I am a social media entrepreneur (coughs nervously) who is a director of UK new media powerhouse Shiny Media (shinymedia.com), brilliant blokey website network Anorak Media (Anorak.co.uk and whoateallthepies.tv) and leading social media PR agency Shiny Red (shinyred.co.uk).
You can follow me on Twitter.com/shinyashley and email me at shinyashley at googlem@@l dot com
This is my personal blog which I use to witter on about the following
1 Techy stuff - the latest gadgets and cool websites/apps
2 The UK media - and its never ending quest to make money from the web
3 Music - always good to share a YouTube video or two
4 The 20th century - art, architecture, politics and literature
Plus the usual family and fun stuff
At the time of writing (November) the site is getting around 4000 visitors a month
I live in Stoke Newington, north London, am a complete 60s music obsessive, and my fave things ever are...
....George Orwell, Lidos, British seaside towns, Arsenal FC, Art Deco, not eating meat, Ivan Turgenev, Suffolk, Lola and Astrid, PopJunkieTV, John Smedley, swimming in the sea, The 60s, Elizabeth 1, Huguenots, Jonathan Coe, St Neots, Being proud to be English, the history of radical protestant groups, French 60s pop, Venice, La Rochelle, San Francisco, Lowestoft, St Petersburg, English new wave movies, Dodgy London caffs (RIP Piccadilly)
My fave bands are...
Scott Walker, The Groop, Len Price 3, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Martin Newell, Kinks, Jens Lekman, The Church, Robyn Hitchcock, Zombies, Left Banke, Rialto, Him and the Others, The Factory, Chocolate Soup/Rubble/Nuggets, The Dovers, The Squires, Boys Wonder, Hoodoo Gurus, Hummingbirds, The Primitives, Los Campesinos, Spearmint, Blur, Menswear, Belle & Sebastian, Pipettes, Camera Obscura, El Records, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Shortwave Set, Divine Comedy, My Life Story, Magnetic Fields, Ed Ball and The Times, Nancy Sinatra, Claudine Longet, Margo Guryan, Television Personalities, Fountains of Wayne, The Dentists, Billy Nicholls, Blondie, Helen Love, Orgone Box, Stephe Duffy, The Clientele, Spearmint
And my fave films are...
Umbrellas of Cherbourg, A Matter of life and death, Passport to Pimlico, Dig, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Look Back In Anger, The Entertainer, Jules et Jim, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou, Born Romantic, Swingers, Trust, Scandal
Forget Google Buzz! The most exciting thing to happen this evening is finding this gem on YT. It is a cover of the theme from the musical by a 60s Dutch band Zen complete with a really fast compelling beat and fuzz guitar. Marvellous. Their album isn't bad either
Really excited by Google Buzz, so excited in fact I even passed on baby night on the BBC to write a noddy guide to how it works.
http://www.techdigest.tv/2010/02/quickie_guide_t.html
I guess we will get that magical Buzz tab on our Gmails in the next day or two
So will it do much for online publishers? - This is an interesting question. Twitter works well for publishers as it enables them to create an account for a website and then post updates about the content it has placed on the site. It works like a RSS reader. Google Buzz is more difficult for publishers in that it focuses on an individual through their Gmail account rather than a new account linked to a website. If anything it could be very democratic in that if content is good it will be shared by individuals which will of course drive traffic to the website.
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Well they already are http://www.apa.co.uk/news/pixelmags-offers-free-iphone-and-ipad-apps-to-magazine-publishers# but to qualify you have to be a magazine publisher who can zip up your content into a PDF.
It does strike me though that there is a business model there somewhere. Where is the Wordpress/Typepad for iPhone/iPad publishing apps. All it needs is for someone to develop a basic iPhone app that turns blogs into a richer, more magazine like design. They could then work with the bloggers on a revenue share basis.
Of course with the ad market depresssed at the moment, now isn't the optimum time to launch. But in a year or so with an improved economy, more vibrant ad marketplace and the inevitable halo effect that will surround content published for the iPad and the iPhone, it would surely be a very sucessful business.
Bloggers could have the last laugh again too for if lots of blogs end up being published in that format, heritage media might find that the ad revenues they were expecting (which they hope are more like the rates they get for paper mags) aren't realised as brands have much more choice as to where they place their ads. The net result will be ad rates will fall, but once again the bloggers and other new media entrepreneurs will get a decent slice of that ad cake.
Just a thought. Btw any iPhone app developers who fancy a chat about this get it touch
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Anorak.co.uk continues to be the fastest growing website I have ever been involved with. A year ago it was averaging 300,000 page impressions a month.. In February it is on course to break three million and regularly posting over 100,000 PIs per day.
We always wanted Anorak to become the neaerst thing the UK has to Gawker or Slate and we are starting to get there.
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Ok, so I haven't seen Layar (which is still retired hurt), but of the others this brand news app World Surfer from Geovector is the best so far. It is easy to use, had loads of content and really is great fun. It is available free too.
More at Shiny Shiny http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/02/web_surfer_-_an.html
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I have been thinking a lot about the 20th century over the past few days. This is for two reasons. One I visited my mother's home town and saw the place where her mother, my Grandma, got blown up during the war. Two, I re-read George Orwell's Coming up for Air.
Grandma first. She was unlucky enough to be in a street in Rushden opposite a school in October 1940 when a stray German bomber realising that he needed to get out of the air space as fast as possible, dumped six bombs on a quiet Northamptonshire town. One landed on a school where it killed seven children - ironically several of whom were evacuees - and sent debris flying across the street injuring my grandma. My mother says that although she lived several more years she never really recovered physically or psychologically from the trauma. I found this story from the local paper.
http://www.rushdenheritage.co.uk/war/bomb-alfred-street-school.html
The bit that almost made me chuckle is this part
'A farmer living a few miles from the town said that he saw a German plane circling round near the town.
He said that some British fighters were above the bomber and he thought that it might have dropped its load to make its escape. After the bombs fell, the Nazi made off in a London direction with the fighters in pursuit and it seemed certain that he would be brought down.'
Rushden needed to know that the RAF got their man!
As for Coming up for Air, it is the story of one George Bowling, a fat fortysomething Londoner, (coughs nervously) who takes a little jaunt back to the idyllic village where he had grown up at the start of the last century. As the novel is set in 1938 the impending war with Germany colours many of his thoughts and indeed there is a bombing incident - though this time an RAF plane is responsible.
Inevitably when Bowling gets back to Little Binfield he finds that it is virtually unrecognisable. The secret pond where he used to fish is a rubbish dump and the local hall has been taken over by a vegeterian commune.
It is perhaps Orwell's most under rated novel, maybe because it is so short and easy to read and also unlike the more timeless 1984 it is so rooted in the 1930s
Which brings me to a soundtrack for the book. There are two serious contenders. The Kinks 1968 masterpiece The Village Green Preservation Society is the obvious one in that it is an homage to an English rural idyll (probably from around the same era that Coming up for Air is set) which is a tad ironic as Ray Davies grew up in north London.
The less obvious one is XTC's Apple Venus from 2000 with its gorgeous songs of Harvest Festivals, Village pubs and rivers of flowers. I'd forgotten quite how astonishingly good it is. IMO it is tha band's best album by some distance which is no mean feat given how many other great records they made. Here then is an excerpt from it - the stunning Easter Theatre.
Maybe it is time to take a trip to St Neots. Wonder if anyone still swims in the river?
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Shiny is best known for its tech and fashion websites, but we have one site that does't really fit in either of those categories that is doing amazingly well.
Bridalwave is a wedding website which mixes recent wedding news with tutorials, how to's and galleries of dresses. And in January is had its best month ever - with almost 400,000 people visiting the site.
Much of the recent growth has been down to the excellent articles by Andrea @andreapetrou on stuff like beach weddings and hairstyles for the big day. However it is clear that more people are planning weddings again and searching for wedding content. Maybe in some small way this says something about the state of the economy too. Weddings tend to be pretty expensive and perhaps in some small way Bridalwave's growth illustrates a small, but significant upturn in comsumer confidence
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http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/02/interview_with_1.html
Really interesting stuff and good to know that the UK is pioneering AR
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Fancy a free iPad?
Well here's how you might one day get one
1 They aren't that expensive to produce anyhow and besides Apple has a mark up of 50% http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/hardware/laptops/news/index.cfm?newsid=18592
2 Old media - think Vogue, Wallpaper etc as well as The Times/Guardian need to agree a digital format that does justice to their beautifully designed publications.
In other words - Big publishing houses aren’t making enough ad money from the web, while at the same time sales of periodicals, which do attract big ad spends, are declining. If those publishers can get their periodical content to look and feel like their paper versions on electronics devices they might be able to continue to attract the big ad spend of the paper editions rather than the limited ad revenue of the web versions. To do this they need to get the best device for reading their content to as many people as quickly as possible. Hearst Publishing is already thinking along these lines with its Skiff ereader. However ultimately it might make sense for all publishers to back one platform – i.e. the iPad.
3 One way to get reach is to offer the device for free - eg Subscribe to Vogue and you get 12 months of the paper edition plus the digital one and a free iPad to view it on. Alternatively big publishing houses could offer a free iPad with subs to say , 3 or 4 of their titles. So you pay £10 a month for a load of mags plus digital versions and a free iPad.
Then one day you don't get the paper versions just the digital ones, you are still a subscriber and you still have a free iPad.
Newspapers could do it too. For an extra £15 a month on your Sky bill (or mobile phone one for that matter) you get the daily newspaper in a digital form and a free iPad to read it on.
It is all about the maths (not my strongest subject) but if old media has any nous it will be offering the hardware that makes the most of its digital ad-friendly content for free
Just a thought
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Been waiting for this for a while. It is a really odd late 60s mod/psychedelic dreamfest that is kind of like The Avengers at its most trippiest. It has a bizarre storyline which makes no sense at all, but is wonderfully watchable, has the grooviest late 60s trappings and comes with an ace soundtrack courtesy of mod popsters Scrugg.
There's a very good review of the movie here http://www.cinedelica.com/2010/01/dvd-review-this-that-and-the-other-1969.html#more
and here's a bit of Scrugg
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