Tag Archives: viral

Did The Guardian miss a viral opportunity with their Ultimate Summer Pop Quiz?

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. Continue reading →

A web presence without a website?

4 Replies

Sarah* is a final year journalism degree student who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine.

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.” Continue reading →

JEEcamp – when the cottage news industry met mainstream media

14 Replies

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? Continue reading →

Reading Evening Post – we generated more hits to their video than they did. In two days.

2 Replies

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.

YouTube links

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.