February 2012 Archives

Here are my notes from Hacks/Hackers London meet-up where Steve Pinches from the FT gave a very open and frank talk about their work in the mobile space. He is product manager for that area, and was talking particularly about their move to HTML5 web apps and away from native apps.

This month’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up had a business theme to it, and the first talk was from Damian Kimmelman about duedil.com. The site - recently shortlisted for a Guardian MEGAS award by a judging panel that I chaired - brings together a host of data sources about businesses into one aggregated service. Here are my notes from the talk.

This is my contribution to February’s Carnival of Journalism. The topic this month, set by Steve Outing, is “What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?” I’m hoping it might be journalist-centred design for the CMS.

I’ve featured in a couple of interviews published over the last few days about the Guardian’s Facebook app and my ideas on UX recruitment.

I had quite a rude awakening from Twitter on Sunday morning when someone contacted me about John Naughton’s Observer column: “Graphic designers are ruining the web”. The users in the comments have done most of my blogging for me...

A quick glimpse into the future and some of the blog posts and stories I expect to see written about Pinterest in the coming weeks and months...

A couple of weeks ago I was part of a panel session talking about social media optimisation at news:rewired. I was talking about the Guardian’s Facebook app, and the rest of the panel consisted of Darren Waters from MSN, the BBC’s Chris Hamilton, and Nate Lanxon of Wired. Here are some points that came out of the Q&A that followed the talks.

At news:rewired, Nate Lanxon of Wired explained how their Facebook presence has become a sort of “members club” for fans of the brand - and how a picture of Mark Zuckerberg looming over him reminds him to post to Facebook.

At news:rewired, MSN’s Darren Waters discussed how, with limited resources, MSN were adopting a human social media voice, and reaping rewards in increased user engagement.

I tweeted today that “Twitter did/did not break news” is the new “bloggers vs journalists” - a tired old trope that gets periodically trotted out. It was this dreary ReadWriteWeb piece about the origins of news of Whitney Houston’s death that provoked it. News breaks for the user where they first find it - and that isn’t a broadcast network anymore, it is a real-time peer-to-peer one.

A couple of weeks back I was at news:rewired to talk about the Guardian’s Facebook app, as part of a panel discussing social media optimisation. Here is the first of my set of notes from the other talks making up the panel - Chris Hamilton, Social Media Editor at the BBC.

As part of news:rewired earlier this month, there were workshop sessions on skills like SEO and datajournalism. Leading one of the sessions was Nicola Hughes, aka DataMinerUK, teaching people how to use social media for search. Here are my notes from a session that raised interesting issues of ethics and security for investigative journalists using social media.

François Nel’s talk about media business models at news:rewired drew a massive contrast between the fortunes, financially, of the Mail and the Guardian, and sparked a discussion about the Guardian’s digital strategy which made for some uncomfortable listening for those of us in the audience involved in trying to implement it. Here are my notes from that session - including a big disclaimer reminding you that this is a personal blog...

I wasn’t able to be at this month’s London IA event, which is possibly the first time I’ve ever missed it. Unavoidable, but a real shame because I had been looking forward to seeing Jeff Gothelf talk about Lean UX, and hear the debate that was sure to follow. But instead of hearing about it, I was putting it into action.

One of the panel sessions at news:rewired last week was devoted to the paid content model. Tom Standage, digital editor of the Economist, gave an upbeat talk about the title’s success in transitioning to the digital era. Here are my notes from the session.

One of the panel sessions I attended at news:rewired was devoted to the notion of paid content. It featured some interesting insights from Alex Watson of Dennis Publishing and Tom Standage from The Economist, as well as some scrutiny of the Guardian’s business model, which, for those of us who work there, made for some uncomfortable listening. Here are my notes from Alex’s talk about Apple’s Newsstand.

Last week at news:rewired I was talking about the Guardian’s Facebook app. During the Q&A after my talk, the topic of privacy cropped up several times, especially with regard to younger people using the Facebook platform. Here are three important things that I think adults should know about when they are discussing privacy amongst teenagers.

Last week Liz Heron gave the opening keynote address at news:rewired, explaining some of the social media work that the New York Times does, and offering some advice for those who are also involved in doing it. These are my notes from her session.

Last week the Guardian held one of our regular hack days, where the developers (and other people in the tech department) get to spend two days putting aside their regular work, and instead concentrate on a project of their choosing. Here is what I made.

A flurry of activity around the Guardian last week as we tried out some new things on our Beta site, and had a two day hack day.

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.