February 2010 Archives

Despite Murdoch's stance that search engines steal his newspaper's content, The Sun are using search keywords as the main marketing thrust for their 2010 FIFA World Cup competition.

"Well you seem to have made a lot of people extremely unhappy" - a look through some of the comments left on Observer editor John Mulholland's blog post about the recent redesign of the Sunday print edition of the paper.

The Observer relaunched at the weekend with a new magazine and 'The New Review'. Here are some of the things that caught my eye in the new format.

On April 11th I will be speaking as part of a panel at the Edinburgh International Science Festival discussing "Journalism in the digital age: Trends, tools and technologies" alongside Iain Hepburn and my Guardian Local colleague Sarah Hartley.

There are still a couple of weeks for young journalists to enter the European Commission sponsored award.

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.

Richard Godwin's argument that schools should use pencils rather than the latest technology would be a lot more convincing if he didn't back it up with the tired old urban myth about NASA's "Space Pen".

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.

In the final part of my review of user experience features in the online versions of university student union newspapers, I'm looking at social media usage, and the moderation overhead of providing online comment facilities on a student newspaper.

In part two of this series looking at some of the user experience features in the online versions of university student union newspapers, I'm examining student news sources like Pluto Online in Preston, and The Demon in Leicester.

With my interest in the future of news, I've been looking at the digital publishing by the people who might be producing the news in the future. This series looks at some of the user experience features in the online versions of university student union newspapers.

I've recently started a blog post series on Inside Guardian about my role as information architect at guardian.co.uk, and also been interviewed for the Nodalities podcast about 'Linked Data' and news.

The Sun was plugging Sky's experimental live football 3D service - even on Page Three!

Mobile phones and the Internet have transformed interpersonal communication since John Wyndham wrote his classic novel. I wondered, in a 'Day of the Triffids' scenario where most of the world has suddenly gone blind, how long would the Internet last, and could you still publish news on it?