That slightly popular communication service Twitter has announced changes to their SMS policy.

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…)

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:

Joan Burnie at the 2008 Scottish Press Awards - m4a format
or
Joan Burnie at the 2008 Scottish Press Awards - wavformat

(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)

Punter at T in the Park

(more pictures here.)

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.

(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.)

(Yes, the T in the Park stuff’s coming…)
Opened up LinkedIn today to get a nice little surprise in the form of a recommendation from well-known (in the US anyway) writer and publisher Larry Young. Larry and I first met through Warren Ellis and kept in touch - sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, rarely enough - and have chewed the fat over doing some projects together, and it nearly came off once (saying nothing else as it’s still a slowly evolving project for elsewhere).

Anyway, there was a recommendation there for me, that not only made me laugh, but I may just have to find a permanent home for on the front page of here:

“Craig’s command of language allows him to make words dance like teenagers ’round the campfire, enjoying cheap beer and each others’ company on the last day of summer before school starts.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to round up those teenagers…

There’s a PR point to this one: According to The Register and the comments people are leaving O2 stores and an Apple store after waiting up to two hours for their new phones - and leaving not only empty handed, but also giving negative interviews to reporters.

Ouch.

Surely after last year, someone saw this coming? Yes, the phone didn’t launch great here last year but this was the version - and at a price point - that everyone could get behind.

The PR response seems quote interesting though - more or less a denial that there’s a problem while people are going online and saying there is a problem, but from O2 there appears to be no attempt to counter the online moaning. Surely they have a team monitoring and countering this stuff? That’s basic in this day and age. If I was them I’d have someone right now logging on to every blog and forum where there is a moan and countering it. Or at least be honest and upfront with people.

I’m heading up to be part of the fun at T in the Park and will be found milling around the media village and the main stages and I’ll be tweeting - depending on signals - from my N95 all weekend, so anyone wanting T updates should head over to http://twitter.com/craigmcgill or stay at Craig McGill as I’ll be setting it up so the Tweets come here too.

There’s a Knight Rider GPS SatNav out now for fans of the old Knight Rider show (yes, I know there’s a (not awful, but not great) remake pilot out there and a series coming soon) that has the old KITT voice, but for the new series, NBC should make downloadable voices available for popular SatNavs free of charge? You could have Val Kilmer alongside John Cleese.

But why stop there? You could have James McAvoy or Angelina Jolie from the film adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic Wanted; Peter Cullen voicing Optimus Prime from the Transformers film (”Freedom is the right of all sentient beings - as is turning right 300 yards ahead”) and Steve Jobs as an iPhone 2.0 GPS addon (”One last thing…turn left to reach destination”).

Or you could get a collection of voices for specific places. For example, directions to the job centre? Alan Sugar or Donald Trump.

The only area this might not work is in getting porn film tie-ins. After all, do we really want someone saying ‘faster, faster, faster’ in these safe driving times?

The one I would love to see would be the classic Glaswegian tones on this page (NSFW as the Acronym Army like to say).

Some days, PR work can be very strange…

Today, one of the Polish Sun editions came out and it was absolutely fantastic. The content was tailored but it still looked like a Sun, so well done to all concerned - I’m sure it went down especially well in Scotland where there are more than 50,000 Poles.

I remember when the Scottish Government (back when it was just an Executive) invited me out with a group of Poles (I had spearheaded the media details of Lloyds TSB Scotland’s Polish initiatives) and even then, two years ago, I was wondering why more wasn’t being done to court this group from a media point of view.

And I know one of the Highland papers does a few pages of Polish every week, but this seems like a far greater venture. But there are two niggling questions that result from it:

1) Does a Polish-only language newspaper help with integration at all?
2) Why haven’t editions been produced at any point for other populations in Scotland - I’m thinking Asian particularly - who have been settled for longer and have a higher population base than the Poles.

(and no, I’m not talking about Gaelic. To me that’s a language that is vastly over-funded and over-represented in this day and age, but that’s an argument for another day)

What number 2 then leads on to is the other issue of representation in the media - PR, marketing and press. Last time I checked there were few Poles or other ethnic minorities in the Scottish media scene, which means not only that there are fresh influences being missed out on, but also huge audiences not being tapped into as prospective clients. If a Shaf Rasul, Charan Gill or Tony Hussein was to set up their own specialist PR agency or media agency, the benefits could be huge.

Normally, a new section to the Blogroll would matter not a jot, but this is something I’m growing more and more frustrated (and concerned) about and it’s a bit unfair to leave it all to Iain Bruce to take care of.

Scottish Digital Matters is going to be used to highlight Scottish companies who are grasping the new media and using it well because quite frankly there are too damn few of them doing it. I’m shocked at the number of business people who think the likes of Facebook, blogs and Twitter are just for fun and don’t have any business use - or the companies who don’t want to be engaging with their customers, which is fine to an extent because it isn’t for everyone.

But it’s for some and at the moment very few are grasping the opportunities. I mean, let’s look at it this way, if Dell and Wal-Mart can set up blogs for customer interaction, why can’t Scottish companies? Of course it would help if the majority of Scottish media was online as well, but that’s another symptom - or is a cause - of the country’s digital malaise.

Why does this matter past that of geekery? Quite obvious from a number of viewpoints: Scottish businesses are losing out on an incredible number of potential revenue-generating schemes by not being online; Scots are not getting to see the potential of online - for pleasure or business; Scots are not being able to exercise their digital skills and having to leave the country to do so; Scots are not being as informed about the world as a democracy should be.

So if none of that matters to you, fine, go stick your head in the sand, but to me having fun, generating revenue, increasing knowledge, enriching the population (hell, enriching the world) - physically and digitally - and being more informed are generally good reasons to be around in the early days of the 21st Century.

Or we can just let other countries overtake us in these areas and then moan about it, despite having had the chance to do it ourselves. Perhaps that will be Scotland’s digital legacy. Couldabeen, shouldabeen…