September 2008 Archives
September 30, 2008
Take-away facts and quotes from the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam - Part 1
Over the weekend I've been in Amsterdam attending the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit. It was held at the Tuschinski Theatre, which was a simply amazing venue. Despite a couple of schedule clashes - including missing a much anticipated presentation by Deanna Marbeck and Silver Oliver because it coincided with my own session - I got to see a great selection of presentations. Here are some of my take-away facts and quotes from the morning of day one. Keynote...
September 29, 2008
Goodbye Google Eye
"Oh goodbye google eye... Goodbye goodbye goodbye google eye" No, not a reaction to news that Google's Street View Spycams have been banished from Britain, but a chunk of lyrics from a 1960s hit called "Google Eye" that I stumbled upon the other day. Written by John D. Loudermilk it was recorded in the UK by The Nashville Teens, and came out in 1964 on the Decca label, catalogue number F12000. The song is about search in a roundabout way...
September 28, 2008
Currybetdotnet recent comments round-up 2008-09-28
Earlier this year I wrote a post about ways of promoting the use of comments on your blog and getting better exposure for the comments people leave. That post is now a total honeypot for comment spam, thanks to the way it ranks on Google for the phrase 'Please waste my time and fill my blog with dull and unimaginative fake comments signed by an SEO or real estate company' or some combination of words which seem to have that...
September 27, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring social media success
Over the last week I've been publishing a series of articles looking at the social media performance of the websites belonging to some 24 hour news channels, including CNN, the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Euronews and France 24. The results have been derived from a thirty day study I carried out in July and August 2008, taking half-hourly snapshots of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz to look for prominent media URLs....
September 26, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring the social media success of Russia Today, Euronews and France 24
This week's series of posts on currybetdotnet have been looking at the performances of 24 hour news channel websites like CNN, BBC News, Sky News and Al Jazeera on social media websites. Today I wanted to look at 3 other stations that featured as part of my social media survey - Russia Today, Euronews and France 24. Russia Today on Reddit During the course of the month's study I only saw content from the Russia Today website on five...
September 25, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring Al Jazeera's success with social media
This week I've been examining the social media success of the website belonging to some major 24 hour news television stations. So far I've looked at impressive performances from the BBC and CNN, each with over 300 links going popular across 8 services during the course of a month. Yesterday I looked at a more modest performance by Sky News, and today it is the turn of the English language version of Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Newsvine During my study...
September 24, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring Sky News' success with social media
During July and August I collected 3,500+ popular stories from media sites that appeared on the front pages of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz. This week I've been looking at how 24 hour news channel websites fared during that study - so far covering CNN and the BBC. Today I wanted to look at the biggest domestic rival to the BBC on television, Sky News. Digg The total number of Sky News links becoming...
September 23, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring the BBC's success with social media
During July and August I conducted a major study of how media URLs were represented on the popular pages of social bookmarking services like Digg and StumbleUpon. This week I've been concentrating on how the websites of 24 hour news channels fared. Yesterday I started with CNN, who were the most successful of the networks I measured. Today it is the turn of the BBC News website. Although it did not generate as many social bookmarking links as The...
September 22, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring CNN's success with social media
During the course of July and August I set up a project to monitor the performance of major media sites on social bookmarking and link sharing services. Every 30 minutes I took snapshots of the front pages or 'recently popular' pages of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz. I then extracted from that the popular URLs from a range of newspaper and television channel websites. You can read about the results for British newspapers in...
September 21, 2008
Will last.fm ever ask for the last time?
I love last.fm. You love last.fm. Everybody loves last.fm. It is a cool poster child for the Web 2.0 generation, and the fact that they built their business model on avoiding paying streaming royalties in the UK as much as possible is neither here nor there to most people. But... ...installing the application on your Windows XP PC can be really sucky. The problem is that the Last.fm application seems to pay no attention to the account settings on the...
September 20, 2008
My Euro IA Summit plans
This time next weekend I shall be preparing to give my presentation at the 2008 Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam: "Taking the 'Ooh!' out of Google - Getting site search right for news". The event is being held in the Tuschinski Theatre, which should be an experience. I'll be posting a few notes from the event here, and also doing a more thorough write-up for the Free Pint stable of publications who put together the FUMSI magazine that I contribute...
September 19, 2008
The impact of duplicate content on social media success for newspapers
On Monday I published an e-book entitled 'Measuring UK newspaper success with social media'. This featured the results of a study which captured 3,500+ URLs from 50+ media websites that proved popular across 8 social media and link sharing services. I've also been blogging about some other results from the study, concerning local newspaper and freesheet content. Today I wanted to look at the impact duplicate content publishing has on social media, and search engine, success. Duplicate content 'Duplicate...
September 18, 2008
Measuring This Is Plymouth's success with Fark
This week I've been looking at UK newspaper success on social media sites, following a survey I carried out in July and August. So far I've published an e-book covering 12 national titles, and blogged about the successes and failures of Metro, This Is London, and This Is Local London. I was looking for URLs containing the phrase 'thisis' in the domain name, in order to spot whether any of the UK's local newspaper content became popular on the...
September 17, 2008
Measuring London newspaper success with social media
On Monday I published an e-book entitled 'Measuring UK newspaper success with social media'. This featured some of the results of a study which captured 3,500+ popular URLs from 50+ media websites across 8 social media and link sharing services. As well as the e-book, I've been blogging about the results of my survey, and yesterday I looked at some of the content from the Metro free newspaper that was successful on social media sites. Today I wanted to...
September 16, 2008
Measuring Metro's success with social media
On Monday I published an e-book entitled "Measuring UK newspaper success with social media". This featured some of the results of a study which captured 3,500+ popular URLs from 50+ media websites across 8 social media and link sharing services. It concentrated on the performances of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, News Of The World, The Scotsman, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. Often, when I post about...
September 15, 2008
Measuring UK newspaper success with social media
It seems these days that the majority of mainstream media websites on both sides of the Atlantic, whether print or television based, have littered their online design with icons begging users to Digg this, StumbleUpon that, let people know they've Reddit, or describe it as Fark. I wanted to know whether adding this rash of buttons actually drives the audience to bookmark and share content, or whether users do it based on the strength of the content and news brand,...
September 14, 2008
Nostalgic decorations at ULU
It seems at the moment that no trip to the UK is complete for me unless I manage to get to see Idlewild. In October last year we managed to catch them outside London, during a day trip which involved a ghost walk of our own devising around Haunted Cambridge. On our most recent trip back to Blighty, we saw them during July at ULU in London. In a twist on the usual gig format, they actually supported themselves. They...
September 13, 2008
$num XL passengers stranded somewhere
It is a commonly held belief that arithmatic in the UK has declined following years of dumbing down, A-level grade inflation, and Play School being replaced by Tikkabilla. There was a great example of how random numbers have become in the Chipwrapper news feed yesterday. BBC News: Thousands stranded by XL collapse Guardian: 10,000 XL passengers must pay to fly home Daily Express: 85,000 holidaymakers stranded as XL holiday firm collapses Daily Mail: 300,000 British tourists hit by XL collapse...
September 12, 2008
A painless way to file your tax return
Very often when I'm writing about some online application or web site or the other, I'm making a list of things that could be improved. It is always much nicer to be able to write something completely in praise of a system - in this case the HMRC's online tax self-assessment application. Well, I can't completely praise the system, since it is designed to part me with my hard-earned money. And you know they are only going to waste it...
September 11, 2008
Insert your own lame "It's the end of the world as we know it" gag here
I've never seen so much global excitement about particle physics as there was yesterday, but I think Al Jazeera must take the prize for playing up the sensational angle of the story on their homepage. For most of the day, the whole complex area of sub-atomic particles was reduced to the following headline and strapline: "Scientists start 'big bang machine' - critics fear the experiment could go wrong and destroy the earth." The alarmism was neatly punctured by the very...
September 10, 2008
So far so good...no bing-bang at the LHC according to ERT
I know that the Large Hadron Collider has suddenly made physics exciting and sexy again, but it looks like in their rush to publish the translations of today's news, ΕΡΤ skipped over the subs desk. It's actually the prospect of the "big ban" further down the article that worries me more - just how big is this ban, and what will it encompass?...
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - England
England started their attempt to qualify for the 2010 South Africa World Cup at the weekend, with an away game against Andorra. Tonight, they face what is expected to be by far their toughest test in the Group 6, an away match in Zagreb, Croatia. Although I can't say I fancy the Ukraine, Belarus or Kazakhstan away matches much either. During the course of the qualifiers, I'm going to be reviewing the websites of the FAs opposing England. However,...
September 9, 2008
"The year 2525: Were Zager & Evans right?"
Every time I heard the Zager & Evans 'classic' "In The Year 2525" as a kid, I instantly imagined myself transported into the glorious future of jet-packs and hover-cars that I was so cruelly promised, and then, as an adult, denied. Listening it to it again the other day, I began to wonder if we could yet assess how accurate Zager & Evans' predictions of the future were... "In the year 2525, If man is still alive, If woman can...
September 8, 2008
No news is usually good news - unless it is the Chipwrapper feed
Those of you who rely on a live RSS bookmark of the headlines from Chipwrapper might have found the last couple of weeks to be slow news weeks. In fact, for some of the time, it even appeared to be a no news week, as the main RSS feed failed. I've vaguely ascribed the blame to a combination of Yahoo! Pipes, the Daily Mail and the Express. In fact, anything pretty much except my own shoddy Perl ;-) What appears...
September 7, 2008
Google error reports - non-geeks need not apply!
I got a '502 Server Error' page when using Google search the other day. After about five minutes of running around like a headless chicken screaming at the top of my voice "OMG! THERE IS NO GOOGLE! WTF! THE INTERWEBZ IS BROKEN!" I actually read the message, and it gave me a good chuckle. I've got this mental image of someone from Google's PR / customer service / marketing department very earnestly sitting down and talking to the engineers and...
September 6, 2008
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Andorra
England begin their attempt to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa today, with an away game against Andorra, held at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona. Cue the "there are no easy matches in international football" cliche. England will be trying to qualify from Group 6 which, alongside Andorra, features Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It has all the hallmarks of a group which England will struggle in, and which they will be berated for by a...
September 5, 2008
More on the Daily Mail and my comments about their 'suicidal five year olds' article
If you are interested in newspapers, the Internet and blogging, you can't have missed the growing blogstorm around the Daily Mail, following an article by Julie Moult that was rather ill-informed about the web. I don't need to pick over the bones of the story itself, as it has been covered in plenty of other places, but I did want to pass comment because my name has been mentioned a couple of times in the course of it. The piece...
September 4, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 4
I've been reviewing the recent re-design of Mirror.co.uk. I've been impressed with some things, like the organised site map in the footer of the page, a forgiving tag 404 page, and the RSS feeds of tags. I've been less impressed with the gambling strip design, colour-coding and lax taxonomy. Yesterday I looked at some aspects of The Mirror's site search. Mixed horoscope feeds The Mirror has made nearly all of their online content available via RSS, including the full content...
September 3, 2008
Mac users very unwelcome at the Google Chrome download party
The blogosphere is awash with early reviews of Google's Chrome browser, but, as a Mac user, I've been struggling to get hold of it - and not just because the Mac version is still under development. Initially, Google detected that I am in Greece, and so presented me a Greek welcome page for the Chrome download - full marks there for product localisation at launch. However, once I switched to English I found that Google had also detected I was...
The Mirror re-design review: Part 3
Over the last couple of days I've been reviewing The Mirror's recent re-design. I've looked at some of the good and bad in the navigation, and examined their use of tags. Today I'm looking at some of the aspects of the site search design. Lack of detail I noted a distinct lack of detail in the way that The Mirror presents search results. In Amsterdam in September I'll be giving a Euro IA presentation about the ways that you can...
September 2, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 2
Yesterday I started a review of the recently designed Mirror.co.uk site. I was impressed with the way they had organised links to content in a site map at the footer of the page, but less than enamoured of some over-enthusiastic colour-coding, and a 'gambling strip' across the top of every page. Today I wanted to look at the site's use of tags. Story tags The Mirror applies a selection of tags to each story to provide lateral and related navigation....
September 1, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 1
Earlier this year The Daily Mirror re-vamped their website, giving it much more of a visual-led magazine feel. At the time I didn't get the chance to do a review, but as I recently reviewed the re-design of The Telegraph, I thought I would have a look at how the new Mirror design has settled in. Old Mirror design New Mirror design Global navigation and mouse-over As seems to be the fashion at the moment, The Mirror has gone for...