November 2007 Archives
November 30, 2007
Haunted Cambridge - Part 2
Yesterday I started recounting a recent ghost walk of our own devising which my wife and I did in Cambridge. A lot of the source material comes from Geoff Yeates book "Cambridge College Ghosts", although the internet provided us with some extra stories. The fourth Cambridge college on our journey was Jesus College. It is a little way out from the main shopping centre of town, and as such is much more peaceful. We found a bench to sit on...
November 29, 2007
That 2002 BBCi Search impartiality problem in full
In my recent post on the BBC's Internet Blog about the development of the BBC's web search engine, I mentioned in passing that in 2002 the BBC was accused of artificially inflating the rankings of BBC content within the results. James Cridland picked up on it, reminding us that searching for 'Classic FM' used to bring back BBC Radio 3 in top spot. The original draft of my blog post went into a little more detail about this 'technical glitch',...
Haunted Cambridge
Every now and then I deviate from this blog's usual diet of newspapers, the BBC, RSS and moaning about badly broken websites, and move into the realms of the paranormal, with accounts of ghost walks I've done with my wife. I'm a sceptic myself, but I love the way ghost stories weave themselves into the fabric of local history, and given that lots of ghost stories revolve around haunted pubs or inns, I find the walks perfectly enjoyable. During our...
November 28, 2007
10 years of BBC.co.uk on the BBC Internet Blog
I've been guest-blogging this week over at the BBC's new BBC Internet Blog. December 15th is the official birthday of the BBC's web services - although, rather like the Queen's official birthday, it seems a slightly arbitrary date. There is, of course, plenty of evidence of prior art. So far three of my articles have been published on the blog - sticking to topics that regular visitors here will be familiar with. The first was an overview of ten years...
Putting my money where my mouth used to be over ID cards
I don't know whether it will turn out to be one of the furthest-flung contributions, but a PledgeBank pledge I made a couple of years ago about ID cards has been called in. 'Hello, you have received this message because you signed my pledge, "I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge" back in 2005. In fact 11360...
November 27, 2007
My photographs of Sedlic Ossuary gaining a wider audience
I was contacted a few weeks ago by some people asking if they could use my photographs of Sedlic Ossuary in a 'Sacred Destinations' travel guide for the area, and of course, I was delighted to agree. Sedlic is located in Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic, and was somewhere we visited quite early on in our tour of what is now known as "formerly Eastern Europe". The "attraction" of the church is that it is decorated with bones. "This...
November 26, 2007
Watching the FIFA World Cup draw in Greece and online
You couldn't exactly say you got a flavour of South Africa from the TV coverage on ΝΕΤ of Sunday's FIFA World Cup draw. The hosts put on a vibrant show I'm sure, but in Greece our hour-and-a-half long programme mostly consisted of clips of Greece's Euro2008 qualifying campaign, and studio experts talking over silent coverage of whatever was happening in Durban. Although I understand it wasn't much better in the UK, with coverage shunted off to the red button of...
November 25, 2007
Trust me, the Child Benefit data loss risk to children isn't from paedophiles
One thing I noticed in the press coverage of the British Government's abject but predictable failure to protect personal data was this preposterous line of argument in an editorial in the Daily Mail: "The missing discs contain the names, addresses and dates of birth of every child in the country...Wouldn't fraudsters and child abusers give anything to get their hands on them?" Seriously, what are child abusers going to do with this information? Surely, and call me old-fashioned, if paedophiles...
November 23, 2007
BBC RSS subscription league table for English & Scottish football teams
What with the Euro2008 qualification outcome, it is maybe not the best week to be writing about English or Scottish football, but in the process of compiling my lists of the most popular BBC RSS feeds and podcasts in Google Reader, I noticed subscriptions for lots and lots of England and Scotland's football teams. The BBC provides an RSS news feeed for all of the teams in the 4 divisions of each league, including Welsh interlopers Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham,...
Not qualifying for Euro2008 - as it happened in Greece
I already had one Euro2008 slap in the face when UEFA didn't grant me any tickets to return to Salzburg to watch a couple of games staged in a place where, this time last year, I was living. And then there was the Croatia game. The comedy of errors here in Crete was nowhere near as bad as Scott Carson's competitive debut, but I thought I should share. According to the Athens News, Greek channel ΝΕΤ were showing the...
November 22, 2007
Top 50 BBC Podcasts in Google Reader
...well, 49 actually... When I was compiling my list of the most popular BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader, I noticed subscriber figures for a lot of content from the BBC's download.bbc.co.uk podcast feeds. I'm not a regular Google Reader user, so I didn't realise that it actually had the facility to play podcasts inline from the RSS reader interface. I know that Colin Murray for one gets quite vexed about where his Fighting Talk podcast appears in the iTunes...
November 21, 2007
Top 100 BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader
Adrian Monck recently described this kind of thing as the production of "list porn", but I still find it all rather fascinating. When I was making my list of the most popular British newspaper feeds in Google Reader, I couldn't help wondering what the comparative figures would be for BBC RSS feeds. The usual caveats apply: Google Reader is only a fraction of the market for online RSS feed readers. Online feed reading is only a proportion of the way...
November 20, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 11 - Feature chart and scores
Over the last two weeks I've been testing the accessibility credentials of 9 of Britain's leading online newspapers, The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. I've been looking at how they perform at basic accessibility tasks like re-sizing the text in a browser, rendering the page without images or JavaScript, and how a screen-reader emulator called FANGS copes with their pages. Yesterday I wrote in more detail about the...
November 19, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 10 - Methodology
Over the last weeks I have been looking at the websites of the major UK newspapers, and assessing them for their accessibility features. I've worked out a way of scoring them on these features, and so tomorrow I'll be publishing a feature comparison chart, and a league table of which papers performed better in the testing. (Of course, everybody loves publishing league tables of someone else's performance, they just don't like to themselves be rated that way - just ask...
November 16, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 9 - Daily Star
Although I originally only intended to review 8 newspapers in this series of posts looking at the accessibility of Britain's online newspapers, The Daily Star has recently re-designed. I therefore thought that it would be worth running my eye over the new design for accessibility features, in the same way that I have tested the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. Text resize Sadly it seems that the new Daily Star...
November 15, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 8 - The Times
I've been looking at how accessible British newspaper websites are, testing the most popular online papers against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph. Today, I'm looking at the accessibility of The Times website. Text resize The Times, along with The Mirror and The Guardian was one of only 3 out of the 8 newspapers I tested who allowed users to resize their text...
November 14, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 7 - The Telegraph
Over the last week and a half I've been looking at the accessibility issues surrounding British newspaper websites, and testing some of the most popular against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, and The Sun. So in broadly alphabetical order, provided you count the 'Daily' bit but don't count 'The'. Sometimes. Anyway, today it is the turn of The (Daily) Telegraph. Text resize Allowing your users to control...
November 13, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 6 - The Sun
I'm writing a series of posts about how British newspaper websites perform in a series of accessibility tests. These include simple things, like whether the text on a site is re-sizeable within major browsers, and more complex issues like how the site is rendered by screen reading technology. So far I've examined The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian and The Independent's sites. This post looks at the accessibility of The Sun's site. Unfortunately for me, after I'd done...
November 12, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 5 - The Independent
Last week I started a series of posts testing British newspaper websites against various accessibility standards and issues. So far I've looked at The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Guardian. Today it is the turn of The Independent. Text resize The Independent appears to be almost almost alone amongst the major newspapers in the UK in having a stylesheet 'widget' on the page to allow users to adjust the size of the text that they are viewing...
November 9, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 4 - The Guardian
I've been doing a series of checks on British newspaper websites to see how they match up to their accessibility responsibilities. So far I've looked at the Express, Mail, and Mirror. Today, in the last of this week's reviews, it is the turn of ex-broadsheet The Guardian. For each set of tests I have been looking at the homepage of a site, and then the top story from that day's paper, in order to access both types of template. For...
November 8, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 3 - Daily Mirror
This week I'm looking at the level of accessibility built into British newspaper websites. I started with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, and today I want to look at The Mirror. I'm assessing the paper's homepage and top story page against a number of accessibility criteria. Text resize One of the simplest tests for accessibility is to see whether a site uses relative font sizes or fixed font sizes. Relative font sizes means that users can control for themselves...
November 7, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 2 - Daily Mail
Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the accessibility of British newspaper websites with an overview of the accessibility performance of the Daily Express website. Today I'm continuing the series by looking at the Daily Mail. I'm testing each newspaper homepage, and a subsequent story page, against a range of accessibility criteria. Text resize The Daily Mail is one of the newspaper sites that uses fixed font sizes in its homepage and story page display. This means that...
November 6, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act put the force of law behind the principle that businesses should not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their goods and services. Although yet to be tested by major case law in the UK, it is generally accepted that 'services' includes a business web site, and that therefore businesses should take care to make sure that their sites are as accessible as possible. In theory, this is trivial to accomplish. All that...
November 5, 2007
The BBC's UK website...brought to you by Airbus
On a good day to bury bad broadcasting news a couple of weeks back the BBC slipped out the message that the BBC Trust had approved adverts on the BBC website for users outside the UK. They've appeared this evening, and somewhere I never expected them as well. I have to say that I understood that if you were outside the UK and were looking at the 'UK Edition' of the BBC News site then you were going to get...
More details on the Linux user base of the BBC, The Telegraph and The Guardian
A mistake can have unintended consequences, and a nice one after Ashley Higfiled's original claim that the BBC only has 400-600 Linux users is that it has thrown a bit of a spotlight on OS statistics in the UK media landscape. First of all, Ashley has posted on the BBC's new BBC Internet Blog to upsize the estimated Linux user base to between 36,600 and 97,600. Secondly, Neil McIntosh of the Guardian came out with some figures for Linux usage...
British newspaper RSS subscriptions in Google Reader
Last week I published a list of the Top 100 British newspaper RSS feeds - well, according to the subscription numbers given by Google Reader, anyway. It is a flawed metric, but in the absence of any kind of audited figures from the papers themselves, it is one of the few public indications of the relative audiences for RSS feeds. In order to get the list of 100, I had to look at the figures for a lot more than...
November 4, 2007
Daily Sport brand hi-jacked by Russian RSS squatters
One interesting thing I noticed when doing my recent survey of newspaper subscriber numbers in Google Reader was to do with the Daily and Sunday Sport. They themselves don't seem to have any feed format subscribers - but that didn't stop some feeds turning up when I was searching Google Reader. A couple of RSS feeds with a Russian domain name were using the Sport's brand in the sub-domain of their URL. Newspaper phising via RSS? It seems a...
November 2, 2007
Busting the BBC's 600 Linux users myth
It seems my ex-boss Ashley Highfield dropped a bit of a clanger this week with a claim that amongst BBC.co.uk's 17 million or so users, 5% of them use Macs, but only about 400 to 600 users run Linux. The Linux community has been spluttering with outrage at the low figure given, and there is already a group on Facebook with the aim of collecting more than 600 members who run Linux and visit the BBC website to prove the...
Top 100 British newspaper feeds in Google Reader
Six months ago when I was doing a series of articles about how Web 2.0 British newspaper websites are, I produced a couple of charts illustrating which newspaper and newspaper blog RSS feeds were popular according to their Bloglines subscriber numbers. It was rather a flawed study, since it only looked at one source of subscription figures, and would obviously be skewed by the demographic make-up of the Bloglines user base. At the time, though, I made the point that...
November 1, 2007
Haunted Clerkenwell
There can't be many occasions during married life where you get to lean in towards your wife in a dark alley in London, and utter the immortal phrase "Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane". But that's exactly what happened to me last week, when we were on a ghost walk near Farringdon. Yesterday I wrote about a ghost walk my wife and I did in London from St Pauls to the Barbican. The walk featured in Richard Jones' excellent "Walking Haunted...