This picture is one of an ongoing series called ‘The Elephant Under The Table’ representing the things that people in organisations (and our wider culture) just can’t – or won’t – say.
You can follow the series on Twitter or by visiting Delta7’s website.
You’re welcome to print or re-use any of these images providing you leave the copyright attribution in the image.
If you want to crop or edit that’s fine – but remember to add the copyright notice again please.
A couple of weeks ago some friends came by and we found ourselves creating a soundtrack to the evening via YouTube. You know how it goes; guitar out, dancing in the front room to a whole load of old tunes you could never admit to liking in everyday life.
For many people, YouTube is more a place to go for music than it is for moving image. You can be sure – legal issues aside – that someone somewhere has uploaded your favourite music. The only downside is the interface; a masterpiece of MySpace style chaos.
Then along comes TubeRadio.fm. Think YouTube meets iTunes meets Spotify and you’re close.
Unless I’m sorely mistaken (and I rarely am) the TubeRadio.fm web interface is so entirely intuitive that you don’t even need to read the f****n manual. How refreshing. You just start using it – and, providing there’s no unforeseen catch – you keep on using it.
I’ve no idea whether TubeRadio.fm is the future of music video listening but right here, right now, it’s most definitely the present.
Get over there yourself and try it out. You won’t be disappointed.
We’re taking a break from writing the newsletter for two reasons: firstly, our newsletter plugin has become extinct and secondly, we’re in a period of evolution here at mukaumedia.
The plugin issue is typical of working in this kind of open-source blogging environment: a piece of software designed to add functionality made by a developer who then loses the motivation to upgrade his plugin in line with the development of the Wordpress platform.
The result is something that worked well for a couple of months progressively breaking down and becoming unusable. Moral of the story? Don’t bank on anything in the open source world. Why? Because most people developing for it haven’t worked out how to ‘monetise’ what they’re doing. No money, no customer service or inclination to support their software.
With regard to mukaumedia, some visitors will know that I’ve been working more and more with Delta7 Change Ltd in London. That’s been hugely rewarding and exciting so it’s taken up a lot of my time and created the space to have a re-think about what we want to do with mukaumedia in the longer term. We’re planning on a review towards the end of this year (ideally on a beach somewhere warm).
Meantime, this blog will still be the home of critical feedback (about all things digital, marketing and customer service). Expect me to carry on the crusade against nasty online ripoffs like Expo Guide and World Business Directory as well as pointing out the kinds of do’s and don’ts that we’ve learned (usually the hard way!) from our 3 years in this business.
Once again, many thanks to those who’ve subscribed to our newsletter over the last year. If you’d like to stay in the loop, then please feel free to follow me on Twitter here.
So says the Evening Standard headline I spotted at Paddington tonight. I love headlines – especially when they’re so deliciously over the top.
‘Swine flu kills healthy people’ is ’stating the bleedin’ obvious’ as Basil Fawlty might have said. It’s also the journalistic equivalent of ‘Defcon 4′. Logjcally, there’s only one place to go after that headline. “Official: End Of World”.
But it’s not just the apocalyptic that amuses me but those damn headlines that catch your eye like a virus you can never quite get rid of. Ones like the surreal and inexplicably pleasing “Fish Spillage”.
Years later, I still find myself trying to picture that event. 
‘Conversation Studio’ is a Twitter-enabled video & image & audio podcasting site by Michael Bailey (who created the cute little ‘MyChingo’ audio widget a few years ago).
Seems to me it’s easy to use from my macBook. What do you think? Any good?
Or is it an evolutionary dead end just waiting for a video-enabled iPhone to come along and kill it off?
God this stuff rushes on at a pace! How anyone (Michael included) makes any money trying to keep up is beyond me.
Once upon a time there was a thing called podcasting.
You got some kit together, took a deep breath, recorded your words of wisdom spent hours editing them and then? Then you faced the daunting technical task of distributing them to an unsuspecting world.
To do that, you had to build a site to host your files and create mysterious (and unfathomable) things called ‘RSS feeds’ so that people could become regular subscribers. The technical stuff was hard enough, but harder still was attracting subscribers in a ‘pre-social media’ era.
‘AudioBoo’ connects podcasting to social media. No more worry about where your stuff lives (they host your audio), no distribution worries (it integrates with Twitter and Facebook plus has its own social network) and no recording hassles (it uses your iPhone as a good quality mic).
Perfect. Except for the silly name and the fact that there’s no search facility yet although they say they’re working on it. Makes it hard to, er…network.
And don’t forget that you still have to create interesting, quality content that your market will want to hear 
Just reading Canadian communication consultant & podcaster Donna Papacosta tweeting about the White House press conference on Swine Flu – or as I think I’ll prefer to call it, ‘Schwein Flu’ (pronounced with a heavy Clouseau accent).
Made me wonder: um, do we have any of the vaccine here in the UK?
A quick web search turns up only a few distinctly unpromising three year old news items reporting that the UK might possibly get round to inviting the pharmaceuticals to tender. At some point. Probably.
Three years later, what am I bet that we never got round to it?
So it looks like we’re going to watch the first Twitter-tracked pandemic in human history. #swine flu
US reality TV ‘czar’ talks about his search for a ‘Susan Boyle’ moment to swell the revenues of America’s Got Talent. The search includes plans to have Susan Boyle on the show reports this feature in TVWeek.com. Just look at the way these people are talking about Susan Boyle.
The panel on Britain’s Got Talent may have declared they were forced to re-think their prejudices (from ‘fat, ugly people are useless’ to ‘fat ugly people CAN be talented’) but the industry is still hell-bent on treating them all as commodities to be exploited – whatever they look like.
At first you were a joke, Susan. Then you were suddenly a very talented… er..person. Now you’ve become a ‘moment’ for a media mogul to recreate. Shudder.
This is a nice idea. EarthHour. Turn off your lights for an hour 8.30pm Sat 28th March and save energy. And use the power of social media to get the message out there everywhere, quick. NIce.
Does it matter that we don’t know who we’re saving the energy for, exactly? Or what difference it will make to anything? Not really.
This is what I call awareness-raising. It breaks us out of habitual ways of doing things and brings things to consciousness. It just feels good to be doing it.
I watched Obama’s short press conference speech outlining his plans for US economic recovery and one thing struck me: he never looked anywhere else except at the camera.
Its clear that this President is talking to a screen audience, an online world.
Since I was also watching this online (here on the BBC website), the fact that he was looking directly at me (at the dark eye of the camera) seemed ‘normal’.
Having thought about this, what then seemed really odd was to see the long shot of the hall that Obama was speaking from.
What I saw was a man speaking over his audiences’ heads to a camera at the back of the hall.
How unnatural, how strange. How…disconnected.
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