Last Friday the Guardian published it’s ‘Ultimate Summer Pop Quiz’ – a typically original take on the pop quiz format with a gloriously, insanely difficult set of over 100 questions such as “The opening lines of which post-punk song were inspired by the above passage from Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky?”

Having only managed 31 answers (and 24 guesses) over the weekend, I took to the web on Monday to see who else was doing it – and if it was on the web so I could send it to friends.

The problem? The Guardian hadn’t exactly made it easy to do so. The quiz was nowhere to be seen on Monday’s Music section homepage – instead it took a Google search for “Ultimate summer pop quiz Guardian” to bring up the specific page for last week’s Film & Music section. Even then, the link to the quiz (in PDF form) was so small and easily overlooked as placed in a completely different story that it took Google’s caching option to spot it.

So, was everyone talking about this quiz? A search for webpages linking to the PDF brought… one result, from the comments on a Guardian article… and it appeared that the comment in question was no longer there.

What a shame. This was perfect viral material. A quiz most individuals couldn’t complete, where half the fun was competing with your peers to be the first to find out that the uncle of Randy Newman who received 45 Oscar nominations was Alfred Newman.

What should they have done?

• At the very least had a ‘button graphic’ promoting it on the Music section page – and pushed to have it on the main homepage as well (after all, I seem to remember it was on Friday’s Guardian front page)
• There should have been an ‘email to a friend’ feature.
• Readers should be able to bookmark the quiz, ‘Digg’ it, etc.
• Although the PDF is a nice format to email to others, there should also have been a more interactive format version where you could fill in your answers and then email the results to a friend (the answers aren’t revealed until this week’s supplement). You could even include an on-page calculator for the Maths section (“Take That claim to have sung a million love songs. If each song has an average length of three minutes, how many days would it take to sing them all?”)
• There should be a discussion forum or thread devoted to the quiz and the searches related to it, linked from the quiz page. Imagine how much traffic that might generate – and how much higher the average time spent on the site.
• Oh, and they should have twittered it, inviting people to tell them how they’re doing.
• And if you really wanted to make this an event, why not turn it into a treasure hunt and litter the web with clues? Or red herrings?
• UPDATE: Chrys Wu adds in the comments: “the quiz would have also made a terrific Facebook app along the lines of Flixster.”

I’m sure there are more examples you can think of.

But let’s focus on the really important question: how many answers did you get right? (PDF)

Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine – Things.

She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.

“I don’t have a website,” she replied.

“But you have a blog?”

“Yes.”

“Facebook?”

“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”

“So you do have a web strategy.”

Charlotte had been worried about her technical limitations and the lack of a website. Instead, she quickly realised that this wasn’t important – it wasn’t about building a big solid brick house, but about taking a bunch of caravans on tour, to where her audience lived online.

And crucially, this was backed up by her research – which is worth reading for any news executive or editor who wants to know how consumption of information is changing online.

Here’s what she wrote about her 15-30-year-old audience:

“When asked which four websites they visit most often, a whopping 67% of them included Myspace, with an equally large number – 65% – listing Facebook. The next greatest number was Ebay at just 20%. Other popular answers, surprisingly, but much lower, were Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Dont Stay In. Other websites were mentioned barely twice – the research gathered long lists of obscure websites.

“Evidently my target age group lean heavily towards using websites with some kind of social networking element. Another common trend were blogs (yay) – Trash Menagerie, Perez Hilton and Fluokids, to name but a few.

“So – getting exposure via a good web presence, in Birmingham, to our target age group, is perfectly achievable without a website.

“We have the top three most visited websites for our target audience covered – Myspace, Facebook and E-bay… a Flickr account has been set up and is awaiting content – I’m thinking well tagged page layouts, our original photography (where the photographer lets us use them) and images from our events and associated events. Similarly there will be no problem uploading event content from Youtube. We could even look into recording snippets of face to face interviews in future too. I presume a Wiki would be equally simple to set up? And of course, we have a blog – here. Commenting on other blogs is a way to create networks of readers. Blogs like the award winning Created in Birmingham would be our best bet.”

She demonstrates the concept of a distributed web strategy further by looking at how Fluokids works:

“Fluokids is a collective of young French bloggers who comment on music and events. Dazed and Confused (incidentally the most popular magazine purchased by our target group, according to our research) describes it as:

more than a blog but a youth movement – an internet and musical revolution whereby enthusiasts and DJs alike can download the newest and most wanted music coming out of Europe. By constantly posting remixes, these Gallic laptop maestros are pushing what people will like tomorrow. Teaming up with labels like Edbanger, Kitsune and Modular, the Parisian crew of seven regularly DJ all over Europe, and by their own admission are “nerds with an ultra-developed social life – as much on cyber platforms like MySpace as in real life.”

“Googling Fluokids yields the following first page (in correct order): Fluokids blog, Fluokids Myspace, that Dazed Digital article, Fluokids on Virb.com, Fluokids at Last.fm, Fluokids on Flickr, a couple of old event flyers and finally Fluokids on Technorati.

“The fact that their entire blog is French, and is still reasonably popular with my target audience, says a lot for the ‘cool’ status they have accumulated through placing the right content in the right channels.”

Now, she’s going viral too.

And Charlotte is not alone (although she is very, very good – and if you have a business in Birmingham you should buy some advertising from her). I have other students using the same channels to the same entrepreneurial effect. I notice that students’ first instinct when set a task is to… set up a Facebook group. To connect with people they don’t know. Now how many journalists have the same instinct?

What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?

Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web – the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.

The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.

Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense – I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 – $150 off of it.”

The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”

Instead Rick explained his own business model – a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.

This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ‘scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).

The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.

The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.

And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.

The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion – and create discussions of their own – online.

In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.

Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.

The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.

The question is, which half will be which?

Two days ago I blogged about some bad newspaper video from the Reading Evening Post, and ended

“Let’s see if I can generate more views from this blog than from their own site – at least it will prove the value of making your video embeddable.”

As of today the video has received 145 visits via this blog compared to the 81 from the newspaper site. There are also a further 27 visits from two other blogs. In other words, two out of three viewers came to the video through viral means.

Verdict: if you want people to know about your video offering, make your video embeddable. And do something that people will want to embed – preferably something good, not embarrassing.

[Keyword: journalism, online journalism, video journalism.] How have I missed this before? The Guardian have been featuring a chart of viral news videos since November, with weekly commentary by Jemima Kiss. Well worth bookmarking.

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