Twitternap makes the FT

Mike Butcher, the UK arm of Techcrunch, is squatting the online identity of culture secretary Andy Burnham in protest at his suggestion that a cinema-style rating system might be introduced for the internet.

According to the FT techblog, which reports on the incident at length,

Mr Butcher will retain Mr Burnham’s Twitter account “until such time as he’s prepared to sit down and listen to some real feedback about his ideas”.
“I do intend to hand it back to him,” Mr Butcher told the FT – but only after setting up the Twitter account to follow other users “who know how the internet works, hoping he will get the kind of feedback that makes his job easier and preserves that go-getter internet culture”.

There are only seven MPs on Twitter currently, and the most prolific by a large margin, is Tom Watson, labour MP for West Bromwich East.
UPDATE: The account has been suspended – obviously someone didn’t like the joke!

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Prescription for a digital future for news

Edward Roussel of the Telegraph has a long post outlining the challenges he sees facing newspapers today and some suggestions about how to tackle them, including a 10 point plan. Among the tips are: “narrow the focus”, “engage with your readers”, “embrace multimedia” and “invest in the web”. Sound advice.
Update: John A. Byrne of BusinessWeek adds his perspective on the situation facing magazines specifically.

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Online ads and effectiveness

Marketingcharts.com reports on a survey by Burst Media which it says shows just how little tolerance users have to ad-cluttered sites.

  • More than half say they have a low tolerance for more than two ads per page
  • 27% say they will only tolerate one ad per page
  • Just over 25% say they will only tolerate two ads per page

And the more ads, the less well they work, according to the piece.

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Media needs to catch up


It is a testament to how much the world has become connected by the web that when you see something like this it just seems so lame and so anachronistic.

You can read a review of the Nintendo DSi which has just launched in Japan, or watch events than happen all over the world, but still the old geographical distribution paradigms seem alive at least in the minds of the studio bosses.

A new approach to copyright has to be just around the corner, right?