October 2008 Archives
October 31, 2008
Almost getting my hands on a Sony Reader e-book experience
I got my first chance to play with Sony's Reader at Waterstones in Kensington on Tuesday. Well, I didn't really get a good feel for it, as it was firmly bolted to some point-of-sale material for security reasons. I thought the screen was very readable, but, like a few reviews I've seen. I found the page-flip to be a bit laggy. Mind you, I've been mostly using the Internet at 32kbps for the last two years, so you'd think I'd...
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 3
This week I've been presenting a series of posts based upon my Euro IA Summit presentation - "Taking the 'Ooh!' out of Google - Getting site search right for news". In an era where search usage is dominated by Google, it is important to make sure that site search doesn't just return great results, but that it does it in a way which offers a distinctive experience from Google. Yesterday I was looking at some of the information that...
October 30, 2008
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 2
Yesterday I started a series of articles based upon an expanded version of my presentation at the 2008 Euro IA Summit. Having introduced the problem of what to do with site search in an era dominated by Google, today I'm looking at some of the things you know about your content that Google cannot glean from web crawling. The trick to taking the 'Oooh' out of Google and putting it back into your site search is to use that...
October 29, 2008
BBC fails the online Brand damage limitation test
One of the joys of having the web as a corporate communication channel is that it is very flexible and can be very, very dynamic. Not all businesses take full advantage of that, though. The BBC has not been very nimble in its response to the Brand / Ross / Sachs sex scandal, and this has been especially true on the web. At lunchtime today, even as the Corporation announced the suspension of Ross and Brand, if you visited /programmes...
Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 1
Over the course of the next couple of weeks I want to present an expanded version of the presentation I gave at the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam at the end of September. There I was talking about "Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google" and getting site search right for news. Over this series of posts I hope to show how you can use additional information about content that Google can't get access to to make your site...
October 28, 2008
NOW Brand and Ross have f*&$ed up my vow not to rant about newspaper editorial...
So I vowed that when I got back to the UK I wouldn't expend energy on blogging about the editorial side of the media, just the technical side of things. It has taken about two days for me to tear up that pledge because I've got so aggravated about the Brand / Ross / Sachs sex scandal. As far as I can tell from the reports in the press, between the programme being broadcast and the story appearing on the...
Currybetdotnet recent comments round-up 2008-10-28
Once-a-month or so I like to round up any interesting comments that have been left on the site. You can find previous round-ups for August and September. Here is the selection for October. The 'dofollow' comment debate My promoting blog comments post continues to attract lots of comments, most of which are link-building spam, although there are occasionally the odd comments with a bit of thought put into them. Brad raised an interesting point about having a 'dofollow' policy: "I...
October 27, 2008
ERT re-design takes a cue from the BBC
Just as I was leaving Greece, state broadcaster ΕΡΤ relaunched their news website. The design follows a new set of visual graphics on the three state-owned TV channels, and makes some significant improvements on the previous design. The news site now much more closely resembles a blog, and, according to the metadata on the pages, it is being powered by Joomla. All stories are clearly date-stamped with permalinks. There is also a very prominent calendar for navigation via date, which...
A (dead) lemon tree of our own
I know from the subscription and visitor numbers that only a fraction of regular currybetdotnet readers also read my other blog - 'A lemon tree of our own' which my wife and I co-wrote about setting up home in Chania, Crete. I thought, therefore, it was worth cross-posting and clarifying that we have now permanently moved back to the UK from Greece. Why move back? Well, I was spending increasing amounts of time away from Crete in order to work...
October 26, 2008
Gelsenkirchen's scruffy World Cup legacy
A lot has been made of how the 2012 London Olympics will leave a 'lasting legacy' for the capital in terms of infrastructure investment and regeneration. One thing that is important for the bid team is to make sure that a couple of years after the Olympic circus has left town, people can actually see the effect. I thought about this whilst I was in Gelsenkirchen, a host city at the 2006 World Cup Finals. The VELTINS Arena was one...
A German child's eye view of FYROM: Mazedonien
Over the last couple of days I've been writing about the dispute between Greece and what is officially known as 'The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia'. It is a battle that Greece has struggled to make understood outside of the Balkans, to the extent that apart from official bodies of international law and sporting relations, the majority of people simply refer to FYROM as Macedonia. This was typified by a children's map I saw in a shop window on my...
October 25, 2008
A Greek political map of Europe is also a map of the Greek political mindset
Yesterday I published a little fable - "The Former Scottish Constituency of Northumbria"- intended to make the Macedonian name dispute between Greece and FYROM intelligible to anyone who understands the geography of the UK, but not of the Balkans. It is very interesting to consider how much of our world view is shaped by maps and geographical labels, and a look at a Greek map of the world can be very telling. One of the places I went to watch...
October 24, 2008
"The Former Scottish Constituency of Northumbria"
The year is 2058. It is 12 years since the Scottish Civil War ended. Scotland finally achieved independence from England in the 2020s, but the newly founded Republic of Scotland was short-lived. Initially a handful of the northernmost islands seceded from the Republic in disputes over their level of funding and self-sufficiency. Then, old Sectarian fault-lines, political wrangles between the party power-bases of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and an ideological split over whether the new Republic should retain close ties with...
October 23, 2008
Social media: Contextual help on US newspaper websites
Over the last couple of days I've been looking at how 24 hour news television stations and British newspapers provide contextual help to social media users online. Today I wanted to turn my attention to the US newspaper market, to see how this segment of the online industry helps users to discover social bookmarking. As I've been surveying sites for their social media usage, I've been basing my studies of US newspapers on the list in 24/7 Wall Street's...
October 22, 2008
Social media: Contextual help on 24 hour news TV websites
Yesterday I was looking at how British newspaper sites provide contextual help around the social bookmarking sites that they link to. I found that The Sun provided a very comprehensive help guide, but aside from The Independent, and some 'mouse-over tool tips' from The Guardian, nobody else did. As part of my recent social media study I also looked at a selection of 24 hour news television channels, to see if they provided bookmarking links. Today I wanted to...
October 21, 2008
Social media: Contextual help on UK newspaper websites
So far in my observations of the use of social bookmarking links on mainstream media sites I have concentrated on the end results - the number of URLs that became popular on a service. Today I wanted to start looking at one aspect of the user interface that media sites provide, namely whether they have any 'contextual help' for users around social bookmarking. Of course, it could be convincingly argued that actually the job of 'contextual help' here is...
October 20, 2008
Nominate your most useful FUMSI article of the year
When I was in the UK the other week I started spotting early Christmas adverts on TV, and it is shortly coming to that time of year when a gentleman's mind wanders towards making long lists of the best / worst of 2008. FUMSI magazine is no exception, and the nomination process for citing the 'Most Useful Article' of the year has been announced. Any article published in the FUMSI database between December 2007 and September 2008 is eligible for...
Remembering the war at The Telegraph
I've been watching with interest the development of The Telegraph's war memories site at telegraph.co.uk/war. [1] At first glance it seemed to be very similar to the BBC's People's War initiative from a few years back - a site that is now mothballed as a static archive on bbc.co.uk. It might be interesting to look at the user contributions side-by-side and see if, as I suspect, The Telegraph has managed to capture some unique stories with a different demographic perspective...
October 19, 2008
Haunted Amsterdam - Part 2
Yesterday I was writing about our experience going on the Amsterdam Ghost Walk whilst I was in the city for the Euro IA Summit. There were a couple of allegedly haunted places that we didn't get to see on the walk itself, and so we visited them under our own steam during our break in Amsterdam. The Wailing Tower Amsterdam's "Wailing Tower" was formerly part of the city's defensive walls, and used to be connected to The Waag by a...
October 18, 2008
Haunted Amsterdam
I was recently in Amsterdam for the Euro IA Summit, and on the night before the conference was due to begin, my wife surprised me with the present of a guided ghost walk around town. Long term readers may remember that back when I lived in London I used to quite regularly blog about the ghosts walks we went on around the streets of London. Our guide met us outside The Tara, which was a pleasant, if pricey, Irish pub....
October 17, 2008
No speedy way to a refund from See Tickets
Last week I was blogging about the difficulty of using Ticketmaster as an online agency to get tickets for Depeche Mode's 2009 tour. Presciently, Ian left a comment citing using See Tickets as a worse user experience. Joy of joys, I found out all about that this weekend. Now, it isn't entirely the fault of See Tickets, but it is one of those cases that illustrates the awkward seams that can develop when new media and old media mix in...
October 16, 2008
A storm in the Ionian for the BBC and The Guardian
I got back from a round-trip to Amsterdam, London and Gelsenkirchen to pick up a copy of my local Greek newspaper and find a media storm surrounding the BBC and The Guardian over their reporting of Corfu. Reports appeared in the UK media about some members of the community on Corfu wanting a measure of independence from the political elite in Athens, who are perceived to be growing rich on the back of Corfu's tax payments, and giving little in...
October 15, 2008
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Belarus
With two consecutive emphatic wins behinds them, the English FA must be feeling confident at the moment that the national team will reach the 2010 World Cup Finals. I've been reviewing the FA websites of the countries competing with England in Group 6 of the European qualifying competition. So far I've looked at England, Andorra and Kazakhstan, and I reviewed the Croatian FA site during Euro2008 in the summer. Today, with England facing Belarus in Minsk, I've turned my...
October 14, 2008
Naked hypocrisy in the Daily Mail
Occasionally the Daily Mail veers into the territory of self-parody. Take last Wednesday's edition. On page 22, there was an article about rugby player Danny Cipriani, illustrated with a massive picture of the star with only a rugby ball to protect his modesty. Page 37 had an article about how hippies have turned into their parents. Of course, the Daily Mail can't illustrate a story about hippies without a picture of a carefree hippie-chick showing her breasts. And on page...
Social media and www.bbc.co.uk
Yesterday I wrote about the disappointing performance of the UK's terrestrial broadcasters on social media sites. During the course of my recent month long study, aside from the BBC, I only spotted one URL from Channel 4 become popular. There was no content at all from ITV or Five. However, the BBC figure is, of course, distorted by the inclusion of BBC News stories in the figure of 341 popular social media URLs. Indeed, if I excluded...
October 13, 2008
Social media and terrestrial television
During July and August I recorded over 3,500 URLs from mainstream media sites becoming popular on 8 social bookmarking services. Using the results I've so far published an e-book covering UK newspaper success with social media, and blogged about local newspaper and freesheet success, as well as writing a whole series on 24 hour news stations like CNN, the BBC, Sky News and Al Jazeera. Another group of sites I looked at was the UK's terrestrial broadcasters. I expected...
October 12, 2008
Spooky shop on Hoe Street, Walthamstow
It appears that we might have a new ghost in Walthamstow - 'Spirits high despite the spooky visitors' Well, not a new ghost exactly, it apparently dates from the 1950s, and has been haunting a jewellers on Hoe Street in Walthamstow. There is a theory that it is the spirit of a young man who was murdered in the shop, but the local paper is appealing for anyone with more information about the building to come forward. It was the...
October 11, 2008
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Kazakhstan
As England progress through their Word Cup Qualifying group, I've been reviewing their FA website and those of their opponents. I won't actually be getting to see England's sold out match against Kazakhstan today as I'm actually in Gelsenkirchen for the deciding final round of the World Speedway Championship. That, however, hasn't stopped me trying to get to grips with the Kazakh website. Kazakhstan The Kazakh team has been torn between East and West since they became affiliated to...
October 10, 2008
"You've lost your place in the queue" - the battle to buy Depeche Mode tickets from Ticketmaster
This week Depeche Mode announced what Fletch said was their "rather modestly titled" Tour Of The Universe. It gave me an opportunity to have yet another truly diabolical user experience with Ticketmaster. I got an email alert from Live Nation that the tickets for the London gig were going on 'pre-sale' at 9am on Thursday morning. In order to be able to buy tickets you needed to register with the Live Nation site. Naturally, I did that, and come five...
October 9, 2008
Will The Telegraph's tie-up with eMusic expose the staff's guilty pleasures?
I noticed a couple of weeks back that The Telegraph has a special promotion, where they have joined forces with eMusic to give away free downloads to readers. What struck me as really interesting is the way that they are selling the idea that you can see and follow the music taste of Telegraph writers and editors, as well as contribute to a Telegraph 'chart'. Since eMusic is a social download platform, member's networks can build into an interesting blend...
October 8, 2008
"It's for you" - Lloyds TSB splashes taxpayer's cash in the Metro
So was it just me, or was anyone else gob-smacked on their commute to find that today's Metro came wrapped in a 4 page advertising spread for the Lloyds TSB mobile banking service, whilst the main headline inside was "£50bn buy-up to save banks" including, of course, Lloyds TSB? Did nobody at Lloyds TSB think this may not be a good time to use the slogan "It's for you", when the only thing the average taxpayer is getting from the...
US newspapers in the Google time tunnel: Part 2
Yesterday I started looking at a selection of US newspapers through the 'time tunnel' of Google's 2001 search engine index. Today, I'm going to continue with a look at another 14 American newspapers, starting with some of the New York press. New York Daily News The 2001 edition of the New York Daily News online billed itself as "New York's hometown connection" The site was number one for a search of its name, but Google seems to have lost some...
October 7, 2008
US newspapers in the Google time tunnel: Part 1
Yesterday I published some screenshots of the 2001 versions of UK newspaper websites, as linked to by Google's newly re-available 2001 index. At the same time as doing my research on UK newspaper success with social media, I was also looking at the social media success of a range of US newspapers. I thought it might be fun to peer back through the Google time tunnel and see how 25 American newspapers looked and ranked online in 2001. Arizona Republic...
October 6, 2008
UK newspapers in the Google time tunnel
With everyone keenly paging through Google's 2001 search index, I thought it might be interesting to see how our British national newspapers were faring on Google back at the turn of the decade, and how their sites are represented in the Internet Archive. Daily Express Searching for the Daily Express in 2001 turned up express.co.uk at number 3 on Google. The homepage that Google links to shows that the attention of the Express was firmly turned to the Sarah Payne...
October 5, 2008
H.N. Werkman's "ASCII art" in the Van Gogh Museum
I spent a few days last week in Amsterdam with my wife, enjoying a short break and some sight-seeing after my appearance at the Euro IA Summit. We purchased the 'I Amsterdam' card, which we found to be excellent value for money. On the first day, by the time we had visited the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, started using our 72 hour travelcard and taken a boat trip around the canals, we had already recouped our money. I enjoyed...
October 4, 2008
Live plugin streaming at The Waag
After the EuroIA Summit I took the opportunity to stay in Amsterdam for a few extra days and do some sight-seeing. One of the older buildings in Amsterdam is The Waag, which formed part of the old city walls and defences. The building featured in a ghost walk we did around Amsterdam because of the grisly history it had as a theatre where the public could pay to watch the dissection of the corpses of criminals - and there will...
October 3, 2008
Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 4
Over the last three days I've been blogging my take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam. On Saturday morning I was giving my own talk on how to take the 'Ooh' out of Google and get site search right for news. Here is my final installment of commentary on the conference. "Documenting Mobile 2.0 IA" by Scott Weiss "Now you understand why the animated chart is so helpful, you wouldn't want to do this before...
October 2, 2008
Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 3
Over the last weekend I was in Amsterdam attending the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit. The second day was when I was giving my own presentation, in the stunningly opulent Art Deco surroundings of the Tuschinski Theatre. I've been blogging about what caught my ear there, and here are my take-away facts and quotes from Saturday morning's sessions. Panel sessions There were two panel sessions at the conference. The first was an academic session entitled "Establishing a common ground...
October 1, 2008
Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 2
Yesterday I started blogging some of my take-away facts and quotes from this year's Euro IA Summit at the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam. Here are some of the things that stood out for me on the Friday afternoon. "How do you re-design a business critical web application with billions of unique products" by Floris Ketel "KLM are in the room. If they have to correct me, I will get slapped" Floris Ketel was presenting a case study on the...