And the best blog award goes to...

Jonathan Bowers, September 28th 2006, 11:08AM

There have been awards for the best blog for some time online, normally generated by those who are fuelling the explosion. However, with the growth of MySpace and other social networking sites, blog awards are now hitting areas of the mainstream.

The sector in question is (unsurprisingly) the music industry and the BT Digital Music Awards have introduced a Best Music Blog category this year.

The awards on the 3rd October will pit the likes of Lily Allen against the Streets and Sandi Thom to find the best 'online communicators' in the business.

But talking of business - I wonder when our sector's awarding bodies will start to recognise the important role blogs can play within the communication strategy enough offer rewards?

Tags: awards, blogging, myspace
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TV Times

Chris Norton, May 23rd 2006, 12:38PM

This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings - 'kiss goodbye to your summer' cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB's own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There's a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can't be bothered putting up an impenetrable, culturally cool acceptable front... in fact half of us round these parts of the office are already discussing Shahbaz every morning, like the bunch of gossiping old fishwives we really are.

The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those 'water-cooler' conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There's all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.

But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish - TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it's the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night's crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience... Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.

Hey, if you can't gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV - and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where's my copy of Heat?

Tags: bigbrother, conversations, media, myspace, office, tv, video
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What we do on the web echoes in eternity

Chris Norton, May 5th 2006, 10:12AM

Lately I've been spreading myself all over the internet, in the same way as Jonathan Ross is spread across the TV and radio - admittedly without the wit, fame or eyeball-worrying collection of clothes. As I've said in previous entries, I'm a big fan of sites like 43things and last.fm, which are busy either recording what I do automatically or encouraging me to post information up about myself.

This phenomenon of online-ifying your personal life is really gathering speed, and I find myself worrying a little about the persistence of this information. Whilst I'm getting sick to death of myspace related stories, this one highlights the issue nicely. For a while back there it looked like El Murdocho owned your info for ever if you posted anything up - seems this has been resolved to something more satisfactory, but the fact of the matter is that information on the web stays there.

Myspace may crumble and take all those ridiculous abuses of CSS with it, lastfm may forget how many times I've listened to Dumb Dumb Dumb by Teenage Fanclub - and yet for years, perhaps for ever, archives will remain. Stuff on the web is publicly available information, and people like the Internet Archive (and Google's infamous cache) are filing it all away. Yes, future employers may be able to see those pictures on Flickr of you getting drunk and that rant about authority you posted on your blog. Even I (yes, even I) am a little worried that, if, say, I post a link to chucknorrisfacts.com - sometime in the future someone will be searching for me and, not being aware that Chris in tech told me to post it, might think I'm the sort of joker who spends all day on chucknorrisfacts.com. And I'm not.

My advice? Get up while you can and delete yourself! OK, so I've had no success in implementing this noble aim myself - because those sites are just too cool. Maybe that's the problem - cool vs privacy, fun in the present vs paying for it in the future. God, thinking like that, seems like I'm getting old.

Tags: blogging, myspace, privacy, websites, worldwideweb
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Social Networking

Chris Norton, April 6th 2006, 3:51PM

OK so there's been a lot of news lately about Myspace:

• Firebombing!
• Police stings!
• Rupert Murdoch!

For those of you unaware (i.e. those of you who aren't as young and cool as you think you are), Myspace is a 'social networking' site that basically reproduces the grown-up web in a microcosm of epileptic-fit inducing flashing backgrounds, pictures of teenagers looking moody (don't they always?) and enormous lists of favourite bands. The site's main thrust lies in its blogging features and the ability to build lists of your virtual friends. Aside from this it's become a very musical place, offering the chance for musicians to upload their stuff and then build a fanbase with the friend list functions.

I'm not too interested in the controversy, its seems to me they're just a new spin on those old 'paedophiles lurking in every chatroom' Daily Mail-isms we've all run through a thousand times before. What I do like is keeping tabs on this new breed of community sites - and I'd like to pay homage to three of my favourites.

First up, Flickr. The massive popularity of digital cameras has fuelled all sorts of online photo-album websites, and this is a top-notch example. Flickr gives you plenty of space for uploading pictures, and all the usual titling, captioning and rotating features you'd expect. What makes it a little more interesting and a lot more fun is the tagging aspect. Just as we tag our posts on this blog, so you tag photos on Flickr. Users searching for 'disturbing animal' are then able to get such highly useful results as... this. OK, so it all depends on how well people tag their photos, but coupled with the tags is a large community and the ability to post comments on other peoples photos, and it's extremely interesting to see which of your photos are the most frequently viewed.

Yet another tag-heavy system is 43 things. It's a kind of networked to-do list, a space to track either your mundane plans for the near future or your desire to become a pirate (154 people want to do that?! We all know ninjas are better). You can post blog-style entries on your progress on any of your things, and you can roam around other people's lists - at a click of the mouse you can add appropriate someone else's desire to learn Swahili as one your own aims. One of the nicest things about the site is the idea of 'cheers' - if you approve of someone's thing, you can give them a cheer, they'll note your approval and then you can thank them via private messages. You then become friends, et voila, Bob's your uncle, social networking at its finest.

One of my most-visited sites over the last year has been Last.FM, formerly the wonderfully named Audioscrobbler. It's my favourite because it combines music and statistics - perhaps my favourite things outside of robots and Subway stickers. You install a plug-in for your PC music player of choice (iTunes for me), and then that sneaks about in the background as you listen to music, compiling a list of your favourite artists and tracks on your Last.FM user page. Very interesting to find out just how often I listen to my strangely mis-matched collection of Elvis Costello and Girls Aloud records, but even more interesting to be told who else on the system is listening to a similar mix of music - and based on that, the system then makes recommendations as to stuff I might like. You can even listen to web-streaming radio stations based on your neighbour's musical tastes. Of course, as with all these new social networking sites, there's plenty of room for improvement - apparently, I should be listening to a lot more Billy Joel. Hmmm.

Tags: myspace, socialnetworking, websites, worldwideweb
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