What constitutes the breakfast of champions for your average digital content guru?

Sherbet Breakfast

I know digital content guru Stewart Kirkpatrick is fond of biscuits, shortbread and other sweet treats.

Not that I’m saying he is “fuller figured” or anything like that. Just that his face always lights up whenever he visits our office and we break out the biscuit barrel.

Little wonder. He can go through endless hours of meetings with the various clients who bring him in for serious advice on how to make their website better.

But do they often remember their manners and offer him tea and the odd digestive biccie? Rarely, it seems.

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After seeing Deadline’s web traffic, Susan Boyle aint the only one singing

It must have been one helluva week for Susan Boyle.

Enough’s been said and written about how she’s been catapulted from a modest life in a Scottish backwater town to internationl, er, curiosity.

So no need for me to add to the internet industry which has sprung up around her.

Except to say that Deadline News, the Edinburgh-based press, picture and video agency has been caught up in that internet phenomenon. And quite an experience it has been.

We all know the internet is changing everything from a media perspective. But being swept up in something of this magnitude has been real eye-opener.

For almost a year now, Deadline has been putting its content online, including stories, pictures and video – and building up quite a nice audience. It gives  extra reach to the stories the team work on. 

It’s fair to say they weren’t quite prepared for the sheer weight of the global interest in Susan Boyle.

The figures are astronomical. In a working week Deadline had more than 700,000 hits between its website, its Flickr photostream and its YouTube TV channel.

In fact, in the spirit of web 2.0 transparency, I can even share the figures, below:

The Susan Boyle effect

Congratulations to Susan. She seems like a lovable eccentric with a lovely nature as well as an amazing voice. Hopefully that smiley, likeability will help ensure she won’t be chewed up and spat out by the insatiable monster that is the global media.

Congratulation also to the Deadline team, who grafted their little cotton socks of to make sure they had a real involvement with the biggest story in their patch in a long time. And even though the slightly overweight lady has sung, let’s hope it’s not over yet.

A helluva week indeed.

Who was behind the public shredding of Sir Fred?

Fred the Shred

It’s a fickle thing, public opinion. It blows hot, it blows cold.

As we are seeing with Fred Goodwin, it can even turn into the kind of mightily destructive whirlwind no-one ever wants to reap. Fred the Shred has, in turn, been shredded.

But fickle by its very nature means flighty. Public opinion is as changeable as the wind.

How then, do we explain away the kinds of sustained and immovable hate fest that has characterised the Goodwin affair?

The British public may well be disgusted by the morally bankrupt and grasping-to-the-end antics of the failed financier. I suspect most who saw his sham apology to a parliamentary select committee also felt there was no hint of genuine remorse.

Reprehensible though Goodwin is, he’s just one man.

Scotland has two collapsed banks. Which means you don’t have to go far to find a motley collection of soiled money men, all of whom were complicit in the destruction of 300 years of fine banking heritage – all of them are unfeasibly wealthy as a result.

What then sets Fred so very apart in the crucible of public opinion? Or should that be who?

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