Mobile Day Braindump

It was mobile day yesterday on the BBC Internet blog.

Pros:

Sterling effort from all to make it happen on the day of a Tube strike.

High quality, meaty content from all parts of the BBC.

The video worked! Hooray!

Good news to tell on the N95.

Live twitter surgery a real highlight – we’ll do more of this.

Two potential regular contributors in the making: David Madden and Jason Da Ponte.

Cons:

Like iPlayer day possibly too much content and not enough links/comments/engagement. Perhaps the community interested in mobile isn’t as big as I thought. Or maybe there’s just a lot else going on right now.

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The Good and Bad of Blogging

Rory Cellan-Jones wonders if blogging is bad for you.

Jeff Jarvis explains in fascinating detail how good blogging has been for him – including how much money his blog has made.

The Power Of Nick Robinson

One of the reasons I do this blog is to remind myself of how blogging works. WordPress‘ stats give me a live update of how many hits I’m getting and where the traffic is coming from. And because the numbers are very low it’s much easier to get a quick snapshot sense of what’s going on.

And when I say low I mean low. My blog really is at the very end of the long tail. Somedays the tail doesn’t wag at all, and I get no hits whatsoever. My best day ever has been 350 hits (mainly due to a link from Biased BBC). Tiny numbers.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a link from the sidebar of Nick Robinson’s blog to my blog post would bring me traffic (88 hits on one day last week). But it did surprise me that even though the conversation on Nick’s blog has moved swiftly on, yesterday I got another 87 hits, most of them from Nick’s blog.

Sometimes it seems like a wave. You don’t do anything, yet you still get traffic.

Linking, tagging and searching are the basic things that make blogs (and the internet) work. This is easy to forget, as blogging sometimes seems to be about what you write. It isn’t. It’s about how and how often you link and tag.

Why Oh Why Oh Why?

Why is Alistair Campbell shocked when a journalist tells him he wrote a story about him which was completely untrue? Hasn’t journalism always been a strange mix of fearless seekers after truth and people happy to make things up for a living?

Why do commentators like Madeline Bunting still write “why oh why” pieces about people being rude online?  Haven’t people always been rude to each other both behind their backs and to their faces?

Why, if Comment is Free is worried about people being nasty  about scousers, don’t they just moderate their comments harder? Why don’t they realise that they are responsible for the comments they publish?

Why don’t people think about Jeff Jarvis’s view that social networking will make people more civil and polite not less?

Why if, according to Nick Davies, rewriting press releases is such a terrible thing, do journalists keep on doing it? Why don’t they just link to the press release instead?

Why don’t journalists understand that when they rewrite a press release to make it suitable for their particular readership they are doing exactly the same thing as the PR and marketing people they despise?

Why do journalists and bloggers despise PR and marketing people? Especially when some of them (e.g. Steve Rubell )have a darn sight better idea of what’s going on than your average journalist?

Why can’t people like Madeline Bunting read this excellent column from Jemima Kiss and realise that “participation” is the key (“our front of house task is to get stuck in… tokenism won’t do”)? Internet conversation won’t get any better unless people participate.

Why don’t more people understand (like Hilary Perkins does) that this is all just communication? Marketing and PR people, bloggers and journalists are all using the same tools. It’s not what you’re called that counts, or even whether you are paid for it, but how you use the tools, how you behave and whether people trust you to tell the truth.

N.B. Answer to question 2. Because it’s easier to write a “why oh why” column and get paid for it than to actually do some work to understand how all this stuff actually works.

Just as it’s easier to rewrite a press release than to do some work and find some new facts.

Top Slicing Jobs

Peter Preston on top slicing the licence fee from the Observer:

“…the only thing worse than bringing it in would be five more years of talking about it.”

John Naughton on Apple and bloggers in the Guardian :

“…Jobs may wear velvet gloves, but they’re lined with lead.“

Blogs – Are We Getting Somewhere?

Two posts about blogging sensitive subjects at the BBC. One from Tom Scott  and one from Curtis Poe.

I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet as Curtis is referring to the guidelines that I helped write.

But his comments make me think we, (and I mean the BBC, James Cridland, Tom Scott and everybody) might just be getting somewhere in trying to make the BBC more open.

Curtis says:

“And despite various things the BBC has done wrong, this is what the BBC does right. Blogs are for communicating, not for press releases. They’re not official discussions, but they can say a lot more about a company than an official communication which is carefully vetted by lawyers. And while the BBC has plenty of blogs, you don’t even have to blog there about your job if you don’t want to. I sometimes blog about the BBC on my personal journal rather than their official ones. They’re OK with that. I finally get to work for a company which “gets” blogs.”

“Iran leader’s blog attracts critics”

Some brave people in Iran (from the Guardian).

Why Ed Richards Should Blog

Emily Bell’s column in the Guardian on Monday about OFCOM set me thinking.

I went to a Media Literacy Summit recently and then a week afterwards to a BBC Innovation day (which I will blog about shortly).

What struck me as a result was this.

There is a big gap between what people (like Jelly Ellie) are doing with these new media tools and broadcasting policy makers and regulators who don’t use them. As Euan Macintosh points out the people who make the decisions about media are illiterate in these forms of media themselves.

Among the many things on its agenda OFCOM wants to increase media literacy and safeguard public service content (through its’ proposal for a Public Service Publisher).

So Ed Richards (Ofcom’s Chief Executive) should start a blog.

This would increase media literacy in that one more person (i.e. Ed himself) would become more media literate. And the fact of him doing it might make the people around him more media literate.

It would also increase the amount of public service content. A sucessful blog from Ed might contain his thoughts on broadcasting, strategy and regulation (very public service). Even if he didn’t want to do that, Ed is a cultured man so his cultural tastes would also be public service. A blog from Ed is unlikely to contain porn, guns, tobacco or abuse.

I’m not expecting this to happen. And even if it did it would be a minor miracle if Ed had the kind of “inner blogger” that would make for a good blog.

But if would be much simpler, easier and cheaper than media literacy initiatives or a PSP.