Ian Betteridge › Comments

"In which case, there's even less reason to dislike it. Think about it: How trivial, now that retweet data is metadata, would it be to create a list function in TweetDeck which showed the most popular RT's amongst your follow list? How easy would it be in a client to filter out all RTs from your main stream into a special column? All this is possible - and it wasn't before." - Ian Betteridge

"But you can actually see how popular something is more easily in the "Retweets by others" list. Face it Mike - you just don't like change, you old curmudgeon ;)" - Ian Betteridge

"One of the things I most hated about old style RT's was that if something was being retweeted by lots of people, your stream ended up with a dozen RTs of the same thing. The new retweet system elegantly solves this, and for that alone I love it." - Ian Betteridge

"Holy crap Robert, that's the first post of yours for ages where I'm 100% in agreement :)" - Ian Betteridge

"One small correction - it's Jack Schulze. The company is BERG (yes, all caps)." - Ian Betteridge

"Wait, sorry? "Recreating the client/server type of application"? The web development model is client/server, with thin clients (browsers). Native app development is not a client/server model in many cases (where's the "Server" in, say, an ebook?)" - Ian Betteridge

"Charbax, who's network is that Google Sim Card going to work with? Who will be providing that bandwidth? It's got to run across someone's network, and Google doesn't own one." - Ian Betteridge

"What ads? Or, more pertinently, what ads that it will sell because someone is looking at a Google Phone rather than an iPhone, or other Android phone? There is no trackable ROI on Google significantly subsidising phone hardware. While G has plenty of money to throw around, effectively giving away phones makes no business sense." - Ian Betteridge

"Perhaps you're thinking of the 3G. The 3GS BOM report is here: http://www.isuppli.com/News......" - Ian Betteridge

"$199 barely covers the cost of parts on a phone like that - iSupply estimates cost of parts for an iPhone 3GS at $179." - Ian Betteridge

"The intent of iTunes is admirable, and it's been hugely successful largely because it's free and most folks consider it good enough. But it's about as far removed from Apple's simple-at-all-costs ethos as you can possibly get. It's time for Apple to get serious and apply the same design- and usage-led thinking to iTunes that it applies to everything else in its stable." - Ian Betteridge

Interesting interview with Richard Branson - Ian Betteridge

Dear Eric Schmidt: Stop being an asshat. - Ian Betteridge

Is it time to get out of Google? - Ian Betteridge

Search traffic is the least valuable to publishers. - Ian Betteridge

I think part of the reason why people are wary about Google DNS is more about control than privacy. - Ian Betteridge

ouch. rock. hard place. - Ian Betteridge

And you know this wasn't the first time he'd done this... - Ian Betteridge

Print out a "Get excited and make things" poster for your office today! - Ian Betteridge

"Robert has made me rich beyond my wildest dreams :)" - Ian Betteridge

"Robert, if I had a pound for every time you've told me I'm totally wrong and I've gone on to be proved right, I'd have £38.50 (I'll split the original importance of Twitter with you). Google ads? Seriously? Do you think those are proving to be useful to people?" - Ian Betteridge

"Nope - but that's not because the technology is lacking, really (well, maybe in part). It's mostly down to the advertising mind-set. People who work in ad agencies have around 50 years of cultural heritage based on a single insight: No one actually wants to see their ads. What this means is that they write copy and create images with this in mind. They use tools like heavy repetition, "in your face" images - everything is designed from the ground up to interrupt, grab attention, get the messages across as fast as possible. This is the antithesis of creating *useful* content, which is what you're talking about Robert. And the problem is that I just can't see the advertising industry switching to the mind-set of "we're making stuff which people WANT" very quickly. That means one thing: A lot of the first ads of this sort will follow the same old rules as "old school" advertising. They'll assume that the viewer doesn't want them, so use all the same old attention-grabbing, repetitious..." - Ian Betteridge

"i've bought four for friends; and one myself. it is a marked improvement. but is the apple fanboy brigade big enough to make these things fly off shelves? i dunno." - azeem

I hate it. - Ian Betteridge

"The only way I can tell this isn't the real Daniel is that it's about 20,000 words too short and slightly too cogent." - Ian Betteridge

Or just that they are trimming out unnecessary code? - Ian Betteridge

"Well I'd actually agree with you in part - as I noted above, Murdoch's challenge is to create (or exploit) whatever the "niche" audience is for Fox, or BSkyB, or The Sun, or whatever. The question is whether there really are people out there who think of themselves as "Fox news sort of people" - is there brand loyalty, or can he build it?" - Ian Betteridge

"Well, note that I said "in Murdoch's world..." :) My own take on it is that, at present, you're right: most news is commodity news, with very little to differentiate it. However, does it have to be that way? Consider, for example, the Daily Telegraph's expose on British MP's expenses - I suspect they got more traffic (and copy sales) from that single story than a lot of the "commodity news" they've done this year. So perhaps the lesson should be that news sites need to do less commodity news and more original work. That would probably need less reporters - but that might be no bad thing." - Ian Betteridge

"That is only true if news is a commodity - if there's no differentiator in value between a news story on Site A and one on Site B. In Murdoch's world, that's not true (and never has been). A story on Fox might report the same facts as a report on The Guardian, but someone who "buys" The Guardian would never go to Fox instead, even if it was free and The Guardian wasn't." - Ian Betteridge

"I think your point on inaccessibility to social media is a good one, and certainly one that Mark Cuban ought to have addressed. I'm certain that part of the answer from Murdoch's perspective would be " through MySpace" :) To answer your point about "how do people know that your content is valuable to them if they can't see it or read it or share it with others?" my guess is that Murdoch would argue this is where cross-media ownership and brand building come in. If you're a Fox TV subscriber (which is already a known quantity in terms of "who they are") it should be easy enough to package that up with access to Fox online - and there will be constant promotion of the "more on Foxnews.com" kind on TV. Ditto newspapers, and radio stations, and all the other media channels that News Corp own. Murdoch would probably argue this would be incredibly attractive to advertisers, because it allows him (and he'd pitch it as only him) to deliver extremely well-targeted, coherent audiences - people..." - Ian Betteridge

"There's two problems with your approach, Mathew. First, attention doesn't pay the bills and it certainly doesn't give your shareholders any dividend. Unless you monetize that attention, all it is doing is costing you money in server bills. Attention is like window shopping: valuable, in the sense that you want some of it, but essentially valueless if you can't convert it. Which brings me on to my second quibble. When you say "...which in the long run reduces your traffic and thus your revenue" you're falling into the classic trap of assuming that more traffic = more revenue. It doesn't, and, if you equate traffic to paper readership, it didn't even in the era of print. If traffic is undifferentiated - if all you know about the person on the other side of the screen is that they've hit a single page from a search query - it's just not that attractive to high-paying advertisers. It might be valuable to some advertisers in CPC terms, for example if they're searching for "best mobile..." - Ian Betteridge