currybetdotnet

links for 2010-02-09

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:06:55 +0000

Guardian Media Group sells regional business to Trinity Mirror | Media | guardian.co.uk

"The Guardian severed its historic newspaper link to Manchester today with the sale of its regional media business to Trinity Mirror."

(tags: newspapers manchestereveningnews guardianmediagroup trinitymirror)
Forget scarcity, we’re in the experience business « Robert Hardie's blog

"On a national level it works – I could surf the Guardian for free via guardian.co.uk on the Safari browser on my iPhone, but I choose to pay £2.39 for the app because it’s way more than £2.39 better an experience to consume the content that way. The content is the same, the better experience is what I’m paying for."

(tags: guardian iphone roberthardie)
Electronic Arts predicts fall in sales - FT.com / Media

"Electronic Arts on Monday presented a pessimistic outlook for the video game industry this year, predicting a fall in sales of disc-based games and issuing revenue forecasts that fell short of Wall Street expectations."

(tags: ea games ft)
Talk About Local » #TAL10

"We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road. We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative."

(tags: blogging media news hyperlocal local leeds)
Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices :: UXmatters

"Faceted search has been around for a long time and has become the de facto standard for search on most ecommerce sites. However, filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing, because many sites have not able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner."

(tags: filtering slider facetedsearch search ui uxmatters)
Designing for donations | Carsonified

"Donating money to a charity should be as quick and easy online as it is to stuff a few coins in a collection pot on the high street. It should also be apparent what the money will be used for. With these two things in mind, it is surprising how often charities miss the mark when it comes to their online donation screens. Fiddly pull-downs, peculiar microcopy, trillions of steps, and minimal transparency".

(tags: donations ux design charity usability webdesign)
Why BBC news anchors are the television hosts with the most | Media | The Guardian

It isn't really the choice of presenter that matters to me, but the way a subject is handled. At the risk of sounding like "Cantankerous of East Cheam", 'Seven Ages of Britain' lost me as a viewer the moment it opened with a sequence that made it clear the producers didn't think the audience could imagine digging a Roman statue's head out of the Thames silt unless we saw Dimbleby, you know, digging a Roman statue's head out of the Thames silt.

(tags: bbc history art reallybadreconstructiondevicesindocumentaries)

Fixing the IA of an IA's blog: Part 2

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:58:45 +0000

At the beginning of January I changed the design of my blog. As well as a new banner image, and a few tweaks to the CSS, I also made some significant changes to the information architecture and structure of the site. This came about from realising that I lacked URLs I could point people to which explained the main themes that I write about - themes like 'newspaper website design' and 'the future of news'.

Homepage changes

One area that I made changes was the homepage. Since I mostly view the web through the prism of hundreds and hundreds of RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, my view of how my content was being consumed was skewed. I realised that on the homepage, rather than just have the latest blog post, I wanted to give a clearer overview of what the site is about, and provide some navigation to find the main themes that I write about.

I settled on the idea of a panel that split my content up under three broad headings: information architecture, journalism and digital media. A short paragraph filled with inline navigation sets the overall scene for the blog. This is aimed specifically at new users who may be hitting the homepage of the blog for the first time. I hope this solves the problem that someone might be told "Go to currybet, he writes a great blog about media stuff", only to find the front page entirely filled with something about Walthamstow Dog Stadium or the Victorian ice trade.

I've stuck with only showing the single latest blog entry on the homepage. Most blog software templates ship with a default mode of showing 5 or more recent entires in full on the front page, but then most bloggers don't hammer out an average article length of 700 words. So I decided on displaying the day's current entry, and links with a text snippet to the previous five. A behind the scenes production change for me is actually writing these snippets by hand when I publish a story, rather than relying on the CMS to auto-truncate the opening of the article. It is a little bit of extra work - and I keep forgetting to do it - but overall I think it produces a better homepage user experience.

Moving the linklog

A second issue was that the homepage used to feature the most recent batch of my Delicious bookmarks. In my user survey they had proved to be a 'Marmite' issue with readers. Several people added comments about how valuable they were, and several others found them really off-putting. As a result of the survey I made a special RSS feed that excludes the linklog, and decided to remove them from the homepage. The linklog now appears (almost) daily in the main RSS feed, and can be reached via 'Linklog' in the main horizontal and right-hand navigation. Whilst still putting effort into producing them for dedicated subscribers, I have significantly deprioritised them for the casual visitor to the site.

Next...

In the next post in this series I'll be looking at how I've built new 'hub' and 'theme' pages that give a narrative overview of the things I write about, rather than a simple chronological list.

links for 2010-02-08

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:06:44 +0000

Claire & Emma's Sport Relief fundraising page

My daughter is doing her first sponsored walk - aged 6 months - for Sport Relief. I suspect my wife may have to carry her for most of it ;-)

You can sponsor them on Emma's fundraising page.

Super Bowl XLIV: New Orleans Saints v Indianapolis Colts - live! | Liveblog | Guardian

Paolo Bandini live blogged the Super Bowl last night for us using an embedded ScribbleLive thingy - here is how it all panned out...

(tags: nfl superbowl liveblogging guardian)
Under review: new PCC director on phone hacking, superinjunctions and forthcoming reports | Judith Townend | journalism.co.uk

PCC Q&A session with Stephen Abell which seems to reinforce the view that they move in mysterious days.

(tags: newspapers pcc regulation judithtownend journalismcouk)
The Ridiculant | Metro.co.uk

The stuff they found down the back of the internet is now only going to appear *on* the internet. Which is a shame, as this and Nemi are the only regular features worth picking the paper up for IMHO.

(tags: ridiculant metro funny)
guardian--Zeitgeist on Flickr - Uncle Wilco

I think Uncle Wilco may be trying to make a point about editorial obsessions. Not enough of The Wire on his zeitgeist for my liking...

(tags: guardian flickr guardianzeitgeist)

Fixing the IA of an IA's blog: Part 1

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:55:21 +0000

Despite spending most of my waking hours working to improve the user experience and organisation of information on websites, for some time I had developed rather a blind spot to the mess that my own website was in. I'd had a nagging feeling that I needed to 'sort it out' for some time, but it was an email from @wandster that finally forced me to act. He asked if I could give him a list of useful web resources about designing news websites. I faced the crushing realisation that, despite having written thousands upon thousands of words upon the subject, there wasn't a canonical URL I could point to on the currybetdotnet site where you could find all of that work gathered together.

Now, the excuses that I'd made to myself for not fixing the site were the kinds of things that I would find it hard to accept from a client, things like "That's just the way the CMS works", "People who use the site regularly understand it", and "It is too much effort to redesign all of the templates, and there is too much legacy code". So in December I spent some time re-evaluating the aims and information architecture of the site, and I thought I'd jot down a little bit about my redesign process.

I'd actually begun the process earlier in October, when I put a survey up on the site. There were two key questions - 'how do you usually read the site?', and 'which types of content do you find useful?'. Whilst I myself very much enjoy writing about TV science fiction in the 1930s and obscure Cliff Richard tracks called 'Sci-Fi', the results of the survey were clear about what was most valued by the audience.

The answers to how people consumed the site were interesting as well. Around 40% of people who responded said they read the content by visiting the homepage, a segment of my audience that I seldom considered. I'd fallen into a common trap - thinking about my website purely in terms of how I consume the web and how I go about constructing the site. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs via RSS, and skim read thousands of posts every day. I've got no concept of what most of them look like, or how to navigate them.

After a while working on any site or in any organisation you can tend to go a bit 'native'. That is why user testing is so important, to break people out of the complacency of assuming that everybody consuming a website thinks about it in the same way that those producing it understand it. I've been making currybetdotnet for 7 years now, and it only ever features me. I'd gone way beyond 'native' - I'd literally only been thinking about currybetdotnet as 'the RSS feed of the blog', rather than as a website that people visit.

I quickly identified my main redesign aims:

Reorganise the homepage to make it clearer what the site is 'about'.
Arrange the information architecture so that the major recurring themes of the blog like 'newspaper website design' and 'the future of news' and 'my work at The Guardian' had canonical, findable URLs.
Narrow the range of content I was producing.

Next...

Over the next couple of days I'll be posting about how and why I've ended up with the structure for currybetdotnet that I have - and how I've tried to circumvent the inherent information architecture limitations of 'blogging'.

Tomorrow's newsmakers today - Student newspaper online review: Part 3

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:55:14 +0000

Over the last couple of days I've been looking at the digital and online versions of various student newspapers from the UK's universities. With my interest in the future of news, I'm interested in the people who may well be producing the news in the future.

Using multiple channels

In yesterday's post, I showed how some student newspapers were simply putting their printed edition online using technologies like Scribd, rather than having 'a website'. This has some drawbacks in terms of a lack of permanent URLs and findability of articles, but it does beg the question, what is the most appropriate method for delivering news to students online?

With the sweeping generalisation that students use social networking sites lots, and read newspapers very little, investment in delivering content via Facebook and Twitter may be much more cost effective for student unions than running an entire website. Indeed, my research was littered with logos asking people to follow and become fans of their student union.

The student unions were not necessarily using all channels to get urgent news out, however. For example, during the adverse weather conditions in early January, Salford Student Union was closed for a couple of days. The website announced this as the lead news item on the homepage.

At the same time, the union's Twitter feed had not been updated since before Christmas, and their Facebook page also had no indication that the building was shut.

Facebook as a recruitment tool

There was lots of positive engagement with social networks though. 'Leeds On' is the paper for Leeds Met University, after the student union disaffiliated from the Leeds Student paper in 2006.

The Student Union at Leeds Met seems to have a broad approach to social media - Leeds On used Facebook to put the year's editorial team together, and the Union's PR team have a blog, which gives an interesting look at their successful campaigns to get coverage .

The reality of being on the web

I didn't find an online version of 'Leeds on', but I did find their rival paper - a title I appeared in myself during the 90s when I was at Leeds.

Articles on the Leeds Student site have a nicely formatted pullquote in them, use tags to classify the stories, and have a panel linking to related pieces.

The comment forms on the site strongly emphasise using Facebook connect to have your say.

With the online edition of the Leeds Student paper there has been a gap between issues over Christmas. In some cases it looks like this has meant the spammers have moved into the comment thread, with a story about Mephedrone being swamped with comments pushing websites selling the stuff. At the time I took the screengrabs, the spam had been up for a week.

Thanks to a site-wide comment sidebar, these must be gaining plenty of Googlejuice, as they are appearing on virtually every page of the site, and URLs within comments are not nofollow.

An interesting feature, although seemingly with little take-up of voting, was the 'Big Debate'. This replicates the format of a debating society online. After an initial setting out of the premise, the page is split between a 'for' and 'against' position, and the users get to vote on who has carried the day.

Conclusions

This has been a somewhat whistle-stop tour round various student newspaper websites. One of the obvious conclusions to draw is that the proficiency of digital news publishing varies greatly from title to title, whether it is running a large website like Beaver Online at the LSE, or simply putting up digital facsimiles of the print product like The Demon. Examples like a stagnant Twitter feed at Salford, or the spam comments appearing on Leeds Student, also illustrate that it is sometimes a lot easier to set something up on the web, than it is to keep it maintained. Overall though I was impressed with the professional look and feel of several of the larger sites, and I found that most of them used a very sensible set of navigational categories, making it easy to differentiate between news reporting and 'features'.

Next...

As I mentioned on Wednesday, this exercise is the first of a couple of series of posts looking at how people currently going through university or taking journalism and media courses are approaching digital news publishing. Later this month I'll be looking at some of the trends I have been observing through following the blogs of a selection of current journalism students.

links for 2010-02-04

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:06:52 +0000

Martin Belam | formspring.me

It's the new thing! Ask me anonymous questions! Or just email me directly from a sockpuppet address and achieve the same thing!

(tags: formspring martinbelam)

http://www.formspring.me/currybet

Council newspaper - Waltham Forest - WhatDoTheyKnow

According to this FOI response, Waltham Forest Council's newspaper is budgeted to cost £629,000 in 2009/10 - £86k on salaries, and over £500k on distribution.

(tags: walthamforestcouncil foi whatdotheyknow)
Does web addiction cause depression? | NHS Choices

I don't know. I was too melancholy to get to the end of the article...

(tags: nhschoices internet addiction lamegags)
In favour of freedom of expression and pluralism, but… » Newspaper Innovation

"Marina Solodkin, a member of the opposition Kadima party in the Israel parliament Knesset wants to limit the free distribution of newspapers to no more than a year". Interesting, in the UK it is a knee jerk response to say that because the BBC is giving news away for free, the industry can't make money from it. It seems that for some people in Israel, it is the free newspapers that are causing the problem.

(tags: newspapers freenewspapers israel)
Sun is not happy with the defence green paper and the slippery French | Thoughts of Nigel

More bile about the French from The Sun.

(tags: france thesun)
What Are the Universal Principles that Guide Journalism? | Martin Moore | MediaShift Idea Lab

"We've identified 10 themes that we think characterize many journalism statements of principle. We'd really like some feedback on whether these are right, if ten is too many, if there are any big themes missing, and which ones have most relevance to the web."

(tags: ethics hnews journalism)

Tomorrow's newsmakers today - Student newspaper online review: Part 2

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:55:59 +0000

With my keen interest in the future of news, I've an interest in the people who will be producing the news in the future. Yesterday I started a series of blog posts looking at the digital incarnations of various student newspapers around the UK.

Furthest from the sun...

The websites were not without problems, even the best looking of them. Pluto Online at UCLAN uses Wordpress as the back-end CMS, and has a very crisp design feel to it. They are using the Arthemia theme by Michael Jubel.

I particularly liked the use of a secondary navigation underneath the main items on the homepage, which highlights some of the key content.

Using Wordpress gives the team at UCLAN easy access to some modern new online design patterns. For example, they employ a tag cloud on the right-hand side of their homepage. Over the years I've gradually come to the conclusion that the value of a tag cloud is not so much navigational for the users - although it does provide an overall 'information scent' about the site. It is more useful in SEO terms of having a keyword rich set of deep-links to important content.

The footer of Pluto Online isn't taken up with the usual graveyard of worthy but dull links to privacy policies and copyright notices. Instead, it is used for the 'zeitgeist' of what is happening on the site - most viewed, most commented and most recent.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to explore much of the site beyond the homepage. When I viewed it on January 13th, using Safari on a Mac, the main navigation on the site didn't work for me. Clicking a link changed the URL and appeared to reload the page, but the content remained the same. It was the same when I checked yesterday.

Online reproduction

There is a joke in here somewhere about students only being interested in reproduction, but I noticed a significant trend towards simply putting a facsimile of the entire print edition online, using a variety of technologies.

The Demon, at De Montfort University in Leicester, for example, uses the Issuu platform for their digital edition.

At Staffordshire University, the magazine produced by the OMG Media group is placed online using Scribd.

Salford Student Direct, meanwhile, relies simply on the tried and trusted PDF format.

Whilst I am pleased to see these student papers experimenting with different publishing technologies, it does have one drawback. If I want to search for, or link to, Amy Seabrook's piece about tanning addiction in The Demon, it is trapped inside the digital print format. There is no unique URL. Increasingly as young journalists and writers rely on having a digital portfolio as they move into the workplace, this may prove to be a disadvantage.

Next...

In the final part of this series, I'll be looking a little bit at uses of social media by student newspapers, and some of the common pitfalls of owning a website that they can fall into.

Tomorrow's newsmakers today - Student newspaper online review: Part 1

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:25:02 +0000

Over the last few months I've been involved in several projects looking at the future of news and journalism skills, whether that is has been the Linked Data summit and London meet-up, or the Meld project at UCLAN. It has made me curious about the digital journalists currently going through our universities, and so over the next few weeks I'll be publishing some posts reflecting my research in this area.

I'll be looking at some of the trends I've seen in blogs by journalism and media students, and I've got some great Q&A interviews with people who have recently left academia and started working in the news industry. I'm starting though with a look at the online manifestations of student newspapers.

I must point out at the beginning that student newspapers at a University can originate from several different sources - a media society at the Student Union for example, as well as University departments. Contributing to a student newspaper doesn't necessarily mean you want a career in journalism - after all I was in the sci-fi society at Uni and I didn't end up working as a Doctor Who monster. Although there is still time...

With my "voice of the user" hat on, I haven't worried too much about investigating the production structure behind the papers. Instead I have focussed on looking at some of the positive and negative user experiences of trying to keep up to date with student university news online.

When student news goes national

One aspect of this was that often the news on the Student Union website was not the same as the news produced by the Student Union. As an example, LSE Student Union site has an online news feed, mostly concerned with the minutiae of administering a student union. The LSE also has the entirely separate Beaver Online site that accompanies the printed Beaver newspaper.

The LSE Student Union site actually had a very interesting dynamic news navigation feature. The top horizontal 'Latest News' link acts more like an RSS 'live bookmark' in a browser, rather than having the more traditional static list of sub-sections.

The Beaver is the output of the union's media society. The LSE has recently been surrounded by controversy over the views of Reza Pankhurst. The Beaver obtained a statement from Reza, and had it running under a 'breaking news' strap, which I thought was a really good use of the online medium.

It is interesting to note that the reach of the printed paper, given away free on campus every Thursday, is very niche and time-limited. The online presence of the student paper allows a story with national interest to compete on a level playing field with the national press in terms of digital distribution, in a way that it never could have done before.

Manchester through the time machine

University of Manchester Student Union is another example with a very different online news operation for the union itself and 'student news'. The SU site had a fresh bright and breezy look to their site, with a pleasingly retro 80's cassette deck hogging the masthead.

Student Direct is the newspaper for Manchester students. Amongst the sections is a specialist area from media & technology, including website and games reviews. Opinion pieces, especially around the divisive issue of Manchester getting a "Men's Society" generate pretty active comment threads.

One of the nicest features was a site map, that linked back to previous incarnations of the site, so it was possible to trace the development of the web design over the years.

Next...

In the next part of this series I'll be looking at features in online student newspapers from Preston, Leicester, Salford and Staffordshire.

links for 2010-02-02

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:06:48 +0000

What is 'Information Architecture'? | Martin Belam | Inside Guardian

"Telling people at parties that you are an 'Information Architect' generally leads to blank looks all round. Here is a brief overview of 'the art and science of organising websites'."

(tags: informationarchitecture insideguardian martinbelam guardian)
Martin Belam Talks with Talis » Nodalities

"In this Nodalities Podcast, I talk with blogger and Guardian information architect Martin Belam. Martin has an interest in Linked Data, and an interesting perspective on where it fits in with News, both as a tool for journalism and research and as a resource for the industry."

(tags: linkeddata #linkeddata nodalities martinbelam podcast talis)
Search Patterns: Design for Discovery | Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender

"Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe". The website of the book.

(tags: search ux design ia usability petermorville)
69 Love Songs, Illustrated | How F***ing Romantic

Ongoing project to illustrate every one of The Magnetic Field's 69 Love Songs. How f***ing awesome.

(tags: magneticfields awesome 69lovesongs music)
A paywall nobody will notice – because it comes bundled with your satellite TV | Peter Preston | Media | The Observer

Especially if they do that sneaky thing where they give it to you for nothing for a month and then you forget to cancel it, which is how come I now have ESPN at home...

(tags: paywall newspapers observer peterpreston bskyb)
Isthmian programmes of the past (Part 2) | The Cold End

Great scanned images of a beautifully typed up match programme from 70s non-league football, which mentions Walthamstow Avenue in passing

(tags: isthmian nonleaguefootball football footballprogrammes walthamstowavenue)
Scott Trust Technology bursaries

"The Scott Trust Ltd, owner of Guardian Media Group plc, is offering two bursaries to assist students who face financial difficulty in attaining the necessary qualifications needed to pursue a career in software development for the web."

(tags: guardianmediagroup scotttrust education)

'What is information architecture?' on Inside Guardian, and talking with Talis

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:41:41 +0000

No big blog post from me today, but you can get your regular fix of currybetdotnet related stuff elsewhere.

On the Inside Guardian blog I've published the first of a loosely linked three part series of posts about what I do at guardian.co.uk. This post asks the question 'What is Information Architecture?', and gives a very broad brush-stroke introduction to the concept.

The next two parts will have a look at what I believe information architecture means specifically in the context of a news website like guardian.co.uk, and give a more detailed view of the wireframes and research process that went into the design of the World Government Data section of The Guardian's Data Store.

I'm also featured this week in the Nodalities blog from Talis. I've been talking a lot recently about 'Linked Data', both here and on guardian.co.uk, and I'm in further conversation on the topic in 'Martin Belam Talks with Talis'. The podcast features an interview with me by Zach Beauvais, and covers my thoughts on where Linked Data fits with news, both as a tool for journalism and research, and as a resource for the industry.

links for 2010-02-01

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:06:42 +0000

Beatbloggers recruited for Guardian Local project | Sarah Hartley | guardian.co.uk

"Tom Allan, Hannah Waldram and John Baron [were] based at the Guardian's offices in Kings Place [last] week to undergo training and will be starting work on their beats of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds respectively from next week. The Local blogs will be launched during the first half of this year although no dates have been confirmed."

(tags: guardian blogging newspapers hyperlocal beatblogging sarahhartley)
Togo banned from next two Africa Cups of Nations after pulling out of Angola | Football | guardian.co.uk

Has there ever been a more despicable and wrong-headed decision by a sporting authority than CAF's move to punish Togo for being the victims of terrorism? It is comparable to the idea that the IOC might have banned Israel and Egypt from the 1976 and 1980 Olympics for withdrawing their teams after the terrorist atrocity at Munich in 1972. An utter disgrace.

(tags: togo caf terrorism africacupofnations guardian)
Caf decision over Togo makes no sense | Piers Edwards’s Blog | BBC

As Piers makes clear here, it seems that all along the main concern of the CAF leadership has been the logistical fall-out from the terrorist attack, not the emotional one.

(tags: togo caf football africacupofnations bbc)
Various commentators on the iPad and accessibility :: ia play

"After some of the frustations with the accessibility of the iPhone when first launched, I wondered what people were saying about the accessibility of the iPad. There’s not masses of commentary yet and doesn’t seem to be any from anyone with any first hand experience (unsurprisingly). This didn’t stop abledbody being unimpressed with the accessibility of the announcement"

(tags: apple ipad iaplay karenloasby accessibility)
Shades of Gray: Thoughts on Sketching | Semantic Foundry

Excellent article looking at the difference between big 'D' and little 'd' design - and why sketching is such a valuable tool. Increasingly, I find I mostly want to take photographs of my preferred sketch outcome and show people that, rather than break out the computer toolkit.

(tags: process wireframes ux sketch semanticfoundry)
Uberblic.org Release » Georgi Kobilarov

"It’s been a very interesting year of R&D work for me. In early 2009 I had the idea for a linked data integration platform, capable of importing and mapping all of the publicly available data sets in the Linked Data cloud into a single repository, represented in a coherent ontology, reconciled and accessible through central APIs. What started out as an idea a year ago now became reality. Today, we have released uberblic.org, a service for integrating the web of data."

(tags: georgikobilarov uberblic linkeddata)

Page Three plugs 3D

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:38:52 +0000

No great surprise today that The Sun (Prop: R. Murdoch) managed to turn Sunday's 3-1 Manchester United-Arsenal scoreline into a front page plug for the new Sky TV 3D service (Prop: R. Murdoch).

I was more impressed to see that Stacey, 20 from Plymouth, had an opinion on the polarised light that made it happen...

Day of the Triffids: How long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:55:47 +0000

When a new TV version of Day Of The Triffids was announced, I wondered how they'd deal with the fact that the Internet and mobile phones had revolutionised person-to-person contact since John Wyndham wrote the novel. Indeed, I began to wonder if, in the land of the blind, the man who already knew how to use the web with JAWS and LYNX might be king. Or at least whether those who had been blind already would now have an enhanced 'first mover' advantage when it came to looting and protecting themselves.

In the end, the new adaptation had a line from the Jo Playton character quite early on, bemoaning that she had no mobile signal, but there was no mention of any residual Internet usage. As the ARPANET origins of the web were in part designed to thwart a cataclysmic attack on the infrastructure of the US, I began to wonder how long the mobile phone network and Internet would last in a world where nearly everybody had been struck blind.

I've asked around a few of my more knowledgeable techie friends, and opinion varied from a quite optimistic few weeks, to a pessimistic less than a couple of hours. On the assumption that major datacentres would trip over onto some backup power when the national grid failed, and that some ISPs and mobile networks would also have resilience, the key issue seemed to be whether you would still be able to get power into all of the links along the chain. And whether some newly blinded sysadmin had inadvertently pulled all of the cables out of their sockets.

It also got me thinking about broadcast continuity for news services on the web. There is a well established tradition of radio and TV broadcasters preparing for a doomsday scenario - indeed I seem to recall that the BBC archive in Windmill Road was capable of playing out directly to the broadcast chain so the nation could be entertained with morale boosting repeats in the event central London was wiped out in a nuclear attack. In one of Wyndham's other 'cosy catastrophe' novels, "The Kraken Wakes", radio broadcasts from the EBC are a key part of the narrative, but unlike in the recent adaptation, I don't recall TV or radio playing much of a role in the novel of "Day Of The Triffids".

So, what would digital era newspapers do in this kind of scenario? Would staff, sighted or not, still be able to access their CMS to publish emergency information for the public? Even if they could, would anyone be able to access it? In short, if the "Day of the Triffids" unfolded today, how long would the Internet survive, and could you still publish news on it?

links for 2010-01-29

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:06:33 +0000

IFPI insults Spain to make some sort of point | No Rock And Roll Fun

"Their main worry seems to be less that Spain is turning into a cultural wasteland anyway, and more that they won't have any material to flog off in Latin America. Did Rob Wells really think through a complaint that his company's flooding of one country's market was reducing the flow of material he wants to use to flood other countries with? If Spain was turning into a cultural desert, isn't that good news for Latin America's homegrown artists?"

(tags: spain piracy ifpi norockandrollfun)
Inbetween Days cover in iPad video | Chain Of Flowers

IMHO the single most important snippet of info about the iPad yet..."Just started watching the promotional video about new Apple iPad and at 01:15, there's a piano interpretation (by Ben Folds) of Inbetween Days in the background".

(tags: thecure apple ipad chainofflowers lovely)
Making things with data.gov.uk - Part 1 | The Guardian Open Platform | guardian.co.uk

"The Guardian has long been interested in the availability of public data, both as a raw material for reuse, to empower more active and informed citizenry, to improve transparency of government and as a public right. There's a lot of key information within data.gov.uk which is of interest to our journalists and readers, so to begin to understand how to unlock it we decided to build a simple app based on Government data and data collated within our own Guardian Data Store which allows you to inspect lots of different quality metrics about schools and education in your local area"

(tags: guardian linkeddata openplatform christhorpe sparql)
Guardian website attracts nearly 37 million monthly unique users | Media | guardian.co.uk

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African Cup of Nations online coverage review: Part 4 - British and American online newspapers

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:55:31 +0000

I started this series looking at some of the British press coverage in print of the African Cup of Nations, and today I wanted to look a little bit further at online coverage in the main papers.

My impression - and this is an unscientific one - is that there has been more coverage of the tournament than in previous years. I think this is in part because it allows news organisations to gear up for covering another football tournament in Africa this year, and in part because, viewed through the prism of the English Premier League, for a British audience, there are a lot more familiar star names on show than usual.

Daniel Finkelstein on the domestic impact of the tournament

One of the most interesting articles I saw was in The Times sport section during the group stages. Daniel Finkelstein used maths and science to illustrate how having players away in Angola might impact on English clubs in terms of points gained and points lost.

I found it a fascinating read, and an interesting way of calculating the individual contribution to a team's point tally over the course of a season. I wish I'd thought of this approach during my Championship Manager playing days!

Sadly, the piece didn't quite work as well online as it did in print, as the initial image shown with the digital version of the article was cropped to remove the scale, making the meaning somewhat esoteric. Well worth reading nonetheless.

You are your data

One interesting thing that the tournament highlighted was the extent to which newspaper websites are only as good as their data providers. The Guardian, where I work, was a classic example. Although covering the afternoon matches with minute-by-minute commentary, if you checked our live scores and fixtures page, there was often no evidence that the tournament was taking place at all.

This was true elsewhere. On the 19th January, The Times fixture widget featured the exciting news that Yemen were playing Bahrain in a friendly, but made no mention of Ghana's critical Group B showdown in the group affected by Togo's disqualification.

The Telegraph also had a fixture list that was purely domestic.

The Mail had considerable coverage from Angola showcased on their football index, but again, their fixture widget excluded the details of the games due to be played in Africa.

In all these cases, I'm sure this wasn't an editorial decision to sideline the games, but the consequence of having a data supply that didn't include the fixtures, and not having the ability or the contractual flexibility to add extra matches into the presentation of that data.

African-American newspaper coverage

With this series I also surveyed a range of papers aimed at the African-American market, an area of the web I've not really looked at before, but I found that 'soccer' coverage was beyond scarce. In fact, it was non-existent on the 20 or so sites I looked at.

Some, like The Baltimore Times didn't cover sports at all. Some, like the Tennessee Tribune were very much a local concern - although I was heartened to see the paper declare "NOTE: site is best viewed in Mozilla Firefox. click here for free download".

Whilst I appreciate that 'soccer' is not a mainstream sporting interest in the US, I still found it strange that the African continent's biggest sporting event being attacked by terrorists didn't seem to merit a flicker of interest from the African-American press.

Next...

The next major event in the sporting calendar that I'll be looking at the digital coverage of is the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in February.