Month: July 2006

Lifeguard
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Hi,I am taking a break from blogging for a few days but will be back at it on Tuesday in the meantime I can recommend Bob Cringely’s weekly column which this week talks about YouTube, its licence changes, intellectual property rights and the whole phenomena of YouMedia.

Three interesting parts to it:– YouTube doesn’t believe in the warm fuzziness of web 2.0 companies i.e: Google’s don’t be evil mantra. But then Flickr has had its Nipplegate as well, so no surprises

– YouTube is going to make money by pillaging and repurposing other peoples content to their hearts content, how will affect the social forces that have driven YouMedia? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: the mass media begat media literate consumers that eventually became innoculated from conventional advertising. Also is there a market for them to charge PR companies for the privilege of not having their viral videos subverted, relicenced and remixed with competitor messages?– YouMedia is the emperors new clothes, there is evidence that it works, but the companies at the forefront of it often don’t really get it. They talk a good game on PowerPoint but that doesn’t really mean squat. Something that I have suspected for a long time, but Bob got a frank admission from some 30-something executives from a large unnamed media company. There again this kind of makes sense, the hippy movement could only really be understood in retrospect.

To many PR people time tracking is as offensive as any swear word, thankfully the interweb has once again came to the rescue. Courtesy of LifeHacker comes a downloadable paper sheet for those of you that like to mark their tracking and then put it in electronically. (I don’t get the sense of it, but there you go). For freelancers or budding the Martin Sorrell’s of this world, you could do worse than look at Toggl an online time tracking solution built on wholesome web 2.0 goodness.