April 2008 Archives

April 30, 2008

OMG! They are not searching for 'Princess Diana' anymore at the Daily Express!

I've mentioned before that I have a little Perl script that keeps an eye on the 'Most popular searches' at the Daily Express site. Each day it faithfully goes and checks what they are, and then alerts me with a 'VROOT! VROOT!' email if anything changes. This morning the alarm went off for the first time in 74 days. The Express has finally changed the list of what users are most looking for, by altering two of the terms. You...
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70 years of televised F.A. Cup Finals

It seems that for many years now football pundits have been claiming that the F.A. Cup has lost its sparkle, and hasn't been living up to the tradition of the tournament. Various reasons are often cited for this - the abolition of replays, Manchester United refusing to take part in 2000, and the fact that nobody outside 'the big 4' has won it for a decade. It will be slightly different this year, as successive 'giant killings' have left us...
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April 29, 2008

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The beautiful people and the badly-dressed Brit: Touring Miami's Art Deco district

I wasn't quite sure what to expect of Miami. My only experience of the city was from watching CSI:Miami, Miami Vice (the 80s version, not the movie remake) and playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. So I kind of thought I might instantly get into some sort of gangland action. Actually, when I got there, I just got into a really, really, really long wait for the not-so-Super Shuttle to take me from airport to hotel. It was the Grand...
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April 28, 2008

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7 things I like about the Daily Mail Beta

Regular readers may have noticed that I find it very easy to write article after article moaning "Well, I wouldn't have done it like that" about newspaper websites, so I thought I'd try a different tack for a change. Instead of the usual currybetdotnet "Here is where I think they went wrong" article - here are seven things I like about the Daily Mail's new beta design. Click through today in pictures People like pictures on the web - well,...
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April 27, 2008

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100 years since the first London Olympics

Earlier this week I wrote a post on the anniversary of the 1906 Intercalated Olympic Games in Athens. We are used to the Summer Olympics being held later in the year nowadays, but April used to be the chosen month to get the games underway. Today is the centenary anniversary of the first time that London held the games. Following the first three modern Olympiads in Athens, Paris and St. Louis, the 1908 Olympic Games were scheduled to be held...
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April 26, 2008

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Chipwrapper and the Ofcom PSB review

It seems that quite a lot of people I'm connected to via teh interwebz over the last couple of weeks have been slowly making their way through the mountain of documents that Ofcom have issued as part of their second review into Public Service Broadcasting. Martin Moore, whilst praising the PSB blog, has been thoroughly bogged down in the detail: " The wonderful thing about the internet is that OFCOM can publish as much as it likes without worrying about...
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April 25, 2008

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'Real World Usability' Chinwag Live event

On Tuesday night I went to the latest Chinwag Live event, a panel discussion about 'Real World Usability', held underneath the Slug & Lettuce on Wardour Street. The panel for the event featured Andy Budd, Paul Dawson, Udy Ravid, Niqui Merret and Bryan Rieger, and it was chaired by Giles Colborne. Andy Budd and Paul Rieger were the most vocal of the panelists. Andy's philosophy was that usability wasn't a 'taught' skill, but something that one acquires with experience. Whilst...
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April 24, 2008

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How many British newspapers use sitemap.xml to help search engine indexing?

When I started my 'Newspaper Site Search Smackdown' the other week, within a few minutes of the first part being published Bruce had posted the following comment. " 'a newspaper site search ought to be able to index content directly from a CMS faster than Google can crawl a site' - Perhaps, but this seems kind of irrelevant. Any well built site will be creating a sitemap.xml and pinging Google whenever any updates are made so that it's indexes will...
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April 23, 2008

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The BBC need a TARDIS to transport their Doctor Who RSS URLs

There was an astonishing message in the official BBC Doctor Who News RSS feed yesterday: Now that we've switched over to our shiny new site, our news stories are being created in a different way. Therefore you'll no longer see news stories added to this page. Instead, you'll find them if you follow the link below. More importantly, if you subscribe to our RSS news feed using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml you'll need to update it to: http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml That way you'll...
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April 22, 2008

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1906 Athens 'Intercalated' Olympic Games anniversary

The fact that the modern summer Olympics have generally been run in late summer means that there is a cluster of Olympic anniversaries in August. However, today is the 102nd anniversary of the opening of the 1906 games being held in Athens. These games are remarkable because they are no longer counted as 'official'. Athens held the first modern Olympics in 1896, and also wanted to host the 1900 edition. Paris was offered this honour instead, but by way of...
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April 21, 2008

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A month of Twittering

I never really had much interest in Twitter when it first launched. Despite it being almost exactly tailored to a compulsive blogger and early technology adopter like me, I really, really couldn't see the point of it. As the service has developed, people have begun to find more and more ways of using it to do research, market their blogs, get questions answered, get engaged, and to arrange when to meet down the pub. Increasingly I've been reading about what...
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April 20, 2008

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IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 4

This is part 4 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Another approach that adds more value and entertainment to widgets is including 'Easter Eggs' - hidden bits of content or functionality triggered by specific user actions. The recent marketing campaign for U2's U23D concert movie was a great example of this. Users could download a widget which carried clips of the movie, behind-the-scenes footage, and news about the film leading up to...
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April 19, 2008

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IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 3

This is part 3 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Now I want to move on and look at a dimension that is often-underused on websites, but can be absolutely crucial for widgets - time. It is fine to have a website or mini-site devoted to coverage of a specific event, and to leave that untouched at the end of the event as an archive of what happened. This particularly applies to...
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April 18, 2008

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IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 2

This is part 2 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Let us imagine a company, that has just been told by their whizzy new internet consultant that they need to develop their widget strategy if they are to stay relevant to their target audience. The company - Nom Nom - makes small fluffy toys of baby animals, aimed at the pocket money of their target market, 9 to 15 year old girls....
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April 17, 2008

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IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets - Part 1

This is part 1 of a 4 part article - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 We are all familiar with the basic history of how mankind developed the written word. Initially, to keep any message preserved, or available to be read by a large audience, you basically had to bang it into the side of some rock. This wasn't a very portable format, and it certainly didn't have RSS feeds. Over time humans improved their written communication,...
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April 16, 2008

currybetdotnet scrapes into Wikio Top 100, but where is Guido?

One sure way to get a mention on this blog is to make an exciting list of the most influential blogs in the UK, stick currybetdotnet in it, and then email me to tell me what you've done, just in case my vanity search alerts fail to pick it up. And that is exactly what Wikio have done with their UK blogosphere list. This blog just squeezed into the top 100, although obviously my techie credentials are not as strong...
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Take-away facts, quotes and top tips from the 2008 IA Summit - Day 3

I've just come back from Miami, where I was giving a talk about 'IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets' at the 2008 IA Summit. Here's my take on Day 3. Search Patterns - Peter Morville The first thing I went to on Monday was the repeat session of Peter Morville's 'Search Patterns' presentation. He seems to be doing a great job of discovering and exposing every possible variation on search interfaces that there is on the web. What...
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April 15, 2008

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Take-away facts, quotes and top tips from the 2008 IA Summit - Day 2

I've spent the weekend in Miami at the 2008 IA Summit, where I was giving a talk on 'IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets'. Yesterday I published a round-up of my take-away facts, quotes and top tips from Day 1 of the conference. Here's my take on Day 2. Extending the gaming experience to conventional UI’s - John Ferrara I think it is a generation thing, but I've been to several presentations now at conferences where someone basically...
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April 14, 2008

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Take-away facts, quotes and top tips from the 2008 IA Summit - Day 1

The IA Summit started here in Miami in earnest on Saturday morning, and I'm due to give my presentation today. As I did with the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona last year, I thought I would put together a summary of my take-away facts, quotes and top tips, on a day-by-day basis. Journey to the Center of Design - Jared Spool Jared was very entertaining and energetic as a keynote. His premise was that User-Centred Design was the stone in...
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April 13, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars

I've been running a series of Newspaper Site Search Engine Smackdowns to see which papers were able to index their own content faster than Google could. It turned out that the answer was not many, with only The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Independent getting close to indexing news stories faster than Google's web search did. Although it is the dominant player in the market, Google is not the only search engine, so I also carried out the...
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April 12, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 5 - The Newspapers vs Google

Over the last four days I've been pitting British newspaper site search engines together in a fight to the death to see who had the fresher index - the Newspaper Site Search Smackdown. The Independent triumphed, followed closely by the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. The exercise was prompted by the fact that Google has launched "Search in search" boxes for several of those papers. Kevin Anderson argued that this was an improved user experience for most newspapers,...
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Wikipedia users respond to Tom Utley's criticism in the Daily Mail

I bookmarked this piece by Tom Utley in the Daily Mail today - "Abortion and why, since my boy fiddled my Wikipedia entry, I've feared the sinister power of the internet" - with the comment that: "I'm willing to wager Tom Utley will have an expanded Wikipedia entry pretty soon after publishing this article which seems to pin the decline of Western civilisation on his son's ability to vandalise Wikipedia, the BBC and Google's stance on advertising" In fact, I...
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April 11, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 4 - The Daily Express vs The Times

I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. The Daily Mail triumphed over The Sun in Round 1, and in Round 2, The Independent emerged victorious over The Telegraph, getting a perfect 10 out of 10 in the process. Yesterday was a low scoring Round 3, with The Guardian just edging out The Mirror, by 7 points to 6. Today I'll be finishing off the inter-newspaper contests with...
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April 10, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 3 - The Guardian vs The Mirror

I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. In Round 1, The Sun was put down by The Mail. Yesterday's Round 2 saw a perfect 10 from The Independent, and the lowest score so far, from The Telegraph. Today it is the turn of The Guardian and The Mirror to face the test. The rules The rules of the contest are quite simple. Go to a newspaper homepage...
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April 9, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 2 - The Telegraph vs The Independent

I'm running a series of smackdowns between British newspaper site search engines, to test how fresh their indexing is. Yesterday, in Round 1, The Daily Mail had the edge over The Sun. The Mail had 9 of their top 10 headlines indexed and findable via search by 9am - The Sun was left in their wake with only half of their top 10 stories in their index. Today it is the turn of The Telegraph and The Independent. The...
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April 8, 2008

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Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 1 - The Daily Mail vs The Sun

The other week I wrote about the potential threat to newspaper revenue from Google's new 'Search in search' feature. Links to the article appeared on a few blogs, and Kevin Anderson made the point that Google was doing search better than most newspapers: "Where I might disagree is Martin's argument that it negatively impacts user experience. He says that Google's position is that they can provide search better than the news sites. Well, the sad truth is that whether...
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April 7, 2008

My IA Summit plans

Karen Loasby just published the schedule of what she is hoping to attend at the IA Summit this weekend, which prompted me to sit down and do some early planning to make sure I get to see all that I want to see. Fortunately, it seems that all of the sessions will be available for download in audio format after the conference, so you can't completely miss anything, and luckily there don't seem to be too many big clashes...
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Up and down del.icio.us links

RSS subscribers to currybetdotnet might have noticed I've been having a bit of an up-and-down time with the posting of my del.icio.us links. I started publishing them back in December, and wrote a piece about adding del.icio.us links to your blog. One tip I didn't list was to make sure your links publish at all, but that was a problem I only started having a fortnight ago. Suddenly on Wednesday 26th the links didn't publish automatically as expected. Once it...
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April 6, 2008

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Propaganda, politics and censorship - The Olympic Torch Relay since 1936

Today the Olympic flame will be passing through London, and we will almost certainly see some form of protest about China's treatment of Tibet. And importantly, we will almost certainly see it in the media. This was not the case in Greece, where the state-run media tried its hardest to suppress any images or reporting of protests that took place on the flame's five day trip around the country. State television only showed the protest at the lighting ceremony...
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April 5, 2008

Game for a laugh - Anne Diamond on games in the Daily Mail

I still haven't had a chance to read the recent "Safer Children in a Digital World" Byron Report in full, although from what I've skimmed through so far I'm still sticking by my original opinion when I bookmarked it - that I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't framed in the hysterical tabloid tone that usually accompanies any debate about child safety and new media. The analogies about how we teach our children to swim and cross the road despite...
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Not going anywhere today with Expedia

I was just trying to tie up some loose ends of my travel arrangements this morning, and wanted to price up the relative merits of flying around Britain rather than using the rail network. All my instincts tell me that, at short notice, it will be much cheaper for me to vastly increase my carbon footprint. However, I wasn't getting any of the information from Expedia. A visitor to their site this morning was getting a positively old-fashioned "We've taken...
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April 4, 2008

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Reviewing the Instablogs 'citizen journalism' platform

A couple of week ago I was contacted by the team at Instablogs, asking whether I would be interested in having a look at their site. I normally shy away from this kind of promotion, but I was rather intrigued by the premise of the service, so I did have a look, and had a bit of email to-and-fro with the PR manager. In one sense, Instablogs is just another simple blogging platform. However, it combines the regular concept of...
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April 3, 2008

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Doctor Who and the Fan Who Never Was

I noticed a flurry of referrals from The Pirate Bay and Mininova this week, which is, frankly, a reversal of the normal direction of traffic from me to those sites. My recent interview on currybetdotnet with Paul Wilson about file-sharing - "Doctor Who and the Pirates" - has been cited in the latest round of the saga about Big Finish and the people who upload their work to peer-to-peer networks. An open response to the Big Finish podcasts was posted...
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April 2, 2008

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60% of Editors Blog comments hate the BBC News redesign

"A silly waste of licence-payer's money and another example of the relentless advance towards turning the Web into a Fisher-Price wonderland for simpletons." And with a quote like that, you know you must be on the BBC Editor's blog talking about the re-design of the BBC News site. At the time I checked it yesterday, Steve Herrmann's piece about the new look had generated 627 comments. At last count there were over 1,500. From experience I have a checklist...
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Postcard from Macau #11: The EA Games centre in Hong Kong

I recently spent three weeks visiting Macau, the former Portuguese territory on the south coast of China. As a former colony like Hong Kong, it is now a 'Special Administrative Region'. This post is the last of a series looking at aspects of information design, user experience, internet use and journalism that interested me when I was there. Whilst I was staying in one Chinese 'Special Administrative Region', it made sense to visit the other, Hong Kong. During my...
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April 1, 2008

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7 years of Google April Fool jokes

If the tech and search blogosphere isn't awash this morning with posts about Google's latest April Fools prank, then we'll know that corporate culture has finally bitten hard at the Googleplex. In just a few years, the Google April Fool has become something of an internet tradition. Last month there was already even speculation as to what the joke might be, with the discovery in Google Documents of an animated rival to Microsoft's annoying paper-clip 'helper'. This was strenuously denied...
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