Over at the site of my new business, we’ve been having fun with the seven deadly sins. Nothing sordid, mind, all very tasteful. We’ve been listing the various downfalls we’ve seen befall sites and matching them up against the classical vices. (Of course, being a business, we then offer ourselves as the solution.) It’s part of our radical strategy of making clients’ content interesting.
Thanks to Bruce Combe from The List for pointing out this great headline in Woman & Home (no, I don’t know what he was looking for either). “Five years off your face”? I didn’t know that Bez wrote for that market. What next? “Shaun Ryder opens his heart to the People’s Friend”?
It’s not always easy being a hack. You throw your creativity out into an uncaring world and think nobody’s watching.
But they are, especially when you screw up, as BBC Scotland’s Judith Tonner demonstrates.
What’s even more surprising is the extent to which even the smallest (albeit very flashy) gesture gets analysed over and over again, as with David Robertson’s pen trick.
I just took the What Is Your Net Culture IQ quiz. Man, has my finger slipped off the web trivia pulse. Given that I used to pen the Lazy Guide To Net Culture I was disappointed with the result: 104. Higher than average but less than half of the top score.
Mind you my disappointment was as nothing compared to what I felt what the redesign of scotsman.com did to the display of my old columns in the link above…
Well played, Sir Robert of McNeil, who has apparently seen off a wealthy person who was offended at his comment that “the rich are leaving and good ruddy riddance to them”.
Carol Høgel – who hails from a place called Chicago in one of the former colonies – also referred to The Scotsman columnist as a “destructively spiteful philistine“. This is a plainly untrue as Rab is a devotee of the poet-warriors in green and white who grace this Earth under the name Hibernian Football Club. He thus demonstrates delicate artistic sensibilities that make Ovid look like Stephen Frail.
At the risk of being “spiteful”, I note that Ms Høgel is an heiress. Perhaps if she had had to make her money herself she wouldn’t have so thin a skin. In the hope that Rab can keep this up, I have sent him a list of people that I think Scotland would be better off without. Sadly, he has not replied to my pleas.
More seriously, Rab is one of the very, very few writers in Scotland who is provocative. I’m sure that rich people prefer paeons of praise – such as they might hear from desperate fundraisers after some dough – but that is not what real journalism is about. Too much of what fills our papers is tepid, timid, predictable and corporately approved.
Thank God for the Rabs of this world who remind us that proper journalism jars, surprises and – yes – offends. Let’s hope the Carol Høgels of this world see the art in that.
For eight years I plied my trade as an online journalist. My mission, should I have no choice but to accept it, was to attract readers to pages where adverts were served. For every 1,000 page impression a piece of content received we could expect something like £10 (plus any sponsorship for the relevant section).
That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.
Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.
This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.
But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but simply getting a message to them. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.
Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.
For those of you who are still struggling with what this Web 2.0 thing is, I’ve some bad news (though really it’s great news): Web 3.0 is just around the corner, according to the man who invented these tangled Webs.
Tim Berners-Lee says in an interview with Paul Miller that the Semantic Web – a crucial part of the Web 3.0 vision – is open for business.
“Wow,” I hear you say. “Web 3.0. The Semantic Web. Great … Err, what the **** does that actually mean?”
Well, the sainted Sir TBL puts it this way:
Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision [is] where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent. A given application can use different data. An application can run on a desktop or in my browser, it’s my agent. It can access all the data, which I can use and everything’s much more seamless and much more powerful because you get this integration. The same application has access to data from all over the place.
Now in my view all data is content. What we are looking at is a future where you will be able to access all data (or content) from any device or any application anywhere. But that does not mean that the Facebook Vampires application will stalk you to the toilet or “private personal enhancement medication” emails will start tumbling out of your iPod. One of the key characteristics of what’s known as Web 2.0 has been the organising of data (content) to enhance relevance. As technology allows the universal sharing of data this trend towards completely targeted relevance will become even more pronounced.
It’s good to know that TBL believes William Gibson’s oft-quoted dictum: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
(Also posted on w00tonomy.com.)
I am very proud to be a journalist and, coincidentally, have long admired the late great Bill Hicks. I especially enjoyed his assessment of those trod “the other side” of the media line:
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root. I don’t know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. “There’s gonna be a joke coming…” There’s no fucking joke coming, you are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
So part of me is bewildered to find that I have set up a “content marketing” agency called w00tonomy. Yup, I now work in marketing, though I still consider myself a journalist. A journalist who is hibernating until the current great winnowing is past and the good times come back.
In the meantime, sorry Bill.
Hurrah for the vicious, unforgiving, hilarious power of the vox populi!
I was sent a link to this Guardian Unlimited blog by a 19-year-old called Max who’s off on a trustafarianesque jaunt to India and Thailand. I won’t pass comment on the quality of the lad’s writing because the poor boy has been given a highly entertaining kicking by GU readers. Here’s just some of the very very negative responses.
Reallynay: Nil interest. Full stop.
teganjovanka: Bring back national service.
DaveWinters: Instead of setting off on yet another inane, identikit trip around Asia before you take up your place at Oxbridge (or wherever), why don’t you leave your family’s Highgate mansion FOR GOOD, cut yourself off from your father’s allowance, move into a council estate in Salford, STAY THERE, and then consider writing a blog about your experiences. Why does our society only grant a voice to those with nothing to say?
Calleprofunda: This has to be by far the least interesting thing I’ve ever stumbled across on this website. I mean, really? I’m sure Max is ‘an-alright-kinda-guy’ and he will have fun on his holiday (yes ‘holiday’, it’s funny how by labelling it ‘travelling’, people somehow attach some sort of profundity to their couple of months lounging and partying in the sun). He’ll make a few new friends, see some beautiful sights/ landscapes, take some fun drugs etc etc…exhilirating stuff. Seriously, is this guy’s holiday really worthy of a blog advertised on the main page of the website? Have you nothing better to put on your website. Shame on you guardian.co.uk
Realsocialdad: who, in God’s name, thought this would be a good idea?
Lameplanet: He looks like a cliche, talks like a cliche, and is about to embark on a monumental cliche.
IvorMarlow: I noticed a problem with the site: under every post there’s this: “Offensive? Unsuitable?” Then a report button. Except on the top one. You know, Max’s post.
Benulek: Oh Christ, this guy’s going to get an absolute hammering. [Guardian Unlimited] commissioning editors, you are cruel, cruel beasts. I almost feel sympathetic. Almost. Don’t forget, poverty is sad, but kinda authentic and like ennobling, mmmhmmm. Why does nobody go looking for themselves in Belarus?
Luwinta: Please take it down. It’s not fair.
Things really start to hot up when people notice that the 19-year-old wannabe wordsmith, one Max Gogarty, shares a surname with a journalist who had written for the Guardian on travel.
Cevicheater: …and who on the Guardian is he related to?
Madame: Well, given that Paul Gogarty is a travel writer for the Guardian, I guess that answers the question about who he’s related to …
Aikers: It seems there is a Paul Gogarty who already writes for the Guardian Travel section. Coincidence? I think not.I like the Guardian usually, but sometimes, they don’t half get it wrong. Moneyed youngster goes travelling to the usual places to get drunk and meet girls? Well, bugger me, a stroke of genius.MacDonald: This is excellent stuff. Normally the Guardian, along with our other fine press establishments, manage to hide from their readers the fact that journalism is one of the most neoptistic industries in the country. The ‘work experience’ to children and friends’ children; the unpaid work you have to do to get in – - but now, true to its politics, the Guardie has blown the lid on all of that. Hats off to them, that’s what I say. May this be the start of great transparency – I suggest a weekly list of whose kids are benefitting from the paper’s largesse at that moment.
Somewhat unsportingly, one reader compared a quote from Max’s post to an article his father had written about taking him to Thailand half a decade ago:
Sonofagun: “every one I’ve spoken to is making no secret of the fact that Thailand should be pretty damn decadent.” Max, you were only in Thailand five years ago when your father wrote an article about your trip for this very newspaper. Cast your mind back to that holiday. That’s what Thailand will be like. The link is here, in case you’ve forgotten: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2002/apr/06/bangkok.thailand.familyholidays
But fair play to the Graun, they’ve left a large number of the posts up there. And there’s even this post:
Hello everyone, I’m the editor of the site. Thanks for all your comments. Just to clear up a couple of points. Yes, well spotted, Max is the son of Paul Gogarty, who has written a few travel pieces for the Guardian over the years, though he isn’t a Guardian employee. Max got in touch with us because he writes occasionally for the TV programme Skins. He wants to write an honest account of what teenagers get up to on their travels, and we hope you might be able to give him tips about what to see and do when he’s in Thailand and India – how to make the most of it, what to avoid… Plus, if you’ve seen other travel blogs you’d like to recommend, do send links for us to add. Some of you have mentioned that you’d like to be given the chance to write about your travels. We’re always looking for good writers, so feel free to drop us a line at travel@guardian.co.uk.
Afterthought: It occurred to me during the long watches of the night that this sums up the dilemma of online publishers. Traffic is governed by the iron rule of the power law distribution. Because of the famed long tail associated with this content sites need to have as many bits of content on them as possible to A) serve niches and B) increase traffic. The long tail means that every piece of content has its place, that it will be of interest to somebody. The secret to high traffic is to have enough of these items to appeal to as many niches as possible. Someone, somewhere will be interested in Max’s holiday (even if it’s just his dad and chums) so the GU is serving a niche in a way. But at the same time it’s pissing off its core readership. Aye, there’s the rub.
Mad propz (as teh young peeple say) to my old mucker Simon Pia who has landed a plum job as chief spinmeister to Wendy Alexander. He is only her third media spokesman in six months so the impressively begubbed one has been positively restrained of late.
The key fact about Simon is that he is a devoted follower of the poet-warriors in green and white who grace this earth under the name Hibernian Football Club. Quite how his experience of this once great Scottish institution brought to the brink of extinction by desperately poor leadership will relate to the Scottish Labour Party I have no idea.
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