February 2009 Archives
February 28, 2009
Can the Daily Mail and online dating really be soulmates?
Yesterday, Jemima Kiss mocked the Daily Mail's online dating service: "Single? Lonely? Bitter? Having trouble finding a life partner who hates immigrants, bleeding heart liberals, the BBC, Gordon Brown, hoodies, TV filth, feminists, Channel 4, the loony left, rip-off Britain, feral children, the French, the PC brigade, yobs, lesbians, single mothers, the Euro and Jonathan Ross quite as much as you?" It didn't take very long at all for a few comments on the article to point out that it...
February 27, 2009
Hearing about mentoring from the horsesmouth
Last week I got the chance to see a presentation from founder MT Rainey about the Horsesmouth mentoring website. It is an ambitious site which aims to match willing mentors with those in need of advice. As the strapline says "Someone knows what you need, someone needs what you know" A couple of things about the site struck me as echoing the principles for good social design that Nokia's Miles Rochford outlined at last year's IA Summit in Miami in...
February 26, 2009
Currybetdotnet recent comments round-up 2009-02-26
This is one of an occasional series where I round up some of the interesting comments that have been left on the blog over the previous few weeks. You can find earlier examples from August, September and October of last year. The PCC, the Daily Mail, and "the slut" A couple of useful points were raised in the comments on my piece about the 13 year old girl that the Mail allowed their readers to label a 'slut'. Rav Casley...
February 25, 2009
'Delivering Digital Britain' still too much about 'delivery'
I was lucky enough to get a seat yesterday morning when Lord Carter presented the next steps for his Digital Britain report at NESTA. The event was heavily over-subscribed and the busiest I've seen at NESTA HQ. The release of the report was heavily criticised in many quarters, some of which was captured by a move to put it into a more malleable format than the PDF document that was initially published. I wondered whether Lord Carter would address any...
February 24, 2009
How to turn Google's Gmail failure into an opportunity to make money
Some smart AdWords buying in the wake of today's widespread Gmail outage. A couple of firms have booked adverts against people using 'gmail' as their search term. LCN.com are advertising their reliable email hosting, whilst craftbarrow.com are urging you, without email, to take a break and go and do something less boring instead. Smart work from their respective creative teams....
February 23, 2009
What would you put in corporate Twitter usage guidelines?
What would you put in corporate Twitter usage guidelines?
It is surely only a matter of time before companies start drawing them up. Here are my five initial suggestions - what needs to be added?
February 22, 2009
More like 'pop your clogs' than 'get on your boots' for the U2 iPod
My wife has had one of Apple's limited edition U2 iPods since 2004, which she got not because of a desperate love of the band, but because it was the first time one was available in black. Sadly last week it died, and she was faced with the dreaded 'unhappy iPod' icon. The thing is, I can't help feeling that it might not have been a total coincidence that the machine chose to give up the ghost on the very...
February 21, 2009
Poised over "The Pirate Bay"
It used to be that when your favourite band were about to release a new single, you'd be poised over the pause button of your cassette recorder, waiting to tape it off the radio onto a C90. I can remember John Peel playing the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Sidewalking" single for the first time on air, and liking it so much that he immediately played it again, and before that I can remember listening to Peter Powell's 5 45s. Of...
February 20, 2009
The BBC's "Points Of View" online culture clash - Part 3
Earlier this week I published a couple of posts about the BBC's Points Of View message board, which have sparked some debate on the boards themselves. I thought it was worth returning to the topic to clarify a couple of points. "50 or so" users One thing that seems to have vexed the POV board is my suggestion that there were only '50 or so' regular users on the board. I added a comment about that on my previous post,...
February 19, 2009
A technological revolution in miniature
I'm always on the look-out for historical examples of how an industry was changed or destroyed by a technological development, if nothing else to keep avoiding the obvious comparisons between the newspaper, movie and music industries and the impact of the Internet. On a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum last week, serendipity provided me with another. Just before you get to their spectacular jewellery exhibition, there is a small room charting the history of the British miniature portrait....
February 18, 2009
How accurate was Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the future?
How accurate was "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the future?
I recently re-watched Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie masterpiece, and I was struck by how accurate many of the film's portrayals of the future were.
February 17, 2009
The BBC's "Points Of View" online culture clash - Part 2
Yesterday I posted about the current furore surrounding the BBC's Points Of View messageboard. I used to help host the board in 2004 and 2005. I did it as part of an experiment within my group at the BBC to see how much time it took for a manager to host the message board for the bit of the BBC that they were responsible for. The group of users there were always a challenge - and I have to say...
February 16, 2009
The BBC's "Points Of View" online culture clash - Part 1
I've been watching with interest the way that the BBC has been trying to discuss future developments for their interactive online services like blogs and messageboards in an open way. However, rather than make the process smoother, they have managed to get the collective back of the Points Of View messageboard up, and Jemima Kiss picked up on the story in the Guardian. Seeing how events then unfolded is a very interesting study in group dynamics online. A BBC Points...
February 15, 2009
At least Daily Express readers are still searching for Madeleine McCann
I have a little Perl script that runs each morning, and checks what the popular searches are on the Daily Express website. I know it is a little childish, but it just amuses me so much that they are obviously editorially chosen rather than a real reflection of what users are doing, and, more importantly, that they seldom ever change. I got a little bit excited in April last year when they suddenly dropped 'Princess Diana' from the list. The...
February 14, 2009
Wireframing the front page: Part 5 - The Sun
Over the last couple of days I've been comparing the different proportions of types of content on newspaper front pages and their online equivalent. So far I've looked at a 'quality paper' - The Times - and a 'mid-market' title - The Daily Mail. This has been part of a series called 'Wireframing the front page'. Today I wanted to compare the front page and online "viewport" of a 'red top' tabloid - The Sun. The Sun Again we see...
February 13, 2009
Reports of 'the death of the sub-editor' may not be exaggerated
"Mention any major story of the last century and you can remember how you saw it in print." The key words for me in that quote are 'last century'. Even by the end of the 20th century the power of the printed press to shape our collective memory was failing. Ask people about the release of Mandela and the defining image is not a still one framed with a cleverly worked headline, it is the literally moving images of him...
Wireframing the front page: Part 4 - The Times
This week I've been looking at various ways of comparing the newspaper printed front page with their online equivalents. Yesterday I looked closely at the Daily Mail and the Mail Online, and today I want to look at The Times. The Times We can see a big contrast here between The Times print and web incarnations. 72% of the surface area of the printed front page is given over to carrying stories. By contrast, only a quarter of the online...
February 12, 2009
How LOVEFiLM kept their user experience warm in the snow
During the course of last week's winter weather we heard a lot from people about how much the snow was going to cost the UK economy. Some types of enterprise, however, were affected worse than others. LOVEFiLM's entire business model rather depends on a working postal service, and so they faced potentially a great deal of disruption to their service, and consequently a bad and disappointing end user experience. They chose to handle it in a really good way. First...
Wireframing the front page: Part 3 - The Daily Mail
Earlier this week I started a series called 'Wireframing the front page'. I've been looking at different ways of comparing the printed front pages of UK newspapers with their online equivalent. In today's post I'm going to concentrate on one paper in-depth. What I've done is break up both the printed page and online 'viewport', and look at the relative percentage of space occupied by different types of content including things like the masthead, advertising, navigation, and self-promotion slots. I've...
February 11, 2009
Why the PCC is broken - a case study in trying to complain
Why the PCC is broken...
I'm not allowed by PCC rules to complain about a named 13 year old girl being called a slut in the press
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Northern Ireland
Over the course of England's qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup, I've been reviewing the websites of the FA and those of England's opposition. I've also been looking at the sites of the other 'home nations', using the friendly against Argentina in November as an excuse to peek at the SFA site. Whilst most national teams are playing friendlies this week, Northern Ireland are actually in World Cup action against San Marino, and so I thought I'd look...
February 10, 2009
Let's have a PCC for the 21st century
Let's have a PCC for the 21st century
A list of 6 things I'd change about newspaper self-regulation in the UK
Wireframing the front page: Part 2 - The "viewport"
Yesterday I was comparing the front pages of most of our national newspapers with their equivalent homepages online. Reduced to the same scale, it illustrated just how much stuff is crammed into the average newspaper web homepage, and how they lack focus compared to the printed edition. Using the whole length of the page is a little misleading in terms of judging the online version's initial impact, because users do not see the whole page at once. Users will only...
February 9, 2009
Wireframing the front page: Part 1 - The "homepage"
I've been giving a lot of thought to the way that people navigate through newspaper websites, and it has made me consider the different functions that the homepage and the front page serve. Navigation, for example, is mostly redundant on the printed front page. Occasionally a paper might have something like "Turn to Page 7" to link to the continuation of a story, or a promo for the sports section, but generally the front page functions to sell one major...
February 8, 2009
The Independent goes free...in Muswell Hill at least
It looks like the credit crunch is beginning to bite around Muswell Hill, and this week we lost our branch of the Fine Burger Company. That didn't deter The Independent's distribution team, however. This week, despite the country grinding to a halt under the weight of the snow, the newspapers have continued to get through to the branch. I suppose it is one way of keeping the bulk distribution numbers up for those all important ABCs. I can't help feeling,...
February 7, 2009
Boris thinks casual racism about 2012 London Olympic athletes will be OK, provided you are 'sensitive' about it
When I blogged yesterday about the strengths of the Mail Online's comment voting system, I steered clear of comment on the subject matter being voted on. It seemed to me that there were enough people pontificating on the Carol Thatcher / One Show issue, so why should I add anything to the cacophony?However, yesterday I changed my mind. Firstly I read this piece by Hannah Pool in The Guardian, which reminded me of how much racial abuse my non-white classmates...
February 6, 2009
A big thumbs up for the Daily Mail's comment rating system
I've been for some time meaning to write a series of blog posts along the lines of 'things I like about online newspapers' looking at what they do well, but I wanted to pre-empt that with a look at one thing in particular on the Mail's website. It is a very simple interaction that they added in December, but one that I think really enhances the site. I'm talking about the ability for users to give comments a virtual 'thumbs...
February 5, 2009
Are our celebrities turning Twitter into a broadcast medium?
The current media buzz around celebrities on Twitter seems to be driving take-up of the service, at least in the UK anyway. However, what is interesting to me is that the celebrity angle fundamentally changes the nature of the service. Are we gradually watching Twitter transform from a conduit for conversation into a broadcast medium? Earlier this week The Times published a (somewhat maligned) list of popular celebrities on Twitter, sorted by the number of followers they had. That isn't...
February 4, 2009
Navigating newspapers: Part 5 - The 'quality press'
During the course of the last few days I've been publishing a series of posts looking at how 9 leading UK newspaper websites present their navigation to their audience. Yesterday I was looking in-depth at the layouts on the 'red top' and 'middle market' papers. Today I want to look at the online incarnations of the 'quality' press. The Guardian One of the distinguishing features of navigation from the 'quality press' is the prominence of comment, opinion and columnists in...
February 3, 2009
Old media beats new media to breaking yesterday's news
Jon Slattery has an interesting post today entitled "Old media beats new media in snow havoc". He suggests: "It seems an inherent fault of the internet that when a site is really popular and at its most needed it crashes." I'd certainly agree with him that the printed press have a very resilient delivery network. I'm not, though, entirely convinced that failing is an inherent characteristic of the online network. I'd argue that a lack of contingency planning for load...
Navigating newspapers: Part 4 - The 'red tops' and the 'middle market'
Last week I started publishing a series of posts about the primary and secondary navigation on 9 of the UK's national newspaper websites. Today I want to look more closely in depth at the red tops and the 'middle market' papers. Daily Express Alongside The Sun, the Daily Express is the only paper I looked at to still utilise a left-hand navigation. There are a lot of links, and I didn't include in the study a second similar panel of...
February 2, 2009
Navigating newspapers: Part 3 - A question of sports
Last week I began publishing a series of posts looking at the primary and secondary navigation on 9 national UK newspaper websites. In part one I looked at the huge variety of labels used by the sites to describe their content. I then looked more at the similarities, discovering how similar topics mapped together across the papers. Today I want to focus on sport. Sport is one of the most common primary navigation labels, used by every single paper. However,...
#uksnow out-trends the Superbowl on Twitter
If Twitter crashed last night, it won't have been due to the Superbowl, but more likely the sheer number of British people tweeting #uksnow about the weather. We are nothing if not a national stereotype. I had to get up early this morning, and so I got a few peaceful shots of the snow blanket around Muswell Hill, before the inevitable snowy London rush hour transport chaos ensues....
February 1, 2009
Disposable mobile handsets from environmentally challenged Orange
I don't suppose I should allow myself to be surprised anymore, but I'm still astonished at how badly wrong some major brands can get contact with their customers. Take my mobile phone provider for example. I woke up the other day reasonably well disposed to Orange. I've had some issues with their website in the past, and don't think I would score them highly in a net promoter test, but I was pretty happy with my phone and my tariff....