March 2009 Archives
March 31, 2009
Web search at the BBC: Part 5 - The path of least resistance
I've been writing up my recollections of the development, rise and fall of the web search provided by the BBC site. I worked on it in the earlier part of this decade, but in January this year the BBC finally shut the service down. It had never been popular internally. Between 2002 and 2004 the BBCi homepage had web search as one of the main features above the fold. Having the external search service up-front-and-centre in that way was...
March 30, 2009
Web search at the BBC: Part 4 - Glass onion
In recent years the BBC website was also a place where you could, perhaps rather unexpectedly, search the web using the BBC's search service. In January this year it was discontinued, and so I thought it might be a good time to review the development, rise and fall of the service. Today I'm looking at a period when searching the web became one of the dominant features on the BBC's homepage. In splendid isolation in basements in Bush House...
March 29, 2009
Stan Collymore scores with me on Twitter
Part of the recent buzz around Twitter in the UK has been driven by the adoption of the service by celebrities. Some of them have been using it as a pure broadcast medium, but there are also some examples of fantastic audience interaction there, and people who seem to be real naturals with the medium. One of them is Stan Collymore. Since he retired from football he has often been a controversial figure, but I've been totally impressed with the...
March 28, 2009
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Wales
During the course of this World Cup Qualifying campaign, I've been reviewing the Football Association websites of England and their opponents. And when England haven't been involved in competitive action, I've been looking at the websites of the other 'home' nations. So far I've looked at Scotland and Northern Ireland, and today it is the turn of Wales. Wales have a crunch match this afternoon against Finland. Anything other than a win is almost certain to consign the Welsh...
March 27, 2009
Press silence on Alfie Patten DNA test result broken by Google News
Yesterday, The Mirror was reporting a further development in the story of the 13 year old boy named as a father. The initial coverage of this story was a significant factor in boosting The Sun from #5 to #1 in the UK newspaper online charts. Today, The Mirror has pulled the story from their site. It is an interesting test case of whether legal deletions should also cover SEO-orientated keyword stuffed URLs. They might have pulled the story, but I...
Web search at the BBC: Part 3 - Centerfield
The BBC recently shut down the web search option it used to have on bbc.co.uk, and so I thought it might be an appropriate time to look at the rise and fall of searching the web using the BBC. Over the last couple of days I've been looking at some of the user-testing carried out by the Corporation in 2001 prior to launching the service. Photo courtesy of Beatnic At this stage the BBC's New Media department was housed...
March 26, 2009
Web search at the BBC: Part 2 - Over the horizon radar
This year the BBC has withdrawn the Corporation's web search service that I worked on for several years at the turn of the century. Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the history of how it was developed, including some screenshots of design that were user-tested with Flow Interactive in August 2001. A second iteration of testing was carried out a month later, and by now the design of the search results had begun to take a...
March 25, 2009
Web search at the BBC: Part 1 - The beginning is the end is the beginning
"A key part of BBCi's mission has always been to offer a trusted guide to the Web. Over the years we've helped thousands of people to use the Internet through our WebWise training and through our WebGuide to the best sites on the Web. Now, with 80 per cent of those asked believing that current search engines could be better, according to a recent NOP survey, BBCi is developing its role as a trusted guide by launching BBCi Search...
March 24, 2009
Professor Karen Spärck Jones - 'Ada Lovelace Day' blog post
"I think it's very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men." - Professor Karen Spärck Jones Professor Karen Spärck Jones is one of the pivotal figures in the history of the development of the search engine as we know it today. In 1972 she published the paper "A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval" which introduced the concept of 'inverse document frequency'. This is...
March 23, 2009
How not to approach a blogger for PR
One question I often get asked is 'How should PR people go about pitching things to bloggers'. I always suggest that it is important to build a relationship with a blogger, and that is better to approach 10 small blogs who are passionate about your niche, than 100 popular blogs on the off-chance. If you do it badly, you expose yourself to potential brand damage - just like the PR person who sent me an astonishingly poor pitch the other...
March 22, 2009
March 21, 2009
London's abandoned Underground Stations on Google Street View
Abandoned Tube Stations on Street View
Peek at the disused bits of London's Underground that you can see overground using Google Street View
March 20, 2009
The fragile future of newspapers at the British Library
We are used to hearing newspapers described as fragile these days, but usually in the context of their business models, rather than the physical preservation of the artifact. Not so at the British Library last week, where 750 million pages of newspaper were described as "the most fragile" part of their collection by Helen Shenton, Head of Collection Care. It is a problem that makes freesheet ink rubbing off on your hands seem trivial by comparison. Photo courtesy of stevecadman...
March 19, 2009
The future of 'the future' - the British Library and technology
Yesterday I blogged about an event I went to at the British Library called "A building for now and the future: the British Library after 10 years". One of the most interesting aspects for me was the discussion around technology. Photo courtesy of Istvan We take it for granted now that libraries carry a great deal of digital information and services. Indeed, one of the future construction projects mooted for the British Library site is a Digital Research Centre. However,...
March 18, 2009
"Stacks, Readers, Staff" - Building the British Library
I was at a fascinating British Library event last week called "A building for now and the future: the British Library after 10 years". It was a look back at the torturous process by which the new building came to be built. In fact, prior to this government's woeful recent IT record, building the British Library was the text-book example of how not to run a public sector procurement project. Photo courtesy of stevecadman Architect Sir Colin St. John 'Sandy'...
March 17, 2009
The mobile web's penalty shoot-out - Nokia N95 vs iPhone
Last Wednesday Arsenal's Champions League tie against Roma went to penalties - but the real shoot-out for me was in the Crown & Sceptre pub on Foley Street, between @solle's iPhone and my Nokia N95. It was 'London IA in the Pub' night, but Matthew and I were a little distracted by the game. Once it went to extra-time we nearly ducked out to a nearby pub that had Sky, but instead we ended up watching the penalty shoot-out in...
March 16, 2009
Currybet's law - 5 reasons why Doctor Who always crops up in BBC meetings
Currybet's Law
The more BBC staff you put in a meeting room - the more inevitable it becomes that one of them will mention Doctor Who.
March 15, 2009
The long road to the cinema
We recently got given a gift pack of 4 free tickets to go to Odeon Cinemas, which was distributed through WH Smith. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not ungrateful for the present. Our local Odeon costs the best part of £10 to watch a film in a stale-smelling room on a screen not much bigger than a large home cinema system, whilst you pay for popcorn which they must be able to make on a huge margin. So...
March 14, 2009
Wind up the Barclays clockwork robot
We are quite used to 'amusing' failure messages on the web. The Twitter 'Fail Whale' has become a meme in itself, and we are also familiar with characters like the Bloglines plumber. The other day I spotted this online trend escaping from the virtual into the real world. Apparently, if you can't get money out of a Barclays ATM in the UK, it isn't because our banking system has broken, but because their clockwork fifties sci-fi b-movie robot has ground...
March 13, 2009
London IA Mini Conference at The Guardian in April
I'm delighted to be able to blog that on Monday 20th April, The Guardian will be hosting the first 'London IA Mini Conference' at our Kings Place office. It is the start of what I hope will be a series of mini-conferences that allow our London IA group to share knowledge and experience in a setting that is less formal (and less expensive) than a big one day conference, but a little bit more structured than 'IA in the pub'....
March 12, 2009
"An Open BBC?" at Broadcasting House
With my posts over the couple the last couple of days about The Guardian's Open Platform and m.guardian.co.uk, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was going to be wall-to-wall Guardian on currybetdotnet from now on. However, on Tuesday night I was back at one of my old stomping grounds, the BBC, for the event wrapping up Steve Bowbrick's time as the BBC's "open blogger". Although, to be fair, Emily Bell was on the panel, so there is still...
March 11, 2009
The Guardian's Open Platform launch
Yesterday morning I mingled in the Scott Room at Kings Place for the launch of The Guardian's Open Platform. There has been plenty of coverage of it elsewhere, so I don't think I need to re-iterate much beyond the fact that it is a step-change in the way that The Guardian makes content available for re-use on the Internet. Last year I was around for The Guardian's Hack Day, where a rudimentary implementation of the API was available to power...
March 10, 2009
Guardian Open Platform launch trends on Twitter
I'll have more comment about The Guardian's Open Platform launch in due course, but it was very nice to see that despite another incidence of #gfail stealing some of the thunder, both Guardian and Open Platform were trending on Twitter search during this morning's announcement....
Reactions to The Guardian's new mobile site
Last week The Guardian launched a new bespoke mobile version of our website at m.guardian.co.uk. During the same week It was interesting to see that there was still some life left in the should-you-or-shouldn't-you have a specific mobile facing presence. Jakob Nielsen still very much thinks you should. "Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions." Bruce Lawson over at ZDnet disagreed: "He's wrong. Making two...
March 9, 2009
Isn't teenage social networking just the new rock'n'roll?
I was alerted - via Twitter, where else? - to the fact that Nicky Campbell's "The Big Questions" show on Sunday morning had a section on teenagers and social networking. You can watch it on iPlayer for the next 6 days. [1] The consensus amongst the audience seemed to be that social networking was damaging the social development of teenagers. I happen to believe that this is an area where an astonishingly wide generation gap has rapidly opened up. Put...
March 8, 2009
Their greatest album?
The new U2 album is being promoted by a TV spot in the UK, using a chunk of the middle section of "Get On Your Boots" - the first U2 lead single from an album to miss the UK Chart Top 10 since "Gloria" in 1981. The TV ad quotes Q's opinion of "No Line On The Horizon" "Their greatest album - *****" I'm unsure where the quote comes from. Try as I might, the only line close to this...
In-line adverts on the Daily Express site
On Saturday morning for the first time I spotted in-line advertising on the Daily Express site. I don't know whether this means it is a new thing, or whether I've just been spectacularly slow to notice that they have implemented it. I only spotted the adverts on two articles, triggered by the words 'lifestyle' and 'fitness'. Both adverts were provided by Vibrant Media and were for a Nicorette product. I could see how the positive contextual association of the product...
March 7, 2009
March 6, 2009
"You are what you measure" - why the music industry should adopt user-centred charts
In my line of business, we have a mantra - "you are what you measure". If you decide page views are your KPI, then you can increase those by simply splitting articles across three pages. If you decide time spent on the page is your main measure of success, then you can publish longer articles and puts lots of images in so it requires more scrolling, and so on. The music industry measures success by 'the charts', and the charts...
March 5, 2009
Searching in vain for Amazon's Kindle in the UK
Amazon have built their business on delivering a service both physically and virtually, and are variously credited with inventing online recommendation engines, the shopping basket concept and affiliate marketing programmes. They have a reputation for consistently delivering good user experience. Which is why, when they appear to be getting something wrong, it really sticks out. Their move into hardware with the Kindle has generated a great buzz of both sides of the Atlantic, even though it is only available on...
March 4, 2009
"Byzantium" at the Royal Academy of Arts in London
For most people the history of the Byzantine Empire is an obscure one. Our popular culture and education system tends to focus much more on the Roman Empire as it existed a few decades either side of Augustus Caesar, rather than the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for over a thousand years. After all we have 'Carry on Cleo', 'I, Claudius' and Asterix, but we seldom have works which feature Constantine , Justinian or Nicephorus Phocas. Arguably much of our artistic...
March 3, 2009
3 key moments when the NUJ 'effing blogs' dust-up might have been avoided
Last week I ran a training day at The Frontline Club in conjunction with journalism.co.uk about blogging, and towards the end of it I included a session loosely known as "101 things that will go wrong with your blog". As part of it, I used the recent NUJ vs Adam Tinworth 'effing' blogstorm as an example of how situations can quickly get inflamed. As an outsider, it strikes me that there are three very clear moments where the personal elements...
March 2, 2009
"Nous sommes Leeds"
I'll be going to the pub tonight to watch Oldham Athletic against my Leeds United, in what used to be known as the Third Division. The last time I watched this fixture being played at Boundary Park, it was 1992, I was actually there, and the game was in the top flight. It was memorable for a couple of reasons.Firstly it was one of the few games that Leeds lost that season, as they went on to win the last...
Is 'internet news being free at the point of delivery' even still negotiable?
After Cale Cowan's withering response to the last time I joined in a trans-Atlantic debate about how newspapers can survive and thrive in a new media world, I suspect I may qualify as one of the "self-serving bloggers" mentioned in a David Lazarus piece in the LA Times last week. David was making the suggestion that newspapers should group together and offer bundled-up electronic subscriptions. In another variation on the iTunes-for-news theme he argues that "iTunes proves newspapers can and...
March 1, 2009
"It feels like one hundred years..."
I can actually remember the exact moment I became a fan of The Cure. It was in 1986, and they had just released their first singles compilation - 'Standing On A Beach'. A friend used our 80's style peer-to-peer network to swap the music files with me i.e. he physically lent me his cassette of the album. Double-play edition with extra unavailable b-sides no less. I was on the 34 bus. The route ran as far as Whipps Cross then,...