My New Career
I haven’t written here for some time. Four weeks ago I started a new career with First Digital Media. I had a good innings at advertising agency Mojo & ZenithOptimedia and will miss my work family and mates there.
My new role at First Digital is predominantly in an internal commercial strategy role working on their media titles BusinessSpectator, Crikey, SmartCompany, ClimateSpectator and Eureka Report and an exciting new website starting next week called Start Up Smart.
I am a big believer of competition and diversity in media, and in investment in quality content. These are thing that are happening at First Digital and I am looking forward to helping them grow their audience, screens and market position.
Blogging
I have been reather absent from this blog over the past month and a bit. Mainly due to the change in jobs, quick holiday up north and distracting election (which kept me busy both as a punter and as a volunteer for a particular political party).
I have been committed to blogging mainly about mobile media here. My blogging will continue a lot more now, though you will notice more general ‘digital media’ and business idea related articles here over time.
iPad
I recently started using an iPad 3G as a reading device. As a means to consume media, I absolutely love it. Video is also great, I’ve been giving the ABC News24 app a hard workout throughout the election streaming via my wireless network at home. YouTube is also a great viewing experience on the iPad.
What I am finding interesting at the moment is the complete lack of consistency in usability and navigation. There are some well known apps by Wired, Popular Science and Marvel Comics I have been reading that are incredibly rich and all different. Conversely, the way you navigate a website in Safari, or use the ABC or The Australian news applications are again different.
I think the main point of confusion at the moment is, to paraphrase Jakob Nielsen, some publishers want to emphasise user empowerment (i.e. modern website standards) and others author authority (i.e. traditional linear newspaper and broadcast style). I’ll expand on this later in the week with examples and some results from a recent usability study Jakob Nielsen’s firm did on various iPad apps.
Links:
useit.com – Jakob Nielsen
