Talking Is Working
You can put what I know about advertising (digital or otherwise) on the head of a pin.
But I was invited to this “think tank” by these nice people a few weeks ago. So in return I’m linking to their video.
Digital Advertising for a Digital Britain: A Think Tank brought to you by VideoEgg from VideoEgg on Vimeo.
Some good things to read, watch and listen to.
1. Profile of Sir Thomas Legg on Radio 4.
2. Fascinating blog post about Helmand Province from Adam Curtis’ blog. (Thanks to Roo)
3. Nerdfighters entry on h2g2.
4. “Glamour’s Golden Age” Art Deco programme on BBC FOUR.
5. Peepshow – series 6 episode 5. It’s still funny.
From Conservative Home. I particularly liked number 3:
There is an attraction for free-marketeers in making the BBC compete with others for licence fee money… However we rejected it because we believe it would make all broadcasters focus not on attracting viewers but on attracting subsidies. We need a BBC that uses the licence fee to produce programmes of the highest quality – and commercial broadcasters to keep it on its toes. The danger of the top-slicing model is that broadcasters would focus their energies more on lobbying Westminster than producing programmes that viewers want to watch.
I suspect this will be the last in the series.
There’s definitely some wierd ironies here. (Originally spotted via Blue Cat Onine on Twitter)
Ms Fox revealed details of the break-in on the social networking site Twitter.
“O bloody hell the #digitalinclusion office has been broken into and all computers taken
(,” she wrote.
Steve Hewlett in Media Guardian;
The most serious issue (as the BBC keeps saying to little effect) is the threat “top-slicing” poses to BBC independence. It is worth remembering what a fragile flower this is. Independence is the BBC’s key editorial and creative asset and yet it is only sustained, in such a typically British way, by a series of individually flimsy conventions. That the BBC royal charters should be 10 years and each licence fee settlement a minimum of 5 years isn’t written down anywhere, but it protects the BBC from having to mix too frequently with politicians who just can’t help trying to exert influence. That the BBC exists by Royal Charter at all and is in that sense not really owned by the government is another protection. And so is the BBC’s monopoly on the licence fee: it prevents an open competition for this revenue in which politicians (or government appointees) would have the final say.
#9 Bob Hoskins and Francis Barber in The Street on BBC ONE. Still available on iPlayer.
#10 Michael Parkinson on the Today programme’s Sports slot this morning.
Some rather good swonky avanguard classical music. Jonathan Harvey is composer of the week.
It can, and does make challenging TV, which other commercial stations can’t/don’t/won’t. Take, for example, any of the Adam Curtis documentaries.
Or, quite frankly, the latest Torchwood.
I cannot see any of the commercial channels trying a five parter-in-one week. It’s only because the Beeb is free of commercial pressure that they can indulge themselves and us, in it.
I don’t buy newspapers very often these days. But back in May I happened to get the Observer on a day when it was publishing its Music monthly supplement.
I was very interested in the “Walking The Plank” feature inside it (see picture above). I wasn’t able to find this feature on the Observer’s website so I’ve reproduced it above (which is an irony in itself).
“Walking The Plank” looks at the history of five music file sharing sites. In case you can’t read the text above here’s what it says in the final box at the bottom of each column.
Napster: Shut down by courts. Bought by Bertlesmann for $8 million and relaunched as legal, subscription based service…
Limewire: One year after opening a store allowing people to pay fro tracks, the now legits site claims 70 million unique users per month.
Grokster: Shuts down five months after the Supreme Court rules it can be sued for misuse of its file sharing software.
Pirate Bay: Convicted of promnoting copyright infringement. The founders and their buisness partners aare sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay £2.4 milllion…
Oink’s Pink: Alan Ellis was due to appear at Teeside crown court on charges of conspiracy to defraud…
Like a lot of people when I first came across ideas around digital media and how it was changing notions of copyright I got rather excited (the link is to my internal BBC blog of the time so you won’t be able to read it unless you’re inside the BBC firewall). Reading that post again now makes me realise how naive I was. Particularly in the light of what’s actually happened in the past three years.
When Pirate Bay lost their court case there was a lot of bold rhetoric about them fighting the system (“we can’t pay”). But from the look of this story they’ve gone legal, and may have to pay.
Things have value as long as human beings are prepared to assign value to them and pay for them. As long as they are prepared to pay for things, laws around ownership of those things will still exist. And it doesn’t matter if you disagree with a law, if it’s the law then in the end you have to obey it or face the consequences.
These days I am pretty sceptical of statements like “data wants to be free”. This is an example of what I was taught at school as “the pathetic fallacy” – the tendency of human beings to think that inanimate objects and other living things have the same “feelings” as human beings do. Human beings may or may not want to be “free” (whatever that means), but code doesn’t have feelings or aspirations.
It is true that the nature of digital media means that its easier for some people to do certain things (like copying). But just because they can, doesn’t make those things right or even useful.
Virtual world Second Life was the centre of a copyright dispute. None of Second Life is “real”. Yet people felt ownership of the things they made there and objected to other people “ripping them off”.
People make rules, then break them, then make them again. And it’s the rule makers who have the power. In cyberspace as much as anywhere else.
Where’s Nick? What’s he up to? BBC Internet Blog Radio Labs BBC People Personal Blogs BBC Jazz Album Reviews (I write the odd one) | john on Putting Your Money Where Your … |
 | Mo on BBC Trust: cheerleader or crit… |
| Mo on BBC Not Destroyed By New Guide… |
 | nickreynoldsatwork on BBC Not Destroyed By New Guide… |
| Mo on BBC Not Destroyed By New Guide… |
