Puffbox

Yes Charles, yes Alan, I’m sure your new initiative is purely about provoking a policy discussion within the Labour Party. I’m sure it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the leadership question.

Others will be much better placed to talk about the politics of this. I’ve finally managed to find the website, and it’s located at www.the2020vision.org.uk. I can imagine a few completely unrelated websites suddenly seeing an increase in traffic: such as Andrell Education, or this US initiative on energy security. Both 2020vision.org.uk and 2020vision.co.uk have been registered, but neither presents a website – which is going to confuse a lot of people. At least if you saw the wrong site, you’d know you were in the wrong place.

The site itself is running on the Expression Engine blogging platform, so there’s lots of scope for comments on site content – when eventually there is any site content. Currently it’s very sparse indeed – everything seems to be ‘coming soon’. According to the homepage there’s no news, no speeches, no policy papers.

But Charles Clarke’s launch speech promises:

We will post speeches, articles, policy papers and blogs which address these matters. We’ll start on Friday with the subject of identity management, about which a Channel 4 Film, the Insider, is being broadcast on Friday evening. The website will link to all those which address the debates about our political future, and it will stimulate involvement and engagement from individuals throughout the country. And the2020vision will organise throughout the country events to encourage and stimulate discussion and debate about these political and policy questions. Our funding, from donations, will be published on the website and declared to all the relevant statutory bodies.

It doesn’t yet look like a great experiment in social networking or collaborative authoring, or anything like that. The platform is certainly capable of it, though. Whether that’s really where their focus lies is, of course, still to be seen.

Complaining about the outdated list of RSS-consuming methods in The Times reminds me of something I meant to flag up before. ReadWriteWeb has analysis, based on two (admittedly contradictory) sources, of the most popular web-based RSS readers. It looks like Google Reader has taken over from Bloglines as the number one, apparently by a significant degree. The global figure would seem to be backed up by the data for this particular patch, with Google Feedfetcher now topping my own feed stats.

Personally I’ve stuck with Bloglines thus far… it does what I want it to do. The only reason I might want to switch over to Google is because I use all their other stuff – mail, search, etc – as my default choice.

I don’t want to be picky… actually, who am I kidding, I live for picky. But I don’t really understand why The Times (of London) feels the need to reinvent the industry-standard RSS icon.

Actually, it seems symptomatic of a general not-getting-it: they haven’t thought to include auto-detection of feeds in the appropriate places, and their feeds themselves are not compliant with the standards. The feeds don’t declare themselves as XML in the first line – and since there’s no character set specified, it fails the classic UK site test: can it do pound signs? (It can’t. And surely they checked that? Don’t headlines in the business feed typically include a pound sign?) Plus there’s no such language code as ‘en-uk’; rightly or wrongly it’s officially ‘en-gb’.

Nor do they make reference to the market-leading methods of consuming RSS: their list (Feedreader, Newsgator, NetNewsWire) looks like it hasn’t been dusted down in a couple of years. No reference to IE, Firefox, Outlook 2007, Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, live.com, netvibes, etc etc etc.

Some of this is so basic that it shocks me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Firefox fan primarily because of the range of available extensions add-ons. One recent find – and it’s a true godsend – is URL Fixer. If you’ve ever cursed yourself having typed an address ending mistakenly in .ku or .cmo, you’ll know you need this. Sits in the background, and corrects you when it thinks you’ve screwed up. Which is exactly what you want it to do.

Bigger, bolder, blacker. Sky News responds to News 24’s toning-down of its on-screen graphics by making yellow its colour for breaking news, and loading up a new fatter font for its big headlines. Blue has more or less disappeared from the colour palette – replaced by heavy use of black. Yes folks – red, white and black, same as News 24, same as a tabloid newspaper (in the old sense of the word).

The SKY NEWS logo is now a rotating cube, presumably a deliberate reference to Fox News, their much-derided cousin across the Atlantic – and, frankly, I’m surprised they would do anything to invite comparison. The time rotates too, to be replaced by the date, which is surely an enhancement nobody ever wanted. And I suspect there are still some glitches, since the morning weather symbols are disappearing off the edge of my widescreen TV, which has never happened before. (And apparently I’m not the only one.)

Overall, the response on viewers’ editor Paul Bromley’s blog is not good. Perhaps that’s inevitable in matters creative, especially when you’ve got so many people who take these things so seriously. But in Sky’s defence, fair play to them for leaving all the bad stuff up there, for all to see. Mind you, criticism like ‘worst graphics in the history of television news’, though, is so extreme that you can’t take it seriously.

I’m not going to condemn them, myself: they are functionally successful, and that’s really all that matters, although they aren’t perhaps the choices I would have made – admittedly, coming from a screen design background that is entirely web-based. It’s still basically the same (increasingly tired) formula: clock, logo, ticker. It’s about time someone really re-thought the requirements.

No changes on the website yet… meaning, not for the first time, the web presence is out of step with the on-screen presentation. But I understand a new Sky News website design has long been scheduled for Easter or thereabouts.

Finally got my invite into the Joost beta programme – and the immediate reaction is positive. Full-screen video with very good quality sound, as promised, plus a ‘widget’ platform for things like RSS and live chat. But a very restrictive selection of content in these early stages – unless you’re a big fan of the World’s Strongest Man contests. And frankly, it doesn’t feel right to be watching that stuff on anything other than a Bank Holiday. Encouraging stuff, though, in these early days.

Figures published earlier this week by National Statistics show that the UK broadband audience is continuing to expand, with over 79% of all internet connections now broadband. It’s the first time NatStats have published numbers relating to connection speed: they found that 60.1% of broadband connections were 2 meg or less, with 32.5% between 2 and 8 meg, and just 2% at 8 meg plus. But as it’s the first time the data have been published, they offer a note of caution that it may be corrected later. Full results are published in PDF; there’s more info available from here if you’re interested.

I’m surprised more people haven’t been migrated up to the higher speeds; it sounds a slight note of caution, before we all get too carried away with high-quality online video’s possibilities.

There are times when language in headlines can be far too confrontational, far too polarising. The Sky News website today, for example, carries a headline on its homepage: ‘Road Charging: Blair Defies Petition‘. Have a read of the emailed response… and tell me, is defiance the right word? Hardly. The headline on the story itself is much better – ‘Blair Won’t Give Way’ – with extra marks for the traffic pun.

Of course, minds are probably on other things at Osterley today. They must be quite relieved to have won last night’s RTS award for News Channel Of The Year, following News 24’s success last year… and a particular ‘well done’ to Dominic Waghorn, named TV journalist of the year. (Was Chris Rogers really nominated? Hardly a Premier League reporter: he seems to be doing some very odd freelance shifts these days, including in the wee small hours on Five Live.)

Incidentally – look out for new on-screen graphics on Sky before the end of the month. I hear talk of ‘a new way of alerting you to breaking news’, which sounds ominous.