Puffbox

Hot on the heels of their showbiz-only app comes a full-on Sky News Facebook app. I still like the idea of RSS-to-Facebook, but to be honest, once I’d added the showbiz app, I forgot all about it. On reflection, why would I look at my own profile for content updates? Meanwhile, I’m seeing a steady stream of updates from Five Live, because it’s a ‘friend’. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Sky could change its status each time it has a (decent) ‘breaking news’ story: ‘Sky News is reporting that…’.

Radio Five Live has a new logo. I’ve always found it a bit weird for radio stations to have logos – but in these days of converged media, with screens on your radio, and radio on your TV, I suppose it makes sense. It’s a big number 5, in a circle, so it can’t have cost much. 🙂 I only know this because it just popped up in my Facebook news feed. This stuff works, folks.

The new website for The Guardian Weekly is the first really interesting development we’ve seen from Faringdon in quite a while. In print, it’s really a ‘best of’ selection from the daily newspaper, plus the Observer, Washington Post and Le Monde. Online, it’s going for something completely different.

The site splits in two. The ‘blue section’ is professionally produced editorial, ‘all linked by the common theme of reporting the experiences of individual people’. Blogging by proxy, if you like. The ‘brown section’, My Guardian Weekly, goes all social-networky. Once you register, you can submit articles for inclusion in the ‘blue section’; you can create a ‘watchlist’ of friends; upload photos; send ’email’; submit comments on ‘blue section’ articles; and see yourself, and fellow registered users, on a Google Map mashup. Oh, and it looks much more Guardian-y, too.

There’s also the intriguing notion of a ‘campaign on a major issue chosen entirely by Guardian Weekly readers and website users’. Social networking with a centre-left purpose? Intriguing.

Comparisons with the Telegraph’s equivalent service are inevitable. The key difference is that the GW site brings the users into the ‘proper’ editorial. My.Telegraph gives you a blog, but keeps you at arm’s length from the real journalism. GW doesn’t give you a blog (per se), but invites you to be part of the real journalism. Personally, that feels like a more engaging offer. But I guess they’ll have to set the bar relatively low; readers need to feel there’s a high likelihood of their writing being accepted.

Only the niche-market Weekly product for now… but I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to see this as the ‘beta’ for a new Guardian Unlimited.

Lloyd Shepherd hits the nail on the head. If Google News is going to start hosting original news content, in the form of comments from people involved, then it has moved from being a search engine for published news, to being a news publishing rival. I always felt that news publishers’ anger at Google News was misplaced. Far from building a business on other people’s content, Google News (surely?) acts as a generator of extra traffic for those very news publishers. But this changes things quite dramatically.

Or rather, it won’t. I just don’t see how it can possibly work. ‘Email us your rebuttals, and include some kind of identification method’? I’d have thought Google’s efforts would have been better directed at some kind of ‘related blog posting’ function. Maybe I could register my name with Google News, and when it sees me mentioned in a news story, it could check my blog for a relevant posting. (A bit like Technorati, but with proactive rather than reactive indexing, maybe?) I wouldn’t have thought it would be too difficult to find corresponding keywords.

It wouldn’t have to be blogs, necessarily. It could include press releases, speeches, transcripts, etc etc. Anything which counts as primary source material. So for example, any time you saw David Miliband quoted, you’d hit the Foreign Office ‘latest news’ page, and see what you could find. Any time something is quoted from the Commons, you’d scan the (almost real-time) Hansard transcript. Doesn’t that keep everyone happy?

Over at the Telegraph, Ian Douglas has some interesting ideas about your local cinema. It follows in the wake of comments by Dave Winer, prompted by his trip to see the Simpsons movie.

Home technology is rapidly catching up with cinemas, in terms of quality and pricing. You can buy a setup relatively cheaply, which is at least as good as the local multiplex, and has added conveniences. (I speak as someone who just bought a famous-name 42″ LCD TV for under £700. There are some benefits to being flooded, I guess.)

The exact same thing happened to amusement arcades: when the PlayStation brought true arcade-quality gaming to the living room, they failed to deliver something better. And there are few more depressing places than a seaside amusement arcade these days.

Sky News has launched its first web-only news bulletin: Martin Stanford presents a six-minute dash through the headlines, with a bit of shameless YouTubing. (If that isn’t already a word, it should be.) Hugh Westbrook’s post on the Sky editors’ blog doesn’t actually say it’s going to be a daily thing, but that’s certainly the implication.

The choice of lead stories is a bit on the low-brow side – Madeleine McCann, Pete Doherty, ‘Bond girl Jane Seymour’ (?!), the National Lottery… and not a single mention for the day’s biggest ‘proper’ story, foot and mouth. But take a look at the ‘most popular stories’ lists on any website, even the hallowed BBC, and you’ll see this is what people actually read online.

The ‘yoof’-style editing reminds me, ironically enough, of the BBC’s recently-axed StoryFIX, which was trying to do something similar… albeit a bit more quirky, and a bit less newsy. With that in mind, I’m not sure I’d have chosen Martin Stanford to present it. Leaving aside his genuine interest in all things technological, Martin is now one of the more ‘serious’ presenters on the channel, probably second only to Jeremy Thompson in terms of gravitas. This deliberately flimsy content isn’t his natural territory, and despite his best efforts, it shows. The rather conventional screen makeup – newsreader’s head and shoulders, studio set with a map backdrop, big strap across the bottom – seems a bit too ‘TV’, too.

It’ll be intriguing to see how this project goes forward. It’s an attempt to produce a ‘news bulletin’ which accepts the reality of the web audience’s (dumbed-down?) interests, and will sit alongside the ‘proper’ headlines. Is online video just a distribution channel for existing TV material, or is it a distinct medium which requires a different editorial approach? The relative traffic levels may reveal all.

You never hear much about the BBC News Select java application for mobile phones. It’s an excellent micro-browser, which pulls in the full text (and lead picture) of the top few stories from your choice of BBC News sections (including individual football teams). I’ve found it especially handy on the Tube; if you can get a signal long enough to get an update, you can still read the full stories when the signal drops. It’s free, and it’s compatible with loads of java-friendly phones.

Full marks to Lloyds TSB for their rapid response website helpimflooded. It looks like it was thrown together relatively quickly, in response to the flooding in the north of England – the DNS record shows the domain was registered on 5 July, a fortnight before the south got the worst of it. There are a few rough edges – spelling BBC wrong on the homepage, for example. But it just goes to show that it can be done.

A nod, too, to the new Living ‘blog’ launched by More Than insurance, working with Antony Mayfield‘s mates at Spannerworks. It looks very well done, all built in WordPress (so thumbs-up from me) and is very blog/mashup/2.0-literate. It’s a tangential project, more about brandbuilding than selling insurance… and I always wonder how sites like these can maintain an audience. But hey, they’ve got a page of flood advice too.

Not that flooding and insurance a subject currently dominating my thinking, or anything.

Quick note to Sky’s legal department. The Belfast Telegraph is getting some well-deserved attention for its extra-high-quality video news bulletins. They’re doing everything right: proper presenter, proper set (although clearly ‘virtual’), proper pacing etc. Delivered in Flash, although a full-screen playback option would be a useful addition. A TV news bulletin, without the TV bit.

But just a minute… that red, white and blue logo on horizontal blocks? The ‘video wall’ set, predominantly blue, with a slowly animating Planet Earth? Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?