January 2010 Archives

In the second part of this series looking at coverage of the 2010 African Cup of Nations, I have reviews of online news sources from four of the nations taking part: Angola, Algeria, Cameroon and Egypt.

During the course of this year's African Cup of Nations tournament in Angola, I've been reviewing news coverage in the UK and in Africa itself. In the first part of this series, I look at how, before a ball was kicked, the terrorist attack on the Togo team made print front pages in the UK.

The curious experiment by five French journalists to hide in a remote location and only use Facebook and Twitter as their news sources ignores the fact that social media is a conversation with friends - and conversations with friends are generally pretty good at conveying the news you need to know.

With moves afoot to allow the UK's copyright libraries to archive websites, I wonder how much of the experience of digital assets like games and online news will be preserved alongside the code.

The Etz-Hayyim Synagogue in Chania, which serves as a monument to the fate of the Jewish community on Crete at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War, has been attacked by arsonists twice in the space of a couple of weeks.

It is hard to argue that ethics and quality set the 'professional journalist' apart from the amateur blogger or 'citizen journalist', when newspapers persist in publishing professionally produced articles, like the Sunday Express 'exposure' of the BBC use of Twitter, which are so wrong that they have to be swiftly deleted.

Sarah Hartley has been using the 'Help me investigate' crowd-sourced journalism tool to find out how local newspapers cover local councils. I've chipped in with a review of coverage in the Waltham Forest Guardian and the Romford Recorder.

At a recent UCLAN workshop on the future skills needed by journalists, I got to make a Lego model to describe The Guardian.

When I moved house last year one of the worst examples of user experience, both online and offline, was provided by Sky when I tried to get their TV service installed.

In part 6 of this series, I turn my attention away from estate agents, and towards the user experience of dealing with Haringey and Waltham Forest councils.

Globrix and Rightmove are two 'digital native' websites that illustrate that the user experience of searching for a new home online need not be as painful as most estate agent websites seem to make it.

In the fourth part of this series, based on a presentation given at 'London IA in the pub' in October 2009, I look at different online interfaces to help you determine the transport links surrounding your potential new home.

Not all estate agent websites follow the same formula. In this part of the 'UX of moving house' series, I look at an experimental flash search results page, and ponder why so many estate agent sites make such poor use of images.

Looking for a new home is essentially one long search process over a set of structured data - location, price, number of bedrooms etc. You'd therefore expect most estate agent sites to be heavily optimised around the search experience. You would be wrong, as part 2 of this series illustrates.

Last year my wife and I bought a house for the first time. She was heavily pregnant during the process, and so I did much more of the leg-work that I'd usually expect to. Naturally, I tried to do everything online, and document the good and the bad about the information architecture and user experience as I went along. This is the first of a series of posts based on a presentation of my findings, which I originally gave at 'London IA in the pub' in October 2009.

Whilst the Evening Standard gets confused about whether the African Cup Of Nations is being held in Angola or Ghana, The Guardian is making available an open public sporting events calendar which knows for sure.

In response to claims that David Tennant was on BBC television too much over Christmas, a Conservative MP seems to think he appeared on over 200 channels.