September 2010 Archives

Amongst all the tweets that surrounded my talk at EuroIA last week was one that revealed one my public speaking techniques - to have my speaker's notes on the stage in front of me.

One of the talks I really loved at this year's EuroIA was Claire Rowland & Chris Browne talking about designing for the 'Internet of things'. Generally when I talk about an 'Internet of things' I'm thinking of linked data style URLs that describe real-world things, but Claire and Chris were talking about physical objects and their work at Fjord on the SmarcoS project.

All of the slides from this year's EuroIA that I have been able to find online gathered in one place.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that we would be holding an event called "Search at The Guardian" at our Kings Place office on Monday October 18th. It is part of a series of regular meet-ups held by Enterprise Search London group. Speakers will include Stephen Dunn, Mat Wall, Graham Tackley, Thibaut Sacreste and Daniel Levitt.

One of the most interesting things for me at EuroIA this year was that keynote speaker Oliver Reichenstein has done so much work in digital newspaper website design. In the Q&A session after his talk he made the interesting suggestion that "Journalists are information architects in their way as well"

It isn't every day that a friend's website makes the news, but just a couple of days after talking about it in my presentation at EuroIA, Harry Brignull's excellent 'Dark Patterns' website is getting a rather wider exposure, as the source for a story in this morning's Metro.

A special edition of the linklog today. If you were at EuroIA and saw my presentation "Implementing 'Identity' at Guardian.co.uk", then here is a list of links to things I mentioned in the talk. If you weren't there, then this is a taster of what you can expect to see discussed when I publish it.

I'll be talking about this week at EuroIA in Paris. My presentation is on the first day of the programme, entitled "Implementing 'Identity' on Guardian.co.uk". I'll also be taking part in the evening IA Jam session, explaining why "Tags are magic!".

There has been some recent discussion about the impact of metrics in the newsroom on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. It often seems to me that fear of measuring the performance of news gets simplified by many people into worrying that the outcome will be 'x which is trashy is popular, y which is dull but important isn't, therefore we must do more x and less y and distort our news values'. Which isn't the point at all.

I've been talking and writing a lot recently about data driven journalism and data visualisations, and how there is no point doing it for the sake of it, but that you should do it to tell a story. And so I thought I'd try my hand at one. I want to tell you a story about the futility of the UEFA Europa League.

The new YouView homepage obeys Currybet's Law - that the BBC can seemingly do nothing without cramming in a reference to Doctor Who.

Over the last couple of days I've read two blog posts that touch on the subject of archiving the digital experience of the Internet. Our failure to adequately capture what the early web was like is something that has bothered me for some time.

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about how I ended up with the current stripped down design for the blog. The first comment left underneath suggested the choice isn't universally popular.

Yesterday, the Nieman Journalism Lab broke an embargo over a Pew Research Centre study. When they realised, they removed the story and apologised on Twitter, and once it was republished, added an apology note on the bottom. Coupled with trackbacks to a blog criticising the error, it was an exemplary way to handle the error online.

Last night I went to my first London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Since I'm technically neither a hack nor a hacker, I was a little worried that I would be rumbled as an imposter and blackballed, but I think I got away with it. Jonathan Richards and Julian Burgess of The Times were presenting "The dos and don'ts of starting to code", and Chewy was presenting a wide range of products and tips from Google.

My post about feeling that I missed reader's comments when reading the print edition of newspapers was unexpectedly thrown back into the limelight last week when incoming Comment Is Free editor Natalie Hanman used it as the starting point for a blog post introducing herself to the CiF community.

There has been plenty of reaction my "Let a million data structures blooom" post last week, which was sparked by Tom Coates and his "Death to the semantic web" slide at dConstruct the other week.

At dConstruct last week Tom Coates stood in front of a slide saying "The semantic web must die". I couldn't help but respond...by saying that I agree with 99% of what he said in Brighton.

Last week Adam Tinworth cited currybetdotnet as an example of a trend he was noticing in stripped down blog design. Here is how I ended up with such a stark and simplistic layout for my articles.

Being caught up in the bubble of hyper-connected media professionals means it is sometimes easy to get very over-excited about the level of internet activity and literacy, and the digital future for newspapers, and forget about the strengths of the 'legacy' print product. And I don't just mean that print advertising still pulls in a big chunk of the money. But overhearing things in pubs can sometimes be a good antidote.

I've spotted a few blog reactions to last week's datajournalism meetup in Berlin, and thought I'd gather a couple of them here, which focus on the importance of linked data being free from commercial restraint, on the German attitude to privacy on the web. And David Essex.

Andy Budd has written a brilliant and carefully nuanced riposte to Ryan Carson's claim that "'UX professional' is a bullshit job title".

At the Berlin datajournalism meetup on Wednesday I had the chance to meet Anna Lena Schiller, a visual sensemaker who does graphic recordings of conferences and seminars. She had made a set of pictures illustrating the talks given at another data driven journalism event in Amsterdam the week before. I'm fascinated by the skill of being able to take visual notes in this way, and Anna kindly agreed to answer a couple of questions about how she got started, the way she works and the equipment she uses.

The first of what will no doubt be a flurry of blog posts about my trip to a datajournalism meetup in Berlin looks at one of the questions asked during the final panel session: Why do the UK and US seem to be so more advanced with linked data and the semantic web than Germany?

A special edition of the linklog, with a list of things that I mentioned in a talk about datajournalism at The Guardian & The Observer which I gave at the 1st Datajournalism Meetup in Berlin in September 2010.