Author Archives: Paul Bradshaw

Something for the Weekend #8: the easiest blogging platform in the world: Posterous

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom WordPress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move. Continue reading

Could this be the tipping point for UK data mashups?

The best thing that I took from this week’s 2gether08 event was yesterday’s announcement by blogging MP Tom Watson and Ofcom’s blogging Tom Loosemore of Show Us a Better Way.

The site (also a blog – notice a pattern here?) is releasing a range of public data and inviting people to mash them up, or come up with ideas to do so. In their words:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for hereContinue reading

When social media meets art and creates a new business model

Twit2art is one of those wonderful ideas that captures the age we’re living in – and heading towards. A project by Belgian artist Jan Leenders, it works like this: you send a tweet @twit2art and he’ll make an artwork with it.

So far, so good. But this is where it gets interesting:

“If you’re fast, it’s cheap. The first twit (thus the first painting) costs € 1. The second € 2, the third € 3 and so on. The price includes everything. Material, packaging, shipping, taxes. Everything. Continue reading

Image of the day: celebrities beat politicians hands down

Here’s a little graph using Google Trends to compare how many people have been searching for the terms ‘celebrity’, ‘politician’ and ‘footballer’ in the past few years – more interestingly, along the bottom is how often those terms are mentioned in news articles. Even since 2004 the gap between ‘politician’ and ‘celebrity’ has noticeably widened – particularly since 2007 (narrowing this year, presumably due to the US candidate elections). Continue reading

Another Week in Online Journalism

Virtual intern Natalie Chillington rounds up last week’s online journalism-related news

Google

  • Lots of debate over whether Google is making us stupid

WordPress

  • Puffbox.com announces it will be sponsoring WordCamp UK in July,bringing together around 100 devotees of WordPress in Birmingham for aweekend of code and conversation. Continue reading

Could the BBC – or Channel 4 – be funded by a tax on web and mobile?

Could the BBC be funded by a tax on web and mobile? In France President Sarkozy has just announced that, from next year,

“prime-time advertising on public television will be phased out, with the lost revenues to be replaced by taxes collected from internet, mobile phone and commercial broadcasting companies Continue reading