currybetdotnet RSS archive
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...
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...
When RSS ads go bad...
One of the risks of context-driven text advertising is that occasionally there will be some uncomfortable juxtapositions of editorial content and advertising. It happens on currybetdotnet from time to time. I particularly recall Google deciding that one of my lengthy pieces about working in a record shop and collecting records suited adverts saying "Do you need help with your autistic child", which I took slightly personally. It can be even worse when the adverts are being served in an RSS...
Press Gazette or Jon Slattery? Why not quickly read both with RSS?
Yesterday, Nigel Barlow picked up on some discussion about B2B publications being usurped by 'the lone blogger'. A different Nigel, Nigel Thackery, had asked the question: "Try this for an experiment. Read the Press Gazette web site and then read Jon Slattery (a former PG long term staffer). Which is better?." For his part, Nigel Barlow says: "Personally I tend to read Jon Slattery more than I read the Press Gazette site, it used to be one of my first...
Local RSS: Google Reader subscriber numbers for the UK's top regional papers
A couple of weeks ago I published a list of the Top 75 British Newspaper RSS feeds in Google Reader. Since I've been looking at the RSS feeds published by the UK's top 20 regional papers, so I thought I'd make a note of their subscriber numbers as well. The table below plots the popularity of the main RSS feed from each paper's website in Google Reader. There are two things of particular note. Firstly, the number of subscribers...
Local RSS: What do the leading regional newspapers offer? - Part 2
Yesterday I had a look at the RSS provision of ten of the UK's leading regional newspapers. Today I want to continue looking at the newspapers that make up the rest of my regional 'top twenty'. Birmingham Mail The Birmingham Mail offers a range of nearly 200 feeds, which can be found by visiting the site map. The main feed is auto-discoverable from the homepage, but the RSS logo in the top-right of the page leads to information about...
Local RSS: What do the leading regional newspapers offer? - Part 1
With job cuts and financial uncertainty in the sector, and the BBC Trust's decision to prevent the BBC producing £68m worth of new local news content, I've turned my attention to a selection of the UK's leading regional newspapers to assess their online offerings. I started last week with with an overview of the video content that they provide. Today I wanted to turn my attention to RSS - and look at the syndication services provided by ten of...
Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds in Google Reader
Hooray - some good figures for the newspaper industry for a change! This time last year I made a list of the 100 most popular British newspaper feeds in Google Reader, and I thought it was worth updating the figures. The headline is that the number of RSS subscribers to the popular newspaper content has pretty much doubled. Last year, the top 75 feeds added up to represent 249,269 subscriptions. This time around the top 75 accounts for 488,828 subscriptions....
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...
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...
The Daily Mail site redesign: Part 1 - Navigation & RSS
Way back when I first started the currybetdotnet blog, the Daily Mail was one of the first newspapers to get its own category, as I alternated between writing about BBCi Search and having a go at the Mail's coverage of things like London's telephone numbering system. These days, I try very hard to keep my honest appraisal of the Daily Mail's site functionality apart from my occasional irritation with the editorial coverage in the paper of things like games and...
The BBC need a TARDIS to transport their Doctor Who RSS URLs
There was an astonishing message in the official BBC Doctor Who News RSS feed yesterday: Now that we've switched over to our shiny new site, our news stories are being created in a different way. Therefore you'll no longer see news stories added to this page. Instead, you'll find them if you follow the link below. More importantly, if you subscribe to our RSS news feed using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/syndication/rss091.xml you'll need to update it to: http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/rss.xml That way you'll...
'RSS Feeds: Managing the Mechanism' article for FUMSI
I've contributed an article about managing your consumption of RSS feeds to the Manage area of the FUMSI site - 'RSS Feeds: Managing the Mechanism'. If you get the FreePint newsletter you may have already seen the promotional blurb for the article. "Martin Belam explains the ins and outs of RSS -- not the technology or mechanics of it, but the nitty-gritty of managing yet another information stream on a desktop already close to bursting with resources. He provides practical...
Making the most of blog comments: Part 6 - Making a unified blog post and comment feed with Yahoo! Pipes
I've been writing a series of posts looking at various aspects of implementing comments on blogs. This week I've been concentrating on the way that blog comments can be output as RSS. Yesterday I explained how to add a recent comments RSS feed to Movable Type. Today I want to look at how you can publish one feed from your blog, which features both the entries written by the author, and the comments left by users. What I want...
Making the most of blog comments: Part 5 - 'Recent comment' RSS feed template for Movable Type
I've been writing a series of posts looking at the best ways to implement comments on blogs. Although one of the often championed features of the blogosphere is the 'conversation', not all blogging platforms make it easy for users to track their part of the conversation. One way to facilitate that is to provide streams of the comments added to a site in the RSS format. Although there doesn't seem to be a huge take-up for this kind of...
Making the most of blog comments: Part 4 - Do people read comments via RSS?
I'm doing a series of posts about the way that people implement comments on blog sites. I started by looking at the methods that can be used to promote comments prominently to users, and then undertook a survey of 100 blogs to get a feel for which ways were popular. I found, thanks in part to the growth of Wordpress as a platform, that distributing RSS feeds of comments was being increasingly used, either on a 'per blog' or...
IA Summit bloggers mash-up feed
Last week I published a list of 37 bloggers who are participating in the 2008 IA Summit in Miami in April. As well as in individual list, there was an OPML file to allow you import all of the sites into your feed reader of choice in one go. I've now put together an alternative way to subscribe to them. I've mashed 35 of the feeds together using the awesome Yahoo! Pipes - partly thanks to Kevin Cheng who features...
IA Summit bloggers
The programme for the 2008 IA Summit features 100 people either talking, hosting workshops or presenting posters. I was interested to see how many of those have blogs, and thought it might help shape my opinions as to which sessions I shall be attending at the conference. Having done the legwork to trawl through the list looking for bloggers, I also thought it might be nice to share. I found 37 participants with personal blogs that looked active. I've...
Now the Daily Express RSS feeds are in Latin
There is something very wrong with the RSS feeds from the Daily Express - and I don't just mean that the constant focus on Diana makes it look like they are ten years out-of-date. I've already written about how I had to pull the Express content from the Chipwrapper sports feed, as the stories in it still have Sam Allardyce at Newcastle, and Fabio Capello denying links with Liverpool - December 5th was the last time the feed updated. I've...
Gene Marks is dangerously wrong about "Tech 'solutions' your small biz can't use"
A couple of days ago via the extremely useful Sphinn I was directed to an article on MSNBC by Gene Marks - "Tech 'Solutions' Your Small Biz Can't Use". In amongst it he lists RSS, blogs, SEO and Web 2.0 as tech that have no uses for the small business. Once I'd spluttered out my coffee and started hammering my outraged response, I realised it was a great bit of linkbait designed to get lots of people frothing at the...
More RSS errors - The Sun and The Express
The Sun's broken RSS still affecting Chipwrapper one month on
BBC RSS subscription league table for English & Scottish football teams
Top 50 BBC Podcasts in Google Reader
Top 100 BBC RSS feeds in Google Reader
British newspaper RSS subscriptions in Google Reader
Daily Sport brand hi-jacked by Russian RSS squatters
Top 100 British newspaper feeds in Google Reader
The Daily Star's unique approach to promoting RSS feeds
The Telegraph's scatter-gun approach to related RSS feeds
The BBC's Editors blog links to currybetdotnet - and illustrates one of the downsides of RSS
British newspaper and blog feeds OPML file listed on Grazr
Today is the deadline for opting out of Feedburner handing all of their usage data to Google
Extra URLs for the Guardian Gamesblog in Bloglines
RSS article in the Press Gazette this week
Newspapers 2.0: OPML file for British newspaper RSS feeds
Twitter polluting Google search results for news topics
Newspapers 2.0: OPML files for The Telegraph and The Mirror blogs by author
Bloglines subscriptions numbers and OPML file for The Guardian's Comment Is Free site
Converting BBC Sport RSS feeds to WML
Roaming web-based RSS aggregation from Bloglines
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Talks & presentations
"Journalism in the digital age"
I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Sunday April 11th. More details...
Posts of the moment
Day of the Triffids
If everyone suddenly went blind, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?
With professionals of this quality, who needs 'citizen journalist' enemies?
It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger, if the 'professional' keeps publishing articles so wrong that they have to be deleted.
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- The future of news
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- Media policy and regulation
- New media best practice
- Newspaper website design
- Notes and quotes from media and web events
- 'Old' media relationship with 'new' media
- Site search management and design
- Working at the BBC (2000 - 2005)
- Working at The Guardian (2008 - now)
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Contact: martin dot belam at currybet dot net. © Martin Belam where appropriate.
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