currybetdotnet

The Financial Times and "the worst online redesign I have ever seen"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:55:11 +0000

Site redesigns are seldom initially popular - you only need to ask BBC News about that - but the new Financial Times homepage seems to have come in for some especially harsh criticism. On The Guardian site yesterday, Andrew Brown launched a withering attack on the redesign, calling it "the worst online redesign I have ever seen".

"It is ugly, uninformative and actively confusing. Instead of presenting a lot of information quickly and quietly, it presents very little, slowly, and with maximum confusion. It's like Powerpoint that has been dropped into a blender. It looks as if it has been aimed at people who don't want to read. No doubt this is a growing and important segment of the population."

I think Andrew is being overly-harsh here. Whilst I'm sure nobody would describe the new look as beautiful, it isn't as bad as all that. Early on in his article Andrew talks about point size and leading, which made me initially think this must be the rantings of a print dinosaur. However he then goes on to mention Wordpress templates and Rememberthemilk, so clearly he is no novice to the Internet.

I said in my Delicious links yesterday that the one tweak I would make to the Financial Times design would be in the area of the pink background. I understand it is an important element of the print branding, but I'd also like the site to be easy on the eye when reading from a screnn.

After a short while on the page, I find the pink background a little stressful. I'd rather see the pink restricted to the header area, with a more restful white background behind the text.

If you wanted to increase the amount of screen real estate that was pink, then I'm sure a better visual designer than me could come up with a balanced way to keep the right-hand elements of the page echoing the pink brand, whilst keeping the headlines and story snippets at maximum legibility.

I'd be astonished if mock-ups like these didn't crop up during the redesign project. According to this tool, the sub-headings on the new page fail the W3C accessibility test for colour contrast.

One thing I was definitely impressed with about the Financial Times redesign was the way they handled the launch. They sent registered users an email in advance of it happening:

"Here's a sneak preview of our new-look homepage, which launches this week. We're aiming for a more sophisticated look and feel that is consistent with the Financial Times brand - a clean and uncluttered executive briefing on the world of global business."

The email included a link which took the user through to a full-size mock-up of the design. Points of interest were marked on it, and hovering the mouse over them revealed a brief explanation of that change or feature.

Just as with the Daily Mail's beta trial of their new design, I thought this was a really good way of introducing a loyal audience to the changes that were about to be made to the site. Ultimately, whatever I think of the new design, I got a good user and brand experience from being shown a demo first.

links for 2008-11-20

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:01:22 +0000

Strictly Come Dancing Message Board Closing At 10 p.m | BBC Internet Blog

"Unfortunately due to the sheer volume of comments, plus the high number of new people who wish to join the conversation, the Strictly Come Dancing messageboard will be closing tonight at 10 p.m.". If in doubt, duck!

(tags: strictlycomedancing bbc messageboards ugc bbcinternetblog)
John Sergeant and the Death of Democracy: Heresy Corner

"Like them, he has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the competition. Of course it's not a dance competition; it's no more about dancing than the Eurovision song contest is about songs. It's an entertainment show: and Sergeant was the primary entertainment."

(tags: heresycorner strictlycomedancing bbc)
The online Financial Times should be pink with embarrassment over its redesign | Andrew Brown | The Guardian

"The financial crisis is grim enough without the Financial Times panicking; yet last week the paper committed the worst online redesign I have ever seen...It is ugly, uninformative and actively confusing. Instead of presenting a lot of information quickly and quietly, it presents very little, slowly, and with maximum confusion...It's like Powerpoint that has been dropped into a blender...It looks as if it has been aimed at people who don't want to read...As the world dives into the biggest financial crisis since 1945, the redesign suggests that FT readers, who will largely be the people who get us out of it, now can't or don't handle chunks of information more than a couple of hundred words long. In that case, we really are all doomed". Come on Andrew, say what you mean! Honestly, the redesign isn't *that* bad - the one tweak I'd make is to keep pink branding borders but have a white background behind the text for ease of reading.

(tags: financialtimes guardian webdesign newspapers)
Top 10 Best [U.S.] Newspaper Websites | Bivings Report

"As a follow-up to our research on newspaper websites that we published recently, we decided to break out a list of the best examples of 'good' newspaper websites."

(tags: newspapersites websites usa newspapers)
Doug (U1564650) - currybetdotnet - 27 November, 2006

Going out for drinks with some of my old BBC team tonight, but sadly a notable absentee will be Doug, who died nearly exactly two years ago.

(tags: currybetdotnet)
Behind the scenes: story of the far right map of britain | Inside Guardian.co.uk

"Here's the story of how a hack day project in the office coupled with a data leak from the BNP allowed us to easily present an interactive view of news events to our readers". Awesome representation of the BNP membership data that didn't invade privacy but provided context. Love to see other political parties voluntarily release anonymous postcode or constituency level membership data for comparison.

(tags: bnp privacy guardian #ghack1)
An ABC of R2 | guardian.co.uk | Inside guardian.co.uk blog

Day-by-day set of blog posts from Nik Silver looking at elements of the huge CMS build and migration project that The Guardian has been busy with over the last couple of years.

(tags: niksilver guardian)
BNP members 'targeted by threats' | BBC NEWS | Politics

Not the best copy-editing on the BBC site: "Are you a member of the BNP party? Were your details published online? Contact us using the form below. Your contact details will not be published". I mean, surely the fact that the contact details *have* been published *is* the story...

(tags: bnp bbcnews privacy ugc)
Social Media Statistics: Welcome to Social Media Statistics

"A big home for all facts and figures around social media - because I'm fed up of trawling around for them and I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who gets asked 'how many users does Facebook have?' every hour of every day. It's not the snazziest name for a project ever. Oh well". Big respect for this.

(tags: socialmedia socialnetworking statistics research)
BNP List - if only papers had staff, the power of traditional media and observations | Craig McGill: Cluttered Desk »

"Given that the list is going up and down all over the shop, how long before people start adding in other names to it as a prank, Black PR op, revenge or some other reason? Sadly that's the sort of prank that could have nasty repercussions."

(tags: bnp journalism privacy)
British tennis protege arrested in America on rape charge | Mail Online

Great bit of UGC in the comments: "Rape is the ONLY crime where people are likely to suggest that the criminal is innocent - how many of you have seen an article about a burglary suspect and defended him, because you know, maybe the homeowner made it up?"

(tags: dailymail ugc rape)

Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 11

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:55:38 +0000

Transforming your results

During the course of this series of articles, I've looked at various elements of interface design which have been employed, for better or for worse, across a wide range of European newspaper websites. Today I'm going to wrap up the series by laying out a step-by-step transformation of Google's search results listing into something that presents users who opt for 'site search' with a richer UI experience.

Google's layout

In part 2 of this series, I looked at how Google's default search results layout give us a clue to the 'map' of information that Google holds about our articles. Everything Google knows has to be gleaned directly from the HTML, so there is no additional metadata or structured information displayed to the searcher.

Transform the title

Instead of sticking with the HTML title for the page, which is likely to include extraneous information like the global site branding, present the exact and full title of your article. Don't truncate it like Google does.

Transform the snippet

Think about transforming the snippet of text that you display underneath the article headline.

Google dynamically selects a chunk of text from your page, because it is near to, or involves the first use or most dense use of the search terms. However, since you have access to the data from your CMS, you know exactly where the start of the article is. That means you can opt to show an editorially selected description or snippet, using the opening paragraph, stand-first or tag-line from an article. For a news site, this can give users a search results page with a much easier to understand overview of the topics of the articles that have been returned.

As an example, if you are searching for 'Cuba' on a newspaper site, the first paragraph will give you a much better indication of whether an article is about Cuba or just mentions Cuba. You can't immediately glean this understanding if the snippet displayed features the sole mention of Cuba in an article, which is how Google would display it.

You certainly should always display some type of snippet however, unlike La Dernière Heure in Belgium. Their results display is compact, but lacks vital information which can help the user decide if a result is relevant.

Credit the author

Again, because Google has obtained their information from scraping the HTML of your published article, they don't know who the author is. On this page, for example, they can see some HTML that says 'Written by Martin Belam'. However, if in the course of a post, I mention that I've enjoyed a piece written by Dan Taylor, and another recent blog entry written by Karen Loasby, then Google can't definitively pin me down as the author from the HTML alone.

By contrast, if your CMS and site search are working in tandem, then you know exactly who wrote every article, and you can feed that back to searchers in the results.

Display the published date

This is another case where your CMS information is vastly superior to that belonging to Google. Google knows the date that it first crawled your webpage, and it knows the timestamp of the HTML page you published, and it knows the last time it successfully accessed the page. But you know the exact moment it was published. So again, let users and searchers know in the search results page.

Google also offers a limited ability to time-slice web results - so you can consider offering users a way to narrow down their results to a specific date range. This allows for a more accurate refinement of results than can be achieved on Google's regular web search.

Next...

In tomorrow's final part of this series, I'll be looking at further transformations you can make to the standard search results listing, by including images, structured data, and providing additional search related services.

Another threat to local newspapers - daily BBC horoscopes by email!

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:55:33 +0000

I love a good spam email title - and I was amused by a sudden rash of spam that appeared last week promising 'Your horoscope every day from BBC'.

It was only for a second that I considered it might be genuine, and yet more evidence that the BBC was carefully marching towards occupying every niche market currently served by the UK's beleaguered local newspaper businesses ;-)

FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Scotland

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:51 +0000

During the course of this year's World Cup Qualifiers, I've been looking at the FA websites of the countries that England have been playing. With it being an international friendly night, inspired by a comment from 'Uncle Wilco', I thought I'd look at the website of one of the other 'Home Nations'.

Earlier in the year, when the Scottish FA were consulting with their fans over whether the expense of bringing Argentina to play in Glasgow was worth it, they can't have imagined that they would be at the the centre of the biggest media story in world football today. For tonight, Maradona makes his debut in Scotland as Argentina's coach. With little experience, but a talismatic presence, his reign is sure to be eventful, and it all starts this evening at Hampden Park.

Scottish FA Website

Despite the media hype surrounding the match, today the Scottish FA site was still trying to sell a handful of remaining tickets for the game.

Display customisation

One of the features of the Scottish FA website is that it offers a lot of display customisation. In the toolbar you can change the page's text size, the screen resolution required, and change the stylesheet to represent Scotland's home, away and third kits.

Coverage

There is an admirable detail of coverage on the site of the Scottish national team at all levels of the game. The left-hand menu elements expand to offer a host of options.

There is also an extensive archive of content covering the tournaments that the team have participated in or attempted to qualify for.

In addition, there is an entirely separate site for members of the Scotland Supporters Club.

Social media and Web 2.0 functionality

I didn't spot a great deal of what I consider to be 'social' or 'Web 2.0' functionality, which is something I've been looking out for in these reviews. Unlike England's opponents tonight, Germany, the Scottish FA website doesn't seem to have any video news content about the squad.

There didn't seem to be any opportunity for users to publish on the site, although, obviously, I wasn't able to access the Supporters Club site, which would seem to be the natural home for that sort of content.

There were no social bookmarking links, and I didn't find an RSS feed of the latest news from the site.

Coaching and development content

One area where I thought the site was very strong was in the 'Coaching and playing' section. Here there were lots of video clips and downloads for improving the skills of Scottish youngsters, and footballers with disabilities.

In addition the Scottish FA support the 'Football Central' initiative, which encourages the development of football in the nation. This has its own website which promises "free resources for all grassroots associations, leagues and clubs, including websites and tournament and fixture management"

Next...

International football takes a break now until February 2009. When those fixtures come around, I'll be looking at the Northern Ireland website, as they prepare to take on one of Europe's weakest sides, San Marino, in a World Cup Qualifier.

links for 2008-11-19

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:01:42 +0000

NS leading in fight to block BBC local plans | Jon Slattery

"They know if the BBC steals local press audiences with bumped up websites, it could lead to lower ad revenues and threaten their jobs. On the other hand, if they are going to lose their jobs anyway because of the rise of the web they wouldn't half like to work for the BBC's local websites."

(tags: localnewspapers bbc jonslattery)
Tories ditch spending promise as poll shows lead collapsing | Politics | The Guardian

"The [Labour] party has also agreed an Obama-style fundraising campaign, using the internet to attract small donations and trading on the commitment that the money will only be used for campaigning."

(tags: politics guardian labour barackobama)
Upcoming Journo Drinks

A-ha, this new site promises the possibility that mainstream journalists will finally see the real value of social media!

(tags: journalists drinking socialmedia)
Barclays: expensive independence is better than government interference - Telegraph

"One reader sent me details of his long and tortuous dispute with Barclays, inviting me to apologise for a failure to expose the bank's directors as a bunch of vindictive pocket-picking scoundrels! He did not call for them to be flogged, but only, I suspect, because he ran out of paper."

(tags: ugc telegraph banking)
BBC - Archive Project - The Genesis of Doctor Who

Great release of archive material about the creation of Doctor Who.

(tags: doctorwho bbc archive television)
The Future of TV: Between Voice and Choice? - Max Gadney | BBC Internet Blog

"If TV executives and technologists can appreciate the strengths of what each can offer - the (still) dominance of linear television brands and the emerging sophistication of on-demand technologies will compliment each other."

(tags: maxgadney bbcinternetblog television)
Barbies "sexing" on the floor | Alpha Mummy - Times Online

Great post from Alpha Mummy - sample quote: "'Barbara' couldn't even get the dolls to have $e* in character, for crying out loud. What kind of an amatuer were my girls working with?"

(tags: alphamummy timesonline children)
Children watching 'illicit' content on online TV - Telegraph

"Digital piracy is viewed by many as simply a more convenient alternative to obtaining content from most legal online channels. 'Obviously I would prefer to use legal services but none of them can currently compete with the illegal ones,' said one person who was surveyed. 'The chance of getting caught is so minute as to be a non-concern.'"

(tags: iplayer bbc telegraph media)
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Nobody calls the Boy Scouts 'animals' | Mail Online

From the "You couldn't make it up files" - Littlejohn rants at Barnardo's for projecting 'the exasperated outpourings of bloggers on to adults as a whole' with their campaign to stop teenage children being demonised, suggesting real people don't call real kids animals. On the Mail's online front page at the very same time: "'Feral' boy, 14, stabbed man with broken beer bottle after he refused to buy him alcohol"

(tags: children richardlittlejohn dailymail)

Tom Dunmore of Stuff says print magazines have a future..."for the moment"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:55:56 +0000

I was at an event at the Dana Centre last night to mark the launch of Jack Challoner's book "Desirable Future?: Consumer Electronics in Tomorrow's World". One of the panel was Tom Dunmore, editor of the UK edition of Stuff magazine.

Part of the format of the evening involved breaking into small discussion groups, and I had a chance to ask Tom, how, as a publication talking about new technology, he saw their position in an industry seemingly staring into the digital abyss.

He defended the concept of paper, suggesting that if we had grown up in a world just of screens, the permanence and portability of paper would make it a cool invention. He admitted he tended to get his information online, but he was sure there was a future for magazines - "for the moment" - as they provide a "sit-back" experience which digital can not yet emulate.

I think this is something that the news industry really needs to begin to take on board, that the print medium is increasingly suited to "sit-back" features, opinions and analysis, but the page count devoted to simply printing out yesterday's online news may need to be reduced.

Tom seemed to see good potential in devices like the Sony eReader, and thought particularly the introduction of flexible electronic ink screens might have a big impact on print publishing.

Another person asked if he thought his audience would just migrate online. He admitted that their print sales had dropped 3-4% this year, and thought that any publisher with those figures at the end of the year would be "pretty happy". However, he also said that their website had allowed them to reach a whole new strata of people who would never have bought the magazine.

Tom also made me feel a little bit old when he started talking about their retro gadget profiles, and, faced with a youthful audience, said: "I don't know if you've heard of a thing called the ZX Spectrum..."

Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 10

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:30:26 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I've been publishing a series of posts about getting site search right, based on my presentation at the 2008 Amsterdam Euro IA Summit.

Today I wanted to look at some examples of poor search user experience design which you should seek to avoid.

Don't use confusing gimmicks

Lots of search technologies come with plenty of features in them for displaying relevancy to the user - almost all of them useless. Giving results a star rating or relevancy percentage doesn't convey anything meaningful to the user. They can easily determine relevancy for themselves. For a start, they expect the top result to be the most relevant, and they expect to be able to judge from the result if it is what they want.

Το Βημα in Greece has a search results page with a lovely bar chart illustrating the relative relevancy of the listing, but virtually no 'real' information on which to judge whether a result is useful or not. The SERPs displays the title, author and publication date of an article, but no text snippet.

Dziennik Polska, meanwhile, has an unfathomable star rating applied to some results, but not to others.

I've got no idea at all why the 'two star' ranked article is higher in the listings that the 'four star' items - or why some of the results have no stars at all.

Make it work!

And one thing you need to do, whatever interface you decide to implement, is make sure that your search wrks. Not everybody does. Iltalehti in Finland, for example, offers a Google supplied search with three options - 'Iltalehti', 'Alma' and 'Web-haku'. All of them, at the time I was doing the research for this article, produced completely null results sets, whatever you searched for.

Giving up the ghost

Some newspapers, mind you, do seem to have completely given up on search. Take the English version of the Karjalan Sanomat, a Finnish language newspaper in the Russian Republic of Karelia. This weekly newspaper provides a date-ordered text link index of the year's content, with no clue as to what the stories contained are. It then delivers the content in a frameset, to make sure that Google, or any other search engine, can't help you locate anything either.

If you can't beat 'em...

If you are going to hand over your search technology completely to Google, then there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Εθνος in Greece, uses Google's syndicated search. It places the results within an iFrame on an Εθνος branded page. This layout does not work particularly well, and looks cramped and awkward.

By contrast, De Volkskrant in the Netherlands has a very clean and fresh look and feel for their Google powered results.

Next...

Later this week I'll be beginning a step-by-step guide to transforming your search results from the standard Google interface into a distinctive site search service, using lessons from the examples I've been showing over this series.

links for 2008-11-18

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:01:21 +0000

Where Duran Duran can still count on the star treatment | Music | The Guardian

"Local media swooned over Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor and Roger Taylor as if they were all-conquering sex-god rock stars. Burly cameramen set down their gear and clamoured for autographs.For a band hardened to mocking, naff-obsessed British critics it was an exhilarating change. 'That was the most amazing press conference I've ever experienced,' Le Bon beamed afterwards."

(tags: duranduran guardian music colombia)
Pew Internet: Nearly half of technology users need help with new devices

"Although information technology is well integrated into the lives of many Americans, gadgets and communication services require, for some, a call for help. Some 48% of technology users usually need help from others to set up new devices or to show them how they function."

(tags: technology statistics pewinternet)
Thinking of the numbers — Techbelly

You can download Techbelly's "quite brilliant" [(c) The Guardian] GreaseMonkey script to turn any monetary sum into a more useful comparison.

(tags: #ghack1 guardian techbully)
UFO sightings: 140 years of UFO pictures - Telegraph

Awesome photo gallery from The Telegraph with a visual history of "UFO" pictures

(tags: ufo photographs scifi telegraph)
8 Ways to Buy Links Without "Buying Links" | SEOmoz

Includes this gem: "Process - Put out ads for bloggers and have your development team custom-build or assist them in building blogs they can own and operate. Give the bloggers marketing plans and training so they know how to broaden beyond an insular ecosphere and earn link juice and rankings of their own. Create an agenda for blog posts, links and messaging and launch the sites."

(tags: linkbuilding google seo blogging seomoz)
iPlayer: search resolution - technogoggles

"My kids watch a lot of content through the iPlayer and one of the things that I've noticed is they use Google to search iplayer". [via Frankie Roberto nudging me on Delicious]

(tags: iplayer bbc technogoggles)

Protecting the identity of Baby P's killers: The courts vs the people vs the Internet

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:27:37 +0000

The last few days have shown how very difficult it is to keep information out of the public domain, if the public are determined to find it out. A lot of comparisons have been made about the cases of 'Baby P' and Victoria Climbié, but in many ways they took place in a very different media landscape.

'Baby P' has his own Wikipedia page, created on November 12th, within hours of the court verdicts being announced. In 2000, when Victoria was killed, Wikipedia did not exist. It was not until the 4th anniversary of her death in April 2004 that someone made a page about 'The murder of Victoria Climbié'.

Trying to stick to the terms of the court order preserving the anonymity of 'Baby P''s killers has been very testing for a lot of sites online. Today, Wikipedia editors had to make several revisions to the 'Baby P' page to remove the killer's names. They also took the unusual step of removing the 'diffs' that showed what had been added and removed.

Nevertheless, all this information was carefully being archived on the Wikirage site, which produces a chart of which Wikipedia pages are currently getting the most edits.

Google was also a useful tool for finding out the details that the court wanted kept secret. Their cache on Monday afternoon still contained a BBC News report from late last year that not only named those charged with the death of 'Baby P', but also the toddlers proper name, and, incredibly, their street addresses.

A Telegraph report initially from around the same time could also be located in Google by using search terms which referenced the names of the people involved in the case. However, the article was edited by the paper on November 13th to remove any mention of the case, and was also expunged from the Google cache.

The cache of the BBC story was taken on November 4th of this year, and it is unclear to me why neither Google or the BBC have made sure it was removed.

The other big difference between 2000 and 2008 when we consider the Internet is the sheer scale of usage. According to National Statistics, 65% of households in the UK are now online, compared to 46% in 2002, and, obviously, less in 2000. In July 2000, only 17% of UK Internet users were believed to visit 'chat rooms or sites'. Now, social media sites like Facebook and Bebo are ubiquitous amongst mainstream Internet access.

Additionally, the majority of mainstream media websites now carry comments and forums. Today I've watched a series of threads on The Sun, ITN, Telegraph and Mirror sites get indexed by Google for publishing the child's mother's name, only for the threads to be pulled. It must be a tough day to be a moderator.

It is difficult to see how much longer the court ruling can be expected to hold. If the anonymity restriction is lifted, it will at least remove the curious moral anomaly that people who worked on the case are free to be named, shamed and hounded by the press, whereas the actual perpetrators of the dreadful crime are protected by the state from the prying public.

Please note: I have not included screengrabs or URLs in this blog post in order to avoid any risk of breaching the court order myself.

links for 2008-11-17

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:00:51 +0000

Mystery of Mr Seagull highlights tragedy of hundreds of bodies still unidentified | UK news | The Guardian

"The Guardian has learned there are at least several hundred, and perhaps even as many as 1,000, unidentified bodies in churchyards, crematoria and morgues that have been found but not identified in the UK over the past few decades".

(tags: guardian missingpersons unidentified)
Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? - Official Google Reader Blog

"The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar". All your 'rotten meat' translation are belong to Google!

(tags: translation googlereader google language)
Viewer who complained about Jamie Oliver swearing on TV told to 'f*** off' | Mail Online

"The email was written by Kris Boobyer, 25, from Oliver's enquiry team, and had been intended as an internal joke between him and the chef's publicist Peter Berry, but it was accidentally copied into the formal response". D'oh, the f***in' humanity etc etc...

(tags: dailymail jamieoliver swearing)
Why story comments are destructive - Lost Remote TV Blog

Fron the comments (of course!): "Do the awful comments tarnish our brand? Depends on your point of view, I guess; I tend to think that the over-the-top sensational crap that we frequently produce during sweeps is a lot more damaging to our news brand than the weirdos that fight over football and politics on our comment boards". Amen to that! [via Martin Stabe and elsewhere]

(tags: newspapers comments ugc)
On the press, Peter Wilby: Where's the care in social work coverage? | Media | The Guardian

"A trawl of newspaper websites suggests that one or other of these stories gets reported about twice a month, with wronged parents slightly more common than wronged children. Wronged social workers don't exist". Some slightly more reflective writing about the Baby P case than most found elsewhere

(tags: guardian socialwork children)
What I got up to on Thursday » Infovore

Video of Tom Armitage's LED Guardian swing-o-meter hardware hack.

(tags: guardian #ghack1 tomarmitage)
Show Me Your Dock! | The DesignO'Blog

A display of 42 docks from designers. As a relative newbie to the Mac, I'm still extremely prone to breaking off mid-sentence when talking to Mac users and suddenly going 'Ooh, let me see, how is your doc configured?'

(tags: mac design)

'Hornsey Past' with Steven Denford at Hornsey Library

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:55:12 +0000

Last Tuesday I went to Hornsey Library in Crouch End to attend a talk by author Steven Denford about his book 'Hornsey Past'. As I've just moved into the area, it seemed like a good opportunity to get a grounding in some of my new basic local history.

Denford himself, in his introduction to the topic, admitted that the old villages were never 'caught up in national events', and unfortunately, the subject matter turned out to be a rather dry affair. For much of the time since the late 200s when a Roman coin hoard was deposited in the area, Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Hornsey have been a rural backwater. For that reason, a lot of the format of the talk transpired to be that 'gentleman developer x had acquired plot of land y and built estate z'.

Amongst the worthier anecdotes was the fact that Muswell Hill had formerly been a site of pilgirmage, following the miraculous cure of a King of Scotland - possibly Malcolm IV - at a well in the area. A less fortuitous medical happening was the death of Sir Francis Bacon in 1626. This is famously supposed to have happened after he tried an experiment in freezing a chicken using snow, and contracted pneumonia. Denford suggested that local folklore tells of the area being haunted by the anguished squawking of the chicken.

The talk was illustrated with some slides of photographs, sketches and maps of the area through the ages. It was poignant on Remembrance Day to see a photograph of young men signing up for the Great War in Muswell Hill, and there were slides of bomb damage from World War II, when 80% of local housing stock was affected by the Blitz, V1 and V2 rockets.

The images gave a tantalising glimpse of how the local area might still have looked - with demolished train stations and a florid meeting house (replaced these days by a rather dull Sainsburys) being just a couple of the views of the area that have gone forever.

The Hornsey Past: Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Hornsey by Steven Denford is published by Historical Publications Ltd.

Day #2 at Guardian Hack Day

martin.belam@currybet.net — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:55:32 +0000

I spent a couple of days this week at The Guardian's first ever Hack Day - open to internal staff and some invited guests. It was great fun, and, I think, a real success.

There were a few hacks which I guess people wanted to deploy into production straight away. Nik Silver produced a script that would allow any of the tabular data published on guardian.co.uk to be downloaded as CSV or JSON files. Another hack was to render The Guardian crossword in simple HTML using forms, removing the need for a Java applet and thus making it accessible.

One the biggest laughs was for Charlian.co.uk - Matthew Somerville had re-jigged The Guardian homepage to only show content written by or mentioning Charlie Brooker.

Several hacks focused on visualising data supplied by Simon Rogers - for example a map of where people in the UK were claiming jobseekers allowance. As the map scrolled across the screen the hacker in question announced "So you can see that rural areas are fine, but surprise, surprise, Birmingham is f*&$%d".

Visualising data is fine, but one of the prototypes was concerned with getting people to understand the real value of the big numbers announced by Governments and businesses. "Won't someone please think of the numbers" added a panel to The Guardian website which allowed you to change any monetary sums in the stories into useful comparisons like what % of the salary of Jonathan Ross this represented, or how many tons the sum would weigh in pennies, or how many Wispa bars you could buy with the money.

Rob McKinnon, who produced the New Zealand version of TheyWorkForYou.com, had devised a tool to examine the truthfulness of statements and consistency of line over time. If you hovered over the name of a person, place or concept, a pop-up would let you see things that The Guardian had said about them or it in the previous year.

Various degrees of seriousness permeated the hacks. Somebody had written code to count up coins in images, and another person had devised a way to remove all negative stories about Tottenham from the site, leaving them with a happier world view. In the interests of balance they'd also produced the flipside for Arsenal fans - it only showed stories where Tottenham lost.

More seriously, one hack inserted the biographies and photographs of Britain's military casualties in Afghanistan into The Guardian's pages on the topic, to remind the reader of the human cost behind the political analysis and statistics.

One really good aspect of the day was that people who don't code as their day-to-day jobs also produced some really good work. Members of the QA team produced working prototypes of software that would help them in their day to day jobs, and a team with a 'no code' ethic produced geo-tagged maps of The Guardian's restaurant reviews, mainly to see the percentage of them that were located within a half mile radius of The Guardian's offices.

The winning hack implemented a playful interface onto the 'keyword tags' that appear on each Guardian article online. It is a little documented fact that you can merge the keywords into 'combiner' pages to filter content down to a more specific topic. This isn't terribly obvious to the user, but the winning hack made it possible to drag the links around and visually combine them.

The voting was done via SMS - itself one of the hacks produced during the 24 hours - and the 'tag' hack narrowly pipped a Lego robot which was running Java and controllable via Bluetooth. Another hardware hack used the MySociety API to determine the allegiance of MPs, and then produced an LED bar chart of whether The Guardian's political homepage was favouring coverage of Labour or the Conservatives on that day.

My own hack was a rather meagre effort. I re-badged the Guardian Google Toolbar Button that I made last year with the paper's new online branding, and updated the RSS feed information.

The Guardian [Add this button to your Google Toolbar]

Photograph by Paul Carvill

What was more important, I felt, was firstly to shamelessly plug my website during my 90 second presentation, and secondly to get across how the spirit of a 'hack day' can be carried over into general workflow in order to improve the chances of innovation flourishing within a business.

One of the important elements of the success was identified by Tom Armitage - that it didn't feel like a 'hack day at The Guardian', but it felt like 'a Guardian Hack Day'. The hashtag chosen - #ghack1 - reflects the hope that there will be more to follow. Although there was no requirement for hacks to be about the newspaper content and the systems at The Guardian, they nearly all were, and it produced some genuinely useful tools that people will continue to use in the business.

Overall it was a very impressive event - and I was totally knocked back by the quality of the work that had been produced.

Day #1 at Guardian Hack Day

martin.belam@currybet.net — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:55:03 +0000

This week The Guardian held their first internal 'Hack Day', run by Matt McAllister, and based on the original Yahoo! model.

Part of the format of a Hack Day is a series of 'lightning presentations', aimed to get the day kick-started. I gave one on Search APIs, and overall they were a rapid-fire whizz around some external resources that would-be hackers could use, plus some explanations of some of the idiosyncrasies of The Guardian's web platform.

Guardian technology strategist Stephen Dunn explained how attendees could get various permutations of content and RSS feeds from the public guardian.co.uk site with a bit of URL hacking - including looking for GuardianWhacks. Simon Willison tried, and succeeded, in presenting his 10 favourite hacking web tools in 5 minutes, and journalist Simon Rogers got the crowd excited with the painstakingly researched sets of data he was able to offer.

Meg Pickard was hoping that people would hack around with some of The Guardian community content. She opened her presentation with an image of three seemingly random people standing at a bus stop, and asked whether that formed a community, bemoaning the fact that so much online interaction on mainstream media sites seems to be '1+1+1' rather than a real gathering.

Not that real gatherings aren't without their downside, because one of the hacks she was on the look-out for was some sort of GreaseMonkey script to allow people to do their own personal moderation on the client-side for The Guardian's comments.

Scott Karp was presenting the publish2 platform. I had a good conversation with him about it afterwards. It is a tool very similar to online bookmarking platforms like Delicious or Furl, but crucially, publish2 has thought very hard about the editorial 'workflow' issues. Journalists using the system are able to file bookmarks for personal research, group sharing or public 'linklogs', and the content can be re-organised and curated by editors. It looked like a really good package, and, once she'd seen it demoed, Jemima Kiss was even moved to tweet about it.

I also had a great conversation with Kevin Anderson, and got to see close up exactly how much incredibly geo-tagged data he had collected on his recent trip to the States to cover the US Election. Armed with just a couple of spatially aware gadgets, it seemed that every photo, tweet, and blog post could be pinned down to an exact location on his coast-to-coast trek. One of the day's hacks was dedicated to trying to visualise it all. ^[1]

My own personal hacks didn't get off to a flying start on day one - I seemed to spend more time reacquainting myself with the command line than I did actually producing the code that I hoped was going to add to the functionality of Chipwrapper.

[1] And it is always reassuring to see that I'm not the only person to take hundreds of slightly nerdy abstract photos of 'things' on a road trip ;-) [1]

links for 2008-11-14

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:55 +0000

Recovering Journalist: "What If We Try Arranging the Deck Chairs in a Circle?"

"What's happening instead behind those closed doors at API, I fear, is still more navel-gazing from the 50 newspaper execs". Can't help notice the irony that it is called API, and probably one thing they won't be talking about is becoming platforms rather than publications.

(tags: onlinejournalism)
Martin Kettle: Tabloid irresponsibility means readers get most of their political information from newspapers no one trusts | Comment is free | The Guardian

"The survey found that eight times more British people trust judges to tell the truth than trust tabloid journalists to do so. Sadly, but not at all surprisingly, this finding went almost wholly unreported". ROFL

(tags: tabloid politics newspapers commentisfree)
12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean | CSS | Smashing Magazine

All nice things that one day I might even aspire too.

(tags: xhtml webstandards webdev)
K9 - PRODUCTION SITE

"Welcome to the K9 PRODUCTION SITE - published for the production team working on K9 - The Television Series!"

(tags: k9 doctorwho)