August 2010 Archives

Harry Mount's Daily Mail column about the death of the printed edition of the OED suggested computers cannot produce serendipity. Nonsense. Computers do what they are told to. If you program them to produce random or semi-random content selection, then that is what they will do.

Relying on print to deliver my fix of technology news at the weekend made me realise how much I miss reader's comments on articles when they are not there.

A weekend spent offline at the Green Man Festival highlighted three key difference between analogue and digital news consumption.

I just spent a very wet weekend in Wales at the Green Man Festival, totally offline as I couldn't get any data signal for my phone. One of the nice things there was the science park, which featured a small cinema in a shed which only seated a couple of people, and which was showing TED talks.

Short notice I know, but I'm only just able to confirm that on September 1st I'll be in Berlin, talking at the '1st Data Journalism Meetup' about data-driven projects on guardian.co.uk.

There has been a flurry of publicity recently around the BBC Archive, and so it seemed churlish not to plug my own archive material from 2005 on the topic - "People Don't Like Basements But Tapes Do" - A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road

Whilst I am off-grid in a field in Wales at the Green Man Festival, if you are stuck for your regular fix of bloggage, here are the top 12 media and journalism focused posts I've written this year.

Today I wanted to draw to a close an unexpectedly lengthy set of blog posts triggered by Patrick Smith's "Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010?" with a look at a couple of ways that BBC News has used external links in the past.

With all the talk over the last couple of weeks about news sites and external links, it seemed appropriate that the BBC should come out and make yet another promise to drastically increase the amount of traffic bbc.co.uk is sending downstream. Erik Huggers' commitment follows the pattern laid out by the BBC Trust in 2008, and by the Graf review before it.

Part of the reason that there is still a debate is due to the newspaper industry's unique legacy production systems and workflows. The only viable solution would seem to be a radical re-working of the priorities of newsrooms around the UK.

Last week I wrote a couple of posts looking at 5 ways that The Guardian puts external links onto web pages and Inline article links to tag pages on guardian.co.uk. They've both generated a few comments, which I've replied to on the original posts. The comments have raised a bunch of interesting points, and so I figured it might be worth gathering them all together into a blog post of their own.

It is that time of year again when I feel compelled to moan about the way that the media reports A-Level results, although this year, at least one journalist has put their money where their mouth is, and sat one of the exams.

Over the last few days I've made a couple of blog posts about the demise of Google Wave, and what the news industry could learn from the tool itself, and from the way Google handled the launch and failure of Wave as a product. Two newspapers in particular were very early public adopters of Google Wave - Welt Kompakt in Germany, and RedEye in Chicago. Stephanie Yiu, who recently left RedEye, very kindly agreed to answer a few questions I had about how they used Wave, and what they learned from it.

Google Wave promised journalists the possibility of collaboration and live publishing that was both real-time and permanent. With the recent announcement that Google is no longer supporting the product, what lessons can be learned about the merits of a real-time publishing tool.

The Guardian has launched a new blog to cover The Football League, at the same time as I am trying a thought experiment in ignoring the Premiership, and hoping it goes away...

The demise of Google Wave has been much publicised, and widely described as yet another failure by Google to 'get' the social web. I think there are some valuable lessons for the news industry from the way that Wave was developed, launched and died. And I promise not to include a single predictable pun...

Over recent weeks there has been a focus on datajournalism at The Guardian & Observer, following the publication of the Afghan War Logs. Simon Rogers has been busy being interviewed and blogging about it - and I've chipped in on guardian.co.uk with a blog post about the Information Architecture behind our World Government Data search.

One of the problems with the debate about how news sites link out to the rest of the web is that those involved tend to come at it from the point of view of journalistic process, production tools, or SEO. I see far too little debate about what the audience want or expect in terms of links. What should the user experience considerations be when linking out from a news site?

On his blog last week, Patrick Smith partially retracted his suggestion that guardian.co.uk was good at linking out, on the basis that a lot of inline article links point to internal tag pages, not to external websites. These are the product of a rather blunt tool in our CMS, the automated generation of hyperlinks from analysing the body copy of article.

Last week, Patrick Smith sparked off a lot debate with a blog post entitled "Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010?". In it, he mentioned The Guardian website as being one of the best examples of linking out. I thought it might be worth blogging about 5 different ways that The Guardian puts external links onto web pages.

A fascinating booktwo.org blog post the other day looked at the effect of digitalisation on the design of book covers. For me, it isn't about how a design works when viewed in a smaller image size, but the attention to detail that is put into rendering a digital design. XTC's Go 2 album is a text book example of a classic album sleeve not being translated into a digital format.

HTML is changing significantly for the first time in the best part of a decade, and news journalists, sub-editors and production staff will need to learn to recognise, if not use, some new tags in the process. Here is a very quick overview of the tags most likely to impact a news CMS.

Given that Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a regular reader of The Times, it was perhaps no surprise that the news website that the 21st century BBC Sherlock was using looked more than a little familiar.

A recent debate sparked by Megan Garber at The Nieman Journalism Lab over "Follow-up journalism" or "Timeless journalism" prompted me to re-examine my News Innovation unconference presentation from last year, about how the tyranny of chronology dictates the news story-telling formats we use, and prevents us from realising the full potential of the new digital media at our disposal.

I was dreading making the phone call to cancel my trial subscription to The Times' paywall, expecting to be made to jump through hoops. Instead, I was surprised by just how good the customer service was. It seems that The Times and The Sunday Times are making the transition from just having 'readers' to having 'customers'.