currybetdotnet

Platforms not pages - solving problems with The Atavist, n0tice and Journajobs.eu

2012-05-23T17:13:15Z

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.

The Atavist

The Atavist - which I’ve written about before - was featured in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece was driven by recent investment in the business, which delivers multimedia long-form journalism, and they are planning to open up their authoring tool to the wider world later this year.

The team at Atavist have retained an editorial focus, rather than a pure technology approach, and I think that shines through in the content that has been produced so far. You can be sure that when the tools are released I’ll be experimenting with publishing with it...

n0tice

This week the Guardian, where I currently work, released an API for n0tice. The brain-child of Matt McAlister, the n0tice API is billed as “the open journalism toolkit”. The Guardian itself has already been using it, and Justin Ellis at Nieman Journalism Lab has written about the launch.

I was once asked what I would do if I was setting up a news business from scratch, and I said I would hire some journalists and then build an API. Once they were publishing stories into the API, I’d work out the best sustainable way of distribution. It looks like the n0tice toolkit means I might be able to skimp on the “building my own API” bit.

The beauty of having an API is that it really forces you to make long-lasting decisions about your content structure, and then drives down the cost of any further development. Nobody can quote you for some costly database and CMS integration when you can simply point them at a RESTful API for your content.

Journajobs.eu

Today the European Journalism Centre released journajobs.eu - an attempt to aggregate journalism job listings from across the globe. Sitting in London I can filter opportunities by type (e.g. freelance, internship, full-time) or by location. So far I’ve spotted listings from as far afield as New York, Istanbul, Kenya and Hong Kong.

They give their USP as a job board as follows:

Built for journalists
And only for journalists
Reach out to 20,000 professionals
Low fees, almost free
Proceeds go to charity

What brings them together?

So what, in my mind, brings these together?

Well, they are all platforms and services, not ways of publishing pages. None of them are perhaps completely revolutionary, but all of them are trying to solve a problem for users.

When the internet gives you the possibility to help people solve problems, publishing pages just isn’t going to be enough.

Situation vacant: Head of UX at the Guardian

2012-05-23T15:20:01Z

I joined the Guardian in February 2009, and in just over three years I’ve had the opportunity to work on an amazing range of products, including apps for the iPhone, iPad and Facebook, on redesigns of commercial and editorial areas of the Guardian’s website, and been involved in fascinating projects like the Guardian’s local beat blogs and new live blogging tools. I’ve helped introduce a greater degree of user testing into the company’s product development process, and I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world talking in public about what I’ve been up to.

But now it is somebody else’s turn.

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

“We are currently looking for someone to join our Digital Development team as Head of User Experience. As Head of User Experience you will be wholly responsible for leading, defining and shaping the user experience for the Guardian’s digital products and services. You will have proven success in building and leading world class user experience teams at either a successful international digital business, large media organisation or a major design agency. ”

As well as all of that, you’ll need to be passionate about forging a place for quality digital news provision in a challenging marketplace, and championing the voice of the user, reader & consumer at every turn along the way. And what the job ad doesn’t say is that you will get to work with the most amazingly talented team of developers. When I first did a few weeks contract work at the Guardian before they moved to Kings Place, it was the passion and enthusiasm shown by the development team on their first hack day that was instrumental in me deciding to take a permanent role.

The closing date for applications is June 4th - and if you move quickly enough you may even find yourself being interviewed by me as part of the recruitment process before I leave...

Apply for the job

“Making sense of messy problems” - Johanna Kollmann at London IA

2012-05-23T06:40:09Z

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.

“Making sense of messy problems” - Johann Kollmann

Johanna Kollmann was giving a talk that originated in some research she did when doing a multi-channel UX project with a retail store. Her interest was sparked when people started asking her hard questions like “How do we structure the supply chain?” and “Do the people in the store have the same access to the customer data that the call centre staff do?”

Johanna said it was lovely that they were asking the UX person these questions, but where did she go to get the answers? She ended up doing a lot of digging into “systems thinking”, and this gave her some practical exercises and deliverables that helped her with her work.

It was over 100 years ago that Fred Winslow Taylor proposed that “in the future the system must be first”, but Johanna reminded the London IA crowd of the second part of his famous quote - where he qualified that statement by saying that this does not mean we won’t need great men too. The “messy problems” that Johanna was trying to solve get messy because of the squishy organic bits in the system - the people.

Johanna spoke about how Donella Meadows defined a system - by asking “is it achieving something that the people involved could’t achieve on their own”.

She also showed us Mix’s poster of “A website named desire” illustrating the number of messy organic people involved in building a website (whilst lamenting that that had drawn all the developers off in a lonely silo by themselves away from the “creatives”).

Peter Checkland was also referenced. He developed the “soft systems methodology”, suggesting that most problems in systems are caused because “human beings are hard to predict”. He did not think that there were things you could “fix” with systems thinking, instead there were “situations you could improve”.

Johanna said that systems thinking was really huge, but identified three key areas where applying some of the techniques could help UXers.

1. Modelling

She introduced us to two techniques - “rich picture” and the “business model canvas”. The examples she put on screen were from the eighties, and were yet again a reminder that many of us in the web profession have been guilty of thinking the creation of the Mosaic browser was year zero for human evolution. The diagrams she showed looked exactly like things I’ve been drawing as a UXer for ages, without fully appreciating the heritage of the technique.

The “rich picture” in particular looked useful. You draw out all the human and non-human actors in a system, work out their worldview, and note what they express about openly about a system, and also think about what they don’t express. Then you work out their connections to everything else in the system. At that point you can start looking for conflicts. The nerdy historian in me was thrilled to see that you could use crossed 16th century swords as an icon for a map of behaviours around a digital system. Johanna said it worked fantastically to help you build empathy - as you suddenly figure out reasons why some people might not be so thrilled with a product, system or process.

2. Behaviour over time

Johanna invited us to think about a bath-tub, and the control mechanisms there are to affect behaviour over time - you can turn the taps on or off, or have the plug in or out. There is also another automatic feedback mechanism - the overflow pipe which, should the water reach a certain level, cut in and prevent an overflow.

Applied to people and systems, the idea of mapping feedback loops can help you understand how to improve situations. Johanna’s example was a project running late, so managers putting more pressure on a worker. But knowing that a worker doesn’t react well to pressure explains why the project continues to get later and later. In fact the feedback mechanism needs to allow the worker to ask for help and support, not just to invite more pressure.

She also showed us the idea of “cohort analysis” - illustrating it with a graph of Twitter usage. In this technique you bucket users with certain characteristics together, and map them on top of each other. Her example was the behaviour of people who joined Twitter at a certain time. It allowed you, at a glance, to see that there was an optimium period when people had joined Twitter and then remained active. You could look to explain that through design or design changes, or some other analysis of what was special about the people in those particular buckets.

3. Change

Ultimately, Johanna has concluded, most UX projects are about making an effective change to business processes, as well as a change to user interfaces and customer touch-points. She said that the key to successful projects was finding the right “leverage points”. Leverage may have become an over-used business buzz word, but Johanna meant it in the truest sense, of finding the point where a small amount of effort can cause the maximum change in a system.

In her retail project, it transpired that the reason it wasn’t working well as a multi-channel offering was nothing to do with the usability and design of the online component. It had everything to do with the fact that sales staff were incentivised to drive in-store sales. They would do almost anything to convince a potential customer to make a purchase in person rather than direct them to the web, because they got no credit for those sales. That was the leverage point.

You can view Johanna’s original slides from the IA Summit on SlideShare.

Next...

I’ll have my notes from Tim Caynes’ talk at London IA later in the week. The next London IA event will be on 19 June, in a new format and at a new venue for the summer.

“It’s all about content. It’s not about content” - Giles Colborne’s IA Summit Redux at London IA

2012-05-22T07:05:55Z

“It’s all about content”

Easily the most popular presentation of the event, he said was Karen McGrane’s. She gave her talk twice to packed rooms - from the viewpoint that “it’s all about content”.

Karen compared the internet to the newsstand 100 years ago. Publishers much prefer the scenario where everything is rigidly organised, the news vendor acts as a gatekeeper, and you get paid for everything. The internet has blown much of that away, and even the little community noticeboard the newsstand may have had has migrated online.

Then Apple introduced Newsstand, and everyone in publishing breathed a sigh of relief. They recognised this. As Karen McGrane puts it: “All I see is entire organisations screaming ‘we want to live in the eighties goddammit!’”

At the IA Summit Karen introduced the audience to NPR’s COPE strategy - “Create once publish everywhere”. It has allowed them to rapidly grow their mobile traffic, compared to publishers like Conde Naste who have “trapped their static pages behind glass” in apps, which are delivering a declining sales yield.

As he presented what Karen had been talking about, in London Giles added that at CX Partners they were increasingly taking an approach that moved away from making rigid wireframes and content flows, and instead have moved towards something much more fluid. You have to get away from the idea of beginning with a web page.

One problem for print organisations trying to adapt is that they often still hold the original print version of content to be “perfect”, and that all the other versions on mobile, on the web and in apps are somehow “cut-down” and “inferior” to the polished print layout. This means they naturally focus a disproportionate amount of effort on that version at the expense of the others.

Karen’s talk repeated Ethan Resnick’s assertion that metadata could be “the new art direction”, rather than something that the IA in the corner frets about alone.

“It’s not about content”

Giles counter-pointed talking about Karen McGrane’s presentation with an opposite viewpoint put forward by Stephen Anderson in “What’s Your Perception Strategy? (Why It’s NOT All About Content)”.

Anderson argued that elements like presentation and ordering where vital influences on how you understood a message. A survey that asked “Are you happy? How much are you dating?” would get very different answers to one which asked “How much are you dating? Are you happy?”.

Another example given was the effect of typefaces on reading a legal document. Some typefaces enable you to read faster, but slower reading aids cognition and recollection. In a court case, you’d be better off being represented by someone who had taken longer to read the documentation if it meant they could muster better arguments.

Stephen Anderson was saying that as well as a content strategy, you need a perception strategy too. Design details can radically effect how your message is perceived. Giles said that one of his take-away points from the conference was a better understanding of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message”.

Giles said that in his experience, websites have a lifespan of three to five years, and publishing systems a lifespan of ten to fifteen. If you are working on either of those right now, you need to make sure that you are building it to cope with a massive shift to mobile and away from reading and producing web pages at a desktop computer.

He finished with a plug for the next IA Summit in Baltimore in 2013. Giles is helping put together the programme, and spoke about “the sense of mission” that going to a conference can give you. “A conference is about congregation.” he said. “It isn’t just about the ideas. The presentations are all up on SlideShare, but you get so much more from a room full of people where you can talk about it with your peers.”

Please note that Giles was giving a talk based in part around other people’s talks. He was very careful to present it in that way. If I have mis-credited any of the ideas or comments in the course of this article, the fault is mine alone.

Useful links

“Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content” - Karen McGrane at IA Summit 2012
“What’s Your Perception Strategy? (Why It’s NOT All About Content)” - Stephen Anderson at IA Summit 2012
“CMS - the software UX forgot

Next...

I’ll have my notes from Johanna Kollmann and Tim Caynes’ talks at London IA later in the week. The next London IA event will be on 19 June, in a new format and at a new venue for the summer.

Friday reading #3

2012-05-18T08:31:51Z

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...

Friday reading

“Stop Documenting, Start Experiencing” - Daniel Gulati, Harvard Business Review blog network
“We must choose between capturing these moments or viscerally experiencing them as they unfold. That we can’t do both simultaneously seems obvious — we aren’t really enjoying the live concert if we’re busy taking photos of the band. Recent research hammers this home, showing that our performance drops when we try to perform both encoding tasks (experiencing what’s around you) and response selection tasks (capturing stimuli) at the same time”
Read the full article

“The robot journalist: an apocalypse for the news industry?” - Emily Bell, guardian.co.uk
“Visit the website of Forbes.com and read the earnings forecasts for the New York Times Company, and you will notice the byline ‘By Narrative Science’. Normally you have to open a copy of Wallpaper* to find someone with such a florid monicker. Except of course Narrative Science is not a person but a robot journalist – actually a set of algorithms which take data and turn it into words.”
Read the full article

“Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills” - Justin Ellis, Nieman Journalism Lab
“If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.”
Read the full article

“Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking” - Julie Bosman, New York Times
“The e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.”
Read the full article

“Educated for unemployment” - Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail
“Journalism schools have spread like mushrooms in May. Some of them are excellent. They also provide high-quality employment for aging journalists, including some very, very dear friends who, I hope, will think of me some day if I ever get laid off. What these schools do not provide is jobs in journalism.”
Read the full article

“10 ways to make waves in journalism & publishing” - Adam Westbrook
“The industry already has more reporters, subs, producers, editors and designers than it needs, and you’re up against thousands of others to become one of them. What the industry sorely lacks are people who come up with big boat-rocking ideas and execute on them.”
Read the full article

“Hindsight Journalism” - Josh Stearns, Groundswell
“After the fact, journalists have done admirable and important work explaining how we got here, but what if those investigative pieces had come out beforehand? Could they have helped changed the course of events? Perhaps. But, what more could we be doing to foster the kinds of journalism that can help us address problems before they become a crisis?”
Read the full article

PastPages – The news homepage archive
An ever-expanding archive of news website homepages “run at a loss by a fool who thinks it ought to exist.”
Visit the site

£10k Bootstrap challenge
“I'll publish my weekly bank balance, income, and progress, plus running daily updates. The challenge continues in public until I've either quintupled my money or have lost it all.”
Visit the site

“Why UX is better marketing than marketing” - Peter Merholz, peterme.com
“Traditional advertising grew up in an industrial age world dominated by mass-manufacture and products. As we shift into a connected age built on services and customer relationships, savvy businesses are those that recognize money is best spent not cramming messages down people’s throats, but tirelessly figuring out how to enhance the service experience.”
Read the full article

“Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value” - Steve Buttry, The Buttry Diary
Perhaps an appropriate note to finish on this week: “The people who are critical or dismissive of aggregation and curation fail (or refuse) to understand the value that aggregation and curation have in themselves. Pointing out things that people may be interested in has value. It’s a great function of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and other social media, which together drive huge traffic for news organizations.”
Read the full article

Things you might have missed...

By me on currybetdotnet and the Guardian this week:

“Digital news is heading for a mobile future” - The Guardian Media Network
Please carry on learning to code
Guardian & Observer NUJ debate on the nature and future of journalism
Google Currents - a system for publishers, not journalists
Metro comes out fighting for photographers’ rights
I’m running two training courses in June: “Improve your blogging” and “Kindle Publishing”

Please carry on learning to code

2012-05-17T17:24:26Z

Every time I see someone retweet Jeff Atwood’s article “Please don’t learn to code” my heart sinks a little. I’ve got to respect his personal achievements, but on this I think he is spectacularly wrong. Here are four reasons why:

It isn’t about jobs

It isn’t all about employment. Coding can be fun if you find you like that kind of thing. Saying people shouldn’t learn to code because they aren’t going to be a useful addition to the coding workforce is like arguing I shouldn’t enjoy a kick-about in the park because I’m never going to play for England. I think this is particularly true the younger that you get people involved. Hack days with kids and initiatives like Code Club are a brilliant way of widening the talent pool for the future. I got taught to code at school. I don’t do production standard code, but understanding the principles of programming is invaluable in my design job.

An open net is important for all of us

I’ve recently finished editing a Guardian ebook about “The battle for the internet”. Having more people dabbling in code will help keep the internet and computer technology “open”. It is much easier to explain to people the importance of a whole range of concepts like open source, net neutrality and generative computing if they have programmed. Jonathan Zittrain has spoken persuasively about the risks of computers becoming appliances. It is hard to make people realise the implications of not being able to “View source” on an app or access the command line on a machine if they’ve never “Viewed source” or written anything that generates “Hello, world!” at all.

We’d get better technology decisions

One of the reasons businesses and government frequently make bad technology procurements is because the decisions are taken by people who don’t understand computers at all - and they buy from suppliers who are happy to sell them systems that could never possibly work, or that will never work well for the end user. Anything that helps increase literacy on how technology and information work together in a technology and information driven economy will bring economic benefits. And if more people learning to code helps more people realise that the way things are programmed and designed affects the usability of them, we all win.

It smacks of elitism

What is most noticeable for me in Jeff’s post is the same tone of voice that I’ve heard over the years from countless publishers and journalists - “Woe is me - the masses are coming!” A tone of voice that says that a move to get more people interested in coding for themselves marks a threat to professionalism. A fear of the rise of the “citizen coder”. That the barbarians are at the gate. That what I do is so important and complicated that even though I learnt it from nothing, you couldn’t possibly do that. It smacks of elitism and sneering at the little people.

The best software developers I’ve worked with are all about sharing - about sharing open source code, about sharing knowledge, about sharing their expertise. Long may that continue.

If you’d like to start learning to code yourself, you could try Code Year. If you are in the UK and you’d like to volunteer to help school kids learn to code, then please get in touch with Code Club

Guardian & Observer NUJ debate on the nature and future of journalism

2012-05-16T19:16:26Z

This evening at the Guardian’s offices the Guardian & Observer Chapel of the NUJ have been holding a debate about the nature and future of journalism. There have been posters around the offices for a couple of days.

NUJ poster for tonight’s event. Not sure about journalist, but I’m definitely not a good photographer.

The job titles, tasks and skills that the poster lists are: Tweeter, photographer, writer, reporter, graphic artist, blogger, video and audio producer, editor, designer, subeditor, illustrator, picture editor, moderator, critic, community coordinator, columnist, cartoonist, presenter, network editor, producer and systems developer. There is no mention of “Lead User Experience & Information Architect”, but then my job title is so long it would have filled up half the poster anyway.

It was a real shame that I wasn’t able to go to the event - not least of which because of being one of the kind of people that sparks this kind of debate. If I had gone, I would almost certainly have taken meticulous notes, and then posted a pretty straight-up report with a tiny bit of editorialising, as I’ve done for many events over the years, including people like Andrew Sparrow, Paul Lewis and Matt Wells talking about their work at the Guardian.

It certainly looks like reporting, but I’m not a journalist by profession. I’m very explicit about the principles under which I blog - you can read them here - and I don’t think there is anything at all that would look out of place if you were trying to write the ethics and standards you’d expect of a professional. But “journalism” isn’t the primary thing that I do, even if I sometimes stray into it.

The NUJ chapel have joined Twitter - you can follow them at @go_NUJ - and were tweeting from the event. You can get a flavour of the event in this Storify I’ve built.

View the story "Guardian & Observer NUJ debate on the nature and future of journalism" on StorifyGuardian & Observer NUJ debate on the nature and future of journalismOn Wednesday May 16th 2012, the Guardian & Observer Chapel of the NUJ held a debate at the Guardian’s offices on the nature and future of journalismStorified by Martin Belam · Wed, May 16 2012 15:13:51NUJ Debate starting now in the Rotunda bar ... tweet your thoughts, and we'll let you know what's going on ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJSerious question for @GONUJ #GONUJ: how can journalism, whatever it might be, help a loss-making business become profitable?Patrick SmithPaul Anderson is talking about the jobs market ... cyclical and structural decline in employment; about 20,000 jobs lost in 10 years #gonujGuardianObserver NUJPaul talking about the familiar subject of multi-skilling; just in case you thought you were on your own, multi-platformers! #gonujGuardianObserver NUJ#gonuj Very few journalists making money out of serious journalism as freelancerspatdevereauxAnd on self-publishing , citizen journos ... although revealing new stuff, won't replace role of media orgs: how to make online pay? #gonujGuardianObserver NUJAnd now Andrew Sparrow ... when the book on the death of journalism is written, I'll be there! #gonujGuardianObserver NUJAndrew Sparrow: I do the signal int. I can't tell you what politicians eat for lunch ... blogging is like broadcasting #gonujGuardianObserver NUJ"Is blogging #journalism? Yes. Just the kind you can do from your bedroom & not get paid. Pay isn't index of worth" @andrewsparrow #goNUJEliza AnyangweAndrew Sparrow: I'm wary about using pay to define journalism, but opportunities are better than they've ever been #gonujGuardianObserver NUJAndrew Sparrow: I think the problems in the business are structural, and that citizen journalism is here to stay ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJAndrew Sparrow: we should focus the debate more on are you a good journalist, rather than are you a journalist ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJDeborah Orr's on now : journalism is not a profession, it's a trade, and that's what we've lost sight of! anyone can be a journalist #gonujGuardianObserver NUJNow Debora Orr is speaking. General tone so far not wildly optinistic about future of the profession. Follow @go_NUJ for more detail #goNUJJohn Stuttle"#Journalism isn't a profession. It's a trade. You don't need a qualification to do it." I rather like @deborahJaneorr. #goNUJEliza AnyangweDeborah Orr: things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, but eventually people will pay for the Guardian online #gonujGuardianObserver NUJNow from Claire Armitstead, Gdn books ed: interdependency of media; the business of "open" , bringing commenters above the line ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJClaire Armitstead: journalism is about investigating stories and telling them ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJAndrew Sparrow on James Cameron: journalism's a craft, or trade, not profession. Good, because that means they can't throw you out! #gonujGuardianObserver NUJPaul: Where you had regional papers, you now have degree courses, hence professionalisation of a trade, and the makings of a crisis #gonujGuardianObserver NUJFrom the floor, Elisa, a content co-ordinator for Gdn Prof Networks: I feel I don't have any of the privileges of being a journalist #gonujGuardianObserver NUJGdn content co-ordinator: the person I follow on Twitter and for news is actually a student ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJSimon Hattenstone: Our job as a union is to support anyone making their living as a journalist; anyone doing that IS a journalist #gonujGuardianObserver NUJLuke Hoyland: As a moderator I'm now using more of my skills as a journalist than I have for the last 18 years ... #gonujGuardianObserver NUJBrilliant final point about future of the Guardian vs future of #journalism: journalism will survive, so what if a company doesn't? #goNUJEliza AnyangweDiscussion draws to a close and people heading to the bar to continue more informally. Steve Bell dives in at the last moment #gonuj @go_NUJJohn StuttleSteve Bell: I consider myself a journalist, even tho I 'm a cartoonist ; but we're all becoming casualised, and need to be organised #gonujGuardianObserver NUJSpeakers summing up. Deborah Orr saying don't be protectionist - let anyone join NUJ, don't be heirarchical, face the future @go_NUJ #gonujJohn StuttleKathy Whitfield: aren't citizen journalists just sources? #gonujGuardianObserver NUJNUJ's Barry Fitzpatrick speaks followed by readers' editor Chris Elliot - change is massive and fast. Don't have answers yet #gonuj @go_NUJJohn StuttleChris Elliott: journalism is about mediation; the variety of sources is not new #gonujGuardianObserver NUJJournalists mediate that which they rEport - Chris Elliott. And get paid! Says Paul Anderson #gonuj @go_NUJJohn StuttlePaul Anderson on the need for large news organisations - the absolute priority, and how to make money out of it #gonuj @go_NUJJohn StuttlePaul Anderson: the crucial question is big media companies to make money; that's how to support journalism #gonujGuardianObserver NUJReader's ed Chris Elliott: revenue's hard but we should stop panicking and work out what journalism is, not who a journalist is #gonujGuardianObserver NUJOK, we've finally finished, but on the note that people seem to want to do it again ... so join in on #gonuj and make your suggestions ...GuardianObserver NUJ

I’m really heartened to see the NUJ engaging in debate in this way, and I hope I’ll be able to make the next one.

Improve your blogging course

2012-05-16T07:55:57Z

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”.

Improve your blogging

Blogging has gone from being an alternative means of publishing on the internet to something adopted by mainstream media organisations and companies. Successful blogs have a distinctive tone and rhythm that allow the blogger’s voice to stand out. In this intensive evening course you’ll learn how to develop and improve your blog.

Aimed at new and aspiring bloggers, or journalists or corporate bloggers dipping their toes into the daunting ‘blogosphere’, this course provides insight into:

How to create a distinctive personality for your blog;
How to blog in a way that generates attention and responses;
How to get your blog found;
Tools for finding a network of blogs also discussing your topics;
Techniques for solving some common problems your blog will encounter.

You will leave understanding:

How to use specialist search tools and techniques to uncover where the conversation is happening about your subject
How to blog in a way that encourages and generates conversation
How to promote your blog posts effectively on social media
Getting the tone of your blog right for your audience
Techniques for dealing with difficult voices online
How to build a consistent online “personal brand” that commands attention

You can sign up via the journalism.co.uk website - the course takes place at the Friends Meeting House, London on 20 June 2012 between 6pm and 9pm. It costs £95 (+ VAT).

Sign up

Google Currents - a system for publishers, not journalists

2012-05-15T11:15:31Z

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.

I found the tool delightfully easy to use, but also that the product is very much set up for publishers rather than journalists.

To add the main contents of this blog I simply defined one section as “currybetdotnet” and pointed it at the RSS feed for this website.

I then added an @currybet social media stream of my tweets.

So far, so good.

What I wanted to then do was to add in the content that I write for the Guardian.

In theory it should be easy - set up a section in my Google Currents edition called “on guardian.co.uk”, and point Google’s service at the RSS feed of my contributor page.

However, I can’t verify that feed in Google Currents, so the content languishes in the CMS as “pending”, and doesn’t form part of the published edition. I can’t prove to Google’s machines that I wrote the content, and so it belongs in an aggregation I’ve put together, because I can’t prove my association with the domain name the content was published under.

I can see why this is there - obviously as a publisher you’d probably prefer that people weren’t making custom mix’n’match Google Current editions featuring your content. But it is a system that favours the traditional gatekeeper model of publishing, rather than recognises that individuals can publish in various titles, and that an aggregated edition of their writing might be desirable for the consumer. In effect, Google is acting as the gatekeeper for the gatekeepers.

As for the Google Currents product itself, like similar apps, I think it does a good job of presenting content in a design that is suited to the form. When I look at apps like Zite, Pocket and Flipboard, I increasingly wonder whether, in time, having clean easily-parsed code on your web pages is going to become just as important as the front end design that human’s perceive.

Content discovery isn’t yet great in Google Currents unless you are an established media provider. The classification scheme is rigid - I had to choose whether my edition fitted in the “design” category or the “Science & tech” category. The fact that it is mostly about the design of tech doesn’t compute. You don’t get listed in search results in Google Currents until you’ve got over 200 subscribers. Again, I can see why Google have opted for that model to stop spam clogging up their walled content garden, but it does mean that if you search for my name you get a long listing of random URLs, and Currents doesn’t actually say that I’ve made a definitive edition.

Currybetdotnet in Google Currents

If you want to try the Google Currents edition of this blog, you can add it from here: Google Currents: currybetdotnet. There are other ways to subscribe too: Good old fashioned email and RSS, on your Kindle, or by “Like”ing my Facebook page.

Kindle ebook publishing training course in London

2012-05-15T07:55:19Z

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”

I’ve published my own Kindle ebooks independently, and edited them for the Guardian, and also designed a system at the Guardian for making ebook production easier. Here’s what you’ll learn if you sign up for the day:

Kindle Publishing

As the printed book market diminishes, it has been important for publishers to get into the ebook market. However, the ability for people to self-publish into the Amazon Kindle store has levelled the playing field between major publishers, independents, and the self-publishers.

In this one day course you’ll learn how to format your writing for Kindle, how to produce the right types of computer files to upload to the Kindle store including a cover image, how to get the best royalty rate from Amazon, and how to promote your ebook.

Course contents:

Structuring your ebook
Preparing your text
All the HTML you ever need to know (almost)
The other bits of HTML
Special Amazon tags
Making a good cover image
Setting up as an Amazon publisher
Amazon’s different royalty models explained
Previewing your book
What happens when you press “Publish”
Do’s and Dont’s of promoting your book
Understanding Amazon’s sales reports

You can sign up via the journalism.co.uk website - the course takes place at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 29 June 2012. It costs £200 (+£40 VAT).

Sign up

The Premier League finale brought out Twitter’s churlish side

2012-05-14T19:55:32Z

It was a really lovely sunny weekend, and so on Sunday I went out for a weekend stroll around Hyde Park. I noticed lots of people had set up picnics and were eating outside in the sunshine. They all seemed to be enjoying it, and chatting about how much they were enjoying it, and how amazing it all was.

I hate picnics. Can’t seen the point of them. Why eat outside when you’ve got perfectly good tables and chairs indoors, and anyway, you could be doing something else entirely?

So I stomped round Hyde Park interjecting into people’s conversations: “Can’t see the point of this. Enjoying yourself are you? There are much better ways to eat food. All this talking about picnics is pointless.”

Well, of course I didn’t do that at the weekend. I mean, that would be a bit silly and pointless wouldn’t it? It would make me look like some kind of churl.

No, what I actually did was watch the climax of the Premier League on Sunday afternoon, whilst having my Twitter client open. And I saw a lot of people behaving remarkably like my silly idea of spoiling people’s picnics.

The thing is, when Twitter gets gripped with something that is a cultural event, it can easily dominate your timeline. If you are not interested in that event, whether it is the X-Factor or Question Time or a sporting event, given that your timeline is made up of people that you have voluntarily followed talking about what interests and excites them, you’ve basically got four choices:

Try and get into the thing, even if only in an achingly ironic way.
Ignore tweets about it, thinking that ultimately all things must pass. Including pop culture hashtags.
Make like “Why don’t you?” did in the seventies, and just switch off your Twitter client and go out and do something less boring instead.
Start mouthing off that you don’t like the popular thing, and can’t see why anyone would.

Doing the latter is basically the Twitter equivalent of logging into a news website just to leave the comment “How is this even news?”

And nobody thinks that is witty or clever...

Metro comes out fighting for photographers’ rights

2012-05-14T19:33:50Z

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. You can find the online version of Etan Smallman’s report here - “It’s enough to make you snap”. They don’t seem to have made the advice available in anything other than a jpg though, so I’ve written it out below.

Metro’s cut-out-and-keep guide to photography rights

Metro advice for photographers

Challenge it! Ask under what law you are being stopped. As long as you are on public land you are allowed to take as many pictures as you like.
If you can, record or film the incident on your mobile phone.
Take down the details of the officer or guard approaching you so you can make an official complaint afterwards.
The police cannot stop you unless they ‘reasonably suspect you of being a terrorist’ and cannot seize any equipment or photos unless it contains something which ‘the officer reasonably suspects may constitute evidence that the person is a terrorist’. If they do, they must provide paperwork detailing what has been taken.
Under no circumstances can any photos or footage be deleted during a search.

Friday reading #2

2012-05-11T07:55:20Z

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...

Friday reading

“Nearly 100% of publishers have seen e-booksellers get their metadata wrong” - Jeremy Greenfield, Digital Book World
“According to an upcoming study from the Book Industry Study Group set to come out in a month, 95% of publishers have had the experience of creating their e-books with one set of metadata and seeing an altered set of metadata at the point of sale, online booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple”
Read the full article

“It doesn’t matter what e-books cost to make” - Mathew Ingram, GigaOm
“I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by sticking rigidly to models that were appropriate for a different world, when “windowed” releases and regional restrictions made sense. There’s at least some evidence to show that if prices drop low enough, sales can climb by orders of magnitude. Why not allow e-book prices to float and then see where they end up?”
Read the full article

“Research: How people use mobile email” - Ben, MailChimp blog
“What happens when that guy’s not on the go? Does he check his mail when he’s on the couch? Or out shopping with his wife? Or walking the dog, or taking his kids to the playground? Yes, he does. We all know he does, because that’s what we do. So how does that change the way people use email?”
Read the full article

“Typeface As Programme” - Jürg Lehni, Typotheque
Designer and programmer Jürg Lehni analyses the evolution of typographic technology and the nature of digital fonts, and introduces Donald E. Knuth’s groundbreaking TeX and Metafont systems.
Read the full article

“Science and Truth: We’re All in It Together” - Jack Hitt, New York Times Sunday Review
Fascinating essay suggesting that the comments underneath news articles should be considered more like the annotations to text made in the Middle Ages
Read the full article

“Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps” - Jason Pontin, Technology Review
“We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.” Hmm. Really. A design team that couldn’t work out how to dynamically resize pages from portrait to landscape you say, and your app was not a success? Funny that...
Read the full article

“Fungible - A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead.” - Stijn Debrouwere, stdout.be
“The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.”
Read the full article

“The A/B test: Inside the technology that’s changing the rules of business” - Brian Christian, Wired
“Today, A/B is ubiquitous, and one of the strange consequences of that ubiquity is that the way we think about the web has become increasingly outdated. We talk about the Google homepage or the Amazon checkout screen, but it’s now more accurate to say that you visited a Google homepage, an Amazon checkout screen”
Read the full article

Martin Clarke's witness statement to the Leveson inquiry - full text
Mail Online publisher’s full written evidence to the inquiry into press standards
Read the full article

“The changing role of the homepage and why your website is not a newspaper” - Patrick Smith, TheMediaBriefing
“It's odd to think that despite all the talk of social sharing and device-led disintermediation, many publishers' thought processes doesn't extend much beyond: ‘Put link to 400-word thing on front of site, people read thing, advertisers happy, repeat ad infinitum...’”
Read the full article

“Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How about some sensible digital subscription pricing?” - Danny Sullivan, Daggle
“The digital products are overpriced compared to the print products. That’s because, in all likelihood, a print subscriber is still stupidly deemed worth more to advertisers, even though I’d wager most of us ignore most of those print ads.”
Read the full article

Things you might have missed...

Also on currybetdotnet this week:

The ups and down of Facebook Social Reader traffic
“Do you want your internet to work? Yes/No” - some thoughts on users, cookies and the EU
What are the “cheat codes” for the news industry? - and how can we hope to cope with 69p games?

“Do you want your internet to work? Yes/No”

2012-05-10T07:55:52Z

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.

The key take-out figures were that from a sample of 2,000 users surveyed by eDigitalResearch and IMRG, 75% had not heard of the new EU cookie directive. And once it was explained to them 89% thought it was a good idea, and only 23% plan to accept cookies

I’ve no idea what the explanation of the changes given in the survey was. The legislation is complex, and I’m fairly certain you could have spun a totally different result out of the survey by borrowing a leaf from the UKIP/Daily Express playbook and asking people “Do you want unelected technocrats in Brussels messing with your British internet?”

As I’ve written before, one of my biggest concerns with the new emphasis on gaining consent for placing cookies on a user’s computer is that it means mainstream sites and businesses will spend the time and effort to make systems that will interrupt the browsing experience, whereas those that are planning nefarious activities won’t bother. Ironically the legislation will make the user experience of sites that mean you and your data harm smoother and easier than the user experience of sites that are being responsible about cookies.

You’ll begin to see cookie warning messages appearing on a website near you soon, and today for the first time I encountered Civic’s “Cookie Control”, which promises a “universal solution for cookie law compliance”.

At the Guardian we’ve been discretely testing some variations of showing a message about cookies to a small percentage of our audience to gauge their reaction.

To my great personal regret, one of my preferred wordings didn’t go forward to the testing stage: “Do you want your internet to work? Yes/No”

The ups and down of Facebook Social Reader traffic

2012-05-08T14:58:15Z

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”

It starred this rather dramatic looking graph of Daily Active Users to the Guardian’s Facebook app over the last thirty days:

Daily Active Users to the Guardian Facebook app, as shown on BuzzFeed

TechCrunch have a different angle, and of all the outlets who have subsequently written the story up they seem to have done the most actual journalism to stand the story up: “Decline of reader apps likely due to news feed changes, shows Facebook controls the traffic faucet”

Notably they looked a bit to the left of that dramatic graph, which gives a slightly different picture

Daily Active Users to the Guardian Facebook app, as shown on TechCrunch

It isn’t that the BuzzFeed graph isn’t true - we certainly do have less users at the moment than we did in April. It is just that in April we’d seen an abnormally high number from a massive spike, a context which isn’t reflected if you only look back thirty days.

The BuzzFeed story played happily into a narrative where a lot of tech commentators have criticised the social reader apps, which seems to have blinded some of them to actually digging a bit further into the numbers behind this particularly story. One of the charts BuzzFeed published showed Angry Birds and Draw Something also lost huge numbers of users, but nobody today is writing off “social gaming”.

Brittany Darwell has also written about the data for Inside Facebook - “Data shows social readers have mixed results, but aren’t ‘collapsing’”. She states:

“We looked at 12 media sites and apps that integrate Open Graph to allow users to automatically share their reading and viewing activity with friends, and have concluded there is no single trend affecting these apps the same way.
...
It is also worth noting that the dramatic changes in some apps’ numbers around April 10 are related to the fact that Facebook did not return MAU data for a period of five days leading up to that date. As such, the growth or decline appears more suddenly than if the graphs included growth for those five days prior.”

The fact is that if there is one thing I’ve learned from looking at Facebook traffic data, it is that it swings wildly. I mentioned in my talk about the app at news:rewired back in February that Facebook traffic simply doesn’t seem to follow the normal “news curve” that publishers are used to. In the way we have currently implemented our app it is almost entirely driven by peer-to-peer action within Facebook, and the viral distribution of Open Graph content works a bit like compound interest. Any break in the viral loop sparks a decline that takes a while to recover from, whereas any really popular individual story gaining viral traction can send the graphs soaring. And on those occasions we’ve even seen referral traffic from Facebook momentarily eclipse referral traffic from Google.

Finally, if you can bear to read one more thing about Facebook today, Patrick Smith has written an excellent piece on a related topic - “Facebook as editorial opportunity and commercial threat to publishers”

Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. The views expressed are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former employers or clients. Read my blogging principles.