Sky.com news - worth a watch

10 points to Sky for launching their Sky.com news strand today, looking at the news stories doing the rounds on t'internet. Jeff Jarvis was a good first guest to get on - though I'm not quite sure whether he was familiar with the story about fighting nuns until he was told to discuss it. Daniel Finkelstein also did a fine job dissecting the Brown/Iraq announcement designed (dare one suggest it) to blow the Conservative conference off the news agenda.

I'm not quite sure that the mix of top 10 "crazy whacky videos", juxtaposes perfectly with the top 10 most clicked-on stories from the Sky news site and a few other oddities from around the interweb, but the programme (which merges traditional TV with online) is certainly heading in the right direction.

Fingers crossed I'll help point it in that direction still when I'm one of their guests on it in the next fortnight or so. Flattering and daunting in equal measure...

The Daily Express is right!

Not a headline I ever thought I'd write, but today, with pretty much all the red-tops leading on the Diana Inquest, it turns out that the Express was right to do so as well... Just this once, mind. I'm bored of it all already. I predict Diana on the front page of the Express every day for the next 3 months... just like the last 3 months then...

(p.s. I just love the Express's sub on their masthead and their Google listing, "The World's greatest newspaper." Errr... which World, exactly?)

Why twitter works

I tagged this a while back, but have only just got round to writing about it - but some great discussions recently on whether Twitter is asinine (Adage), or useful (Marketing Profs). Lots of good discussion as to whether/how twitter could be useful from a corporate perspective. No brainer, as far as I'm concerned. The answer is yes. The question should be "how best?"

It's a natural for news organisations, so you get what you'd expect from The Guardian, the BBC (I've got BBC Arsenal's RSS feed set up to tweet whenever it's updated), Sky News, and the NY Times, but other corporates are pretty interesting, particularly as a way of adding a personal touch to a big brand - my own favourite is Delta. Just the right balance of dealing with customers' issues in the way that customers raise them (e.g. on twitter itself) and (especially for a US brand) humour.

Just such a shame that Twitter's so unpredictable. Some times it's instant. Others, it takes an age... If they don't sort it out soon, then people will try it once, then leave it well alone...