Thursday, 22 July 2010

Is this the beginning of the death of magazines?

‘The death of....’ is usually rubbish. But this one makes me wonder.

A new iPad application called Flipboard turns online content into a magazine on your desktop. And it makes it looks like a magazine (closer to The Times magazine than Hello at present).

It bridges a very important gap. Professionally produced content tends to be presented well, even when the content is poor. User generated content tends to be presented badly, even when the content is superb.

Flipboard means that there is a level playing field for content, and is prioritised on the basis of its interest to the reader (as Facebook does on the basis of your behaviour, but also prioritising things like the people you interact with and retweets). So it’s rather cleverly combined the best of UGC with the best of traditional media.

It’s a long video on Scobleizer’s blog, but worth a watch:

http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-revolutionary-social-news-ipad-app-flipboard/

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Crowdsourcing an iPhone app

Giff Gaff* is a people powered mobile phone network - who get their core business mainly done by their customers.

So I'm pleased to see that one of their customers has designed an iPhone app for them, now in the Apple Store.

As my digitally native colleague Lisa (who spotted this) says 'bloody brilliant'.

*Declaration of interest - a client - but this is actually a result of their core business model rather than something we've done for them.

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Monday, 12 July 2010

Building a website for free in 15 seconds

Around half of people I talk to about new websites just need a Posterous site.

In a nutshell Posterous is very useful because:

·         It creates a website for you instantly and for free, just from sending an email to post@posterous.com

·         It can then re-post this material to any other websites you want. I get it to automatically post my blog postings to Twitter, Facebook and my Blogger blog, as well as sending photos to my Flickr account.

·         It’s search engine friendly – so comes up prominently in Google without any fiddling.

·         There’s no need to brief anyone or build anything difficult.

This is why I often recommend that people use it.

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Monday, 5 July 2010

The worst use of polling I've seen for months

Childwise have done a poll on whether children are scared by adults drunk. Potentially quite an interesting issue.

But their interpretation of the results is bonkers. They say that one third of children are scared by adults who are drinking too much. Which is sad and clearly matters.

But they then go on to say that nearly half of children aren't bothered by drunkeness - and that this is disturbing too.

So basically it's disturbing if children are scared or not scared by drinking.

Posted via email from Rob's posterous