Recent posts on currybetdotnet

UK newspapers in the Google time tunnel
With everyone keenly paging through Google's 2001 search index, I thought it might be interesting to see how our British national newspapers were faring on Google back at the turn of the decade, and how their sites are represented in the Internet Archive. Daily Express Searching for the Daily Express in 2001 turned up express.co.uk at number 3 on Google. The homepage that Google links to shows that the attention of the Express was firmly turned to the Sarah Payne...

Read the full post - Published October 6, 2008 in Google, Newspapers

H.N. Werkman's "ASCII art" in the Van Gogh Museum
I spent a few days last week in Amsterdam with my wife, enjoying a short break and some sight-seeing after my appearance at the Euro IA Summit. We purchased the 'I Amsterdam' card, which we found to be excellent value for money. On the first day, by the time we had visited the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, started using our 72 hour travelcard and taken a boat trip around the canals, we had already recouped our money. I enjoyed...

Read the full post - Published October 5, 2008 in Travelogue

Live plugin streaming at The Waag
After the EuroIA Summit I took the opportunity to stay in Amsterdam for a few extra days and do some sight-seeing. One of the older buildings in Amsterdam is The Waag, which formed part of the old city walls and defences. The building featured in a ghost walk we did around Amsterdam because of the grisly history it had as a theatre where the public could pay to watch the dissection of the corpses of criminals - and there will...

Read the full post - Published October 4, 2008 in Travelogue, Web

Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 4
Over the last three days I've been blogging my take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam. On Saturday morning I was giving my own talk on how to take the 'Ooh' out of Google and get site search right for news. Here is my final installment of commentary on the conference. "Documenting Mobile 2.0 IA" by Scott Weiss "Now you understand why the animated chart is so helpful, you wouldn't want to do this before...

Read the full post - Published October 3, 2008 in Greece, IA Summit

Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 3
Over the last weekend I was in Amsterdam attending the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit. The second day was when I was giving my own presentation, in the stunningly opulent Art Deco surroundings of the Tuschinski Theatre. I've been blogging about what caught my ear there, and here are my take-away facts and quotes from Saturday morning's sessions. Panel sessions There were two panel sessions at the conference. The first was an academic session entitled "Establishing a common ground...

Read the full post - Published October 2, 2008 in IA Summit

Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 2
Yesterday I started blogging some of my take-away facts and quotes from this year's Euro IA Summit at the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam. Here are some of the things that stood out for me on the Friday afternoon. "How do you re-design a business critical web application with billions of unique products" by Floris Ketel "KLM are in the room. If they have to correct me, I will get slapped" Floris Ketel was presenting a case study on the...

Read the full post - Published October 1, 2008 in IA Summit

Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 1
Over the weekend I've been in Amsterdam attending the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit. It was held at the Tuschinski Theatre, which was a simply amazing venue. Despite a couple of schedule clashes - including missing a much anticipated presentation by Deanna Marbeck and Silver Oliver because it coincided with my own session - I got to see a great selection of presentations. Here are some of my take-away facts and quotes from the morning of day one. Keynote...

Read the full post - Published September 30, 2008 in IA Summit

Goodbye Google Eye
"Oh goodbye google eye... Goodbye goodbye goodbye google eye" No, not a reaction to news that Google's Street View Spycams have been banished from Britain, but a chunk of lyrics from a 1960s hit called "Google Eye" that I stumbled upon the other day. Written by John D. Loudermilk it was recorded in the UK by The Nashville Teens, and came out in 1964 on the Decca label, catalogue number F12000. The song is about search in a roundabout way...

Read the full post - Published September 29, 2008 in Google, Music, Nostalgia

Currybetdotnet recent comments round-up 2008-09-28
Earlier this year I wrote a post about ways of promoting the use of comments on your blog and getting better exposure for the comments people leave. That post is now a total honeypot for comment spam, thanks to the way it ranks on Google for the phrase 'Please waste my time and fill my blog with dull and unimaginative fake comments signed by an SEO or real estate company' or some combination of words which seem to have that...

Read the full post - Published September 28, 2008 in Blogging

Social media and TV news: Measuring social media success
Over the last week I've been publishing a series of articles looking at the social media performance of the websites belonging to some 24 hour news channels, including CNN, the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Euronews and France 24. The results have been derived from a thirty day study I carried out in July and August 2008, taking half-hourly snapshots of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz to look for prominent media URLs....

Read the full post - Published September 27, 2008 in BBC, CNN, Social media, Television

Social media and TV news: Measuring the social media success of Russia Today, Euronews and France 24
This week's series of posts on currybetdotnet have been looking at the performances of 24 hour news channel websites like CNN, BBC News, Sky News and Al Jazeera on social media websites. Today I wanted to look at 3 other stations that featured as part of my social media survey - Russia Today, Euronews and France 24. Russia Today on Reddit During the course of the month's study I only saw content from the Russia Today website on five...

Read the full post - Published September 26, 2008 in Social media, Television

Social media and TV news: Measuring Al Jazeera's success with social media
This week I've been examining the social media success of the website belonging to some major 24 hour news television stations. So far I've looked at impressive performances from the BBC and CNN, each with over 300 links going popular across 8 services during the course of a month. Yesterday I looked at a more modest performance by Sky News, and today it is the turn of the English language version of Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Newsvine During my study...

Read the full post - Published September 25, 2008 in Social media, Television

Social media and TV news: Measuring Sky News' success with social media
During July and August I collected 3,500+ popular stories from media sites that appeared on the front pages of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz. This week I've been looking at how 24 hour news channel websites fared during that study - so far covering CNN and the BBC. Today I wanted to look at the biggest domestic rival to the BBC on television, Sky News. Digg The total number of Sky News links becoming...

Read the full post - Published September 24, 2008 in Social media

Social media and TV news: Measuring the BBC's success with social media
During July and August I conducted a major study of how media URLs were represented on the popular pages of social bookmarking services like Digg and StumbleUpon. This week I've been concentrating on how the websites of 24 hour news channels fared. Yesterday I started with CNN, who were the most successful of the networks I measured. Today it is the turn of the BBC News website. Although it did not generate as many social bookmarking links as The...

Read the full post - Published September 23, 2008 in BBC, Social media

Social media and TV news: Measuring CNN's success with social media
During the course of July and August I set up a project to monitor the performance of major media sites on social bookmarking and link sharing services. Every 30 minutes I took snapshots of the front pages or 'recently popular' pages of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz. I then extracted from that the popular URLs from a range of newspaper and television channel websites. You can read about the results for British newspapers in...

Read the full post - Published September 22, 2008 in CNN, Social media, Television

Will last.fm ever ask for the last time?
I love last.fm. You love last.fm. Everybody loves last.fm. It is a cool poster child for the Web 2.0 generation, and the fact that they built their business model on avoiding paying streaming royalties in the UK as much as possible is neither here nor there to most people. But... ...installing the application on your Windows XP PC can be really sucky. The problem is that the Last.fm application seems to pay no attention to the account settings on the...

Read the full post - Published September 21, 2008 in Apple, Application design, Microsoft, Music, Usability

My Euro IA Summit plans
This time next weekend I shall be preparing to give my presentation at the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam: "Taking the 'Ooh!' out of Google - Getting site search right for news". The event is being held in the Tuschinski Theatre, which should be an experience. I'll be posting a few notes from the event here, and also doing a more thorough write-up for the Free Pint stable of publications who put together the FUMSI magazine that I contribute...

Read the full post - Published September 20, 2008 in Europe, IA Summit

The impact of duplicate content on social media success for newspapers
On Monday I published an e-book entitled 'Measuring UK newspaper success with social media'. This featured the results of a study which captured 3,500+ URLs from 50+ media websites that proved popular across 8 social media and link sharing services. I've also been blogging about some other results from the study, concerning local newspaper and freesheet content. Today I wanted to look at the impact duplicate content publishing has on social media, and search engine, success. Duplicate content 'Duplicate...

Read the full post - Published September 19, 2008 in Daily Mail, Newspapers, Social media

Measuring This Is Plymouth's success with Fark
This week I've been looking at UK newspaper success on social media sites, following a survey I carried out in July and August. So far I've published an e-book covering 12 national titles, and blogged about the successes and failures of Metro, This Is London, and This Is Local London. I was looking for URLs containing the phrase 'thisis' in the domain name, in order to spot whether any of the UK's local newspaper content became popular on the...

Read the full post - Published September 18, 2008 in Newspapers, Social media

Measuring London newspaper success with social media
On Monday I published an e-book entitled 'Measuring UK newspaper success with social media'. This featured some of the results of a study which captured 3,500+ popular URLs from 50+ media websites across 8 social media and link sharing services. As well as the e-book, I've been blogging about the results of my survey, and yesterday I looked at some of the content from the Metro free newspaper that was successful on social media sites. Today I wanted to...

Read the full post - Published September 17, 2008 in Newspapers, Social media