Mark Pack

The story of how United Airlines broke musician Dave Carroll's guitar was one of the 'business gets a monstering in social media' stories of 2009. Carroll turned the incident into a song that made it big on YouTube, spawning huge traditional media coverage, knocking $180 million off United's share price and highlighting the weaknesses in [...] »

Yesterday we covered an open letter from 25+ Liberal Democrat prospective Parliamentary candidates (and see also this comment from ex-MP Richard Allan), expressing concerns over the line the party had taken in the House of Lords on a key part of the Digital Economy Bill. The party’s DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) team [...] »

Campaign ’08: A Turning Point For Digital Media is a slim volume by Kate Kaye, senior news editor at ClickZ, taking an in-depth look at the online advertising used in the 2008 Presidential contest for the primaries and then the general election. Though the book touches on other aspects of internet campaigning, what makes it stand [...] »

The Hansard Society has a new report out which asks the public what they want out of politicians and the political system online. Although many studies have looked at what politicians do or don’t do online, those looking at what the public actually wants are rather rarer. That makes this a particularly welcome report and is [...] »

We’ve covered before the campaign by Jo Swinson and others to change the antiquated Parliamentary rules which ban MPs (and in theory other people too) from placing footage from Parliament on YouTube. Here’s the latest from Jo Swinson about the campaign (via an update sent to fans of the campaign on Facebook): In my last update I [...] »

This feature has now been around for a little while, but it's not that well known. Also it can be hard to find information about it online as people often call it deep linking - which makes sense if you know the jargon but isn't the sort of phrase you'd otherwise guess is the one [...] »

Comments posted on YouTube films are notoriously poor. Some of the films are pretty poor too, but whilst for films there is a range from the great to the awful, with the bizarre, inspired and just weird along the way, comments on them are overall of a very low standard. So low in fact that there's a [...] »

First and foremost, the news that YouTube is rolling out automatic subtitling is good news for the hard of hearing: The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found on 13 channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels... Currently YouTube offers a manual captioning [...] »

The news that Channel 4 is going to use YouTube as the mechanism for providing catch-up and archive content, starting in November, is of obvious direct interest to the TV industry. But Channel 4's decision to go with YouTube also has wider lessons which apply across other sectors. First, even Channel 4 - an organisation that does [...] »

Without any fanfare, YouTube has quietly added real time search of its comments via www.youtube.com/comment_search. So far the page is pretty limited: no advance search options other than language, fairly minimal information available in the search results listing, no feed available of your search results and so on. On the up side, it allows you to search [...] »