Recent posts in my Popular Category

HTML is changing significantly for the first time in the best part of a decade, and news journalists, sub-editors and production staff will need to learn to recognise, if not use, some new tags in the process. Here is a very quick overview of the tags most likely to impact a news CMS.

Last week the BBC Trust gave permission for the BBC to launch applications into the iTunes store. As someone who has worked on The Guardian's competing iPhone app, and given the fragile state of the news industry business model, I couldn't help but be disappointed that the BBC Trust did not put the proposal through a full Public Value Test.

Throughout the course of this summer's World Cup, at The Guardian we had a display of archive coverage of the tournament up in the newsroom. Put together by Richard Nelsson and his library and archives team, it covered the years 1950 to 2006, and showed how the design of the newspaper and the nature of sports reporting had changed over the decades.

Watching feedback to today's redesign of the BBC News website is another example of how the real-time web is speeding up and changing the product development lifecycle.

A furious man jabbing at his newspaper in anger in Walthamstow market today reminded me why I care about the accuracy of our press - and despise the racism of today's Daily Express front page.

The 2010 General Election did not deliver the 'Internet election' in the way that some pundits predicted. However, the rise of social media tools, particularly those used to counter the more established broadcasting methods of delivering party messages, illustrated again the diminishing power of traditional media 'gatekeepers'.

When suicide bombers attacked the London Underground 5 years ago, I was in charge of the technical delivery of the BBC homepage. During the course of the day I kept a record of how the page was used to convey information to Londoners, setting record levels of streaming media usage in the process.

If the Mail is so worried about companies using Twitter for reputation management, why does it do it itself?

Over the last couple of years I've been practicing 'ambush guerilla user testing', which is basically the art of pouncing on lone people in cafes and public spaces, and quickly filming them whilst they use a website for a couple of minutes. It isn't by any means a formal research technique, but you can soon build up a valuable clip library of initial reactions to you and your competitors' products, and tease out interesting anecdotal evidence about the way that people use and feel about your website. Approaching strangers in a public place and asking to video them using the Internet sounds pretty daunting, so here are my top 10 tips to help you get started....

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.