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[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .] This week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I’ve done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small. But there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that’s my term for it. I define machined media as content that’s automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year’s CIPR Social Media conference. Machined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn’t had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much. But semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp. ...

CIPR TV is underway! I co-presented the first show this afternoon at 5pm with Stephen Waddington (@wadds ) and, despite the novice presenters, two aspects worked really well. First up, Paul Mylrea was a fantastic guest. The BBC’s Head of Press and Media Communications, and the CIPR’s 2011 President, Paul was never stuck for an interesting and articulate response to a wide range of questions spanning public sector PR, reputation washing, graduate recruitment and internships, diversity, the CIPR’s response to the ASA’s misguided stance towards social media , and his plans for the CIPR next year. ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ZeMQM-TQo&feature=player _embedded The last time I was on TV it was the BBC’s Working Lunch, March 2002. I was running Europe’s first email money service at the time (before PayPal was available in these parts) and our servers were struggling quite a lot under the weight of our success on eBay UK. Facing up to a firm line of questioning, I was able to reassure Working Lunch viewers that any money they had stored with us was safe and sound. Fast forward eight years and the definition of TV has changed somewhat. Indeed YouTube wasn’t even launched until 2005, before going on to be the fastest growing website ever. By 2007, the capacity consumed by YouTube exceeded that of the entire Internet in 2000. In May this year, over 24 hours worth of video was uploaded to YouTube for every single minute of the month! And now we have . ...

Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK’s first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election. But that doesn’t mean same-interest groups aren’t coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It’s just that the majority of the British public aren’t that engaged with social media just yet. And don’t start with that “but Obama did it in 2008” malarkey… sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority “online” effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone’s definition of social media. Let’s take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election. ...

So Ofcom has given the BBC the go ahead to start a high definition channel later this year. Whilst I recognise that anything the BBC does these days has to be scrutinised for “public value” by the BBC trust, but this decision also had to be reviewed by Ofcom with the purpose of assessing the marketing impact. Ofcom has concluded that the launch of the free-to-air channel is “unlikely to have significant negative market impacts”. ...