Recent posts in my Blogging Category

After ten years, this is the last blog post on currybetdotnet.

Sadly/luckily^* for the rest of the world wide web at large I don’t confine my writing just to here. No, sirree. Here are three things I’ve recently had published on other sites…

A thank you post — and list of the most popular items I’ve published this year.

At news:rewired, Seb Ramsay of the Manchester Evening News explained how a rolling news live blog had brought them closer to their audience. Here are my notes from the session.

Billed as a workshop in live blogging, Neil Macdonald’s talk at news:rewired was an emotional look at how the Liverpool Echo had covered the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report. Here are my notes from the session.

I’ve confirmed a line-up of four different training courses that I’m teaching or taking part in early next year. All are open for booking now, and they cover a range of topics from blogging to digital journalism to the fundamentals of UX to the nitty-gritty of responsive IA.

What shall I get my blog for its birthday? On December 24 this year currybetdotnet will be ten years old. That’s quite a long time to have been running a site. What shall I do to celebrate?

In all my time blogging - which is coming up for nearly ten years - I’ve staunchly stuck to the principle that I didn’t accept free gifts in return for editorial. It has been set in stone in my statement of blogging principles. Until today that is. Because when I got offered the chance to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi, I just couldn’t resist. One swift edit of my blogging principles to exclude offers of sexy little electronic kit later, and here we are.

One of the star turns at the Guardian’s London Activate Summit was Matt McAlister in conversation with Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg gave a great insight into how the company is run, in one of those talks that makes you think “Oh yeah, why don’t we all do that?”

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

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

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

Mathew Ingram wrote yet another great post on GigaOm the other day entitled “Yes, blog comments are still worth the effort.” He was responding to what is beginning to seem like a trend for bloggers deciding not to have comments on their site. I’m one of them - and here’s why I need a break from them.

Christmas Eve, incredibly, marks the ninth anniversary of this blog on the web. Here is my now customary annual round-up of the posts that have proved the most popular in the previous twelve months.

Why I’ve closed comments on my blog

Pride comes before a fall. In the wake of the Johann Hari affair, I boasted that as an amateur blogger I never misattribute quotes. Only, four hours later, to be notified that I had done just that the previous day...

Sitting down to write a blog post about the UX Writing workshop we just had in London is a little intimidating. I feel compelled to follow my own rules about having an SEO-friendly headline and a “grabby” opening paragraph, and demonstrate that Cennydd’s talk has improved my writing style. If you can’t spot the “standalone tweetable quote”, or you see me using the passive voice or convoluted sentences, then shoot me down in the comments below...

Outside of the news industry, it sometimes seems insane that we insist on reinventing the wheel and rebuilding tools when there are free alternatives out on the web. Here are five reasons I think we do that.

The final session at news:rewired on Friday was a panel discussing the medium of live blogging, expertly hosted by Marcus Warren from the Telegraph, and featuring my colleague Guardian Blog’s Editor Matt Wells, Anna Doble of Channel 4, and Paul Gallagher of the Manchester Evening News. It was a really good session, with some good natured rivalry between the Telegraph and Guardian on display, and it really felt like the conversation has moved on from “What is live blogging and should we be doing it?” to “How can we use this new uniquely digital media to its best advantage and develop it further”.

I’ve had some great feedback in recent weeks from people on how much they’ve been enjoying the currybetdotnet blog, and lots of questions about how I manage to keep it up. Well, one of the ways I keep up my enthusiasm for blogging is to periodically take a break from it - and I’m well overdue one of my “blogging holidays”, so you can expect this to be the last post for a while.

There was a lovely blog post by Khoi Vinh this week, about the way he thinks blogging and commenting on blogs has changed over recent years. He rightly points out that you can’t extrapolate behaviour across the web from one set of anecdotal evidence. However, his main points, that long-form blogging increasingly feels like a niche activity, and that there seems to be less conversation in the comments on his blog, are how I feel too.

A rare foray into print for me today, where I’m quoted in a Media Guardian article looking at live blogging news on the web. Guardian Blogs Editor Matt Wells wrote the piece, and he asked me a few questions about my views on live blogging to get those quotes. Here they are.

A few people recently have asked me “the secret” of my prolific blogging output, and a recent factor has been using the iA Writer app on my iPad which is enabling me to blog through my commute.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been posting my notes from a couple of sessions at The Guardian where Matt Wells and Andrew Sparrow were talking about how we do blogging on the site. There was some debate about unearthing the first live blogs, where the Edinburgh G8 summit, the 7/7 London bombings, and the fate of Shambo were touted as candidates. Matt also pointed to Leo Hickman’s claim to have been the first blogger on Guardian Unlimited. It prompted me to delve into our digital archive to find the first reference to “weblogs” in print in either The Guardian or The Observer.

At the Guardian we've been having a series of talks looking at digital products and services. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk. Yesterday I posted some of my notes from a talk given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and today my notes are from another session, which featured our key political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

The louse & the flea blog had a post today entitled “The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism” which, somewhat naturally, rather caught my eye.

In recent weeks at the Guardian there have been a series of talks looking at digital products and services. I've given one myself, and also blogged about a talk on software engineering and datajournalism by my colleague Daithí Ó Crualaoich, and the visit of Dr Sue Black to talk about Bletchley Park. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk, given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

If the main shtick of this blog can crudely be reduced to "stuff news organisations and journalists can learn from digital design", then here is the complete opposite, an article about what web designers can learn from journalism.

As I mentioned in my post about comment spam yesterday, offering 'dofollow' links in my blog comments attracts a lot of comment spam. And some of it is amusingly inept. Here is a gallery of some of my favourites...

If you've been running a blog for any length of time, you'll be sure to have come across the phenomena of comment spam. People pimping sex products and pr0n are easy to spot, but there is a whole breed of spammer out there who are rather more subtle. They particularly target blogs which allow them to post links which aren't marked as 'nofollow', making them valuable in the eyes of search engines.

Today is the eighth anniversary of the first currybetdotnet blog post, and in what has become a tradition, here is a list of the ten most popular posts this year.

Not much activity on the blog for the last couple of days as I've been in action elsewhere, posting a couple of articles to the Guardian's website about the top search terms of the year, and a review of the linked data sessions at Online Information.

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about how I ended up with the current stripped down design for the blog. The first comment left underneath suggested the choice isn't universally popular.

Last week Adam Tinworth cited currybetdotnet as an example of a trend he was noticing in stripped down blog design. Here is how I ended up with such a stark and simplistic layout for my articles.

Whilst I am off-grid in a field in Wales at the Green Man Festival, if you are stuck for your regular fix of bloggage, here are the top 12 media and journalism focused posts I've written this year.

I'm going to be taking a blogging holiday during the course of this summer's World Cup in order to finish some presentations, develop a couple of training courses, and make some back-end fixes to the currybetdotnet site. See you after the final...

In the final part of this series looking at the blogging habits of our current crop of journalism students, I look at some trends I identified as being risky or posing ethical questions - blogging about personal faith, and blogging about the business of becoming a reporter.

In the second post of this series looking at blogs written by current journalism students, I examine how choosing a topic that runs to a schedule can help someone to blog regularly.

The first part of a series looking at some of the issues and trends in blogs being written by current journalism students. This post looks at how domain expertise, a good choice of niche topic, commercial potential and a natural blogging voice make a student journalist blogger stand out.

Labour may have said they 'regret' stealing a blogger's photograph in Walthamstow, but that hasn't stopped them having it on prominent display in Stella Creasy's E17 campaign office.

Despite legislating against digital copyright theft recently in the Digital Economy Act, it seems that The Labour Party is not worried about pilfering their election leaflet images from a local Walthamstow blogger.

A visit to the Identity exhibition at The Wellcome Collection was the first time I've seen 'blog comments' appear as part of an exhibition.

As part of the recent redesign process on the currybetdotnet blog, I implemented the 'Value Added News' hNews microformat to provide additional metadata on my articles. Doing so raised some questions that were not just practical about how to implement the format, but philosophical about the nature of the blog itself.

In the final part of this series about my recent blog redesign, I look at how I set the criteria for success, and use the Venn diagram in the top right-hand corner of the banner area to set my content strategy.

In part three of this series looking at the currybetdotnet redesign, I talk about the new 'hub' and 'theme' pages, and what I hope they will achieve.

In the second part of this series looking at the how and why of the recent changes I've made to the site, I'm focusing on the homepage and the demotion of the linklog.

At the beginning of the year I changed the design and information architecture of this blog. This series of posts examines how and why I finally fixed the IA of an IA's blog.

My annual round-up of the posts on currybetdotnet which have attracted the most attention and page views this year.

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