There’s a post on the Newsnight blog about a book called The Cult of the Amateur by David Keen arguing that the media revolution (which he refers to as Web 2.0 - I don’t think that’s a correct application of what is a fairly meaningless term anyway) has significantly harmed our culture and society; blogs allegedly ‘collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture’. There are extracts of his book in the Newsnight post, if you want to read more.

Having read the extracts published, his main issue seems to be that much user generated content (UGC) is poor quality, and that the ease with which it can now be published and reach an audience because of facilitating technology is therefore a bad thing, because poor quality content pushes out the considered, well informed contributions to the media.

So what defence does the accused enter? I thought this would be a good opportunity to actually examine why the new media phenomenon is a good thing, and while I’m at it rebut his argument which, in my opinion, fails miserably. Much of this post is an adaption of what turned out to be a rather long comment I left on the Newsnight blog.

His central premise seems to be based around the abundance of poor UGC. However, he has overlooked the fact that bad UGC tends not to reach an audience. A poor quality, ignorant rant on MySpace will not reach any audience significant enough for it to do any damage. Since most people producing UGC tend to want an audience, there is actually an incentive against creating ill-informed, poor quality content because anyone with two brain cells to rub together will be able to work out that it will have a negligible reach. Those without the aforementioned brain cells will continue to produce bad content, but hardly anyone will read/watch/listen to it. And no-one forces him to watch those ‘poor fools’ on YouTube.

Contrary to his belief, there is no threat posed by bad UGC to good quality content, and the incumbent providers of much of it. The risk to the ‘old media’ is that they fail to maximise their routes to content and thus as people become less likely to buy a newspaper, their reach decreases. So long as an old media entity produces content and makes it accessible in as many ways as possible, they will continue to be a powerful voice in our society.

The new media revolution has, in fact, increased good quality content in real terms. A long tail has been created, much of which is of real value. The technology sector perhaps has the most developed media ecosystem (simply because it was the first to adopt the new technologies, and has therefore had the longest to mature), and is a good example of this. There is a clear distinction (I hope) between GizBuzz, a member of that long tail, and an ill informed rant on MySpace.

The democratisation of media has brought profound benefits. The work of the charity MySociety (behind sites such as TheyWorkForYou and the Downing Street Petitions website) is an excellent example of what the internet can do to promote good governance and make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. More people can become involved in the running of their country thanks to better communication. More people can feel enfranchised, a powerful weapon in fighting dangerous political apathy. To dismiss all of this based on the increased availability of drivel, which does no harm and he is not forced to watch, is ignorant and unhelpful.

Technorati, the incumbent blog search engine, has launched a new design today, as well as a number of features which reflect a change of emphasis.

The redesign itself is very nice; it’s more minimalist than any recent effort, and gives big emphasis to discovery of content, with a frankly enormous tag cloud and a selection of three videos, blogs and music albums which are deemed to be of the moment. Visually it maintains the obligatory rounded corners, so it must be a success.  The interface throughout is tidier and more effective than previously.

An interesting change (in that I don’t remember it last time I used Technorati) is in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are manfully attempting to do something fairly similar to Google’s recently announced Universal Search, in which a single search will result in the most relevant content, whatever the form. On Google this can include anything from text to images, maps to books. On Technorati this would include video content, podcasts and blog posts, for example.

Technorati is, however, less successful than Google. Their attempt revolves around a ‘featured’ tab on the search, which is far less clever than Google, because all they do is search various mediums and then plonk it in a relevant box. Video results are shown in the video box, blogs in the blog box. You get the idea. This easier to do because it doesn’t require ranking algorithm, and all it really amounts to is a metasearch of the different content-type searches. Whilst a nice UI touch, it isn’t really much more than that. They continue to push using Technorati tags; if you want to show up on that ‘featured’ page, my initial look would suggest that you must use them.

So what’s that change in emphasis that I mentioned then? CEO Dave Sifry alludes to it in his post on the Technorati blog:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.

I think what he’s talking about (the emergence of many different forms of new media) only really scratches the surface of what Technorati is becoming, or could become. I’ve talked before about the problems of content discoverability in the long tail (explanation of what that means), and Technorati is well placed to provide a completely different solution to the problem from what’s being done by the current leaders in the area (Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon).

Through some sophisticated, well developed algorithms, it should be possible to leverage the vast number of blogs which they search to come up with personalised recommendations for a person based on their OPML file and/or web history, by analysing past reading patterns and then ranking possible content recommendations by similarity and discussion on other blogs. At the moment all they do is come up with the one-size-fits-all suggestions that you see on the homepage, which is possibly useful but of fairly limited value.

All in all, an update that goes in the right direction but isn’t massively exciting. The UI is now impressive, and they appear to have recognised their importance in facilitating the discovery of content. They’re not doing such a great job in that, or the universal search idea, at the moment but that will come. They face the ever-present challenge of Google Blogsearch, but seem to be growing well and crucially they are out-innovating Google in the space at the moment.

Flickr-alternative Zooomr is launching a major new version over the course of today, and is doing a number of interesting things with social media to promote the launch and engage users. Quite a few of the Oratos team use Zooomr because of the price advantage over Flickr (it’s completely free without limits), so I expect there’ll be a review of the service when it launches later today, but what I want to look at in this post is the way that they are going about launching it.

Zooomr CEO and well-known photographer Thomas Hawk is (and has been for a few hours now) sitting on a UStream.tv channel, embedded below. This is a live video stream from a web cam, with a chat box below. Thomas has been taking questions from users on everything from Zooomr to his recommendations for SLR lenses. The chat room and direct interaction between users and him (and occasionally founder Kris) is encouraging a great sense of community; a sense that users have some sort of ownership over the service that they use. He’s also getting potentially valuable feedback by having that direct conversation. Equally importantly, it helps to take the sting out of the fact that Zooomr has now been down for quite some time while they do the upgrade.

Kris Tate, the legendary 19-year-old founder of the service, has also been making posts on Vimeo, a great video blogging website. Much of what applies to the live stream is significant here, with his chatty, honest style doing much to encourage anticipation of the relaunch and subdue irritation at the service being down. He’s also posted a demo of the service, which is in general a great thing to have done because it helps bloggers who want to cover the next version (Mashable has already done so, for example, despite the fact that Mark III is not live yet) and gives a hype-enducing titbit. The one criticism, though, is that the demo isn’t great. Kris tries things that don’t work, which he doesn’t need to demonstrate, like geotagging Japanese landmarks in English. The lack of this functionality doesn’t matter to the vast majority of those watching the demo, so why embarrass oneself by letting the service fail?

Maybe I’ve over analysed all this, but I just thought it was a really neat way for a small startup for which community is essential to encourage that community and make it feel enfranchised through the relaunch. It shows that conventional PR, and even standard new media evangelism , just isn’t necessary in some cases to get coverage and hype for a launch. Now all that matters is the product itself, which we’ll see in the morning. Hopefully!

You’ve probably already heard of OpenID. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a new and upcoming standard for user authentication (and fellow Gizbuzz blogger Huw gave a nice introduction here).

I personally think OpenID is a great idea, and I’m a proponent of the idea and the standard. For a web development project I’m working on at the moment, we’re going to be using OpenID as the sole authentication system for users. That is to say, you will need an OpenID to actually sign up for the service and it will be the single system controlling your sign in.

There’s a problem though. The average computer user has never heard of OpenID, doesn’t really understand it and might be turned away from using this new service if they don’t very quickly ‘get’ how to sign up. We could have just shunned OpenID, built another proprietary username/password system and be done with it.

As a web service provider, though, I feel we have a responsibility to be pushing for new standards and helping spread OpenID. After all, it’s only through the widespread adoption of standards that the web is what it is today.

So we want to push OpenID and bring it to the forefront. What do we need to do?

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There’s been some interesting things happening in personal publishing happening recently - Twitter has become incredibly popular, and that has probably been the catalyst to a new phenomenon known as lifestreams. As far as I can tell, these were invented by British web developer Jeremy Keith, who described them thus:

Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

We are producing so much information in so many different places that it makes sense to try and pull that all together into one place. Jeremy Keith did that himself, and you can see the results here. That used a PHP script, and is fairly basic. However, a number of different services have cropped up which emulate the basic functionality, and they have all have evolved Jeremy’s concept in a slightly different way.

Jaiku is an interesting, slightly Twitter-like, product which is much more comprehensive and allows you to pull in your own feeds. iStalkr doesn’t have the mobile emphasis of Jaiku, and is more true to the original concept with a few nice extra features - in fact Jeremy Keith is a user of the service.

The one I really like, though, is Tumblr. Tumblr was originally conceived as an easy way to create Tumblelogs,  which are described by Wikipedia as preferring “short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” The whole point with Tumblelogs is that they are supposed to be a joy to update, with no work required, posting interesting things as and when. Tumblr realised that a great way to take that further would be to allow you to import your own feeds and republish that, lifestream style.

The result is a great service, for a number of reasons. It is a study in usability;  signup is incredibly quick, and the backend dashboard is brilliant, ensuring that anyone will feel confident using it. Crucially, the whole concept is instantly understandable, in a way that perhaps iStalkr and to a lesser extent Jaiku won’t be to those not well versed in the concepts involved. At the same time, there are a number of brilliant features on Tumblr, including custom themes and domains, as well as a friends system, adding the possibility of getting a network effect going.

I’ve been really enjoying my Tumblr blog. I’m not sure that anyone’s reading it, but in a strange way it is extremely satisfying to see everything you produce online collected in one place. I guess we’ll see this gaining popularity in the tech world, and probably even breaking out of that - you don’t need to know what RSS is to use Tumblr, which makes barriers to entry low. Give it two years, and Tumblr could be big.

Updated

At 3pm BST Splashcast launched a new feature for podcasters, called My Podcast Network. Previously Splashcast allowed users to create a ‘channel’ of various different pieces of media, allowing formats including audio, video, images and PowerPoint presentations. This media had to be either hosted by Splashcast or online at a small number of locations including Flickr and YouTube.

The rubbish part, as I understand it, is that you couldn’t make the channel update automatically in any way, unless you were using either Flickr or YouTube. That made me initially ignore the tool (despite the fact that ex-TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick helps run it).

Now, however, Splashcast has made the link from essentially being a content provider to being an aggregator and re-processor, by allowing the input of new shows into the channel via RSS. This immediately makes it vastly more useful for many people, including us. We can use Splashcast to create a widget for the GizBuzz podcast. This updates whenever we add a show and allows easy playing right on our site. Previously this would have been achievable, but only after what I imagine would have been a lot of coding by either Peter, Jacob or Chris (or some or all of them!).

Update: Since the post has been live, I’ve tried to put the widget in the sidebar to use as a player for the GizBuzz podcast (I couldn’t publish it before because of an embargo). It turns out that Splashcast won’t do what we want it to do. It won’t actually produce a widget of all the items in an RSS feed as far as I can tell; I want an option to display all our podcast episodes, but it will either display one episode at a time or the whole feed as one option. However, Marshall Kirkpatrick has told me that this is a feature currently in development, and that he may be able to think of a work around. It would be great if it came together, because it would be genuinely valuable to us.

They also have a few usability issues with the console used to create the widget, which aren’t present when initially creating it (all I did yesterday), but are present when you’re trying to tweak it. To some extent this is down to confusing vocabulary (players, shows and channels are all very different, but in the context of Splashcast I wasn’t initially sure what was what), which is perhaps inevitable given how unique the service is.

Embedded below is a video from Kirkpatrick which probably explains the feature more clearly than I have. It also demonstrates the nice Splashcast video player, which doesn’t show any branding or controls unless you hover over it (unlike YouTube etc).

The idea of the ‘Attention Economy’ is well defined by Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb. Companies have always endeavored to find out as much information as they can about their customers in order to improve the services they deliver or in some cases to sell this information to other companies. Information about people has always been a valuable commodity. The Attention Economy is about digging deeper and extracting more detailed information about where people devote their ‘Attention’. The history log of your web browser is a good example of your where your recent attention has been devoted to on the web and it is interesting, and perhaps inevitable, that Google is seeking to make use of this information with its Web History product.

There are already a host of services our there such as StumbleUpon which uses your browsing behavior to recommend sites you might like to visit. Even Last.fm uses your ‘Attention Information’ on your iTunes playlist (how many times you’ve listed to various songs) to create a personalised radio station which is tailored to your particular taste. Particls, which Huw will be reviewing shortly, is another application which is using attention data in a fascinating new way. What all of these services have in common is their use of past attention to predict what you will be interested in now and in the future. This could be extremely powerful in solving problems like information overload and content discovery in the long tail media economy (previously discussed here).

Such information is extremely valuable, and as such there is an effort to standardise the way in which it is stored, therefore making it portable. As a result, the APML (Attention Profiling mark-up language) has sprung up to try to standardise the way that “Attention Information” is formatted. This is certainly a good thing as I feel that the ‘Attention Economy’ really shines when attention information can be shared between services in a meaningful way. However, agreeing on standards and persuading companies to adopt them is notoriously difficult. It will be interesting to see how the effort develops in the coming months, and you can be assured that GizBuzz will be there to cover it!

Just as they’ve released their quarterly earnings report, Google sneakily launched a new feature today, “Web History”. Offering a web-based alternative to your browsers similar feature, Web History aims to organize what you visit into a concise and easily browsable archive of data.

The feature appeared for me in a small box on Google’s search results and I’m presuming this is where the feature will see its search integration. I’m too paranoid to install it (privacy concerns) however it looks like an intriguing idea from both ends (user and Google). I’m frequently losing websites that I visited earlier in the day or week; sometimes even months after visiting a page I’ll go back and try to find the page in question. Google is looking to eliminate this problem by creating a navigable database of everything you visit, and by throwing Google’s famous search on top of it they are looking to make your net archeology a bit easier.

A similar feature to this was implemented in Google Desktop, allowing users to search through their web history. It is likely that we will see a merging of these two features in the future to prevent redundancy, however Google hasn’t given any word yet. One feature that has been lost (or as they say, renamed) is Search History, the functionality of which is now present in Web History.

I applaud Google for trying to make users’ lives easier, at the same time though we have to wonder what Google is doing with this data. Storing all the world’s information isn’t the most profitable business and Google has ads to make up for this, however it surprises me that ads will continue to cover for these side ventures that take focus away from the original mission of search. I don’t want to suggest Google as an Orwellian Big Brother, however they must be fast approaching some government organizations with the ability to find out about people!

Ultimately Web History is an interesting addition to the Google suite of tools, however I won’t be enabling it. I’m a bit too paranoid (and too forgetful for those times I may want it disabled).

More and more applications are moving to run on the web. With online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs & Spreadsheets and many other services that traditionally have been the realm of the desktop moving on to the web, it seems like everything is going to the web.

One of the first things to actually make this move was email. It feels like webmail clients have existed forever. Hotmail was the startup (back before Microsoft owned them) that really brought webmail to mainstream use and since then we’ve seen many other services.

Most notably has been Gmail, which was one of the first mainstream webmail services to bring a user interface built on Ajax technology. This move (and other Ajax interfaces we now see in Yahoo Mail, the beta Hotmail interface and others) has brought the webmail experience pretty much on par with that of desktop clients.

So - with webmail services like Gmail providing such a rich user experience, are desktop email clients even relevant any more? If they are, are their days numbered?

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Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight - a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

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