Dropbox: Why I couldn't live without it.

Do you own a computer? Then you need Dropbox. That's how good this thing is. If you haven't heard of it then you should stop reading right now and click the link above.

Dropbox is simple. You create a new folder (the dropbox) and everything which is saved their is automatically uploaded to the service.

This folder stays synced with the cloud, meaning you have complete access to all your most important files wherever you are, on whatever device you choose.There's a fantastic mobile app and you can even set your Dropbox up across multiple computers meaning you don't even have to think about making sure you've saved the right copy of something to your USB key. 

You can even allow other users to access parts of your Dropbox for collaboration.

But I think its most useful application is when you need to access a file you had no idea you'd need. Instead of driving all the way home or making sure you always have your USB key with you, simply download the file from the web.

I can't even count the amount of times I've needed a file at uni or work and Dropbox has come to the rescue. To say I couldn't live without it is obviously a bit ridiculous but, it's definitely made my life immeasurably easier. And for an everyday low price of $0 for 2GB you'd be silly not to take advantage.

Brisbane Festival 2011 draws to a close

The final curtain has fallen on Brisbane Festival for another year, as encore performances came to a close this weekend.

The cultural extravaganza saw total attendance figures in excess of 850,000, a significant increase over last year’s festivities.

The festival’s artistic director Noel Staunton is extremely happy with how it was received.

“Our box office is doing well and people are enjoying the performances,” he said.

“We have a lot of standing ovations.”

The event thrilled and entertained audiences in a huge variety of venues around the city throughout November.

The festival, which included acts from all around the country and the world, came to its official close two weeks ago with massive shows from the likes of Kimbra and Bell Shakespeare.

However, a few more special events couldn’t fit the busy schedule and were presented as a series of encore shows.

The high energy dance of The LandOf Yes And The Land Of No, and the haunting theatre of Die Winterreise (TheWinter Journey) comprised the encore event series’ finale.

The festival played host to an all star cast of performers taking in everything from the high energy dance of Mortal Engine to the unconventional comedy of Sam Simmons.

In addition to the obvious artistic benefits, Mr Staunton says the festival's 700 odd performances have been a major boost for the city economically.

“The reality is they might pay the festival 60 or 100 dollars to see a performance but a hotel and an airplane ticket is costing them more money,” Mr Staunton said.

“It also establishes Queensland as a destination for an arts festival.”

The economic effects are not just limited to the city; the individual venues also experienced a significant increase in attendances coinciding with the festival.

The Brisbane Powerhouse theatre was one of the event’s key venues, and director Andrew Ross says the festival made a big impression.

“It’s always nice to have people in the venue,” he said, tongue in cheek.

“The powerhouse has been full of people... things have been pumping down here.”

Expressions Dance Company’s artistic director Natalie Weir says performing their show, First Ritual, as part of the festival has been a completely new experience for them.

“For us it was actually quite simple because Brisbane Festival looked after all of it,” she said.

“They talked to all of the Chinese, and they organised all of the flights and the accommodation, they looked after the box office.”

Ms Weir and her colleagues collaborated with Chinese dance company BeijingDance to bring the show to stage.

She also says the festival has brought a new and wider audience to the show, which played to enthusiastic crowds at the Brisbane Powerhouse.

“What I’ve noticed with the audiences is that a lot of people have come who probably normally wouldn’t come to our shows,” she said.

“There’s a real cross section of people.”

The many free events also proved immensely popular, with 30,000 people immersing themselves in South Bank’s Interactive Light Tunnel in the first week alone.

Mr Staunton says preparations are already under way for next year's festival, which promises to be just as entertaining, but he couldn't reveal any secrets.

Click the placemarks below for detailed venue information.

View Brisbane Festival 2011 in a larger map.

When even porn is free. Who will pay for news?

How to make money from journalism Part 2

Paywall, the word seems to be everywhere in the online journalism world these days but what does it really mean? And can we ever convince people that they have to pay for news online?

I won't bore you with the details because I'm guessing you're mostly already familiar with paywalls. If not, there's always Wikipedia (not that I condone its use of course).

At first glance, a paywall seems like a no brainer for a news site looking to increase its revenue. Start charging people for something that was previously free. Profits go up. Simple.

The problem with this sort of thinking is it doesn't take into account the (admittedly small) revenue generated by ads.

Every user that hits the paywall has to make a choice: Do they lay down the cash and keep reading, or simply find what they want elsewhere?

Source: Alexa

The above graph shows readers of The Times, in England, left in droves once the paywall was implemented. The smaller line represents the users who subscribed to the paid version of the site. It's impossible to know how this has affected profits without extensive advertising data from The Times but that's a lot of advertising traffic to lose for a relatively small gain in paid customers.

Source: Alexa

And this graph shows what happened to traffic when the New York Times introduced a paywall at the end of March. A massive spike as people checked out the shiny new wall, then traffic settled down to normal. If anything, it's actually increased since the paywall was implemented.

Traffic to The Times was decimated whereas NYT continued on as if nothing happened. So why the difference?

There are obviously many factors involved here (size, relative prestige of the paper, even visitor nationality), but the biggest one of all is moderation. NYT allows users to read 20 articles a month before throwing up the paywall, plus a further 5 from search results and unlimited links from social media. This may sound like a lot of free news but it means casual readers can still visit the site and hardcore followers still pay for the service.

It seems no matter how much free news/porn is out there, there will always be people willing to pay for premium content. If it's done right.

Ok. You win. Old Media is kind of great

I was wrong. Now read closely because like most people, that's not something I say a lot. Several weeks ago in this very same blog I went slightly on the attack against Old Media, especially TV and radio news. I argued they were too passive, not immediate enough and basically just weren't new and sexy enough for my liking.

Well something's changed, the last two weeks I've been working hard. I mean properly hard, not uni student hard. 12 hour a days hard. And I've come to appreciate the passivity of Old Media. TV and radio certainly still have their place in today's world and I for one, hope they're not going anywhere soon.

A good friend of mine (and I use the term in the most optimistic way possible) @SpencerHowson once said to me:

At the time (about 7 weeks ago) I was too young and proud to admit it but now, gosh darn he's got a point. When a properly busy person gets up in the morning they don't have an hour to spare browsing the interwebz for every little news tidbit. What they often do have is a long drive to work, in a car which, unless it's stupidly old or stupidly sporty, will have a radio.

I feel I was more than a little unfair to TV news as well. After a hard day of tree wrangling (that's actually what I'm doing for work this week), nothing feels quite so good as to sit back on the couch and have the news spoon fed to me by people who know much more about it than I do.

Old Media: It's great, just try some.

How to make money from journalism Part 1: Advertising

The future of traditional journalism looks sketchy at best. Newspapers are dying, TV and radio viewers are switching off, online is the answer blah blah by now you should all know the spiel.

It's getting to the stage - scratch that, it's already well past the stage were we can continue to refer to the internet as some vague guardian angel who'll swoop down and save our sweet, news-gathering souls. Most news organisations well and truly missed the boat when it comes to bringing their content online and it's going to be a long, hard swim to catch up.

As with any emerging industry (which is what we have to consider journalism as, so massive are the fundamental changes occuring), everyone's got their own ideas of how to succeed. Unfortunately, at this stage none of them are very good. Essentially there are two philosophies on how to make money from online journalism: Advertising and Paywalls.


Advertising
Advertising can be broken down into two main categories, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Pay Per Impression, both of which have distinct advantages and disadvantages.

PPC advertising is easily the least beneficial because advertisers only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad. Rates are much higher but studies suggest click through rates on these ads are at 0.1% and falling meaning the revenue stream is tiny.

For this reason, PPI is more beneficial because the advertiser gets charged every time an ad is served someone browsing the website. Unfortunately, because their is so much choice for advertisers on the net, rates for this sort of advertising have to be many many times cheaper than comparable ads in newspapers. If you charge too much, it's not too hard for companies to find somewhere else to advertise.

Many sites use a combination of both tactics to make a base sum of money from impressions and then treat any clicks as a bonus.

Coming Soon: Paywalls

TV News online: The current situation

This video gives a comprehensive rundown of the Australian online TV news landscape.

Apologies, I just figured no blog is complete without tumbleweed (#interwebrulez). Excuse me also for using extreme hyperbole (also known as Hyperbowling) but our options are definitely pretty thin on the ground.

What they offer:

Channel 7

Channel 7’s solution is probably the best as far as an actual bulletin goes, they upload a short (seven or eight minutes) afternoon bulletin and also add most individual stories to the site after the evening news airs. Here's an example of the short bulletin from 25/08/2011:

ABC

The ABC, much lauded for its iView service, simulcasts their bulletin online on the News 24 channel, meaning you have to be there at 7 PM to tune in. This is great for people who live with parents or housemates who might want to watch Home and Away or the 7PM Project (both of which are of course available for viewing at a later date) but not a lot of use for people like me who simply aren't at home. I'll admit, the News 24 is a pretty phenomenal service to have available online but it's no reason to not put the nightly bulletin up as well. For overall online news quality, this has to be the winner.

Channel Ten and SBS

Channel Ten and SBS both offer an online 'Catch Up' service on which they offer the majority of their programming. Once again, news bulletins are the obvious exception.

Channel Nine

Channel Nine essentially offers the same service as Ten and SBS but with one extra little addition.

In my desperate search for news bulletins online I understandably started my quest with the following search term: "watch australian news bulletins online"

Channel Nine's website was first on Google and when I clicked the link I saw this message.

"Now you can watch the nightly Nine News bulletin online, just as you would on television."

Perfect! I thought. How easy was that!

Only to be confronted with this nasty little disclaimer a little later on.

"Note: Bulletins will only screen at 6pm and are not viewable at other times."

The fact they have set up a special section of their website purely for this 'service' absolutely astounds me and shows that more than  any other channel they've failed to understand not only the potential of the internet but the basic way it operates. 

One of the major reasons the internet is so popular is because it's always there. You don't log onto Facebook only to find it's not open for another half hour. Google.com.au doesn't keep regular business hours. 

Channel Nine's version of news online

If these stations are going to offer all other their programming online, there is absolutely NO REASON for the nightly news not to be included.

Why can't I just watch the news online?

Despite, what many people seem to think, I’m a pretty busy guy.  I study at uni full time, live away from home doing all my own cooking cleaning etc, hold down two jobs and play a whole lot of sport.

All this boring background info means I don’t get much spare time. And when I do, the chances of it being between six and 7:30PM on a weeknight (when the news is on) are remarkably slim.

Unfortunately, and surprisingly, given how far we’ve come recently with TV stations offering their content online*, this means I rarely get a chance to watch a nightly news bulletin.

I can come home at 10:30 and tune into any variety of shows from all the major free to air stations but I can’t watch the news.

When I asked Seven Brisbane’s Director of News, Rob Raschke why the station didn’t simply upload the whole bulletin to its PLUS7 service he admitted he was frustrated by the issue.

He said he had no idea why the bulletin wasn’t available online but suspected it might be due to a misguided belief it would erode viewership of the TV bulletin.

But as he readily admitted, no one is guying to watch the news on the computer when they can watch it on TV.

“We saw the same attitude when we tried to get the radio simulcast started,” he said.

He believes it’s only a matter of time before we see full news bulletins online and I certainly hope he’s right.

ABC, Seven, Nine, Ten and SBS all offer some sort of online 'Catch Up' service where users can watch the majority of their content weeks after it airs.

Next Week: A rundown of the current online TV news options