Recent posts in my Chipwrapper Category
December 14, 2008
Chipwrapper now available with time-slices
I can officially announce that the Russell Brand furore is over for the British press. Well, nearly. In the last week the national papers only managed to publish 270-odd stories to mention the ex-BBC comedian. At the height of the scandal, between them, they managed to churn out something like 440 articles a week referencing him. How do I know these figures? Well, not because I've counted them, that's for sure. Instead I've been using Chipwrapper's new time-slicing feature. Ever...
September 13, 2008
$num XL passengers stranded somewhere
It is a commonly held belief that arithmatic in the UK has declined following years of dumbing down, A-level grade inflation, and Play School being replaced by Tikkabilla. There was a great example of how random numbers have become in the Chipwrapper news feed yesterday. BBC News: Thousands stranded by XL collapse Guardian: 10,000 XL passengers must pay to fly home Daily Express: 85,000 holidaymakers stranded as XL holiday firm collapses Daily Mail: 300,000 British tourists hit by XL collapse...
September 8, 2008
No news is usually good news - unless it is the Chipwrapper feed
Those of you who rely on a live RSS bookmark of the headlines from Chipwrapper might have found the last couple of weeks to be slow news weeks. In fact, for some of the time, it even appeared to be a no news week, as the main RSS feed failed. I've vaguely ascribed the blame to a combination of Yahoo! Pipes, the Daily Mail and the Express. In fact, anything pretty much except my own shoddy Perl ;-) What appears...
August 15, 2008
'Lost playlists' and Chipwrapper in the Guardian's Music sections
I've had a couple of mentions in the Guardian's music section recently. You may have spotted in my Delicious links that Steven Wells described blogging list-making music fans as "the antithesis of rock'n'roll" on the Guardian Music blog, citing "Lifetime of lost playlists" as a prime example. There was also a mention for Chipwrapper at the weekend, in Johnny Dee's piece about the history of the "Now That's What I Call Music" albums - 'NOW that's what I call a...
August 7, 2008
Latest Team GB news feed now on Chipwrapper...but not the BOA site
As Olympic Chipwrapper is focussed on British news about the Olympics, I've added the official Team GB RSS feed into the headlines mix, so that as well as seeing what British newspapers are saying about the Games, you can see what the BOA thinks. At the moment, it is one of the easiest places to find British Olympic headlines, as I had to do a bit of a hunt around for the feed address. The BOA site claims to have...
August 4, 2008
Introducing Olympic Chipwrapper
When a global sporting event like the Olympics comes around, you can be sure that there will be acres of coverage in the British media, even if public interest is dwindling. And for every newspaper contingent that is slimming down this time around, the BBC can be guaranteed to be sending a bigger team than Team GB itself. If there is masses of coverage, you need something to guide you through it. That is where Olympic Chipwrapper comes in...
July 3, 2008
How was it for you? The Chipwrapper & Fansivu Euro2008 review
With Euro2008 over, and Spain worthy champions, I thought I'd take a quick look at how my two Euro2008 web prototypes fared during the course of the tournament. I built Euro2008 Fansivu, which attempted to track in real-time user-generated content which featured references to Euro2008. I also made a Euro2008 edition of Chipwrapper, my newspaper search engine service. Euro2008 Fansivu When I decommissioned Euro2008 Fansivu on Monday morning, the final page showed the strengths and the weaknesses that the...
June 3, 2008
Introducing the Euro 2008 edition of Chipwrapper
Last year I produced a special version of my Chipwrapper newspaper search engine to celebrate the Rugby World Cup, and so it only seemed natural to follow suit for this summer's big football event - Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland. Today I've put live the new Euro 2008 edition of Chipwrapper. As ever, Euro 2008 Chipwrapper comprises of a search engine, some feeds and some other bits and bobs to help you find content about Euro 2008 from...
April 26, 2008
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...
April 12, 2008
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,...
February 23, 2008
Chipwrapper goes to church
As well as an array of 'vanity searches' and 'vanity alerts' from Google trying to track down every reference to this site on the web as it happens, I also look out for references to Chipwrapper, the custom search service for British newspapers that I put together. It has turned up some very kind comments about the service, as well as some very thorough reviews that have rightly found it to be lacking in some key areas. One thing I...
December 5, 2007
The Sun's broken RSS still affecting Chipwrapper one month on
Well, it has been a month now since Dave Cross pointed out on his blog that The Sun's re-design utterly broke their RSS feeds, and still we await them being fixed. As a consequence it also broke several aspects of Chipwrapper. Until today I'd resisted the temptation to poke around and try and fix things, on the grounds that surely The Sun themselves would put things right. That doesn't seem to be the case. The first problem was that The...
September 10, 2007
Headline buzz tag cloud now on Chipwrapper
I put live another new feature on my Chipwrapper newspaper (and major broadcaster) search and aggregation site over the weekend - the Chipwrapper Headline Buzz page. Rather than displaying the usual Chipwrapper aggregation of UK newspaper headlines, it shows a tag cloud generated from the UK's headlines in the previous hour. The tag cloud is based on analysing the top 10 headlines from 11 UK news sources - the BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky...
September 7, 2007
Pavarotti and Jane Tomlinson's deaths test search
Reaction to Chipwrapper has been mostly positive so far, and users have started to arrive and subscribers have started to pick up the RSS feeds. Adrian Monck made a very good point about not having the ability to search results chronologically, illustrating it with some results after the death of cancer campaigner Jane Tomlinson. Unfortunately it isn't a feature offered by Google, and so although I'd love to, I couldn't incorporate it into the engine. It shows some real shortcomings...
September 6, 2007
Chipwrapper gets a rugby edition for the world cup
On Monday I went public with a new project I've been working on - Chipwrapper. It is a search engine for UK newspapers (plus, as Lloyd eloquently put it "some other stuff"). One of the features is a headline aggregator, and feeds of the headline aggregation covering news, sport and football. With the Rugby World Cup opening in France tomorrow evening, it seemed appropriate to add some Rugby flavoured content into the service. To that end there is a new...
September 3, 2007
Introducing Chipwrapper - a UK newspaper search engine
This week I'm launching a new web project - Chipwrapper. Chipwrapper is a hub for a set of tools to search news content from the UK's major newspapers and TV news sources. It was originally intended just to cover the printed press, but I found it odd to be searching for news from the UK and to not be seeing content from the BBC or Sky. Adding the TV news giants does rather spoil the chipwrapper metaphor, of course, but...