currybetdotnet

On holiday...

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:00:27 +0000

I went on holiday yesterday, and, with the exception of my commitment to write a blogpost for Ada Lovelace Day, I'm also going to be taking a long overdue holiday from blogging.

currybetdotnet will be back in April.

In the meantime, here are some dates for your diary, of things I'm speaking at or attending over the next few weeks.

March 30th: I'll be chairing "London IA 2010 on Innovation" which features speakers Richard Rutter, Glenn Jones, Claire Rowland and Andy Budd.
April 11th: I'm appearing at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, where I'll be on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn discussing "Journalism in the digital age: Trends, tools and technologies". Tickets are available now.
April 13th: I'll be attending "Content Strategy, Manhattan Style at The Book Club in Shoreditch.
April 17th: As yet unconfirmed, but I hope to be at the "Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010" in Leeds, which is being sponsored by Guardian Local.

And it isn't a paywall, or an official tip-jar, but it is blatant emotional blackmail. If you enjoy the work I do on currybetdotnet, why not consider donating to my wife and 6 month old daughter, who are doing their first sponsored walk together later this month for Sport Relief?

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 6 - Germany, Canada, and video overview

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:56:11 +0000

Over the last week or so I've been reviewing online newspaper coverage of the recent Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. In the final part of this series, I want to look at elements of coverage in Germany and Canada, and present an overview video with some clips of the sites in action.

Discrete Facebook presence from Bild

Bild had added Olympia 2010 to their main navigation.

There was also a prominent promo presence for a German Olympia 2010 group on Facebook.

One of the things that I found very interesting about this is that above the fold on Facebook it was not branded 'Bild' at all.

It is only lower down the page that the association with Germany's biggest tabloid paper becomes clear.

The Bild site also had a Flash interactive. this included live text coverage, and the Bild Backstage section which I mentioned when looking at Twitter coverage of the games on Wednesday.

Bild also offered the enticing promise of 'Sportstätten in 3-D'. Rather than donning some special glasses, however, this appeared to just be schematics of buildings turned at a slight angle to add some perspective.

Staying in Germany, sueddeutsche.de also offered a 'live-ticker' portal. This was made up of lots of elements in one fixed size pop-up, which didn't work too well on my Mac, as I wasn't able to scroll around to see all of the content.

The host nation - Canada

I couldn't really do an online review of coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics without looking at the media in the host country of Canada, which I did during the final couple of days before the games got started.

National Post had an unobtrusive and minimally designed banner across the top of the site. This linked through to a co-branded CBC / National Post 'Vancouver Now' site.

This offered a chance to directly message athletes from the Canadian team

although I have to say that if your forum software needs a legend this large to explain the varieties of the icons that might appear, you probably need to re-evaluate your feature set and have clearer icons!

With 3 days to go until the start of the games, The Globe And Mail had not added Olympics to their sports navigation or featured topics. Clicking on links to stories about Vancouver took the user to the CTV Vancouver 2010 site.

This is something that would be quite unusual in the UK - one can't imagine, for example, football stories on The Sun's website linking directly through to Sky Sports branded content, or The Times coverage of the Olympics being handled by Sky News.

And finally...

Here is a video overview highlighting some of the features I've been pointing out during this series, along with a somewhat under-rehearsed commentary where I pronounce the names of all the European newspapers badly...

Winter Olympics - Online newspaper features from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 5 - Austrian coverage

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:55:41 +0000

Over the last few days I've been posting a review of online coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, taking in interesting elements from papers in South Korea, Italy, France, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland along the way. In this post, I'm looking at some of the coverage that was in the online Austrian press.

Before the games began

I started my research for this series before the games started, looking at how online coverage was beginning to build up. In Austria, Kleine Zeitung has a special Olympics section prepared, along with several graphics charting the history of Austrian achievement at the Winter Olympics. These seemed to be re-purposed flat print graphics, rather than specific online interactives.

There was also the compulsory vote to ask readers how well they thought their nation was going to do in Vancouver.

A couple of days before the start of the Olympics, Austria's biggest tabloid, Kronen Zeitung, didn't seem to have a lot of coverage online, although the John Terry sex scandal had managed to warrant a feature - chiefly I expect so they could use the headline 'Sex scandal'.

Kurier had a promo for their Olympic coverage on their homepage, and already had launched a combined ticker and Flash interactive.

Winter Olympic Interactives - Kurier in Austria from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

As online news coverage matures, increasingly sites have an archive of material. Prior to the start of vancouver 2010, Der Standard's Olympic section had comprehensive links through to their coverage of the previous tournament in Torino, including individual sports results and the final medal table.

Die Presse had a homepage Olympic promo slot, leading through to their preview section, which included a detailed photo gallery of Austrian team members.

Next...

In the last part of this series, I'll be looking at some elements of Olympics coverage in online German and Canadian newspapers, and have a video overview of some of the features I've highlighted.

Whatever Paul Waugh thinks, The Guardian's MPs Expenses crowd-sourcing experiment was no "total failure"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:32:20 +0000

I spotted a tweet earlier by the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones suggesting that the Evening Standard's Paul Waugh had described The Guardian's crowd-sourced MPs expenses experiment as a "total failure".

It is an interesting comment. I've got a great respect for the way that Paul has embraced Twitter and blogging in his role at the Standard, and I'm almost certain he was suggesting it had been a failure from a purely editorial point of view.

Indeed, as my friend John helpfully pointed out, the users never got through the complete stack of documents.

And, as we know, thanks to the heavy redaction, we would never have uncovered the duck house and the other juicy details that The Telegraph were able to expertly lead the news agenda with for days on end, thanks to their unfettered access to the original documents.

But it is the word "total" that I would object too in Paul Waugh's statement.

I think there are several areas where you couldn't judge the project as anything other than a success.

Firstly, on a pure implementation level, it demonstrated that as a team our tech guys could, in the space of around a week, get an application deployed into the cloud but appear integrated into our site, using a technology stack that was not our regular infrastructure.

Secondly, it showed that as a business we could bring people together from editorial, design, technology and QA to deliver a rapid turnaround project in a multi-disciplinary way, based on a topical news story.

And thirdly, we learned from and improved upon it. When a second batch of documents were released, the team working on the app broke them down into much smaller assignments. That meant it was easier for a small contribution to push the totals along, and we didn't get bogged down with the inertia of visibly seeing that there was a lot of documents still to process.

It was a much smaller dataset, but the more playful and game-like interface of MPs Expenses II got 100% of the documents processed. And it served as the principle underpinning the way The Guardian investigated Tony Blair's finances.

There is a wider point here though.

Earlier today I was reading this post by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. In it he wrote:

"[Marc] Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications are either. 'All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.'"

Andreessen went on to make the point that technology companies are used to having adapt around incessant technological change.

Now, we are constantly told that to survive in this new world, where we compete for the scarce attention of a fractured audience, that us old fashioned media companies have to innovate and experiment. Yet, within the media, we all have an almost Nelson Muntz-like compulsion to stand and point at any of our rivals if we perceive them to have made the slightest falter.

For me, trying new things with journalism and technology, working out why and where they fail, and making them better, is the only possible way forward. As an industry, we will never learn to innovate with technology if we are not prepared to fail in public.

Apologies in advance - comments are currently disabled across the whole of this site, as I'm going on holiday and can't bear the thought of coming back and having to moderate the spam. If you would like to comment on this post, please drop me a mail to martin.belam@currybet.net and I'll make sure it appears. And a reminder, the views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former employers or clients.

links for 2010-03-10

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:08:02 +0000

The Guardian International Development Journalism Competition 2010 | guardian.co.uk

"Many crucial issues facing the developing world are often overlooked or underrepresented by the media. The Guardian International Development Journalism competition 2010 aims to highlight some of them. We are searching for enthusiastic writers who want to demonstrate their journalistic abilities by examining these issues. The challenge is to write a feature of 650 to 1,000 words by 30 April on an aspect of global poverty that deserves greater media exposure. The 16 best writers (eight amateur, eight professional) will be selected from a longlist of around 40 entrants, all of whom will have their articles published online at guardian.co.uk."

(tags: development competition journalism media guardian)
Engagement and Optimisation: Architecture for optimisation | User Pathways

"How do you construct the architecture of a site or web application you are designing to give an optimised experience? When talking about architecture it is not specifically about the technical implementation but more the concept of a site being able to exist in multiple areas, accessible from multiple paths and able to accommodate different user interactions."

(tags: jameskelway userpathways informationarchitecture)
This is not a blog post... this is a confession | Alison Gow | Headlines and Deadlines

"Letting others see your copy-in-progress in advance of publication is no longer the issue it was, because we're already showing the thought-processes behind articles via blogs, tweets, liveblogging, crowdsourcing, livestreaming and more. The big 'Ta-daa' moment of revealing an exclusive is a lovely thing if you're the reporter writing it but if others are blogging or tweeting or commenting on forums about various angles before you're anywhere near a print deadline what are you gaining?"

(tags: alisongow journalism)
Cardiff | guardian.co.uk

Hannah Waldram has gone live in Cardiff with the latest addition to our local journalism and community coverage experiment Guardian Local.

(tags: cardiff local guardian guardianlocal hannahwaldram)
Presentation Tools: Beyond Powerpoint - Martin Belam - FUMSI

By me at FUMSI, an overview of using presentation tools other than PowerPoint, looking at Google Presentations, OpenOffice, Apple Keynote and Prezi.

(tags: fumsi martinbelam presentations)
Charlie Brooker's Screen burn | Television & radio | The Guardian

Following this review from Charlie, I ended up watching an episode of Sky One's "Pineapple Dance Studios". O. M. G.

(tags: charliebrooker skyone pineappledancestudios televisionsopainfulitiscompulsive)
Trust should review BBC mobile apps, says newspaper body | Media | guardian.co.uk

"The NPA, which represents the UK national newspaper industry, has written to the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, and the BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, arguing that the corporation should not be allowed to launch the applications without an assessment of the impact of such a move on commercial rivals."

(tags: bbc apps npa)
Why is our democracy so broken? | Mark Reckons

"I am not politically naive. I understand the pressures politicians are under and what could happen if they 'say too much' especially from their political opponents. But surely something has gone seriously wrong when the result of our adversarial political system is that politicians just cannot or will not go into details about crucial things like where they will focus on for public spending cuts before an election?"

(tags: markpack liberaldemocrats democracy politics)
Jeremy Hunt: 'We are proposing a revolution in local media' | New Statesman

"What we are proposing is a revolution in local media that would get rid of the cross media ownership rules at a local level and that would mean that if you are [Trinity Mirror chief executive] Sly Bailey you can say that I own the Liverpool Echo, I have got Liverpool.com, I've got Liverpool FM and I've got Liverpool TV, so if you want to reach people in Liverpool there's no better way. I think that would be a very compelling offer for advertisers". Of course, the hospitals and council services in Liverpool have to keep going out to tender because competition is the only thing that drives efficiency and keeps prices down in the public sector....

(tags: newstatesman jeremyhunt conservatives localnewspapers)

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 4 - "The Twitter Olympics"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:55:36 +0000

Over the last few days I've been posting about some of the things I noticed of interest in online coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Today I wanted to specifically look at uses and applications of Twitter.

"The Twitter Olympics"

In some quarters, Vancouver 2010 has been described as "The Twitter Olympics". Twitter itself provided a verified list of Olympians using the service, which was heavily promoted in the top right-hand 'advertising' slot when you visited the site.

With Glowing Hearts, a documentary movie which is 'about a marginalized community embracing social media tools to empower, inspire and breakdown the digital divide' in Vancouver used Twitter extensively, and gained a lot of media coverage off the back of social media.

With Glowing Hearts from Andrew Lavigne on Vimeo.

The Olympic organisers may not have been impressed that social media made such a splash of a story about some of the social and financial costs of hosting the games.

Elsewhere, use of Twitter upset the USA Olympic team's chief marketing officer, Lisa Baird. 'When people partake in this kind of ambush behavior, it hurts American athletes' she said. She was talking about brands that were not official Olympic sponsors tweeting messages of encouragement to American athletes.

Some of the comments on this Wall Street Journal blog article on the issue pointed out that one of the companies being castigated, Red Bull, actually sponsors winter sport athletes all year round, every year, and that surely it is the Olympic marketing rules that ambush them at the moment someone gets their biggest worldwide exposure.

Integrating Twitter into newspaper coverage

There were a few instances of online newspapers integrating Twitter feeds into their coverage and interactives.

In Sweden, Aftonbladet had 'OS-Twitter' as part of the left-hand navigation on their Winter Olympics sections, leading the user through to a page with an embedded Twingly window. Users were encouraged to tweet with the hashtag #vinterOS.

The community aspect of Chosun's site in South Korea looked quite Twitter-ish, with brief exchanges between nicknamed users, but all hosted on their own domain, and I have to confess that I struggled to understand the functionality on offer.

I wasn't helped by the fact that Chosen Ilbo was the only newspaper in the whole of my survey whose Olympics site had significant layout issues when viewing it using Safari on a Mac.

In Germany, part of Bild's interactive coverage was 'Bild Backstage', where a toggle allowed users to switch between reading tweets from Tobias Holtkamp and Ayla Kiran.

One of them was in Berlin, and one in Vancouver, although I have to say that the design of the buttons left me unclear which one I had actually selected. Is it the button in the Twitter blue, or the easier to read button in white. When I'm reading tweets from Sportchef Tobias, is he in Berlin or in Vancouver?

Next...

In tomorrow's part of this series, I'll be looking at more online Winter Olympics coverage from newspapers.

links for 2010-03-09

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:08:39 +0000

You need a paper licence to link to the Royal Mail website » malcolm coles

Priceless to and fro about getting permission to link as per the terms and conditions.

(tags: malcolmcoles royalmail humour)
#IWD: Why do men dominate newspaper letter pages? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

"It has always fascinated me why male names dominate the readers’ letter pages in newspapers, the original home for crowdsourced comment. What’s more, it’s a trend that plays out online too: men are already significantly noisier on Google Buzz, for example, and dominate online comment in subjects like politics and media."

(tags: journalism newspapers readersletters men)
Should you use ad blockers or not? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

"A few weeks ago during a discussion here about the iPad, somebody in the comments asked me if I used AdBlock, and if not, why not. I don't, not only for these reasons put forward by Ars Technica, because money made through advertising pays a good proportion of my wages and other reasons. It would be more than a little two-faced to want people to pay for my content with their attention and then effectively remove my attention from other peoples' sites. But I accept that it's an argument that isn't made enough by publishers - and that it may not brook much sympathy with you."

(tags: business guardian adblocking bobbiejohnson)
Facebook murderer's monitoring 'an issue', Alan Johnson says - Telegraph

"Mr Johnson also said that he is considering measures to flag up the identities of convicted sex offenders when they log on to social networking sites like Facebook. 'There is an idea we are talking to the Americans about – when you log on, if you are a convicted sex offender, that actually there is a way of flagging that up,' he said. The Home Secretary did not explain how sex offenders could be prevented from signing up to social networking sites under false identities". Nor did he suggest that a sex offender's car, house, or phone number should be 'flagged up'

(tags: alanjohnson crime telegraph childsafety stupidthingspoliticianssaywithoutthinking)
Viewer or voyeur? The morality of reportage photography | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

In contrast to Alan Johnson's knee-jerk populism, given the current UK media frenzy around 'justice' that looks like 'vengeance', this is a sobering piece about how to capture acts of execution, with some intelligent and thoughtful comments.

(tags: photography execution justice guardian)
Alexi Sayle stand-up comeback in mid-May | Twitpic of Evening Standard article

According to yesterday's Evening Standard, Alexi Sayle will be doing his first stand-up show in London for 15 years in mid-may. One can only presume he knows the date and result of the election, and can just pick up where he left off during the dying days of the Major years.

(tags: twitpic eveningstandard alexisayle election2010 comedy)
Good video can make all the difference | Iain Hepburn | Fear and Loathing in Glasvegas

"That's not defeatism, it's realism - trying to take on broadcast rivals with limited video resources is the equivalent of trying to stop a rampaging safari park rhino with a chicken wire fence. You might get away with it for a while, but eventually it'll just trample right over you...Video online has to offer added content to be worthwhile. Replicating what users can get elsewhere's just pointless. But equally, as I've said before, doing video for the sake of video's just as pointless an exercise."

(tags: iainhepburn video localnewspapers)
Trinity Mirror sees 'dismantling' benefit - Yahoo! Finance

"To save £67.9m, Trinity restructured its regionals, closing or selling 30 titles last year, although Ms Bailey said it had no plans for further closures and would not be shutting down any of the 32 papers it bought from Guardian Media Group for £7.4m in cash last month". Harsh, but to be honest, in the current financial climate, if you are *not* re-examining the efficiency of *all* of your processes and tools, you are doing your readers a disservice.

(tags: trinitymirror yahoofinance newspapers)

"We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong" - Retweeting without verification

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:22:04 +0000

Yesterday I tweeted a comment I'd noticed on the Daily Mail website underneath an article about Jon Venables:

Best ever user comment in the Mail? "We should have hung them when they were ten. Killing children is wrong" http://bit.ly/cTnFrE

Whether the original comment was intentionally funny or not, my message got retweeted quite a bit, and I noticed something curious about the way it was distributed. A lot of the retweets missed off the link to the source. People echoed the message with an audit trail of sometimes 2 or 3 retweeters, but with no link to the Mail to verify the message.

I found it odd that the link was the disposable bit. I did a quick analysis of Twitter search results this evening for "killing children is wrong", and found that around 35% of tweets taking that quote from the Mail's comments did not have a link back to the paper's website.

It seemed like a classic example of where the assertion that 'something has happened' by trusted peers was more valuable than a hyperlink that actually demonstrated that 'something has happened and here is the evidence'.

In the news industry we are discussing the importance of open linked data to establish provenance, and Ben Goldacre is campaigning for the BBC to link to precise academic articles rather than homepages. This struck me as evidence that for a lot of people, if the soundbite is good enough, people will repeat it without credit regardless.

links for 2010-03-08

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:08:46 +0000

Tories red-faced after 'Samantha for Labour' gaffe | Politics | The Guardian

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but does this story not boil down to "Woman may not have voted the same way her husband (presumably) does, some time before he became leader of his party?". And, unless the Camerons at some point lived in Sedgefield, she can't have "voted for Tony Blair" can she? I don't tell my wife how to vote, why should Cameron?

(tags: election2010 conservatives mailonsunday guardian davidcameron)
Pat Stannard: Will We Ever Have a Strong Local News Network in the UK?, Leytonstone Events » Leytonstone TownTalk

"Local newspapers have been in decline for several years. The depression has accelerated the process with more than 1,000 editorial jobs axed in the space of a year. Instant news on the web has replaced in-depth reporting & investigation. Pat talks about what has been lost & what the future may hold". I'm gutted that I'm going to be away on holiday and will miss this. Pat Stannard was editor of the Waltham Forest Guardian for many years, and this talk about the local newspaper industry looks to be well worth attending. If someone goes and takes notes for me, they can have the first ever guest blogging spot on currybetdotnet to write about it...

(tags: leytonstone walthamforestguardian patstannard)
Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love | Ars Technica

"Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn't see our content. We tested just one way of doing this, but have devised a way to keep it rotating were we to want to permanently implement it. But we don't. Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on". [via Martin Stabe]

(tags: internet arstechnica advertising adblock)
why your search engine (probably) isn’t rubbish :: ia play

"Now all search engines struggle, to varying degrees, with the knotty mess that is natural language. But they don’t generally don’t get called rubbish for not succeeding with the meaty search challenges. Rubbish search engines are the ones that can’t seem to answer the most basic requests in a sensible manner. These are ones that get mocked as “random link generators”, the jibbering wrecks of their breed."

(tags: karenloasby search iaplay)
The importance of curation in a metadata driven information architecture : block, slab, pillar

"Overall the project was a great success but it raised some interesting questions. The design of the indexes was created by the user experience team. The algorithms were written by developers and informed the ordering of the stories. This left journalists to simply tag stories and watch their stories appear on indexes they had no control over. It certainly felt like their influence on part of the product had moved a step away from them. This was reflected in journalists’ feedback and the frequent questions about how to game the system to control the order of stories on indexes."

(tags: silveroliver bbc informationarchitecture tagging journalism)

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 3 - Online tabloids in Sweden

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:46:33 +0000

Last week I began a survey of online newspaper coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Rather than my usual assessment of what various UK newspapers had done, I've concentrated on the digital media of the countries that did well in the medal table in Turin in 2006. Today I wanted to look at some of the things I noticed in Swedish coverage of the games.

Sweden

One of the things that we tend to do in the newspaper industry - and I'm as guilty of this as anyone - is to focus very closely on what our niche competitors are doing, rather than looking at the wider picture. I noticed what I thought was an example of this in Sweden, where it seemed that main tabloid evening papers Aftonbladet and Expressen had set their Olympics coverage up in almost exactly the same way.

Both of them were promoting their special Olympics sections from similar small banner ads at the top of their sports sections, both had separate video channels off-domain, and by the close of the Games, they were both trailling their latest coverage with a very similar graphic treatment.

A couple of points of interest on the Aftonbladet site included the use of a dynamic masthead on the Winter Olympics section, indicating Sweden's current performance in the medal table.

Some headlines on Aftonbaldet were preceded with a big red 'TV', and clicking the link took the user directly through to the Aftonbladet TV channel.

Unfortunately, as I was outside of Sweden, I was able to see the pre-roll adverts, but not the actual content.

There was a social side to the clips, with signed in users being able to add comments directly underneath the video.

Expressen promoted their video content slightly differently, with a panel on the right-hand side of their Olympics front page.

Something I'd not noticed particularly before on a newspaper website was that when you hovered over the promo thumbnail of the video, it began 'playing' in the thumbnail space. Or, at least, an animated low-res version of the video started looping.

By contrast, the much smaller minority Italian language Swiss paper Corriere del Ticino was using the simple mechanism of embedded YouTube video in the right-hand column of their Olympic special.

Like Aftonbladet, the Expressen TV Winter Olympics site took the user completely to a different site.

Expressen was also running special Olympic 'Vinterbloggen', with multiple authors contributing to the series. Whilst their blog platform had some standard features like comments and trackbacks, I did notice that individual entries didn't include any of the 'Tweet this' or 'Share that' logos that usually litter newspaper websites. These days that seems something of a rarity.

Next...

~~Tomorrow~~ Wednesday, in the fourth part of this series, I'll be looking at some of the social media aspects of coverage that I noticed in my survey.

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 2 - Visual navigation in Italy and France

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:39 +0000

I wanted to continue my round up of Winter Olympics coverage from around the world's online newspapers by saying that none appeared to be more beautiful at first glance than Dong-a Ilbo's special Olympics section from South Korea.

Although, thanks to my lack of grasp of the language, I remain slightly unsure whether the blue skier was part of the design, or part of the advertising campaign for Nike that you can see in the right-hand side of the screenshot.

Another South Korean paper, JoongAng Ilbo, also took a strongly visual and graphical approach with their Olympics section.

Graphical navigation elements

In Italy, La Gazzetta dello Sport had an interactive medal table. As well as an overall view, the user was able to drill-down into medal table breakdowns by Olympic discipline.

This used a graphical interface made up of the pictogram representing the different Olympic Sports. Whilst I found this to be visually neat, I do feel that the Winter Olympic discipline icon set is much less distinctive than the equivalent sets for the summer games.

Incidentally, during the course of Vancouver 2010, the New York Times published a video tracing the history of the Olympic pictograms.

Le Monde in France also used the Winter Olympic pictograms to allow users to navigate between disciplines in their Vancouver 2010 section.

Again I found this appealing visually, but not without problems. I thought it was confusing to have three tiers of navigation. You can see in this screenshot that I have selected 'Historique' in the primary navigation. This has defaulted to showing information about Turin in 2006, and above the Turin headline there is a list of years, which allows me to see an overview of previous tournaments, like Innsbruck in 1976.

However, the discipline pictogram set interlopes visually between those two, even though the function it performs is neither related to the 'Historique' or the year. Clicking an icon takes the user not to a page about that discipline in the year you are viewing, as you might expect, but entirely out of the 'Historique' section and back into the 2010 'Calendrier' for that discipline.

Where I though Le Monde used visual navigation much more successfully was in their 'live coverage' timeline. At the top of their sport pages was a scrollable timeline.

It shows the events that the paper is going to be covering live online. The user can scroll forward, to look at what is scheduled, and hovering over the event displays a pop-up with more details. The user can also scroll back, into the archive of live text coverage. Clicking on an event takes the user through to the page for that sporting fixture.

Specialist French sports newspaper L'Equipe had their Vancouver 2010 coverage on a special Olympics sub-domain, and also used graphical navigation to direct the user around their live coverage. In this case it was daily timeline of liveblogs.

This defaulted to the current day of the games, but allowed the user easy access to look at a growing archive of daily live coverage, e.g. day 5.

Next...

I'll be continuing this series next week, starting with a look at coverage of Vancouver 2010 in Sweden.

links for 2010-03-04

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:08:31 +0000

BBC review labels blogosphere as “unruly” « Reportr.net

"In a discussion of public space in the digital age, the review talks about the 'vast and unruly world of the blogosphere'". Maybe they only looked at BBC News Have Your Say?

(tags: alfredhermida unruly bbc blogging haveyoursay speakyourebranes)
Local paper wades into tweeting row | Leeds | guardian.co.uk

"Lord mayor Judith Elliott imposed a tweeting ban at last Wednesday's full council meeting in Leeds Civic Hall and insisted all electrical equipment in the chamber should be switched off - effectively banning people from using social media or live blogging the proceedings. The YEP has today done an interesting article on councillors' reaction to the ban. It would've been nice if the YEP had mentioned me, given I'm where the whole issue started and I was the only journalist it affected, but hey ho - good to see they've featured the issue anyway!"

(tags: guardianlocal leeds)
The BBC obviously didn't like what I was saying in their consultation... on Twitpic

I tried to submit my response to the BBC Trust, but they obviously didn't take too kindly to what I was saying...

(tags: bbc bbctrust)
6 music, photography, and tidying up - James Cridland

"Incidentally, some of the twitterati have been equating The Times’s sales figures (611,894) with BBC 6 music’s audience of 695,000 people, and smugly pointing to 6 music being more popular. False. That number for 6 music is a weekly figure, not a daily one; and more than one person reads each copy of a newspaper."

(tags: jamescridland bbc 6music)

The Winter Olympics online review: Part 1

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:55:55 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I've been looking carefully at some of the online coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics on newspaper websites. The Games got off to the worst possible start with the tragic death of Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili. This immediately raised some ethical questions about coverage of the Games.

Max Gadney has blogged about how he felt the New York Times infographic of the events leading up to Kumaritashvili's death lacked taste. As he put it:

"This graphic has focussed on the What rather than the Why or How, so is just showing, rather than explaining. The thing is that showing this is not really very necessary or nice. The lack of insight leaves sour taste."

The New York Times was not alone in this. In print, The Guardian, where I work, had a four picture sequence illustrating the accident, including a final frame appearing to show the fatal impact of Kumaritashvili's head on the metal pole. We don't appear to have published these pictures online, but it made for uncomfortable viewing.

I also noted that Sega continued to market the official Winter Olympics video game under the slogan "Pain is temporary, glory is forever". I can't help feeling that strapline would have been deemed in poor taste if Kumaritashvili had been a higher profile athlete, or from one of the major Olympic powers. The marketing tag even appeared on the front of the Guardian Sport section that was actually carrying the news of the Georgian's death.

Winter sport newspapers for winter sports coverage

In a sequence of events worthy of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, the media coverage of the Games became a media story in its own right. Olympic officials gave press briefings, where they briefed the press against the negative publicity the Games had garnered, thus generating more instant negative publicity, and a chance for the British press in particular to re-hash all their previous claims.

Given the negative coverage, I wanted to break out of my regular round of looking at English speaking Anglo-Saxon based media sites, and so, instead of the usual 'The Guardian has done this, The Telegraph did that', I've been surveying the serious and popular news websites in countries that traditionally perform well at the Winter Olympics (which doesn't, with the odd exception, include the UK). I've based my choice on the top ten of the medals table at the conclusion of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.

I've been typically looking out for the things that interest me about newspaper website design, interactivity and information architecture. This includes how sites handle social media, the kind of interactives they provide, and how they arrange navigation to their Olympics coverage.

Next...

Irritatingly, it turned out there had been a joint 10th place in Torino in 2006, and so I ended up examining media outlets from eleven countries - Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. Over the next few days I'll have screenshots, links, and an assessment of some of the most interesting features I found, starting with visual approaches taken by newspapers in South Korea, Italy and France.

links for 2010-03-03

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:07:19 +0000

The User Centered Design Conundrum | UX Booth

"The conundrum always starts the same way: those who budget a project’s time, materials, etc. believe that incorporating user research into the design process could potentially add to the project’s overall scope. These stakeholders, project managers, whathaveyou are concerned with making things work for themselves or their superiors within a specific time frame". Features an awesome cartoon.

(tags: design userexperience ux process research webdesign uxbooth)
Stories and examples for my IA book » DonnaM

"I’m working like mad through March to write a book on information architecture. As I go, I find I need two things – stories to illustrate points I describe, and examples of sites that do particular things. This post will be a continually-updated one that lists what I’m interested in and what I have enough of."

(tags: ia informationarchitecture donnaspencer)
BBC cutbacks - a threat to digital? | Heresy Corner

"Radio 6, in particular, does nothing that is not or should not be done by Radios 1 and 2. 'Encouraging new music', for example, which its fans claim to be a unique property of the threatened station, is precisely the justification trotted out whenever someone wonders what a taxpayer-funded organisation is doing putting out wall-to-wall broadcasts of commercial pop music."

(tags: bbc 6music heresycorner)
Alan Rusbridger: ‘Weak press self-regulation threatens decent journalism’ | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

“Once again weakness by the regulator has led to people calling for tougher sanctions against journalism,” Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger argued at today’s press self-regulation debate in the House of Lords.

(tags: pcc regulation alanrusbridger journalismcouk)
A middle way for linked data at the bbc > Inkdroid

"The main thing that I took away is how much good work the BBC is doing in this space. Given the recent news of cuts at the BBC, it seems like a good time to say publicly how important some of the work they are doing is to the web technology sector."

(tags: linkeddata bbc)
Some cross words | Hugh Stephenson | Crosswords | guardian.co.uk

"To say that the new crossword website when it was launched in mid-February was not universally popular would be something of an understatement. I have seldom read such an outpouring of vituperative abuse, coupled with more plaintive cries of 'give us back our old site!'"

(tags: guardian crosswords)
Guardian Zeitgeist | In the future there will be otters...

We are very possibly the only newspaper in the world to cram a Doctor Who reference and a picture of an otter into an error page, thanks to @revdancatt amongst others

(tags: guardian errorpages otters)

Privacy, distribution, licences and standards - more notes on the London Linked Data meet-up

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:55:15 +0000

Last week I went to the 2nd London Linked Data meet-up, and I've already blogged a few things about it for journalism.co.uk ("How media sites can make use of linked data" and "Silver Oliver on A history of linked data at the BBC"), The Guardian's Open Platform blog ("London Linked Data meet-up"), and here on currybetdotnet about human readable URIs. Twice. ^[1]

Here are the few remaining bits of my notes that didn't make it into those articles.

Government data and privacy

One of the best questions from the floor on the day asked John Sheridan & Jeni Tennison, who were talking about data.gov.uk, about the implications for privacy of governments releasing all of this data. The asker suggested that in recent weeks we've seen that bright people at Facebook and Google are not able to stand back far enough from their products to realise the privacy problems they may be posing, They suggested individual datasets may not pose a risk, but that combining them could have implications.

John Sheridan insisted that at data.gov.uk they understood the difference between 'public data' and 'personal data', and that civil servants will be trained in the DPA and in publishing data.

Personally, I think there is a bigger issue to be explored here, as it seems to me incongruent that in one country people can be arrested for taking photographs because this might pose a terrorist threat, whilst at the same time governments are releasing data sets that would allow you to track and hijack school buses without having to bother to do any of the surveillance yourself.

Software licences

A question from the floor at one point was suggesting that it was a concern that datasets were being released with licences that made the data free, but the tools that were being built to process it were using more restrictive licences - and the Uberblic platform was specifically mentioned. Was there a danger, they wondered, that because people were not using truly open software licences, free data could get trapped in proprietary software?

The gentle answer from the panel was that provided the data was licensed properly and was in portable formats, then it shouldn't be a problem. I'd have been more tempted to suggest that if you don't like the licenses the tools are being written under, instead of moaning about it, you are completely free to write your own...

Distribution is good

One of the organisers of the day, Georgi Kobilarov, made a telling point about why the distributed published nature of open linked data was so vital to the health of the datasets. He pointed out that it meant that each dataset was curated by a community that cared specifically about that data, whether it was music fans on MusicBrainz, or a specific scientific community. It certainly seemed like a challenge to me for news and media organisations to get actively involved in curating the datasets that are important to them.

Standards that work

At the weekend I was in conversation with Jonathan Stray of the Nieman Journalism Lab about linked data, and I finally managed to articulate one of my nagging doubts about the current approach. It seems to me quite right that there is a healthy debate around setting an appropriate standard for people to follow, but I am concerned that, at present, the debate is being framed in a totally academic way, by organisations that are chiefly free from time and commercial pressures.

The world view around linked data seems to be that people will produce validating code containing spam-free 100% accurate data. I'm yet to see a single area of the web where that has happened. The reason that the various flavours of HTML/XHTML work, and were adopted as a standard, is not because they were rigidly right, but because they and the browsers that displayed them were forgiving.

Standards get adopted because they are usable, not because they are perfect. I think we need to be aiming for usable open linked data, not a perfect open linked data schema.

Next...

I feel like I've said more than enough about linked data over the last few days. Tomorrow I'll be starting a new series of blog posts on currybetdotnet, looking at how the recent Winter Olympics were covered online.

[1] Personally I was quite excited that the event was being held in the room at ULU where I have seen loads of great bands early on in their careers - Blur, Muse, Goldfrapp and Happy Mondays amongst others - although it looked astonishingly small in daylight! [Return to article]