Top digital stories this week, incl. Sky, Google & Bring Your Own

The basic idea is that you start with three cubes (you can have up to six to increase the length of your composition) and each is aware of their own orientation, tilt, direction, and proximity to other Sifteo cubes. A single button is embedded underneath each cube’s 128-pixel-wide screen. They are controlled wirelessly by a nearby computer and come in packs of three (expandable up to six) cubes.

You then rotate, tilt, press, and connect to create music and sounds that change with every different connection.

This video will give you the best idea of how they work and what you can do with them. It may still seem like witchcraft but the premise of this project was  “to work on a multitrack music toy that was more exploratory than goal-based, and would leverage the minimalist and modular nature of the cubes themselves.”

For the full article that explains the design/interaction process and more, follow the link in this story’s title.

Sky News: closing the stable door…

Tim Downs, Head of PR

Last week The Guardian broke the story that Sky News was adopting draconian social media guidelines that seemingly not only undermined its own journalists but also the channel’s ability to be first with the latest news. This was, according to some commentators, either a cack-handed attempt to retain control of the news agenda or a demonstration of not understanding social media.

The social media commandments included; thou shall not retweet rival journalists or people on Twitter, though shall stick to your own beat and though shall always pass breaking news to the news desk before posting.

Having prepared myself to join the baying masses I read many of the proposed dictats and simply thought… errr, how very sensible.

These were some simple and easy-to-follow rules that applied to work Twitter accounts in order protect the quality and accuracy of the output of a news organisation that relies on the trust of its viewers in order to remain in existence.

What the new guidelines did in my mind was to raise a couple of questions: 1. What is best, to be first with the news or to be right in the digital age? And 2. What was Sky News doing before these guidelines?

On question one, in my view Sky News is the organisation that proved that the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive precisely because they were early digital innovators. Personally, in days gone by, and being an ex-journo, I would have said be first every time. However, in the digital age, my answer now would be: be right. Because you can’t always be first and cock-ups are now potentially seen by much larger audiences over much longer periods of time.

The biggest problem for Sky News is question number two. A number of its journalists have built reputations for being first to the punch specifically by using Twitter and retweeting other sources. One of Sky’s online news editors, Neal Mann, who tweets as @fieldproducer, was announced in November 2011 as the UK’s most influential journalist on Twitter, with over 100,000 mentions and retweets in a three month period. He gleans much of his information from the many and varied sources who he trusts enough to retweet and, under the new rules, his ability to do his job and therefore his influence would be badly impaired.

So, whilst it would appear that Sky News’ motivation for the new guidelines is to safeguard its reputation, its journalists have been happily enhancing its reputation without such restrictions in place. Which to my mind is  a bit like trying to close the stable door after the news horse has bolted.

Online video-viewing on the rise

Ally Manock, Head of Digital Strategy, Planning & Insight

While people are still watching much more traditional TV,  streaming video continues to grow in popularity, mainly, it seems, due to increased smartphone and tablet usage. It’s interesting to note that:

• In the social sphere, Facebook users on average share ten times more video than Twitter users.

• Tablet viewers are far more engaged than desktop viewers – they are 45% more likely to complete at least 75% of videos played.

Could these findings be partly due to the fact that Facebook is more visual and less fast-paced than Twitter and therefore seems to lend itself to video better? And could it be that tablets are used in leisure time more than desktops (which are generally associated with work), explaining the fact that more videos are completed?

Either way, online video-viewing looks set to soar in 2012.

Can an algorithm really measure ‘funny’?

Simon Marshall, Digital Account Director

Well according to Google Research it can. This article caught my eye on Mashable and I figured I should take some time to watch some silly videos and research the story in a little more detail…

According to Google it has “designed features to quantify the degree of emphasis on words associated with amusement in viewer comments, then trained a passive-aggressive ranking algorithm using human-annotated pairwise ground truth and a combination of text and audiovisual features”. Whatever that means… Either way, I’m sure they had fun doing it. (You can read the full post by clicking on this story’s title.)

While a sense of humour is pretty subjective, I can’t help but think that my own sense of humour algorithm isn’t quite tuned in. I was a little disappointed in the results I saw on the Comedy Slam leaderboard, which is voted for by real viewers rather than calculated by a fancy algorithm.

Does this mean Google has got a better sense of humour than real people?