Given that the Friday mail guest slot has been filled the past two weeks with some excellent missives (many thanks to Helen and Russell), I’ve had a bit of time to look around. And there has been a lot going on. As is the way with these things, I’ve been looking at the big picture. So this week, there are two serious discussion topics (although I’ve just noticed that the press has finally picked up on the Digital Economy Bill piece) and then a couple of things that caught my eye – one I like, the other I don’t.

Enjoy.

Guilty until proven innocent
Earlier this week, our government fast-tracked the Digital Economy Bill through Parliament. I have mentioned it in previous Friday mails, but principally the Bill is a piece of legislation that is intended to safeguard peoples copyright interests by penalising illegal file sharers. Or at least that is the way the notion of the Bill is being presented in its current form. Makes sense. Until you start to read the detail. Imagine if a crime syndicate hacks into your wifi and downloads a load of films from the net for resale. You are responsible. Or if your child has a friend who uses a machine in your house to copy and share music tracks. Again, you are responsible. There is a lot more to the Bill, but principally the notion of an individual being innocent until proven guilty has just been thrown out of the window.

My grievance about this whole sorry charade is that the whole thing reeks of reactionism. Over 20,000 people (me included) wrote in to protest about the Bill. Given that a letter is supposed to represent the views of 200 voters (something to do with the amount of effort it takes to actually write a letter), this is ostensibly four million people who object. However, only 5% of MPs actually bothered to turn up to the pre-bill debate. I thought MPs were supposed to represent the public interest?

My other point is that the notion behind the Bill only works if what you are downloading can be accessed. So what will probably happen is that those people who are up to no good will use tricks like using proxy servers (servers that allow you to access the web whilst protecting your anonymity) or file encryption to prevent information being accessed. Leaving the ignorant or naive in the firing line. And I thought legislation was supposed to protect us?

This site nicely sums up my thoughts.

Social Networking is Dead. Long live Social Networking
So the death knells for Bebo are finally tolling. At one time, Bebo (a Social Media site dedicated to Tweens) was vaunted as the rising star of the Social Media world, attracting a vast amount of interest from suitors and journalists around the world; so much so, that AOL paid the princely sum of half a billion pounds to buy it. But AOL has recently discovered that the golden rule of staying ahead in the uber-competitive Social Media marketplace is that you have got to continually push and reinvent your offering (just look around and see how sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are constantly tinkering with the way things work in order to cater for the ADD-esque needs of their respective audiences). Without this, numbers around the world have been dwindling, as its audience has adopted Facebook as the de facto  site of choice (aside from the UK, funnily enough, where audience figures remain comparatively high). So AOL has put Bebo back on the market and no one wants to buy it. Funny that.

I have a number of issues with this:

• Firstly, the initial Bebo valuation was grossly overpriced – I wonder if AOL will sue the Investment Bank behind the IPO because of this? I ask because in the late nineties and early noughties, the financial world was caught up in a speculative frenzy, over-valuing pretty much anything that had the tag ‘internet’ (including agencies), which led to the dot com crash of 2003. In the ensuing repercussions, we were promised that “lessons had been learned” and “this sort of behaviour wouldn’t happen again”. So either the AOL/Bebo situation is a complete one-off, the investment bank’s analytical team were pretty useless or the promise was a misappropriation of the truth. Hmmmm…
• Secondly, having spent half a billion dollars, how could the AOL board have allowed Bebo to get to this situation? Given that not a huge amount of time has passed since the initial purchase, I know I would be looking pretty hard at the financial return to ensure that my investment was showing a return. And I don’t think it is acceptable to claim ignorance of the internet/digital as an excuse. Someone, somewhere took their eye off the ball and I would love to understand how and why this happened.
• Finally, I don’t accept the notion of simply giving up and accepting loss. Given that Bebo has an active audience, which is varied by country, there are a number of routes/options available. Why are these not being investigated? It strikes me that someone at a senior level has simply made a call on the level of acceptable financial loss and, rather like the O2 arena, Bebo will sit around burning vast amounts of money until someone can be bothered to actually put their mind to thinking about it properly. Although unlike the O2 arena, the only tangible element of Bebo is its audience (the O2 had the real estate and the land as a fall back). And given the fickle nature of internet users, unless something is done pretty quickly, I’d give Bebo about 6 months – 1 year to live.

Virtual rock, paper, scissors
We are starting to user a broader set of media touchpoints in advertising, with the ABB QR-coded T-Shirts a recent example. T-Post, a Swedish news company, recently designed a t-shirt that featured images of real rocks, paper and scissors. The cool part? When wearing the t-shirt, T-post subscribers can stand in front of a webcam for the ability to play a virtual game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with a computer-generated arm that appears to be coming out of the shirt. A video demonstrates the virtual game in action. Dixy will probably like to frame 27 seconds in…

London Fashion Week
Mercedes-Benz is the main supporter of British fashion during London Fashion Week. As part of its sponsorship, Mercedes developed a dedicated microsite that linked to the ‘voices’ that would define this year’s LFW. The site claimed to” filter through the avalanche of fashion blogs, celeb gossip and stylist advice from the shows, offering only the best options, news and advice”. The result, IMHO, is quite disappointing – simply a collection of videos that link to other sites, with one daily video log summary. A classic case of style over substance. The broader campaign was actually a bit more substantive and won the IAB Creative Showcase campaign of the month. Just goes to show, eh?