Written in response to an interesting slideshow titles “Is the Internet dying?”

The Internet was conceived back in the 1980s as a way for a community of scientists to share information and to update and work on that information. An early wiki really. User-generated content was in there from day 1. The internet was designed to connect a community.

Social networking is often spoken of as a new trend for the internet, so leading people to ask “what’s next for social networks?” or “What’s next for the Internet after social networks?”

What do social networks do? Social networks connect people. They bring together people who are interested in sharing interests or finding out more about other people or rallying people round a cause.

The Internet is and always has been a social network and what we think of as social networks are simply a development and not a departure from what the Internet is, making questions like what happens after social networking redundant.

Many people’s first use of the internet was for web mail. they used the internet to connect with friends, family colleagues, businesses. They downloaded instant messaging services as a way of connecting with communities. A few years later they began to use Friends Reunited, Facebook, Twitter as a way of connecting with communities.

The trajectory of the internet has been one of increased ease of social interaction and increased range of social interactions and it’ll continue to be that way. the question we should be asking to try and figure out what the next developments are going to be is simply how can we enable connections between communities even better than currently. And it’s pretty much the same question that’s been pondered since the world wide web came into being.

The BBC has launched a site called Democracy Live. According to The Guardian the site cost £1m to launch, is funded by the BBC’s online budget and will be run by 11 permanent members of staff.

It contains videos of statements and debates, links to political programmes, information on MPS’s expenses, data on who your MP is, guides to the institutions, and blogs from people like Nick Robinson. There’s very little original content written or shot specifically for the site, apart from a couple of articles from John Bercow and Ruth Fox. I might have missed more but there’s certainly not very much.

This is a development several media (and other) organisations should be concerned about. Here’s why:

1. This is a watchdog-type site. People will be able to go in and scrutinise what their politicians are saying in a more useful format than Parliament TV. It treads on the toes of existing sites like TheyWorkForYou. What will happen to these sites that don’t have the backing of licence fees?

2. One million pounds? For what exactly? The salaries of 11 members of staff, video equipment, hosting and streaming costs, some nice speech-to-text technology. These can be expensive, but the scale of this for what is pretty much just an aggregation site surprises me. Who can afford to compete?

3. Lastly, this is a site that will appeal to bloggers and journalists – anyone in fact who wishes to investigate the goings-on of Parliament. By making itself an essential resource, a research tool if you like, the BBC is turning itself into not just a watchdog, but an archive. Potentially the BBC will control what gets investigated through controlling the archive.

It’s cementing its place in journalism and politics but at what cost?

This year’s AOP was an interesting event. These are the points some of the speakers made that I found most thought-provoking, amusing, controversial etc. Some new, some old, some borrowed, some blue… This is not an exhaustive list and if I’ve slightly misquoted then apologies (please get in touch if you feel something should be corrected). Some of it is blatantly paraphrased. Some comments from me in [ ].

David Gilbertson:

Most media has an advertising not a content culture

Is your content really “must have” or just nice to have?

Quite interesting is not enough.

News is always urgent but not always important (and people pay for important)

 

Shawn Colo

Content is marketing

Social optimization will become more important than SEO

People pay for a combination of voice and product experience [it’s not just the content but how you consume it that matters]

 

Chris Cramer

CPA – continuous partial attention

Social information is information of the first resort

It’s not multimedia, it’s media.

 

AOP content and trends census

People expect to charge for apps on mobiles [Don’t build your whole business model on this. Things sometimes start out expensive and become cheap as competition gets tougher. Cheap or free. And look what happened to apps on Facebook.]

 

Luke Bradley Jones

There are not enough advertising dollars in the world to support the Internet [Maybe not currently but spend is growing (it’s overtaken TV in the UK) and targetting of ads can only get better. If it works people will spend money on it. Our challenge is to make advertising work online. Are we spending enough time and energy on this problem or are we spending more time worrying about how journalist’s jobs are changing?]

 

Dominic Feltham

There’s a whole business in optimising sites for subscriptions

 

Andrew Langhoff

Don’t forget the customer service and related issues [if you’re planning on charging for content]. Charging for content is a complex business

 

Bill Murray

You have to add value to the consumption of content. The experience and functionality is important.

 

Simon Francis

Look for “big content ideas” that work across different media

Idea leadership not idea ownership

The holy grail is loyalty beyond reason

 

David Montgomery

Editors-in-chief should be replaced by content directors. [Yes, but many sites are already doing this – this is the model MSN uses for instance – and it’s not enough to ensure profitability and save local media. There’s still a huge issue with funding the content through advertising, whether search, display or classified. Incidentally, the likes of eBay and Autotrader have all but destroyed local media’s business model. What’s to be done about that?]

We pay more for coffee than we do for content [The implication is that content is more important to us than coffee so we’ll pay more for it. £2.00 for a latte or a sports report. Is content more valuable than coffee? Not so sure everyone will feel the same way.]

The title of this blog post is intentionally wordy. I used online content providers instead of journalists to emphasise that online is the single biggest threat and opportunity to all content providers, whether the provider is a large content organisation like News Corp, Time Warner or individual bloggers or journalists.

Content production is an industry that can’t control the consumption of what it produces. You make toasters, you sell them at a price you (partly) determine. You produce content, and that’s where it starts getting complicated.

The openness of the Internet, the paid-for debate, actually the issue of content producers not making enough money, means that content producers are struggling to show the worth of content and there isn’t agreement over what the best measurements of content consumption are or what we should be aiming for (loyalty, audience size etc).

Should I have used effective and popular and good? Each is an inexact and loaded word and much bandied about. Whichever of the three we want (or how many of the three), will effect how we measure what we do.

In the good-old days it was easier. People bought cinema tickets, casette and video tapes, vinyl, newspapers. Good journalists (sometimes) became popular and (often) effectively sold newspapers.

But now that content is being distributed online and shared rather than paid for, measuring success has become more difficult and more imperative.

The Mirror has made public that it’s going after engagement rather than audience size (this links to an interesting blog post on their strategy by Roy Greenslade). Sounds like a good idea. An engaged audience sounds like a more valuable one. But it’s not necessarily the case and what do we mean by “engaged” anyway?

Below I set out what are probably the most popular measurements of content consumption and success in encouraging it and try and point out some of their good sides and not so good sides.

PVs: Nice to have lots of PVs but they cost money to serve. How many pages carry ads and how much are these ads sold for?

Share: So you have 5% of the online audience? How long are they staying, what are they spending? What is your share of advertising spend? If it’s 4% you have a problem. 6% and you’re doing great.

UUs: This measure values a user who comes in once and never returns as highly as a user who returns 17 times a month. I know which I’d prefer to have (in some cases). Would you prefer 1m users in a month who never return or 100,000 who return 10 times each? But for some sites a pure user play can be effective. Much display and contextual advertising (think the finance market) is tied to a CPA no matter how it is sold. The more users you get the more clicks the ads are likely to get and so the more advertisers will spend. Possibly. Of course one user seeing one ad is less likely to click that ad than one user seeing ten ads – another argument for loyalty over audience acquisition. Where one advertiser dominates a site or section (a sponsorship for example) then user acquisition is important but where ad placements are in demand then loyalty (combined with a large audience) is more important.

PVs/UU: A measure of loyalty, but doesn’t measure what kind of users (once-off or regular) they are or what kind of pages they consume (messageboard PVs cost rather than make money) or what their activity is (are they just coming in to a valuable page to do one thing like check a stock quote and not getting involved with anything on the rest of the page? Can be artificially inflated by using photo-galleries or inserting an auto-refresh. Not many content sites do auto-refreshes fortunately. You only really see it on sports scoreboards.

Time online: Ads should really be linked to time rather than page views, that way a user spending a long time on a page can be shown several adverts. Conversely, a user consuming many pages in a short space of time can be shown fewer adverts if it’s believed a longer impression time increases clicks. Spending longer on a site does not always equate to loyalty (perhaps many once-off users just can’t find what they want) and doesn’t mean that valuable content is being consumed (is watching a video for 7 minutes more valuable to the producer than a user consuming 2 articles in 5 minutes?)

Bounce rate: people bounce when they leave after the initial page view. A useful measure of engagement but needs to be understood over time. Again, does not (cannot) measure the relative worth of pages.

Visits and return frequency: While a user who returns every day sounds like a very valuable user indeed, I refer again to the stock quote example. A reader comes to the site Monday to Friday, checks the price of the FTSE 100 and leaves. He’s got so used to seeing the chart on the page that he doesn’t look around and doesn’t engage with anything else on the page, has a great user experience but is costing the producer money (unless of course he has such a great user experience that he recommends the site to others). This brings to mind how shops regularly change their displays. Many shoppers have things they buy regularly and come to know where they are in the store. They go straight to the items and then to the checkout and do not look at what else is available. That’s why displays are changed, annoying as it is to those of us who prefer not having to spend time in shops looking for the new place the muesli is hidden.

Subscribers: The number and rate is clearly an easily understandable and quantifiable metric. But there are other factors: are ads served on subscription pages and if not how much revenue is being lost by not selling a loyal audience. Do subscribers consume non-subscription content as well as subscription? What does your pay-wall cost to build and maintain?

ARPU: Perhaps the only measure that really makes sense. To those of us who care about making a profit, understanding the average revenue per user (and of course what our costs are), is crucial. All the other measurements are needed for a holistic view of the business and for strategy planning but for a overall picture of the health of our business the ARPU over time is all important.

Maybe it’s actually quite simple. Know what you want to achieve (it’s usually profit but not always) and the right measurement will follow.

Facebook Lite has been designed with users who have slow internet connections in mind. It’s stripped out a lot of the stuff you don’t use anyway and just gives you the basics – writing on walls, uploading photos etc. There are no apps. This is really a very joyous thing – no apps. What is the point of a Facebook app these days anyway? When Facebook was new and bright and shiny everyone loved these things but like any game you get tired of it. You stop playing and go back to just talking to your friends and it seems like this is what Facebook Lite is catering for. People who just want the core communication experience will start using this version more and leave the pie-chucking to others. Facebook’s strengths have always been that it enables real connections between real people and this Lite version brings that to the fore.

Here’s the link to FB Lite: http://lite.facebook.com/

I’m lucky in that my company allows me to work from home every now and then. When I do though any productivity gains I might make because of no meetings, and fewer phonecalls and interruptions are partly offset by the slower speed of my home broadband connection and by the frequent loss of service I have to endure. I seem to be on a particularly flaky connection and regularly get chucked off the network by one or both of Orange and BT. What do I lose in terms of productivity? Probably no more than 5% but if I had to work from home more regularly that would start to add up. The quality and speed of home broadband connections in the UK is, I dare say, probably not the best it could be and probably holding back regular home workers. Some people still don’t have any broadband at all.

Still, it’s not as bad as in South Africa, where this week it was proved that a carrier pigeon is faster than that country’s broadband.

It’s coming, like or not. The recession is bringing forward the day when we’ll be paying for content as a matter of course and a number of publishers are beginning to experiment with how to charge for their content.

The amount of content we pay for probably exceeds what we don’t. We (mostly) pay for movies, music, TV, newspapers in print form, magazines, games. Unless we subscribe to publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times though, we don’t pay to consume news and other content online. Publishers haven’t charged for their online content in the past but now they find advertising revenues from online divisions are not compensating for the loss of newspaper and magazine sales as more and content is consumed online. Advertising rates are falling and behavioural and demographic targeting is still way off where it should be.

Publishers will find a way to start charging for content online. It’s not an if.  The survival of their businesses depends on it.

The challenge for publishers is not to change consumers’ minds that content should be paid for – they already do pay for quite a lot of what they consume – it’s just that they have to be persuaded to pay for a particular means of consumption that they haven’t previously paid for.

It’s not completely unthinkable that if everyone starts charging people will become used to paying. Yes, you’ll always have some free stuff out there but if the choice is limited and the stuff people like is behind a barrier then why not?

Publishers also don’t have to worry about losing ad revenue on the free pages. For every £10 subscription they get they would have had to serve anywhere in the region of 1000 to 3000 pages depending on sell-through rates and CPMs. And that’s not including the fact that it costs publishers to serve page views. They also don’t have to forego relationships with advertisers completely as there are plenty of ways of taking revenue from them that don’t involve simple banner ads.

The fly in the ointment in this of course is the BBC – in the UK at least. Will we see the day when you have to have a licence to view BBC content?

Today you might still be able to consume your favourite newspaper site for free but behind the scenes (and in some cases not very far behind the scenes) a number of publishers have started experimenting with the paid-for model in one form or another.

• The most obvious is News Corp. Rupert Murdoch has said that he plans to start charging for all his news websites within the next year and there have been rumours around for a while that consumers will have to start paying to consumer Jeremy Clarkson’s columns. Malcolm Coles argues that Murdoch is in a much more favourable position to start charging than many of his competitors and it’s hard to disagree with this.
• Associated Press charge publishers for reprinting their content. It’s one way of getting revenue for their content, that is from other publishers rather than individual readers (though they’ll happily charge anyone).
• The Daily Mail have started tracking how people copy their content, which is probably an initial foray into working out which content people are most likely to pay for.

Publishers will find a way to get us to pay for content, BBC or no BBC. It’s only a question of when. Of course there will be a backlash. The Internet will try and find a way to make it all free once more.

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Politicians are in trouble over Twitter again. The latest incident follows hot on the heels of David Cameron’s schoolboyish use of the word “twat” last week.

It also follows the publication of government guidelines for departmental tweeting. It took up 20 pages. They got a bit of stick for that as you’d expect but, well, it’s the government isn’t it. At heart it’s a conservative (with a small c) organisation. You couldn’t imagine Barclays bank allowing employees to tweet on its behalf without an in-depth study of risks and rewards. The guidelines are more interesting than you might think as well.

Some people have asked whether government employees, MPs or other, should be tweeting at all. That’s a bit of a non-question. They should go where their constituents are in order to communicate with them and plenty of them are on Twitter. Of course they’d need to tailor their communications to the platform and not do a Habitat but that’s another issue.

The guidelines debate has come up before and it won’t be the last. Many corporations and media organisations have Twitter and social media guidelines. It’s only right that there should be some guidance for employees on what is expected of them as employees of that company.

A couple of politicians who got Twitter before any guidelines were issued are Tom Watson and John Prescott.

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The worldwide growth figures of Twitter and social bookmarking sites are in stark contrast to each other.

Twitter’s users, according to Comscore, have grown from 2.6m in May 08 to 37.3m in May 09. It is now the 7th largest social networking site in the world (and the 3rd largest in the US behind Facebook and MySpace).

Digg comes in at 11th place. Digg has gone from 15.4m to 24.9m in a year (May 08 to May 09). That’s not bad growth – 62% – but nowhere near Twitter’s.

Digg’s larger rivals have not performed as well. Yahoo! Buzz has gone from 7.2m to 9.2m and Delicious from 2m to 2.4m. While some of the smaller sites are showing good percentage growth, their audiences remain relatively small. Reddit has gone from 740k to 1.8m and Newsvine from 873k to 1.6m. Stumbleupon’s audience has actually dropped from 2.2m to 1.5m.

The problem with Twitter, at least for bookmarking sites, is that Twitter is one of them. People use it to share links they find interesting. They also use it to talk about what they find interesting. Just like people can Digg an article and make it more prominent, the more people who talk about a subject on Twitter, the more likely that topic is to end up in Trending Topics. Twitter is becoming more and more relevant for finding out what people are thinking about at any particular moment.

The don’t serve exactly the same purpose but if you only had enough time to maintain your Twitter or your Digg account, which would it be?

Twitter’s phenomenal growth will take audience away from Digg and others like it. That’s not to say both can’t be successful but social bookmarking sites might have to find other models, other experiences to offer, if they’re not to be left behind in Twitter’s wake.

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The cover story of Barron’s is a timely reminder that at least some believe there is at least short and medium-term potential in media stocks.

The article points out that the recession has exacerbated the media industry’s woes, but “While print, broadcast networks and radio are fading,
it could be decades before they truly become irrelevant.”

The advertising market is getting to grips with supply and demand. The cheapness of ads, the difficulty of reaching audiences, the over supply of inventory, all these are contributing to the current sorry state of affairs for many media companies. The advertising market is not evolving quickly enough to cope with what consumers are doing online.

If we can solve that problem, if we can make advertising more relevant, engaging and better targeted, then content can still be king.

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There are a lot of very concerned people out there who have read, or read about 15 year-old Matthew Robson’s research report for Morgan Stanley. The report is about the consumption of media by teenagers. It throws up a few surprises but also many things your grandmother probably already knows. This is not to say that the report isn’t a worthwhile read. There are some interesting points and if you’re marketing to teenagers you probably want to know what they think, or want to know what one of them thinks anyway.

But if you read it because you think you might gain valuable new insights for how media will be consumed differently by the adult generation of tomorrow then you might be disappointed.

Here are the report’s conclusions. Thanks to The Guardian for reprinting the report.

Radio: Teens don’t listen to radio because you can get music for free. Me: I don’t listen to radio either.

Television: Teens watch TV but not that much. They use iPlayer. Me: They don’t watch TV because they’ve got other stuff to do and the distractions of the internet and phones.

Newspapers: Teenagers are reluctant to pay for newspapers and only really read the freebloids. Me: I have also reduced the number of papers I buy, though I haven’t replaced them with freebloids.

Gaming: PC gaming has little or no place in the teenage market. Teenagers play video games and as most consoles can connect to the internet are starting to use them to chat, so having an impact on phone usage. Me: no surprises about PC gaming. The video gaming point is intriguing though.

Internet: Teens use Facebook not Twitter because texting Twitter uses up credit. In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are ‘pointless’. Me: Makes some sense. Do teens realise you can update Twitter from a computer? But yes, Twitter does seem like something that is easier to do if you’re sitting in front of a computer all day or can pay for texts. Also teenagers probably get more use out of instant messenger which can fill a similar function to Twitter.

Marketing: Teens respond better to viral marketing than pop ups and banner ads. Me: As do we all.

Music: Teens listen to a lot of music and download it illegally. Me: If there’s someone out there who didn’t realise this please try and remember all those New Year’s Eve parties for the last 50 years. It’s not 1959.

Cinema: Teens visit the cinema more at 13 and 14 than at 15 when they have to pay full price. Also they might be tempted to buy a pirated DVD. Me: Again, teens are cost conscious. No real surprise.

Mobile: Teens use the free features of their phones rather than the ones you have to pay for. Me: So do I. 

Devices: Teens like big TVs, long battery life, and touch screens. Me: Me too.

 

Why teens don’t matter (that much):

1. They don’t have much money
2. When they do get money their behaviour will probably change
3. They’re quite similar to us in many ways
4. Just because they don’t use something now doesn’t mean they won’t in their mid-twenties. Maybe they’ll find a use for Twitter then or mobile internet.
5. When today’s 15 year-old is 20 the world will be very different and there are not many futurologists who get it right.

Obviously I’m being flippant here. Clearly teenagers’ disposable income is huge in this country and is a difficult market to tap. The point is rather that if you don’t market to teenagers then you don’t have to worry about what they think too much, or as much as we seem to.

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Vanessa Feltz, Tony Harding, Max Clifford, Alan Shearer, Alex Ferguson, Gordon Taylor, Simon Hughes, Elle MacPherson, John Prescott, Tessa Jowell, George Michael, Boris Johnson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jade Goody, Nigella Lawson, Anne Robinson, Lenny Henry, Patsy Kensit, Lisa Snowdon, Sadie Frost and Jude Law are among those whose phones are alleged to have been hacked or communications illegally recorded or intercepted, or were targets of the News of the World. Thanks to the Guardian for the list. Are these the celebrities middle Britain cared about most in 2005/6? Probably a combination of that and of luck and ease of access. I wonder though if there’s any jealousy from celebrities who weren’t targeted. Do any of them feel slightly aggrieved at being left out?

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Habitat have blamed their anti-social use of media on an “overenthusiastic” intern who did not fully understand what he was doing. The intern made tweets using inappropriate hashtags such as #iranelection, #mousavi and #iphone followed by something inane about Habitat’s spring/summer collection or suchlike. This person is apparently “no longer associated” with Habitat.

A few thoughts on this:

a) Habitat don’t have a clue about the relevance and impact of social media marketing if they let an intern lose on it

b) Habitat are still responsible for their staff, interns included, and so who was responsible for the intern?

c) If the intern did it completely of his own volition then fair enough but he is/was an intern and one who has learned a very valuable lesson. Is it fair to have got rid of him?

d) The real crime here is the continuing inanity of Habitat’s tweets, such as “Acrylic pendant light. Available in magenta and smoke”. @team_woolies is a much much better example of how it should be done.

e) The number of tweets, articles and err, blog posts about this topic is out of proportion to what actually happened. Some of the tweets are incredibly self-righteous about the sanctity of Twitter and sites like it. It’s just a website people. Habitat is full of contrition and realises it has alienated an audience by misuse of a site and by piggybacking on the Iranian demonstrations. Some of those who have taken offence on Twitter are now calling for discounts for Twitter users. Why? Slightly hypocritical I think.

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The MPs’ expenses saga continues to grip the nation’s interest. As I wrote in an earlier post it seems a peculiarly British affair. I could not imagine this story running the amount of time it has in many other countries. That’s not a value judgement, just an observation.

As well as what’s being reported what has proved interesting to those who work in the media is how it’s all been reported. We’ve seen a variety of approaches from “old-school” scoop-based reporting to a more collaborative UGC-based method. In the former camp sits The Telegraph and in the latter The Guardian and to a lesser extent the BBC.

Martin Belam, who works for The Guardian, makes a similar point in his blog currybet.net. He writes: 

“The MPs expenses scandal has been the defining political story of the year, and with the final publication of the information by the House Of Commons we can now see another potentially defining battle emerge for the future of news - that between the cheque book, bunker and 'traditional' journalism, and an alternative path of open crowd-sourced data-driven journalism.”

The Telegraph became the envy of its rivals when it scooped the MPs expenses. Day after day it published revelations. Other publications must have been highly annoyed at having to kick their heels while the Telegraph stole a march.

The Telegraph’s coverage has been, and continues to be, exemplary, both in the depth and the quality of reporting. It has been a massive effort. As Ian Douglas writes in his blog:

“This has been the biggest piece of data journalism I've ever worked on, or suspect I ever will work on. Throughout the project the focus has been on accuracy and the publication of every scrap of information that we can.”

It culminates today with the publication of the largely uncensored claims forms.

Other publications have used the time before the records were released by Parliament to plan how they could take advantage of it and regain some lost ground. The Guardian has used the time well. Their crowd-sourcing project has allowed them to harness the power of their users and sift through the thousands of documents much more quickly than the “bunker” approach of the Telegraph. Their live blog yesterday was an excellent example of how a collaborative effort adds to the story.

It’s also an example of how to get high quality user comment on a site. Too often just asking for opinions will lead to a load of drivel but saying what you want and how you want it can lead to higher quality submissions. A useful reminder for those of us looking to increase user-generated content on our sites.

So we have two quite different approaches to the story both hugely compelling and offering lessons we can all learn from. But would most readers rather see the heavily censored versions of the expenses reports on the Guardian or the lightly censored versions on the Telegraph? Which of the two publications would they believe has more and indeed more accurate information? The old media approach has attractions that cannot be denied.

It would be interesting to know what the Guardian’s approach would have been if it had been the paper to secure exclusive access to the expense claims. Would it have been as open as it is now and risk losing the exclusivity? While the Guardian has often led the way in “new media” I wonder if it too would have adopted a more insular, “old media” approach had the circumstances been different. And is its adoption born out of the necessity to compete rather than simply a desire to tell more sides of the story through harnessing the power of users?

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I read in the excellent RWW this morning that Twitter is censoring the trending topics list. Topics of a sexually offensive nature were removed. The post asks:

“Should there be an algorithm for trends rather than making trending topics a pure numbers game? Should the system be fixed so that #liesboystell doesn't win out over truly important, significant, or newsworthy content? Should tweets, like images and other kinds of content, be screen for "adult" material and user preferences be set accordingly? Or do trends really belong to the lowest common denominator?”

It does provide for a strange experience when you’re using Twitter to exchange useful links and are having highly charged debates on the Iranian demonstrations, social media or what you had for breakfast to glance to the right and see that some of the most popular topics are #threewordsaftersex or suchlike. It makes you realise that a vast number of Twitter users are, well, not quite as interesting as you.

Light self-deprecation aside the post raises the important issue of censorship at a time when everyone is talking about Twitter as a tool of democracy.

If an algorithm is brought in to ensure that the trends board is kept for “important, significant, or newsworthy content” then the obvious question of who gets to determine this is raised. Also there is no such thing as a global profanity filter. I’ve had experience with the word “pud” being filtered out in the UK, referring to a Christmas pud, because it means something else entirely in the US.

Perhaps the answer is an option to allow users to set their own filters if they choose, as the post suggests. Another option is to limit trending topics to the people you follow, though that rather defeats the purpose of trending topics. A further option might be to allow users to select types of trending topics they want to see (similar to allowing users to set their own filters).

Twitter is still evolving as a communication platform and no doubt these issues will be debated for some time. However, one thing shouldn’t be lost sight of. Twitter’s USP is in allowing conversations with all sorts of people across all sorts of divides. Any form of censorship risks its USP.

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Rupert Murdoch has apparently said that digital will be the primary form of press delivery within the next decade and that the presses will stop rolling in twenty years. This seems reasonable to me, my only demurral would be whether it would take that long. Journalism is alive and well but more and more people are losing more and more money. Unless a charitable organization, an NGO or the government itself funds the press it’s difficult to see it continuing in its current form.

The blog post I linked to above reminded me of a podcast I listened to earlier in the week, Media Talk USA with Jeff Jarvis from The Guardian. One of the commentators was suggesting that print is in a more competitive position than many believe since the New York Times is unique with a strong editorial line. But it was the mention of the Denver Post that brought home to me that the UK press might have to find a different solution to the US market if they are to monetise press – print or digital - more effectively.

The US press is far more local than the UK. Cities have their own newspaper and there is no truly national newspaper. The UK on the other hand has plenty of national newspapers. The local newspapers are there but are few peoples’ first-choice newspaper.

The US might find it easier to generate advertising revenue because of the more local focus since they will have more access to classifieds, local and national advertising campaigns than the UK’s press. Perhaps the next ten years will see more problems in the industry on this side of the Atlantic.

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In my last blog post I compared Twitter to a party at which people mostly talk to those people they already know. Now it appears that not only do people mainly talk to those they already know, only a few people at the party talk at all.

The news that broke yesterday that just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content (reported today by the BBC) means that most of the people at the party are sitting in the corner not talking to anyone. Or perhaps they took one look through the door, spied a whole bunch of twitterheads and decided to leave well enough alone.

@mazi writes that “you can go to a party where a few talk more than others, but it can still be a good party!” That might be true – the 10% seem to be having a blast.

What’s more remarkable about this study is that it should come as a surprise. Most websites in my experience, social networking ones included, get the majority of their traffic from a minority of users.

An implication of the study might be that Twitter is not attractive to the majority of people. This is not necessarily a bad thing either for Twitter management or Twitter users. Having a core group of highly committed users has often been proved to be more lucrative in the long run than having larger groups of vaguely interested people. And having a smaller group of people to interact with is often better. A conversation between 5 people you find interesting is going to be more productive than trying to have a conversation with 5 million you don’t know or want to know.

Twitter’s “exclusivity” might be the cause of its longevity.

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An interesting question was posed on Twitter this week by @megpickard. It asked if Twitter has reduced the usage of instant messenger to communicate with friends.

I’m not sure if it went anywhere after the question was posed but for me it highlights the difference between the two services. I use messenger for private conversations or for one-on-one conversations and Twitter for public conversations. Messenger is for a chat with a friend or a colleague and is closer to a phone call, while Twitter is for a chat with a group of friends and other random people you don’t mind listening and joining in – Twitter is like going to a party where you don’t know everyone (and some conversations you find there are more interesting than others).

My usage of Messenger has stayed the same since I discovered Twitter since I use them for different things.

The question also raises the issue of whether Twitter is a new form of social interaction or just a development of things like email, messenger and Facebook. It’s all of those things and none of them.

One thing for certain is that unlike email and messenger to a lesser extent it’s a popularity contest. Twitter grader ranks people by the number of followers, the ratio of followers to following and the number of retweets. The party metaphor is apt. As much as I love Twitter (and parties) as with a party you get cliques forming in Twitter. In a way it’s also like being back at school and desperately trying to prove that you’re one of the cool kids. Or maybe that was just me…

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I rediscovered Baekdal.com today.  It bills itself as an “online magazine about great experiences” and it’s certainly worth a read.

I say rediscovered because a while ago I came across a story when using Stumbleupon which recounts an experiment with robots. As the robots could only walk in a straight line, they relied on the kindness of strangers to point them towards their destination. It’s an interesting social experiment showing how humans co-operate with each other at the same time as interacting with technology.

Sounds a bit like what happens on social networking sites.

I’m finding more and more content through social sites that I use like Stumbleupon, Digg and Twitter. And it’s not just me. Many sites now get a considerable amount of traffic from social media sites. Baekdal itself claims that it gets 65% of its 200,000 monthly users from social sites with only 15% coming from search engines. Facebook is apparently a bigger referrer of traffic to Perezhilton.com than Google and here in the UK, the Telegraph has recently claimed that it gets 8% of its traffic from social media sites.

People are getting more and more information from their peers, their communities, and their networks. A couple of years ago the entry point to the web was a search engine. Now it’s increasingly likely to be Facebook and Twitter. Over the next year more money will be spent on social media optimisation just as a few years ago there was a sudden realisation that search engine optimisation was paramount.

So far I think smaller businesses have been quicker to pick up on this. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. Large media companies are only now starting to realise there is money to be made from social media – or at least from the traffic that these sites send to the showcase website. That is probably a dated model – the notion that a media site is a like a trawler fishing for traffic which it then sells on to advertisers – but I’ll leave that for another post.

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This article from Nieman Journalism Lab is a good analogy in some ways. It points out that sellers of bottled water have found a way of charging for something you get in other places for free. I’m not sure it works entirely. We have to ignore the fact that tap water is not free, though it might appear to be so, and that water fulfils a wide range of needs – it’s essential but bottled water is also sometimes just a fashion accessory. Content is a different type of product entirely.

But it does work in other ways. People pay a premium for bottled water because of two reasons I’d say: convenience and the idea (correct or not) that what’s in the bottle is better for you than what’s in the tap. A third could be celebrity endorsement. The idea that newspapers will be able to charge for convenience and for something that at least gives the impression that it’s something you can’t get elsewhere is not new. It’s just that most publications haven’t figured out how to do it yet. So, the analogy doesn’t contain a new idea, but sometimes analogies are what’s needed to get the creative juices flowing. 

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