Guardian launches rolling PDF editions

With very little fanfare, the Guardian has launched G24, its rolling PDF newspaper service announced just over a month ago. Depending on where you’re coming from, it’s a no-brainer that any CMS should be able to do… or a stroke of editorial genius. Probably both.

The G24 page lists five editions: Top Stories, World, Media, Business and Sport – each updated on a rolling basis, generated from the content added to the Guardian Unlimited network of websites. The idea, of course, is that you print off a 10-page edition as you’re heading to or from the office, and you have a bang-up-to-date ‘newspaper’, on actual paper.

I’m not sure how automated the process is… but there are a couple of rough edges, which imply that humans were not involved in the page layout. Certainly there’s a more than close correlation between the top stories listed on sport.guardian.co.uk, and the stories included in the Sport PDF, for example. Same stories, same order.

You only have to look at the numbers of people fighting for a free copy of Metro each morning at any Tube station entrance, to see there is an appetite for this sort of thing. It won’t appeal to the most tech-savvy, though, who are probably already reading the various news websites over the airwaves. (Apart from when they’re underground, obviously.)

But yes – being blunt, it’s the sort of output you would expect any decent CMS to be able to do. There are plenty of tools to turn plain text and/or XML into PDFs automatically. But innovation isn’t always the ability to do something… it’s having the idea to do it, too.

I like it, but I don’t expect to use it much. Consuming live news on-the-move is precisely why I bought a web-enabled PDA. But definitely, good on them for doing it… and don’t be surprised if other newspapers decide to follow suit, very quickly.

Gmail Firefox extension: now covers hosted accounts

The fantastic Gmail Manager extension for Firefox reaches version 0.5 – and includes what could be its killer function. Namely, the ability to check Gmail accounts which use ‘hosted domains’. What this means, in practice, is that you can have a web-based 2GB email account running with your own .co.uk domain name, for barely a couple of quid a year. So much more professional than an I’m-a-cheapskate email address, for loose change.

Annotating 'primary source' documents

Citizen journalism guru Dan Gillmor points to a relatively new feature in online magazine Slate, called ‘Hot Documents‘. They are posting scanned versions of ‘primary source’ documents, annotated to help you understand the significance and subtext. Dan rightly points out there’s a problem in how they have executed it… but if you want to achieve the same effect, you can do so – and avoid the tech glitch – by posting any documents to Flickr, and using the ‘add note‘ function.

BBC News and 'lite' personalisation

Personalisation used to be the future of the web. Then it wasn’t. Now it is again. The search engines have led the way, with My Yahoo, Google‘s personalised homepage and Microsoft’s live.com. Now the content sites are pitching in, with BBC News adding a ‘beta’ personalised component to their homepage.

To their credit, it’s extremely well done. Initially just a box to enter your postcode, and bingo – local news and weather. If you want to add headlines for a given sport (or football team), you get an additional option to do that too. (Not tied to your local area… shall we call this the ‘Man Utd factor’?) No need to register. No username or password. And a ‘hide’ button to (more or less) remove it if you don’t want it.

If anyone was going to offer this, and make it worthwhile, it could really only be the Beeb. Nobody else has the breadth and depth of content.

But it isn’t a huge step forward; as Paul Brannan writes on the Editors’ Blog, with admirable restraint, it’s about making the site ‘just a bit more convenient’.

We have the toolset for the truly personalised web, in the form of RSS feeds. I take several feeds from the BBC site, and combine them with many others into ‘my personal view of the web’ within my chosen RSS tool (currently Bloglines). But it’s nice to let people reduce the amount of clickage from the homepage. And if it’s easy enough to do, at no additional expense, hey – why not.

Sky buys its favourite web agency

Very interesting to see Sky taking full control of Mykindaplace. And I’m inclined to agree with Media Guardian’s assessment that ‘it is Mykindaplace’s web development capability that most interested Sky. The site’s development arm, Burst Interactive, has already created websites for Sky One and Sky Movies.’

You can see the influence Burst have had in various recent Sky web products: the Sky One website, the recent launch of the broadband product, or last year’s general election coverage. As I know to my own cost, the company’s in-house technical arm wasn’t ever really geared to rapid web-literate development. But Burst need to keep their distance – the worst thing that can happen is for them to ‘go native’.

New Technorati: the end of web 2.0

Does the new design of Technorati mark the demise of the ‘web 2.0’ style? It just looks a lot more, well, like a normal website. Three columns. Small-ish fonts. Minimal use of colour gradients. Dave Sifry explains what’s going on:

While we love expert bloggers, we’ve also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.

In other words – Technorati has grown up, got its hair cut, and bought some sensible clothes. Depending how you want to look at it, this is the mark of a company entering maturity, or the death of idealism. It’s probably both.

Education Minister backs blogs in UK politics

The education secretary, Alan Johnson makes some very interesting and perceptive remarks on the subject of blogs and electronic engagement in the democratic process, during a speech today to the UK Youth Parliament. Some of it is inevitable ‘playing to the gallery’, of course, but overall it’s a very well-informed set of remarks by a very senior government minister.
He talks about ‘the exodus from collectivism’, which he attributes to two big factors:

First, any institution which grows runs the risk of depersonalisation. There are paradoxes at play here: by expanding its market, it can contract its appeal; through trying to please everyone, it could end up pleasing no-one; and, while the use of technology can open doors to massive new audiences, it can also close them down.
Second, we are all growing more confident and demanding as citizens and consumers. Aided by new technology, we expect instant gratification – such as the EBay ‘Buy it now’ option. We demand a personalised service which, if people can’t access, they just walk away. In many ways, this is the age of individual.

The solutions he proposes: ‘a more local and personal feel’… ‘reach out to people in a more emotional way’… and ‘seize the full potential of modern technologies.’ You can guess where this is going… but he goes well beyond the kind of superficial endorsement of the blogosphere that you might expect.

Some of you might be amongst the 90 million people with sites on MySpace. Virtual communities are increasingly places people we go to make friends, have fun, do business or share knowledge. Something like 100,000 blog sites are created every day; and political blog sites now receive more hits than official party websites.
Blog sites spread seemingly authoritative information without accountability or the need for accuracy, although, to be fair, newspapers have been doing that for years. Political parties should try to emulate the immediacy, interactivity and excitement of blogs. These days dull, standard automatically generated emails are beginning to look as ancient as the telegram.
The challenge for politicians is not to use technology to replace the ‘doorstep experience’, but to replicate it. There’s no reason why dissent and cynicism should be the only messages spread on the internet. We should promote activism and participation to counter apathy and scorn.

It’s a tremendous improvement on the comments by John Prescott in his now notorious Today Programme interview – ‘I think it’s called the internet, isn’t it, or blogs or something, I’ve only just got used to letters, John, I haven’t got into all this new technology.’ It’s easy to see why Alan Johnson might be considered one of the Cabinet’s rising stars, and indeed, a possible replacement for Mr Prescott as deputy prime minister.
But what’s really disappointing is how these comments have been completely ignored by the newspapers, who prefer to cover his ‘pre-emptive attack‘ on those who hark back to a ‘mythical golden age‘ of harder exams and more meaningful results.
(PS: Yes, I’m currently doing some work for Mr Johnson’s department, and I know people who know people who write the speeches. But I can’t claim any direct credit for this one.)

The truth about 'interactive TV'

Newsnight deputy editor Daniel Pearl has a brilliant piece on the BBC News Editors blog today, which presents the real truth about ‘interactive TV’. Forget the red button, forget the technowaffle… it’s all about the PC keyboard. And the fact is – it’s working.

Blogs are giving him feedback as to what people like and dislike on the programme. Blogs (via Technorati) are telling him what people are talking about, and hence influencing his choice of running order. Oh, and there’s the open secret that BBC staff’s email addresses all follow the same basic format… so if you know someone’s first and second name, and you can put a dot between them, then you’ve got an email address direct to them. This is true interaction between TV and its viewers.

Incidentally, speaking of Technorati… I’m just putting the finishing touches to another blog-based project for a Major Government Department (not my usual one). We’re still shying away from offering full comments or trackbacks, for fear of spammers. But following an idea Ben Hammersley instituted for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, it’s dead easy to link people directly to a Technorati search, to see what other bloggers are saying. It’s no extra effort for you, and critically, it distances you from anything which might be legally dodgy.

It's just too hot

Even my PC setup is having trouble dealing with this heatwave. I spent most of the morning offline and cursing my ISP… until, in a fit of desperation, I swapped my rather warm wireless broadband router for an old freebie one I had lying around. Perhaps significantly, the old one had been sitting in a dark cupboard. And it worked. First time.

As Heather at Hitwise points out, it’s a good time to be in the weather business. Interesting to see the BBC site far and away the market leader – when sites like Metcheck or uk.weather.com have much richer data. Ah well, you know what they say about turning to the Beeb in times of national crisis…