The Digital Week

Chris Nee, the Julie Andrews of the social media space, discusses Murdoch’s bullish attitude towards Google, Obama’s Tweet #fail, crap tattoos, the outing of Belle du Jour and the death rattle of Technorati.

Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation have been grappling with the web for a long old while now, and Murdoch has been very vocal recently in his assertion that free-to-user business models are not viable for news outlets. Paywalls and micropayments are more his kind of thing and, as unpopular as he is, he may have a point.

News Corp has closed ranks on the social web, apparently coming to the conclusion that blocking Google (i.e. preventing its articles from appearing on Google News) will do the outlets little economic damage because most visitors who enter websites through that route quickly depart.

That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. Google sends outlets 100,000 clicks a minute (according to itself) and provides 25% of WSJ.com‘s traffic (according to Hitwise).

Google also has problems in Switzerland, where it’s being taken to court by the state over Street View privacy concerns.

In other Murdochy news, MySpace could be set for an interesting development. True to News Corp form, the site looks set to introduce paid services in order to remain/become viable. The payments will likely focus on the site’s music offering (something I previously argued was its biggest asset) in an effort to offset a staggering monthly streaming spend of $20m.

Obama doesn’t tweet

Digi News wouldn’t be Digi News without lots of pointless Twitter fluff. First, alleged UK comedian Rory McGrath addressed its ubiquitousness in shoddy Dave comedy show Argumental last week. Clearly ignoring the fact that it’s 2009 and all possible plays on the word “Twitter” have been done to death, McGrath suggested without irony that it should be called “Twatter” and then grinned smugly as if he was the first to crack that particular joke. Get to the back of the queue, Rory.

Elsewhere, Barack Obama aka The President of the United States of America has not-very-controversially revealed that he has never used Twitter. Given his presidential campaign’s heavy (and well-managed) use of the site I suppose this is worthy of a raised eyebrow, but nothing more.

The Obama Twitter profile has never claimed to be written by the man himself or tweeted anything that implied as much. Most of those who applauded “his” use of Twitter knew it was part of an effective communications campaign, not a window into the soul of the future President.

Arbitrary photo of bad tattoo

One of my personal favourite things about social media is proliferation of photography featuring crap tattoos. Some of the most amusing are the logos of brands, particularly social media sites. But Brian, the owner of the shoulder above, is a Cisco fanboy. What an unusual chap.

Belle de Jour unmasked

Last week I gave a training session which defined Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl as one of a batch of anonymous blogs about ordinary people living extraordinary lives. Now, the word “anonymous” doesn’t apply.

Dr Brooke Magnanti outed herself as Belle in an interview with The Times‘ India Knight. Her blog caught the public imagination and became a best-selling book and an ITV television series starring Billie Piper. Her steamy tales are now all but confirmed as true, and she really did work for a London escort agency between 2003 and 2004. Now, just like Girl with a One-Track Mind and NightJack, we know who she is. Unlike them, her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.

But why now? Magnanti outed herself, claiming that she is tired of anonymity and wanted to get the news out before an aggrieved ex-boyfriend did it for her. But The Media Blog‘s Will Sturgeon has a more cynical theory: nobody’s given Belle a second thought for yonks.

Technorati: changes masking death throes?

WeissComm’s Neville Hobson posted on Sunday about something I considered recently, namely the demise of Technorati. The site was once the standard for blog search engines and had a very useful system which provided two vital statistics (difficult to come by in blogging, sometimes): rank and authority. Speaking purely as a blogger, I pay little attention to rank because it makes little difference to me whether I’m ranked 783,235th or 827,214th.

However, authority, previously defined as “the number of unique blogs linking to this blog in the last six months”, gave me an idea of how I was doing in terms of people finding my stuff interesting enough to link to. Technorati is currently undergoing significant infrastructural change which it argues will bring the ailing site back up to scratch.

But is it too late? I’ve given up on Technorati because I don’t trust it and it also no longer acts as a worthwhile service to let me know when I’ve been linked to. They’d have to do a hell of a job to persuade me to come back. And I’m not the only one, as Neville notes.