January 2013 Archives

When systems fail and embarrass a news organisation, the temptation is always to blame the technology or the programmers. But no computer forces editors to commission content based on flawed sources.

Is video-loop sharing app Vine the most high-profile experiment yet with the concept of the “Minimum Viable Product”?

There is already a lot of grumbling on the net that new video-loop sharing app Vine is ‘pointless’. Perhpas the point isn’t necessarily the output alone…?

The Guardian swapped flat comment threads for ‘nested’ ones. The Manchester Evening News swapped ‘nested’ for flat. Guess what happened next…

Whether news sites should or shouldn’t use the Facebook comment plug-in or Facebook identity seems to have been a recurring theme in the last few days.

The BBC is under fire for editing an episode of “Fawlty Towers” to remove racist language. Given the proximity of the BBC finding itself on the front pages of the tabloids for not editing a ten year old episode of the Tweenies that they had broadcast loads of times before without comment or criticism, you can see why there might have been heightened awareness of potential offence embedded in repeat showings. Especially if audience research has only recently said that this language was unacceptable when broadcast.

The latest Hacks/Hackers London meet-up was crammed with talks from people at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and the Financial Times. Striking a rather different organisational note at the end of the evening was Chris Taggart. I’ve previously seen Chris talk about OpenlyLocal, but this talk was about another open data project — OpenCorporates. Here are my notes…

I’ve been publishing my notes from the talks at the newly revived Hacks/Hackers London meet-up. Representing the Financial Times on the evening were Emily Cadman & Martin Stabe. Here are my notes…

The BBC’s blunder in repeating an episode of the Tweenies this morning that featured a Jimmy Savile reference will no doubt usher in a review of the controls around selecting which children’s programmes to repeat. Was it avoidable?

The Times is surveying subscribers in order to “improve the products and services we offer to our customers”. They’ve designed the survey in a way that excludes digital customers.

Hacks/Hackers London returned this week, with an evening of talks about financial and data journalism. Himanshu Ojha is a data journalist at Thomson Reuters, and was talking about the story behind “The Unequal State of America”. Here are my notes…

Last night was the first Hacks/Hackers London after a break, and it was jam-packed with talks about financial and data journalism. The second slot was taken by people from Thomson Reuters, opening with Sam Arnold-Forster talking about “Financial graphics”. Here, as ever, are my notes…

After a lengthy hiatus, Hacks/Hackers London was back this week with a data journalism themed evening. First up was Marianne Bouchart from hosts Bloomberg, whose plush offices gave the whole evening a rather different feel to the usual dingy pub basement. Here are my notes…

The Guardian’s website has been no stranger to controversy over the last couple of weeks, and yesterday was no exception, with the decision to have comments open on the live blog of the unfolding reporting of the helicopter crash in London.

Two minor footnotes to the Suzanne Moore / Julie Burchill brouhaha, which developed further today with the Observer removing the article from guardian.co.uk.

Rather like grandparents fondly referring to the wireless, my generation are going to carry that word “click” in our vocabulary to describe interactions long after anybody last used a mouse.

Sadly/luckily^* for the rest of the world wide web at large I don’t confine my writing just to here. No, sirree. Here are three things I’ve recently had published on other sites…

Is it just me? Or does it sometimes feel like the whole of the internet is screaming at the news industry: “Jeez, you guys really need to innovate more and hurry up and get yourself a new business model”. And then the response to any attempt at a new model is “But not that one.”

A very short blog post about women in tech.

At the risk of just turning into a linklog to Matt Andrews’s blog, he wrote a great post this week about trying to set aside the British curse of negativity. During the course of it he spoke about his own reaction to Menshn, and it has prompted me to dig this unfinished blog post out of the “drafts” folder.

Over the last few days there has been some attention to a blog post claiming that Irish newspapers are trying to “destroy the web” by charging for the presence of hyperlinks to other sites.

If my daughter grows up and wants to go into tech, and is still faced with events where organisers think it is OK to have 22 male speakers out of a possible 22 speakers, she’ll be entitled to turn around to me and ask why I didn’t make a fuss when I could.