August 2012 Archives

When I was teaching “So you think you want to be a UXer?” at the Guardian the other day, I gave a list of five websites that I thought were essential regular reading for any budding UXer. I suggested they pop them in their RSS reader to generally blank looks all round. I prompted for a show of hands, and out of a group of 40 people - who were all involved in making the web in one way or another - only a couple put their hands up to admit to using RSS readers.

Yesterday I ran the first of my “So you think you want to be a UXer?” Guardian Masterclasses at Kings Place in London.

It is just about a month to go until EuroIA, which this year is being held in Rome. The full programme is now available for download, and discounted “early bird” tickets are still available for a couple of days until the 31st. Speaking at the event, amongst others, will be Peter Bogaards, Eric Reiss, James Kalbach, Mike Atherton and Jonathan Khan. I will be participating in two sessions.

Fancy that - another Friday, and I’m off for another dose of mud’n’rock’n’roll at a different festival. This time it is Reading for the day, mostly to see The Cure, who I first saw live, erm...well...it feels like one hundred years ago. Anyway, as usual, I’ve prepared in advance a feast of essays and links which caught my eye as they flashed passed me on the intertubes this week. So settle in to fill up your reading device of choice for the weekend...

A question that I used to get asked time and time again in the comments underneath techie blog posts on the Guardian was why the site didn’t open external links in a new window. And I get asked variations of it elsewhere, so I thought I’d just take five minutes to set out why, on the 21st century internet, forcing links to open new browser windows is wrong.

In all my time blogging - which is coming up for nearly ten years - I’ve staunchly stuck to the principle that I didn’t accept free gifts in return for editorial. It has been set in stone in my statement of blogging principles. Until today that is. Because when I got offered the chance to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi, I just couldn’t resist. One swift edit of my blogging principles to exclude offers of sexy little electronic kit later, and here we are.

Contributoria is “a peer-based collaboration platform for storytellers”, which has been funded by the International Press Institute. In July I joined them for a week to work on some early sketches and wireframes of how the service might be realised.

Whilst you are reading this, I’ll be standing in the rain waiting for the Green Man Festival to start in Wales. No wifi. No 3G signal. Blissfully unconnected - although possibly slightly missing the green ink brigade below the line. But never fear, because, as Tom Baker’s Doctor might have observed: “The moment has been prepared for.” Here are a bunch of links I rustled up earlier in the week for your reading pleasure.

The final part of my series looking at protest and dissent at the 2012 London Olympic Games, with a focus on the closing ceremony, and how much I personally enjoyed the Games being in my hometown.

Part four of the bonus chapter of my Olympics book “Keeping the torch burning” - which looks at drugs cheats and sporting protests at the London 2012 Games.

Part three of a series looking at protest and dissent at the London 2012 Olympic Games - looking at instances of racism and sexism amongst athletes, the audience and organisers.

Part two of a series looking at protest and dissent at the London 2012 Olympic Games - with a focus on disruption to the Games, on and off the field of play.

Part one of a series looking at protest and dissent at the London 2012 Olympic Games - with a focus on the Opening Ceremony and TV coverage of the Games by the BBC and NBC.

Services aggregating social media around the London 2012 Olympic Games remind me of a service I created in 2008 to grab pictures and tweets from the Beijing Olympics - Fansivu.

Friday reading is very thin on the ground this week - I think a combination of me having one eye on the Olympics, and then a bunch of things I marked as “Read for later” being less interesting than I thought means there is a only a handful of things I’ve picked up form the intertubes which you might find fun to download to the ereading or save-later app of your choice.

The BBC has announced that Richard E. Grant will be joining the cast of the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas Special. Eight years ago I blogged about his appearance as the Doctor in an online only adventure - “Scream of the Shalka”

Maybe like me you’ve spent a lot of this week glued to watching the Olympics, rather than keeping up to date with the worlds of UX, journalism, product management, and the other stuff I write about on here. Never fear. My trusty “favourite” button has still been doing sterling work on Twitter, and so here are a bunch of things you might have missed on the intertubes whilst trying to work out the rules of handball and judo. Fill up the reading device of your choice, and dip into them during a time-out in the basketball over the weekend...

It seems that like most of my Twitter timeline I spent a good deal of last night futilely pounding my fists on my laptop keyboard trying desperately to get any joy out of the London 2012 Olympics ticketing website. After a while, hypnotised by the queue animation graphic, I got into a zen-like state where I began to ponder how you could possibly end up designing a system that worked this way.