October 2006 Archives
October 31, 2006
Illustrator Jhinuk Sarkar launches Paper-Fig.com
Another project I have been working on which has recently launched is the website for London based illustrator Jhinuk Sarkar. (Some of you might recall that I DJed at the launch of her exhibition "Parts of the Adult-Kid-Me-In-You" at the Pool Bar in Shoreditch back in 2005). She was recently commissioned to produce some illustrative work from Time Out magazine in London. Her new site, which I have assisted a little bit with building and am hosting, Paper-Fig.com, features a...
October 30, 2006
High rankings for Wikipedia doesn't mean the net has been hi-jacked by teenagers
Last month Sam Vaknin, Ph.D., wrote a piece explaining how he felt Google's ranking had changed over the last year, and how "the more incoming links from MySpace a Website has - the higher it is placed in the search results" Titled "Google-Wikipedia-MySpace - How Teenagers Hijacked the Internet", his complaint is that Google, Wikipedia and MySpace form what he calls "a pernicious feedback loop", distorting the natural order of search engine results in favour of content made and used...
October 27, 2006
Writing headlines to whip up a frenzy of comments about kids
You have to hand it to the Daily Mail, which certainly knows how to write headlines online to whip up a storm. Today's prime example is their story "Outcry as brother and sister get ASBO for playing in the street" The thing is, it simply doesn't appear to be true. By the time you click through to the article, the assertion "get ASBO" has already been watered down to "face Asbo" in the slightly less dramatic "Siblings face Asbo for...
Blog censorship in Greece ahead of the IGF forum in Athens
Some disturbing news from Greek bloggers has emerged this week. In Greece of 2006 we have the first sue against a site that (through rss) published some satirical posts (from a blog) about a famous person. You see, in my country WE ARE NOT FREE. The owner of the site was handcuffed and driven to prison for one night and now he is free until the day he testifies in court. His computer with all his work was taken away...
October 26, 2006
Are corporations always wrong to engage with the "grey" market?
Sony's engagement with the "grey" market surrounding their games hardware has been in the news a lot over the last couple of weeks. First there was the anouncement that the corporation was intending to do everything possible to keeps the PS3 games console out of Europe until the official launch scheduled for March 2007. Then there were the revelations by the Lik-Sang website that Sony staff in Europe had previously purchased "grey" market Sony products from them. Sony's official line...
October 25, 2006
Sniffing out bias and censorship on the BBC News site
A mail on the BBC's backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list yesterday pointed me to News Sniffer. It is a site that monitors online news output to detect revision and bias. At the moment it has two main sections - "Watch Your Mouth" monitoring the BBC News message boards, and "Revisionista" monitoring edits to output on the BBC, Independent and Guardian website. I'm always intrigued by systems that mix automation with human input, and the News Sniffer also allows users to "recommend" revisions...
October 24, 2006
Nine years on and still we wait for a timid reform of the House of Lords
The House of Lords must be reformed. As an initial, self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future, the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute. This will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative. The legislative powers of the House of Lords will remain unaltered. The system of appointment of life peers to...
Getting content onto Britain's sex beasts' mobile phones
I wonder if it was just me who found it a rather strange juxtaposition on The Sun's online site today, promoting "Page 3 Stunners on your mobile" on their story "30,000 fiends lurk in pervs' UK", next to a helpful map of where, as the article puts it, "Britain's sex beasts lurk"....
October 23, 2006
Some six year olds are not very good at geography
The "finding" that 1 in 5 UK school children can't point to the UK on a map is currently whizzing around the internet and being reported as far afield as Australia - "Q: Where is the United Kingdom? A: You're standing in it " - and India. Funnily enough, most people don't seem to be reporting it as "commercial company selling geography magazine aimed at children releases headline grabbing statistic which suggests parents need to buy their children geographic...
Greta Blue launches web site
One of the things I have been working on over the summer is building and hosting a website for a new company from East London importing Indian made fair trade bedding. They are called Greta Blue. As well as a range of organic cotton bedding, they are also importing a set of fair trade toys and accessories, which are really cute. I didn't realise until working with them that the chemicals used in the production of non-organic cotton were one...
October 20, 2006
The one-way Mary Whitehouse radio experience
I'm a little stuck for entertainment in the guest house I am staying at in Austria. The television can only receive a couple of fuzzy German language channels, and it is so old that I haven't been able to connect the PS2 to it either. I've been relying on some podcasts and downloading some old comedy shows. I've just started listening to the original radio series of The Mary Whitehouse Experience from Radio One, first broadcast in 1989. Most people...
October 19, 2006
Google Talk's latest update doesn't behave gracefully offline
I've griped before about software programs silently updating themselves on my laptop, and then not behaving gracefully when they find I live in an almost always offline world at the moment, and yet again Google Talk is a prime culprit. Last time it updated itself without asking my consent, the Norton software and the Google software on my machine just would not play nicely until one of them got a chance to go online again. That time the honours were...
October 18, 2006
Ignore the #privacy campaign - searching the internet is not a private activity. Period.
There is a new campaign on the internet to make search engines respect a "standard for search engine query privacy". They are targeting Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask, and claim that "If these four search engines accept the #privacy standard, the world will be - literally - a better place". The "Pound Privacy" campaign proposes that any search appended #privacy "should not be tracked by IP or cookie, and should not be made public in keyword tools". Of course, there...
October 17, 2006
Why I, and thousands like me, can't make up the European Year of Workers Mobility Citizen's Panel
A little while ago I wrote about the European Workers' Mobility questionnaire and hotline from ECAS, dealing with the question of how easy it was to move between EU members states for work. Having done work in 3 members states so far this year I was interested in taking part. Last week I got a follow up email, asking me whether I might be willing to participate in the European Year of Workers Mobility Citizen's Panel. It is a...
October 16, 2006
Eurodesk workshop in Budapest
Last week I ran a seminar for the Eurodesk AISBL General Assembly and Eurodesk Network Meeting, which was being held in Budapest. The event took place in Budapest's European Youth Centre. My contribution was billed with my own description, that I would be: talking to them and running exercises to help them develop their understanding of reaching out to a youthful internet audience, on building an international web presence, and in utilising user-centred design principles to improve their online...
Ticketweb Presents: Example Event but different featuring Support
I was looking at the Ticketweb UK site to see if there was anything worth going to when I am next back in the UK, and I found one event that I think I shall probably give a miss: Monday, December 4 at 2:05 PM TICKETWEB PRESENTS: Example Event but different featuring Support at Demo Venue 2 Important info to be printed on ticket. Max 120 characters may be printed on tickets. £0.01-£500.00 Mind you, with tickets from 0.01GBP it...
October 15, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Shopping around
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Shopping around My final piece of advice to you when searching the internet is to shop around. There is a real danger that putting some words into Google will become the be-all and end-all of information retrieval on the web - but there are loads of topic...
October 14, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Easier visual interfaces
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Easier visual interfaces The visual interface to searching on the web hasn't change much since its inception. Either you get one big box where you can type anything into it, or you get lots of complicated boxes where you have to enter specific types of information -...
October 13, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Let the information come to you
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Let the information come to you In the early days of the web you always had to go to sites and check to see if there had been any updates. Recently the advent of RSS has changed all that. Whenever you see these badges on the internet...
October 12, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Optimise your browser for search
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Use a browser optimised for searching Another way to improve your efficiency when searching the web is to use a browser with special searching features built in. The Firefox browser is an open source project that, essentially by word of mouth alone, has gained a foothold in...
October 11, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Yahoo!'s "social search" concept
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Yahoo!'s social approach Yahoo! have taken a slightly different approach to the personalised route taken by Google, which they have termed 'social search'. One of their social web search products is called "MyWeb" This service allows you to 'save' or 'bookmark' URLs, either directly from the search...
October 10, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Google's personal search services
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Personalising your search experience Another interesting variation on standard search offered by Google is Google Co-op. This allows a user to 'subscribe' to a specific search source. When there are results from that source for a specific search, they are displayed at the top of Google's search...
October 9, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Introduction Once upon a time, when the public were searching for information, they would have to carry themselves off to a public library and ask the nice librarian behind the desk to help them look. They'd pull out some typed index cards, and eventually the library user...
October 7, 2006
I'm loving Google's Blogger Web Comments for Firefox extension
Whilst I enjoyed Brian Kelly's talk about Web 2.0 at the AUKML conference, it was one of those occasions where I could sit in the audience and nod sagely, safe in the knowledge that I was probably the only person in the audience who had heard of all of the services he mentioned, and things like the concept of service "mash-ups". However, in conversation during the weekend, Brian did introduce me to something I hadn't encountered before - Google's Blogger...
October 6, 2006
MySpace's teenage audience - up or down?
I sometimes wonder if bloggers and journalists should be sent on some kind of mathematics boot camp before they are allowed to write articles based on statistics. Yesterday comScore put out a press release pointing out that there had been a demographic shift amongst MySpace users in the last year, with the percentage of users in the 12-17 age bracket dropping from 24.7% to 11.9% Cue a slew of articles saying that MySpace was going out of fashion."Those teenagers are...
NEWSPLAN 2000 at the 2006 AUKML conference
One of the talks that I really enjoyed at the AUKML conference the other week in Edinburgh was Cate Newton's presentation about NEWSPLAN 2000 in Scotland. In the end Cate couldn't deliver the talk herself, so one of her colleagues from the NLS gamely stepped in at the last moment. The original NEWSPLAN project was an archiving project around the UK which had been dedicated to preserving the fragile archives of regional and local papers held in libraries around the...
October 5, 2006
The newspapers in the Front Page exhibition don't belong to the British Library
One thing that came out of the talk by Torin Douglas to the AUKML conference in Edinburgh which was news to me, was that whilst exhorting people to attend it before it closes this weekend, he pointed out that the newspapers on display at the British Library's quite fantastic exhibition "Front Page" didn't come from the British Library itself. Apparently their collection of newspapers is too preciously bundled into tight old leather-bound volumes with titles like "The Times, September 1956...
October 4, 2006
Brian Kelly on Web 2.0 at the AUKML Conference in Edinburgh
One of the talks I was particularly looking forward to at the AUKML conference was Brian Kelly's talk on "What can Web 2.0 Offer?". Brian holds the position of "UK Web Focus" which is based at the University of Bath, and he has been a self-confessed 'web enthusiast' since 1993. His role seem primarily to be an evangelist for web technologies, travelling around the UK presenting to different audiences how new technologies can help them. The thrust of his presentation...
October 3, 2006
Blogs and technology in the National Library of Scotland's 'Discover NLS' magazine
Having just spent a weekend with librarians trying to understand how their discipline fits into the digital world, I chuckled when I saw this article on CNet - "Most reliable search tool could be your librarian". The National Library of Scotland in particular is doing a lot to address the challenges that digital media present to the traditional librarian. When I recently toured the library, we were given a pack with lots of information about the services provided, and the...
October 2, 2006
Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins present their search analytics survey results
Earlier this year Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins carried out a survey about search log analysis. They published the results a few weeks ago, but I've only just got round to looking at them myself because of the amount of time I spend offline these days. I was very pleased to see that a couple of my articles had been reccommended by someone or some people as good resources on the topic - How Search Can Help You Understand Your...
October 1, 2006
Using Bloglines to snoop on people's private Gmail
I was astonished on Friday when I was looking at my Gmail account inbox, and accidently hit the 'Subscribe with Bloglines' bookmarklet on my Firefox links toolbar. Bloglines then dutifully put up on the screen a whole series of Atom feeds of other people's Gmail accounts that I could subscribe too. At first, because all of the Atom feeds had been sent through FeedBurner, and the content seemed so spammy, I wondered if it might not have been set up...
YouTube is a neo-Nazi website according to The Independent
Regular readers will be aware that I loathe rubbish journalism which features the internet. This weekend the article that most roused my ire was a piece in The Independent by Tony Paterson headlined "German neo-Nazis to launch their own video news channel". Maybe it is my new setting in Austria that particularly made this grab my attention. Essentially the story is that the German right-wing NDP party are producing news bulletins to promote their point of view, claiming that they...