Charles Moore, former editor of the Telegraph, interviewed Tory leader David Cameron and played the either…or game with him – with interesting results. 

Red or white? Red

Bitter or lager? Bitter

Meat or fish? Meat

Town or country? Country

Or again….

Star Trek or Dr Who? Star Trek.

Later, the Today Programme repeated the exercise at the Tory Party Conference – it’s well worth a listen.

This strikes me as a very useful and fun way of gaining insight into key figures and could be used to great effect in the markets we cover. I wonder who will be the first to do it?

UPDATE: I’m having trouble playing the link with Firefox – though it plays just fine in Internet Explorer.

Wired has a story about a patent filed by Google which envisages handsets which automatically poll wireless providers (including wi-fi and wi-max) for the lowest price before connecting. There’s a long way to go, and a lot of vested interests in the way, but it’s a great vision.

Jeff Javis writes a thoughtful post responding to the blanket criticism of "citizen journalists" following the false story of Steve Jobs’ "heart attack" on CNN’s iReport.

The main problem isn’t with citizen journalism, he says, but with credulous readers (and that isn’t a new problem).

we have to get better at giving caveats. As news rushes by, it is important that we make it clear what is and isn’t confirmed. We thought we were in the business of saying what we know in the news. But we’re more in the business of saying what we don’t know. I’ve often quoted Nick Denton’s definition of what we bloggers call “half-baked posts.” They say to our readers: “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t know. What do you know?”

The "story" was corrected very fast by journalists contacting Apple for clarification, he points out.

The web, as it turns out, is almost as fast at spreading truth as it as at spreading rumors.

With t&e budgets likely to be slashed around the world next year some enterprising bloggers have come up with a novel idea: free conferences on the web. They have collected (curated if you like) what they consider to be the best free presentations around a subject and are offering them to the world. I’ve found two so far:

The Online Marketing Conference and
Pixelated – the Online Business Conference

What a fantastic idea. I wonder if there is enough content for us to do the same in some of our verticals? Worth a look, surely…

Technorati Tags: conference, innovation, online, education

The building block of journalism is no longer the article; so says Jeff Jarvis in a post which argues that the web needs a new paradigm.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation.

Instead:

… I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

In response to the huge complexities and fast past of the economic crisis, will we see a new form emerge? I actually think one of our blogs, Flightblogger, is already doing something like this for the 787 programme – he’s mixing the fast (Twitter) with the slow and reflective (old-fashioned feature articles) and pulling it together in one place. What’s probably missing is easy access to “the story so far”.

Technorati Tags: internet, journalism, media

I was making a presentation to the news team at Estates Gazette on Friday and as part of the story I pulled off a series of traffic graphs from Alexa to show the relative share of voice of traditional newspapers (The Guadian and New York Times), aggregators (Digg), social networking sites (Facebook) and video (YouTube).

The general story is predictable and well illustrated by the Alexa charts (check it out: one, two, three, four, five – see what I mean?) but the interesting back story is: what has happened to Digg? The site has enjoyed uninterupted growth until June and then has fallen to one third of its relative popularity. I checked out competitors, and the only one making inroads seems to be Mixx – and it’s growth doesn’t explain the fall. Any ideas?

BTW credit to the idea of comparing in this way goes to my colleague Karl.

Technorati Tags: Alexa, internet, traffic

RBI scooped the most awards at last night’s AOP awards, including the big one – Online Publisher of the Year. RBI’s e-newsletters sales team won Online Advertising Sales Team of the Year, FWi won Online Community and XpertHR won Business Website of the Year. Read the full awards list in Brand Republic’s report here.

Technorati Tags: AOP 08, awards, RBI

Web collaboration firm Socialtext is launching Socialtext 3.0 which aims to bring a wiki, “Facebook” and “Twitter” mashup to the enterprise.Techcrunch writes about it here

Technorati Tags: collaboration, enterprise, Facebook, twitter, web2, wiki