July 2009 Archives
July 31, 2009
Social media unplugged: Part 4 - Google Bookmarks, Fark and Mixx
During the course of this week I've been studying the user experience when you encounter social bookmarking services for the first time. This has varied greatly, from something like Yahoo! Buzz with a comprehensive registration process which ends up asking you to confirm your 'buzz up' for the article that started your journey, to Newsvine, which just seems to throw up a browser security error if you are not logged in. In today's final part I'll be looking at Google...
July 30, 2009
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
You might recall that a while ago I published a presentation called "Introducing Information Architecture at The Guardian", which I gave at the first London IA Mini Conference. In it I used different Star Wars Lego characters to represent the different disciplines in the business. Here's me presenting it at Kings Place. Photo by Nizam Well, even if you don't recall it, it seems that Bearing Partnership - "The leading Executive Search & Digital Recruitment specialists for Media and Ecommerce"...
Social media unplugged: Part 3 - Newsvine, Reddit and Facebook
This week I've been writing about 'social media unplugged' - finding out what the user experience is like when you approach social bookmarking for the first time via using an icon on a content site. I contend that having detected an attempt to share by a user who isn't logged in, these services need to provide an opportunity for an existing user to log in, for a new user to register, and they should take the opportunity to showcase their...
July 29, 2009
Social media unplugged: Part 2 - Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious
This week I'm looking at 'social media unplugged', finding out what the user experience is like if you click one of the multitude of share buttons that litter the web without being logged in to the service you are attempting to use. In yesterday's first part I examined Digg and StumbleUpon. Both of these put the novice user through a registration process, only at the end to have not captured the URL that they were hoping to submit. Today I'm...
July 28, 2009
Social media unplugged: Part 1 - Digg and StumbleUpon
Social media unplugged
A series of posts looking at the user experience of social bookmarking sites when people first visit them via clicking an icon.
July 27, 2009
Toby Moores and Mark Jones discussing social media and 'the third voice' at #newsinnovation
"It's not a few people talking a lot, it is a lot of people talking a bit" One of the more interesting panels at the News Innovation conference featured Toby Moores from Sleepy Dog talking about social media, alongside Mark Jones from Reuters. Part of the focus of the talk was how to capture 'the third voice' in the room. Politicians and journalists are used to conversing with each other in the set-piece of an interview of a press conference,...
July 26, 2009
Phillip Bradshaw, inept senior search consultant and "SEO expert", take a bow!
By writing about the inept SEO approaches I often get, I'm dignifying them with more time than they deserve, but I did enjoy this recent one from Phillip Bradshaw, senior search consultant at bFirst, who seems to have form in this area. "I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, www.currybet.net, during a routine survey of web sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance resulting in an increase in online sales. I hope...
July 25, 2009
Spotted! A multi-lingual sign on the tube
One of the notable things about our travels through Eastern Europe a couple of years back was that we could pretty much make our way around with only learning a smattering of 'yes', 'no', 'please' and 'thank you' in any country we came too. Nearly all of our travel arrangements could be made in English on the web, and pretty much every travel interchange we used came with copious amounts of dual language signage including English. Visiting Macau and Hong...
July 24, 2009
The tyranny of chronology: Part 5 - Journalism centred design
This is the fifth and final part of a series of posts based on the presentation given by Martin Belam at the 'News Innovation' unconference in London on July 10th 2009. You can find part one here. Journalism centred design During the course of this week I've been looking at some of the issues I think surround the news publication industry, many of which are driven by relying on a traditional model geared towards chronological publishing. Even in a...
July 23, 2009
The tyranny of chronology: Part 4 - Meaningful metadata and our missing librarians
This is the fourth in a series of posts based on the presentation given by Martin Belam at the 'News Innovation' unconference in London on July 10th 2009. You can find part one here. Meaningful metadata In yesterday's part of this series, I looked at how news stories might be disaggregated further, if only machines could understand more about human language. I suggested that one way of teaching systems about content in to use more of the 'm' word...
July 22, 2009
The tyranny of chronology: Part 3 - News atoms for the 21st century
This is the third in a series of posts based on the presentation given by Martin Belam at the 'News Innovation' unconference in London on July 10th 2009. You can find part one here. News atoms for the 21st century Yesterday, I was discussing how the 'atom' of news has moved from being the newspaper to the individual story. I think we need to go further, and disaggregate the neutrons and protons from that atom - the paragraphs and...
July 21, 2009
The tyranny of chronology: Part 2 - On the subject of topics
This is the second in a series of posts based on the presentation given by Martin Belam at the 'News Innovation' unconference in London on July 10th 2009. You can find part one here. On the subject of topics Yesterday I was arguing that a recognisable pattern for news reporting was established by Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which carefully recorded on an annual basis who did what to whom, where it happened and what the consequence was. We might be able...
July 20, 2009
The tyranny of chronology: Part 1 - From year-by-year to minute-by-minute
The tyranny of chronology
Martin Belam's presentation at the News Innovation London conference, looking at the development of news from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the digital formats of the future.
Let there be humbug!
Yesterday in the Mail On Sunday was an article entitled "The Genesis enigma: How DID the Bible describe the evolution of life 3,000 years before Darwin?". The premise of the article was an outline of Professor Andrew Parker's theory that the Book of Genesis features an accurate description of how scientific evidence has chronologically ordered evolution. It includes perhaps one the most entertaining couple of paragraphs I've seen in a British newspaper in recent months. "On the third day, we...
July 19, 2009
Macau (slight return)
This week I'm going to be paying a lightning visit to Macau. The trip is so short that I'm unlikely to get much chance to blog about it whilst I'm there. Or indeed see anything worth blogging about whilst I'm there. However, I wrote quite a few blog postcards from Macau and Hong Kong last year, and thought it worth putting together a reminder myself of what they were. Selling adverts in the Chinese 'free' press Measuring customer satisfaction at...
D45's from Apple's iTunes? I'd give it a 'D'
The music industry has been going 'back to the future' for format inspiration again, with the launch this week in the US of the D45 via iTunes. These digital downloads feature an 'A' and a 'B' side, and the thumbnail image embedded in each digital file looks a bit like an old 7" single sleeve or a jukebox promo version of an old hit. The range includes a 'D45' from Michael Jackson (of course), and 'Use Somebody' by Kings Of...
July 18, 2009
The mysterious case of The Telegraph's anonymous columnist who cost the BBC £45,000
It was No Rock And Roll Fun who I saw pointing out that The Telegraph had reported on the BBC's £45,000 payout to the Muslim Council of Britain, all the time referring to an anonymous 'panelist' who had made the libelous statements on Question Time. Most other media outlets mentioned that the mysterious 'panelist' was Charles Moore. They also seemed to think the fact that he is a columnist for, and ex-editor of, The Telegraph was a significant element in...
July 17, 2009
Where was the 'editorial viewpoint' at the News Innovation unconference?
Last week's News Innovation unconference was a very interesting gathering of a lot of engaged people who are interested in journalism, many of whom have a deep understanding of the web. However, there was a distinct lack of focus on 'editorial'. In this short video interview I made, Linda Kennedy of newsatsize10.com makes the point that the day, for her, seemed to be about form without content. She also says that, given the mantra about data and data-mining in some...
July 16, 2009
Expectations of the News Innovation unconference on camera
News Innovation London
I gathered together the links shared on the day, and captured some video from the News Innovation unconference, including clips of Linda Kennedy and Andrew Walkinshaw
July 15, 2009
The Barbican at 40
Today the City of London Corporation is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Barbican Estate with a party for around 400 residents. As anniversaries go, the timing seems a little bit arbitrary - I've seen articles on the web suggesting the actual anniversary was July 7th or July 8th - but it was certainly in 1969 that people and families first moved into the new tower blocks. They are now a familiar part of the London skyline,...
July 14, 2009
Andrew Walkinshaw of Timetric on 'numbers that vary against time' at #newsinnovation
....or, the exponential growth in the price of a cheese sandwich. "The really interesting thing is not what these numbers are now, but what they used to be and what they are going to be." At the London News Innovation Unconference on Friday I recorded some video clips of the presentations. This is some footage of Andrew Walkinshaw of Timetric. The opening part of Andrew's presentation was about how Timetric is mapping 'numbers that vary against time', and the work...
July 13, 2009
Visualising the Twitter stream from the #newsinnovation unconference
On Saturday I published a set of all the links I had extracted from tweets featuring the #newsinnovation hashtag on Friday during the News Innovation unconference. I thought I'd share some other ways I've played with that data. The Twitterstream as a Wordle This is all of the tweets that used the hashtag #newsinnovation rendered as a Wordle News Innovation - as seen on Twitter I've pulled out some of the highlights from the Twitterstream and strung them along into...
July 11, 2009
#newsinnovation links on Twitter
I've been through the tweets that were tagged with #newsinnovation yesterday, and extracted the links and pictures that were being shared during the event. Links shared via Twitter during #newsinnovation #newsinnovation Twitterfall AP, Media Standards Trust propose news microformat - Guardian PDA blog / PaidContent Investigate your MPs Expenses - Simon Willison's Guardian crowd-sourcing application What Next After the MPs? by Adam Tinworth New rules for Lobbyists - campaign on 38 degrees An open, digital Iraq inquiry by Will Perrin...
July 10, 2009
Nokia's near-real-time adverts on the Northern Line
Yesterday Kings Cross seemed to be the epicentre of a London Transport #fail that thwarted my every move, but it did mean that I got an enjoyable bit of serendipity. As I was forced to unexpectedly re-route my journey via the Northern Line platforms at Euston, I spotted this advert. And then the delays meant I had time to film it. In the last few days I've been in a debate about how news organisations have totally failed to sell...
July 9, 2009
Michael Jackson and search at The Guardian
With the memorial service over, it looks like we'll now gradually see diminishing amounts of column inches devoted to Michael Jackson. I wanted thought to put down some of my thoughts about what the reaction to his death tells us about search on the Internet, and on news sites. There were a lot of articles looking at the reaction of search engines to the news. This is always one of the cases that fascinates me about the whole problem of...
July 8, 2009
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 4
This time last week I was gearing up to attend The Guardian's first Activate summit at Kings Place. I've blogged about Gerry Jackson's heart-breaking mission to get independent news into Zimbabwe, Nick Bostrom's presentation about 'the end of the world', a politics panel featuring Tom Watson and Adam Afriyie, and the thread of data release and story-telling that ran through the day. I wanted to conclude with a final set of observations about what had caught my eye, made...
July 7, 2009
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 3
Last week I was lucky enough to go to The Guardian's first Activate summit - a one day conference at Kings Place which brought together politicians, economists and technologists to discuss the future shape of the world. Today I wanted to pick up another thread that ran through the day - data and story-telling. Arianna Huffington described story-telling as "mankind's greatest gift". Personally I reckon fire is probably up there as well, but let's not quibble. She was responding...
July 6, 2009
No SOS needed for newspaper RSS
Last week Malcolm Coles wrote a blog post entitled 'Newspapers: turn off your RSS feeds'. It was a provocative title, and it certainly gained a lot of attention. Whilst Malcolm was right to point out that subscriber numbers to many national newspaper RSS feeds are low, his interpretation that this made them worthless was wholly wrong. At the time, Malcolm, myself, Ian Douglas from The Telegraph and Charles Arthur from The Guardian had a debate about newspaper RSS feeds on...
July 3, 2009
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 2
Wednesday was The Guardian's first Activate summit - a one day conference at Kings Place bring together people to discuss how technology, politics and social sciences could come together to forge the future. Yesterday I published some thoughts about the presentations by Gerry Jackson and Nick Bostrom. One panel, chaired by Emily Bell, focused specifically on politics, featuring former minister Tom Watson, shadow minister for science and innovation Adam Afriyie, and Thomas Gensener from Blue State Digital. Adam Afriyie's...
July 2, 2009
Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 1
The Guardian's Activate 09
A series of posts with my notes and take-away quotes from the Activate 09 Summit.
July 1, 2009
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 6
This is the final post of a series based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. What about when it all goes wrong? A lot of brands can be very cautious about potential negative brand damage from social media. And it is true - you might make mistakes, and you will definitely be criticised online....