Hill+Knowlton Strategies

With new media eating into print circulation, The Daily Telegraph is striking back for traditional media by offering a daily podcast service. This takes the form of a free audio broadcast of highlights from the day’s paper, no doubt as a teaser for its recipients to buy the full edition and/or visit the website. It includes a step-by-step guide for those new to podcasting, plus a helpful set of FAQs.

The Telegraph podcast itself take the forms of a traditional radio news bulletin, with more in-depth reports from the likes of their City editor. It is a surprsingly long with around 30 minutes of content, so may provide an ideal introduction to the day for us poor commuters. It’s certainly easier than trying to read the actual broadsheet on the tube in half a square metre of space. Some contributors are better suited to the spoken word than others, but it is still informative and well produced.

With podcasting still in its early stages, this is unlikely to transform the paper’s circulation overnight. However, as the first national newspaper to offer this service, it has stolen a march on its competitors who are likely to be considering offering a similar service. Certainly they will be hoping that regular subscribers will be more likely to chose the Telegraph to get the full take on the stories of interest.

While the ‘traditional’ Telegraph demographic may not quite be ready for podcasting, there are still considerable sections of its readership among the iPod generation and this kind of innovation may help to change attitudes and open up new areas of readership.

I wrote a few months ago about Google’s experimentation with predictive search. Today on a (work-related!) search for football forums, I noticed an interesting development in predictive search – predictive search history.

I had previously done a search for ‘football forums’ and after finding a couple of relevant sites, I decided to widen my search to ‘ sports forums’. While the previous version of predictive search would add related terms, e.g. suggesting ‘gin & tonic’ during a search for ‘gin’, this search went a stage further by suggesting ‘football forums’ (see screenshot below).

Given the tremendous number of sports available, suggesting ‘football forums’ is too detailed a suggestion without some degree of personalisation. It seems highly likely that Google had taken into consideration my previous searches and suggested a niche query based on my searching history.

I would even suggest that as a Google Desktop user, it may even have taken into consideration my football obsession and offered suggestions based on my interests. Now that would be an interesting development.

I’d be interested to hear your explanations.

My own informal research suggests that many of the blogs run by communicators represent an attempt to establish a dialogue between haves and have-nots (or in some notable cases a monologue!): The blogger occupies an information niche, and his or her visitor is assumed to need expert guidance through it. The end result is rather like a consultant’s shop window, complete with chatty shop-owner standing in the doorway. This kind of channel can of course be very useful for the information have-nots, but many of the haves are peddling much of the same stuff as every other consultant in the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see how many of these individually-branded platforms mature into spaces where original thoughts can be shared between the haves. Those that don’t may end up losing their constituency – as information shoppers become more skilled they may desert their local ‘corner-blogs’ for the better located super-blogs which have faster and more direct access to new content and ideas.

In a post from Nov 15, I recounted the tale of how a well-known broadsheet critic has acquired his own personal online detractor. B.L. Ochman also picked up on this story a couple of days ago, suggesting that blogs have the potential to provide checks and balances for big-name critics of all kinds. Of course, such pairings of mainstream commentators with mirror-image bloggelgangers are going to be less common in the future than old media writers that become more blog-like in tone and platform. Consequently the ‘official’ view and the opinion of consumers will no longer tend to be located at different hubs on the Web. Imagine a restaurant or film critic’s blog that blended their own with comments from both customers and fellow critics.

John Husband’s Wirearchy reflected wisely a couple of days ago on the social phenomenon of blogging and on the pyschology of blog scepticism:

Many people won’t blog, or don’t perceive a need to blog, or don’t really have the skills, discipline, inclination or (dare I say it) the courage to wrestle with their thoughts, ambiguous issues and beliefs and don’t want to express and expose the possibilities.

A good number of business bloggers insist on writing as if they were communicating at audiences, delivering a set-piece speech rather than fostering or contributing to a debate. You might think that the blogosphere has room enough for all kinds of alternative modes of discourse, but there are certain basic characteristics of the medium itself, its very personal nature, the regular nature of postings and the piranha-pool of professional and amateur critics out there, that might make the broadcast approach to blogging a potentially hazardous pastime in the long run.

What to do when the feedback goes beyond a good set of constructive comments plus the odd flame or two? Frank Bruni, the New York Times chief restaurant critic has acquired “a literary doppleganger he can’t shed” according to the AP’s Adam Goldman. Rapidly rising to a parallel fame almost as great as the weekly target of her mockery is blogger Julia Langbein, forerunner perhaps of a new breed of critic’s critic. Even more so than traditional journalism, blogging is as much about listening as it is about speaking. Forget that and you might be running the risk of acquiring your very own online nemesis.

Right now the BBC may be neglecting to use RSS enclosures for delivering audio and video content, but down in the digital culvert that is the BBC Radio and Music Interactive R&D team they are experimenting with annotatable audio – a system that allows the “collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music.” Read more about this and see some screenshots of the demo here. This surely points the way to an era when all media is glossed in some way, either by ‘individuals’ (blog-style) or by collectives (wiki-style).