Great animation content from Will Simon’s Clickwheel.net. Check it Out. Richard talked about teh fact that pod/vod casting is opeing up the business oppos that Puttnam talked about. Sarah went through what the Beeb is doing in this arena.

Steve has invited us to the networking event tonight? Whoo hoo! Free booze… Fiddian from Soda has just got up to talk. Soda rose from the ashes of the Middlesex Uni centre for electronic arts. They love play, learning and art through technology. Talked about SodaPlay 2.0 - based on an integrated community but from a learning point of view for teachers pupils and general users. Also sodaplaymobile… Soda aim to be self sufficient from IP within 3 years.

Andy Pickles - Jive Bunny himself…believes you can do things all yourself. But you can create some IP and keep selling it. Made points about needing talent and harnessing creativity for commercial gain, not just for creative purposes. He believes that education wil be their core revenue within 3 years.

Top Web sites in April 2006: Yahoo!, Microsoft.com, MSN, Google by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — In April 2006 Yahoo!, Microsoft.com, MSN and Google received over 90 mln unique visitors. Yahoo! was the only one to break the 100 mln unique visitors barrier, according to Nielsen//NetRatings data.

Top Web sites in April 2006

Web site          Audience 000,  Time spent

Yahoo!                105,4443:10:02

Microsoft              95,7770:45:25

MSN                    92,7861:38:53

Google                92,1200:52:48

AOL                    70,4336:11:06

eBay                   53,4651:53:00

MapQuest            40,8010:10:53

MySpace              38,3592:06:46

Real.com              38,1830:47:48

Amazon               37,8540:19:37

Source: Nielsen//NetRatingsITFacts also published Web traffic findings for top sites in March 2006, top sites in February […]

As we are seeing (click here for nielen/netrating figures), social network sites continue their spectacular rise. Yet another aspect of community that is growing. Social Radio, shared and social video (Youtube etc.) and out and out social networking sites are all rocketing in size and reach. The nielsen figures show MySpace dominating as a service but when you look also at the retention figures the order lower down the list changes a little with Facebook scoring highly.

I like this because it confirms that standard behaviour is occuring online. We read so much about ‘new behaviours’ but the fact that smaller sites have great retention bodes well for up and coming and new ventures in this space and shows that a sustainable model based on satisfied cutomers is possible even if you dont attain MySpace scale - i.e. when you plan to launch something aim clearly at a market and serve that market well.   They will reward you with loyalty.

As we are seeing (click here for nielen/netrating figures), social network sites continue their spectacular rise. Yet another aspect of community that is growing. Social Radio, shared and social video (Youtube etc.) and out and out social networking sites are all rocketing in size and reach. The nielsen figures show MySpace dominating as a service but when you look also at the retention figures the order lower down the list changes a little with Facebook scoring highly.

I like this because it confirms that standard behaviour is occuring online. We read so much about ‘new behaviours’ but the fact that smaller sites have great retention bodes well for up and coming and new ventures in this space and shows that a sustainable model based on satisfied cutomers is possible even if you dont attain MySpace scale - i.e. when you plan to launch something aim clearly at a market and serve that market well. They will reward you with loyalty.

Read this article by Kevin Kelly on the digitisation of print and the emerging online library of scanned texts. Worth a  read if a little evangelical in tone. He talks with great energy about the ultimate triumph of the digital text over print.

Just got back from a break and been catching up. This post caught my eye from Kevin Anderson. Its a rather humorous take on how comfortable the mainstream media actually are with blogging. The main thrust of the arguement from the BBC representative seems to be “who checks the bloggers?”; are blogs trustworthy? Well its interesting that a news organisation (that often commits errors, don’t they all?) can ask that, as it shows that they are running scared and dismissive about ordinary people actually stepping into their territory.

This is interesting. This is a typical middleclass liberal elite reaction to democratisation. Since the dawn of modern pop culture this elite has consistently claimed to support “ordinary people’s culture” while at the same time insisting on the retention of outlets such as radios 3 and 4 and sneering at anyone who reads the Daily Mail and The Sun. People do have the choice to read other newspapers but still they choose to buy the tabloids in their millions, not the qualities, and despite this being real democracy in action it’s not good enough for the elite, they have to attack ordinary poeple who buy these papers so why should their attitudes to social media be any different?
It is interesting that they choose now to attack outlets and channels that allow people to tell their story in their way and insist that their definition of “checking” should be applied to this world too. In other words they want to control it.

These new forms are great precisely because they dont have that old fashioned system of checks put on them. It will be interesting in the coming years to see how this begins to work when smart meta data filters emerge and the whole process of editorial approval breaks down even further.

This post isnt about the BBC by the way its about attitudes in the media in general - feel free to argue with me here or at the festival…