Recent posts in my Popular Category

My family had a dreadful 'customer' experience at the hands of abusive National Express East Anglia staff at Liverpool Street station on Sunday morning. However, a member of London Underground staff came to our rescue. In seeking to find out how to thank them, I discovered that TfL have a form to do that on their website.

The debate about whether journalists need to be able to program has flared up again. My view is that it isn't necessary to write code, but that learning to think like a programmer will bring you lots of advantages when wrestling with getting the best out of online publishing systems.

I've been keeping a close eye on the new media elements of this campaign, and thought I'd stick my neck out and predict three digital trends we will see a lot more of next time around.

After a decade experimenting with different ways of categorising BBC content on the web, it looks as if BBC Online has finally come round to what user testing was telling them all along - that news, sport, weather, TV and radio are the five main categories users expect to find on the BBC's website.

I had my first real grapple with an iPad this week, checking out applications from the New York Times, BBC and USA Today. Whilst I found some things about the device impressive, I also had some concerns about the rush to 'replicate the print experience'.

I've been tracking the timeline of the 'digital election', and, with the second leader's debate taking place tonight, here are ten things about the new media campaign that I think we've learned so far...

This is the first part of a Q&A interview series with young journalists Helia Phoenix, Priyal Sanghavi and Ann Danylkiw. They've all recently moved from education into the profession, and I wanted to ask first of all about their educational background.

On Tuesday night I was moderating the "Content Strategy, Manhattan Style" panel in Shoreditch. Here are my notes from the stage.

Whether it is Cybermen insisting on 'upgrading' everything in sight, or Daleks seeking to 'exterminate' competition in order to reign supreme, I recently got to thinking about how several monsters from Doctor Who remind me of the UK media scene...

I've been compiling a timeline of digital and social media campaigning by political parties, innovation from news organisations, and interesting election related web content and applications to see whether the 2010 UK General Election really will be a 'digital' or 'social media' election.

The decision of the BBC Trust to examine whether the BBC's iPhone application plans need further regulatory oversight is the right one, and the only that could have been made.

For Ada Lovelace day, I've blogged about 5 women who have inspired and influenced my career in technology, and to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude.

In describing The Guardian's MPs Expenses crowd-sourcing experiment as a "total failure", the Evening Standard's Paul Waugh gives us a glimpse of one of the reasons the traditional media industry finds it hard to innovate with technology.

Best ever user comment in the Mail about the James Bulger killers? "We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong". This article looks at what happened when I tweeted a link to it...

The opening post in a series looking at online newspaper coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics from around the world.

One of the topics that came up in last week's London Linked Data meet-up was whether URIs needed to be human readable, or whether computer generated random mixes of characters were acceptable. For me, human readable is the way to go every time.

"Well you seem to have made a lot of people extremely unhappy" - a look through some of the comments left on Observer editor John Mulholland's blog post about the recent redesign of the Sunday print edition of the paper.

As part of the recent redesign process on the currybetdotnet blog, I implemented the 'Value Added News' hNews microformat to provide additional metadata on my articles. Doing so raised some questions that were not just practical about how to implement the format, but philosophical about the nature of the blog itself.

At the beginning of the year I changed the design and information architecture of this blog. This series of posts examines how and why I finally fixed the IA of an IA's blog.

With my interest in the future of news, I've been looking at the digital publishing by the people who might be producing the news in the future. This series looks at some of the user experience features in the online versions of university student union newspapers.