June 2006 Archives

June 30, 2006

Searching 'This Is London' from The Evening Standard

I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. I've already looked at a couple of News International Titles - The Times and The Sun - and one of Associated New Media's properties - The Daily Mail. Today I'm going to look at another Associated New Media site, This Is London, the online presence of the Evening Standard. Although the Evening Standard is not a national newspaper I...
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Which Coca-Cola billboards will be at today's matches?

The companies sponsoring the FIFA World Cup pay huge sums of money to get exclusive billboard placement at the matches. In order to maintain the exclusivity of the contracts, stadiums have been renamed, fans have had their clothing removed before they can be admitted to matches, and Germany, home of some of the world's finest beers, has been reduced at matches to only selling the USA version of Budweiser. Yet, with the world's television viewers glued to the games, and...
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June 29, 2006

Searching The Daily Mail

I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. I've already looked at a couple of News International Titles - The Times and The Sun - and now I'm going to look at one of the Associated New Media properties - The Daily Mail For a long time the Daily Mail's online site carried a very sparse amount of content, and had some hideously intrusive advert technologies that...
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June 28, 2006

Searching The Sun online

I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. The quality of the results, and the usability of the interfaces, varies widely across the market sector. I thought I'd look at each newspaper I studied in turn, and give a little review of the features, usability and accuracy of their search facilities. I started yesterday with a look at The Times online, and now I'm looking at another...
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"What a school boy error" - audience responses to professional World Cup blogging

Earlier in the week I was looking at David Bond's Telegraph article about the way blogging has changed the coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. If print journalists are taking time to adjust to this apparently new type of coverage of a major sporting event, then so are the audience. The comments on some of the posts of The Guardian's World Cup blog have degenerated into the kind of trolling slang matches you'd only expect to see on poorly...
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June 27, 2006

Searching The Times online

I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. The quality of the results, and the usability of the interfaces, varies widely across the market sector. I thought I'd look at each newspaper I studied in turn, and give a little review of the features, usability and accuracy of their search facilities. I started with The Times online. The Times default search is a site search, although the...
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Has the World Cup strangled the web?

Yesterday I was looking at David Bond's article in The Telegraph, which talked about how technology was changing the way the British print media were covering the 2006 FIFA WOrld Cup. All this online coverage of the 2006 World Cup and two-way response hasn't been seen as a good thing by everyone. Very early on in the tournament Flic Everett's article "Pundit Country" on The Guardian's Comment is free site was pretty scathing of the internet frenzy around the World...
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Spam is for doughnuts

I understand the economics of spam - that you need a very low conversion rate for it to be worthwhile and therefore the scam doesn't have to be too sophisticated, but honestly, some of it is just so half-hearted. Take this example I received yesterday. Dear Homeowner, [MY ADDRESS] [URL] You have been approved for a $ 976,596 house loan (2.9 fixed) This offer is being presented to you right now!. Your credit history is in no way a factor....
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June 26, 2006

The Telegraph's David Bond on the impact of World Cup blogging

With the British printed press being a day behind here in Greece, I've been using Rojo to aggregate just about every scrap of RSS-enabled online World Cup coverage from the press back home. I spotted this very interesting take on the whole online and new media coverage from The Telegraph's David Bond - New dawn for World Cup coverage I thought I would share some of my thoughts on blogging, three weeks or so since my first online ramblings were...
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June 23, 2006

Sloppy search on Yahoo!'s World Cup site

Here are some search results from the FIFA World Cup site for the word Budweiser - you'll note some of the pages have got "Budweiser Man of the Match" in the title of the documents. So how come when I search for the phrase "Budweiser Man of the Match" I get this? I thought search was meant to be one of Yahoo!'s core competencies?...
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June 22, 2006

Usability issues with OTEnet's On Wireless wifi service at Athens airport

My recent trip to Germany to see Switzerland versus Togo in the World Cup meant I spent Tuesday trying to get from Dortmund back to Hania in time to see England play Sweden. It also meant I got to try out the wi-fi facilities at two different airports, with very mixed results. In Frankfurt, it seemed the whole airport is covered by a T-Mobile wireless network. This was very simple to log-in to. You could purchase access in 15 minute...
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June 16, 2006

I'm looking for work in the UK

Well, there is no point having your own website if you can't turn it into a personal notice board when necessary, and I'm looking for work in the UK for a couple of months from mid-July. It doesn't mean I've given up on living in Crete - far from it - but I have to visit the UK in August for personal reasons, and then again in September to speak at the AUKML Conference in Edinburgh. It seems to make...
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Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage

During April and May 2006 the BBC ran a competition to redesign their web homepage, called reboot:bbc.co.uk. Accompanying the competition was a blog, which I was a guest contributor to. My main series of posts on the reboot:bbc.co.uk blog described the way I developed a theoretical entry into the competition, and compared it with how the BBC's New Media department develops new products and services. Here on currybetdotnet, rather than duplicating the whole thing, I have gathered together links to...
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June 15, 2006

A history of the online World Cup - the BBC's online coverage

  Download a print version of this article Having looked at the official World Cup sites, and finding that the site for USA 94 exists but that the sites for 1998 and 2002 do not, I wondered what had happened with the BBC's coverage of the tournament. The BBC's 2002 World Cup site is archived, and still available on the bbc.co.uk servers from the URL bbc.co.uk/worldcup2002. In fact it is so properly archived that the toolbar at the top hasn't been...
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June 14, 2006

A history of the online World Cup - USA '94

  Download a print version of this article I've been looking at the online history of the FIFA World Cup, and found that the sites from the previous two tournaments in 2002 and 1998 have been subsumed into the design of the current World Cup site. However, the world wide web presence of the tournament prior to that, the 1994 finals held in the USA, has slipped through the cracks. Google hosts an announcement about the forthcoming service from usenet. Official...
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June 13, 2006

A history of the online World Cup

  Download a print version of this article In the run up to World Cups it is usual for acres of print to be expended on the history of the tournament. Not a single English newspaper supplement about the contest can have been printed that didn't mention 1966, and I'm sure the same can be said for this year's hosts, who view their triumphant 1954 West Germany team with similar rose-tinted reverence. All of which made me wonder about the online...
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June 12, 2006

I just want to play some of my music

Having just moved countries, the only thing we had to play music on was either our iPods, or my laptop, which has probably got worse quality speakers than my three year old mobile phone has. Anyway, we picked up a cheap DVD/VHS combo recorder - a Philips DVP3055V - and part of the attraction was that it could play MP3 files from CD, so at least we could get some music played out of the slightly better quality TV speakers....
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Techie bloke gets new job

Was American techie changes jobs really the ninth most important news story in the UK this morning? Perhaps I'm just jealous because they didn't put me on the front page when I left the BBC ;-)...
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June 10, 2006

P2P browsing during surge events

Well, I don't know how it was for you, but here on Crete in the run-up to the opening game you couldn't get on to fifaworldcup.yahoo.com, or indeed yahoo.com, for love nor money. I don't know if that was a worldwide phenomena, or whether my little rock in the Med just exceeded the maximum number of connections or bandwidth back to the mainland. It called to mind though something that was mentioned in a thread on Digg about the demise...
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June 9, 2006

Advert banned for being unfair to corporate football

I'm not sure how this story didn't immediately come to my attention, but a friend pointed it out to me in an email yesterday, and it gives me the chance to mention Doctor Who, football, the media and the internet and get on my high horse at the same time, and I just can't pass up an opportunity like that to mark the start of the World Cup. Eighth Doctor Paul McGann recently recorded a voiceover for a TV commercial...
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June 8, 2006

More reboot:bbc.co.uk designs - part four

I've been having a look through the late flurry of entries to the BBC's reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage redesign competition. Ricardo Couto's "Clean and Useful" entry redesigned the international version of the homepage. Yet more confirmation, if it were needed, that whilst within the BBC the two versions of the page are maintained by different teams and seen as different entities, outside of the Broadcast Centre people treat what they receive at bbc.co.uk as the BBC's homepage, regardless of whether it is...
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June 7, 2006

More reboot:bbc.co.uk designs - part three

I've been having a look through the late flurry of entries to the BBC's reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage redesign competition. BBC Active Home by Paul includes a very neat tiny embedded radio player at the top of the page, although he concedes that unless it uses AJAX or iFrames or some other magic-widget-tech, it isn't going to work very well for people who immediately browse away from the homepage and lose the stream. Buried in Paul's very long explanatory notes is this...
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June 6, 2006

Guardian World Cup RSS woe

I promise to try and not turn this blog into a drip-drip-drip of minor gripes about World Cup related sites over the next month....but...I can't help thinking that the Guardian would get more traffic to their World Cup blog if they included the right address for their RSS feed. Or, if when their links generate 404 errors, the error reporting form you get given didn't insist on you narrowing down what you are reporting a fault on to a list...
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More reboot:bbc.co.uk designs - part two

I've been having a look through the late flurry of entries to the BBC's reboot:bbc.co.uk homepage redesign competition. I thought BBCv2006 by Eego was a very strong entry. I liked they way they had already incorporated the new design of BBC search into their homepage design - making all of the tab/buttons available from the homepage, including the audio/video search. The gallery of 'widgets' included on the page was also impressive. They also made the following interesting suggestion in their...
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June 5, 2006

More reboot:bbc.co.uk entries

I've already devoted a couple of posts to looking at some of the entries to the BBC's reboot:bbc.co.uk contest, and wanted to write about some of the highlights of the late flurry of entries that were published just before the competition closed. This wasn't helped by the website itself needing a reboot after it was unavailable last week all over the UK's bank holiday weekend - but I've had a look through them all now. Of course, a design competition...
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Service availability is not available

The government in the UK is often criticised over the provision of eGovernement websites, but I was very impressed when browsing the HM Customs and Excise site that they had a 'Service Availablility' page. Real-time monitoring of the availablility of services made available to the public. Very impressive, I thought. Until I clicked on it and read the disclaimer: The details on these pages are only updated during normal office hours and therefore may not reflect any unplanned out of...
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June 4, 2006

"You can only select 2 teams"

I hate bugs in web applications, and more than that, I hate bugs in web applications that imply that I'm the one doing something wrong when I am not. Yahoo!'s official FIFA World Cup site is meant to allow you to customise the homepage with personalised news about two of the teams in the final tournament. Unless you are using Firefox, in which case you just don't seem to be able to add a second team. It keeps insisting on...
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June 2, 2006

Demise of the Pirate Bay

The internet was abuzz yesterday with the news of the raid on the Swedish torrent tracking site Pirate Bay. A triumphant press release from the Motion Picture Association of America pronounced them "one of the world's largest and most well known facilitators of online piracy". So who might next in the sights of the anti-piracy lobby. Ask perhaps? Their new blog search linked to the Pirate Bay's RSS feed of TV downloads. That must be facilitating online piracy. What about...
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Is the BBC's World Cup blog the new Slashdot for football sites?

One of the disadvantages/advantages of living in Greece is that I don't get to watch England friendlies anymore (delete according to whether we are turning over Hungary or being humiliated by Australia) which means I didn't get to see Peter Crouch's inexplicable robot dancing this week. I did though get to witness the aftershocks on the internet. The BBC Sport World Cup Blog linked through to a site that had some video of Peter Crouch dancing, and promoted it on...
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June 1, 2006

Popular, but so new anymore

Yesterday the BBC dropped from the UK homepage the little "New" tag that had been next to the "See what's popular and new" link since the 24th May. The "Popular and new" page has been revamped to include data from a few more sources. It was a project that went on for some time within the BBC - it was already late when I left back in December. The new version includes the latest articles and campaigns from the DNA...
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