The Digital Week

Chris Nee, otherwise known as @twofootedtackle, discusses what on earth has been happening online …

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post. Apologies for the 48 hour delay this week, it was sadly unavoidable. Now…on with the week’s news.

Gotta love Mark Cuban. The controversial and outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks is the poster boy for balls-out corporate blogging, and his site Blog Maverick is always an entertaining and insightful read. Cuban is a social PR person’s dream and nightmare rolled into one. His openness is exactly what we’d like to encourage bloggers to embrace, but it’s safe to say he doesn’t really hold back.

Much of the talk in recent weeks has been of Rupert Murdoch’s war on Google, part of his gradual move towards charging for news content. Cuban’s way of dealing with such issues is a little more direct and he put his mind to knocking Google down a peg. Gizmodo posted about his solution shortly after last week’s instalment of this column: ask the top 1000 sites to take $1m each, along with a commitment from Bing or Yahoo! to make up lost traffic, in order to de-list from Google.

Difficult in practice, of course, but just the kind of openness and sharp thinking that makes us love a bit of Cuban.

Web-style newspaper design: the future of print?

Well, it’s unlikely – but it’s still pretty cool. Online Journalism Blog recently reported on a pitch process which saw Information Architects present a complete re-design to Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Their pitch failed, but their design was very impressive and could point towards one or two tactics newspapers will employ in the future to freshen up their game.

iA went for a usability and web-style reader-friendly design. They optimised the text for reading, fully supported by user testing, as well as ordering every page from top-left to bottom-right, made pictures and graphics bigger and made the text scannable by highlighting key words in blue. The final product looks fantastic and while we’re almost certainly not looking at the newspaper of 2020 here, I wouldn’t be surprised if some aspects of this effort were adopted by then.

Twitter changes trigger question

“What’s happening, dudes?” So asked Holly, the ship’s computer on the television series Red Dwarf, when he returned to his regular self after convincing the crew he was a disciplinarian computer named Queeg. Honestly, he did ask that.

And now, so is Twitter. Since its beginning the site has asked its users to update their status by answering the question “What are you doing?”, only in reality it evolved into a different beast altogether. Given the more conversational approach most Twitter users take, it now asks them to tell the world “What’s happening?”

As Mashable notes, it’s a subtle change. But it tips the hat to Twitter’s true user culture, even if the point of having a question at all is uncertain at this stage.

Wikipedia sheds eds

Wikipedia, the gargantuan collaborative free online encyclopedia, is losing editors. The English language version lost 49,000 editors in the first three months of 2009, which strongly suggests a drop in interest from the editor community.

Wikipedia editors are an extraordinarily committed bunch but, as Econsultancy has pointed out, they’re unpaid. While it may not be accurate to suggest this is the main reason for the drop, it is worth considering. Perhaps the Wikipedia generation – possibly dominated by editors who got on board early – are simply that little bit older and starting to reflect their added responsibilities in life by stepping back from unpaid work in their spare time.

The drop might also suggest that free user-generated content is dying. That may or may not be the case, but it certainly seems dated now when we see brands asking consumers to produce content for them under the auspices of a competition. As prosumers, are we starting to prefer payment to prestige?

What do you think? Is free but branded UGC dead? Your comments on that, and everything else in this post, are most welcome.