The Labour Humanist

18 Doughty Street...guess how many viewers...

Right, I think we now know why the backers of 18 Doughty Street have been so shy about publishing their viewing figures. Prominent dreary streeters like Iain Dale are usually quite eager to boast about how many people visit their site, but have been strangely tight lipped on this one. But thanks to Jeff Jarvis' column in the Guardian we now know "The audience is not yet huge - one to 2,000 viewers at any moment (more than 2,500, Dale says, and their technology would teeter)."

Taking the UK population at roughly 60 million and assuming a Doughty Street full house of 2,000...wow....that's 0.003 of population tuned in!

I suppose it would be rude to mention that in the same edition of the Media Guardian is the story of how Living TV has dropped its new Jodie Marsh fronted series "Get A Life" after just two episodes"...due to poor ratings. Its second show "only" had 11,000 viewers.

The Twitter Curve

Talking of twitter Kathy Sierra's Asymptotic Twitter Curve below is just too good not to post:

The decline, and further decline, of Western Civilisation's attention span!

The Labour Humanist: Now with home made twitter

The Labour Humanist - now with added twitter "home  made  twitter"!

Well, we did try to add a twitter RSS feed to the blog but it just wasn't right. But don't worry a home made, environmentally friendly  low-tech twitter like thingy has been created in typepad and added to the top left of the blog.

Hope it adds to the browsing pleasure of our regular readers...It's all sooooo very Web 2.0...don't you know.

In praise of Youtube - the long tail whips Senator McCain, West Ham football club and Fox News

It really feels at the moment that Web 2.0 is coming into to its own and the long tail is impacting on the conduct of politics and issues of the day - particularly through something like youtube and other
distributions of media produced outside the economic constraints of the mass market. Here are three good examples:

1) Racist chanting at football games - in English football it has long been the case that fans of Tottenham Hotspur have had to put up with racist anti-semitic chanting from other fans because of the club's historical and cultural Jewish connections. And nothing has ever been done about it by the authorities, except last week when Tottenham beat West Ham in the EPL people at the game recorded racist chanting by West Ham fans and posted them on youtube allowing supporter groups to use them as evidence in a complaint. West Ham are now being investigated by the police.

2) The "flip flopping" of Senator John McCain - Even taking into consideration the ability of any film maker to spin, distort and exaggerate, good grief, this video of McCain's apparent inability to be consistent on a number of subjects looks very bad. All election candidates prone to "flip flopping" should watch this video and be afraid, very afraid:

3) "fair and balanced" (sic) Fox News' attacks on Barack Obama - Bravenewfilms productions on youtube includes the following video detailing what appears to be a concerted campaign by Fox News to damage Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The people can fight back against mass media that plays fast and loose with the truth: