The first of the ideas is a bit of an abstract one but one I’m convinced will work. Those who know me will know that I’ve always been a bit of an amateur theologian, I like to read about the way religions work and the arbitrary rules they set themselves, as a committed atheist I find it fascinating.

One thing I have always liked was the concept of tithing. Put simply “The tithe is that tenth of our income that we give to God, which enables Him to move on our behalf in the area of blessings”. Now, I’m not advocating that I randomly bestow a tenth of my income on a random church, after all some of these organisations are some of the richest in the country, and anyway I’m an atheist. The idea that I had was that I should give ten percent of my time, ie. one afternoon or morning of the week, over to doing stuff for free. At the same time I happened upon Matthew Knight of yarned, and we hit up a discussion about it. After a brief chat I decided that if he could do it than so can I, so I will. Being a new business, I think 10% is logical as a start figure. I already do about that amount, if not more, of unpaid advisory work but formalising it somehow makes it more real.

From now on Totaal, as a company rule for anybody on the payroll, shall henceforth have one morning or afternoon of the working week as “Tithed Time” to do something good. That means something charitable, something that gives something back to a community or something that is downright cool.

Also, something else that has been troubling me is the lack of perceived ethics in what I do. Now, that’s not the same as a perceived lack of ethics, even if we are a Social Media company, we have so far – and always will have – 100% client satisfaction. I’m as strict a critic as an agent as I was when I was a client and that wont change. More specifically, what we do as a company needs to be framed by what we wont do and what we don’t do.

It’s probably too big an issue to tackle right now but over the next few months I’ll be blogging, and speaking to people I respect offline too, about the best way to develop this ethical policy in more detail. It’s a given that I wont work with, or work for anyone owned by, arms dealers, oil companies or any companies responsible for acts of mass pollution like Union Carbide. What’s really interesting though is can I refuse to work for tobacco companies? I smoke, would that not just be massively hypocritical? Do I try and remain apolitical? I certainly have failed at doing that in my personal life even if I’m avowedly unaffiliated to either of the major parties.

I know some pretty ace people read this blog so if any of you have any thoughts on either of these issues it would be great to hear them. I could really do with some help on the ethical stuff, I want to make an interesting and considered, thought-provoking ethical policy and not a polemic. How do I do my bit for the planet or at least not muddy my environmental karma? HELP!

Anyway, Google’s unreliable and hyperbolic schpiel apart, will Buzz be the “game changer” guys like Mashable’s Ben Parr say it will? It certainly has the backing, obviously, to make it big and a great plus point – for some anyway – for it is that it’s linked to gmail accounts.

One of the really interesting things about Buzz though, is that it seems to be somewhat of a chameleon network. It seems to change its skin to suit how you access it. Use it from the desktop and it’s a Twitter style aggregator of content from all of your contacts, use it mobile and it’s a location based realtime network generator more like FourSquare or Gowalla.

It’s largely irrelevant to me though, as I’ve never been a fan of gmail it doesn’t really work for me in any real sense. I have no network to contact with. Sure if I want to import one from Windows Live I can but why would I? Everyone I would connect with through Buzz is already on Twitter, my hotmail account only really contains legacy addresses of people I’ve not emailed in the years since I’ve had my own domain.

I’m sure Buzz will be great for some people but not those without gmail accounts and are also not already on Twitter, I’m no fan of ven diagrams but just draw one in your head and see how big the intersection is there.

Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter and head of the API Team no less, put out the following Tweet:

“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”

It might not sound like much but there’s now such a flourishing, healthy industry that has built up around Twitter clients that it has a lot of people fearing for their livelihoods. Twitter’s back house team are rumoured to have all manner of cool tools they use to develop things with and it seems that they might have now reached a point where they are able to integrate these into a more coherent stream, one that’s able to actually be deployed onto the site.

The Tweet was later clarified

“Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.“

and

“I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.”

But it seems as though the genie was well and truly out of the bottle as the rumours spread far and wide across, ironically enough, the Twittersphere. The jungle drums appear to be beating louder and louder when you consider that they have just hired UI Specialist Bryan Haggerty from LinkedIn and API Evangelist Taylor Singletary who all but confirmed his next port of call is but this rather lovely cryptic tweet.

Expect everything to be clarified at Twitter’s Chirp Conference taking place in San Francisco on April 14th. If anybody fancies getting me a plane ticket I’ll be eternally grateful.

I’ve been lucky to speak to, and be spoken to by, several Twitter staffers over the course of the past year and what best characterises them is, apart from all being incredibly smart, the way they seemed to be focussed with keeping the service live in the face of such immense growth. They also have a surprisingly small staff in comparison to other Social Media behemoths. Twitter suffered several major outages over the last year where the service fell over due to volume and the concentration seemed to be, more or less, making it more robust.

As the year went on Twitter also began to roll out a selection of new features like lists and a revamped retweet feature which, whilst not placing significant load on the service, certainly improved and matured the user experience. It’s also perhaps a sign of the fact that these incredibly talented people had finally been let loose on improving and developing the service rather than just plain coping with the demands placed on them by this exponential growth.

But that said, are all these reports of Twitter’s growth slowing actually accurate? Neilsen certainly think so, claiming that Twitter is suffering from a deficit of user retention, with 40% of Tweeters coming back the next month after joining, as opposed to 60% with Facebook and MySpace.  Twitter, of course, works very differently from anything of its size that has gone before. Facebook and MySpace have also both constructed a product where 99.999% of the interaction takes place on the site. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least advertising where you can serve incredibly well targeted ads to users based on the detailed information held, but the major drawback is that you have to develop software and capacity on a “one size fits all” basis.

The beauty with Twitter of course is that there are a million and one ways to use it over a million and one platforms. None of which are “owned” by Twitter. This multiplicity of platform is a key difference, not only in keeping a smaller more agile development staff, but also to measurement. It’s actually much, much harder to measure Twitter’s usage because of it. See that graph above? Pointless. I’ve done a count of my follower list and – right up to the point where my eyes crossed – I counted about 5% of tweets that actually came “from web”, that is to say directly from the Twitter site itself. The truth is only Twitter know the full story of their usage. But, much like Facebook, reports of Twitter’s demise are way off of the mark.

Anyway,  Hubspot’s “State of the Twittersphere Report – January 2010” posits some quite interesting theories about Twitter and its direction of travel. For those of you who are time poor here’s what they had to say, more or less:

1. Users are following more, are being followed more and Tweeting more. (Does this look like a drop off to you?)
2. Biographical information in profiles stood at 24% in July 2009, up to 53% in January 2010
3. Location information in Profiles stod at 31% in July 2009, rose to 65% in January 2010
4. URLs in Profiles were around 20% in July 2009, up to 41% in January 2010
5. 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside America compared to 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations in January 2010 outside America.
6. Top location in July 2009 – London and still No. 1 in 2010
7. 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
8. 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
9. Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in our study
10. 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day

That’s right, the single biggest threat faced today by the Social Web is – dun, dun, duunnnnnnnn – Internet Explorer 6. This isn’t a hatchet job and I’m not a hater of Micro$oft by any means which, given the fact that I own a machine running Windows Vista, surprises even me sometimes. Even Microsoft themselves would suggest you download the later versions of IE and they made the thing! So, it’s probably best then, that I explain what I mean when I say it’s the Osama Bin Laden of browsers. IE6 was first shipped in August 2001, yes that’s before most of us even knew who Bin Laden was, which by anyone’s reckoning is nearly a full eight and a half years ago. Now, I am not a neophile, my car is older than that and – I’ll be honest with you here – so are some of my clothes but just imagine how long a time that is in the world of the internet.

Back in 2001 you could almost name your price for any business with a domain name attached to it, almost nobody used google, we were all allowed to download anything we wanted from Napster for free and without fear of legal recourse from our ISPs and the closest thing to the Social Web were sites like FARK, Slashdot and technology like ICQ and MSN Messenger. It’s safe to say that nowdays the web is a very, very different place. So why, even now when the web has moved on immesurably, do roughly 20% of users still browse the web using IE6? I guess the short answer would be the good old fashioned combination of laziness/ignorance. It’s actually different in some Third World countries where web usage is more likely to be via mobile web where it’s actually factory shipped but lets skip over that, it’s fairly safe to say that you aren’t very likely to be reading this from Thailand. So, in an effort to spread the word, here’s why you should upgrade post-post-post-haste if you are using IE6.

Aesthetics:

Aesthetically IE6 is awful, without getting too technical, it’s not really designed to interpret web pages made in the last few years. You know all of those lovely drop shadows, rounded corners, shaded edges and layers? No? Well you must be using IE6. It doesnt even support CSS2! Good designers will factor in workarounds for sites to look passable in IE6 but even the best will sometimes spend hours cursing it, going grey and grinding their teeth. They shouldn’t be doing this though, it’s a waste of everyone’s time that they have to, good designers should be doing better designs and not enslaving theirselves to a technology that, if it were on TV would be in black and white.

Functionality:

An interesting thing has begun to happen around the web, if you use IE6 then some sites will actually implore you to switch or upgrade your browser. Others on the other hand just plain wont work. Twitter, for instance, began doing so around the middle of last year and I virtually jumped out of my chair when they did. Youtube followed suit not long after, and much more brutally too. This isn’t sniffy high mindedness on their part though, it’s for a perfectly valid reason. A lot of the applications that now drive the Social Web actually struggle to work with IE6. Again, without getting too technical, and to use the simplest analogy to hand, it’s like running a car on unleaded petrol when it doesn’t have a catalytic converter. Sure it might work but you’ll be in for a bumpy ride and you’ll more than likely break down pretty quickly. What’s more, you’ll get where you are going terribly slowly.

Security:

If the last two didn’t get you switching then this one will. “As of January 10, 2009, security advisory site Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched”. Tossing aside the likely hood that, if you are still using IE6, you will more than likely have not updated your security patches for it, that is still 22 security flaws in your browser. 22 Separate ways which nasties can still infiltrate your personal data and do beastly things to all your lovely data. I just hope you don’t bank with it.

So there you have it, switch if you can. If you are in a company using ie6, which my last company were up until last year, picket the IT department, send them this link. If you know someone who uses it shun them like a leper. It’s for the good of the Social Web remember, the less time spent on catering on nearly decade old technology the quicker progress will be.

Bin IE666 people, you know it makes sense.

The press industry is having a bit of a hard time at the moment, and don’t we know it. On a national level several of the biggest UK newspapers – titles like the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Express – are rumoured to be looking at making serious cuts to editorial staff, with journalists and the humble but vital subbers being the ones getting it in the neck more often than not. The issue has reached such a pique that it’s even been debated on the floor of the House of Commons with the then Minister for Culture Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, offering the luke warm comfort that “Lord Carter is considering how to sustain quality news provision across all media at a local level as part of the final “Digital Britain” report”. Which was received about as enthusiastically as a hybrid car on Top Gear.

On a regional level in the UK the *ahem* news is, if anything, less positive. With staff being made redundant from major regional titles in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and countless other cities across the UK. The real casualty of the year though, is the London regional press. Competing freesheets The London Paper and  London Lite both hit the buffers over the past year and a bit with only the doughty, stoic Metro remaining. Even the once preeminent evening paper of London, the Evening Standard, having seemingly fought off competition from its free rivals, is itself set to become a freesheet.

It’s safe to say then, that 2009 was very much a bad year to be in newspapers and it’s pretty much the same world wide. Why is this though? Are journalists effectively being laid off because they cant do their jobs or are too expensive all of a sudden? Of course not, journalists the world over are getting the boot because the industry they work for is no longer viable, the business model is broken. The, often very talented, intelligent and savvy people are finding their selves out of a job because consumer habits have turned away from a model which has worked, on one level or another, for a good couple of hundred years.

Take a look at the ad above, you’ve probably seen it before and might even have found it funny. It was originally dreamed up for The Sun’s 40th anniversary celebrations and meant for a viral only campaign. Eventually the campaign went big though so they decided to give it a TV Run. The strange thing about it though is that it, and it’s funnier follow up, both illustrate quite how obsolete the medium of the newspaper is. It looks anachronistic, quaint even, when set against the uber-modern template of the iPhone ads, even with a tongue in cheek approach.

I’m not going to lay out all of the reasons why I, and for that matter all the reasons others, think that traditional media like newspapers are failing. The threats to their markets are everywhere from podcasts, better mobile 3g coverage, changes in the habits in which people consume their media and even the humble internet. You can debate these all you want but Newscorp, owner of everything from Fox and Sky to The Sun and The Times place the blame firmly at the feet of the internet as their main threat. In typical old media fashion Rupert’s gang have fired the first shot across the bows of Google by blocking their search bots from The Times’ site. You could say that Rupe is still smarting from the somewhat less than resounding success that was Newscorp’s acquisition of the old and busted myspace for a whopping $580 back in 2005.

In my mind the myspace disaster is probably a great test case in the difficult relationship between old and new media. Newscorp’s shiny new myspace got beaten beaten by the upstart Facebook, now ironically worth many, many times what myspace was sold for, and from that point Newscorp essentially took their ball home. Game over.

So where is the solution in all of this? Rather oddly I believe it’s The Guardian who have got the right ideas to cope with the future of publishing. I say rather oddly because if you were paying attention I mentioned them at the start of this post as being one of the ones with the threat of redundancy over their staff, in fact they also owned MEN Media who made many journalists redundant in 2009 and, to top it all off, their parent company, Guardian Media Group, lost £90m last year. Strange choice you might say then. Well yes and no.

The Guardian create – for my money at least – far and away the best online content of any organisation bar the BBC. This content isn’t just well regarded by those in the UK, I constantly get friends from India, Malaysia, Canada, The US and even Serbia linking to me to Guardian stories. Their podcasts are also fantastic and some of their video reporting would more than stand up to that of half of the UK’s terrestrial channels. It’s not just good journalism though, it’s innovative journalism. When the story of the MP’s Expenses Scandal broke The Guardian did something very, very clever and published all the leaked documentation onto the internet and asked their readership to scrutinise the very people they elected. As we all know, there’s nothing like a bit of local interest to spike someone’s attention and it soon began to yield it’s fair share of stories, Duck Islands, Moat Cleaning, Hob-Nobs and all. This simply wouldn’t have been possible without ‘citizen journalism’. What’s more they’ve also just launched an iPhone app which will, I promise you, blow your mind with just how great it is.

So in short, the coming decade’s successful media organisation will have to constantly reinvent it’s model. It will need to sometimes absorb a loss and it will definitely have to engage and enthuse its readers to make them part of the story. As a model press on its own is very probably a busted flush however, using the internet well – and by that I mean wringing every drop of value possible from it – must surely be the only way forward if there is any hope for survival for some of the oldest and most respected newpaper titles in the world.

Though it may only seem like a little change at this point but throughout their meteoric rise Twitter have been almost wilfully ignorant of the user experience through twitter.com barring some recent small, incremental improvements. Twitter’s main tactic has been one of instead opening their API up early and well and this has allowed a healthy ecosystem of third party apps, among them clients, to flourish instead. Now with lists, something that’s obviously outside the core functionality of Twitter, comes the time to ask whether this move is just a user experience upgrade of if this is a concerted effort to regain some of the territory lost to Twitter clients.

I’ve blogged a couple of times before about Twitter clients and the fact that they are absolutely essential to make using Twitter an enjoyable experience. The latest statistics indicate that roughly only 25% of people actually use twitter.com, it’s an incredible statistic if you pause to think about it for a minute. Three quarters of people using your services dont even touch your webpage actually never visit your site, using an API and third party client app. As someone with a fair bit of background in web1.0 (where traffic is king and driving traffic is an art form) it’s just impossible to fully rationalise that stat, at least without a little shake of my head and a roll of my eyes.

From the traffic side alone it would make sense to improve the “in browser” functionality of Twitter but also, even though Twitter is booming the current state of play isnt exactly ideal. People I know have tried Twitter and been turned off by the basic functionality (or lack thereof) and subsequently have not been enthused enough to bother with downloading a client. Could it therefore be the case that Twitter want to up their conversion rates for sign ups? Are they planning to advertise and want to funnel more traffic through the service? Maybe they just want to mature a bit as a service and taking back a little control helps to do that. Either way, a reliable web based client would be great.

It’ll be interested to see where they go next from here.

It’s also specially lovely when you consider that they have two stadiums (Wembley and the Emirates) which are absolute shoe-ins for selection of the final 12 and are therefore unlikely to be awarded the other. Anyway, some more local cities are also bidding to be host cities and given the amount of stick I would get if I didnt here are the link to Leeds, Sheffield and Hull’s bid efforts. You can also follow them on Twitter here: Leeds, Sheffield and Hull

Piano Stairs

World’s Deepest Bin

Bottle Arcade (Teaser)

I have to declare an interest at this point though, I adore VWs, especially some of the late 80s / early 90s examples. My first car was a gorgeous, but slightly careworn MkII Golf GTi which I nicknamed the Millenium Falcon, as much for its ability to make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs as the alarming regularity that things fell off it. I loved that car and I love 80s Volkswagens – even more than the 60s equivalents – and somehow VW have managed to capture a bit of the fun of the Mk1 and Mk2 Golfs or the Sirocco.

I drive a Honda Civic estate now though so I might just be missing the old days.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont

Claremont is the brainchild of Adam Kimmel, New York Suit Designer (and fashion label), who decided that there was no better way to publicise his new line of suits than to embark on a 60mph downhill skate. No? Me neither. Anyway, it hots up about two minutes in.

Tony Hawk, the 900

This video is pretty self explanatory. It is one of the most inspiring moments that I have ever witnessed in sport, watching live as he completed a trick he had been attempting for a decade. In case you were wondering, the 900 is a vert ramp trick involving two-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Tony completed it at the 1999 x games after 12 attempts.

Mouse, a film by Girl skateboards

This is a seminal film by Girl skateboards directed by now famous, but in 1996 very much less so, director Spike Jonze. It was as influential as it was referential, see how many other films you can pick off in the clips below. Also, if you are a fan of any of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games then you may recognise some of the settings.