Multiskilling? Or Jack-of-all-Trades?

Our visiting speakers all sing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to multiskilling. Since no-one knows what the future of news will hold, we're advised to put our eggs in as many baskets as possible: we must be writers and bloggers and editors and webmasters and mobile technologists. But Sarah Radford brought home the downside of this mentality when she told us about her experiences at the Newbury Weekly News.

She was hired to launch the paper's multimedia web portal and was frank about the steep learning curve and lack of investment in training. We saw first-hand how the end product is... shall we say... not of broadcast quality. If the rest of our economy is based around specialization and exchange, why should it be different for news? You wouldn't expect your plumber to advise you on interior design and give you elocution lessons, would you?

* A Vision of the Feature

I am contractually obliged to spin out some of the ideas in this blog into a feature. What I have found in my web-based meanderings is that technology is now advancing at an exponential rate. Globalization and the Wiki-culture are the driving forces behind this revolution. Never before has knowledge and capital flowed so freely.

Look at it this way. In the 1950s, the most rudimentary adding machine would only just fit into a large room. By the 1970s, the first microchips were starting to appear. In the 80s, they were putting computers on board airplanes. In the 90s, they started putting them in washing machines. Now we have computers on toothbrushes. And I’m sure the toothbrush has more processing power than all its predecessors put together.

So where will it end? My feature will take Moore’s Law to its logical conclusion. It will draw together the latest advances in genetics, graphics and human-machine interfaces to imagine a future which is just around the corner. Some potential interviewees:

• Max More (the Branson-looking founder of the Extropy Institute, and a leading advocate of transhumanism).
• Professor Ian Owens (Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Imperial College, London)
• Professor Antonia Jones (Professor of Evolutionary and Neural Computing at Cardiff University)

Watch this space.

Video: Killed Radio Star?

I'm in two minds about online video. On the one hand, watching people make bombs from Pepsi and Mentos is great. On the other hand, watching grainy recycled coverage of the day's news happenings is incredibly dull.

Amanda Powell showed us how BBC News Online gives you the option of hiding the video on the front page, as some users apparently didn't like it. That seems a bit redundant to me; either make the video good enough or get rid of it.

Pete Clifton (Head of BBC Interactive) has the right idea. He says online video needs to be a short, compelling moment from a story. Something a bit leftfield or weird that people will want to email to their friends. He recognizes that BBCi aren't there yet - right now their Vodcasts are little more than aggregations of the past week's Newsnights - but at least they're paddling in the right direction. I say they need to show more clips like this one: a crazed bull running after a policeman on a busy road. Now that's more like it.

Mmm... Smells Like Oily Machinery

If BBC Magazines did decide to add subtle consumption-inducing smells to their newsprint, they might want to enlist the services of ScentAndrea. They're an American company dedicated to adding olfactory dimensions to the retail experience, and their site makes for interesting reading (if you can sift through all the exclamation marks).

Their latest gadget is the 'scent mouse' which can recreate odours to enhance your online shopping experience this Christmas. Smells on offer include Gingerbread, Cheddar Cheese, Siberian Fir Forest and, er, Oily Machinery.

Mmm... Smells Like Magazines

I'm not a huge fan of BBC Magazines - just because the Radio Times sells more copies than the Bible doesn't mean it's any good - but I must admit I was impressed by Deputy MD Nicholas Brett's upbeat assessment of his particular media. He's not selling the family paper farm to jump aboard the nebulous bandwagons of UGC, Citizen Journalism and the Blogosphere just yet.

Because the magazine industry actually has some pretty good things going for it: mags are driven by consumers rather than 'the news'; they can make money from cover charges as well as ads; and people actually want something 'real' and collectible to hold in their hands. This final point was clearly close to Mr Brett's heart, and he expounded at length on the science of making paper smell and feel nice. But he wouldn't be drawn on whether the BBC planned to package their magazines with 'novelty smells' such as freshly-baked bread or strawberries.

Oh, and I also like Nicholas Brett because he gave me a free subscription to Top Gear.

A Return to Victorian Values

Everything is cyclical, don't you think? If there's one certainty other than death and taxes it's that crap long-dead trends will at some point inevitably be dredged up by a eager doe-eyed audience too young to remember how rubbish they were in the first place.

Examples. Flares. The Clangers. George Bush. Furry boots. Asymmetric haircuts. Socialist Worker's Party. Dungeons & Dragons.

But why not take the longer term view? Why not eschew the last few centuries of progress altogether and return to the days when Britannia ruled the waves; the era of Upstanding, Courageous and Morally Sound Gentlemen with Prodigous Facial Hair?

You could start by visiting The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Since 2003, this blog has been putting up a diary entry from Pepys' famous journals every day. How postmodern is that?

Hemingway Chimes In

The debate over the democratization of the media is nothing new. In fact, this kind of controversy has dogged writers since the days of quills and inkwells. Ernest Hemingway, were he alive today, might ask the blogging masses to consider his 'iceberg principle':

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."

On the other hand, many of our literary greats were incredibly prolific and varied in their writing. Consider the output of Victorian heavyweights such as Charles Dickens and, er, Sir Richard Burton.

My two cents? I think my heart would love to fall for Iain Dale to be right, but my head can't help but side with Burton. The most interesting Blogs are the ones written from the inside: Salam Pax in Baghdad; The Captain Ed Blog, which broke a media gag order to show Canadians just how corrupt their (now defeated) government were; and our very own Guido Fawkes.

After all, if information is currency, then third-hand-information is the New Zealand Dollar.