October 2010 Archives

There have been two contrasting stories of news media companies interacting with their online communities this week. On Comment is Free, the Guardian has embarked on an open discussion about the moderation in comment threads on the site. Over at Sky News, however, they have shut down their message boards, claiming that they had been 'hijacked'.

No blog post planned for today, but I have been cropping up in a couple of other places on the web if you need a daily fix of @currybet-related content...

Last week I went to the latest Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London, and I've already blogged about Martin Rosenbaum's "Freedom of Information tips and tricks". Over the weekend I've pulled together my notes on the other talk that night, from my Guardian colleague Alastair Dant.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks at Guardian Towers, with the release of linked data into our API, an evening event discussing "Search at The Guardian", a packed news agenda, and lots of other interesting initiatives and launches. Here are four that caught my eye.

At last night's Hacks/Hackers event in London, BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum talked about what he has learned about using Freedom of Information requests as a journalistic tool.

Some bits and piece from around the web about a couple of things I've been involved with at The Guardian this week - the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers in our content API, and the "Search at The Guardian" event I helped run on Monday.

One of the ways that our developers keep across stuff happening externally to Guardian.co.uk is by inviting people in to give "Tech talks" on a regular basis. Last week we were visited by Richard Pope of ScraperWiki, a service which has been causing a great deal of interest in the datajournalism community. Here are 3 key points that I got from the talk.

Last night at Kings Place I helped Tyler Tate put on the latest London Enterprise Search meet-up, which we called "Search at The Guardian". We had 7 people speaking, and I was really pleased that we covered a range of search related topics, with talks from people with varying roles at GNM.

Today we have announced that we have added 'Linked Data' to the Guardian's API. You can now query it using MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers.

A long list of numbers is the very definition of tabular data, easily represented in an accessible HTML <TABLE> structure. And yet the ticket prices for the Olympic games were only made public as a PDF file...

I'm embarking on my next round of commissioning for FUMSI magazine, where I am contributing editor for the 'Share' section, and so wondered if anyone reading the blog or following me on Twitter would be interested in writing for us.

We had some '9/11 truthers' demonstrating all day outside The Guardian and Observer offices yesterday. I can't help but think that if you are trying to convince me of the existence of a worldwide conspiracy, you are going to have find some more authoritative sources than relying on what the Daily Mail says about Muslims.

I've written quite a few blog posts already about my trip to Paris for EuroIA so far. This one is a bit of a round-up of some of the bits and pieces that didn't really merit an entire blog post all of their own, but which I nevertheless found interesting, and it features Greeks, UX Basis, Daleks, the otherwise absent BBC, and an intimidating matter of life and death...

No, not a blog post complaining that I missed out on the Friday night partying at EuroIA this year because I was too tired, but a thought about some of the isolationism in our discipline. There was no overall theme to the EuroIA programme, but you always hope that the confluence of talks will help you join some dots and spark some connections. At times I almost got a feeling of being in the 'The Quiz Broadcast' on That Mitchell and Webb Look, as if the information architect of today emerged stumbling from a mysterious vacuum...

When Twitter launched their 'Who to follow' feature there was a flurry of outcry and much gnashing of teeth at the way the algorithm worked. In my case, it seems on a one-man mission to get me to follow every single possible Guardian Twitter feed going. Including @guardianrobot.

I'm able to release a few more details about our "Search at The Guardian" event on Monday 18th October at Kings Place.

The second session I went to on the Saturday morning at EuroIA 2010 had a focus on the mobile platform, as Johann Richard from UNIC spoke about how to "Start Your IA with Mobile". Johann gave some very clear examples of how the small screen and context of use on phones forces you to focus on the key tasks and activities the user needs to be able to achieve. With mobile use in mind, forms become simpler, navigation tauter, and the complexity of choice is reduced for the user.

The Reuters decision to change their commenting policy has been seen as another step towards news sites "civilising" the debates that appear under stories. A few things about it stood out for me.

At EuroIA this year, Belén Barros Pena and Bernard Tyers were presenting their approach to DIY usability testing on mobile devices. Having listed various expensive ways of doing it, and their drawbacks, the duo then MacGyver'd up a device that clamped to a phone, and filmed the screen as a user carried out the test.