Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With a spike in visitors to my blog exceeding 1000% of normal activity, the most popular post of all time on this blog is Content – an illustrated history . That obviously excludes the much greater exposure the illustration by Nic Hinton (@karoshikula ) and me will have garnered when Mashable and Wired ran with it, and I’ve since heard that the illustration is being used to teach university students and school kids, and for the purposes of social media training in organisations.

I mentioned in the updates to that post inserted during the ensuing days that Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar had become smitten with the illustration style and had expressed an interest in applying the style at Taptu in future. Well now they’ve done just that.

Today, the next generation of the popular and free social news reader comes out for iPhone and iPad (it’s already rocking and rolling on Android). Taptu calls it the social news DJ – allowing you to mix your favourite news streams. I’ve posted some of the illustrations used in the app here, but there’s nothing quite like checking the app out for yourself and seeing all of them in all their glory… particularly on the larger screen of the iPad. I’ve also posted a video of the new iPad version in action.

I consider an app like Taptu to be an indispensable tool in the PR professional’s armoury. Do you have a favourite social news reader?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkcMi3EuKew

It's all about curation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.

My-Taptu on Philip Sheldrake

Taptu for iPad – with gorgeous illustration

It's all about curation