November 2012 Archives

Here is my weekly round-up of interesting long(-ish) reads about UX, journalism, product management, and other stuff that interests me. This week guaranteed to be 100% Leveson free.

The Leveson Inquiry report has been criticised for not addressing the impact of the internet on the press, and the way it was published today was symptomatic of old-fashioned print publishing that doesn’t put user need at the centre.

It appears to be compulsory to write about press regulation in the run-up to the Leveson report being published. So here is my tuppence, hopefully before you get bored of the entire business.

So who knew that a thing I tried for a couple of weeks as an experiment would end up lasting for thirty weeks non-stop? Well, here it is — yet another weekly round-up of long(-ish) read I’ve found lying around the intertubes during the week about the kind of stuff I’m interested in

At Online Information I was moderating a session that featured Daniel Gunnarsson from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts of Architecture, Design and Conservation. He was talking about a photo database of Danish architecture available on the web at Arkitekturbilleder.dk. Daniel described it as a “feel good” story, but also admitted that when he had pitched to do the talk, he had been expecting to talk about a product that had launched, not about how one had failed to launch on time. We’ve all been there. Here are my notes from the session.

Sounds like David Byrne has been having a tough time developing an enhanced ebook version of his “How music works”.

Lucia is Digital Development Editor at The Times, and at Online Information she was outlining the journey of a 200 year old newspaper publisher into multi-platform publishing. Here are my notes from the session.

At Online Information this year Charles Arthur was talking about the platform wars that he has recently written a book about, inspired by a call from a publisher’s agent who observed that Apple, Microsoft and Google “always seem to be fighting each other.” Here are my notes from the session.

Has the week gone by so quickly? I can’t believe it is time for another Friday reading again — my weekly round-up of long(-ish) reads about UX, design, product development, journalism and the media. You can also download the lot handily packaged as a slightly morally dubious ebooky-thing from Readlist.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, or follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I’ve recently produced free ebooks of my notes from conferences like EuroIA, UX People, and the Tablet and App summit. I thought I’d explain the how and why of making them.

I spent Monday night at Together London’s Content Strategy Lightning Talks. I’ve already blogged my notes from four of the sessions from the evening, and here are the rest...

I spent Monday night at the latest Content Strategy Lightning Talks night in London. Organised by Together London and Jonathan Kahn and hosted by Richard Ingram, the meet-up group now has 900 members, and this event was sold out to 100 attendees. On the night there were eight talks, on topics as diverse as SEO, technical writing, video production and mapping site structures. Here are my notes from the first half of the evening.

The Guardian are currently trying out some changes to their commenting system. Like most changes to a major website, the backlash amongst some users is very, very vocal, and everybody gets to watch.

If it is Friday, then it must be time for my weekly round-up of long(-ish) reads from around the intertubes about UX, journalism, product development and all the other bits and pieces that interest me. And it isn’t all about Nate Silver and the US election, honest.

Alexandra Hardiman is Director of Mobile Products at The New York Times, and at the Tablet and App summit in Frankfurt she talked us through the paper’s mobile products and strategy. I was delighted to hear lots of talk of it being user-centred. Here are my notes.

Yesterday I glibly tweeted that I had trademarked the term “The British Nate Silver”. Not for myself, you understand, but in recognition of the fact that his data analysis has played such a pivotal role in debate around the US election that it is inevitable that someone will get dubbed with that title in the run-up to the next General Election in the UK.

Kate Collins is Managing Director, Emerging Platforms & Products at Star Media Group in Canada, and at the Tablet and App summit she was presenting a case study of some innovative work they’ve done in collaboration with advertisers, exploring how advertising might work in the future in the tablet edition of the Toronto Star. Here are my notes.

The final session of the Tablet and App summit was about Windows 8 and the opportunities it might provide for publishers and media companies. The half-hour was split into two parts — Frank Wolfram of the SYZYGY Group agency gave an overview of some features that might appeal to media companies, and then there was a case study of Belgian newspaper De Standaard building an app. Here are my notes.

On Twitter I described Stephen Pinches talk as a “masterclass in making good call after good call and really using user data.” With typical modesty, he replied that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nevertheless, as Group Product Manager for Mobile & Emerging Platforms at the Financial Times, Stephen has steered the FT into the uncharted waters of breaking free from the iTunes store and going down the HTML5 web-app route. Here are my notes.

After Caio Túlio Costa’s talk about Brazil’s newspaper industry taking on the might of Google and Apple at the Tablet and App summit, Philippe Jannet presented a similar story of collective commercial action in France.

Two talks at the Tablet and App summit in Frankfurt addressed the issue of national newspaper groups coming together to challenge the established digital distribution channels of Apple, Amazon, Google and the like. The first of these case studies came from Brazil - Caio Túlio Costa explaining how the newspaper industry had challenged Google and Apple.

Having opened the event with what Patrick Smith described as “an impassioned plea for iterative, responsive and nimble development run by small teams within big media firms”, my talk was followed by two case studies of pretty traditional approaches to digital magazine publishing from Stern and Condé Nast. I’ve already blogged my notes from those two sessions. Stijn Schuermans brought a welcome change of pace and an outside perspective to the problems assailing media companies in the digital publishing space.

Condé Nast were represented at the Tablet & App summit by the duo of GQ publisher Jamie Bill and Jamie Jouning. The two Jamies were showcasing the work the company had done to move into tablet publishing in a fairly short space of time. Here are my notes.

David Heimburger was speaking at the WAN-IFRA Tablet & App summit about how Stern magazine has become a digital property, in a talk entitled “850 000 print copies per week, 7 million readers, and the challenge of reproducing print miracle for tablet readers.”

This is an essay version of a talk I gave at the Tablet & App Summit at the World Publishing Expo in Frankfurt, October 2012.