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The Sun relying on 'copyright thieves' Google and Yahoo! for their Wrightys XI campaign
Despite Murdoch's stance that search engines steal his newspaper's content, The Sun are using search keywords as the main marketing thrust for their 2010 FIFA World Cup competition.
African Cup of Nations online coverage review: Part 1 - UK
During the course of this year's African Cup of Nations tournament in Angola, I've been reviewing news coverage in the UK and in Africa itself. In the first part of this series, I look at how, before a ball was kicked, the terrorist attack on the Togo team made print front pages in the UK.
Social media unplugged: Part 2 - Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious
This week I'm looking at 'social media unplugged', finding out what the user experience is like if you click one of the multitude of share buttons that litter the web without being logged in to the service you are attempting to use. In yesterday's first part I examined Digg and StumbleUpon. Both of these put the novice user through a registration process, only at the end to have not captured the URL that they were hoping to submit. Today I'm...
Is 'Search online for "Act on CO2"' costing the taxpayer unnecessary pay-per-click money?
Tamlyn posted late last week after spotting that the Government's 'Act on CO2' campaign was asking people to search for the term rather than publishing a URL. It is a trend that Cabel Sasser noted is well established in Japan, where the fact that URLs have to be formatted in the Western alphabet is a significant marketing challenge. The trouble with the Government initiative is that once you announce that you are asking people to search for specific non-trademarked terms,...
Mumbai terrorist attacks show that search engines still can't get breaking news right
We are used to hearing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I've just been having a scout around the three major search engines as news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not performing very well. Google does have some news results inserted into the one word search for 'mumbai', but they are not in the top slot. Searching for 'india'...
8 Search APIs for Hack Days
I spent most of yesterday at The Guardian's first ever internal Hack Day. I gave one of the short five minute 'lightning' talks that got the event kicked off. I wanted to outline a few of the search related APIs out there that might prove useful as people put their hacks together. Here's the written down version... Google AJAX Search API I'll start with the big one - the Google AJAX Search API. This lets you put Google Search in...
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...
Newspaper widget review: Yahoo! Widgets
I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obviously great idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. Well, obvious maybe, but it turned out not to be such a great idea after all. Rather than ending up with a lengthy series of posts looking at all the available widgets and...
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars
I've been running a series of Newspaper Site Search Engine Smackdowns to see which papers were able to index their own content faster than Google could. It turned out that the answer was not many, with only The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Independent getting close to indexing news stories faster than Google's web search did. Although it is the dominant player in the market, Google is not the only search engine, so I also carried out the...
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...
Flickr users protest about Yahoo! takeover. Again.
The interweb's tubes have been buzzing that Flickr users are already in open revolt over Microsoft's offer to take-over Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company. Image by sebestyenistvan "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic 'mass suicide'" - Wired "I'm not cross and I'm not bitter - I'm just a little sad because I have a belief that things can be good/great without taking the obvious route". - grange85 "My fear is that over time they won't...
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...
24/7 TV news websites: Part 10 - Search
Having individually reviewed the websites of 8 24/7 news channels that broadcast in Europe to identify their Web 2.0 type features, I wanted to look specifically at the way they handle a very Web 1.0 piece of functionality - search. Al Jazeera Al Jazeera is the only site I looked at with a search service that does not have a search box on the homepage, or in the templates of story pages. Instead, the user has to select a text...
Grade 'F' all round for British newspaper homepages on YSlow
Last week the Yahoo! Developers Network released a Firefox add-on called YSlow. It combines with the fantastic Firebug add-on to allow you to assess a web page against Yahoo!'s 13 criteria for delivering a really fast scalable web service. I thought it might be interesting to benchmark British newspaper homepages against the YSlow performance metrics, to see how well they performed. Some of the technical solutions that Yahoo! recommend require significant investment in infrastructure. I suspect most newspaper editors in...
ITV advertise using the keyword 'iPlayer' on Google and Yahoo!
Well, here's one amusing thing that I didn't predict about the day of the BBC's iPlayer software launch. Early yesterday morning, ITV - or someone making mischief on their behalf - were buying up keywords on Google and Yahoo! related to the BBC iPlayer, to trumpet their own streaming on demand service. Boasting that there was no software to download, there seemed to be two or three variations of the advert, which stopped appearing around lunchtime. Some BBC properties, like...
A tour of Tour De France news sites - Étape 5: Eurosport / Yahoo!
Like the majority of cycling fans, I have been watching this week's events in the Tour De France unfold with dismay. Most other weeks, someone claiming to be from ETA letting bombs off on the route would be a major story, but yesterday with the expulsion of yellow jersey wearer Michael Rasmussen and the exclusion of the Cofidis team, that hardly seemed to matter. Of course, there is an argument that says that out of the couple of hundred...
Flickr imprvment
I'm well behind the curve on this, as I see it was announced at the end of February, but yesterday I noticed a significant user interaction improvement on Flickr around adding photos to groups you don't currently belong to. The old way was a bit cumbersome. Someone would spot your photo of the lesser-spotted outer Mongolian tortoise-shell widget, and you'd get a Flickrmail saying: Hi, out of your 6,512 photographs, I notice that once, in the corner of one,...
Yahoo! door-stepping ex-Google Answers researchers
I loved this cheeky little blog post from Yahoo! last week encouraging the paid researchers from Google's now defunct Answers service to jump ship to Yahoo! Answers Please consider sharing your knowledge with millions of people on Yahoo! Answers; connect with users with shared interests; get answers to all your questions; and help build the world's most vibrant and trusted community. They've even set up a Yahoo! Group specifically to help those involved manage the change. I've written before that...
Sitemaps in search engine news
I'm always interested to see how search engines provide coverage of themselves when they are making the news, and so at around 3:30pm Austrian time today I had a look to see what searching for 'sitemap' or 'sitemaps' turned up, following today's announcement from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! that they were converging on one standard. Yahoo! performed best, with an injected Yahoo! shortcut to a Search Engine Journal article about the news. Google, on the other hand, had no mention...
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Yahoo!'s "social search" concept
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Yahoo!'s social approach Yahoo! have taken a slightly different approach to the personalised route taken by Google, which they have termed 'social search'. One of their social web search products is called "MyWeb" This service allows you to 'save' or 'bookmark' URLs, either directly from the search...
Searching for pictures on ImageShack and Yahoo! Photos
Yahoo! Answers - Beta AND (New)
Sloppy search on Yahoo!'s World Cup site
A history of the online World Cup
Yahoo! points to the Firefox search box
Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta - My 6 month report
Yahoo! Using Flickr To Supplement News Coverage
Firefox Search Plugin For Yahoo! My Web 2.0 Beta
Google and Yahoo! Playing With Video Search
Yahoo! and MSN both tweaking their search
Searching for the "War on Iraq"
Early Christmas present for Yahoo!
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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.
Read more about...
- The future of news
- IA and UX events
- Local and hyperlocal news
- Martin Belam talks and presentations
- 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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