March 2012 Archives

I thought I’d fallen asleep and been transported back into 1997 today when I saw a tweet from Media Bistro asking “Are bloggers #journalists?” After from issuing a caps lock ranting frenzy on Twitter, I thought I’d try and pull something positive from the experience, so I tried to find the first time anybody asked “Are bloggers journalists?” on the internet.

At this week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, the first talk of the evening was about black cab application Hailo, presented by Russell Hall and George Berkowski. Here are my notes.

It has been a busy couple of weeks on the Guardian Beta site. Over the last few days we’ve launched or started testing several new products. Here are some of the details.

Last week we held the latest London IA evening, hosted by Sense Worldwide and sponsored by Zebra People. The talks were from Warren Hutchinson and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Here are my notes from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino talking about “Products & products: how the web and manufacturing collaborate”.

Last week we held the latest London IA evening, hosted by Sense Worldwide and sponsored by Zebra People. The talks were from Warren Hutchinson and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Here are my notes from Warren Hutchinson’s talk about “Brand with a little b, Design with a Big D”

I’ve long been fascinated by how to make content, context and user work on small screens, and intrigued by how to make coherent and satisfying user experiences with a minimum of design and sign-posting, so I’m very pleased to be able to announce one of my main projects for this year - on May 3rd I’ll be teaching a day long masterclass in “Responsive IA”.

Since we launched it back in September I’ve been constantly monitoring Twitter for feedback and reaction to the Guardian’s Facebook app. One of my favourite tweets asked this question: “I wonder how much referral traffic The Guardian has lost from Facebook since they implemented their 'Social Reader' agreement..” Yesterday we answered that question in a talk by our director of digital development Tanya Cordrey.

This week ITV News relaunched with a site that made a radical break with the one they had before, and which frees itself from a lot of the baggage that usually comes when designing a news site. It certainly still has some rough edges, but it is a fascinating approach.

I’ve not written much on this blog in recent months on media regulation, which used to be one of the recurring themes. It has seemed to me that whilst the Leveson inquiry and various police operations related to newspapers are ongoing, it is safer, on the personal blog of someone who works at a news organisation, to say nothing. I can’t, however, let the dissolution of the PCC pass without comment.

Andrew Chen wrote an excellent blog post a few days back entitled “Why you’ll always think your product is shit” No digital product is ever finished, and the flaws in the one you work on should hurt you.

A quick update on three things I've been involved with recently at the Guardian.