Archive : May 2010

I did a quick poll via Twitter and email last week to see what sites, services and apps some of the people I know are using in their daily lives. These are of course likely to change as more and more services make their appearance (or, as I sometimes wickedly dream in the case of Facebook, slowly die), but for now I notice some clear trends:

News sites will continue to be a key source of information, even as print fights for survival

BBC News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, Al Jazeera, News24, the Daily Mail and the Sun were the most commonly visited sites amongst respondents to my poll, with the BBC and Guardian clearly leading the pack. Smaller, more local sites still have their audience amongst people who have an affiliation to those areas. News sites found a mention by all respondents, so whatever happens to print magazines, their digital avatars are here to stay. As the Times prepares to go behind a paywall, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the changes in the behaviour of their audience – something that is bound to happen.

My first trip to the Frontline Club last night (thanks, @saradotdub) was rewarded with a lively and contentious debate on the future of newspapers featuring The Times digital director, Gurtej Sandhu, enduring a severe cross-examination on Murdoch’s paywall strategy. It came from all sides: the Chair (the subtle and persistent Steve Hewlett) fellow panel members and the floor.

My takeaway was that the discussion highlighted three fallacies that still govern much newspaper thinking.

Fallacy Number One is that the internet is free because of a mix of habit and a spurious moral right, and that if you can change habits and challenge morality we’ll go back to paying for content.

Here’s a phrase I’ve been reading a lot on blogs and comments recently:

“I’m finally through with Facebook. Seriously, I’ve made my mind up and I’m going to quit (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)”

It’s sad. They sound a bit like smokers when they’ve got to the stage where they hate cigarettes but they can’t give up.

I should know. Somewhat shamefully, I am a smoker and I’ve been on Facebook since 2006.

Before I go on… ARG = Alternative Reality Game – an interactive, cross-media narrative.  ARGs are cross platform games that explore storytelling in an interesting and non-linear way.  They tend to be used as a form of viral advertising, a way to get people involved and engaged in a product so they continue to support it.  However, as the genre grows, self-supporting ARGs are created which function in a similar way, but aren’t based on the back of another media product.

We have a very small and talented development team here at Made by Many. We’re technology agnostic, and while we have a very strong Ruby backbone, we regularly supplement our in-house skills with specialists from a range of disciplines. Most often we do this with a trusted network of specialists. But now we are ready to add an exceptional Objective-C developer to our team.

The primary focus for this new role will be – of course – the iPhone and iPad (not forgetting the iPod Touch).

Imagine being able to share conversations, pictures, links or movies on your chosen social network, safe in the knowledge that your information isn’t going to be passed along or sold to some third-party you know nothing about or that there aren’t going to be massive security holes that reveal your secrets to the entire Internet, or that your privacy settings aren’t changed indiscriminately . Sound good? Then read on.

Self-service checkout machines. Is there any other machine we interact with in the modern world that is quite so odious?

As I stand in line to use one of these infernal devices, listening to the sighs of frustration from the customers ahead of me, I debate whether it’s worth it. The extra minutes I’ll save from not queuing up for an old-school conveyor belt, or the agony of a vein exploding on my forehead from using one of the damn things…

Forget reading manifestos, analysing policy impact on your monthly take-home pay or weighing up the pros and cons of entry into the Euro. Who are our political leaders and, more importantly, what do we really think of them?

What started as a conversation at SXSW launched in double-quick time just over a week ago after a flurry of code production and pixel shuffling.

Tagminster, like it’s cousin brand tags (from Noah Briar), aims to capture the true sentiment of the public; in Tagminster’s case, on the subject of politicians.