Recent posts in my Web Category

Last week at news:rewired I was talking about the Guardian’s Facebook app. During the Q&A after my talk, the topic of privacy cropped up several times, especially with regard to younger people using the Facebook platform. Here are three important things that I think adults should know about when they are discussing privacy amongst teenagers.

Last week the Guardian held one of our regular hack days, where the developers (and other people in the tech department) get to spend two days putting aside their regular work, and instead concentrate on a project of their choosing. Here is what I made.

A flurry of activity around the Guardian last week as we tried out some new things on our Beta site, and had a two day hack day.

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.

The release of 60 new apps that employ Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has sparked another round of internet debate about the value of the functionality. Here’s my take.

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added: “a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.” The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London. Markham Nolan was talking about how Storyful sources social media content from accidental citizen journalists.

Today is “Community Manager Appreciation Day”. If you’ve ever taken part in online community, used UGC for research or entertainment, or chased up story leads from comments left across the web, you probably owe it somewhere to an unsung community manager. I’m not normally a big fan of organised recognition, but I believe, especially in the news space, that community management is a dangerously under-valued skill.

There is always debate about the value of pseudonymous comments on websites, but I thought this comment underneath Kate Bevan’s recent piece on Comment is free about booth babes at CES summed it up perfectly.

The launch of Google’s “Search, plus Your World” launch has started a round of people exclaiming that SEO is dead. Again. I’m trying to find out exactly when the fatality took place - and the earliest claim I can find is March 2005.

An Oregon judge has inadvertently sparked a wider debate about the nature of journalism, as Cleland Thom reported for the Press Gazette. I think a public set of principles is one key way for publishers to set themselves aside from the general hubbub of the internet.

Paul Adams, an ex-Googler now at Facebook, has written a great blog post about why the announcement that volunteers at the London Olympics won’t be able to use social media is not just King Cnut-like, but a missed opportunity. It is no surprise the IOC doesn’t understand social media.

Everybody loves a social media story with a happy ending - by which I don’t mean that PR stunt about that other Martin guy. Here are two that have caught my eye over the last few days, involving a student trying to get an internship, and the Muscatine Journal in Iowa.

Last night we threw open the Guardian’s door for “UXmas” - a chance to meet people from the UX and design teams, hear a couple of talks, and eat some mince pies before retiring to the pub.

I’m hosting December’s “Carnival of journalism” on the Guardian Developer blog, so it would be a bit remiss not to join in myself. As neither a hack nor a hacker, I thought I'd take the liberty of answering both variations of the question...

The BBC has been taking a lot pf public stick for their redesign of their web homepage. Here is a quick look behind the scenes at how the design process for the page took place back in 2002.

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up Dan McQuillan was talking about “Hackovation: how social innovation camps, crisis camps and other hacker movements are trying to go beyond the headlines”. Here are my notes.

Here is a miserable set of reading if you: 1. Like the internet. 2. Are a man. 3. Would prefer it if you lived in a society where it wouldn’t be acceptable for someone to threaten your mother, sister or daughter with rape and sexual violence for the dreadful crime of expressing their opinion on the internet.

At the weekend the Guardian became the first major publisher to experiment with Scroll, a new tool from a New York based start-up which promises to allow users to build magazine-style layouts for the web without having to know any code at all. Benji Lanyado put together a version of the weekend’s lead travel section article using it, and we published that in our new Guardian beta section, as well as publishing the more conventional version.

At the recent Enterprise Search Europe conference where I was talking about search on Guardian Books and the future of search, the most entertaining and illuminating talk I saw was by Tim Gollins, Head of Digital Preservation at the National Archives. Here are my notes from his talk.

I’ve just about recovered from last week’s Guardian Hack Day, where at one point I found myself desperately trying to live blog the event, finish my own hack, and get Guardian Beta launched.

Here are my notes from Chris Sumner’s Hacks/Hackers London talk about using tools to map social networks across the web, and what that means for information security and digital journalists.

I wasn’t able to make last night’s Hacks/Hackers London, which is a shame, as it is always a great night, I’ve always enjoyed seeing Heather Brooke speak, and it would have been brilliant to catch up with the BBC’s George Wright who I used to work alongside in Bush House many moons ago. George has published his slides about the BBC’s R&D department. Seeing all the tweets reminded me that, for one reason or another, I never got round to posting my notes from last month’s Hacks/Hackers. So here they are...

It is just over twenty days since we released the Guardian Facebook app. I’ve been engaged with a lot of conversations with people about it on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might put down a few thoughts on the app, and some of the reaction to it.

At London IA last week, Oli Shaw was reprising his EuroIA talk about serendipity. It is, he said, a lovely word on the tongue, but has been rated as one of the hardest English words to translate into another language. Here are my notes from his talk.

This is my final set of notes from last week’s EuroIA conference in Prague - covering Margaret Hanley’s closing plenary session.

I’ve been gradually working through the remaining notes I made on my trip to Prague to speak at this year’s EuroIA. One of my favourite talks was more heavily focussed on software engineering than anything else on the conference programme, which put a big smile on my face. Here are my thoughts on Bob Royce presenting “The Rise and Fall...and Rise Again of Information Architecture.”

I’ve been catching up on the notes I made in Prague over the course of the EuroIA Summit. Here is what I made of a couple of talks with a Scandinavian twist - Haakon Halvorsen & Kjetil Hansen from Norway, and the BBC’s Anna Dahlström.

This is the essay version of the talk I gave yesterday at the EuroIA Summit in Prague.

This year’s EuroIA Summit kicked off with a keynote from Luke Wroblewski - whose book on web form design is one of my personal bibles. Here are my notes.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll be blogging my notes from the sessions at EuroIA in Prague. Not necessarily, it must be said, in the right order. I’m starting with my notes from a session that has just finished - LBi’s Terry Ma talking about localising web design to compete in the Middle East and Asian markets.

Welcome once again to my probably futile attempt to gather together all the EuroIA slides, resources, poster sessions, and blog posts into one place. If you know of a resource I’ve missed, then drop me a mail at martin.belam@currybet.net or ping me on Twitter - @currybet.

This week I braved the potential troll hordes of the interwebs with a piece for Comment Is Free about the trolling phenomena, commissioned as part of our coverage of the prison sentence given to Sean Duffy for some unsavoury internet posts mocking the deaths of teenagers. Given the subject matter and the potential audience, I think I got off quite lightly in the comments, especially after it ended up with the headline “All you trolls out there – come out and explain yourself”.

This is my final set of notes from this week’s Content Strategy Forum. Elizabeth McGuane was presenting “Content is UX is design: crossing disciplines for fun and profit”, talking about topic maps, disambiguation, and multi-disciplinary teams

Over the last couple of days I’ve been blogging my notes from the sessions I saw at the Content Strategy Forum in London, including those by Karen McGrane, Eric Reiss, Lisa Moore and my own. Today I’ve got my notes from a masterclass in micro-copy delivered by Catherine Toole - “Seven micro content strategy projects with high return on investment”

This is the essay version of a talk I gave this morning at the Content Strategy Forum in London - “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one”. It covers how the Guardian has shifted from traditional to digital publishing, and talks about our CMS, our metadata, our API, and gives my advice for those entering the content strategy field when dealing with traditional publishers.

I’ve been trying to blog my notes from the talks I’ve attended at the Content Strategy Forum as fast as I can, but I’ve got a little bit out of synch. These notes are from the last session I attended before I had to head off - Lisa Moore talking about “Agile and content strategy”.

Continuing my series of blog posts from the sessions I have been attending at the Content Strategy Forum, here are my notes from Erin Kissane’s talk about “Making sense of the (new) new content landscape”

My notes from 2 sessions at the 2011 Content Strategy Forum, featuring talks by Lisa Welchman and Eric Reiss.

My notes from Karen McGrane’s brilliant talk at Content Strategy Forum 2011.

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

I happen to think that if you take most community management guidelines or blogging and commenting guidelines for staff, they basically boil down to “Don’t be a dick”. In fact, I think there is quite a simple flow chart to follow if you find yourself on the wrong end of a moderation decision on a news website.

I’ll be speaking tonight at the London Hacks/Hackers meeting, and one of the points I’ll be making is that the digital publishing revolution is a perpetual revolution, one that requires constant learning. That section of my talk is partly fuelled by how angry I was made yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.

Today there has been a Twitter-storm over an email sent from the BBC to Andy Mabbett. He had complained about the BBC’s use of pictures from Twitter, and the reply he got seemed to suggest that the BBC considered anything posted via Twitter to be in “the public domain”. The response was clearly wrong, and at odds with the BBC’s own guidelines about the usage of social media. Several BBC staff responded on Twitter and in the comments on Andy’s blog post. I have some sympathy with whoever wrote that original email.

There has been quite a fuss today about a BBC response to a complaint by Andy Mabbett. It implies that the BBC believes all material posted via Twitter is copyright-free and in the public domain. This approach is at odds with their own terms & conditions of use.

It is easy to think of “data journalism” as being about automatic computer analysis of large datasets, but good data journalism has story-telling at the centre. Over the coming days, weeks, and months there is a lot of data journalism to be done about the riots and looting in the UK. It is an opportunity for long-form data journalism, and the responsibility of the media to use this data in a way that helps us understand the riots, not in a way that prolongs their negative impact.

Last week I was at the London Content Strategy meet-up, where I was giving half of my forthcoming talk at the London Content Strategy Forum, and asking the audience how they would like the second half to develop. Also talking were Lisa Welchman, Sophie Dennis and Tyler Tate. Here are my notes from their talks...

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

Matthew Cock of the British Museum recently visited the Guardian. He was talking about “Wikipedia, the British Museum and the GLAM sector”. GLAM stands for “Galleries, libraries, archives and museums” by the way - and here are my notes from the session.

Fiona Romeo, Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory recently visited the Guardian to give us a lunchtime talk last week about “Inviting bots and citizen scientists into the museum”. It was fascinating - and delightfully geeky.

The Huffington Post, Microsoft and Apple have faced differing levels of criticsim for attempts to cash in on the sad death of Amy Winehouse.

I posted a screengrab to Tumblr last night of the headline from The Times website which unfortunately managed to follow the formula “Live: Someone is dead”. I think it is the perfect example of something that wouldn’t be allowed to happen in print, but which hits a magic Venn diagram intersection of technology, editorial and information architecture allowing it to happen digitally.

The other week I wondered why newspapers still need a distinct name on a Sunday in a digital age. I thought I’d have a look at how the existing titles handle their URL and domain name strategy.

Chris Elliott, Readers’ Editor at The Guardian, recently addressed the issue of our coverage of the Sarah Palin email release in his Open Door column. The project raised some interesting questions about the information architecture of how we publish this kind of crowd-sourcing exercise on the Guardian website.

Sometimes you can end up just as proud of some small changes to a website as you are of the big projects. We’ve made a couple of tweaks to the Guardian website recently which fall into that category.

Over the last few months we’ve been holding a series of talks at The Guardian for staff around the theme of “digital”. Recently it was the turn of Benji Lanyado, who has made a name for himself as the Guardian’s travel writer who goes on #TwiTrips. He arrives in a city, and then relies on people tweeting him with tips and directions to find hidden gems and the things that the locals recommend.

At the UPA conference Susan Weinschenk talked about the paradox of choice, and that how as humans we often say that we want a wide array of choice, but actually find it bewildering when presented with it. I thought it might be worthwhile doing a quick survey of the level of choice that news homepages present to users. This table shows the number of headlines displayed to readers on the front pages of some major international news sites:

Whilst I was in Atlanta I took the opportunity to take the Inside CNN Studio Tour, and was interested to see how an American news operation gets presented as a tourist attraction.

Last week I was in Atlanta for the UPA conference. Here is part one of my notes from the week featuring Brooke Baldwin, Kathi Kaiser and Susan Weinschenk.