It's the Third Thursday of the month. I think the word you are striving for is... budget. This month we have been challenged by both space and time but thanks to the power of (limited) video tech we stick together. Nonetheless plenty is going on in the past, present & future. Enjoy!

PS We are actually quite gifted at film making. Seriously, check this out :)

Python Developer Neng from BKK makes the most of his time in the UK

Other links referenced...

• Winston Churchill iPhone App
• Sing Up Awards
• Hoxton Hotel £1 Sale
• Exchange Away - (current site trading as Home Xchange Vacation)
• Searcys - (current site)
• Skechers - (current site)
• Nokia Coast to Coast Challenge - Scotland
• Arsenal 6 - Braga 0

People have been sharing music since the dawn of time. First we swapped 7 inches, then we made mix tapes and when the computer age arrived, we just clicked ‘send file’ and the work was done for us. Now music sharing has become truly digital and is being shared in a truly digital way. Music has become a much more social experience but who is going to lead in this digital market?

iTunes launched itself into the social music world last month with the release of the social music service Ping. In the short term, it has been a very successful venture, gaining a million sign-ups a day for the first week. These figures are amazing for any social network, but social networks aren’t about sheer numbers -- whether a social network lives or dies is dependent on active users.

So my question to you, Steve Jobs, is: once I have signed up, searched around for my friends and seen the last 5 tracks they have bought, what next? iTunes is the world’s largest digital music store and Ping obviously wants to get us to buy more music. Yet, in its current form, Ping isn’t going to do this.

Firstly, from a band’s point of view, unless you are signed to a major label, it’s really difficult to get your own space. Compare this with MySpace’s UX, where anyone can create a page for their band. Secondly, iTunes is trying to ‘own’ the conversations by restricting all users to a walled garden where it’s difficult to find your friends again -- and if your friends aren’t there, you can’t share with them through other social networks. Finally is Ping’s focus on what one’s friends have bought. There’s no reference to playlists they have created, their top listened to tracks or their favourite bands. This restriction of the conversation is bound to end it early.

Spotify understands the importance of not controlling conversations in the social music world. They burst onto the UK market early in 2009, with a free music streaming service that allows users to listen to a catalogue of over eight million tracks -- just as long as you can put up with the adverts popping up between the songs on your favourite albums. There is a premium service which will allow you to listen offline and on your mobile anywhere in the world and without any ads: quite a bargain at only £10 a month.

Spotify has always been social at its heart. It’s easy to share tracks with your friends. With just one click, you can send out what you are listening to Facebook or Twitter. You can even create playlists and tweet your whole set. This is all very well and good in the context of broadcasting one’s tastes (one way) but Spotify understands that this is not where social media should end; they have also come up with collaborative playlist, where a user can allow anyone to add tracks to their own playlist.

This was successfully incorporated into a recent campaign for Fiat. Here Fiat tapped into the ‘creator’ in their audience and got them to put together a set of tracks that would result in the “ultimate driving song”. This keen cross-promotion and integration with advertisers has been able to keep Spotify ahead of the pack.

Never one to sit on their laurels. Spotify has pushed on with Facebook integration, for example, so now, instead of waiting for your friends to broadcast what they’re listening to, you can browse their profile and see their favourite artists, top tracks and the playlists they have created.

This is all done through your Facebook account, so there’s no finding and making of friends again -- it even automatically updates your friends list when a new friend installs Spotify. The user experience is smooth and -- more importantly -- connected. I can’t wait to see what they add into this service, as I am sure they are going to make it even better. For a taste of where they are going, check out the open API for Spotify instant.

mFlow sits halfway between Ping and Spotify, with a strong emphasis on recommending music to your followers. mFlow has made this as simple as browsing their catalogue and tapping out a 140 character review (Twitter-style) which is then sent to all of your followers.

One very important difference with mFlow is the motivation for sharing. No longer are users sharing music in exchange for whuffie: mFlow offers their users 20% of any music which is bought off their recommendation, I don’t have to tell you that this kind of motivation appeals to the heart of every consumer.

“That’s amazing, why haven’t I heard of mFlow?” you may well ask. The answer to that reflects the same misgiving as Ping: the walled garden. In order to get a Facebook friend to buy a song you have recommended, you have to post it as a status update (which is easy from mFlow). Then your friend has to download an application, sign up for an account, find you on mFlow, then listen to the track. Then -- and only then -- can they get out their credit card and make a purchase, for you to get your 20% commission.

As much as I desperately want mFlow to take over the world, there are just too many points of failure in it. If this was a web-based system which required no download and used Facebook to connect users, doing away with concerns over “yet another log in”, then mFlow would be a serious contender.

The future of social music isn’t clear, as no service has got it completely right, but if you want my opinion, Spotify is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

Back in April I wrote a blog post about the then impending Times Paywall, pontificating on the approach that Murdoch has taken and whether I thought it would work or not. A couple of months have passed since the paywall went up so I thought I would stick my nose in again to see how things are shaping up.

News International are being pretty cagey with both statistics and an official assessment of the first 2.5 months of paid for content. Snippets of information have escaped, and external sources have claimed knowledge, revealing figures which, on the face of it, don’t look too promising for advocates of paid-for news content on the web.

Figures suggest that only 15,000 subscribers had signed up by the end of July despite running an initial (and ongoing) promotional offer of £1 for 30 days access. The Times were, it is said, prepared for such a brutal dropoff, with some sources claiming they were anticipating a 90% fall in uniques. But low user numbers will surely be the cause of wider problems, with Advertisers understandably reticent to buy space on a site with no traffic, ad sales revenues will plummet. Similarly PR firms will look to other publishing streams to push their content rather than let it sit away, undiscoverable by the scuttling spiders of the Search Engines in the empty, echoey halls of The Times.

Rumour has it that the journalists themselves are by no means thrilled by their move, unhappy that their work is reaching fewer and fewer people. The chat rooms are empty, the copy reaching precious few eyes and the discontent is almost palpable in tweets such as this by Caitlin Moran, sent during a temporary lapse in the paywall in early September.

Hopes that the paywall would increase sales of the print edition have also been dealt a blow with sales figures down month on month since it launched in July – it must be worrying times at News International.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope… by the end of July, 12,500 people had downloaded the Times iPad app on a £9.99 per month subscription basis. Not bad, particularly given that the penetration of the iPad – in fact is it currently 7th in the top grossing iPad apps. This goes some way to confirm my belief that paid-for apps are the way to monetise news content as they are tangible products with perception of value. Furthermore, the Times iPad Application is unique – there are no other quality UK news publishers out there doing the same thing on the same platform. The biggest issue that Murdoch is facing in trying to monetise his website is that there are dozens of competitors out there giving the same stuff away for free.

I doubt Murdoch will be quick to retreat, however, and at the time of writing there are plans afoot to erect a paywall around the Sun and News of the World sites. This would surely be a foolhardy move, certainly in the light of the statistics mentioned above. If the Times demographic is proving reluctant to part with it’s cash, then I doubt the average Sun reader will be throwing his hard-earned lucre towards Docklands.

Writing a brief to a digital agency is not easy. You’re asking someone, who possibly knows more about these things than you do, to provide an idea about how they would approach designing and building a site. But in order for them to do that, you have to give them enough information in the first place.

You might feel that this is a bit of an impossible task. I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? It would be like going to the dentist and telling them what grade of silver to use in their amalgams. You’d kind of hope they’d do that stuff for you.

It’s pretty much the same for writing a digital brief. We don’t expect you to be an expert necessarily or tell us what constitutes best practice in web design and build. We just need to get a solid idea of your vision, for us to be able to work out what resources we would need to get it done.

We’ve tried to give you an overview of the things we like to see in a digital brief. And also some of the things that we don’t need to see (may as well save all of our time). For the purposes of this we’re assuming that this is a digital brief where you are asking for a quote, rather than a creative brief.

The Brief
The clue’s in the name and all that. It doesn’t have to be a treatise on why the world is ready for this website. Keep it precise and to the point – we’ll try and do the same. If we need to know more about anything, we won’t be shy when it comes to asking.

What is it exactly?
Ideally you need to be able to sum up in no more than a couple of sentences, what it is. You might need to give some background on your business, but the fundamentals of what you want us to look at should be something we can ‘get’ in a second. After all, if you can’t explain it that way, then how are your end users ever going to?

Objectives
This is possibly the most important bit of the brief for us. What are you trying to achieve? We can help you with the ‘how’, but only if we know the ‘what’. Objectives such as ‘change perceptions’, ‘increase traffic’, ‘drive sales’, ‘entertain’, ‘educate’ are all good.

Functionality
What does it need to include? These are the functional elements to the site such as e-commerce, video player, user registration, user-generated content, predictive search facility. Anything above and beyond simple content pages, list it out. You don’t have to include a full functional spec here (unless you’ve already got one lying about). As I said earlier, we’ll almost certainly be coming back to you with a list of questions anyway.

Often the agency will suggest other functionality that you hadn’t considered, but if there is something you absolutely positively need included, this is the time to say.

Technical considerations
You may be open to recommendations and that is totally fine. But if you have a requirement for a particular coding language or need hosting, it’s always best to mention it.

Timescales
It’s not absolutely critical at the initial stage, but if your deadline is impossibly short, we probably need to know about it now, so we can start to provisionally plan.

Budget
This is a divisive subject. The argument goes that if we tell the agency how much we’ve got then that’s how much they’ll quote. Or if you’re looking for the best price, then you might ask a few agencies and see who comes back the cheapest. There is definitely some value in this argument, but it assumes that all pieces of digital work quoted by different agencies will come out exactly the same, just with a different cost.

Obviously some agencies are going to be more expensive than others, but you need to know you’re comparing apples with apples, which is never easy.

The advantage of giving a budget, is that agencies have a better idea of the sorts of time you want them to spend on it. If you’re prepared to pay 1 day of a creative director’s time, you’ll get a different output to the one where you buy 20 days of his or her time.

You’ll also find that if you give a budget, the responses and the amount of work offered by agencies will vary – and then you will be able to really see what you can get for your money.

Some clients will approach the issue of budget by saying: “These are the digital issues/opportunities facing my organisation/brand at the moment and this is my budget. What can you do for me?”

Where others tend to approach it more as: “This is what I think I want. How much will it cost me?”

Neither is wrong, but we think in most case you’ll already have an idea what you want to spend and will it find it easier to see what you can get for that money if all the agencies are responding within the same parameters.

In summary
Your job is to work out who’s going to give you the best work for the best price. To do that you need to make sure that all the agencies you are talking to understand what you want, but you also need to give them the opportunity to do what they do best: ie apply their knowledge and experience to turn your vision into the best it can be.

The best briefs are precise without skimping over the important bits, descriptive without being prescriptive and clearly set the aspirations and boundaries that the agency will be working to.

Simple!