July 2006 Archives
July 31, 2006
Reading the Sunday Express on the way back to the UK
In preparation for my stint in the UK I 'treated' myself to a Sunday newspaper at Athens airport yesterday, although the choice was limited to the Sunday Express, and it got me all excited about seeing British newspapers once again every day. Where else but the British press could you get such great things as a front page splash "Bitter end for Pan's People" leading to a three page article about how the BBC had agonisingly snubbed the ex-Top of...
July 28, 2006
coComment introduce a crawler to track conversations
I've written before about the coComment service, which aims to allow you to track comments you've left all over the place in one tool. They've recently announced some improvements to the service which I believe have really taken it to another level. The major change is that instead of aggregating conversations based on what has been submitted by coComment users, they have introduced a crawler which will aggregate comments from a page regardless of whether the other users are coCommenters...
July 27, 2006
Vote for your 50 favourite number one albums
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the UK's official albums chart, and to celebrate there is a vote to work out the nation's top 50 number one albums of all time - a ruse always good to gain a few column inches in the press. I was very interested in the usability of the vote. When I was involved in building this kind of vote at the BBC we were always careful about how many options were available at once....
July 26, 2006
The Time When trial from the BBC
Over the last couple of weeks I've been looking at a trial online service from the BBC called "The Time When". The premise is quite simple, that people annotate a diary with their memories of the time when something happened to them. The homepage of the site showcases excerpts of the most recently submitted memories. Each features a title, a user attribution, and a date, and all these three act as deep links into the content of the site. Each...
July 25, 2006
How Vox handles audio, books and photographs
Yesterday I was looking at Six Apart's preview of their new Vox blogging and online social networking tool. At first glance I felt it was little more than a re-hash of existing products but with a more up-to-date client-side interface, but the functionality around collecting and sharing objects other than blog posts and comments looked to go a little deeper. Vox promises to 'play nicely' with third party software to make it easier to gather all of your online content...
July 24, 2006
Looking at Six Apart's new Vox service
Like many people with some kind of Six Apart account, over the last week or so I've been trying out the preview of their new Vox service - you can find what little I've posted at currybet.vox.com. To get something off my chest straight away, I'm with Dave on the spelling issue - it really bugs me that the social network feature of the service is spelt incorrectly for anyone outside of the U.S.A. I know spelling isn't my greatest...
July 23, 2006
Yet another ex-staff tuppence on the BBC's new media restructure
Last week Tom Coates wrote a pretty damning appraisal of what he thinks of how the BBC's proposed restructure will impact on new media at the Corporation, particularly on what, up until now, he called "an environment where parallel parts of the BBC could operate independently". There was a central new media team, and then each content producing department had their own new media teams (many of which had originally been staffed with central new media editorial people who had...
July 21, 2006
Greek Universities against the use of the internet
One of the biggest stories here in Greece at the moment is the government's proposed reform of tertiary education. They are proposing that private investment in universities be allowed for the first-time, and that a raft of other changes are made to bring education in Greece in line with EU legislation. The reforms are also aimed at addressing some curious situations that arise in the Greek education system. There is no time limit to finishing a degree in Greece, and...
July 20, 2006
Why webmasters don't like Lycos Retriever
Yesterday I was looking at a new beta service from Lycos, called Lycos Retriever, which they claim is "the Web's first information fusion engine". It builds directory pages on topics selected after analysing real user search queries, and populates those pages with encyclopeadic content from websites. Lycos Retriever has not proved popular with the webmaster community, and I can understand why. If Joe Bloggs made a directory web site consisting of flat HTML pages, each page of which was optimised...
July 19, 2006
Looking at Lycos Retriever Beta
Due to the overwhelming market share that it enjoys, frequently even the rumour that Google is going to introduce a new feature or product can make global news headlines. Meanwhile a lot of the search engines with smaller market share are producing some interesting new takes on search and web navigation, with barely a fanfare. One such product is Lycos Retriever - which they claim is "the Web's first information fusion engine". The product is an attempt to build a...
July 18, 2006
Searching The Sun online - part two
I have returned to looking at search on The Sun's online site, as the situation has changed slightly since I took my first look at the site a couple of weeks ago. At that point England were still participating in the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and it appears that The Sun were using a different masthead design for the duration of the competition, which impacted on the placement of the search boxes that I recorded. The masthead on the homepage...
July 17, 2006
Search box placement in British newspaper search result pages
Whilst surveying the search services of the British newspaper market, I looked not only at the placement of search boxes on the homepage, but also the subsequent placement of search boxes on the results pages themselves. I have not included The Sun in this section, as their search results open in a small pop-up and so the positioning would not be a like-for-like comparison. Also it should be noted that I have included the Daily Star and The Daily Express,...
July 14, 2006
British newspaper homepage search box placement
Whilst surveying the online searches of British newspapers, I also had a look at where they placed their search boxes on their homepage. I found these fell into four main zones. The Mirror and The Times, along with the Daily Express and Daily Star, opted for the top left-hand corner of the page. It should be noted, of course, that The Daily Star and The Daily Express were the two British newspapers not to offer any site search facility, and...
July 13, 2006
Surveying search across British online newspapers
Over the last couple of weeks I have been surveying the online search facilities offered by British newspapers, and this post gathers together my conclusions and a table of features across the market. In all I looked at 13 newspaper sites: Daily Express Daily Mail Daily Star Financial Times The Guardian The Independent The Mirror The Scotsman The Sun The Sunday Sport The Telegraph This Is London The Times On the whole I found relevancy across the market sector to...
July 12, 2006
Searching The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. In this last look at individual papers I'm focussing on two of the lesser-selling and frankly less serious newspapers on the British market, The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport. The Daily Star is generally seen as Britain's third red-top tabloid, after The Sun and The Mirror, although in recent years it has been gaining ground on them both...
July 11, 2006
Searching The Daily Express
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. Today I want to look at the British paper most likely to feature Diana, Princess of Wales or house prices on the front page - The Daily Express. From the homepage of the Daily Express search is offered over the web, or over the Thomson Local directory, using a radio button selection mechanism. The search results feature a title,...
July 10, 2006
Searching The Financial Times
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. Today I want to look at the specialist financial paper - The Financial Times. FT.com has had a considerable amount of investment during the years, and was one of the earliest newspapers in the UK to move to a paid-content model online. Search from the Financial Times homepage is via a box underneath the masthead. The actual results from...
July 7, 2006
Searching The Scotsman
I've been surveying the strengths and weaknesses of site searches across a number of British newspaper web sites, and today I'm going to look at a newspaper which isn't seen as one of the major national newspapers south of the border, but which is one with a significant and well developed online presence - The Scotsman The user can reach the site's search facility by following a link on the navigational toolbar. Selecting this link takes the user to the...
Yahoo! Answers - Beta AND (New)
I know Yahoo! are proud of the take-up levels of their Yahoo! Answers service, but are they pushing it in their current SERPs just a little too much? A service that is simultaneously BETA and (New) in two different places within pixels of each other?...
July 6, 2006
Searching The Telegraph
I've been surveying the search services offered by British online newspapers, and today I am looking at the search on the site of one of the newspapers that has fiercely stuck to years of broadsheet tradition - The Telegraph. The Telegraph offers a search in the navigation menu that sits underneath the masthead on their homepage. The search defaults to site search, but via a radio button mechanism the site also offers a Google branded web search. The search engine...
July 5, 2006
Searching The Guardian
Over the course of the last week or so I have been looking at how search works across various different British newspaper websites. Today I am looking at the search service offered online by The Guardian. Search from The Guardian's homepage is positioned near to the top right-hand corner of the homepage, above the masthead. Search engine results from The Guardian include the title of an article, the publication origin, the authors name and a date stamp. There is also...
July 4, 2006
Searching The Daily Mirror
Over the course of the last week or so I have been looking at how search works across various different British newspaper websites. Yesterday I looked at The Independent's search systems, and today I am going to return to red-top tabloid territory, with a look at the Daily Mirror. Mirror.co.uk didn't get into my good books to start with, as an invasive advert for Currys prevented the page from rendering properly in Firefox, which meant that I had to fire...
July 3, 2006
Searching The Independent
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. Last week I looked at the site searches offered by The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Evening Standard's This Is London. This week I'm starting with a look at search on The Independent. Search on The Independent's homepage is accessed by a small box towards the top right-hand corner of the page. It doesn't seem to...
Using Wikipedia as a statistical source in the Athens News
Although being on Crete we are some way from Athens, the Athens News is the nearest we have to an English language local paper. Something rather odd struck me about an article they ran last week, entitled "Primates in Peril?". The article is credited to the AP and to Athens News, and follows the story of a request by the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre to experiment on a type of primate, sooty mangabey monkeys, which some people claim is...