The way social apps can authenticate against each other has taken usability to a whole new level. But it makes you think how cataclysmic a security breach on one account could be. The new iPhone Blog-it app, for instance, easily created links with my Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Google identities.

Not all journalists feel put upon and under pressure in this multi-media world. At least that’s the presumption behind the JollyJournalist.com which aims to capture up beat soundbites from journos happy to be alive.

Yahoo! has produced a guide to reputation systems with discussions about which system is right for your particular type of application. Some of the types described are: the competitive spectrum (points mean prizes); named levels (like rank for enthusiasts) and numbered levels (does what it says on the tin). As they say:

A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and reputation embodies its own set of biases and incentive structures. Balancing these forces determines in large measure the success or failure of a social system.

The Online Journalism Blog posts an answer the the question "how can journalists use Facebook?"

1. As a way to find contacts
2. As a way to find special interest groups (particularly niche ones)
3. As a news source via status updates (not convinced about that one)
4. By setting up your own groups to bounce ideas off

Convinced? Using Facebook already?

Knews is a new concept news site which promises to split ad dollars with authors and to reward participants who propose or vote up stories. They have created their own currency – "watts" – and the amount of this which is earned determines how much money changes hands. Will it catch on?

Tim O’Reilly outlines a glum proposition that the world may be heading for disaster as the oil runs out. Maybe, without oil, man will be unable to build the technologies which would lead to spacetravel he argues. And maybe this is a general, universe-wide kind of law which may solve Fermi’s Paradox?

Technorati Tags: predictions, oil, space, theories

There was an interesting dinner conversation last night. It was sparked by a senior music industry exec (who I will call M – for “music” and not because it is his first, or last, initial). Was it not possible, he asked P (a leading British painter – again, initial for “painter” not …blah, blah) and my other half Gail , a rising star in the printmaking world, that the internet might not do to art what it had done to the music industry?

P thought not, believing the traditional gallery system would continue to be the most effective way of selling art. Gail wasn’t so sure, pointing out that at the more popular end of the market the smaller regional galleries were increasingly under threat from new retailing forms such as the highly successful Affordable Art Fair series of shows featuring work under £3,000, and galleries such as Wills Art Warehouse. Both of these make good use of the internet to promote themselves and an increasing number of artists are doing the same.

Will’s describes its mission:

Will’s Art Warehouse is the concept of Will Ramsay, who realised the need for a gallery which:

First, makes art more affordable (all work is priced between £50 and £3,000)

Second, is a friendly gallery. You are not hassled and each piece has lots of information beside it so that visitors or prospective buyers are helped in their understanding of the work, however much or little they know about art.

Third, he recognised that customers want a large variety of art to choose from. To use an analogy, he wants Will’s Art Warehouse to be “The Oddbins of the Art World”.

“We want to be as unintimidating and accessible as possible, to enable people who have a background which may not be art-based to feel they can buy original work without feeling they must acquire the theoretical baggage.”

The effective use of the internet is key to the broad appeal of these types of enterprises.

Yet there is still a feeling among the elite of the art world that somehow art is different and it will never be sold online and subject to the “destructive” forces of the internet.

I’m not so sure. If you look back at the history of internet commerce, easily accessible, commoditised items like books were the first to go. Later, however, almost all product lines started to succumb and some of major high street and shed retailers tried to respond by penalising those trying to buy form them online – after all the most expensive channel they have is the stores. The smart ones, though, realised there isn’t a choice and if people want to see the merchandise in the (expensive to run) store and then buy on the (cheap to run) internet later, it would be better if it was from the retailer’s own site. Now it is common to see joined-up, multi-channel approaches – from Comet, for example.

Not so in the art world. And yet with gallery commissions of up to 50% of purchase price there is an incentive for the artist to deal direct, even if the clients are experiencing the work first hand in the gallery. Smart galleries should start to recognise that increasingly there isn’t online and offline – it’s all part of the same continuum. Working with the new reality – something the music industry should have done a hell of a lot sooner – might just save the day.

Technorati Tags: art, commerce, internet

There is something disturbing about extreme dog lovers. Today in the park I witnessed a typical incident. Man runs by jogging, dog chases man, dog owner says, in wheedling, ineffective voice ” oh Teddy, what are you doing?”, dog takes little notice but eventually gives up the chase. The attitude of the dog owner seems to be that 1. everyone obviously loves their dog as much as they do 2. everyone knows the dog is harmless (how could it be otherwise) and 3. everyone is happy to be interrupted by the lovable pooch as they are obviously not doing anything so important that a pleasant doggy diversion wouldn’t be welcome.
As a runner myself I have good cause to appreciate the fallacy of all of these assumptions, having been tripped up more than once, barked at numerous times and even, on rare occasions, bitten. Taken to its extreme, this kind of dog worship leads to the plague of dog crap which litters our parks and beaches. Love me, love my dog and whatever my dog produces.

Technorati Tags: dogs, antisocial

There has been quite a stir in certain quarters caused by this account of my PPA panel appearance on Tuesday. The main thrust of the furore (if I may call it that – storm in a teacup may be more accurate) is that paying journalists for page inpressions they generate inevitably leads to lowest-common-denominator journalism which will undermine the credibility and ultimately the very existence of specialist b2b websites.

Clearly, if any pay for performance scheme were ever to be implemented in a blanket fashion that very well might be the result – which, for the record, would be a bad thing!

However, in an online world where attention is firstly more valued and more difficult to get, and secondly increasingly measurable it surely comes as no surprise that questions about how to maximise it arise from time to time.

Leaving aside the somewhat dramatic “RBI contemplates pay-for-performance pay for journalists” headline (which conjours up images of the company’s top brass locked in a room thrashing out time-and-motion plans for journalists – which, again, for the record did not happen, I assure you) there are clearly some audience-building activities which are more valuable than others in attention terms. Finding ways to maximise them is therefore a worthwhile goal.

But there are lots of subtleties: some audiences are smaller than others but may be more valuable; some types of customer are more prone to consume the web than others; some subjects respond better to SEO than others. And there may be altogether different reasons for wanting particular types of coverage to appear, other than naked traffic. For all these reasons, and many others, I doubt that pay-for-performance schemes will be seen in mainstream publishers for a very long time, if ever.

But characterising the debate about optimisation as an inevitable dumbing down does not further the argument much.

Technorati Tags: economy, journalism, PPA

Google Reader has added a shared notes feature. Simply drag the Note in Reader bookmarklet to the browser bar and then drag anything you want to share to the bookmarklet – either complete pages on just selected text. You can also add a note to describe your clip.

Technorati Tags: tools