Articles
This section is dedicated to in-depth articles on web technologies, online marketing and all things digital. Feel free to comment on the articles and suggest any other articles you have come across.
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

The debate is starting to get confusing. It’s like schoolyard bickering all over again. Apple doesn’t like Adobe, Google doesn’t like Apple, Adobe and Google are buddying up, YouTube is stuck in the middle. And Steve Jobs rants at everyone.
The latest development in the HTML5 vs. Flash debate was YouTube rewriting its mobile site entirely in HTML5 – after criticising it in their official blog. This was happy news for iPhone and iPad users, but the rest of us are confused. Who’s in the right and what’s the future of these web technologies?
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Tags: adobe, apple, Featured, Flash, google, HTML5, website
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Thursday, July 8th, 2010

A few days after the official launch of ‘Stribe’, a new web tool to give websites a five-minute social make-over, its creators talk about the importance of social traffic on the web.
Launched on Tuesday after 6 months of private beta testing, ‘Stribe’ opens its social network platform to everyone, making social sharing easier for websites and enabling them to generate more traffic.
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Tags: Social Networks, social sharing, Stribe, web 2.0, web tool
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to share details of their private lives on a completely different level to what we knew before.
Now, the web is set to offer us the chance to let others know where we are at any particular time. Geo-location services have started to gain momentum with social media blog Mashable reporting Foursquare nearing 1 million check-ins per day in May.
Services, such as Gowalla or Fouraquare, allow users to check in in a particular location – for example, part of a city or a conference venue – and see who else is there.
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Tags: Foursquare, geo-location services, Gowalla, social networking
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Designed to merge emails, instant messaging, social networking and document sharing, Google’s “ultimate real-time collaboration tool” hasn’t been the success it was hoped to be.
Google Wave was announced a year ago in May with a great fanfare hailing it as “the next big step” in online communication. The beta testing stage in September complied with the company’s signature word-of-mouth approach designed to maximise the hype around the tool.
The start looked promising. At the peak of the hype, invitations were circling on eBay around £55.
But then it suddenly all fizzled out. A few weeks ago Wave was finally opened to the general public but the buzz is inarguably gone.
So what went wrong then?
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Tags: collaborative tools, google, Google Wave
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Digital media and creative industry people were invited along when storytelling legend Robert McKee arrived at Tyneside Cinema last Monday with his famous touring seminar and sharp tongue.
Two intensive days later the audience had heard about Aristotle’s classical story design, practical points on how to structure a story and that modern European cinema sucks.
After 25 years of teaching about storytelling, McKee doesn’t really need to watch his words. Having the likes of John Cleese and Charlie Kaufman as regular clients is surely a good reference.
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Tags: Digital, Events, North East, Robert McKee, storytelling
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
After months of sniping and grumbling at Adobe, Apple boss Steve Jobs didn’t leave anything to interpretation in his open letter on the company’s site.

It has to be admitted, the controversial letter, in which he argues against the use of Flash, is extremely persuasive, if a little long. It’s clear in its point and comes across very professional.
Jobs’ take on the subject at a question & answer session for Apple employees was not so diplomatically phrased.
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Tags: adobe, apple, Flash, steve jobs
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010

It has been talked about for a good part of the last decade but now it looks as if the mobile has finally become an important force for media and advertising.
According to Dr Goi Chai Lee from the School of Business at Curtin University of Technology, the mobile market has finally reached a tipping point.
He said: “There have been a range of false dawns but a number of signs are indicating that the mobile is finally here.”
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Tags: Digital, digital marketing, mobile
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Thursday, April 15th, 2010
For the first time in the UK, social media is expected to play a key role in the outcome of the General Election. Just as the power to enrich campaigns and engage with voters is only a tweet away, the possibility of humiliation is not far away either.

Even those who were still wondering about the importance of the role social media will play in the election may have had their minds changed by the fierce online response to the Digital Economy Bill.
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Tags: Digital, digital campaign, Digital Election, Twitter
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
With Web 2.0 no longer a cryptic name, blogging is as popular as it ever was. Thanks to social media tools like Twitter, users seem to have got past the final remnants of web shyness and blogs are blooming.

Blogs were first published in the mid 1990s, but it was the introduction of simple blogging tools a few years later that really triggered the masses to join in.
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Tags: blog, blogging, web 2.0
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Friday, March 19th, 2010
Free content to anyone, anytime – a new channel of distribution is challenging the traditional ways we consume media.

Following the huge success of the BBC’s iPlayer, the web is slowly filling up with on-demand services. Microsoft is the latest company to join the game with its MSN Video Player launched last week.
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Tags: iPlayer, on-demand, SeeSaw
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