Puffbox

There’s something thoroughly depressing about the comments made by Greg Dyke who – for a few brief hours this afternoon – was going to be the joint Tory-LibDem candidate for London mayor. The Guardian quotes him:

‘I didn’t want to be a Conservative candidate or a Liberal candidate. I said I didn’t want to stand for any political party. I was interested to see if you could change the mould of British politics. The answer is, you can’t.’

I don’t know much about Greg Dyke, but his ‘cut the crap’ philosophy whilst at the BBC held much appeal. Can my idealistic streak survive this kind of downer?

(PS: the headline isn’t a typo… I just don’t want to trigger any obscenity filters.)

It seems to be a UK standard that you write the numbers from one to ten as words, but anything from 11 upwards should be written as figures. I’ve had drummed into me in several workplaces, and I’ve forced it on others; it’s also in the Economist and Times style guides. (The Guardian says numbers begin at 10… typically awkward.) But Jakob Nielsen makes a good case for a different approach, based on semantics and skim-reading.

In essence, he favours using figures in any situation where you’re referring to an exact number, including single figures; but to say ‘hundreds’ or ‘thousands’ as words, because you’re using those words as vague descriptions of a quantity, rather than a precise number. It’s hard to argue with the logic in this; but I wonder if I’m too ingrained in the old way to change now?

Dan Gillmor points to the ‘blog-style’ coverage of today’s Virginia Tech shootings in the local Roanoke Times, saying ‘It’s the right format for this kind of event.’ With developments coming in every few minutes, I absolutely agree. Short text items, posting anything/everything as soon as it comes in, chronological presentation. In fact, why not go a step further, and do it in true blog format?

Presumably our more blog-friendly media outlets in the UK (Telegraph, Guardian, maybe the Beeb) would be able to instantly create a new blog instance within their existing systems, to cover any similar stories over here. Others – including those who pride themselves on breaking news coverage, like Sky – might do well to have an installation of WordPress sitting quietly in a corner, waiting to be called into action. (It might be worth having this off-site, too – just in case.)

Pssst! Heard a whisper that the new Sky News website should be going live one night this week.

UPDATE: actually, there’s a new promo on the Sky site giving a sneak preview of the new design. It confirms my understanding, that the new site goes live in the early hours of Thursday morning.

With so many bloggers attending last night’s ‘open house‘ at the new Telegraph offices, I’m sure we won’t be short of reports on the proceedings themselves. (Here’s what David Wilcox made of it… including a short video featuring yours truly!) But what struck me most was the number of people who went along in their capacity as ‘commenters’ on the various Telegraph blogs.

I confess, it wasn’t ever something I thought of as a capacity in itself. But there were lots of people who wanted to define themselves as active participants in the Telegraph brand, more than just mere readers or consumers. For editorial and commercial reasons, that kind of commitment and enthusiasm is crying out to be built upon.

But how? The one thing blogs don’t yet do well enough is development of the conversation. Yes, it’s great to have the ability to add a few lines summarising my own thoughts… but then what? I might go back to see if my comments sparked any responses, from other readers or from the original author, but I probably won’t. My comments hang off various posts on the same blogs, with nothing to hold them together. I want to be a stakeholder, and given the effort I’m putting in, I probably deserve some kind of recognition; but I’m just a recurring voice in the cacophony of comments.

For a while now, I’ve had a notion of ‘a blog of comments’. Every time I add a comment to a Telegraph news story (for example), it would get aggregated on a ‘personal profile’ page… in other words, a de facto ‘news blog’. You automatically see the headline (and first paragraph?) of the story I commented on, followed by what I thought. It lets me write what is effectively a news-driven blog, but does a lot of the copy-and-paste work for me. Not just somewhere to write, but built-in inspiration on what to write, too.

Commenters would get a degree of status and recognition, and become an extension of the journalistic community. There are numerous benefits for the Telegraph too; it encourages buy-in into the brand, boosts overall page impressions, and does good things for SEO.

Intriguing, then, to see what happens in a month or two when the ‘My Telegraph’ functionality appears. Shane and co didn’t say much about it, but it was definitely mentioned that readers would be able to create their own blogs under the Telegraph umbrella. (Shane? Ian? Care to expand?) But if the Telegraph doesn’t do it, one of the big news brands will.

It feels rather strange to be welcomed to the new Labour Party YouTube channel by a man who – by all accounts – has barely a few weeks left at its head. A late, possibly desperate effort ahead of the local elections next month? (And I wonder how Peter Hain and Hazel Blears managed to find time in their busy schedules – deputy leadership, anyone?)

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=gul2U43solE]

But perhaps even more strange is Tony’s justification for it: ‘The purpose of coming into the YouTube channel is to enable you to hear, unmediated, fresh, first-hand, what it is we’re about.’ That’s quite a startling turnaround from the media manipulation of Mr Campbell’s days, no?

They’ve hit the ground running, with a healthy spread of ministerial faces pitching to the YouTube audience. By and large they aren’t bad at it, but although it isn’t obviously scripted, they’re sticking mainly to a ‘talking head’ approach, which feels just a bit patronising. One or two of them seem to realise this too. I’m afraid it just isn’t anything like as engaging and natural as most Webcameron content.

I’m going to be among the bloggers and other miscreants getting a guided tour of the (Daily) Telegraph offices tomorrow evening… if any of my loyal readers are also attending, do grab me and say hello. And if you want to do a little revision beforehand… this photo slideshow with commentary on the Press Gazette’s Fleet Street 2.0 blog is excellent. A really effective way of getting the story across. Video would probably have been more ‘authentic’, but possibly less effective.

Big news from Bucks: the Buckinghamshire Advertiser has a new website, powered by blogging platform Movable Type. This is enough to get Six Apart quite excited, but in truth, it’s been pretty heavily customised so you can’t really just say ‘they just chucked it into MT’. Martin Stabe at Press Gazette has more on Trinity Mirror’s experiments including some hyperlocal blogging on Teesside. I mentioned this blogs-instead-of-proper-CMS’es theory over a year ago here and here… and if anything, feel even more strongly on the subject.

Anyone know of a UK-based equivalent of ‘web 2.0’ online invoicing services Freshbooks, SimplyBill or Blinksale? Or failing that, anyone have any positive experiences of using these services from the UK? I really don’t want to set up a manual process to do this sort of thing myself… but it seems nuts to be working around US-centric services, or (even more insane) sending printed invoices from the US.