Mike Butcher

Live blog of Ben Hammersley talk at Frontline Club. – excuse typos/errors….

QUESTION (supplied by Graham Holliday and delivered by me)

You had 91 twitter folowers, but you ‘follow’ just 2

Yu posted 44 pictures on flickr, but got few comments

You had 110 subs on YouTube , 6,000 views, few comments, but replied twice

The blog did not allow comments at all.

Only 20 Facebook ‘friends’

Beyond any comments you may have made on blogs, as far as I can tell, you “interacted” exactly seven times – one comment on YouTube and six replies – including one to Richard Sambrook and another to The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh – on Twitter.

With this in mind – and the fact that you and the BBC called this a social media experiment – how social was it really?

Ben’s Answer (paraphrased):

The story was not ‘pushed’ by the BBC.

Not that many people are interested in Turkish politics.

These were not successful traffic/ interaction figures, yes.

But the real point was that from the bbc.co.uk/turkishjourney page, 80% of the content there was built were built with social media tools / public tools

All were consumer social media tools.

In essense it was an internal facing project.

The vast majority of the content was not run off BBC software.

The key thing is – there is a huge driving force from the IT dept to do only stuff built ‘in house’

But this is done specifically on tools which were free, simple and available now.

So the question was can we get this thing into the BBC site under the radar?

Asnwer – yes – that was a huge success.

Yes, we screwed up a lot – it wouldn’t have been an experiment otherwise.

We did the behind the scenes videos in black and white on YouTube to separate them from BBC editorial.

[Q: What about lack of comments on the blog?]

Very little added value would have come from comments . Mark Mardel’s blog has been great but “every single comment thread has gone to shit.”

[later]

British Libel law prevented us from allowing coomments. And it was on MY BLOG and I didn’t want to get sued.

Brunch Bites 1.0, the first “salon” style event from Bites Media (the new mini-network of digital business blogs: tbites, mediabites, mobbites, musicbites) went very well today. In attendance were a wide variety of people drawn from digital media, marketing, mobile, music and the startup world of Web 2.0. These included Luke Razzell who is currently developing a Facebook application called Blog Friends; Walid Al Saqqaf, co-founder of TrustedPlaces; David Jennings, author of a book about to be published on social media and music (which I’ll review soon); mobile guru Helen Keegan of Beepmarketing; Thayer Driver from Chinwag; a new startup still in stealth mode; Anthony Goh, advertising strategist; Lloyd Davis; and serial Internet entrepreneur Steve Bowbrick, who I described as the Grande Dame of the UK internet industry. (I was trying to be reverential but it came out wrong!) Look out for the next Brunch Bites on August 29 (venue to be announced) or join the Facebook group or keeping an eye on bitesmedia.com / mbites.com. There are some photos on Flickr already (thanks Thayer! and here are mine) which make me look – entirely incorrectly – like I was holding court, but which were taken during the two minutes when I just outlined what the event was about an introduced people to each other. Honest!

Remember back in ’07 when you put your whole life online? One day a man opened too many tabs in Firefox spent too long on Facebook and took the Internet down… Life was never the same again. People were forced to print out their blog and hand out pages on the street. Nigeria’s spam economy collapsed… (thanks to Valleywag)

Come for brunch with blogger and journalist Mike Butcher, this Wednesday in Soho…

EVENT: Brunch Bites 1.0 (BETA)

Date: Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Time: 10:30am – 12:00pm

Location:

The Breakfast Club, Soho

33 D’Arblay Street

London

Also on Upcoming

Map

Venue:

http://www.thebreakfastclubsoho.com/

Email: editor@bitesmedia.com

Description:

Into digital media, marketing, music, mobile and Web 2.0? Got a startup?

Come for brunch with blogger and journalist Mike Butcher, mbites.com and Bites Media, and publisher of:

tbites.com

MediaBites.com

MobBites.com

MusicBites.com

A new ‘mini network of blogs’.

I’ll also be doing some video and audio interviews there.

This event is the first from Bites Media

I am reminded of the days when Web access was banned by employers because employees would spend too much time on it. Now Facebook is getting banned by City firms. I mean you might as well ban email and the phone. Dennis Howlett has a good quote on this subject from a former CTO at Dresdner:

“I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time…Banning Facebook is the equivalent of banning coffee shops and water coolers and loos.”

Surely education is the answer, not banning stuff? Besides it’ll all settle down when people get bored with being bitten by Zombies or poked by strangers…(or will they…?)

Head of digital for the Guardian Media Group Simon Waldman hits back with both barrels today at John Duncan and his assertion in a previous issue of Press Gazette that online teams have ‘conned’ unsuspecting newspaper boards into making investments in online publishing.

Here are some key quotes from his piece in today’s Press Gazette:

“The current forecasts for growth in the UK market indicate that, on average, digital spending in the UK will grow from a £2bn market to approximately £4bn over the next two years. In other words, there is likely to be some £2bn of new money coming online. But isn’t much of this going to search engines (particularly, Google)? Well, even if 50 per cent of it is, that still leaves £1bn of new money left for us to fight for….”

“…Last month PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast that we will move from 50 per cent of households having broadband this year to 80 per cent by 2011. All the evidence shows that the longer people have a connection, the more time they spend doing things online. So internet use in the UK is set to grow for many years yet…”



Waldman’s conclusion is that while “print has many healthy decades ahead.. those will be about gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, decline.” Waldman has also been blogging recently about whether the Dialy Express will simply close as a result of the change in the media landscape.

The online world, meanwhile, “offers smart media owners potential for growth – in reach, reputation and revenue. That’s not a con. It’s a fact. And it’s time to learn to deal with it.”

Julian Bond at Voidstar has a great post on routing all your and your friend’s Status updates from Facebook to Twitter using Mario Menti’s excellent TwitterFeed service. Now, here’s my question. Is this not completely insane? Keeping up with Twitter feeds is hard enough. Adding Facebook status updates would hasten my “Twitter Bankruptcy”. At least with Twitter most people tend to keep in the back of their head that at least some of their key followers get Tweets sent direct to their mobiles via SMS. That means Twitter posts – which are also limited to 140 characters – tend to be much more concise than Facebook status updates, which can be even more throwaway that Tweets, if that doesn’t sound like an impossibility…

To illustrate, here’s is an example of my friends’ facebook status updates this morning:

XXXX XXXX is swapping one kind of chaos for another.

one minute ago

XXXX XXXX is pleased that there is finally some sunshine!

7 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is back once more like the renegade master.

11 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is in the other only caff on the A4.

30 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is hoping the weather at 5am this morning holdup for the rest of the week for the folks back home.

44 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is prodding Drupal with a sensitive implement.

49 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is in the office.

50 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is pleased to see that Mike Reid’s death is getting billed above Ingmar Bergman’s on BBC Online. That will probably change. Right? Runaround!

56 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is back in the office.

57 minutes ago

XXXX XXXX is in the office.

about an hour ago

What I call ‘conversational status’ is a great way of just shooting the breeze, but the added element of mobile changes the character of the conversation to be pithier and often far more relevant to location.

Which reminds me of how one Twitter friend of mine recently said he was ‘pruning his Twitter friends’ down to just those in London. His Twitter conversation wouldn’t make any sense otherwise…

I have written about security and terrorism before (in The Guardian). One conference I went to a few years ago in Dublin involved sitting around working out how to hack into WiFi. ‘Black Hat’ security is about things like ‘reverse engineering’ software to work out how to break into it. It’s pretty useful both for governments and for companies to work out how secure their systems are. So I’m amazed this morning to find that a German hacker has been turned away from the US for carrying ‘training materials’ into the country. Here’s a guy who has actually trained US government officials about online security. But after a 9 hour flight and a 4.5 hour interview they sent him packing back home. There’s more on his blog here. Are we to take it that the US no longer wants to hear from people willing to educate its people? Roll on a new President…

Today I’ve been reading Rex Hammock’s Weblog (thanks Voidstar for the link) who writes about how Facebook it’s not really the Holy Grail for either social networking or being the ultimate tool for collaborative working and tracking. He calls it’ “geek play”, and I agree. He says:

Facebook is not even close to being what will ultimately be that thing which alters fundamentally the way in which we relate and communicate. It may show us the way, but there are some important factors related to personal identity and social interaction that Facebook — or any platform that requires us to create community that is locked inside a wall — will not be able to overcome if it is to become the next be-all, end-all.

He also mentioned Ning which was previewed last year at Content 2.0 here in London when Marc Canter got up on stage and pointed out that MySpace users couldn’t own theor own profiles or move them around networks. Well guess what? here we are again with the same old issue all over again, this time with Facebook.

Meanwhile over here, “A VC in NYC” agrees with Jason Calacanis that “Facebook Bakruptcy” is where you have total overload of friend requests and incoming stuff to deal with. Plus FB is becoming so successful, startups are wondering if they should just build an application for Facebook rather than build out a whole web service.

My view is that building a site is a marathon not a sprint. If you can’t control your content then you have no business long term. Sure, market your site on Facebook – but don’t for pete’s sake put your whole idea into it.

It seems to me that something like Wordcamp should be done in the UK. The techies have their BarCamp. Why not something around content? And it doesn’t have to be just about WordPress skills…. (I use Drupal for instance).

Perhaps someone could provide a venue? People can showcase their skills/services. And I can learn how to be a better blogger!

I dare say there are a few other people we could bring together to make something happen…

Email me on mike at mbites dot com if you are interested.