It’s time for our last dip into digital of 2009. Here’s what our DigiMites have been thinking about over the last seven days. (Originally posted at Clicking & Screaming.)
Meet Vevo, the supposed MTV for the 21st century. Universal and Sony have teamed up to counteract the demise of the “physical” music industry by moving videos online and away from television. Seems logical enough.
It’s had little impact so far in the UK (hardly surprising – the videos aren’t actually available here), but looks a neat enough site. It is quite social, offering user playlists and various commenting, voting and favouriting mechanisms. Of course, to musical outcasts like myself, it’s just another cog in the machine. After a good few minutes of searching for bands from the more commercial end of my spectrum I found absolutely nothing.
We don’t believe in ghosts
Every now and again the question we love to hate drops into a conversation: how about you write my blog for me? The theoretical debate rages even more regularly and Neville Hobson has posted again on this topic. He sees the issue of ghost blogging in much the same way as Porter Novelli and that is that we just aren’t going to get involved.
When not disclosed, ghost blogging is duplicitous. When transparent, it’s pointless. Kicking off a blog isn’t something to be taken too lightly and if you’re unable to make the creative or time commitment then you should consider focusing your efforts elsewhere.
As Neville notes, the real benefits of blogging are the people you meet, the comments and interaction you achieve, the joy of writing and being read. Ghost blogging undermines all that and turns blogging into nothing but a ticked box. Please don’t bother.
Guardian hits the iPhone
I love my iPhone and, frankly, I love The Guardian. With iPhone apps flying about like nobody’s business, the two were bound to meet sooner rather than later and they’ve done so in impressive fashion. The Guardian launched its application earlier this week and they’ve done a really good job.
For £2.39 (most other newspaper apps are free), this app offers a smartphone-optimised version of the newspaper, offline browsing (like Spotify – awesome), support for the paper’s excellent audio content and, currently, no ads. Readers can share items to Facebook and browse by author. Being a real football bod, that’s my favourite bit.
I’ve linked to TechCrunch‘s report above, and Econsultancy has reviewed the app too. From my brief time with it, I think it’s a cracking effort. It seems steep at £2.39 but the price is an interesting nod towards the many and various possible “futures of the newspaper”. Perhaps free websites and paid mobile versions are the way forward.
NewsNow ditches titles
In somewhat related news, the news aggregator site NewsNow has decided to stop linking to mainstream media titles. The Newspaper Licensing Authority has been making big moves to get its game in order online and has faced significant opposition. Now it has failed to reach an agreement with NewsNow over online ‘clippings’ from newspapers.
NewsNow is understandably uneasy about its clash with the NLA, and believes the legal case it would have faced was flaky. The readiness of newspapers to shun traffic in this way (see Rupert Murdoch) never fails to surprise me, but this could be the beginning of a new approach for NewsNow. A back to basics version aggregating quality, unregulated free news sources would be a service with which we could all get on board.
My name’s Chris and I’m a miserable sod
I don’t like The X-Factor. I don’t like what it stands for, what it represents for society and the music industry, or the drab, sanitised music it churns out. And yet the internet is abuzz with revolution – and I’m not in agreement.
In apparent protest against Simon Cowell’s sub-bubblegum behemoth, Facebookers and downloaders everywhere are jumping on the anti-bandwagon and are in the throes of a campaign to prevent whichever patholigical Topman customer won the karaoke contest this year from becoming Christmas number one – by downloading Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine.
I quite like Rage, but I won’t be downloading the song because I fail to see how genuinely liking revolutionary music maps onto caring what’s Christmas number one. The two are mutually exclusive. Add in the probability that the whole thing’s been orchestrated from within the music industry in which Cowell is so powerful and the whole thing becomes repulsive.
It would be cool if genuine RATM fans didn’t buy the song. They have no place in the charts and should be proud of that. </rant>
So, on that cheery and festive note, that’s it for 2009. Have a very merry Christmas and a spectacular new year.
NLA