The main one is that Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over their UK number of +44 762 480 1423. You can still update via the number but updates won’t be sent on via SMS.
Now the reason for this given is that it was costing the company a fair chunk of money, so it’s scaling back the offer while it tries to negotiate deals with telecom companies across the globe.
And there’s two interesting points from this - the reaction and the business opportunity.
The reaction has been hilarious/disappointing (depending on how you view humanity) with users from all walks of life, including a Liberal Democrat local councillor, all bemoaning it as if they have lost a limb.
The reality is that they’ve lost nothing. if they want to receive ongoing, real-time Tweets, the solution is simple: go and pay for it. Pretty much what Twitter would have had to do, but that concept seems to have escaped the majority who appear to just want someone else to pay for their service.
(Nic Brisbourne has posted one of the more sensible viewpoints as a contrast to the rants. Another good one is here.)
The other point is that if I was a company offering a decent 3G dataplan and had the capacity to handle it, I’d announce a product with Twitter front and centre. Even the iPhone could jump into this (in the UK it comes with a decent 3G plan). Make the most of Twitter’s change in circumstances to promote your offering, knowing that with even a minimal PR spend, all the Twitter people moaning about this (and the evangelists I suppose) will spread your message.
Personally, I don’t see what the fuss is here. I’ve alread pointed out that I find Twitter useful for journalism and PR, it can be educational, and it can be just good fun to keep in touch with people. Having said that it does have downsides (which I’ll address in a later post) and far too many people still populate it with rubbish (”had coffee. Tasted coffee-y”) and if people want to keep getting a service that they have had for a while for free, well welcome to the real world.
(a part of me actually wonders if Twitter planned this all along. It’s almost the supply model of the drug dealer - give something away for free for a while and then bring in the costs. And given that some people out there are saying they would pay for the service, that poses an interesting question. Of course I think it’s ridiculous that people would pay to receive SMS messages, but each to their own…)
You may scoff, but I - and Rich Johnston (to give him his place) have it on rather good authority that Tom Baker will be in Doctor Who in 2010. I’m so confident about this, I did a piece for The Sun (see the PDF below).
And you may scoff, but may I remind you who it was who revealed David Tennant was the 10th Doctor (see the comments section to read that for free), who did the first review of the new series and who revealed that Tennant wouldn’t be using his Scottish accent (most of the time)?
That would have been me. So I’m standing by this one.
I was up at T in the Park last month, helping out the Scottish Sun lads cover a few of the acts and I thought that it might give me a chance to properly evaluate Nokia’s N95 (the original, not the 8GB) as a tool for covering events.
I know Reuters had a fantastic kit for their N95 trials but I wanted to try it a little more basic, ie - the phone on a full charge and nothing else.
So how did it do? Let’s break this down into five areas: text, video, audio, pictures, phone in general.
TEXT
As well as filing for The Sun, I wanted to be able to capture moments over the weekend and found Tweeting to be perfect for that. I used Twibble and it did the job - 95% of the time - perfectly. There was the odd Tweet dropped, but I don’t know if that was because of the network 3G connection or the software.
But sending Tweets worked as a great way of posting and maintaining the live feel of the event instead of writing after the event. It also gave me a great aide memoir when it came to writing the larger copy (indeed, the sub editors could have just copy and pasted from my Tweets if time had been a factor) as well as seeing what others, like Shaun Milne, were doing at T in the Park.
On the Sunday, time did become a factor in filing, but the N95s notes worked perfectly. I was able to write the review for Primal Scream as it was happening and file by email (sending notes as an attachment) instead of watching band and then heading back to the media area to file. It may have only saved 20minutes or so, but being able to hit ’send’ the second the band went off-stage at 10.50pm made life a little easier for the subs back in Glasgow.
So for text - and none of your predicative texting for me - and writing tweets/copy, it was a definite winner. But I would consider a folding keyboard next time, which would save me a laptop at all.
VIDEO
Given the nature of the event, you aren’t going to get a large tripod onto a N95, so I’ll let people judge the video for themselves. At various points on these videos, I’ve zoomed in and out to/from the maximum to give you an idea of the phone’s capabilities.
What’s quite apparent is that you couldn’t use it on an IMAX screen but for rough and ready footage on handhelds/laptops, it would do. It’s also convenient for the reporter/VJ as they aren’t carrying around anything bulky.
The sound was the surprising thing for me. I’ve certainly had worse bootlegs than what the N95 managed to record.
A BBC lad trying to film…
The Bacardi Breeze Dance Tent
Amy Winehouse plus crowd shots
Amy Winehouse with gradual zoom in/out
Primal Scream - in a tent
AUDIO
Two tests for the N95 in this area - as a dictaphone and as accompaniment for the video. On the latter, as I said above, it certainly did the job decently enough and as a dictaphone, it also did the job. I can’t provide a sample for a ridiculous reason but suffice to say that it was as good as anything else I’ve used in the field (T or any other) in the last 15 years.
Here’s an example of the sound quality from a recent (indoor) bash:
(Thanks to Lynn Hunter, formerly of Macdonald Hotels for the invite to that event)
PICTURES
I’m rubbish at pictures, so I’ll let others judge these. What I would say is that at times the N95 felt slow to get the picture that I was going for and other times I had no idea it was taking pictures (but we can put that down to user error)
My feeling was that you could perhaps use it to capture general pictures but it wouldn’t be any use for catching a quick moment - someone jumping off stage, punching someone, that sort of thing - but again, you wouldn’t be asking the snapper to go out with it.
PHONE IN GENERAL
I wanted something that would do the job, saving me having to carry a notepad, pen, pencil, recorder and various other gadgets (still carried a notepad and pen/pencils though - always need the backup!) and it worked really well. I was able to stand during acts and fire off notes or Tweets, that could be used later as part of the larger write-ups.
The battery life was fantastic. It was charged up on the Friday and that lasted until the Monday morning (4am) and that was with video and audio recording, 3G hammering, phone calls, Tweets, the lot. In fact my biggest worry, and still is, is how much Orange is going to thump me for using the 3G. I’m on their £35 a month tariff and it certainly doesn’t compare to the iPhone O2 tariff.
I’ve used the N95 at a bundle of events now and it’s just a fantasticly rugged device. Every journalist/PR should have one.
N95 v iPhone
In case anyone was wondering: would the iPhone have been better for the event? In all honesty - and this is speaking as someone who wants an iPhone - not a chance. While the keyboard, screen and UI may have made life a lot easier, there would have been no audio recording (this was pre-App Store), definitely no video and I would guess - but that’s all it is - that the pictures wouldn’t have been as sharp.
And then there’s the battery issue. It would never have lasted. And yes, there may have been charging points at the media village and back at the hotel, but in journalism/PR it’s not outwith the realms of possibility to be on the go for a long period of time. Given that T in the Park started on the Friday night and there were incidents over the weekend, it’s entirely possible that a reporter/PR operative may not have got back to a place to charge. A spare battery is one solution - but not for the iPhone.
There’s also the issue of sturdyness. I dropped the N95 a few times and was never worried. If I had dropped an iPhone I would have been calling the cops to get it back safe.
CONCLUSION
The N95 is a far from perfect phone, but for people who like the option of catching a lot of data - mobile journalists, web 2.0 PRs and so on - it can do a lot without you needing to carry a lot of gear. And when I pick up an iPhone, I’ll be keeping the N95 as my mediaworkhorse.
Brian McNair, a professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde, has crafted a decent piece over at AllMediaScotland where he points out a few of the problems facing the future of Scottish press.
But this Sunday Herald article showed another one - some journalists aren’t taking it seriously.
(As a two-par aside, I’ve often wondered if for the next few years we are in for a split in how people access their news. Many people, especially those in unskilled positions or jobs that have them out and about, still pick up a paper, especially with their rolls or lunch.
However desk jockies - especially those who drive door to door from home to office - access their news media online (and traditionally hit Yahoo News, BBC or some other trusted form) or listen to the radio while driving.)
Andrew Harrow’s article asked a few people connected to the Scottish press about online comments and their views make fascinating reading. Some feel that the comments should be ignored because they are more off the top of the head than a physical posted letter, while others feel the comments section can dumb down an article.
As a PR person and journalist, I’ve found comments to be fantastic. I’ve seen new angles to stories develop in comments, I’ve seen legally dodgy comments for clients that I’ve had to get withdrawn (and if the journalist had seen them quicker they would have got far better follow-up stories) and I’ve seen genuine dialogue emerge.
On the other hand, you do get absolute idiots sometimes - see the Bob Crampsey tribute by Tom Shields in the previous blog posting here - which would suggest that the answer is surely to have all comments either screened or moderated. After all, you wouldn’t throw any old letter into a newspaper, so why let any old comment appear on the site?
The frustration I have here is that, here we are in 2008, comments have been around for more than a decade and only now is the Scottish press getting around to discussing them. There are times it feels as if we couldn’t be slower at adopting new technology. I mean it’s not as if anyone still uses Quark 3.3 is it?
For what it’s worth, in an age when people are moaning about customer and reader retention/loyalty, I think comments are a fantastic way of doing it. You write something that engages them, they reply, you converse. And in return, they may pass on tip-offs to you in future as well as being eyeballs on your site.
No, I don’t mean they look like trolls - though one or two certainly fit the bill - but I was considering the article in the Sunday Herald about columnists and online responses and it reminded me of something I had considered a while ago: is there much difference between trolls and a columnist?
Trolls write to get a reaction our of people (see the comments by one person at the end of this article about Bob Crampsey), they’ll put forward some nonsense regardless of context in the hopes of people getting upset or flaming back at them. It’s different from putting forward a reasoned argument - or what you think is a reasoned argument - in that there’s normally no or little factual evidence to their opinion.
And to an extent, that’s what some columnists do. Put forward a point of view, sometimes push it to an extreme, get a reaction out of people. Some people realise they are having their buttons pushed and some don’t.
In an age where a lot of the news is deemed similar, a good columnist can be worth their weight in gold as their viewpoint will have people coming back. The likes of Iain Bell, Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson are always worth a read. You may not agree with them, but they’re never dull. And I suppose that’s the difference. A good columnist does actually state a case and argue it - which makes them stand out from trolls.
Sadly, that does mean, quite a few of the UK press coumnists are little more than trolls because let’s be honest, there are some really duff ones out there. Jimmy Breslin has nothing to worry about.
I know there are those, like Iain Hepburn, who doubt the use of Twitter as a news outlet (I, for one, think it is incredibly underused as a news outlet for posting live updates to events and so on - and I’ve used it for the likes of T in the Park, election gossip and award ceremonies as previous posts here show).
But here’s one from the NASA people - Tweets from the Mars Phoenix probe. Not a tweet about the probe or detached information, but writing as if it’s the actual probe writing it, first person, the lot.
Brilliant. Quick snippets of information. Great way to interest someone. Imagine being a kid and realising that you’re getting information sent to you by a robot on Mars. (And yes, I know it isn’t, but it’s close enough - have some romance in your soul.)
(and as you can’t impersonate someone on a blog, how long before we get a law saying it’s illegal to impersonate someone on a Tweet, even a robot? )
And there’s everyone worrying about journalists. Turns out the death of newspapers (TM) may have a bigger impact than expected.
An article in the latest Scottish Local Retailer (go to page 24) and there it shows that news is the biggest seller for local retailers.
The article also lists the most common items people buy when they go for the paper: milk, lottery, sweets, cigarettes, bread and the most popular times for buying. It also goes as far as to tell retailers how they can maximise the news space where papers are placed, noting that papers dumped at the bottom don’t sell.
More interestingly, it also suggests - if I’m reading the graph on that page correctly - that there are times when people want to go in and get a newspaper/news product and it’s not there leading to people going without a paper - and also the other products that they may have bought.
It begs the question though: who stopped buying papers? I realise that the article doesn’t mention footfall in stories (if it’s up or down or constant) over any period, but this article leads me to think that in the demographics were there are local retailers, there is still a demand for news.
(The interesting breakdown would come from finding out why people are buying papers)
However, if papers do go away from a physical presence (something which probably won’t happen completely for decades. I think there will be a bottoming out, but I think there will be print for a while yet) what happens to all these shops? It’s another interesting part to the thought of news - specifically newspapers in this case - as something that brings people together and is part of a larger social fabric.
i’m told from a very good source that glasgow city council boss steven purcell believes that the snp have won the glasgow east byelection or that it may just go to a recount.
(There really deserves to be a bigger, harder, longer pun in this one, but I’m hard pushed for time and this keyboard is really stiff)
Neil McIntosh has been blogging about recent reports on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - and there’s an article by Shane Richmond in The Telegraph and not one, but two hilarious Guardian columns playing along - and, without free drugs to boost my memory, it brought back to my mind the time, before the credit crunch, I saw a company try to boost web ranking by inserting the phrase women’s car insurance into a release.
A release about a car crash.
And that was how it read.
It was so bad, it was a cock up and a balls up. It had lines like “The driver, who did not have women’s car insurance was unhurt after the incident” and “the drivers of the other cars, who did not have women’s car insurance - some because they were male” and “drivers are reminded that women’s car insurance is a must”.
It was awful. You can say it was trying to sex up a routine car crash, but it was worse than a piece of Harry Potter sex fanfic. I would like to think we’ve moved on from that, but for some, I don’t think we have…It’s almost as bad as the SEO firms that think online PR starts and ends with free PR release sites (though, as you’ll see from above, I’ve started handing out PR tips for free. iPhones - old style and iPhone 3G should be able to access it and it should be viewable on the Wii and PS3 browsers as well. For free.).
(And the company who had the naked cheek to write that release aren’t anywhere near the top Google rankings for women’s car insurance or SEO strategy I’m pleased to say.)
Author Craig McGill is a content manager, PR and media advisor with strengths in the print and digital sectors.
He's written for nearly every major publication in the UK and TIME.
When not writing for media - or working on books - he advises leading companies on PR, internet and media relations.
Learn more about Craig here or contact him here.
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