mediaczar

Tomorrow I’m getting married, so I probably won’t be posting for a while. Not, of course, that I’ve been posting a lot recently.

Without wanting to get sentimental (it’s not that kind of a blog, and I’m not that kind of a man) I can say that not only did I never believe that I’d find someone like Krista, but that now I have found her, I still can’t really believe it.

I’m saving the rest of what I have to say for my speech tomorrow evening. There are all sorts of little surprises planned for the day, but one of the biggest surprises right now is “what Mat will be saying in his speech” because I’ve yet to write it. Tim has told me “be nice to everyone and try not to sound like Hugh Grant.”

Anyway, the hashtag for my wedding will be #wediaczar. Given that the audience is startlingly low on digital media bods, it’s not like I think it’s going to trend or anything, but it seemed like too good a hashtag to waste.

Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.

I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar

While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
Continue reading ‘A first stab at a perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices’

• Chart: Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online
  An old (2007) infographic from BusinessWeek that I just stumbled across. The (incorrect) implication is that one falls into a single category.
  (tags: audience segmentation)

• The Newspaper Licensing Agency – charging for weblinks!?
  Francis Ingham — DG of the PRCA — weighs in on the story in the comments section of this post.
  (tags: newspaper legal idiots)
• Wrong-Headed Newspaper Biz Tries Again To Charge For Links
  paidContent:UK has a nice straightforward article on the NLA's mindless attempt to charge for free content.
  (tags: legal newspaper idiots)
• Newspaper Licensing Agency – What Will it Cost?
  OMFG ROFL — The Newspaper Licensing Agency wants to charge us for sending URLs to clients (see the linked PDF — <a href="http://www.nla.co.uk/pdf/Guide%20to%20Electronic%20Distribution%20April%202009b.pdf">A Guide to Electronic Distribution</a>.) Can we take this seriously?
  (tags: newspaper idiots)
• Johnson & Johnson's "Real Moms" playlist
  J&J <a href="http://jnjbtw.com/2009/05/calling-mommy-vloggers/">called upon Mommy vloggers</a> to submit videos on topics "relevant to them" — a nice idea, but one, as you'll see, that generated little interest either in the way of video submissions (8 videos submitted after 6 months as at July 9, 2009) or views (fewer than 15K.) Needs more investment, or more thought.
  (tags: video mommyblogging pharma healthcare)
• JNJ BTW
  This looks like a best-practice example for pharma company blogging. There's little evidence for consumer interest: most of the inbound links seem to be talking about this as an example of "corporate blogs" and "marketing" rather than as a source of what we might broadly term "medical information." But there's some great evidence of <a href="http://www.postrank.com/feed/38238b9c95b44e75f747871bccf68c70">outreach and linkbait</a> — clearly this is a platform for activity on the broader web, rather than a simple content site
  (tags: blog blogs corporate healthcare health marketing pharma blogging)

• Instapaper, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pipes and being Slack.
  A masterful Delicious/Pipes/Instapaper mashup by Daniel Catt — with clever use of Yahoo! Alerts (a service of which I was previously unaware, but which seems to outperform Google Alerts in significant ways.) Actually, I was just looking for a way to get around a URL Encode problem I was having with Pipes when I stumbled across this (Catt's "sloppy" solution works for me.) But now I want to implement this whole hack for myself.
  (tags: pipes yahoo! delicious hack instapaper iphone rss)

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.

Some red herrings

Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.

1. Some people are cagey about sharing their list of feeds: whether they consider it intellectual property, or whether they think that it may be too revealing, I don’t know.
2. Lots of people said things like “oh — my RSS reader? Haven’t looked at that in a while. I get all my news off Twitter these days.”

Continue reading ‘The #interestingOPMLexperiment (stage 1)’