Norwich City 'social network' takes off

As a Norwich fan and occasional football pundit through my work on NorwichCityMad, as well as a media professional, I took a keen interest in this morning's announcements regarding 4IP launching a social network for Norwich City. All is not as it seems.

Using Jaiku and Twitter streams, Rick Waghorn and the My Football Writer team posted updates throughout the East Anglian Derby match yesterday afternoon, which resulted in a 2-0 victory for Norwich (hurrah!). This is the first example of a 4IP-funded digital innovation, apparently, and it's a slow starter with the high-profile help of not only being the first such project but also having the attention of Twitter-addicted Canary Stephen Fry, who actually brought my attention to it as I follow his feed.



I've long been angered by My Football Writer as an internet property due to their occasional demands for a subscription of £1.50 per month (does anyone pay for online content these days?) in order to see what is, essentially, a blog staffed by professional journalists.



The 'innovation' of posting to a stream on Twitter (I'm not a Jaiku user) is no such thing. Even Rick Waghorn, the former East Daily Press man behind the project, failed to build it up, saying:

That's all we're doing; hooking up with those two service providers, streaming the two 'feeds' together and turning them into a rolling conversation. Creating a 'community conversation' which us, as journalists, are increasingly obliged to join.

'All we're doing'? 'obliged to join'? Not exactly a ringing endorsement is it? Neither is it an innovation, as my first search for an Arsenal stream on Twitter revealed one more active and much older than it's 'groundbreaking' Norwich counterpart.



Mind you, at least Mr Waghorn and his friends are better at using Twitter than a work experience journalist at the Norwich Evening News, who used the site to ask whether, in her blagged lead on the weekend's important local derby, she had managed to disguise her lack of knowledge with 'bullshit'. Maybe, but you'd have undermined it, and the publication that would appoint a clueless work-ex to write a piece many fans would have paid to write.



I don't generally want to post negative things on this site, and the vast majority of what I write in relation to my work and media in general only relates to things I've come across that I like, but I feel this needed to be raised. Through reading blogs and speaking to people within the industry, I am aware of genuine innovations the world over on a daily basis. It's somewhat disappointing that this, which seems eminently PR-able, seems to fall way short of what might be expected from a fund for digital innovation.