The brief: User generated content, Pits n Pots and Spotify play button
Another busy media day, dominated by yet another social media story as Spotify launched their play button and media organisations clamoured over themselves to understand what it all means.
The Swedish music service pulled another rabbit out of the bag as it announced its 'play' button which would allow anyone to embed music on their website. However, read between the lines and there's a catch - you have to be logged into Spotify for the song to play and you must sign up for an account.
So rather than revolutionise the way music is consumed online it's more about boosting their number of subscribers, as this post from Emma Barnett on Telegraph Tech points out they don't have the user base you might think they have - only 10 million, which compared to Instagram (I feel like starting the description of Instagram as 'one billion dollar' Instagram) has 30 million. It's definitely a good thing to be able to embed Spotify, but I'm not sure whether it'll stop people embedding YouTube clips or SoundCloud - particularly for a lot of blogs dealing with new music then Spotify doesn't tend to have the smaller more cutting edge acts they are writing about.
How can mainstream media make use of Spotify? Well apart from embedding it, which will add an extra layer to say music reviews or think pieces, but it won't benefit them much.
Hyperlocal news site delivers printed edition to Stoke
The hyperlocal world is always buzzing away when anyone mentions funding, but it's been interesting to see the Journalism Foundation put some money into the hyperlocal area.
Instead of funding yet another Wordpress blog, they've worked with local news site for Stoke - Pits n Pots - to create a print publication of the online site.
This has been distributed to 50,000 homes in Stoke and it's a great idea. No doubt the print edition should help attract more interest in the site and help it grow. Congratulations to Mike Rawlins and his team, richly deserved and nice to see something actually done rather than a lot of hyperlocal talking.
User generated content - only 12 per cent is useful
A strange piece this, starts out by applauding Archant's new citizen journalism platform - iWitness24 - and then meanders into a reasearch piece saying that user generated content is still a vast untapped market in Britain.
There's an interesting quote from Demotix - a newswire that posts UGC - which says the amount of "useful citizen journalism" in Britain was "probably less than 12 per cent". What the hell is "useful citizen journalism"?
The moves Archant are making, partnering with CitizenSide, is very interesting and has shown there is definitely a demand for people to upload their local photos and videos onto the site. Previously it's been Flickr/YouTube and more, but if it can add value for the local papers and push back into the printed editions as well then it's win win. However, it's not a replacement for good, honest, reporting. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it still needs some words to go with it and explain the context and look into wider issues.
Online community - leave the forms to one side
Short but sweet final piece today, and that's from Richard Millington around what the 'next step' should be after someone has joined an online community.
This is spot on, and users should be pushed to interact and do things rather than to complete their profile. Adding a comment, rating something, submitting a photo - should all be before filling out a form essentially.