May 2012 Archives

A round-up of my notes from four talks from the London Content Strategy Meetup Lightning Talks night, including Charlie Errington on analogue thinking, Jon Marks on tablet apps and HTML5, and Kate Kenyon on how learning from the rest of the business can give you a strategy for your strategy.

There’s a really interesting post by Oliver Reichenstein doing the rounds at the moment entitled “Sweep the Sleaze”, about why sites should remove share buttons from their pages. If you haven’t read it, you should. And then come back and read why I don’t agree with it.

Last night I went on a “UX Field Trip” to the studios of Inition - who specialise in all things 3D.

At this month’s Hacks/Hackers London Kaveh Memari was talking about Renew’s project to create an entirely new type of media on the sides of bins in the City of London. Here are my notes from his talk...

A hack day around election monitoring, a new media forum in Brussels, and a plea to help build a crowd-sourcing tool to improve the questions at press conferences were the pitches at this month’s Hacks/Hackers London.

Last week it was time for another Hacks/Hackers London, featuring my Guardian colleagues Alex Graul & Alastair Dant talking about the Miso project, and Kaveh Memari talking about Renew, as well as a few two minute pitches. Here are my notes from Alex and Alastair’s talk about the open source interactive toolkit they’ve been working on.

Number four in what looks like an increasingly permanent feature - gathering together some of the things I’ve read or noted over the week on a Friday, so you can load up your Kindle or Instapaper or Pocket app for the weekend. Please let me know if you find it useful...

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. Here are my notes from Tim Caynes’ talk about designing the mobile wallet.

Three very different things I’ve spotted this week have illustrated a nagging thought in my mind that if you are purely focused on publishing web pages into the desktop environment, you’ve probably taken your eye off the ball.

This week the Guardian started looking for a replacement Head of User Experience.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. I’ve already published my notes on Giles’ redux of the IA Summit, and here is what I made of Johanna’s talk.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. Here are my notes from Giles’ talk.

Number three in a series of experimental Friday blog posts gathering together some of the things I’ve read or noted over the week, so you can load up your Kindle or Instapaper or Pocket app for the weekend. Please let me know if you find it useful...

Every time I see someone retweet Jeff Atwood’s article “Please carry on learning to code” my heart sinks a little. I’ve got to respect his personal achievements, but on this I think he is spectacularly wrong-headed. Here are four reasons why.

This evening at the Guardian’s offices the Guardian & Observer Chapel of the NUJ have been holding a debate about the nature and future of journalism. There have been posters around the offices for a couple of days.

As well as my day-long training course teaching how to self-publish with Kindle, I’ll also be running an evening training course in June, on “Improving your blogging”.

I always like to play around with new toys, and so as soon as the Google Currents production system was released to the public, I set about making an edition for myself - and discovered that it is a system for publishers, not journalists or individual authors.

Yesterday journalism.co.uk announced one of my first post-Guardian ventures - a one day training course in ebook publishing: “Kindle publishing: How to get into the ebook market”

The climax of the Premier League brought out an astonishing display of churlishness amongst non-footie fans on Twitter.

I was genuinely impressed this morning with the Metro’s double-page spread about photographers’ rights. I love to see papers campaigning on issues of civil liberties and freedom, and I was particularly impressed with the fact that Metro produced a simple layman’s terms explanation of photographers rights in a cut-out-and-keep format.

The second of a weekly round-up of links and reading material I’ve foraged for on the interwebs over the last seven days. It is an experiment at the moment, so please let me know if you find it useful...

There was an interesting post on the eConsultancy blog from Graham Charlton yesterday about the forthcoming changes that mean websites are being obliged to obtain consent for the use of cookies.

There has been quite some hoo-ha on the web suggesting that Facebook “Social Reader” apps are dying, based on a piece written by BuzzFeed’s John Herrman - “Facebook social readers are all collapsing”. I worked on the Guardian’s app - here’s my take on it.

Games developers have monetised the existence of “cheat codes” by morphing them into in-app purchases that raise extra revenue. What “cheat codes” doe the news industry have?

I used to keep a regular daily linklog, but that has rather gone out of fashion. I’m trying an experiment for a few weeks to gather together some reading material for the weekend. I’d welcome feedback if you find it useful...

We seem to have matured beyond declaring each year that this is “going to be the internet election” to having campaign web sites and social media as an integral part of the political cycle. Here are some notes I’ve made whilst looking at the sites of the candidates for tomorrow’s London Mayoral elections.

Reading pieces by Eric Jackson and Peter Kirwan yesterday leaves an awkward question hanging in the air. If Google and Facebook are really struggling with the impact of disruption to their business models from changes in trends on the internet, where does that leave media companies, many of whom haven’t really got to grips with web 1.0 yet?