Posted by Michael Bhaskar
on 15 September, 2008
A couple of weeks ago it was my very great pleasure to attend and give a talk at a conference in Moscow. Yes, Moscow. It went a little something like this…
Hold on a sec. How did this come about? Well thanks goes to Brian Green of Editeur, the bibliographic standards body, and the guys at Nature Web Publishing who put him on to me. Of course thanks also goes to Biblio-Globus, the fantastic bookshop who took us out there. Anyway through a complicated series of events I found myself tasked with writing a piece on social networking sites and publishing for a conference on Standards in a Digital Age. Having never done anything like this it was going to be interesting.
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Posted by Euan Adie
on 30 January, 2008
20th Oct, ‘07: New, inter-company publishing project
Have been asked by James – a colleague here at Nature Publishing Group – to take a look at a trade publishing web project that he is setting up at Pan Macmillan, our sister company. Met with Benrik Ltd and Jon Butler from Boxtree at turkey curry buffet. Could a Facebook application be used to help market This Diary Will Change Your Life online? Yes! But not sure how. Diary is chock full of funny, reuseable content, exactly type of thing that you might want to share with your friends…
Donuts consumed: several. Walked briskly to tube station instead of taking bus.
Continue reading "This Application will Change Your Life Development Diary" »
Posted by Michael Bhaskar
on 3 December, 2007
Facebook is still the site everyone loves to talk about. According to Techcrunch, themselves quoting Comscore, Facebook received 32 million unique views against 71 million for MySpace. So while Facebook has not caught up, it is still catching up, growing 118% in the past year, the result being Facebook continues to attract the most commentary. Facebook hit a wave of negative publicity when they were accused of ruining Christmas. In short their new Beacon ad system incorporates certain purchases into the newsfeed: if you mention to me that you’d like, say, a new Aston Martin for Christmas, and then on your newsfeed appeared “Michael has bought a new Aston Martin”, some of the surprise, the glee, might be taken out of the (large) equation.Many saw it as an intrusion too far, an entangling of business interest and personal financial transaction in a sphere supposedly dedicated to social interaction. However fighting the hysteria was read/write web who argued that no one really cares, at least compared to the way people cared when the newsfeed was first released. Even they thought that without a clear opt out Beacon could seriously missfire. In the end Facebook has baulked at a blanket publishing of user activity on third party sites and has incorporated an opt in function, the catch being that you will keep being pestered by Facebook until you have actively logged in or out of Beacon postings.
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