My blog over at IT PRO has been a bit quiet of late, but there are three new posts this week that you might be interested in:
When is a free laptop not actually free? When it comes with a dongle!
Microsoft planning a Zune-based smartphone
Leaked pics of the Skypephone 2
Please take a look.
In case you missed it, the nice people at CNBC have put a streaming copy of this morning’s iPhone 3G discussion online.
After one small comment on Twitter about my day spent sweating over spreadsheets, it seems that many people within the IT publishing and PR world are very interested in what I was doing.
Every few months I perform what I call a contributor/traffic analysis. This involves generating a report from the main IT PRO site stats tool that shows the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.
I then merge this data with the main contributor expenditure spreadsheet, where we record and track all our freelance spending.
The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author.
It’s not a perfect system, as the PIs and UUs also include legacy content written by that author that was accessed during the given period, not just the new stuff you’ve commissioned and allocated budget for. However, it still provides a valuable metric on the effectiveness of that author’s work to bring in traffic to the site, as well as the cost of acquiring that traffic.
There’s a lot we can do with this data. For example, we can compare the cost of traffic acquisition via a given freelancer’s work against alternative sources, such as newswire copy, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, traditional marketing, sponsorships, list rental, staging competitions, copy sharing, content licensing deals with overseas or non-competing titles, referral deals with other sites and so on.
Doing this, we can see whether we are achieving a suitable return on investment from our freelance spending, we can benchmark in-house writers against freelance writers and visa versa, we can see which freelancers are popular and unpopular with our readers, highlight popular niche content strands and more.
Why do we do this? As a relatively new publication we re not shackled with the legacy of long-term contracts or historic arrangements with writers. We are also an online pure play, which means all our commercial and editorial focus is directed at the online ecosystem, where readers (or users) wield ultimate power, capable of making or breaking a site with a single shift in web surfing habits.
I honestly believe that in the not too distant future, online publications in all sectors, not just technology, will have to adopt a results-driven approach to freelance commissions in order to maximise revenue and to achieve maximum return from their freelance budgets.
The most likely outcome will be that publications begin paying writers purely on how much traffic an article pulls in. Also likely is that commissioning editors will need to take a more frequent and brutal approach to deciding which freelancers to commission regularly and which to drop from their rotation, based on the kind of metrics I am currently looking at.
What does this mean for freelance writers? For a start it means that freelancers will need to think about their working processes and the relationships they have with the publications that commission them. Right now it is far too common that a freelancer will get a commission, write a piece to a given word count and word rate, file it, invoice and get paid. The freelance writer is almost entirely detached from the process that takes place after the piece is filed and published. This will need to change going forward.
Freelance writers need to maintain responsibility for content and for ensuring it can reach the widest possible online audience even after the copy has been filed.
Things that freelance writers will need to consider and change their working practices to incorporate:
Search Engine Optimisation – This is key to the future of online publishing. All writers, whether they are in-house or freelance need to understand the importance of making copy search engine-friendly. That means understanding how search engines interpret content, how they look for keywords and what relevant keywords are popular at the time of writing and publishing. Writers also need to track the online zeitgeist to understand what search terms, themes and trends are popular, in order to incorporate them, where relevant, into an article.
Content Seeding – With publications looking at the audience traffic an article receives as a measure of success (as well as looking at traditional elements such as whether it is well written, accuracy, relevancy and how current the information is), the writer needs to take on some of the responsibility for promoting that article and extending its reach. That means seeding links to content to relevant locations where the links will bring in additional traffic. Also, think about whether the piece you are writing will appeal to the audience of the popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and Reddit. We want readers to submit your content to these services, and it is in the interests of the writer as well for readers to do this.
Stickiness – This is one of the biggest issues affecting any online publication. A reader has arrived at the site to read a specific article, now how do you keep them there to read more than just the single piece that brought them there? The most effective way of doing this is for the writer to cross link to other relevant content on the site. If you are writing about, for example, the Microsoft Yahoo takeover saga, reference and link back to previous relevant articles that publication has published on the same subject, especially if you wrote them as well.
Comment Generation – Your piece needs to spark debate among readers. It needs to encourage them to post comments, engage and debate other readers on that site. The conversation should not end with your final paragraph, but should stimulate the reader to participate in the conversation, add knowledge and share alternative viewpoints.
Multi-skilling – Online journalism is about more than just writing, it is about providing complete coverage in the most appropriate media form, and doing it in as timely fashion as possible. You are covering an event for a publication; you need to consider visual elements as well as written. Think about how you can incorporate video, audio and images into the piece to maximise the effectiveness of the piece. Waiting for images to be sent over from a company or PR agency may be counterproductive to publishing a timely and informative piece, so be prepared to take your own photos, shoot your own video and record audio content for inclusion in a podcast. You don’t need thousands of pounds of equipment to create audio or visual material that is suitable for publication.
It’s the perfect gift for birthdays, christenings, grduation, or just a good read if you are stoned or just miss the greatest decade since we all realised the world isn’t flat.
Written by members of the greatest generation (those of us who grew up in the 80s), and edited by my friend and colleague Simon Brew, this book is the definitive guide to all things 80s - TV shows, music, films and proper computer games (the ones that came on tapes).
You can buy Celebrate the 80s now from Amazon.co.uk.
And yes, I did write some of it.
Seriously, its a brilliant book and it will bring back some fantastic memories, and a few that will make you cringe as well. Find out what all your 80s big and small screen favourites are doing now (not all of them are flipping burgers for a living) and read some exclusive interviews with the people who pioneered 80s entertainment.
WARNING: This book does contain a picture of me, with a mullet!
Following a huge amount of work by my editorial team and the Dennis web team, the new look IT PRO web site went live this morning.
The new look site represents an important stage in the progression of IT PRO, and will allow us to do a great deal more in terms of how we produce coverage what format we publish our content in.
There are one or two small kinks that we are working out, so if you find anything that looks like it might be a bug, please let me know.
More thoughts on the mobile phone situation:
Current Phone
I’m currently using an Apple iPhone (work thing) and a Samsung SGH-i320 (personal phone). It is the Samsung I want to replace. The iPhone is brilliant, it rocks - let’s just leave it there.
The Samsung is a good phone as well, even though it is Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, its a bit underpowered, its only GSM/GPRS - not 3G let alone HSDPA, only runs Windows Mobile 5, is a tiny bit unstable and the keys could do with being a little bit bigger.
The Options
BlackBerry
I dearly love the BlackBerry platform and devices, or rather I used to love the devices. They’ve ruined them by making them too small, and with it the keyboards too small. The 7230/7290 device keyboards were brilliant - anything smaller is too small, and I hear too many friends, business contacts and readers complaining about their BlackBerry Curves and 8800s because the keyboards are too small.
Also - none of the current crop of BlackBerry devices supports Bluetooth data access. They are fine if all you want to do is use a Bluetooth headset or in-car handsfree system, but if, as in my case, you need your TomTom sat nav to be able to access the connection on your phone so it can download traffic and speed camera alerts on the move, the BlackBerry is useless. Even the recently-announced Bold doesn’t support Bluetooth data - c’mon RIM, get with the programme.
Windows Mobile Devices
I have had a play with several. The Samsung SGH-i600 (the 3G HSDPA version of my 320) is not a nice device, it seems that Samsung regressed from the hardware of the 320 rather than improving on it.
I’ve reviewed various HTC devices, and while they are very well built, they either don’t have a keyboard (deal-breaker), have a touchscreen and a stylus (horrible) or an impractical qwerty keyboard. A shame.
Symbian
The keyboards on the E61 and E61i are pretty horrible, and when I reviewed the E61i, I found it painfully underpowered, though the software set and capabilities are excellent. I’d kill for a Noia E90, but I can’t afford to buy one (and Nokia understandably wanted its review unit back) and my mobile provider doesn’t offer it as an option (in fact, all the phones on offer from my German-owned mobile provider are so old and dated, I don’t think any of them were launched in 2008).
The LG KT 610 looks like the perfect solution. All the features and design of the Nokia E90, same operating system, but a fraction of the cost. Trouble is, it’s not on sale yet and nobody (retailers, distributors, LG’s UK PR company) knows when it’s coming.
Data Cards
On a side note, several people have been asking me about 3G data card and USB dongle options of late, so I thought it would be a good idea to post about what I use.
I currently have a USB dongle from 3, on its £15, 3GB-a-month contract. This is not a review unit, I signed up for this out of my own pocket in December 2007. And I swear by it. Very reliable, seems to get signal where Vodafone and other cards seem to fail, and its pretty quick. I regularly get close to the 3.6Gbps top speed on my tube run into the office (3 actually understates a 2.8Gbps HSDPA maximum on its cards, but they can and usually do more).
Ok - here’s the thing. I need a new phone, and need it in a bit of a hurry (just a handset, not looking to change providers or sign up for a new contract etc at this stage).
For the first time in years (far longer than I can actually remember for sure), I’ve forgotten to take my mobile phone with me. As I am now half way along my journey to work, this means I will be separated from my phone until at least 7pm today.
I already feel a bit cut-off, but that will soon change when I get into the office. For now, I’m making do with my 3G modm and the MacBook, which is how I am doing today’s post.
Suffice to say, if you need to reach me today, you will actually need to call my office landline for a change, rather than going straight to my mobile.
I do get rather fed up with people, usually work contacts, who insist on using my mobile phone number as the primary way of contacting me for work-related queries (and I’m talking about the pointless stuff like “did you get the press release we sent you a week ago” rather than the more useful “My client is running late for his lunch meeting with you”.
I have a perfectly good landline in my office - please use it in the first instance. The mobile is there so that you can get hold of me if it is urgent, or if you have genuinely failed to get me on the landline first - don’t just bypss my office number altogether.
I do reject about 70 per cent of the calls I get to my mobile number during office hours anyway (and definitely bounce unknown and withheld numbers straight to voicemail unless I’m not sat at my desk, then I will answer), so chances are you’ll still only end up talking to my voicemail before you talk to me, so you may as well talk to my office voicemail if it is not time critical - it’s more likely to get a reply, or at least listened to before my mobile voicemail will.
I’ve written a blog post over at IT PRO about Herman Hollerith, one of the founders of IBM and the man who pioneered modern data entry computing
Please take a look.
Coca Cola is DOS Compatible in Spain
Originally uploaded by Ewan Spence.
Just finished a Skype chat with Ewan Spence, who is over in Spain at a media conference. Our VoIP call was interrupted by Ewan cracking up, when he spotted this DOS reference on the bottle of Coke we was chugging.
Yes, it’s a geek joke - and it’s a funny one!
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An annual horror film festival in London’s Leicester Suqare. This year’s event takes place from August 24-27 2007 at the Odeon West End cinema on the south side of the Square
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