Category Archives: Internet

People continually say to me that they don’t get Twitter, the microblogging service that integrates with Google Talk, amongst other things. “No-one needs to know I’m having a cheese sandwich for lunch,” they say.

Well, they’re right. No-one does need to know you had a cheese sandwich for lunch. But Twitter brings usefulness and joy to me in a number of ways.

1) With my friends/personal contacts, I catch little snippets and insights into their days. Great for pub chat later, as you have immediate, real, interesting things to say to them beyond “how was your day” or “how was work”. Knowing that people are working on specific projects, or have been reading certain things etc., is a nice enhancement to the relationship.

2) For keeping in touch with several of the journalists I work with (Chris, Simon, Sally’s ‘Getting Ink Requests‘ blog & others), it has great moments. For a PR professional, knowing people are writing about things, thinking about things, or just some context about them helps when you pick up the phone and pitch them stories. I have no doubt there are parallels for this kind of usefulness in other industries.

3) On a more practical level, it’s a great, great way for polling interests, opinions, and the knowledge of a large number of people in a short time. Dennis, Mike, Hugh, Drew & others do this with great frequency. Even people who are relatively new to the medium are getting into it.

4) I get breaking news faster than my RSS feedreader can bring it to me.

The third element here is probably the most useful. Group IM for polling knowledge has huge potential, in business and personal life both. If Twitter extends its functionality such that you can group contacts and ping people with specific expertise/relationship to you on a specific front, that would be fantastic. Think messages like “@friends Anyone for the pub tonight?” or “@workcontacts Anyone know why Microsoft doesn’t support Silverlight on Windows Mobile yet?” or… whatever. It has cool potential.

I have two frustrations with Twitter (not including my issues with the various client applications I’ve tried, none of which is adequate, and the frequent downtime the service has). First, I don’t understand the “friend whores.” I’ve just been added by someone into Semi-Professional American football, following over 2,000 people with only a third as many followers. Why?

Second, I simply don’t have enough of my friends and contacts on it. If I had more of the people I actually speak to in real life, it’d be more useful as a service.

I get great links, insight and have useful conversations on Twitter. And I learn what (a couple of my friends) have for lunch. It’s all good.

Film, Internet

The Interwebs is amazing (pt 54)

March 1, 2008 Armand Leave a comment

Pat was going on at me to watch the new Iron Man trailer, so when I caught it listed (atypically) on The Superficial, I naturally checked it out. It is awesome, Robert Downey Jr seems to be an inspired piece of casting and I’m getting increasingly excited about a character and film I didn’t give two hoots about. It may also be that Toby R & Pat and people telling me how amazing the new spate of Marvel films are going to be is sinking in…

But the bit that makes the interwebs cool was when I googled “Iron Man Theme” because I couldn’t remember where I heard the rockin’ riff at the end (and I didn’t want to pay Shazam any money, and yes, shame on me)… And found this. Music and lyrics included. The awesome randomness of the Interwebs.

Internet, Media & Marketing, Technology, Work

From Shorthand to Broadband

November 6, 2007 Armand 4 Comments

For those of you with an interest in technology, public relations, marketing and the media, my agency, Brands2Life, has done a really interesting piece of research looking at how journalists’ jobs have changed in the 15 or so years the Internet has been around. The headlines on point to journalists across all media types (not just technology or online) working harder and having to manage multimedia content and reader communities — a very different brief to what “traditional” journalism usually entails on a day-to-day basis. You can read the story in depth by downloading the research report from here. There are some graphs up on Flickr if anyone wants them.

The name – “From Shorthand to Broadband” – inspired this video which summarises the development of the media story. Have we got the whole story in? Is there something else you would have included / subbed out?

My personal view? From a business perspective, we’re at a really interesting point; one business model (traditional, ad-sponsored, print and broadcast media) is struggling in the wake of having to share its revenue with the online world, and the online world hasn’t yet developed a business model more substantive than relying on Google adwords. From a consumer perspective, broadband and web technologies are available and accessible to the point where the way everyone interacts with media has changed, whether they realise it or not. Not everyone’s there yet, of course, but where a few years ago you wouldn’t have been that surprised if someone from a different generation didn’t know how to Google something, today I’m having conversations with my mother about Facebook, and helping her organise to deliver a plenary speech at a conference via Skype video conferencing.

From a PR perspective — with journalists having to work differently, is it surprising that PRs will have to as well? Conversations in the industry — even with technology companies traditionally on the edge of new things — indicate how early on we are with this part of the story. A lot has changed since the ‘Martini lunches’ of legend, and even more is set to.

Be interested to hear from people who’ve been in one side and out the other — whilst there’s a lot of “web 2.0” that’s hype, I have a feeling that where we are with “social” media today is a pale, pale precursor to the way we’ll interact online in the future.

Internet, Software

Damnit, Plaxo

October 24, 2007 Armand Leave a comment

I’ve been using Plaxo on and off for a few years now. It started off as a contact management system, which was useful, and a social network of sorts. Then it added calendar synchronisation, also good. Its latest incarnation, Plaxo 3.0, aggregates feeds from ALL your contacts social networks and plays it back to you…. which, of course, makes it completely useless as you get far more information than you need. With Scoble, Calacanis in my “network”, and people like Simon and Chris, I get far more updates than I could reasonably shake a stick at. Seriously, I start shaking the stick and it just shatters under the weight of Twitters, Flickr updates etc. etc.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about, pointless though Plaxo Pulse is. This post is about the “known issues” with Plaxo that have forced me to abandon my $50 investment in the service. The known issues are…

1) The de-duper also deletes random contacts for no reason other than, well, it feels like it
2) Calendar synchronisation over multiple PCs in the same timezone results in recurring appointments sliding further and further back in time
3) And not an issue, but could I sync my contacts with Google Mail, please?

Repeated searches through the forums flagged both of these as recurring issues for some users, and therefore you’d have thought they’d be addressed… sadly, not. I should probably log them as faults and see if I can reclaim my investment, but I suspect they’ll put it down to the vagaries of my system configuration… which will do me precisely zero good, yet waste me considerable time.

sigh. Well, my Google Analytics referral list has taught me that blog posts will sit up here and gather traffic like dust on a pile of messy PC cables, so I’ve at least put this out there for others who experience similar issues. If any of you find a solution, please let me know!

Internet, Viral

Cash for phones

May 17, 2007 Armand Leave a comment

One of my agency’s clients, Mopay, has just released this viral:

I think its pretty funny (and no, I wasn’t involved in this one). The service is good too; mobile phone recycling, for which they give you money. Check it out.

This year really has been the year where the world realises that the things we do have an impact. It’s not all about Al Gore’s PowerPoint skills, I’m sure, although no doubt its helped.

Internet, Miscellany

Fan mail, fantastic spam

April 19, 2007 Armand Leave a comment

I’ve had fan mail for David Armand. I’m hoping that he can do some gigs in the North soon because my interpretive dance version of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn is far from impressive.

I’ve also had a spam email with the subject line lifted out of Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time’ series. Bizarre. But truly, the Darkfriend did indeed fall on his bottom and sit there standing at Rand.

Two random, vaguely interesting things that happened recently. The Internet is truly a wondrous place.

Substantive posts to follow. Maybe. Eventually.

Internet, Media & Marketing

Nice blogger relations

April 17, 2007 Armand Leave a comment

Toptable.co.uk followed a trackback to my blog post that referenced them (the other day, talking about Awana), and a day later I received an email with “200 points” to spend with them in thanks. Which is rather nice of them, really. I mean, I don’t know how their points system works but am intrigued…

It’s a good policy. Nice to see some businesses paying attention to trackbacks… If you want 200 div6 points, please link to me. Preferably telling people how awesome I am.

Internet, Television

Joost vs. BBC TV

April 12, 2007 Armand 2 Comments

I’m bored of Joost. I mean, the principle of interactive TV to that extent is AWESOME, don’t get me wrong. But there are more adverts than I have to watch when I use Tivo, and not enough content or an easy way of searching it. I’ll keep checking, but I’m not too hopeful. It seems to be more about the community than the content at the moment.

On the plus side, the BBC has just emailed me about the BBC TV trial – I got to use BBC iMP last year when they tested that. So that could be exciting – at least the BBC has a guaranteed trove of awesome content. More will follow here.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, these are two internet TV services, one launched by those nice Skype people (Joost) and one by the, erm, BBC. You know. Those guys with the funny hats.

More to follow.

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