Democratizing content in the user-in-control era
Posted by Jodie Hopperton on March 22, 2007 at 2:49 PM
More from the Guardian Changing Media Summit. According to Ben Hammersley, Multimedia reporter, Guardian Unlimited, a lot of brands are at odds with their customers.
Content is personal to the person that is consuming it. It’s a love affair, so make it as easy as possible for people to love your products.
He gives an interesting new take on the Viacom/Google issue:
150,000 people uploaded Viacom content. They loved it; they uploaded it; they wanted other people to see it. Viacom aren’t just suing a faceless corporation (Google), they are breaking the hearts of their own consumers that loved the content so much that they wanted to share it with other people.
Interesting take and probably fairly accurate although breaking hearts is taking it a little to far within the love affair pun.
The other main theme of the session is RSS feeds. Tariq Krim, Founder and CEO, Netvibes says that “the more you put through RSS, the more people click back to the site. They read the headline then click to the site to read the whole thing if it interests them”.
Even if full text is put through the feed, users come back for the content that surrounds it.
The general consensus in term of newspapers is that RSS is just another method to get your content to the consumer, which is, after all, the main objective. According to Hammersley RSS audiences are different to web audiences, which are different to those who read the printed product. He adds that editorial teams don’t need to know the difference between the two, and if they do, their webmaster is clearly wrong.
Apparently The New Yorker puts all it’s investigative journalism stories through RSS and the website.
Advice to editors: Don’t change what you’re doing. We’re now on a 24 publishing cycle. Keep publishing as and when contentis available.
There was also a little debate on the writing of headlines to be picked up by search engines more effectively. Ther’s an interesting UK/US debate here. The US journalists are taught to write in ABC format: who, what, where, which works for search engines. This however, goes against what was called the journalistically clever headlines of the UK, especially using puns. That is though, the way of the digital media today.
He gives an interesting new take on the Viacom/Google issue:
150,000 people uploaded Viacom content. They loved it; they uploaded it; they wanted other people to see it. Viacom aren’t just suing a faceless corporation (Google), they are breaking the hearts of their own consumers that loved the content so much that they wanted to share it with other people.
Interesting take and probably fairly accurate although breaking hearts is taking it a little to far within the love affair pun.
The other main theme of the session is RSS feeds. Tariq Krim, Founder and CEO, Netvibes says that “the more you put through RSS, the more people click back to the site. They read the headline then click to the site to read the whole thing if it interests them”.
Even if full text is put through the feed, users come back for the content that surrounds it.
The general consensus in term of newspapers is that RSS is just another method to get your content to the consumer, which is, after all, the main objective. According to Hammersley RSS audiences are different to web audiences, which are different to those who read the printed product. He adds that editorial teams don’t need to know the difference between the two, and if they do, their webmaster is clearly wrong.
Apparently The New Yorker puts all it’s investigative journalism stories through RSS and the website.
Advice to editors: Don’t change what you’re doing. We’re now on a 24 publishing cycle. Keep publishing as and when contentis available.
There was also a little debate on the writing of headlines to be picked up by search engines more effectively. Ther’s an interesting UK/US debate here. The US journalists are taught to write in ABC format: who, what, where, which works for search engines. This however, goes against what was called the journalistically clever headlines of the UK, especially using puns. That is though, the way of the digital media today.
Posted in :
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Democratizing content in the user-in-control era.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.editorsweblog.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1437
Leave a comment