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12Seconds iPhone App combines microblogging and messaging

September 23, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Video microblogging 12seconds has released 12mail, to join the existing 12cast. Neither requires you to have an existing account, and whereas the earlier application would send videos to Twitter, the new app lets you send videos directly to your friends, which has far more potential for communication.

If you don’t have a 3GS you can send a picture and record an audio message on top of that – and either way, it will be direct messaged to all recipients on Twitter, or strangely posted to a user’s wall on Facebook.

The interesting thing is that I tipped the likes of Seesmic and 12Seconds as video microblogging which would grow hugely this year, but that hasn’t really happened. And the reason is I forgot to think about users more than technology – although there are some great people using video microblogging (for example @Documentally), most people are too self-conscious to be constantly updating to camera at the moment (Although the teen users of Ustream and Justin.tv etc might well disagree).

That’s why I love the fact this operates as more of a messaging service between people that know each other – the familiarity allows me to record a quick message when I don’t want to type or I want to share something visual, without worrying that the entire world will see my bad hair day.

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Filed Under: Video Microblogging Tagged With: 12mail, 12seconds, messaging, microblogging, seesmic, sending videos, twitter, video

Start the week with a great guide to multimedia journalism

September 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

There are increasing numbers of journalists and bloggers utilising every channel in multimedia to convey their stories and information, but whether you’re contemplating starting to embrace digital multimedia, or you’ve engaged in mixing text, audio, video etc for a while, you’re bound to pick up at least a couple of new tools and ideas from Mindy McAdam’s Reporters Guide to Multimedia Profiency.

It’s the single PDF compilation of her 15 excellent blog posts on the subject.

And worth reading if you’re publishing anything online, whether or not you’d define yourself as a journalist or editorial staff.

Former colleague (although we never met in person), Adam Westbrook has also been doing some brilliant guides to using multimedia and video.

And for interesting inspiration, I tend to look at Christian Payne, and spend some spare time trying to persuade friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar to spend more time doing crazy stuff and blogging about it.

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing, journalism Tagged With: audio, beginner, Digital Publishing, experts, guide, help, journalism, multimedia, video

PicPosterous – iPhone app for Posterous launches

August 20, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Posterous straddles the bridge between microblogging and lifestreaming, and although founder Sachin Agarwal definitely prefers the latter description, I’m guessing it’s of interest to you – both as a place to post and aggregate content, but also as a method for sending content out to other sites, such as Twitter.

In any case, it’s first iPhone application is now available, and PicPosterous provides an alternative to emailing all your updates.

You can send content, particularly images and videos, before you’ve registered for an account, which will mean one is automatically created for you, and visual content can also be added to an album without starting a new post.

You can’t forward links or plain text to the site, which is potentially frustrating, and another niggle is that you don’t have any control over your autoposting settings via the app, besides turning them on or off.

But, as always with Posterous, the focus is on keeping things incredibly quick and simple, and then building on that, so I’m sure the feature list will improve fairly quickly over time.

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Filed Under: Microblogging Tagged With: app, applications, images, iphone, mobile, picposterous, posterous, video

BBC reminds me of two elements of consumer satisfaction

August 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I’m a big fan of much of the work the BBC does online, and in general it does a very good job of providing a massive amount of content in a fairly logical manner.

But using the site as a consumer with a couple of urgent needs highlighted a couple of things which I think are good lessons for any website:

Multi-channel delivery:

I’m a huge fan of the BBC iPlayer, and the fact it allows me to watch good quality online and on-demand television. So on Sunday morning, I rushed to watch Match of the Day, having missed it on Saturday night (and with the Absolute Radio Fantasy Football game meaning I need to pay extra attention to every team this year!).

But the listing was greyed out – and with no reason given, I had to presume it was down to the licensing rights for the Premier League.

So it was a bit weird to be looking for something else a bit later, and stumble across it in the sport section! (Flaw here was attempting to browse my way to it, rather than using the site or Google search.)

The lesson: If you’re putting out content through two difference channels for whatever reason, then link between them! And always try to explain why someone can’t access something if they might logically think they should.

Reassurance:

The BBC carries a lot of event coverage, particularly in areas such as music, and especially sport. For example, it’s great to be able to watch the MotoGP series via the BBC, and also great to be able to see the full list of races (125 and 250cc) online, as my TV set-up seems to struggle with the Red Button Freeview channels.

But although it’s nice to see everything go live at the same time, as if a single switch somewhere brings everything to life, unless you’ve got Freeview and the website running at the same time, it isn’t that impressive. And the fact the online feed wasn’t listed from the MotoGP page of the Sport section until the video went live two minutes after the listed time meant that I probably wasn’t the only one frantically refreshing the page to see if it would appear or if there was a problem.

The lesson: If you’re covering an event that starts at a specific time, why not have a page and link ready and live in advance, which can provide a bit of reassurance for internet users? That way, we can relax knowing that everything will go live at noon, for example, rather than worrying that there’s a technical fault with 1 minute to go. Whatever happens afterwards, we’re already stressed and less likely to enjoy and appreciate your hard work!

I’m still a huge fan of the BBC, and there are hundreds of sites which could have been used for the same points – the reason it stood out for me was that I was a completely powerless consumer. Reinforcing the final lesson – always look at your website as a consumer trying to achieve something.

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