by the wayside some time ago and the only magazines I still subscribe to at home are Empire (still the bible for movie lovers) and Web User (can't be wrong for £1.99). I also tend to leaf through the office copies of Stuff, T3, .net and Wired, although less so now that Engadget is taking care of my gadget obsession in a more timely fashion.

Estimated time spent per week: 45 mins

Podcasts

Despite the dozens of podcast subscriptions currently eating up my hard disk/bandwidth, there's actually only one podcast which I listen to religiously and that's Mark Kermode's Film Reviews. Clipped from Friday's edition of the Simon Mayo show on BBC Radio Five Live, it's half an hour of pure radio gold. More occasional listens include the Best of Moyles enhanced and Media Talk from Guardian Unlimited.

Estimated time spent per week: 30 mins

Video games

Until the arrival of my Wii on Tuesday I would've put a big fat zero down for video games, but having had a quick go on the game-changing Wii Sports (and with WarioWare Smooth Moves and Zelda: Twilight Princess waiting to be unwrapped) I think I may have to revise that figure. Let's start with a conservative estimate of 20 minutes.

Estimated time spent per week: 20 mins

Conclusions

- I spend 44 hours a week (39% of my waking hours) consuming some sort of media (although some of those hours are concurrent)
- My media consumption habits aren't very typical

Channel 4 on Demand - first impressions

Tomorrow sees the official launch of Channel 4's UK on demand broadband TV offering, 4oD, which they've been previewing to newsletter subscribers over the past week or so. I received my preview invite last Friday. Four days on and I've finally got around to installing the client following a couple of abortive attempts, first on my Mac (4oD is PC only), then using Firefox (4oD requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or above).

The download and installation of the 4oD programme itself (basically a shell for Flash-heavy IE pages) didn't take long, although the compulsory installation of .NET framework 2.0 did. It then refused to recognise my up-to-date copy of Windows Media Player 10 and I had to download WMP 11 in order to get it working (followed by a mandatory DRM update, natch).

Once up and running, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a relatively clean and simple interface, running in a full-screen (but re-sizable) window. The 'homepage' offers five primary navigation options (TV, Film, Schedule, Recommendations and A to Z) plus one giant wallpaper promo (currently Mr Gordon Ramsey) and four smaller promos which expand and start playing video on rollover in a rather attractive fashion. The schedule strip along the bottom of the homepage, offering a view of last night's prime time, is less successful, falling below the fold at a 1024 x 768 screen res and bumping up against the bottom of the screen on rollover.



So, what of the content offer? Unsurprisingly, quite a bit of the schedule is labelled as "Not currently available for download" although there are an impressive 128 programmes listed in the A-Z. It's perhaps indicative of the on-demand world that the schedule proves to be one of the weaker element of the 4oD proposition. Whilst it's helpful that the schedule is colour coded to let you know at a glance which programmes are and aren't available, it's still feels frustrating to be reminded that you can't watch The Simpsons, The Channel 4 News or Without a Trace, but you can watch Hollyoaks and 8 Out of 10 Cats...



A more fruitful way of browsing for content is via the genres and recommendations. There are currently seven TV genres (Comedy, Docs, Drama, Entertainment, Food & Health, Homes, Music) and three film genres (Comedy, Crime & Thriller, Drama), augmented with a 'Popular' list. The 4oD Recommends section currently includes a selection of Merchant Ivory films and U2 to you - the palindromatically titled U2 season.



In terms of pricing, there appears to be two main prices points: 99p to 'rent' a TV programme and £1.99 to 'rent' a film or 'own' a TV programme (although this isn't an option for many programmes). There's also a smattering of free content, grouped under the heading 'Free for All', which is mostly teaser episodes for longer series.

Once downloaded, you have 1 month to watch a programme and 48 hours to finish it once you've started watching. It is also possible to pre-book content up to 2 weeks in advance. Download times aren't too bad, especially if you're used to BitTorrent. A 24 minute episode of Trigger Happy TV (166.52MB) took 45 mins to download on my 8MB connection. The playback window offers three choices of image size (Regular, Large and Fullscreen). The image quality is pretty good when viewed as Regular or Large but inevitably starts to pixelate in Fullscreen mode (the clips are encoded at 576 x 432 pixels, 1Mbps).



Unsurprisingly for a still wet-behind-the-ears beta there are one or two rough edges which will hopefully be ironed out over the coming weeks. The search engine doesn't seem to be indexing films at the moment and the text sometimes spills out of the playback frame to name two minor quibbles.

Infinitely more frustrating are the things which are a great deal harder to change, such as the across the board Microsoft dependency, determined by the use of the Kontiki P2P client and the Microsoft Plays For Sure DRM package (both also employed by the recently rebranded Sky Anytime). The inability to transfer content to portable devices is also likely to prove annoying for seasoned BitTorrenters.

Not that these issues are unique to Channel 4. The challenge of how to assuage the anxieties of nervous rights holders whilst simultaneously meeting the growing expectations of digital consumers is going to continue to exercise the whole spectrum of digital media providers for some time to come.

Second Life media frenzy

The media seems to have gone Second Life crazy over the last week or so. First there was Endemol announcing a virtual version of Big Brother to start on 1st December with 15 Second Life residents competing for a virtual island. Then German newspaper publisher Axel Springer announced the launch of a virtual tabloid, SL News, offering "snippets about showbusiness and human interest tales from the avatar world" and retailing at between 10 and 15 Linden dollars. Finally, Rivers Run Red announced the launch of a virtual TV station, virtuallife.tv, with content from Channel 4 (TV and radio), the Sci-Fi channel and even the great unwashed in the form of music, video and machinima.

It's easy to forget that dear old Auntie was one of the first out of the gate back in May when Radio 1 teamed up with Rivers Run Red to host a virtual version of it's One Big Weekend festival (real-life location: Dundee) on an island it's renting in Second Life. Sony BMG recently followed suit, pairing up with The Electric Sheep Company to host a Ben Folds virtual meet and greet on its 'Media Island'. The Electric Sheep Company also brokered Reuters recent entry into Second Life and facilitated the BBC's first foray in January as part of Newsnight's Geek Week.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Wikipedia has a rapidly-growing list of businesses and organisations which have operated in Second Life, which includes another couple of media heavyweights (MTV and Disney). It appears that Second Life is rapidly becoming a key place to extend your media brand. Not that all of these brand extensions are solely for the benefit of the residents of course. At the moment, a presence in Second Life is more of a brand statement than a viable distribution channel (much like the web was 10 years ago), guaranteeing a company a fair few column inches and possibly a bit of cool-by-proxy. This will change of course, as the Second Life population grows (it passed 1 million residents last month) and the possibilities of the medium become more apparent.

Changes impacting digital media consumption

A colleague recently asked me what I thought the key changes in consumer behaviour in relation to digital media consumption have been over the last few years. I came up with the following six, which conveniently all begin with the letter C...

Connectivity - from mobile phones to laptops and Wi-Fi, the digital consumer has become increasingly connected (more devices, more of the time), which has precipitated more frequent communication/interaction via digital technologies (e.g. e-mail, web, IM, VoIP, SMS).

Choice - the explosion in choice precipitated by the advent of digital has irrevocably altered consumer expectations around choice. The challenge for media companies is to develop services which can successfully compete in an exponentially-growing media marketplace for the attention of an increasingly fickle and fragmented audience.

Control - from iPods to PVRs, consumer expectations about the level of control they can exercise over their media (the when, the where and the how) have changed radically over recent years. Consumers are also exercising greater control over the process of finding media, as the relationship increasingly shifts from push to pull (e.g. web search, PVRs, P2P, podcasting).

Concurrent consumption - the digital generation, especially its youngest members, are becoming increasingly adept at engaging with multiple media sources at the same time (e.g. watching TV whilst surfing the net and Instant Messaging).

Customisation - from mobile wallpapers and ringtones to personalised radio stations and homepages, the digital consumer is increasingly used to being able to tailor their media experiences to cater for their specific tastes and interests.

Creativity - digital technologies (particularly, but not exclusively, the web) are facilitating a mass democratisation of the tools of production which in turn is fuelling an explosion in creativity (e.g. blogs, podcasts, GarageBand, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube).

Would be interested in other peoples thoughts on this...

The limitations of genre

After a few years of denial, the broadcasting industry seems to have finally woken up to the irrevocable impact that the digital, on-demand world will have on traditional broadcast models. It has acknowledged that linear broadcast channels are destined to lose market share as the audience fragments in a world of potentially infinite choice. It has also accepted that it needs to respond to changing audience expectations about when, where and how they will be able to access content. However, it is in danger of lurching down another blind alley and its name is genre.

Not so long ago, genre was a word rarely heard outside of academic circles. Now it seems to be popping up all over the place. Apple must accept a fair amount of the credit for this shift, bringing the concept of genre to the masses via the iTunes application. Of course, record shops have been sorting music by genre for decades but I suspect the majority of consumers didn't engage with the term in the way that they are now encouraged to.

Genre has shifted from being a way for experts to categorise for research and retail purposes, to a way for Joe Public to organise and access all manner of things. It is difficult to underestimate the power of naming in creating this kind of cultural phenomena (witness the incredible rise of the word podcast, which far outstrips the uptake of the actual technology).

In the broadcasting sphere, the launch of the BBC Radio Player in June 2002 made a significant contribution to the rise of the concept of genre, affording it parity with the radio stations as a means of navigating on demand radio content. For the first time, BBC radio content was defined equally by its genre as its original broadcast channel, so lovers of Jazz music could find the BBC's rich and diverse Jazz output all in one place - a real boon to lovers of a particular genre of music (or speech).

Four years on from the launch of the BBC Radio Player and genre is becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a means of navigating content that would once have been defined solely by its broadcast channel. For example, the recently launched channel4radio.com proffers genre as its primary means of navigation.

So what's the problem, I hear you ask? The problem is that some parts of the broadcast industry are seeing genre as the solution to the challenges of the digital world - a convenient, one-stop replacement for the channel brands that they are told are likely to struggle in a multi-channel, on-demand environment - rather than as just one navigational aid amongst a bewildering array of tools, many of which haven't even been conceived of yet.

Yes, genre is likely to play an important role in future navigation but it is looking like an increasingly blunt tool in comparison with some of the more sophisticated navigational technologies emerging from the latest generation of web apps (e.g. Last.fm). How many music lovers conceive of their musical tastes primarily in terms of genre? I know that I don't. Artists and tracks (and the recommendations they facilitate) are a more meaningful currency in my discovery of new music.

My plea to the broadcasting industry is that they try to embrace the diversity of future navigational models and avoid the temptation to try and impose a top-down taxonomy of navigation, as monolithic as the now deposed hegemony of channel brands.

Orb: taking the home out of home entertainment

Another recent discovery which promises to revolutionise my media consumption is Orb - a free web service that enables me to access all of the media stored on my home PC from any web-connected device with RealPlayer or Windows Media Player installed. So, from my work PC, laptop, PDA or mobile I can stream all of my music and videos and view any of my photos. Crucially, it automatically detects the device's available bandwidth and media player and optimizes the size and format accordingly. It even copes with the DRM'd Napster/iTunes content, validating the license locally before transcoding and streaming it. Plus, if your home PC has a TV tuner you can access that to watch live and recorded TV on your mobile device. It's obviously a fairly niche service at the moment, but as more people get Media Center PCs it could take off and just conceivably provide an alternative to DVB-H/DAB for TV on mobile devices. Oh, and they've got a cool strapline: "Orb takes the home out of home entertainment". Nice.