marypcbuk: (Default)
Tim Anderson wonders if clause 13 of the Live T&Cs is bad news for Office Live. I wonder how much we expect for free just because it's online.

Clause 13 says Live comes with no warranty, guarantee or other certainties. So should you put data there? Yes, but you should never have only one copy of anything. Will Live lose your data? I doubt it. How do I know? Well, I think I'd quantify the danger of loss of data by looking at the details Microsoft publishes about how it runs the MSN data centres and how much of that practice is common with the way it runs the BPOS data centres. I'd compare it to the Danger setup on the basis that MSN is a system Microsoft has built up itself and uses to trial cloud strategies and Danger was something it bought in and didn't care about (and factor in my view of E&D as a division that doesn't manage follow through qv RROD). With respect to Dave I'd suggest that a free service is very different from a pay-for cloud service like Azure where Microsoft customers have already had changes, and where they have financially-backed SLAs, which a private cloud is going to have to do without. And then I'd think like a lawyer and assume that the purpose of clause 13 is to stop people treating the service as infallible and then suing Microsoft when they lose the only copy of their wedding photos or their dissertation or the spreadsheet they run their busness in. What's the service agreement for Google Docs or any other free cloud storage system and how much more protection does it offer?
marypcbuk: (Default)
Everything I know about Web 2.0, I learned at AOL. I plunged in with the idea of bringing a magazine's worth of content every week to an audience the size of a daily newspaper, but I also knew that everything I'd done online personally had been about community, conversation and interaction. That a conversation could be distributed and asynchronous but as long as it engaged the mind and encouraged full responses rather than just the AOL joke(me too!) the medium mattered less than the message - although I also knew there were people I couldn't stand online who were great in person, so I tend to think online conversation supplements rather than replaces face to face friendship. Our highest traffic area was the download section - and building up UK libraries of individually uploaded files to replace the US content took a loooong time - and the gateways out to real Internet services. But the areas we built community around, with the help of the AOL volunteers and the odd special guest, where the ones that thrived. I'd be trying to explain it to people who'd heard Steve Case's 'content is king' mantra, which evolved into six 'c's I don't know if I can even remember and I found myself using the phrase 'they come for content and they stay for community'; if we couldn't have something new every day, every hour, every minute we could give them places to chat, real time or in message boards, with bouncers to deal with the trolls - and that's how we grew the audience.

At a certain point I found myself confronted with a bullying editorial director who declared that advertising is content too, and with the same US management team who'd dismantled the volunteer team in the US and realised I could no longer do the job I wanted to do there. But just as Simon built a blog-style CMS years before anyone else (and the equivalent of HP's Snapfish years before that too), I was doing social content over a decade ago.So I was slightly amused by the press release in my inbox today from UKFast announcing that 'Online Communities Sustain Paid-For News Model'. And that community has to have real content and real community; if the "better, more tailored promotions" suggested by someone called Mark Garner from a site I'm not familiar with Planet Confidential are advertising rather than content your profile says you're interested in they're straight into AOL, the eyeball years -  because advertising is NOT content like any other. Yes, magazines have always run sponsored features and advertorial, but it's clearly labelled and I believe all the readers can tell it apart from independent editorial - just as they know the difference between the salesperson in the shop recommending something and a friend saying how good their new camera is. It's about agenda as much as expertise...
marypcbuk: (Default)
Mr No Privacy has spoken again; no-one was harmed by Buzz (having your abusive ex find out where you work isn't harm, is it?) and we were all just confused about Buzz. Our bad, for worrying, eh? 


 
And when the Buzz team said people were 'rightfully upset'? Nothing like responsibility going all the way to the top, is there?  (and this is nothing like...)
marypcbuk: (Default)
In this analogy, you are the hog...

I don't grant the conclusion but the premise of this little story is excellent; for a free online service, users are not customers - they're ingredients for the business model

The hogosphere reacts to Buzzsaw

EDIT
thanks to ackicif for extracting the URL - I have no idea why the lj web interface borked the link because I didn't write the HTML by hand!
marypcbuk: (Default)
Action on Author's Rights points out that to the government, authors wanting to be paid for their work and control their licensing is seen as a 'logjam'.

"The governments of France and Germany sent briefs to the court urging the rejection of the settlement. The government of India made diplomatic representations to the government of the United States.

In recent weeks, the sorry truth has been emerging: in Britain the New Labour government supports the Google Book Settlement, and has done from the start."

If you;re wondering about the point of view of the author - rather than whether it means you can get cheap ebooks - have a read of http://www.gillianspraggs.com/gbs/GBS_survival_aid.html

marypcbuk: (Default)
$20 for a video or $2,000? $15 or $150 for an article? Do people want quality writing and clips with valuable information or vague details bashed out at speed on a content production line? My career is predicated on the former; Demand's 'answer factory' is using search analytics to churn out the latter. A video that's shot on good equipment but in such a hurry that the presenter isn't in focus; maybe that doesn't matter in postage-stamp clips on YouTube. A crying child in the background of the video; does it matter if all the content provider cares about is the ad money they'll get from advertisers who will pay to be on the same page? Demand has huge breadth and variable depth; they won't get a reputation for quality, but are people loyal to that any more?

Closing the gap between what readers and viewers want and what you commission as an editor and pitch as a writer could deliver fantastic content; or it could deliver low-quality fodder to slap ads on. Am I optimistic enough that quality will win out or am I going to be out of a job?

WIRED: The answer factory

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