January 2011 Archives

If the main shtick of this blog can crudely be reduced to "stuff news organisations and journalists can learn from digital design", then here is the complete opposite, an article about what web designers can learn from journalism.

Last week I attended an event hosted by PublicZone, and their head of user experience, Julie Dodd, spoke about ways non-profit organisations could involve users in their digital product and service design.

On Wednesday I was in Leeds talking to journalism students at Leeds Trinity University College, and I was very impressed with the questions that people asked me after the presentation. Here is a summary of some of the questions and answers.

If you were at my talk in Leeds today, then here are some of the resources I mentioned during the presentation.

Yesterday I published a blog post sparked by a question after a talk I gave at the BBC World Service the other week, which was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". One thing that seems obvious to me is this - news organisations need to have clear community management strategies if they want to have engaged communities on their sites

At the end of a talk I was giving the other week, one of the questions was: "Do you think journalists should always read the comments underneath their articles?". I have to say that my answer oscillates, and here is why...

With all the news about changes to BBC Online, the thing that had caught me eye was the deletion of lots of sites that had already been mothballed or archived in a previous round of BBC cuts. Here is why I think it is such a poor decision.

On Wednesday I'll be in Leeds talking at the Leeds Community News Hub. In the run-up to the event I was interviewed by Tom Page, a second year sports journalist currently studying at Leeds Trinity & All Saints University College. Here is the Q&A session we had.

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day. It is a role that I believe is increasingly important to the digital news industry.

A flurry of blog posts about news sites linking out - or rather usually not linking out - prompted me to rummage around in my archives for the posts I wrote on the subject last year.

As I mentioned in my post about comment spam yesterday, offering 'dofollow' links in my blog comments attracts a lot of comment spam. And some of it is amusingly inept. Here is a gallery of some of my favourites...

A brief round-up of where I'll be talking next week, and a link to the second part of our "Tags are magic!" series on the Guardian Developer Blog.

If you've been running a blog for any length of time, you'll be sure to have come across the phenomena of comment spam. People pimping sex products and pr0n are easy to spot, but there is a whole breed of spammer out there who are rather more subtle. They particularly target blogs which allow them to post links which aren't marked as 'nofollow', making them valuable in the eyes of search engines.

The Internet has been celebrating the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, which is held up as the poster child of crowd-sourcing and the proof of the existence of what Clay Shirky calls the 'cognitive surplus' that the web enables us to harness. I do wonder, though, whether Google gets enough credit for the success of Wikipedia.

Last week at London IA, as well as Mark Plant's talk about agile and UX, Jason Mesut brought along a sneak peek into his "grotto of geek", as he showed us what user experience designers could learn from music software and hardware. Here are my notes on his talk.

This week at London IA, Jason Mesut was talking about the way that music software and hardware design might influence UX professionals. In one of the conversations I had after his talk, I discussed how many of these interfaces would fail our classic user testing methods.

On Tuesday night we held the first London IA event of the year, and here are my notes from Mark Plant's talk explaining why wireframes are dead - "Experiments and experience from the UX/Agile divide"

This week on the Developer blog we've begun posting a series of articles entitled "Tags are magic!", about the metadata under-pinning the content on guardian.co.uk, co-authored by myself and Peter Martin.

A couple of weeks ago Myressa Markham came to visit me at The Guardian. She is studying Electronic Publishing at City University London and is doing a project about the impact of mobile technology on journalism. As part of it she came in to interview me.

There has been a recent thread on the SIGIA-L mailing list featuring Eric Scheid and Stephen Collins asking about "the role of IAs in Data Journalism"

As BBC Backstage closes after five years, it has produced innovation, created a community, and bored me to tears arguing about DRM.

Lots of chatter about whether RSS is dying after this (subsequently updated and calmed down) post from Kroc Camen. Malcolm Coles has weighed in by showing that the subscription numbers to newspaper RSS feeds are way down in Google Reader with, it must be said, lots of caveats around the figures. So is RSS dead for newspaper websites, and The Guardian in particular? Not at all.