Digital DNA

I am experimenting with curation of a kind I haven’t done before. The results are to be found on Please My Eye – a blog dedicated to things that I would like to have. I realise this is fairly materialistic – but I have always loved objects that do cool things (and look good at the same time): tech gadgets, toys, furniture, shoes, bikes, cars, stationery, watches, etc… I clearly can’t buy all of these things (and I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I could), but I thought that collecting pictures and information about all of the things that please my eye would be something that I would really like to do every day.

And so the blog has been in existence for 7 days and I am getting a steady stream of 60-80 people every day. So it’s a start.

It’s been, what, 6 months? Followed a link on Twitter, and ended up at NewTeeVee (part of the GigaOM collection of blogs). And within minutes I was hooked – I signed up to the daily email alerts and I visit every day.

NewTeeVee brands itself as the place to go to “follow the video revolution”. If you work in any form of video/TV or are simply passionate about the way TV and video is changing, then this is one to add to your feeds. I manage to keep on top of the main news stories in video just by scanning through the daily email. For my job, it is an essential source of information.

But NewTeeVee is not just about video related news – it’s also about the content. They have their own station that highlights and showcases the best web video out there. The team review webTV series and content, and visitors can rate the content. In effect, through their editors and community they do what all the big video portals fail to do – they filter out all the crap so that we are left with some great content to chose from. Lovely.

They cover a wide range of content type from great viral vids posted on YouTube all the way to fully crafted webTV content. Recent examples of great content highlighted by NewTeeVee includes the Filipino Prisoners tribute to Michael Jackson…

And Imaginary Bitches first series on YouTube.

If you are into magazines and mag culture in a big way, check out the growing number of excellent magazine-loving blogs out there: MagCulture (UK perspective) and Mag.Nificient (US perspective), Boicozine are just three good examples. Do you know of any more?

Mashable – the site for social network news – has just announced the launch of a French version. The site will kick off as a blend of translated or adapted news from the Mashable mothership and a fair bit of original posts from a team of four French bloggers.

There are a number of very cool social network and web 2.0 sites developing in France and I will be keeping my eye on Mashable France. It’s also a great way to learn certain French words (“breasts on YouTube” = “seins sur YouTube”). Ok, that may be a slightly childish use for the site…