June 2010 Archives

I'm going to be taking a blogging holiday during the course of this summer's World Cup in order to finish some presentations, develop a couple of training courses, and make some back-end fixes to the currybetdotnet site. See you after the final...

I've made a further complaint, after getting an unsatisfactory reply from National Express East Anglia about the way their staff bullied my wife. Their customer service email used the 'data protection act' as a means of avoiding telling me whether my complaint had been upheld, or any action taken.

In the final part of this series looking at the blogging habits of our current crop of journalism students, I look at some trends I identified as being risky or posing ethical questions - blogging about personal faith, and blogging about the business of becoming a reporter.

My post about the deletion of the band First Aid Kit's Wikipedia page got a rapid response from an admin, who saw my blog and restored it to the encyclopedia. However, it has done nothing to allay my primary concern, that in relying on dbpedia as a near-central hub in the #linkeddata world, we are relying on the good intentions of WIkipedia editors, some of whom are keen to reduce the scope of pages on the site.

In the second post of this series looking at blogs written by current journalism students, I examine how choosing a topic that runs to a schedule can help someone to blog regularly.

Whilst it can be a great tool for finding out information that organisations have embargoed in order to co-ordinate press launches, over-zealous 'speedy deletion' of band articles on Wikipedia is harming the linked data ecosystem.

The first part of a series looking at some of the issues and trends in blogs being written by current journalism students. This post looks at how domain expertise, a good choice of niche topic, commercial potential and a natural blogging voice make a student journalist blogger stand out.

If the Mail is so worried about companies using Twitter for reputation management, why does it do it itself?

For some reason, the idea of embeddable fonts being available on demand as a web service gives me the heebie-jeebies. In a presentation at The Guardian last week I tried to explain why. But it is probably just because I am old and resistant to change...

Yesterday I posted my 10 tips for ambush 'guerilla user testing'. Once you've got some footage of people using your website, you need to find the best way to present that back to the business. I like to make a summary clip reel of the testing, and here are my 8 tips on putting your clip reel together...

Over the last couple of years I've been practicing 'ambush guerilla user testing', which is basically the art of pouncing on lone people in cafes and public spaces, and quickly filming them whilst they use a website for a couple of minutes. It isn't by any means a formal research technique, but you can soon build up a valuable clip library of initial reactions to you and your competitors' products, and tease out interesting anecdotal evidence about the way that people use and feel about your website. Approaching strangers in a public place and asking to video them using the Internet sounds pretty daunting, so here are my top 10 tips to help you get started....

Online coverage of the Whitehaven shootings illustrate why the Facebook 'like' button is unsuitable for generic use on all news stories.

In the last of this series of notes from the 'Future of web design' conference, here are two talks about building user interfaces and experiences that are fun, playful and a delight to use.

Here are my 'Future of web design' notes from an excellent talk about inclusive and accessible website design from Robin Christopherson, and some notes from a couple of sessions that didn't quite do the trick for me...

I'm pleased to be able to say that I'll be presenting a talk entitled "The information architect with an identity crisis" at this year's EuroIA in Paris.