January 2010 Archives - 4/5

The beauty of data and graffiti

January 9, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

The call for media companies to make more out of data has been growing for a while now, but I’ve just seen something that beautifully shows how there’s amazing ways to use data for things most of us haven’t even thought about…

Like many cool things, when I first picked up on it via The Pirate’s Dilemma, and PSFK, I wasn’t entirely sure it was real…

Anyway, this week is apparently Graffiti Markup Language Week:

GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

As an aside, is it me or are far more digitally-savvy people choosing Vimeo over Youtube?

Anyway, what’s amazing is that there’s actually a markup language for grafitti, which is a specialised XML protocol dedicated to capturing the motion data created by tagging – allowing sharing, studying, cataloguing and analysis.

There’s so much data in our everyday lives which can now be collated, aggregated, analysed, dissected, repurposed, reused, translated, displayed.

And yet comparatively little appears in mainstream news sources – although that seems to be slowly changing.

But any media, marketing or PR effort should be looking at how to effectively use public or proprietary data to inform, entertain, amaze etc..

It’s why I’m still so excited about the One Golden Square Labs project, Compare My Radio, (disclosure, I work for One Golden Square/Absolute Radio). It takes data and uses it for something noone else had done…

Other great examples include The Guardian’s Datastore - a compendium of publicly-available data which can be used for free – Paul Bradshaw has a nice look at it… Or what about Daytum, which allows you to collect and communicate your data on whatever you choose?

And the visual ways of communicating data can attract attention – particularly when we have so much text and so many moving pictures coming into our space on a daily basis…

There’s no excuse for producing anything which doesn’t have decent data behind it (I’m not suggesting 100% perfection…but so much isn’t good enough), and there’s no reason why I should accept 100% of people like something because you asked 20, and they all said yes.

And allow us to explore it, play with it, and produce our own interpretations – and export it into other places…

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Filed Under: innovation Tagged With: data, daytum, grarfitti markup language, marketing, media, pr, the guardian's datastore, visualisations

My new project is now live…

January 5, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Well, after a few late Christmas nights (But surprisingly few), I now have another digital project.

Having spent years creating content and working for a variety of big and small publishers, it felt odd not having an least one working demonstration of how I’d propose digital publishing can work. Since switching to marketing full time as a career, and the seemingly indefinite hiatus with has afflicted Disposable Media since I left, I’d had an idea nagging at me for a while for a new site.

It’s a fairly simple idea, hopefully serving an audience which I’m hoping is passionate enough to embrace it and also show how it can become a profitable small scale business.

It’s called OnlineRaceDriver.com and the plan is to serve the huge group of people out there who put a lot of time and effort into enjoying their online racing on consoles and PCs. Some like videogames, some like cars, and some are even professional racers or keen amateurs who fancy unwinding with some less risky motorsport.

It’s joined 140char.com and this site as part of my miniscule publishing empire. The plan is to overhaul 140char shortly, redesigning and refocussing it. And I’m more motivated than ever, as OnlineRaceDriver has already got two great collaborators involved with potentially another joining us, and meanwhile I’ve also got a great collaborator on 140Char.

So I’m now working hard to balance an incredibly exciting and demanding day job at Absolute Radio, the demans of a young family, and three websites – and once 140char.com is complete, I’m thinking it’s time for a makeover here as well.

That should keep me busy for most of 2010!

Incidentally, if you’re interested in possibly contributing to any of the three sites, whether it’s content, design or development, let me know… Follow the About link above for my contact details…

Oh, and if you happen to like the look and feel of OnlineRaceDriver, then you’ll be please to know it’s based extensively on the Metro Theme from Studiopress (affiliate links). It’s cost effective, really easy to work with, and they’ve got some really nice alternatives on their site. And if I couldn’t break it yet, you know it’s got to be pretty good!

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Filed Under: Blogging, Digital Publishing, Videogames, website design Tagged With: blogs, Digital Publishing, online racing, onlineracedriver, websites

Solving Feedburner Feedsmith plugin problems with WordPress 2.9

January 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton 13 Comments

If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.9 like me, you might have found that the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin recommended by Google and Feedburner has now stopped working. In fact, I couldn’t even upload it to a new site which hasn’t been upgraded to 2.9.

There’s been no word from Feedburner about this (No surprise, since their original Feedsmith plugin page itself returns an error and they appear to have taken a vow of silence since being acquired by Google).

Luckily some of the other Feedburner plugins work with 2.9. I’m currently using and recommending the FD Feedburner plugin by John Watson. Just install the plugin, enter your Feedburner feed address (The options are under the plugin menu), and you’re done.

(Note, the redirect may not go into action until you make a new post after installing the plugin – but if you create a test post and then delete it, it seems to work fine)

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Filed Under: Blogging, wordpress Tagged With: fd feedburner plugin, feedburner feedsmith, plugin, problems, wordpress, wordpress 2.9

Real investments in virtual worlds continue

January 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton 6 Comments

I was pretty surprised to see social media blog Mashable is ‘utterly baffled‘ by someone investing a record $330,000 in a virtual space station in the online MMORPG Entropia Universe, despite the fact they themselves quote figures of $600 million invested in virtual worlds in January 2009 alone, and the $2 billion virtual economy in China.

Don’t forget back in 2004, David Storey paid $26,500 in Entropia, then Jon Jacobs invested $100,000 in a virtual space station in Entropia in November 2005, and of course Anshe Chung became a millionaire via Second Life in 2006.

Apparently both David and Jon have made their money back and more. Meanwhile back in 2004, Julian Dibbell wrote Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot about his attempt to match or increase his income by trading in Ultima Online – he also wrote a great blog about the experience.

What’s surprising is that the Mashable author, and probably 50% of those commenting, still express disbelief that investing in a virtual good can be worthwhile, despite the fact that we’re all happy to discuss investments in websites, or even in media companies. If your media company goes bust, you might get a share in a building and some outdated PCs locked on a defunct corporate network, but the real value is in the minds of the employees – another virtual asset!

And given the economic climate, I’m not sure I’d count any investment as being comparitively reliable – but the move is certainly towards investing in ‘idea’ companies. And of course, the rapidly expanding, already massive, social gaming companies such as Zynga. Pervasive gaming as entertainment is here, but pervasive gaming as a legitimate, recognized career follows whenever a game is designed to allow the exchange of goods by players (or the players themselves find ways to exchange – e.g. Ebay).

It’s another hugely interesting impact of gaming as the interactive entertainment medium which has risen up to compete with traditional entertainment forms (TV, radio, print), and at the same time powers so many new entertainment forms (Facebook’s gaming population is massive, as one example).

After all, in checking back through this blog’s archives, I’ve invested around 3 years in this version of the site, which only exists virtually on my hosts servers, and on a hard drive backup.

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