Three very different things I’ve spotted this week have illustrated a nagging thought in my mind that if you are purely focused on publishing web pages into the desktop environment, you’ve probably taken your eye off the ball.

This week the Guardian started looking for a replacement Head of User Experience.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. I’ve already published my notes on Giles’ redux of the IA Summit, and here is what I made of Johanna’s talk.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. Here are my notes from Giles’ talk.

Number three in a series of experimental Friday blog posts gathering together some of the things I’ve read or noted over the week, so you can load up your Kindle or Instapaper or Pocket app for the weekend. Please let me know if you find it useful...

Every time I see someone retweet Jeff Atwood’s article “” my heart sinks a little. I’ve got to respect his personal achievements, but on this I think he is spectacularly wrong-headed. Here are four reasons why.

As well as my day-long training course teaching how to self-publish with Kindle, I’ll also be running an evening training course in June, on “Improving your blogging”.

I always like to play around with new toys, and so as soon as the Google Currents production system was released to the public, I set about making an edition for myself - and discovered that it is a system for publishers, not journalists or individual authors.

Yesterday journalism.co.uk announced one of my first post-Guardian ventures - a one day training course in ebook publishing: “Kindle publishing: How to get into the ebook market”

The climax of the Premier League brought out an astonishing display of churlishness amongst non-footie fans on Twitter.

I was genuinely impressed this morning with the Metro’s double-page spread about photographers’ rights. I love to see papers campaigning on issues of civil liberties and freedom, and I was particularly impressed with the fact that Metro produced a simple layman’s terms explanation of photographers rights in a cut-out-and-keep format.

The second of a weekly round-up of links and reading material I’ve foraged for on the interwebs over the last seven days. It is an experiment at the moment, so please let me know if you find it useful...

There was an interesting post on the eConsultancy blog from Graham Charlton yesterday about the forthcoming changes that mean websites are being obliged to obtain consent for the use of cookies.

There has been quite some hoo-ha on the web suggesting that Facebook “Social Reader” apps are dying, based on a piece written by BuzzFeed’s John Herrman - “Facebook social readers are all collapsing”. I worked on the Guardian’s app - here’s my take on it.

Games developers have monetised the existence of “cheat codes” by morphing them into in-app purchases that raise extra revenue. What “cheat codes” doe the news industry have?

I used to keep a regular daily linklog, but that has rather gone out of fashion. I’m trying an experiment for a few weeks to gather together some reading material for the weekend. I’d welcome feedback if you find it useful...

We seem to have matured beyond declaring each year that this is “going to be the internet election” to having campaign web sites and social media as an integral part of the political cycle. Here are some notes I’ve made whilst looking at the sites of the candidates for tomorrow’s London Mayoral elections.

Reading pieces by Eric Jackson and Peter Kirwan yesterday leaves an awkward question hanging in the air. If Google and Facebook are really struggling with the impact of disruption to their business models from changes in trends on the internet, where does that leave media companies, many of whom haven’t really got to grips with web 1.0 yet?

You can’t be involved in digital product design and not have heard the buzz-words “responsive design” - building one URL that changes the information and design displayed as you access it with different devices with different screen sizes. The Boston Globe has won awards for doing it in the news space. A key component of a successful “responsive design” has to be a flexible and responsive IA.

Small details can tell you so much, can’t they? The Newspaper Marketing Agency haven’t updated the copyright notice on their website since 2003. Presumably because it is a GIF file.

I have, it seems, acquired something of a reputation for going apoplectic whenever somebody asks if blogging is journalism. So I thought I’d just write a little FAQ for everybody so I can be completely clear on where I stand on this “issue” which has been going on for over ten years.

Last night was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up organised by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. Here are my notes on Nick Petrie and Ben Whitelaw talking about Wannabe Hacks.

Last night was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up organised by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. Here are my notes from one of the talks, given by Maha Rafi Atal, about Public Business.

The BBC have said they’ll be sending an army of staff to cover the Olympic Games. Everybody will be writing about how that outnumbers British athletes. Hey, look, I’ll save you the trouble of reading today’s articles - here is the exact same story from 2010 and 2008. I daresay with a bit more research I could turn up examples from 2006 and 2004 and 2002 and so on...

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Tomorrow is Record Store Day in the UK. In honour this week the Guardian had a piece with some of the writers remembering the record shops that shaped their lives and inviting in contributions from users on the theme. To get yourself in the mood for tomorrow’s exclusive releases and in-store performances, why not have a quick rifle through Reckless Records R.I.P., a set of blog posts I wrote in 2007 about the record shop in London where I used to work in the 90s.

A colleague tweeted at me “And once again, they forge ahead...” when we noticed the New York Times bettering the Guardian’s sudden penchant for 3D CSS hacks and 3D wireframes with an actual stereoscopic 3D interactive live on their site. Awesome.

Live tweeting the demise of the Titanic in real-tile seemed acceptable, yet a few months back the Guardian was severely criticised for taking a similar approach to tweeting the events of 9/11. Here are some thoughts on why that earned criticism and why it was right for the tweeting to be halted.

Tomorrow you’ll be inundated with articles, blog posts, interactives, TV news packages and special supplements celebrating that it is 100 days until the Olympics start in London. So I thought I’d be different and look back instead - here are some of the web screengrabs I took in 2005 when it was announced that London would be hosting the games.

I stopped keeping a linklog on here a while back, but in the space of a couple of hours today I saw three absolutely must read posts about user experience and product development which I thought worth passing along.

A recent look at how tracking cookies work by the Guardian has had me joining in the comments explaining my position on ad-blocking. I’ve never run ad-blocking software or extensions in my browser, and I never will. Here’s why...

The title says it all - after three-and-a-bit years I’m going to be leaving the Guardian

If you subscribe to the theory that you should “release early, release often”, and that you want to “fail fast” and learn from those failings, then you end up in a world where you should be regularly testing variations of your digital product on your audience. If you don’t go about it the right way, this can be a bruising experience for all concerned. Today I wanted to outline some thoughts prompted by a recent trial of threaded comments on the guardian.co.uk site that I was involved in.

Embedding tweets and Storify in news sites is all the rage to provide a quick snapshot of public opinion. But what are people actually storing in their CMS - and will all this vanish in the future?

Just a short personal post to say that after four years I’ve stepped down as a writer and editor at FUMSI.

Last week was the monthly Hacks/Hackers London meet-up hosted by Joanna Geary and Jonathan Richards. I’ve already posted my notes from the opening talk about Hailo. Here is what I jotted down from the rest of the evening.

For almost as long as I’ve been a user experience practitioner, the issue of how UX deliverables interact with an Agile project has been a vexed one. At the Guardian we’ve been trying a new technique based on a very old optical illusion - the red/blue anaglyph 3D technique - with startling results.

I thought I’d fallen asleep and been transported back into 1997 today when I saw a tweet from Media Bistro asking “Are bloggers #journalists?” After from issuing a caps lock ranting frenzy on Twitter, I thought I’d try and pull something positive from the experience, so I tried to find the first time anybody asked “Are bloggers journalists?” on the internet.