Strictly come Social Networking

According to Anthony Rose, the BBC’s controller of Vision and on-line, speaking at the launch of the Media Guardian’s Innovation awards, this weekend will see the addition of unspecified ‘social media’ applications to Strictly Come Dancing as part of a radical re-launch of all their on-line services. This radical re-launch is planned for March, and will be based on ‘what the next generation in social media will be’. Amongst the innovations will be the development of an open version of iPlayer which will allow third-party platforms to embed BBC content while it remains on the BBC site. This is seen as one element in BBC management’s attempts to prevent top-slicing the licence fee – by working in collaboration with commercial organisations they argue there is value going to the commercial sector – without the need for a funding cut to BBC resourcing.

There are also

Not drowning but Waving

Google Wave – a browser based tool combining email, instant messaging and real time interaction – launched for beta testing 1 hour 24 minutes ago. If you’re one of the lucky testers – and you can apply here then you can be in at the beginning of what they claim can be a way of working which can transform journalism. According to the story in the Media Guardian here, “Google Wave could speed up the collaborative journalistic process from research to writing, including quotes, enriching articles with pictures and videos. Stories could be corrected by subeditors using Google Wave, while readers could suggest changes and use the tool to discuss the article”

Some drawbacks may be that till present it runs on most browsers except Internet Explorer – users of IE will have to download a plug-in called Chrome Frame to use the application.

I’ve applied to be a beta tester – so will let you know if I’m one of the lucky ones to be enrolled to try it out.

Here’s a 10 minute video which tries to explain its benefits:

Ben Bradshaw becomes bizarre

In a bizarre turn of phrase in his speech to the Labour conference, Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw told delegates that the BBC ‘must be more sensitive to views of public who pay for it’

Yet this is the same culture secretary who told Broadcast magazine last week that he was minded to abolish the BBC Trust – the body put in place only three years ago by Labour to do exactly this – monitor the BBC’s actions on behalf of the licence fee payer.

He also threatened to take this action before the terms of the present BBC Charter runs out. A sound bite to conference arguing for the people to have more say is very tempting for politicians. However, when it is linked to proposals that would prevent the people themselves having more say, then it is either muddled or dishonest. Of course perhaps Mr Bradshaw believes that it is the party in power who have the ability to interpret what the people want – and therefore the right to interfere from that position. Now that isn’t muddled thinking – it’s simply dangerous and undemocratic.

Shift happens……..

Two useful new You Tube videos out make varying claims for the impact of social networking on our lives. The first Did you Know 4.0 is an update from their previous Shift Happens video of July 2007 – comparing both shows how quickly things have moved on. Meanwhile AllMediaScotland have done us all a favour of drawing our attention to this latest video from the socialnomics website – essentially advertising their latest book on socialnomics. This makes a number of interesting claims as to the growing importance of social media – at a time of decline for traditional news outlets like the press.

Very professionally produced, the videos hit us with a relentless stream of facts (in the case of Did You Know, sometimes too fast to really grasp), and show some of the changes multimedia journalists have to grapple with. Like any presentation of this type however, little time is given to context, and although it is essentially making large claims for Web 2.0 – the type of web we can interact with, the format of this You Tube presentation is of course one which makes us, the viewer, very much a passive receiver of claims, unable to question or interact at all. Here’s the socionomics video which will give you some flavour of the claims being made:

By 2010, Gen Y (born between the mid 1970s and late 1990s) will outnumber Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and 96 per cent of them have joined a social network.Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
One in eight married couples in the U.S. last year met via social media.
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet four years and the iPod three years.
Facebook (www.facebook.com) added 100 million users in less than nine months. iPod Application downloads hit one billion in nine months. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, behind China, India and the USA, but ahead of Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. Yet, China’s QZone (www.qzone.qq.com) is larger, with over 300 million users.
The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) are shared on Facebook, daily.
The US Department of Education has found that, on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. And the same study had found that one in six higher education students had enrolled in online education.
80 per cent of companies are using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) as their primary tool to find employees.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter (www.twitter.com) followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. 80 per cent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.
Generation Y and Z (born since the mid 1990s) consider email passé; in 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
YouTube (www.youtube.com) is the second-largest  search engine in the world: 100 million videos.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has over 13 million articles; 78 per cent of these articles are non-English. 156 articles are posted every hour.
There are over 200 million blogs; 54 per cent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
25 per cent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34 per cent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google (www.google.co.uk) ranks them.
78 per cent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 per cent trust advertisements. Only 18 per cent of traditional TV campaigns receive a positive ROI (return on investment). 90 per cent who are able to skip TV ads, on their digital video recorders, do.
US-based TV catch-up website, hulu (www.hulu.com), has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
70 per cent 18-to-34 year-olds have watched TV on the web. Only 33 per cent have ever viewed a show on digital video recorders, such as TiVo. 25 per cent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
35 per cent of book sales on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) are for the wireless reading device, Kindle (here).

Are all these stats accurate? Again journalists should not take slick videos just at face value, but follow up the basis of their claims. You can see how the stats are put together (some in a more robust manner than others) on the socialnomics site.

Thanks to AllmediaScotland for doing the work to extract these stats. You can subscribe to AllMediaScotlands RSS feed here

Labour may scrap BBC Trust before Charter Review

According to a report from Broadcast Magazine The row between the BBC Trust and the government has now intensified to the extent that  Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has suggested he could scrap the Trust before the next Charter Review.

Bradshaw had already raised the Trust’s hackles with his speech to the Royal Television Society’s biennial convention in Cambridge, in which he claimed the governing body’s dual role as ‘regulator and cheerleader’ was unsustainable.

The BBC Trust answered that it should not be judged on its performance until the next Charter Review, ‘many years down the line’, and BBC sources said the governing body was safe until then.

However, Bradshaw later told Broadcast that the Trust was not necessarily safeguarded until the 2017 review, and that it could be changed at the next licence fee settlement, in 2013, instead.

He said he had held talks with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who agreed that the BBC’s governance system should be changed, and indicated he would seek the BBC’s backing in scrapping the Trust before the Charter Review.

Bradshaw, who is a former BBC reporter, was reluctant to say whether the government would push the change through without BBC agreement.

His comments followed a heated exchange with BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons, in the Q&A session after Bradshaw’s speech, in which Lyons challenged the government for not talking more about licence fee payers and asking the public whether they would like the licence fee returned to them.

Lyons, who was visibly angered, said: ‘It is money which you raised for one purpose and now want to use for a different purpose. It’s about honest taxation.’

However, other leading industry figures welcomed Bradshaw’s statement. Former Endemol executive Peter Bazalgette said it was ‘the most considered and elegant speech from a Culture Secretary since Chris Smith’.”

This claim from Bradshaw comes hot on the heels of James Murdoch’s intemperate attack on the notion of Public Service Broadcasting, claiming that “The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit ” and is in line with increasing moves by Labour and Offcom to allow top slicing of the licence fee – albeit starting with the un-used portion of the fee originally ring-fenced for help with the digital switchover. Some critics of this approach believe that it is essentially a back door method of undermining the BBC and preparing the way for increasing access to the British market of News International.

Journalist Executed by Drug Cartel

According to a report in the radical French newspaper Humanité Norberto Miranda Madrid, a journalist in a North Mexican paper became the latest Journalist to pay with his life in defence of the truth. According to Humanité , Madrid was executed last week by a death squad on behalf of one of the powerful Mexican drug cartels. Having written a series of stories on the increasing public insecurity in the North West of the country, Norberto was gunned down himself by 5 killers in his newspaper office in the small Mexican town of Casas Grandes. Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) and the Committee to Protect Journalists have increasingly warned of the dangers to journalists from those involved in the growing drug trade.

STV to opt in for increasing opt outs?

The importance of local news to the Scottish TV viewer was stressed in an article in this week’s Sunday Herald (27th September). Earlier attempts by the BBC to launch a local web news network had been rejected by the BBC Trust – due to complaints by the Press that this encroached on their area. Sceptics of the complaints by the Press have till now looked in vain for their offerings – although it certainly scuppered any chances of a decent service from the BBC. More recently in the Government’s Digital Britain report it was suggested that there should be 3 independently funded news consortia set up – one in each of the nations. Latest developments seem to suggest that a serious possibility has arisen for a joint proposal from STV DC Thompson, the Johson Press and the Herald and Times Group to bid for one of the pilot news consortia. Importantly this seems to include an increased element of local reporting through opt outs. Sceptics had suggested that for troubled STV their recent proposal for a new ‘Scottish Six’ was partly about saving money by pulling staff out of Aberdeen and focussing on a Glasgow led production – albeit with the increased opt outs promised. Scottish Television have not yet officially confirmed that it will be part of any bidding for one of the pilots, but given the channel’s troubles it looks increasingly likely. In the longer term whether it is the way to ensure a stable and plural news environment in Scotland is less certain.

Murdoch’s big gamble on pay to view websites

According to a report in the Press Gazette the most recent poll into what news website readers would pay for access to news sites is…………… as close to zero as possible.

A Harris Poll had asked over 100- people in the UK about their attitudes, with respondents who read a free news site at least once a month giving the lowest possible amount in each category – annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p. On Monday results released from the poll revealed that 74 per cent of those surveyed said if their favourite news service started charging to access content online they would switch to a free alternative. Just five per cent said they would pay to continue reading. However 48 percent did report that they would consider paying if the option was part of a deal that allowed reduced subscriptions to a hard copy of their paper.

With News International unlikely to contemplate reduced subscriptions, but rather to go for the all of nothing model, these figures suggest the scheme is unlikely to succeed. This must be good news for all those who reject an approach that sees news reporting as nothing more that a money making business rather than a public service. We need other models – Murdoch’s model does down democracy….

BBC Alba As deidh bliadhna (BBC Alba one year on)

“Tha e doirbh a chreidsinn gu bheil BBC ALBA air a bhith air an eadhar airson bliadhna a-nis agus bu math le MG Alba, as leth na buidhne, taing a thoirt airson an taic a tha a h-uile duinne air a’ thoirt dhan sianal agus MG Alba mar bhuidhean”.

BBC ALBA has been on air for a year now – something that is hard to believe. The channel has enjoyed success with Scottish audiences, with the media and with Gaelic speakers despite only being available on satellite television and on the iPlayer, and we are hugely indebted to you for the part you have played in that
and for the support you have given.

These are the words from a recent press release from MG Alba – the main funder of the Gaelic Channel, who run it in partnership with the BBC Alba. Good news for the Channel this week was that the channel will now be shown live on the iPlayer. However one year in, there is still a huge hill for the channel to climb.
A recent article in the West Highland Free Press however raised a whole set of issues that the channel needs to overcome – many not of its own making -  its budgetary constraints of £14m per year, compared to the £90m of the Welsh Channel S4C, plus the continual frustration of not being available on the BBC’s Freeview platform – it being necessary to have SKY or Freesat to watch it. Currently only a third of viewers in Scotland have access to it, but 200,000 viewers watch it per week – well in advance of the 59 thousand fluent Gaelic speakers registered in the last Census. Surely a case of democratic deficit here, when Gaelic speakers pay the same taxes as non-Gaels and pay their BBC licence as well.

Ha-ha! Dein Medium stirbt (Ha -ha! Your Medium is dying)

“Der Zugang zu Kommunikation und Information berührt Grundfragen demokratischer Beteiligung. Wer mo- derne Kulturtechniken nicht beherrscht oder keinen Zugang zur digitalen Welt hat, kann sich an einem wachsenden Teil demokratischer Willensbildung nicht beteiligen.  Die privaten und weltweit tätigen Tele- kommunikations- und Netzbetreiber mausern sich ohne kulturellen Auftrag, ohne öffentliche Kontrolle und Trans- parenz zu Sendeanstalten von morgen und bedrohen das gesamte duale, öffentlich-rechtliche und private Fernseh- und Rundfunksystem.  Mit der Digitalisierung entstehen auch neue Möglichkeiten, das Verhalten der Nutzerinnen und Nutzer zu steuern und auszubeuten. Die technische Be- schränkung eines freien und gleichen Informationsflusses im Netz nimmt zu. Interessengeleitete Forderungen und Begehrlichkeiten nach Internet- sperren bei Urheberrechtsverstößen werden lauter”. Die Linke Bundestagswahlprogramm 2009

Access to communication and information has to do with fundamental aspects of participation in the democratic process. Those who do not have a command of modern cultural technologies or have no access to the digital world are unable to participate in a growing segment of democratic decision-making.
The private, globally active telecommunications and network operators are mutating into the broadcasters of tomorrow, without public monitoring and transparency, and are threatening the whole dual system of public and private television and radio. Digitalisation is creating new possibilities of controlling and exploiting the behaviour of the users. The technical limitations on a free and equal flow of information on the net are increasing. The demands from special-interest groups for Internet filters to safeguard their copyright are becoming louder. From the Manifesto of Germany’s Left Party – standing in next Sunday’s elections.

An interesting aspect of Germany’s forthcoming elections is the possibility of a major advance in the votes of Die Linke – a new party formed from the amalgamation of the former ruling party of East Germany and disaffected members of West Germany’s traditional socialist party the SPD.

Starting their statement with a quote from Nelson Muntz – the bully of the Simpsons (slagging off  a print journalist……….), they are very critical of current developments in Germany’s monopolised media sector, they call for the adoption of ‘a democratic media policy’ that would further regulate developments in the digital media. The state that their goal is to ‘safeguard programme and content diversity, preserve and extend freedom on the Internet and defend human creativity against progressive commercialisation’. They argue that increasing commercialisation is leading to continuing media concentration with financial investors invading the media and press sector with the consequence that ‘reporting, culture and entertainment become shallow and commercialised’.
They argue that existing health and safety regulations and conditions at work are increasing being overridden  with permanent positions now the exception. Die Linke argue that they are working to safeguard the interests of all those who are employed, often precariously, in the media and film industry. It will be interesting to see what the voters think.

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