Mike Butcher

I would have to concur with Marshall Kirkpatrick. I also now use Twitter as a working tool, not just for ‘status upates’ (which I don’t really do any more unless I can say something vaguely informative or funny). I use it to interrogate and interact with my work and social contacts. It’s now one big ongoing conversation which can help me in my work, and especially in writing stories. I also was one of those who broke the story about Google buying Jaiku, and I got that because of seeing a Twitter post from a contact. As Marshall says:

People laugh at Twitter, and they can go ahead and laugh for all I care, but I’m here to tell you that it can be invaluable. Aside from the personal connectedness and relationship maintenance it’s good for, let’s be honest – it’s paying my rent. (Thanks Twitter!) I don’t mean they’ve hired me as a consultant, though I would love that, I mean Twitter is great for news discovery.

People in the TV business are some of the most creative people you will ever meet. So why is it that the body set up to market the major broadcasters to advertisers (Thinkbox) allows you, via their site, to watch some of the most creative, clever adverts you will ever see… but you can’t embed the ads in a blog post or share them on a MySpace on Facebook profile.

Like, er, duh.

This would be obvious to anyone working in the ‘digital media’ business, but to the TV guys? Computer says no.

When Twitter started out it seemed like a cool new web application to update your ‘status’ (what you are up to) for friends and, well, the world in general. Like Facebook status updates, but out on the Wild Web. But when people started having conversations via their Twitter status updates using the “@” symbol (e.g. “@mike Yeah, I thought that”)I was initially quite annoyed. I even direct-messaged some people to tell them to stop it! Go get a chat room! This was not the proper use of Twitter, I told them.

How wrong I was.

It quickly became apparent that this was turning into the best use of Twitter of all. Not for long, winding conversations you might have on instant messaging, but short, to the point wise-cracks between people interspersed with a little status update here, a small observation on life there. Twitter was no longer about ‘status’ or ‘what are you doing’. It was about conversation, ‘what are you thinking’, ‘what are we talking about’.

The key difference is that people who say “take this conversation over into IM” don’t get it. IM can’t do what Twitter does. You can’t instant message into “the cloud”. With Twitter you can. You can shout or whisper whatever you want to say out into the ether and anyone online can hear you. And anyone following you, even if you don;t follow them, can reply – then you may well become connected.

Of course, the problem comes when people abuse this. They Twitter constantly. The worst are those who Twitter their status all the time (making tea, reading paper etc). According to one statistics site I saw, I Twitter roughly every 2 hours. Too much for a status update but about right for an ongoing conversation.

Status updates – unless they are funny – now seem irrelevant and boring. Status updates are dead for me. It’s all about conversation now. I’m on Twitter here.

Last year fellow blogger and social media expert Lloyd Davis came up with an idea for something called a “social media cafe” where people working in social media (bloggers, marketing people, technologists etc) could get together in the same space and work. Sort of ‘vertical co-working’. He’s been looking for potential venues – I’m talking physical space here – in London. But this requires cash investment. However, it strikes me that a mashup of co-working and a flash mob might work better – or at least be a way of starting the idea without investment. What you need is a cluster of about two or three cafes within walking distance of each other, all offering free WiFi. Then simply flash-mob (all turn up at the same time) those places on one particular day, with people who are signed-up to the project. At lunchtime, try to gather in one of them to meet your fellow “workers”. Then do whatever you need to do that day from your allotted cafe. Crazy?

I hate blog posts saying sorry for not updating here for a while, but…. sorry for not updating here for a while. I have been busy trying to crank up TechCrunch UK since the re-launch and doing some glamourous-sounding (but hard-working I might add) trips to events abroad, including Web 2 Expo Berlin and Les Web 3 in Paris.

And on that note, the fruits of my efforts appear to be paying off. TechCrunch UK is now among the top 20 blogs in Europe:

And I was also recently granted an interview with the [geek world] famous Robert Scoble, reproduced below.

As I was reading the free daily Metro on a train the other day I was daydreaming about a different kind of newspaper but similar in form to the Metro. Instead of giving me a brief run-down of the news which lasted 20 mins, my “New Metro” would have similar stories, but also print lots of URLs so I could go and find out more information. And I don’t mean URLs which pointed to the paper’s web site. I mean real links to both the paper online and other reading. The Guardian’s printed Technology Section is already doing this a lot (using TinyURL.com)and it really helps the experience.

But what my idea about a New Metro also suggested to me was that this, ultimately, would be a newspaper in reverse. Instead of printing stories on paper and having further material to view online, my New Metro would actually be the online product slowed down and freeze-framed for print. Because the chances are I would have seen a few of the stories online already – but I’d still consume plenty more in print because it’s a different medium. I can see a time when a device like the iPhone will just replace most of my currently printed reading, but a ‘freeze-framed’ print version could still offer me more in terms of quick scanning and… well, just a different, more tactile experience. It would probably be a smaller paper and different in terms of story selection, but there would be no reason for print to die out. It would just adapt. (In fact in the early 1990s I wrote about a Guardian project to have an A4 newspaper printed by your home printer, along these lines).

I was reminded of this daydream today as I caught up on the battle currently raging between the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade and the National Union of Journalists (I came to it via MessyMedia). Greenslade argues here and here that the NUJ now stands in the way of journalists taking up their digital tools and running with them. He says the survival of an organised media and journalistic business depends on the Union coming to terms with the fact that newspapers must now invest in online and get journalists to keep the web site updated every day including weekends – you name it. If they don’t then other players who aren’t tied down by lots of rules and regulations will just do it, and win the audience and the advertising.

It seems particularly appropriate to read and blog about this subject now since, in the last week or so I have felt like hell due a heavy cold, but still kept posting to TechCrunch UK, even breaking the odd exclusive and even (horror!) posting on the weekend and at night. If it was that sort of blog I might have uploaded photos and video too. I even went to Barcelona and back this week, using WiFi at the airports and hotel to keep the blog going. I know that is a no-brainer for the average blogger but it’s a world away from the average journalist, who has to wait to submit copy when other people are in the office to edit it.

Maybe I’m odd. Maybe I do it because I am passionate about the subject. Maybe also I could take advantage of the flexibility of a blog to post, especially this last two weeks, when I felt physically up to it, not when I was ‘in the office’. To me, ‘the office’ is when I am online, so the office is the nearest WiFi, regardless of where I am physically. But I am still, at heart, a journalist/blogger/storyteller/whatever who gets a kick out of the scent of a good story. So in that respect the same rules would apply to a journo on a local paper who felt like cracking out a story in the middle of the night rather than waiting for ‘the office’ to open in the morning.

Facebook has quietly launched a keyword advertising system to rival Google’s AdSense. Disguised as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis, the new system charges per click and lets advertisers target by city, gender, age, relationship status, employer, educational level, political views, and keywords. Facebook has the data, generated by its users and the new system will have “detailed reporting”.

When I wrote for a US-owned magazine (The Industry Standard), the house style on almost any story, for example about a company closing, was like this: “John Smith looked at his watch. As the seconds slowly passed, he knew it was time to step up to the plate and tell the board what was going to happen in the next six months. But something stopped him… yada yada.”

This was totally different to the British style which was basically: “CEO John Smith today told employees they would be out of a job inside 6 months.” Now I notice a great letter to The Washington Post, which basically suggests that in the age of the Internet, mobile phones and a plethora of digital media we now no longer have time to sit down and read what in journalism we call a ‘drop intro’. To quote:

“Newspaper circulation in the United States has been sliding for about 20 years. I have an idea that might help these papers get back on track. If the average paper has about 200 stories and the average reader has about 20 minutes to read it, he can spend only about six seconds on each story. But stories are often written in the meandering style of William Faulkner. If the headline reads, “Bridge Set to Close Down for Repairs” the story might begin with: “Bob Wilson gazed down at his empty coffee cup and listened to the patter of rain falling gently against his window pane.” Then, after reading about two paragraphs of fluff like this, the reader is told to “See BRIDGE, C21, Col. 1″ to learn when the bridge will be closed. We clearly need a newspaper digest that will get to the point more quickly. I’m sure that it would be a huge hit for any publisher smart enough to offer it.”

There’s no doubt that blogs now offer that fast filter, which is perhaps why they took off so well in the US – where readers became tired of the Faulkner style, and have not been so dramatically big in the UK, where…. ahem… the media tends to get to the point a lot faster. As in the The Sun’s “Gotcha”…. I rest my case…

The Industry Standard, my former magazine, appears to be considering re-launching. Its six years since the death of the “newsmagazine of the Internet Economy�, but at least it left a good looking corpse. Many people still respect the kind of in-depth investigate coverage it brought to the Internet industry.

Quite why owners IDG are considering bringing it back is beyond me. Time-Warner pulled the plug on Business 2.0, a similar title, only last week.

A web-only format is more likely than a print magazine. And since blogs are now ‘the thing’, it would be odd not to incorporate those., We’ll see….

If you are interested in current digital technology and creativity developments, or have something to contribute about the importance of good design principles in interactive media, then check out iDesign: design for life on September 18th, at London’s Southbank Centre, Purcell Room as part of this year’s London Design Festival. There’ll be an exhibition and debates to examine the impact of digital interactive media on all of our daily lives, and how our collective digital future will pan out. Tickets can be bought here.