http://www.metia.com/london/peter-springett Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:58:00 +0100 Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:58:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2012/03/life-at-the-sharp-end-presenting-to-the-london-content-strategy-meetup/#number-of-comments Earlier this year I got the chance to present to the London Content Strategy Meetup group. The theme? There's been been a barrage of conversations about content strategy and content marketing. But how do you communicate the business value of content? It's a five minute 'lightning talk', by the way. Perfect, because it keeps everything and everyone nice and focused.   Peter Springett — Life at the Sharp End from Together London on Vimeo. /london/peter-springett/2012/03/life-at-the-sharp-end-presenting-to-the-london-content-strategy-meetup/ /london/peter-springett/2012/03/life-at-the-sharp-end-presenting-to-the-london-content-strategy-meetup/ Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:58:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2012/03/curation-conviction,-creativity-and-a-cautionary-tale-of-compost/#number-of-comments What do community managers talk about when they’re off duty? The answers, or at least some of them, came to light at the latest in a series of London Content Strategy Meetups at the Mermaid Theatre last Wednesday. Compost, conviction and creativity were at the top of the list. Why compost? For one community manager, one of the hardest tasks was preventing participants from coming to virtual blows over the best way to prepare organic fertilizer. The point being that gardening stirs up dangerous passions as much as iPads or the latest episode of TOWIE. Be prepared to get your hands dirty—managing a community can be a messy business. As for conviction, most people agree you can’t afford to fake it. Manage a community and you’d better be passionate about the subject matter. Faking it is the first step towards a massive fail. (For the sake of balance, one or two people defended the benign dictator persona, placing objectivity and fairness above subject matter expertise and they had the success stories to back it up.) Most of the people I chatted to also stressed the importance of creativity. Community managers? Creatives? Who knew?  Yet pretty much everyone there said that imagination was essential to keep communities relevant and vibrant. Coming up with new ideas for content, news and discussion are what keep community managers awake at night—which is when the best ideas appear out of nothing, apparently. A few other highlights:Take care of your community and your community will take care of you.  One of the strongest measures of success is when members start generating content or policing bad behaviour on your behalf. Making the rules clear counts for a lot, especially when other people can reference them for you. Proving return on investment to senior executives is hard. Web metrics do tell a story, as does community-generated content. At a time when businesses are being told that they need to publish more and more to remain relevant, getting content for free is a powerful statement of value.  Don’t lead a horse to water. More to the point, if the horse prefers to drink out of a bucket, don’t try and drag it to a state of the art water cooler. Online communities have been around for decades. If you’re a car manufacturer and you can’t get your head round a turn-of-the-century discussion board, then call in someone who can. If your audience is mad about motors, emoticons and animated gifs, don’t try and woo them with a Facebook page. Finally, it was great to meet such a bright and eclectic bunch. Hardly surprising when they were representing communities as diverse as ‘Horse and Hound’, ‘Harry Potter’ and the undisclosed car manufacturer. Special thanks especially to Rob Hinchcliffe (@Hinchcliffe)and Randall Snare (@randallsnare) for two excellent presentations. Kudos too for Jonathan Kahn (@lucidplot) and Richard Ingram (@richardjingram) the event organisers. See you again at the next London Content Strategy Meetup on April 19. /london/peter-springett/2012/03/curation-conviction,-creativity-and-a-cautionary-tale-of-compost/ /london/peter-springett/2012/03/curation-conviction,-creativity-and-a-cautionary-tale-of-compost/ Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:59:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2012/01/content-strategy-2012-time-to-get-stretching/#number-of-comments 2012 will see content strategists stretched in more directions than ever. If that sounds daunting, think again. There will be more opportunities to move centre stage, better resources to help you collaborate in multi-disciplinary teams, and smarter, slicker channels that will help your company's content to shine. 1. CollaborationFirst of all the stretching. Last year was all about becoming more 'T-shaped'. Learning the fundamentals of social media, web design, software development, information architecture, UX and SEO means that content specialists can collaborate more effectively in multi-disciplinary teams. Expect this to go even further in 2012 as content strategists ride the wave of new web and mobile technologies to reposition themselves at the heart of digital marketing programs. As well as overlapping other creative disciplines, this means pushing your skills in other directions that were off-limits until very recently, including software development. If you don't believe the demand for these hybrid skills exists, then take a look at companies such as Decoded which aim to help non-developers learn the basics of web programming in a day. I'd argue this matters more than ever, especially with the ascent HTML5, which has the potential to disrupt the existing blogging or conveyor belt model for content publishing. Keeping up with developments, in every sense of the word, will be critical for content strategists who want to remain relevant in digital. 2. ProductionContent strategists will also increase their fluency across an even wider range of media. Again it's a tale of two years. Where 2011 saw journalists and writers learning how to create and edit video, photography, and podcasts, the next 12 months will see the more ambitious branch out further. Once more there's a contrast between the traditionally 'creative' and more scientific approaches to content. Firstly there's new wave of more user-friendly composition applications such as the relatively inexpensive KORG iKaossilator. Although not as versatile as Garage Band, for example, this innovative app has the potential to do for music composition what Instagram and Hipstamatic did for photography in 2011. The other important area of focus will be data and analytics. Simple tools that measure the impact and reach of content reveal the articles that attract and the ones that fall through the gaps. Versatile content producers will also look at how they can quickly generate eye-catching charts and infographics using tools such Hohli and Visual.ly. 3. ValueThe third step involves better understanding and delivering value to employers and clients. Learning what content works well, what can be replicated, and how it can be monetized will be an essential part of the job description. Thinking like an account manager to grow the business or like a head of operations to make it more efficient will inevitably increase impact and influence within the organisation. Other strategies include learning how to squeeze every drop of value out of new or existing content. They will help businesses multiply the value of a single piece of content by using it as the source for multiple articles optimised for publication cross different devices, channels and social networks. Above all, they'll be able to evidence the impact and value of content. Not everyone will want to be adept in all three dimensions. But as before, there's never been a better time for content to step into the spotlight. It's time to get stretching. /london/peter-springett/2012/01/content-strategy-2012-time-to-get-stretching/ /london/peter-springett/2012/01/content-strategy-2012-time-to-get-stretching/ Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:31:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/10/what-this-cute-baby-tablet-video-really-means/#number-of-comments Cute? Yes. Relevant? That's another question. I've just been speaking to Chris Belmore, one of my user experience colleagues at Metia, about this video that's been racking up a lot of hits in the past 24 hours. It's cute and I can see why people are getting worked up about the death of print (again). But as Chris rightly explains, this misses the point entirely. The brain is at its most plastic in the first three years of life. And while we are born with a sense of touch, language and writing come much later. No surprise then that a one-year-old takes to pinch and zoom more easily than the index, headline, article hierarchy of a print magazine. More to the point, one year olds aren't the target audience of Marie Claire magazine - not yet anyway. Most parents know this already. That's why the most popular 'interactive devices' for babies remain touch and feel books. And while tablet apps are great for learning to read and write in later years, I'd hazard a guess that they complement, rather than replace existing learning methods. Final point here. At Metia we love the way that new user experiences are transforming business, learning and the arts. We build tablet-touch solutions for our clients. And our developers are already under the hood of Microsoft Windows 8, exploring the potential for our clients and creating proof of concepts. But we understand that as new mediums arrive, others evolve to remain relevant and useful.  And then it's all about finding the right mix for you, your business (or your family). Don't get me wrong, I think this is a spell-binding video. But understanding what it really means for the future of user experiences- that's the real magic.   /london/peter-springett/2011/10/what-this-cute-baby-tablet-video-really-means/ /london/peter-springett/2011/10/what-this-cute-baby-tablet-video-really-means/ Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:43:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/09/what-the-latest-facebook-photo-changes-mean-for-content/#number-of-comments Facebook photos just got bigger in every sense of the word. While most people are focusing the top stories feature this week, overnight the photos in your newsfeed also got larger. Why does this matter? Facebook is a monster in more ways than one. One area where it outperforms pretty much any online service by a hefty distance is photography. The company hosts 140 billion photos and rising, dwarfing Flickr which has a measly six billion snaps. So it makes sense to enlarge the appeal of a feature where Facebook has a massive lead. But I'd also argue that this move reflects our changing relationship with digital photography and an important shift in the way that we produce content. Not all that long ago (2006 by my calculation), everyone was a writer. It was the accepted rule in the early days of digital marketing that successful campaigns needed copy and plenty of it. Today, everyone's a photographer, a trend acknowledged by companies including Foursquare, which recently integrated images into timelines and Instagram, which launched a revamped version of its app this week to satisfy the growing demands of its fast-growing community.   In other words, the opportunities to produce and publish photographs are endless. But if you don't now how to make that content attractive, easy to view and simple to find, it's going to get swamped by the trillions of pixels cluttering the web. Make an impact I've already written about how you can make more of an impact with images captured by popular mobile apps such as camera+, hipstamatic and Instagram. But to make sure your photos get the audience they deserve, you need to learn a few SEO tricks that will help push content to the head of the search engine queue. Here's some good advice from Stephen Chapman at ZDNet covering everything from photo titles to metadata. Again, this is much, much more than just taking nice pictures and making them easy to find. When you embed an eye-catching image into an article, you're not only making it look more professional and presentable, you're also helping to promote that content up the search rankings. Today, a picture doesn't just paint a thousand words, it can help you find them as well. As a result I've also noticed that an image search on Google or Bing is often more accurate when it comes to tracking down an online news story or a feature. The good news is that it's getting easier and easier to take better pictures. From affordable digital SLRs to mobile phones, most people carry a camera that's capable of delivering stunning results. In addition, there's no shortage of feedback.I've no doubt that the quality of online photography has improved hugely because people are measuring their own efforts against the images posted by their friends and swapping advice within these communities. In short, the rise and rise of digital photography is profoundly shaping the way that we produce, share and search for content.  It's time to get snapping. Go shoot.   /london/peter-springett/2011/09/what-the-latest-facebook-photo-changes-mean-for-content/ /london/peter-springett/2011/09/what-the-latest-facebook-photo-changes-mean-for-content/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:35:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/09/denmark-probably-the-best-design-in-the-world/#number-of-comments I just got back from a trip to Denmark and a quick hop to Malmo in Sweden.  It's Design Week in Copenhagen, so I made time to visit the Think Human show at the Denmark Design Centre opposite Tivoli Gardens. Good design is a way of life in this part of the world, as anyone who's lucky enough to own an Arne Jacobsen chair will tell you. But when you're in the country itself, it soon becomes apparent just how seriously the Danes take design and how they apply it to pretty much every aspect of life, stripping down a problem to its raw components and then applying this knowledge to create intelligent products and systems. Think Human begins with a clear statement of intent: In other words, 'design thinking' has the potential to tackle the greatest social and economic challenges of the coming years from population growth and aging populations, to climate change and diminishing resources. More than that, businesses needs to understand these principles in order to continue to deliver the products and services that address the needs of a world changing at an accelerating rate. From the exhibition: "The social, economic and environmental forces that created the industrial age of the past 250 years will be replaced by new forces that will create the socio-ecologicial age of the 21st century. This age is not defined by the mass production of goods and products or by individual consumer needs, but will have a greater emphasis on community needs and social solutions...consumers have become manufacturers...open networking across companies will replace closed, controlling systems. One of the major challenges for companies today is to find a way to release this creativity and innovation so that it permeates the entire organisation." You can see this joined up thinking at work elsewhere in the show. I'm focusing on language so I picked out this word cloud that connects the main themes driving innovation in society: Of course there's nothing new about connecting good design with business and politics. The very beauty of this approach is that it is equally useful for furniture and consumer electronics as it is for prisons and hospitals. But to see it applied so rigorously and unapologetically to the contemporary issues facing every aspect of society was impressive and moving. You can find out more about Think Human here.   /london/peter-springett/2011/09/denmark-probably-the-best-design-in-the-world/ /london/peter-springett/2011/09/denmark-probably-the-best-design-in-the-world/ Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:33:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/08/paris-1947-sales-of-smartphones-rocket/#number-of-comments Time for a genuine laugh out loud moment. Here's a wonderful piece of French futurology from 1947. Called 'Television, the eye of tomorrow' the documentary imagines a world where mobile devices, "the size of a torch...mean there's no need to buy a newspaper. You just switch to get the latest news, fashion magazine or sports broadcast." Unlike so many similar films of the past 60 odd years, it's smart, funny - and completely believable.  The scene where Parisians wander the streets clutching their mobile devices talking to friends, watching a football match, or catching up on a soap opera, gave me an authentic post-modern seizure.  More importantly, it also shows that even before anyone invented the phrase 'user experience', there were people clever and brave enough to anticipate how the miniaturisation of media devices would impact our lives. That's inspiring for the UX team at Metia, especially at we develop client proof of concepts for gesture control and facial recognition ready for the next wave of smartphones and tablets.  In the meantime, enjoy the clip. No subtitles I'm afraid, but you don't really need them. Love those aerials.       /london/peter-springett/2011/08/paris-1947-sales-of-smartphones-rocket/ /london/peter-springett/2011/08/paris-1947-sales-of-smartphones-rocket/ Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:01:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/08/book-to-the-future/#number-of-comments Can the book survive? As Borders goes into liquidation, and Amazon announces that Kindle sales outperform print while planning the launch of its own tablet, here's an example of publishing innovation that might help paperbacks survive into the next decade. Flipbook is a new publishing venture that issues handheld, print versions of modern classics  including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Cloud Atlas and One Day.  The books fit in your pocket, and more importantly they're cleverly designed to be held in one hand. You 'flip' the lower page up with your thumb to move to the next spread. I'd like to believe that they chose the paper weight and texture deliberately to make it easy to do this, although that might be wishful thinking. I've had trouble tracking down Flipbook sales, so I don't know whether this will be the saviour of print; frankly I doubt it. But whatever the numbers, you have to be impressed by the way in which the publisher has taken an innovative approach to the reading experience that hasn't changed much, in print terms, since the launch of the paperback. Digital marketing expertise, print innovationThe same goes for print-marketing collateral. While we tend to think of innovation on the digital side of industry, there's still room for agencies and content managers to take smart ideas from online and mobile and use them to drive new ideas in print. Remember, there's more to this than eye-catching, spanking new design. Thanks to tablets and the Kindle, reading habits are changing. It might be something as basic as a return to portrait formats, on the other, the more fluid organisation of printed content inspired by the greater variety of 'reader journeys' available online. Take away the marketing speak for a moment, the majority of reading is now no longer a linear, front-to-back activity.  And traditional print is starting to sacrifice the beginning-middle-end approach to narrative as well. We're not producing Flipbook brochures yet, but we are using our digital exprience to innovate an otherwise endangered format. Can the book survive? Not sure. Can Metia find new ways to bring your print-marketing to life, long into the coming decade? Most certainly, yes.   /london/peter-springett/2011/08/book-to-the-future/ /london/peter-springett/2011/08/book-to-the-future/ Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:02:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/07/human-beings-what-39-s-your-content-usp/#number-of-comments When it comes to copywriting it hasn't been a good year or so for the human race. Last year sports journalists trembled at the rise of the machines, namely an algorithm that took baseball match stats and wrote a convincing account of the encounter. Ok, that I get. Like fiction, sport only has a limited number of narratives that can be replicated time and time again. But what about the really smart stuff? How about summarising a complex article into a headline or even a Tweet. Surely a machine can't identify the salient points of a full-length article and pump them out onto the web? Again, it's time to run for the bunkers, thanks to Trimit, a new app that reads your article and pegs it down to 140 characters. It gets worse. The very organisations that build complex algorithms for financial traders are turning their attention to the arts. Software companies, such as Epagogix, are working with Hollywood studios to predict the box office of film screenplays. You pump in the script and up pops the financials. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase formulaic cinema. Seriously, this stuff is the cutting edge right now, but the more you think about it, the more it's likely that many of the specialist content skills of today will be just another marketing commodity tomorrow, tooled and polished like so many ball bearings or machine parts. At Metia, we produce a lot of content. A couple of years ago we did the sums and added up more than a million words written for clients in just one year. Add to that video, podcasts and social media content and you've got quite a production team at work. One of the things we've been doing in the past year is to focus more on the human side of content so that what we produce will always be more than just a machine-made commodity. Here are few examples of this approach: Demonstrating empathy: If there's one advantage that a human being has over a machine it's the ability to intuit the thoughts and emotions of another person. So before we even get down to the business of production, we're constantly asking ourselves and our clients the following questions: Who would be interested in this content? Why would it attract them in the first place?  How is this material going to be insightful and genuinely useful? Going deeper: When we speak to our clients and their customers we do our best to get under their skin. What are the key activities related to a given job role?  What are the challenges and rewards faced by that individual? What keeps them awake at night and what gets them up and into work in the morning? Making the first impression: The human touch is all the more important when you're at the content capture stage. Messaging seminars, brainstorming meetings, customer interviews - they all depend on being able to connect with people so that you gather the information needed to produce engaging content quickly. For all these reasons, many of our content team come from journalistic backgrounds or from the media, where they're used to dealing with people, sometimes in pressured situations, in order to produce great articles, videos and podcasts. They're all great communicators, but above all they're all creative human beings with an eye, not an algorithm, for a great story and fabulous content.  For more posts about why great content matters: Content: A monarchy or currency? Google's April fool, content and creativity Using Instagram to tell stories Take photographs? So what's your content strategy? Five tips for better web copy PS If you're interested in how algorithms are taking over the world, not just finance, here's a great video from this year's TED conference presented by Kevin Slavin of Area/Code that explains it all.     /london/peter-springett/2011/07/human-beings-what-39-s-your-content-usp/ /london/peter-springett/2011/07/human-beings-what-39-s-your-content-usp/ Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:43:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/07/all-the-news-that-39-s-fit-to-click/#number-of-comments A lot of us have already replaced our newspaper with a smartphone or tablet version. But what would you do if your newspaper offered you a mobile device as part of your subscription? That's what the publishers of the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News plan to do this August when they will offer 2,000 android tablets to readers at a 'heavily discounted price'. The tablets will be packaged with four applications that display digital versions of the newspapers, as well as additional content from The Inquirer and the company's Philly.com website. There's more to this than a generous giveaway. Although the scheme involves just 2,000 devices, it will give the publishers valuable insights into reader behaviour that it can loop back into its current electronic publishing and advertising strategies. There's no information so far about whether the hardware will be branded, whether there'll be any 'walled garden' blocking access to other content. It's a smart idea in the short term, and is certainly gaining quite a few electronic column inches. The only downside I can see, apart obviously from cost, is that this doesn't differentiate the newspaper from the competition. Pretty much every publisher has an app or a digital version optimised for mobile devices. In a couple of years time, tablets will mass-market commodities comfortably breaking the U.S.$100 price point and e-readers will be pretty much free with some kind of minimum download spend per quarter. Once content and hardware are available at no cost, the only thing really left that you can charge for, from readers, is the experience. That's where Flipboard and Zite come in. I still stand by my prediction that one or both will be bought up by a major publisher as proprietary presentation layer in the next 12 months. Until then, good luck to www.philly.com and look out for other newspaper owners trying similar experiments soon.     /london/peter-springett/2011/07/all-the-news-that-39-s-fit-to-click/ /london/peter-springett/2011/07/all-the-news-that-39-s-fit-to-click/ Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:59:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/06/poprocket-is-evil-and-other-helpful-mobile-photography-tips/#number-of-comments Overheard: “You’re not a photographer, you’re a writer with a smartphone and Instagram.” I think that’s probably fair. The latest wave of apps have more to do with Photoshop than my first Yashica 35mm camera. Tap on your Hipstamatic viewfinder enough times and you’re bound to end up with something half presentable. That said, these apps make it easy to create eye-catching content, so here are 12 simple rules—after the slideshow— that you can follow to increase the number of pictures worth posting and sharing. Be a square: Hipstamatic, Instagram and others imitate the retro feel of ‘toy’ cameras from the 60s and 70s. The square format lends itself to portraits and single subjects (see below). But most landscapes are out. None of these apps have a panorama mode, for a very good reason. The world is flat: For the same reason, it’s hard to show a contrast between foreground and background. For the best results, think of your photograph in two dimensions and forget depth of field. Subjects should be evenly lit from the front for clarity. Keep subjects simple: Don’t clutter the viewfinder with too many objects, and try to find shapes that sit comfortably inside the square frame. Close up portraits, a flower, and a plate of food work well; full length photographs, bouquets and banquets are less suitable. Look for patterns: Hipstamatic, especially, works well with abstract subjects. So look out for textures in walls and doorways in the city. Cloud layers at sunset and sunrise also work well. Try to include symmetries that balance the composition, or draw the eye to the centre of the image. Know your filters: I can quite happily live without most of the filters in Instagram. But it’s still good to know the difference between vibrant colours (Hefe), black and white (Inkwell) and desaturated (Brannon). N.B. Poprocket is the comic sans of smartphone filters. To be fair to Instagram, they quietly tried to ditch Poprocket in a recent update, but the outcry from people who should know better, or possess a sharper sense of irony than me, forced them to bring it back. In the frame: Choose the frame or outline that matches the subject. Generally speaking rough edges such as the Hipstamatic Kodak film work well with urban, textured and high contrast images. Use a clean outline, such as Blanko, for clear, sharp, vibrant pictures or to give a clear shape to busier compositions. In the city: Hipstamatic and Instagram work particularly well in urban settings. Street art is a popular subject as are cars, architecture and public spaces. As above, this format doesn't generally lend itself to less forgiving natural environments. Hipstamatic and wildlife definitely aren't snap. Freeze frame: If you're really confident then go for action shots, but speaking from experience you need a bit of time to compose your shot, taking into account the slow shutter response on most of these apps. Motion blur will win you the odd abstract success, but Hipstamatic and Instagram are all about painting with light, not reportage. Be here, now: Some purists will tell you that it doesn't count unless you geo-tag and share your photo the instant that you take it. I, on the other hand, will tell you some purists are talking bobbins. Most of my Instagrams are uploaded from my photo album and days, weeks or months old. Just saying. Share and listen: Instagram is used by lots of professional photographers. It's easy to track them down via the most popular image page. Follow them and invite feedback on your own stream. You'll be surprised how many are happy to offer advice. Hashtag with care: I usually add hashtags to comments in Instagram. Good tags include locations, materials, time of day, colours, fashions and food. With feedback, the usual social courtesies apply, so acknowledge praise and feedback gracefully as you would on other channels. Enjoy: The most important rule of all? Take lots of photos and practice, practice, practice. The images in the video are culled from an album with more than 300 photographs. And I reckon I delete at least five for every one that I keep. Generally speaking, this list of tips works well for me. But it’s far from comprehensive. If you’ve got any other suggestions, drop a note in the comments below.   /london/peter-springett/2011/06/poprocket-is-evil-and-other-helpful-mobile-photography-tips/ /london/peter-springett/2011/06/poprocket-is-evil-and-other-helpful-mobile-photography-tips/ Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:18:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/05/take-photographs-what-39-s-your-content-strategy/#number-of-comments What does digital photography teach us about content strategy for business?  Given all the fuss about content strategy, you'd have thought someone might have come up with a handy definition by now. The problem is that the topic is so abstract that it can be difficult to pin down. However it does become a lot easier when you think about it in terms of common content.  In fact, if you take photographs, write a blog, shoot video or mix music you've probably got good insight into the challenges for businesses, as well as consumers, when it comes to organising, creating and sharing content online. Let's stick with photography for the time being. If you use a digital SLR, point and click, or smartphone camera, you've probably asked yourself some or all of the following questions: Where are my photos? If you've been taking pictures for more than a decade, you've probably still got prints in photo albums as well as the original negatives. Today you could be using Instagram or Path to share photos in near real time on your mobile device. Factor in everything inbetween (memory cards, Flickr, Picasa, that old laptop hard drive) and you start to get an idea of the complexities involved in auditing and then pulling together content from multiple sources. That's if you can find it in the first place. Which pictures do I keep? More to the point, what do I throw out? Aside from cutting the clutter and saving memory space, the less content you have, the easier it is to organise and publish. The downside of course is you never know when you might need that old holiday photo for a school reunion or that picture of your Godsonfor his 10th birthday party. What format do I use for my archive? Do I keep the old prints? Or just the negatives? Should I spend the equivalent of a week archiving everything or spend a couple of afternoons ruthlessly decluttering my collection? Can I outsource storage to a cloud service? What kind of back up or security levels do I need? How do I organise thousands of images? Most of my digital photography is date stamped. More recently it's also tagged by location while face recognition software helps me organise pictures by mug shot. Oh, and someone's just launched a smartphone app that helps me organise and share according to nearby friends and location. How do I organise my pictures so that they are both easy to find and publish across these new channels? How do I make my pictures stand out? Owning a digital SLR in 2006 was a massive advantage when it came to taking good quality pictures that could then be enhanced using Photoshop. Now anyone with a mobile device and a filtering application, such as Hipstamatic, can produce images with a professional sheen. You still need the skills to compose and select the right filter, but the cost barrier to producing high resolution images has all but disappeared. How do I optimise photos for different channels and devices? Should I invest the time and resource in a high-res photoshopped image? When does a smartphone photo suffice? How do I match the picture ratio, topic and resolution to the viewing devices and applications my audience is most likely to use? How do I share my photos with the right people? 15 years ago, you'd print and post. Until recently email attachments and or links to a private online folder were the best way to share pictures. Now I want communities of friends, family and colleagues to be able to find photographs that are current, relevant and optimised to their interests. I've just got my head round Twitter and Facebook. What about dedicated apps and channels like Hipstamatic, Instagram, Picplz, or even Photosynth? Ok, this doesn't cover everything, but it helped me come to three key conclusions about content strategy: Great content still rules. It's the secret to telling memorable stories about your life, your friends or your business. Today, understanding how to organise, optimise and share content is equally critical. The sooner you put in place a content strategy the better. The longer you leave it, the greater the complexity and cost when you get round to the task. If you take lots of photos, mix music or publish other content I'd love to hear how you manage and share content. Or you just want to find out how Metia can help your business make an impact with a content strategy tuned to your requirements, drop me a note below or email peter@metia.com. /london/peter-springett/2011/05/take-photographs-what-39-s-your-content-strategy/ /london/peter-springett/2011/05/take-photographs-what-39-s-your-content-strategy/ Wed, 04 May 2011 09:22:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/04/photosynth-taking-ux-to-the-next-level/#number-of-comments It takes a lot for a new technology to move an old cynic like me. But once in a while something comes along that's so gorgeous to look at, and so elegant to use that it blows my cotton socks off. If you haven't tried Microsoft's Photosynth on a smartphone yet, then download it or get someone to show you. People talk about how in today's world 'the app becomes the device', but this is one of the first pieces of mobile software that genuinely goes beyond the UX brilliance of FourSquare and Instagram, say, and takes things to the next level, thanks to Microsoft's grown up UI. How does it work? In a nutshell, you take several photos of the same scene with your smartphone camera and the software stitches the images together so that it creates a seamless panorama. Stand on the same spot and rotate through a full circle and you get a full 360 degree vista of your surroundings. Here's a quick example of the app in action. I took this in the space of five minutes at lunchtime on a nearby street corner, uploaded it to Bing Maps and Photosynth, which is where it lives right now. I don't mind admitting when I saw the results it was genuinely moving. Ok, it's just a street scene, with a missing piece of sky. But it's made my day, heck my month, my year. Right, better go now, got a bit of dust in my eye... /london/peter-springett/2011/04/photosynth-taking-ux-to-the-next-level/ /london/peter-springett/2011/04/photosynth-taking-ux-to-the-next-level/ Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:57:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/04/what-google-39-s-april-fool-says-about-creativity/#number-of-comments What Google's April fool says about creativity (and what YouTube's doesn't) A good April Fool is hard to get right. It's one thing to come up with a gag, it's another to create something that is genuinely funny on many levels, appeals to a wide audience and deserves to be shared. In fact, you could argue that it illustrates the strengths and pitfalls of any creative-humorous campaign. Take a look at the respective efforts of Google and YouTube this morning and you'll see what I mean.  First off, Google's Gmail Motion launch. At first glance it's a simple joke - which is one of its strengths. But look more closely at the execution and you can see how the gag ripples out in many directions. Here's a quick summary of what works well:  Funny: The primary objective of any April Fool. I actually had a laugh out loud moment with the 'reply all' sequence in the video. Believable: Even if it's only for a split second, the gag should be credible. Email + gesture-based UX? It had me going, though I'm not going to confess the duration of my gullibility. Self-aware: Like any good April Fool it pokes fun at the source. We are Google. We are geeks. We love tech. We wear short sleeved shirts and ties. Sometimes. Mocks the industry (and the competition): There's more than a sly dig at Kinect and probably a bit of quiet respect too. The tone is spot on here. Wide audience appeal: Developers, marketers, UX experts. Oh, and anyone who uses email. Invites repeat visits: The joke works on many levels. It draws you in, plays with your expectations and invites you to explore the content. You can go back to it again and find plenty of detail to admire and laugh about on repeat visits Smart execution: Short videos, believable schematics, neat photography, all wrapped up in the Gmail brand. Campaignable: An April Fool is a one off. But if you wanted to, you could stretch this gag further in many directions. Cost-effective: Can't say for sure here, but apart from the professionally produced videos, this looks like it could have been brainstormed and put together in a matter of days or less. High profile: The 'launch' is announced on the Gmail home page. That's pretty brave and confident by any measure. Global: Small point but this matters. The Gmail motion gag is out of the gates already. YouTube's 1911 parody piece is just about to hit the wires. I won't dwell too much on the YouTube 1911 April Fool. It's funny, granted. But it's one-dimensional. And while there are five short clips, it's the same gag five times. That's the point of pastiche, but it also shows up the limits of this approach. So there you go. With plenty of time to spare, there'll be a lot more banana skins before the day is out. But I'm not sure if any of them will top Google's effort. What do you think? Seen a better joke and what makes it work from a creative perspective?   /london/peter-springett/2011/04/what-google-39-s-april-fool-says-about-creativity/ /london/peter-springett/2011/04/what-google-39-s-april-fool-says-about-creativity/ Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:26:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/03/fast-photography-slow-food-using-instagram-to-tell-stories/#number-of-comments There's a lot of noise about the value of social photography apps right now. First Hipstamatic then Instagram and now Color are attracting significant investment capital in spite of some early hiccups. These apps and others vary, but their essential premise is that your smartphone camera is a social device (and not just about content capture). With Instagram, for example, it takes just three clicks to get from your viewfinder to your social stream. Photos are optimized to the smartphone format and your followers on Instagram can 'like' or post comments to your picture. The attraction from a consumer perspective is obvious - instant photo sharing with friends and wider communities is near instant and requires minimal effort. But we're starting to see good early examples of businesses using social photography for marketing. Starbucks (who else) are using the app to share exclusive content, and enage with customers, as are Red Bull and NPR. Just tell me a story It's impressive stuff, but I'm increasingly interested in the way that individuals and brands are starting to use Instagram to tell stories. Presenting images in a linear sequence might sound a bit old school compared with fluid social content, but it works particularly well, as this example from travel and foodie bloggers GranTourismo shows. They picked up on the potential of Instagram a couple of months ago during a year long tour of the world that recently brought them to Thailand. Here they created an exquisite food photography portfolio focusing on local dishes. This sequence really caught my eye as they work through the preparation stages of a Thai Laksa. The important thing here is that it isn't a recipe. Instagram works best in close up using details to capture a mood or feeling and you can see how they've taken advantage of this to tell a short, mouth-watering story about the preparation of the dish. If you wanted to take the analysis a bit further, you could argue that the date stamps highlight the time and effort needed to create a really memorable dining experience.  Here's the sequence (I've organised left to right, although obviously the Instragram stream scrolls up and down and you only get to see one image at a time). An important footnote - Terence Carter, one of the team behind GranTourismo, is a professional photographer. Goes to show that however easy to use the social content experience, you still need professional skills to capture great content in the first place. You can see more of his work here. /london/peter-springett/2011/03/fast-photography-slow-food-using-instagram-to-tell-stories/ /london/peter-springett/2011/03/fast-photography-slow-food-using-instagram-to-tell-stories/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:24:40 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/03/zite-smart-magazine-shows-the-future-of-content/#number-of-comments Launched today, Zite is a new tablet magazine that combines the content surfacing of Flipboard with the personalisation features of My6Sense. In theory it learns from your reading habits so that each time you return the magazine is rebuilt according to the latest articles and your preferred topics, channels and authors. That's a big advantage over Paper.li and Flipboard, which both do the eye candy thing very well, but are less successful on the personal fine tuning. Again, there's more to this than a neat consumer app for the iPad. Take a look at the personalisation bar on the right of the page (below). Remember when sharing buttons were a novelty? Seems like a long time ago, but it's only in the past 18 months that they've become standard features on most new web pages. The same goes for the like/unlike buttons, that Zite has cleverly incorporated at the top of the bar. Like the share buttons, I'm increasingly convinced that we'll start seeing these personalisation features creeping into online publishing so that when you revisit a favourite destination, content is always current and built around your interests. All this leads to plenty of speculation about the future of content discovery and smart search. The real value in an app like Zite is the way it combines a pleasing UX driven by a proprietary algorithm (Zite was developed by researchers from the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada). But what if you decoupled the algorithm and licensed it to any content publisher? If I can incorporate Google or Bing search into my magazine web site, why not Zitegeist (let's call it that for fun). Could you do it within a traditional browser? What about the development language? All this brings us back to the big question around the business model for all these new publishing ventures. Flipboard says it wants to integrate advertising from its publishing partners, the thinking being that nobody wants to buy a copy of Vogue without the glossy display ads. And there are also rumours that it's breaking out of its iPad home and heading for the web. Meanwhile the New York Times (News.me) and the Washington Post (Trove) also plan personalised content apps, but probably at a price. News.me looks interesting because it will surface content licensed from other publishers, hence the cost to the end user. And then of course there's News International's the Daily, which has the most traditional publishing model of them all, based on a proprietary content/subscription model. It's a busy and sometimes confusing market at the moment. But if it teaches us one thing, it's that there is a clear correlation between an innovative publishing tool and the need for an equally innovative business model. So much as I love Zite and Flipboard, I don't thing they have long term future as independent publishing ventures. I think it's more likely they'll be acquired by an established publisher, or another big name eager to get a share of the content action. But whatever the outcome, all online publishers are going to have to adapt this algorithm based personalisation to their ventures in some shape or form. Watch this space. /london/peter-springett/2011/03/zite-smart-magazine-shows-the-future-of-content/ /london/peter-springett/2011/03/zite-smart-magazine-shows-the-future-of-content/ Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:06:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/03/content-surfacing-explained/#number-of-comments Just a quick follow up to my earlier blog - and the subsequent comments about content surfacing. So, here's an example of the content of a Tweeted link surfaced by Flipboard, from our own Andrew Martin. Here's the original Tweet Nothing wrong with that - concise, to the point and with a neat bit.ly URL as you'd expect. But here's the same Tweet as it appears in Flipboard, where I've created a channel for my Metia Twitter list. (Apologies for the image quality, if anyone knows an iPad screen grab app, let me know): Flipboard surfaces the headline, opening paragraph and a web page illustration. For tweets that link to pages containing infographics - and there's a lot of them about - it's perfect. Posts with other illustrations get the same treatment: Photos embedded as Twitter links or via dedicated apps such as Instagram and Hipstomatic. Videos are playable, shorter articles appear in full. If I want to, I can click on the BankSimple article and get to read the whole article in a pop out window within Flipboard. But the real illustration of why content surfacing tools are so important right now is the way that they intelligently organise content from the original article. (Notice that I didn't use the word 'scrape' in that sentence). For reference, here's a grab of the original web page at www.fastcodesign.com: great photography, elegant layout, but note how far you have to read to get to the graphic (the heart of the article). To be clear, a content surfacing app and an original web page with a proprietary design are two completely different things. But I think the latest generation of content surfacing tools do issue a challenge to web designers and copywriters. And that is to find smart ways to optimise content for our increasingly tablet driven, touch screen world. HTML5 will have a role to play here and I hope we see the results soon. Fast content is great, but rather like fast food, it doesn't satisfy in quite the same way as a properly prepared meal. /london/peter-springett/2011/03/content-surfacing-explained/ /london/peter-springett/2011/03/content-surfacing-explained/ Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:34:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/02/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#number-of-comments This, my friends, it part of what remains of three Ikea Benno CD towers shortly after an hour of fevered dismantling yesterday afternoon. The discs have been crated up and put away in a quiet corner; shelves, wooden dowls, hex screws and allen bolts have been consigned to the Dutch refuse authorities. There's been a lot of talk about the death of 'stuff' in recent weeks, but this is my first venture into the digitally empowered world of decluttering inspired by one too many relocations in the past two and a half years. Living in the centre of Amsterdam also requires a smaller furniture footprint. Something had to give. For the time being, the book shelves are safe, but with a Kindle and iPad in the house, I don't see too many mainstream print and paper purchases in the coming months. Reference books, which probably have to work hardest to justify their existence, are still safe. The really hefty volumes: photography, cinema, history have a lifetime preservation order. Actually, there's more to this than content going digital. Although I've ripped most of the CDs to my hard drive, I'm writing this while listening to the first CD I ever bought*, not on an MP3 player, not on iTunes but on a laptop streaming from Spotify. In other words, getting rid of stuff depends on a suitably elegant user experience to replace the void. Meanwhile I'm wondering how the furniture designers of Almhult will respond. As we start to shed physical media, reversing a trend that started with printing press five hundred years ago, they're going to need something a bit more lucarative than this three dollar iPad stand made from spare Ikea parts. * Not telling.           /london/peter-springett/2011/02/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/ /london/peter-springett/2011/02/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/ Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:31:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/02/what-quora-means-for-content/#number-of-comments   What Quora means for content What has Quora got to do with the future of content? Good question, and maybe that’s one that I’ll post to the site itself a bit later. In the meantime, here’s my take on how one of the fastest growing social media communities is going to change the way we write for our clients. Firstly, I’m going to skip an introduction to Quora. If you want to get the background, there’s a good overview here. Instead I’m going to focus on copy. Take a look at this recent Quora post from tech blogger Louis Gray who’s also the marketing manager for my6thsense. Look closely and you’ll see that there’s a lot going on. Starting with the basics, the post covers: What is my6sense? How does it work? What does it do that the competition can’t? How does it filter and curate content? In fact the more you look at it, the more it becomes clear that this Gray is using Quora to project his product in a specific, but highly effective context.  In addition, the tone of voice is fine-tuned to reflect the needs of the Quora community. It’s challenging, but respectful, it invites conversation, and it opens the door to a wider discussion showing that Gray has faith in the intelligence of the audience he attracts.  My point here is that this style is no longer limited to sites such as Quora. Instead it reflects a growing trend for more authentic, transparent marketing content that has more in common with online communities than traditional corporate web sites.  This approach is shaping content in pretty much every marketing sphere. For the content team here, it’s having an impact on everything on we generate from white papers and customer evidence to podcasts and video. Tone of voice also extends to the way that we use social media channels to curate content and put our clients at the centre of the communities that dominate their sectors.  In the meantime, Quora is rapidly turning into one of my favourite community sites. It’s easy to establish an identity, connect with like-minded experts and start a meaningful discussion. If you want to follow me there and join the content discussion, you can track me down under www.quora.com/Peter-Springet What has Quora got to do with the future of content? Good question, and maybe that’s one I’ll post to the site itself a bit later. In the meantime, here’s my take on how one of the fastest growing social media communities is going to change the way we write for our clients. Firstly, I’m going to skip an introduction to Quora. If you want to get the background, there’s a good overview here. Instead I’m going to focus on copy. Take a look at this recent Quora post from tech blogger Louis Gray who’s also the marketing manager for my6sense. Look closely and you’ll see that there’s a lot going on. Starting with the basics, the post covers: What is my6sense? How does it work? What does it do that the competition can’t? How does it filter and curate content? In fact the more you look at it, the more it becomes clear that this Gray is using Quora to project his product in a specific, but highly effective context.  In addition, the tone of voice is fine-tuned to reflect the needs of the Quora community. It’s challenging, but respectful, it invites conversation, and it opens the door to a wider discussion showing that Gray has faith in the intelligence of the audience he attracts.  My point here is that this style is no longer limited to sites such as Quora. Instead it reflects a growing trend for more authentic, transparent marketing content that has more in common with online communities than traditional corporate web sites.  This approach is shaping content in pretty much every marketing sphere. For the content team at Metia, it’s having an impact on everything on we generate from white papers and customer evidence to podcasts and video. Tone of voice also extends to the way that we use social media channels to curate content and put our clients at the centre of the communities that dominate their sectors.  In the meantime, Quora is rapidly turning into one of my favourite community sites. It’s easy to establish an identity, connect with like-minded experts and start a meaningful discussion. If you want to follow me there and join the content discussion, you can track me down via my Quora page.      /london/peter-springett/2011/02/what-quora-means-for-content/ /london/peter-springett/2011/02/what-quora-means-for-content/ Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:52:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/02/content-now-a-common-consumer-currency/#number-of-comments Content. Ask anyone what that means today and you'll probably get an answer that embraces video, copy, podcasts, Tweets and blog posts as well as the publishing tools that enable you to originate and curate these messages. At least if you ask around the second floor of a marketing agency in central London. That's why I was surprised by this outdoor display ad by tram stop in the centre of Amsterdam the other day. Nothing remarkable here, except that the agency has run with the line 'Find content wherever it is' -  the first time I've seen 'content' used in a consumer context. A little bit of research reveals that this feature is the component of an indexing tool so it probably gets used more for tracking down contacts rather than media. All the same it's an important semantic leap. Now I'm just waiting for the first B2C mention of 'curate'.   /london/peter-springett/2011/02/content-now-a-common-consumer-currency/ /london/peter-springett/2011/02/content-now-a-common-consumer-currency/ Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:14:05 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/01/another-day-another-great-curation-tool/#number-of-comments I've just been trying out Cadmus for a few of the Twitter aliases that I manage. Yes, it's another tool for filtering Twitter content, but like all good social tools it does one simple thing, and it does it very well. Think of Cadmus as your dedicated trending engine. Enter your Twitter details and the software pulls up a list of the most popular topics being discussed by your followers. Not #biebersfringe, not #thingsmensay, but topics that are relevant to your followers and their communities. As well as your personal trending topics, it also pulls up a list of trending conversations, and lists where the most active conversations are taking place. In other words you can quickly see where the most important discussions are happening and start contributing as well. Tools like Cadmus are important for Metia because we manage client Twitter accounts with thousands of followers. So this is a great way to find out what's at the top of a client community agenda. In the meantime we're going to add Cadmus to our current list of curation tools. It means that we're curating the curators, but that's the topic for the next post.   /london/peter-springett/2011/01/another-day-another-great-curation-tool/ /london/peter-springett/2011/01/another-day-another-great-curation-tool/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:08:00 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2011/01/why-surfacing-content-will-be-just-as-important-as-curation-in-2011/#number-of-comments If curation grabbed the headlines in 2010, the next 12 months look set to be dominated by content surfacing. Surfacing is a way of presenting or previewing content typically embedded in links contained in Tweets, RSS feeds, Facebook and other content streams. Flipboard, the much praised iPad app is as good example. Select an RSS reader account, a Twitter list or your Facebook account, and the app builds an online magazine comprising content including copy, images and embedded video. Although Flipboard looks great, there’s more to this than eye candy. Like Paper.li, the software cleverly foregrounds content that’s often missed when scrolling through a Twitter list by prioritising Tweets with links over plain status updates.  This influences the ways that users interact with content. I’m constantly astonished by the volume shared content that I would have missed using a traditional Twitter client, for example. As a result I’m far more likely to share content or interact with the publisher (the Twitter iPad app is fantastic, but you still need an extra swipe to preview a link). Surfacing of content has other consequences. When I can see, at a glance, the quality of an image captured and enhanced by a smartphone app, I might be influenced to choose that platform the next time I upgrade my mobile contract.   It all sounds great, but there’s downside. These apps automate the curation of content, which creates problems of its own. Paper.li, another good example of a surfacing tool, has the habit of foregrounding irrelevant or plain inappropriate content. In other words, a cool interface needs to be matched with smart software that learns the content preferences of the individual users.  Apps such as my6sense curate content from Twitter, RSS feeds and pre-packaged bundles of content. But they go one step further by refining a list of top stories based on the topics and sources you select most frequently, learning from your behaviour. So the next step is to combine a neat user interface with an algorithm that acts like a good news editor, building content around the user. It’s not there yet, but I’ll predict that in 12 months the curation/editorial/surfacing model will be complete. Me? Nervous? Not quite yet. /london/peter-springett/2011/01/why-surfacing-content-will-be-just-as-important-as-curation-in-2011/ /london/peter-springett/2011/01/why-surfacing-content-will-be-just-as-important-as-curation-in-2011/ Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:07:18 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2010/12/my-phrase-of-2010-39-no-screens-at-the-table-39/#number-of-comments File under the way we live now. My six year-old godson, 10 year-old sister plus parents visited Brussels this weekend. Mum and Dad are medical consultants so not really part of the techno-marketing rabble that we know and love. However they were leaving nothing to chance and came equipped with two iPhones, an iPad and multiple productivity games apps. Note to the watching world, the discriminating pre-teens of today pick Cut the Rope over Angry Birds any day of the week, and who can blame them? Until recently the family supper time motto was 'no texting at the table'. At the end of 2010 it's 'No screens' in an attempt to blanket ban games, photo-editing, Dad's management board presentation and Mum's 2011 budget report. (None of them use Facebook or Twitter). Things are going to get better or worse, depending on your point of view. In-Stat predicts that each U.S. household will own between five and 10 internet-enabled devices for watching video by 2014. That's a lot of square eyes even before we're halfway through the decade (and a lot of middle-class nightmares). By the way, the big hit of the weekend for everyone was Scrabble. Worth checking out across most platforms if you want to keep friends and family quiet over the holidays. /london/peter-springett/2010/12/my-phrase-of-2010-39-no-screens-at-the-table-39/ /london/peter-springett/2010/12/my-phrase-of-2010-39-no-screens-at-the-table-39/ Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:17:01 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2010/12/share-and-share-alike/#number-of-comments So Google News now has a 'most shared' section. It's a great example of just how far the sharing model for content distribution has taken over the web. Not long ago we had specialists working on viral campaigns for our clients. Today, pretty much every piece of content that gets published online has a viral component, in the sense that it can be quickly shared with individuals or communities with the press of a button. You can find the new section at the bottom right hand side of the Google News page. Top story? New LinkedIn share buttons (via Mashable). Yes, the social echo chamber is as self-referential as ever, but share is still front page news, for content strategists at least. /london/peter-springett/2010/12/share-and-share-alike/ /london/peter-springett/2010/12/share-and-share-alike/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:17:23 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2010/12/getting-results-from-content-curation-applications/#number-of-comments Several content curation tools have hit computers and tablets in the past six months. Broadly speaking they fall into two categories: automatic curation, where an application pulls in content from a Twitter stream, facebook account or RSS feed; and edited curation where end users select the content themselves. I’ve already written about Flipbook a tablet app, that turns twitter streams, lists and hashtags into an electronic magazine. It makes for an engaging experience but you don’t really have that much control over what goes in (or what gets left out).Paper.li presents similar challenges. The ubiquitous Twitter newspaper is a great way of gathering and filtering information from your stream, but it can also throw up surprises, some delightful, some less so. Where Flipbook and Paper.li do work well is when you put the work in up front to prepare a carefully filtered Twitter list or seek out a consistent, reliable hashtag. We’ve been running a successful #mhealth (mobile health) Paper.li for a few months now as part of Ideaworks for Healthcare and our followers really love it. It’s also a useful way of sourcing content for additional coverage on the blog.Bit.ly bundles, Storify (and to a lesser extent Montage) give you a lot more control. With bit.ly bundles, several articles can be combined under one shortened URL. Click on this link and it takes you to a page where each article appears with a headline, thumbnail and introduction copy. When you pull these links together you can also add your own text commentary underneath each one. Typically each bundle covers the same theme or topic and gives you the opportunity to express your ideas or your personality in greater depth compared with a fragmented stream of individual tweets. Storify works based on a similar approach, except this time you get to drag and drop content from multiple sources including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr. Again, you can also add your own commentary. Storify, as the name suggests, will appeal to journalists. It’s a more versatile than Bit.ly bundles and Montage, but you need to invest the time to search and organise content into a compelling narrative. Finally, Montage, the most recent content curation-publishing tool from Microsoft Fuse Labs. Imagine building a web page from live twitter streams and news feeds, images and video and you get an idea of how Montage works. It also has a fabulous user interface that helps you to divide a page up into tiles of content. Here’s mobile health again, this time as a Montage page. Again, you need to be very careful when including live feeds. Either seek out streams where you have plenty of control, or make the client aware of any risks. In both cases you should run the page unpublished and monitor content carefully before pushing it live.There’s something else to add here. You don’t need to be a designer or a developer to use these tools. But to make them work properly, you do need to have good editorial skills. As a member of the Metia content team, it’s good see new publishing applications that cater to writers as well as developers and designers. They also force us to think about simple page design, branding and even ease of use. Telling a great story with words is one thing, being able to reinforce that within the wider user experience becomes a real pleasure thanks to these new applications. /london/peter-springett/2010/12/getting-results-from-content-curation-applications/ /london/peter-springett/2010/12/getting-results-from-content-curation-applications/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:14:55 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2010/12/no-more-boring-data/#number-of-comments Recommending the Joy of Stats, a TV documentary that goes right to the heart of so many of the projects that Metia teams are working on right now (available to view until December 20, UK only).Whether you're involved in data driven design and programming, or writing about the latest advances in finance, healthcare or just about any other industry you'll find something to inspire you here.Plus it's presented by Hans Rosling, whose TED appearances are already the stuff of legend.If you don't have time to see the full programme, then have a look at the trailer below. Thrilling stuff. /london/peter-springett/2010/12/no-more-boring-data/ /london/peter-springett/2010/12/no-more-boring-data/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:10:16 +0100 Peter Springett /london/peter-springett/2010/08/behind-the-paywalls-content-is-starting-to-deliver-value/#number-of-comments If you stick content behind a paywall, then you'd better make sure that it starts delivering real value above and beyond your 'free' competitors. Look carefully and there are hints of how some organisations are doing exactly that. Here's a good example from The Times. [View:http://vimeo.com/13007086] There's a lot to take from this. I'm as guilty as anyone of throwing around the phrase 'innovative user experience'. But this is a perfect example of how original content that takes advantage of a new UX paradigm (the touch wheel) and combined it with a mass of publicly available data. More importantly still, the data backs up a compelling but also emotional story about how the wealth divide in England impacts mortality rates, especially between the north and south of the country. A strong story has an even stronger foundation by making the background data accessible and visually compelling to the reader. In turn, it also empowers the patient-consumer and makes providing organisations, in this case the U.K. National Health Service, more accountable to citizens.   /london/peter-springett/2010/08/behind-the-paywalls-content-is-starting-to-deliver-value/ /london/peter-springett/2010/08/behind-the-paywalls-content-is-starting-to-deliver-value/ Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:01:00 +0100