Bradley Howard's Blog

Website reading list

May 18, 2011 at 9:21am

At a recent event, I met up with a regular reader of this blog, Andrew, who asked me what websites and news feeds I read regularly to keep track of trends within digital media, social media and the web in general.

I'll start the answer with a disclaimer - this list has been growing over time, and follows specific interests that I've had over the last couple of years.

I find it impossible to keep going to specific websites to keep up to date, so RSS feeds are the answer. I've tried using a number of RSS readers but because my life is ruled by Outlook - when the 2010 version came along with an excellent RSS reader, I was sold, and am now able to stay up to date with RSS feeds.

If you use Outlook 2010 but don't use it for RSS, I recommend you try it because it presents articles just like emails. (Like you need more emails...)

I'm not including news feeds that post less than an article a month. So the list, in alphabetical order is:

Google News. I've set up a number of RSS feeds using Google Alerts. I monitor most of the suppliers in our technology stack, and skim read through the list regularly. I have to skim it because there's usually a lot of duplicate content because of press releases. Examples of the feeds include Akamai (one of our Content Delivery Partners), Endava and IMG (my former company and I still find it interesting to follow).
This blog. I keep an archive of all the articles because I find it easier to search, and it's a nice offline backup method.
Confused of Calcutta. Written by JP Rangaswami, the Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com. His articles are thought provoking and detailed about all aspects of information, and wider architecture thoughts. If you like the book, Cluetrain Manifesto, you'll love his blog (especially as he wrote a chapter in the 10th anniversary edition) because they share the same writing style. I often comment on JP's articles.
Google Webmaster Central Blog. Excellent resource for the latest happenings, straight from the preverbial horse's mouth. I'll often spot content in the articles and email it around to the technical teams at work.
Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty. We have a love/hate relationship with Hitwise that I won't go into here. Sometimes Heather posts interesting traffic trends. Very US centric (not necessarily a bad thing), however she's one of my preferred Hitwise bloggers.
Information Is Beautiful. I am fascinated by this company. Anyone who can illustrate massive or complex data sets to enable us mortals to understand it in 2 seconds and keep our attention for 15 minutes with the same diagram is a magician. Chances are that if you see me shortly after a new post, I'll tell you about it.
IP TV Times. Updated very regularly, Iolo Jones provides a straight-from-the-heart view of pretty much anything connected to digital media, video, commercialisation and online piracy. I aspire to updating this blog as regularly as Iolo updates his. I often comment on Iolo's articles.
Matt Groves Digital Donut. One of the nicest guys in the Digital industry, Matt works at Fallon and often updates his blog with the latest campaigns that have either caught his eye (around the World - not just the UK, which is something I like) or that Fallon are working on.
The Opposite Direction. Also one of the nicest guys in the industry, Robin heads up the social media practice at McCann who we do a lot of work with. Social Media is packed with jump-on-the-bandwagon consultants who are full of hot air however Robin is the complete opposite - he shares his knowledge and experience in every meeting. His blog is written in a similar way - you typically learn something new in most articles.
The Register. Because I am in IT, and the Register provides the latest IT (and some scientific) news, usually with a good sense of humour. I don't read every article (it would take all day) - I generally skim the headlines and read any articles that are relevant.
UK news: Office for National Statistics (The Guardian). I like statistics and the ONS has lots of them. The Guardian apply some commentary but I like the fact it's up to the reader to make sense of them.
Webcredible. A varied blog from a usability consultancy where an old IMG colleague, Ismail, works. The blog is full of useful digital media best practices (not just usability) and examples of best websites out-there.
What's Next: Top Trends. Thoughts from one of my favourite 'futurists', Richard Watson. I often comment on Richard's posts.

If you have any other recommendations or comments on the feeds above, please do let me know.

Photo courtesy of Bytelove.

tags:

Endava, Outlook 2010, RSS, blog comment, blogging, digital media, social media, trends,

0 Comments

Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Mar 1, 2011 at 9:10am

Weeknotes seem to be the new compromise between micro-blogging (aka Twitter) and full on blogging. Take a look at Weeknote - it's quite a neat site if you have something to say but don't want to be constrained to 140 characters.

Marc Holmes and others have started adopting a nice approach to their blogs, by including a weeknote every errrrrr.... seven days, so I thought I'd try it too. So here goes for the last week:

Launched The Race Season on SpotsVStripes - a new campaign as part of Cadbury's sponsorship of London 2012. A very addictive set of Flash games. And a new chocolate bar (the Race Bar - try it and let me know what you think). Here's the TV advert:

Found an excellent new utility for capturing tall web pages as images.
On a personal note - last week was officially the first time it cost more than £20 to fill up my motorbike. I'm not complaining too much, considering a bottle of water at Euston station costs £1.50 (that's 20p more per litre than petrol).
Using Timely more and more for writing loads of tweets in one session, then letting them 'go live' over the course of the week.
Finished reading Lord Sugar's auto-biography, loving virtually every word of it. Worst of all, I didn't have another book ready to start reading, so I'm back to the Metro each day. Another reason to use the bike more!
Read a couple of good articles - one which said that in the US most Internet shoppers are pretty affluent; the second is debating whether we're in a second dotcom bubble.
I got my data back from a faulty hard disk.
Learnt what the word undecillion means during a session on IPv6. (10 to the power of 36).
A fair amount of cycle rides (two sessions of 20+ miles) and a 2.5 run around the block. All in the aim of completing this year's London to Brighton quicker than last year and being a stone lighter at the same time.
Watched that match...

tags:

London to Brighton bike ride, Weeknote, application review, blogging, book review, business, motorcycles, twitter,

3 Comments

Learning from eBay timing

Feb 17, 2011 at 3:30pm

Several few years ago I got really involved selling stuff on eBay, became a PowerSeller for a few months and turned over a nice revenue, until the choice was to give up my main job and go into eBay full time. I decided to concentrate more on my main job, and well, the rest is recent history.

One of the things I learnt from eBay was that when it comes to auctions, timing is 90% of the story.

There was little point creating an auction that would finish at say, 11am on a Monday morning. The end of the auction was when there would be the highest number of bids, and Monday morning was a poor time for attracting traffic to the bid.

I used to list items on the weekend, and pay a few pence extra for a 'Scheduled start'. After some trial and [lots of] error I would schedule for items to finish at around 5.30 or 6pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On items to do with the home, I would schedule for auctions to finish on a Sunday evening.

I've noticed that timing is once again really important when it comes to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn statuses. Actually, the same is true of any status update. If someone (or a brand) continually updates a status, any previous status falls down from prominence very quickly. End users will probably be following tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of other users/brands, so the timing between status updates is absolutely key.

I now find I'm using the same practices for writing blog articles and Twitter updates.

I write almost all the week's blog posts on a Sunday morning, and delay them being made public - trying to stagger them over the week. Also, I try to choose a decent time when they are made public (which then posts to my Twitter page, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). If I made them all public in one go, especially on a Sunday, only the most recent one would get any traffic.

Posterous has an excellent scheduler for blog posts. For my Twitter feed, I use either Timely, which has been written specifically to address the timing issue above, or sometimes TweetDeck. Timely is OK, but provides pretty random scheduling (you can't provide a time - the system does it for you). I find TweetDeck is one those applications that tries to be all things to all people, and ends up being unusable to all of them as well, so in practice I tend to use Timely more often.

Photo courtesy of LenP17 on Flickr.

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, business, eBay, ecommerce, marketing, twitter,

0 Comments

No updates

Feb 1, 2011 at 12:12am

Nope, I haven't got bored of blogging. Quite the opposite in fact - I have a long list of topics to write about. The issue has been time.

I've mentioned before that I write articles on the weekend (usually before 6-9am on a Sunday) and set them to appear during the week. However Mrs H has had the flu for the last 10 days, so I've been running around all weekend sorting out the kids.

Stay posted for quite a few articles appearing in the next couple of weeks.

tags:

blogging, google,

0 Comments

Happy Birthday post

Jan 16, 2011 at 10:47am

This blog has now been going for a year, so I thought I'd share some of the readership statistics with you.

Between 18 January 2010 and 17 January 2011, there have been:

133 posts
2,556 visitors come along
3,723 page views on the site

In terms of geography, it pretty much matches where we have current and former colleagues, clients, suppliers and friends:

It's interesting to note that colleagues in Romania and Moldova spend the longest reading articles whereas colleagues in the US are either put off straight away, or read very quickly (quicker than the UK)!

The most popular article of the year was a review on Yammer where 300 people read the review - well above the daily average. Talking of the daily average, this has been steadily growing from nothing at the start of the blog to a steady 20-30 visits a day now.

These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.

A huge thank you to everyone who reads the blog (that includes you!).

My aims for 2011/2 are to double the traffic and have more people commenting. If you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly.

tags:

analytics, blog comment, blogging, web traffic,

0 Comments

Review of my 2010 predictions

Dec 24, 2010 at 11:16am

Back in January I made 10 predictions for Digital Media for 2010. Being open and transparent, how did these predictions fair over the year?

Reinvestment in Digital Media.
2010 was a great year for agencies. We have implemented a number of very large websites, both brand new brands and existing ones. In terms of reinvestment, clients are now looking into cloud computing and full disaster recovery.
Prediction rating: 10/10
Lack of new products due to R&D being slashed in 2009.
Looking back at new applications and products - what was released that made a big impact? The iPad (at the beginning of the year before being launched it was referred to as the iSlate). I predicted that the end of the year would see some launches, and Kinect was released in November. Before you start commenting that 2010 was the year of 3D TV, they were in fact launched in 2009.
Prediction rating: 10/10
A number of live events on YouTube.
Well, in September they launched live streaming. However I doubt most people really noticed. I'll knock some points off because I said "live is where the value is".
Prediction rating: 8/10
More Flex applications, less Silverlight.
Hmmm - more site are using Flex (BBC iPlayer download for example). HTML 5 changed the landscape significantly, and due to the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe, agencies are nervous about any single vendor, and will move to the latest version of HTML instead.
Prediction rating: 3/10
SecondLife to further decline.

Second-what? The LindenX has just flattened out for the last couple of years - which means no more money is coming into the platform.
Prediction rating: 9/10
The UK to start accepting blogging at the same status as the US.
Absolutely. UK news programmes now interview blogging experts for their views and opinions. Blogs are quoted in the press (errr, but so is Twitter, so maybe it's just reporters' laziness).
Prediction rating: 10/10
Offline browsers make a comeback.
Perhaps 12 months ahead of it's time, this prediction didn't materialise. Before you think there is a gap in the market, we have been approached by a number of vendors in this space.
Prediction rating: 2/10
The FIFA World Cup sees huge use of video over mobile & broadband.
It's easy to forget the World Cup this year. If you were streaming it though, your view of the summer was probably very different to England supporters. Internet traffic reached a record peak (of almost 1Tb/sec) due to video over mobile and broadband.
Prediction rating: 10/10
Expect ebooks to take off.
Ebooks have exceeded all expectations for booksellers, so I was correct there. However magazines, sports programmes and other paper publications have been slow to move to ebooks, mainly because Amazon and other ebook retailers want such a high slice of the revenue. So if you're a football club that sells a programme for £3 or £4, you really don't want a new middleman taking 20-30% of your revenue to sell the book electronically.
Prediction rating: 5/10
2010... the year of Web CRM
There is still a major opportunity for a cloud based platform with efficient pricing. I do not understand why there isn't a white label SSO platform out there. Let me know if you can recommend one.
Prediction rating: 0/10

Pretty good going overall. Any more accurate and I'd be an octopus.

I'll post an article on 2011 predictions next week.

Photo courtesy of Shine 2010 - 2010 World Cup good news.

tags:

Adobe, CRM, Content Delivery Network, FLex, SecondLife, Silverlight, World Cup, YouTube, blogging, digital media, ebooks, predictions, video, web traffic, website production,

0 Comments

Book review: "What Would Google Do?"

Dec 14, 2010 at 9:14pm

I've just finished reading the book "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis.

Actually, I think that title of the book was probably not the first choice from the author.

The first title Jarvis probably thought of was "The cultural difference between Americans and Brits". The first few chapters are full of example stories of how Jarvis bought a Dell computer, complained, and ended up interviewing Michael Dell (the founder of Dell) himself, and how Jarvis have advised most of the biggest companies on the Internet in ways they could improve.

Jarvis is one of those people who always seems know someone at every company in the World, and probably worked there (sorry, advised them to make them better) at some stage too.

If you (and I'm talking to Brits here) can stand those types of bold claims and self promotion, of which I'm not disputing the accuracy of the claims -- just how liberally they're used through the book; you'll move on to the second part. This part deals with the actual title - how would Google run a restaurant, a hospital, a law firm, and many other industries.

Jarvis is quite creative with his thoughts, although if you work in any of those industries you can't help but admire his naivety at lack of understanding that industry. That naivety is precisely at the core of how Jarvis thinks Google approach any industry though - they reinvent it specifically without wanting to understand how it's been done before.

The final part of the book is a long essay into what Jarvis thinks is good and bad about the Internet, and full of promotion about his blog - why he blogs, how he blogs, why he's so great - and then we're back to that same American style which is probably admired in USAland and sneered at in the UK.

WWGD (as Jarvis calls the book) is an OK read. The book is extremely simplistic - for example it lightly touches with the issue of WHY Google goes into certain industries (to capture more search traffic, more personal/crowd/industry insight data) - he only deals with the end user's perspective. If you work for one of the industries that Jarvis uses as a case study of being Google-ised, you'll sit there nodding your head saying to the book "No, that's not how my industry works" - which is the whole point of the book really.

tags:

blogging, book review, business, culture, google,

0 Comments

Why are Fax numbers on business cards?

Nov 18, 2010 at 6:31pm

It doesn't matter if you're an IT services company, a creative agency, anyone and everyone still seems to be putting their fax numbers on business cards.

I haven't used a fax machine for years. So many years, that I can't remember how many years.

Why are we refusing to let go of fax numbers?

How about replacing them with Twitter usernames (too geeky - really?), blog addresses (too much personal promotion - really??), Facebook address (definitely too personal for me)?

OK, let's just leave it out then. And leave white space there instead. At least they'll be more room to write memorable stuff about the person instead.

tags:

Endava, Facebook, blogging, business, business cards, fax, trends, twitter,

3 Comments

Web content doesn't last forever

Sep 28, 2010 at 8:08am

There are many magazines and blog articles which stress the importance of online privacy based on the notion that once content is 'out there' on the Web, it's there forever.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that users who keep a blog in their Live Spaces account will need to move it to another company, Wordpress. This process is not automatic though.

During the summer, a friend and neighbour passed away after a courageous, hard fought battle against cancer. Jonathan used Live Spaces to write about his battle in great detail, with a key aim that once he'd won the battle, it would serve to help other similar cancer patients. He included photos, personal thoughts, detailed medical information and contact details of financial, medical and psychological) support networks available to cancer victims.

So what will happen to Jonathan's blog? Unless someone contacts his wife (who wrote the final, agonising entry after he passed away), the blog will be deleted forever, never to return. So digital content doesn't really last forever - in this case it barely lasted a year.

So what can be done? There are a number of options available. Most blog platforms allow the author to automatically post to another blog platform. You can also host the site yourself (although this will only continue while you're paying for it).

Probably the safest option is to write a paperback book.

tags:

Microsoft, blog comment, blogging, content,

0 Comments

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse?

Jul 24, 2010 at 10:18pm

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse ?

I was going to use the term 'lemmings' but the United Order of Lemmings have written to me and asked me to stop giving them a bad name.
How did ITV get Friends Reunited and ITV Local so wrong ? And where did NewsCorp managed to get MySpace from 100m to 5m users - and why are they now seeming to do the same with The Times online sites?

Yet, with video they have leveraged this positions well and become dominant in the provision of online video in the US and the UK. In the US no major TV company has tried to stray beyond what they do, and at the same time they've come up with concepts such as Hulu.

Collaborative ventures like this have critical mass in the US, but seem futile in the UK where only the BBC count.

Traditional media has great sales capabilities, good production discipline, but the content is what counts.

Great video content is much more difficult to produce than a great article. Volume of video content is even more difficult. For example, by my experience, a minute of high quality video takes an hour to edit on average.

Likewise, audiences now form themselves and generate their own 'content'.

So why can't old media monetize this ? This, perhaps, is the most valuable question in media.

via iptvtimes.net

I just commented on an excellent article by Iolo Jones of VidZapper regarding Old/Traditional Media companies struggling to make New Media ventures successful. The article is above, and my comment was as follows:

Excellent article Iolo - I agree with every single point.
The BBC have successfully implemented Digital Media so, so well - i.e. iPlayer, the BBC News website (including each upgrade), even the BBC Weather site is excellent (albeit the accuracy can be dubious, that's not their fault though).
There's no close second in the UK except maybe skysports.com - will the mothership demand that it also becomes paid-subscription?

tags:

blog comment, blogging, digital media, media, traditional media,

0 Comments

Tags

Website reading list

Weeknote #1 - losing weight and launching a new chocolate bar

Learning from eBay timing

No updates

Happy Birthday post

Review of my 2010 predictions

Book review: "What Would Google Do?"

Why are Fax numbers on business cards?

Web content doesn't last forever

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse?

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse ?

Bradley Howard

Other ways to find me: