Daily Show archive blocked for UK: Channel Four display several layers of stupid

UK fans of America's leading satirical TV show got a shock today when they discovered they could no longer view the show on its website.

The website has forums where overseas fans of the show have been venting their rage at the block. Not just UK viewers but those from Ireland who can no longer watch the show on the UK licensee Channel Four's website yet also remain blocked from watching it on the show's website, apparently because C4 hasn't bothered to tell the Daily Show's channel, Comedy Central, that it's blocked the Irish. People in the rest of Europe have no such problems.

There's no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country's license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show's producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.

What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four's actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK - yet Channel Four is only showing the past week's shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can't watch clips from 2000.

What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.

When the Daily Show's sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn't watch clips on their website - but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel's show and made it far more likely that you'd bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4's block request included blocking embedded clips.

At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!


Here's another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I'm from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.
 What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All - one would assume - in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!

I hope that the show's resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.

Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer's ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won't even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show's forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.

Addendum: Tony Lee has commented on the cross-post of this on the Online Journalism blog that:

Channel 4 denies the above.  I wrote them and got the following response:

Thank you for contacting us regarding THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART.

We would advise that although we do indeed hold UK broadcast rights for the series, the overall rights to the series are owned by Comedy Central themselves. Content on their website, as with other American networks, is blocked to residents not in the US. These blocks are placed by the channel themselves, not Channel 4.

It is the same with content on UK broadcasters website being blocked to those outside the UK. The reason for this is copyright and broadcasting licence terms.

We would suggest that you therefore direct your complaint on this issue to Comedy Central. You can do so via the following link:

http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Channel 4 is not responsible for third-party websites.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us here at Channel 4 and for your interest in our programming.

Regards,

Rachel Salinger
Channel 4 Viewer Enquiries

This is the exact opposite of what Comedy Central say on their forum - so I will post this statement there and see what they have to say for themselves.

There is an actly petition:

petition @ComedyCentral to  lift the IP block for #dailyshow video online UK http://act.ly/mr RT to sign #actly

Addendum two


A fix has been posted on the Daily Show fan forum (ironically) http://forum.thedailyshow.com/tds/board/message?board.id=support_2008_oct&message.id=2897#M2897 (and it works)

When Aussie TV beats British TV

Marketing is one of the biggest influencers on our world, yet when did you last see a TV show devoted to it?

Australia's ABC (the equivalent of the BBC or PBS) has the Gruen Transfer, a fantastic show which is a 101 on how to do two things: make the subject extremely entertaining and also make US stop and think about how this huge industry works and affects our lives.

Where does the title come from?

In shopping mall design, 'the Gruen transfer' refers to the moment when consumers respond to 'scripted disorientation' cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques). Recently, the Gruen transfer has been popularised by Douglas Rushkoff.

The show is hosted by comedian Wil Anderson with a panel of advertising industry experts. The two regular panelists are Russel Howcroft of George Patterson Y&R and Todd Sampson of Leo Burnett. Apparently the concept has been sold to TV production companies in the UK, Denmark, France, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain.

Here's an example of how they combine entertainment with stuff to make you think. Each week they ask two agencies to 'sell the unsellable'.



During last season's penultimate show one agency took the pitch of 'fat pride' one step too far for the ABC's lawyers and produced an ad which didn't get shown. It also didn't win the panelists over - and I agree with them. Here's the ad along with a panel discussion which was only made available online.

It's interesting that the professionals get that the in-your-face abuse of other groups represented in the ad's content, in order to say discrimination-is-discrimination, smothers the overall point. As straight non-Jewish blokes they didn't viscerally feel this but knew it was there. The poofter joke does smack me in the face and totally downgrades what the ad-maker is trying to achieve.





In the best traditions of publicly funded broadcasters failing to police their distributed content, both series can be found on YouTube.

Postscript: I spoke too soon, this has been removed for 'copyright violations'. The spot where the pitch and the discussion was supposed to be hosted - http://www.antiprejudicead.net - is down. The pitch's existence seems to have been removed from the ABC entirely. The pitch itself is still on YouTube, but the debate has been removed.

Now I know Aussie TV and it has some crapolistic shows which make the worst of UK TV look Shakespearean. But it also has a whole terrestrial channel, SBS, devoted to largely 'foreign' programming.

The only non-English speaking UK (non-cable) TV programming we see is out-of-the-park brilliant Wallander and the occasional French film on BBC4. The former is only being shown here three years after Swedish broadcast because we deigned to make an English version of it. We have a shrunken world view as a result of bad programming.

Another thing Aussie TV has is lots of US imports which our rather Little-Englander viewpoint keeps away from primetime. This means that all Aussies know one of the best comedies of all time - Seinfeld - well and - because of the BBC's antics - Brits only know of it through word-of-mouth.

Another thing many a Brit has commented on is how bad UK TV comedy has got over the past few years and in one area this has got politically serious: satire. Yes, there are plenty of Radio Four series which take the piss in a sharp, upset-the-government way, but apart from the (rather weak) Bremner, Bird and Fortune what have we got which stacks up?

By contrast Australia has The Chasers War On Everything (which comes out of a preceding rich satirical TV tradition). This show is so sharp it has landed its stars in serious legal trouble on numerous occasions.

Can you imagine any current UK comedy show doing this?

People + Power - Iran: Inside the protests

This is a really excellent account from a reporter from Al-Jazeera English in Tehran of the protests. Starting from the election results announcement she follows students and protesters and gets a unique perspective.

23' well spent to watch.

BBC making a big gay effort on 40 years since Stonewall

It makes a nice change to be praising the BBC on LGBT content but this week they are carrying some excellent programming.

This is an interview with Martin Boyce, about his memories of the night it all kicked off, 40 years ago on Sunday.



BBC Radio 2 has Stonewall: The Riots That Triggered the Gay Revolution on Tuesday, with legend Tom Robinson.

The BBC News website has an excellent feature, 'Stonewall gave me new gay role models', by David Carter, author of Stonewall: the riots that sparked the gay revolution.

Justin Wells had Armistead Maupin on his 'Americana' Radio 4 show yesterday, reflecting on 40 years of 'Gay Power'.

Today on Thursday had on Jim Fouratt, who was there in 1969.

Let's just hope it isn't another several years before we get such a feast.

A SocMed history moment

This has caused quite a stir. The White House press corps seem mightily upset that some blogger upset 'protocol' and got in a question to Obama.

Only it wasn't just some question, or just some blogger.

Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who's been doing near 24/7 stellar work aggregating and blogging news from Iran, got a question at the press conference, delivering a query from an Iranian reader about whether Obama would ever now recognize an Ahmadinejad government

As Arianna noted, the press pack hated it. Here's the moment.



Pitney talked first about the live-blog he's been running to Rachel Maddow.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Here he speaks to C-SPAN's Washington Journal explaining the question and how he got it, and how he 'orchestrated' its delivery with the White House.



This is a historical moment. A question from Iranians, via social media, gets asked of the US President. Mark this one down ...

Our answer to Maher, Colbert and Stewart?

I just love David Mitchell. Not only is he a brilliant comedian who can do slapstick as well as satire but he's a great writer whose columns never fail to hit the spot. He's smart, witty and not shy of being political. He hosts The Unbelievable Truth on Radio Four expertly. His appearance on Question Time saw him displaying all these talents with no script writer.

I'd vote for him.

I've discovered he has a YouTube channel where he delivers some excellent monologues like this one on TV rudeness:



I've never understood the appeal of shows like Dragon's Den either. I guess I like my wit more on the Gore Vidal level than the Ballantyne.

All his skills make him, IMO, just about the only candidate to do a UK version of the Daily Show or, even better, Real Time with Bill Maher. That is, world class political satire.

Maher just had Gore Vidal on his show and, rare for Vidal, more than held his own with him. Similarly ranty Marcus Brigstock once tried the Daily Show format and failed miserably.

Postscript: Jon Stewart is god

The Indie has a piece today asking Where’s our Jon Stewart?

This is in response to the, apparently, international fallout of Stewart's ball-shattering interview with business cable channel host Jim Cramer.

The article (rightly) largely laments the demise of British TV satire. But in the wake of the Cramer interview I think some of the other comment I've read is right: we don't need another 'hard-hitting' interviewer. Stewart delivered better than Paxman or Humphrys has ever done (more wit, less arrogance) but we still have far better interviewing than the US MSM has had for years.

The article also laments that chat shows like Graham Norton's don't have the political content that someone like Letterman has, but, again, they're not filling some MSM void. Plus Norton pushes the envelope on a different sort of 'politics'.

What we do lack for sure is decent TV satire. On radio we have it in spades.

Family Guy Spoofs Christian Bale

Oh my. That was quick.

Sortof safe for work.

NSFW: Every swear word ever uttered on The Sopranos in chronological order

the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.

27 minutes of f*****g.

Priceless. And somewhat, er, dedicated.

For the, er, 'socio-political' context of f**k, looking forward to this doco.

Notes on a Dirty Island

Bill posing with Wombles

Notes on a Dirty Island was a really good Panorama fronted by Bill Bryson about litter.

Yeah, I can't link to a persistent video and - of course - I can't embed.

[Shakes fist] C'mon BBC!

You will find it on iplayer and a google video search, but not for long. Otherwise, here's the sole YouTube clip.

In an otherwise excellent report there was one aspect very noticeable by its absence - the responsibility of business. The sole aspect which covered this was about bottles and cans and how a deposit scheme is opposed by industry because it's "not profitable". And seeing someone like Joan Ruddock parroting this industry line summed up nu labor's creepiness like nothing else.

The issue isn't just lazy, chavvy Brits. It's also the producers of products taking some - any - responsibility for what happens after they're sold. Think rubbish around fast-food outlets and you can see the area Bill chose to ignore.

This was the only thing which marred an otherwise excellent. rare raising of this usually ignored agenda.

Oh jeez! Not the sheep!

Dutch ad for free chocolate condom giveaway in equivalent of Radio Times. Very popular with Gene Robinson, apparently.

"Shut the hell up"

Anyone who thinks American news is a monolith, Keith Olbermann is an exception. On his MSNBC show he goes on this quite fantastic rant against Bush, which I commend to you:

• To Bush, "freedom is just a brand name,"
• To Bush's statement that he was "told by people" that there were WMDs in Iraq: "People? What people?... Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress's throat, the way you jammed it down the nation's throat."

Substitute Blair for Bush and - yes - this is relevant to us.

Every Simpsons couch

Best HIGNFY in years

I was in tears from beginning to end. So totally f**king hysterical it hurt. Blessed is a national treasure.

Part One

Part two

Google Reader clips catch up

• Grand Theft Auto: Prostitute killing is a big hit
  Feministing drawing attention to one of the hideous promo vids. Catherin Bennett had a good point in the Observer though today - oldies should play it before criticising, plus game play has some researched benefits: I'm game for Grand Theft Auto. You should be too.
• China and the Internet
  HT: Richard Sambrook. More on their censorship regime.
• So long, Canada
  Salon. Zealous new border regime - to the point of stopping fire trucks and ambulances - makes Canadians foreigners.
• Websites go crazy tracking urban eccentrics
  Wired. New local website trend creates new 'micro-celebrities'.
• I would like to pay my council tax please
  Lindsay from Ideal Government's travails trying to give money to Southwark council.
  
  
• If you get free data, what will you do with it?
  Guardian. Now it's out there, what to do with it. 'Can anyone think what you’d do with a lot of weather data?'
• In pursuit of Digital Inclusion
  Helen Milner from local online centres describes the positive economic spin-offs from addressing the - enormous - digital divide.
  
  The Guardian newspaper recently calculated the cost of dealing with the 1.3 million most disadvantaged people in the UK at a staggering £44,538 per person*
  
  Liz, somewhere in her 80s, who is a regular at a UK online centre in the South West. She keeps in touch with family, friends and community services by email, maintains her independence by getting groceries and prescriptions delivered to her door, and finds pension, health and other information at the click of an adapted mouse. She’s also made innumerable friends at the centre, follows hobbies on the internet and reads large text books online.
  
  
• A day’s reporting
  Dave Briggs @ the £295 at head 'digital inclusion' conference. Shurely shome misshtake here ... ?
• POLL: Bush more problematic for McCain than Wright is for Obama
  Via Crooks and Liars.
• How do we fund journalism in future?
  Roy Greenslade reporting from Aussie conference. He's pessimistic.
• Facebook and privacy
  Rory Cellan-Jones about 'how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook'.
  
  
• Tel Aviv Mayor Announces Monument to Gay Victims of Holocaust
  Which is wonderful news.
• Microsoft's Vista Struggling As Business Customers Snub It
• Public sector blogging in the Guardian
  Via Dave Briggs. Patchy article. Highlights Richard Brunstrom, chief constable of North Wales police.
• BBC iPlayer On Virgin Media TV
  Lovely. Just a pity VirginMedia interactive is so b****y snails pace ...

Not on reader

• Mick Phythian from Leicester Uni is running research into electronic government channel measurement via greatemancipator.wordpress.com
  
  If you have anything to do with this, please go and help him out by filling in the short survey and maybe commenting.
  
  
• New and very interesting EU project the 'Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe'. It aims to build a platform for interoperability assets and services available to the public sector and its stakeholders in Europe, focusing on semantic (ie. content) interoperability.
• Not new (but just seen it) Farmsubsidy.org is a project coordinated by EU Transparency, a non-profit organisation in the UK and Kaas og Mulvad, a data consultancy in Denmark. The aim is to obtain detailed data relating to payments and recipients of farm subsidies in every EU member state and make this data available in a way that is useful to European citizens. The project has brought together journalists, analysts and campaigners in more than ten countries.
• The word on the web: 7 keyword trending tools
  Dan Taylor has a useful survey.
• The Most Dangerous Men in Kenya
  Fascinating, rare interview with young men in Kisumu, on the banks of Lake Victoria and scene of some of the worst violence.
  
• Nepal gets its first gay representative in parliament
  
  
• And finally ...
  Mommy 2.0 - A new picture book about plastic surgery aims to explain why mom is getting a flatter tummy and a 'prettier' nose.
  

  "My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

How embedding video will help the BBC

The BBC has said that it is investigating embeddable videos as part of their upgrade allowing videos to be played in-page.

The screenshot above is of 'Survivors of the Titanic' audio, a radio interview from 1936 with the most senior surviving officer Commander CH Lightoller from the huge archive. It's a really good example of how allowing embedding instead of the current 'share it' options will potentially massively boost their traffic — wouldn't it help sell this content and encourage further clicks to yet more previously 'hidden' content if you could click and play this audio right here? And as they are to show ads to overseas viewers (for which the technology is now fairly well developed) embedding will, potentially dramatically, increase their revenues.

The Titanic is a subject of huge enduring interest and the BBC's online archive is stock full of gems. I wonder what the actual number of plays where it's currently located, buried in the archive, gives it. When I went to Digg it, I saw no-one had done this before. Hardly surprising.

People do create viral BBC content already.



The top one - Amy Winehouse on Jools Holland's show has 8.5m views. Currently, Mitchell + Webb clips are viral, and that show is thus being promoted on BBC World.

Their top viral - 640 blog posts is a lot and that's how the ViralVideo Chart ranks - is the Panorama show 'Sex crimes and the Vatican' from 2006. It has been deleted in the version appearing in the chart - but has reappeared elsewhere in an embeddable version. The subject area appears heavily policed on YouTube - see the number of deletions in this list - but less so on Google Video. It's hard to understand why one arm of Google removes and another allows. But with the appearance of sites like LiveLeak, policing distribution is much harder anyway.

I'm not sure whether the BBC had any role is asking for copyright material to be removed in that instance some while back but there is so much copyright material already being distributed now that the conclusion can only be that it's policy not to bother policing it. Though some have been - a Doctor Who clip and something from BBC London about the London 2012 Olympics Logo — deleted on YouTube but there on LiveLeak, the Doctor Who clip simply reposted to YouTube. Perhaps policed (not at all effectively) by others than the BBC. And perhaps that's the point, the resources needed can only come from dedicated people like the Scientologists.

What can only hugely benefit them is deliberately encouraging viral distribution, rather than forcing people back to a website to view, or hiding the viral options alongside other, less valuable, distribution methods like email. Some of the US Networks, especially NBC, are doing exactly that and get the benefit from their own ad plays, wherever the video's playing.



What these networks do is police though. They want you using their embed, not something taped off TV. This allows not just ad play but also cross-promotion and anything else you might develop and throw down the pipe - the pipe you control. Is the BBC going to be thus changing their policy and throw resources at policing once they get embedding started?

This is early days - even for, for example, networks like NBC who are leading the pack they don't seem to be encouraging complimentary marketing like these parodies of Heroes on their official site and thus helping foster a community.

The BBC said back in March, in an aside, and reinforced this in response to my comments, that allowing embedding would "eventually" happen. The BBC has so much great content, including huge amounts of archive content of huge interest like their holdings about the Titanic, which is of wide, world-wide, interest that, especially with them adding in ad plays to monetise, they just can't lose.

And it's not just attracting overseas viewers but also through UK social networks - what a great way to get the benefit potential of BBC news content being seen by younger people for example. I think this should come right up their list of priorities from asides about 'eventually' to 'by around this date' ...

NB: Neither ITV or Channel Four have any interest in allowing embedding. More fool them.

Previous: Embedding video: why isn't it obvious to the MSM?

Did the detox happen?

Well I managed a week without posting but only one day with no computer or TV. I did read a lot (Matthew Parris, Edmund White and history of Islam and C19th homosexuality) and potter around the garden between showers. Completely turning off would require being somewhere without access to anything, I think. That wouldn't bother me but if it's there ...

The excuses:

• I really wanted to check the reaction to the Philadelphia Primary, video + blogs, just listening to the BBC radio news would have me gnashing my teeth, wanting to see what's really going on.
• Same with Zimbabwe news, which is largely on blogs although the BBC has been much better than with Kenya plus Zimbabwean blogs are much thinner on the ground.
  
• I just don't watch much TV but do watch shows online, like the Daily Show and the fantabulous Bill Maher's RealTime and catch-up on BBC iPlayer (my rare forays into Channel Four's online offering just emphasise how thin it is but missing ads is great). You can't watch yesterday's Daily Show online, so you have to catch it before it expires (or wait three months). I need my satire break and UK shows don't cut it (even Bremner, Bird + Fortune most of the time). About the only 'appointment to view' TV for me for months was Glenn Close in Damages and the close-up to Tigers show.
• I needed to check email to see if a friend was OK.
• 'Detoxing' for me includes SimCity.
  

I wasn't reading much online, though, or checking feeds and as I learnt from my break last year - you don't miss that much that's mind-numbingly vitally important.

I did see my backyard birds finally start using the water that's there for them and I love this every year, the babies starting to appear. This year they haven't nested in the planters though, thank god. Seeing plants 'come back' (and what hasn't + needs replacing, I have a habit of putting several plants together and eventually one bully takes over) is lovely too + it's been warm enough to spend time outside. Boring, I know, but that was the idea of the detox I think?

Why the posts will be less this week

Adbusters is a great Canadian group, most famous for their fab spoof ads like these ones.






They've run 'TV turn-off week' for a few years and it's transmogrified into 'Mental detox week'.



And I'm going to try it! Do the garden, read, spring clean ... forget checking the feeds for a few days. Should be interesting because I do have a routine which revolves around this machine :{

As they put it:

Simple, but not at all easy.

Google Reader clips catch up

• Twitter at the tipping point
  [NB: I'm leaving my original text but Rory tells me this is meant completely ironically - read it now in that light!] From BBC dot.life. Contains an opening paragraph of such sheer onanistic pretentiousness it's worth repeating for a good belly-laugh:
  

  Suddenly everyone is talking Twitter. Just as Facebook hit the mainstream a year ago, so the short message social network has become the media flavour of this month - to such an extent you can even find me talking about it on the Today programme.
  
  But I'm not convinced that Twitter is really going to spread, in the way Facebook did, beyond the digerati into millions of people's lives. What's more, I'm struggling to understand the business model.

• Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand (David Barstow/New York Times)
  Investigative reporting, the sort they didn't do before the war.
  
• Mail Online's new look
  Jemina Kiss @ the grauniad. According to comments, it's a 2MB load! Really bad design as well.
  
• New ways into blogs
  The BBC's blog comments problem fixed (but not the 502/404 error message, now several years old)
• No Whining About the Media - Three quick points on the Democratic debate last night: (David Brooks/Campaign Stops)
  Memorandum has Brooks' defence and the critics of Brooks (that's why I like their presentational format for such online debate).
  
  
• Postcards From Yo Momma
  HT: Etre. Really funny true-life emails to offspring.
  
• PoliticsWeb2.0: On the Future of Government in the Digital Era
  TechPresident has a good series of 'semi-liveblogging' from a London conference. Opens with a report of Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, presentation covering UK eGov.
  

  Right now the UK govt has embarked on a high risk "supersite" strategy of centralizing e-govt services on two sites: DirectGov and BusinessLink (while closing down 2500 disparate e-govt sites at the same time). Both have low brand recognition and problems competing with other sources.

  This is what I've been saying for a year!
  
  
• Obama Targets Pennsylvania Voters with Pure Persuasion Ads
  ClickZ. This is new. Before they were just pleas for money.
  
• Blog On Blogging
  More BBC.
  

  The act of blogging wasn't, and still isn't, entirely uncontroversial, even here at the BBC
  

• Twitter spam spirals out of control
• If Robert Scoble is right, then Web 2.0 is dead
  A current Silicon Valley meme. Something to do with content being repurposed.
• Networking Journalism
  Great stuff from Bill Thompson who says:
  

  What has happened so far [to MSM] can be compared to the mild tremors felt before an earthquake.
  
  As the internet spreads there are more and more places where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.
  

  This would be the death of the 'foreign correspondent' (that's you, Orla Guerin, praise be).
  
• The Pleasures of the Flesh
  George Monbiot on why we should eat less meat.
  
• Downing Street removes Labour Party link
  I had a delightful spar with the fierce looking (check the typeface on his blog) Tory wideboy who found a hole in Downing Street's bleedin' edge. Yes, the phrase 'grow up' was used.
  
  
• Civicsurf in action
  Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year.
• Hillary Clinton To Appear On "Colbert Report"
  And it was dull. As was Stephen dazzled by Michelle Obama. Is he morphing into David Letterman?
  
• [Paul Bradshaw] User generated content? Or great place for a prank? Sky gets photoshopped on Marathon day
  This was truly hysterical.
  
• Social media and the dark side of doing PR
  Simon Collister on the growth of 'ghost blogging'.
• Top 10 UK search terms: social networks dominate the list

Not on Reader:

• The First 21st-Century Campaign
  National Journal overview by Ronald Brownstein on how the Democrats are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying TV ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout (and hence have a big edge for November).
  Time also has a piece on this - Why Democrats Rule the Web
• Youth Work and Social Networking Research Project
  Very interesting blog with some new research.
• Will economics put newspapers to bed before the readers do?
  Justin Williams blogging in the Telegraph
• Implications of Google Transit in the UK
  Tim Howgego has a very in-depth analysis on Google's latest project.
• Could the web win it in London?
  The BBC adds a bit more detail on my post Ken's already lost online but doesn't actually answer that question

Ken's already lost online

Here's the latest video from Ken Livingstone's campaign



Er, where are the gays? Nowhere. I sat through all the vids on the YouTube channel. Absent. And this isn't a minor point - gays are a really big part of the London electorate, maybe a million Londoners, and a lot of them are not voting for Ken and practically all of them use the Interweb. AKA - in this tight election, there's your winning margin.

A gay targeted vid would 100% definitely go viral, but the whole vid campaign is just .... I'm holding my head in my hands. This is just one example. Views for these vids are in the hundreds, which is pathetic and just not worth bothering with unless you're going to at least attempt to make them go viral.

They're actually running Google ads (which they need to, he isn't top search hit on his own name, though it has improved), but the link sends you to a 'Be Involved page' - not what it's advertising. Basic, basic 'I could scream' f*** up. YouTube isn't plugged on the main landing page. The website is text, text, stale, stale.

Are they (I doubt it) and if not, why not, involving tekkie supporters in this campaign? There's a lot of donkey work which can be 'devolved'. Or are they just whingeing on about 'not enough time' or money? Is it just 'top down' like Hillary's campaign?

Not that Boris is doing that much better. Try a YouTube search for 'Boris Johnson' and his channel is nowhere. And the viral vids on Boris (thousands of views) aren't complimentary. On BackBoris, YouTube is pretty much invisible.They should thank god for Iain Dale and the other Tory bloggers who actually have a significant web presence. On the plus side, they're running no Google text ads (they don't need to, he's #1 for his name) and Boris is dominating searches:



Paddick, now that he has some real expertise on board, has a in-yer-face great site. This is how to do it and I am hugely impressed. It's pretty much a carbon copy of US and Australian tried'n'tested methods (because they work). With some amateurish LibDem stuff embarrassingly tacked on at the bottom.



Here's his (snaps fingers) wor-king, wor-king, wor-king lead video:



Though it's sitting on a LibDem channel not a Brian Paddick channel, which is a mistake. This branding I can imagine someone who knows what they're doing yelling about - and losing. Actually, it smacks of 'we're going to lose but please vote for some Libdems ... ' And is Brian saying brianpaddick.com, brianpaddick.com, every chance he gets. Can't because for some bizarre reason he doesn't own it. It's brianpaddick.org - and is that being plugged at every single opportunity? Er, I doubt it. Why bother? He's wooden on TV.

Come on Ken's campaign! I have emailed suggestions but they're ignored. I have the button but they don't list me, just the in-crowd. Do we have to beg or are you plain deaf? It's both tiresome and a losing strategy.