Puffbox

I’m personally getting a bit tired of Second Life. I thought the hype had died down, but then Sky News runs two (or was it more?) packages in the Technofile slot saying how great it is. So thanks to Jeff Jarvis for some hard numbers, which I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

At this morning’s session, John Markoff (New York Times) admits that he hasn’t gotten past the opening and I admit I have not either. It’s small. They have 334,000 “regular visitors,” (David Kirkpatrick of Fortune magazine) says – though that’s only people who come back after a month while 2.6 million have come and most, like Markoff and me, give up.

Er, yeah. Me too. (I keep threatening to try it again, though. I refuse to accept the possibility that I’m just too old for it.) 87% of your registered user base seems a lot to have lost, especially after such a long and painful install/registration process.

Climbdown! Backtrack! A deluge of complaints! Oh the humiliation! The Guardian eagerly notes that the BBC’s new News 24 on-screen graphics haven’t been universally popular. Or to put it another way, the BBC proactively explained what they were doing, and offered a forum for people to voice their opinion on it. They have listened, and now they’re acting on the feedback. This is unquestionably a good thing.

The Guardian – who, at the same time, trumpet the success of their Comment Is Free debate – should be ashamed of their choice of words here. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the media and public life in the UK. If you dare to talk to your audience, and – heaven forbid! – listen to their responses, you are portrayed as weak. No you’re not.

My verdict, for what it’s worth: I think it’s an improvement. Good riddance to the OUTRAGEOUSLY LARGE FONTS. But doesn’t it look a lot like Sky News now, eh?

This might be useful for more than just the next series of the brilliant QI… you know how Tony Blair said he used to sit behind the goal watching Newcastle footballer Jackie Milburn, except it turned out that Milburn retired when Blair was only 4, and there weren’t seats at St James’s Park at the time? Well, cue Alan Davies…

Yes, it actually turns out that it isn’t true. (If you believe this piece on the Newsnight blog, that is.) He never said it. Yet it has passed into folklore as fact… and I reckon, if you asked people for ‘evidence’ that Blair is a liar, that’ll be the first or second example that springs to many minds. Google reckons it has 1450 pages mentioning both Blair and Milburn – and a quick scan doesn’t reveal many trying to debunk the story. The top two hits are both from the Guardian: the second one declares it to be an urban myth… but sadly, the top one propagates it further.

I particularly like the line from New Statesman editor John Kampfner, in an article on his website reproduced from the Daily Express: ‘Who can forget the Jackie Milburn reminiscences?’ Er, strictly John – who can remember them? When they didn’t actually happen?

Yesterday, Edelman reported that Brits’ trust in politicians has hit rock-bottom. Lower even than media. Well, maybe – just maybe, that’s a bit harsh.

Interesting to see leading blog platform WordPress following in the footsteps of leading Linux distribution Ubuntu in pre-announcing the precise day of its next release. From one perspective, it’s brave stuff. But I’m personally a firm believer in the timeboxing approach of project management approaches like DSDM – where resources are fixed, time is fixed, and deliverables are variable. Pragmatic decisions about ‘what’s realistic for this release’ are no bad thing.

PR agency Edelman published its annual global Trust Barometer survey this morning, and as ever, it’s fascinating reading. British interviewees have lost faith in pretty much everything since last year, with government’s score dropping by half, falling below the media’s trust rating. We trust business more than we trust NGOs, a reversal of last year’s positions, although both fall markedly.

Technology is the most trusted industry sector worldwide, with healthcare and biotech coming second and third in Europe. Intriguingly, banks score relatively well for the US, China and India – but very poorly in Europe and Japan. The media business comes bottom, more or less across the board.

Swedish and Canadian firms are rated the most trustworthy overall, with Russian companies the most distrusted by pretty much everyone. American firms continue to rate relatively poorly in Europe, with Brits being most negative of all – yet Swedish and British-based companies are considered more trustworthy by Americans than their own!

It’s all summed up by David Brian, Edelman’s top man in Europe:

The growing trust in ‘people like me’ and average employees means that companies must design their communications as much on the horizontal or the peer-to-peer axis as on the vertical or top-down axis. CEOs should continue to talk with elites, such as investors and regulators, but also provide critical information to employees and enthusiastic consumers who spur the peer-to-peer discussion. Third parties with credentials, like academics and physicians, are also critical.

A flick through the presentation slides is highly recommended.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with the open-source Drupal content/blog management system, which has just reached version 5.0. It has a lot in common with WordPress, but it’s much more powerful and much more flexible. However, perhaps inevitably, it’s much more complicated as a result.

Probably the best starting point is to think of it as a blogging tool for multiple authors. The familiar tools of blogging are (generally) in the box to begin with: RSS, categories, comments, etc. If you want to extend your blogging-with-comments into a proper discussion forum, you can do that. If you want to offer distinct category lists (ie taxonomies), you can. If you want to have different types of pages for different uses, you can. And so it goes on. At first glance, there isn’t much in this space which it can’t do, as long as you’re up to the config task. It isn’t best-of-breed in any particular facet, but it’s a great way to tie it all together.

I’d still recommend WordPress for most low-level blog-style projects – which, in my experience, covers most things people actually would want to do. But if you do need to take things to a higher level, Drupal looks like an exceptionally good bet… if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty. A basic understanding of PHP should be enough to get you started, though.

Drupalsites.net gives plenty of demonstrations of Drupal in action, and it shows the huge variety of uses.

I’ve only just noticed that the BBC News website is offering its search results in RSS format. They might have been doing this for a while, but they certainly aren’t doing a great job of promoting it… just a reference at the bottom of their ‘what is a news feed’ page.

I’ve always seen RSS-on-search-results as the ultimate solution for mega-content sites like the BBC. It gives you the ultimate flexibility in terms of customising RSS feeds. Maybe you only want stories about your town, or your favourite individual celebrity. Here’s how to do it:

• Go to news.bbc.co.uk.
• Put an appropriate keyword/query into the main search box.
• Click on the link at the top for ‘BBC News & Sport’ results only.
• Use your browser’s autodiscovery method, or pick up the link from the  icon. (Interestingly, the mockup on the instruction page shows the pictorial  icon, which I thought the Beeb were now using as standard.)

User-friendly it ain’t, but being charitable, maybe it’s a ‘soft launch’. You could put a huge amount of strain on your search engine if you handled this badly.

I’m in the market for a new laptop – and I can’t believe how difficult the manufacturers (software and hardware) are making it. Deep down I want to buy a MacBook, but I know the new version of Mac OS X (10.5 – codename Leopard) is due out imminently. Nobody is talking about a ‘free upgrade if you buy now’; nobody is giving a clue as to the release date, other than ‘spring’. That isn’t much help if you’re looking to buy in a matter of weeks rather than months. The total lack of information from last week’s MacWorld show was a real disappointment, and very out-of-character for Apple.

So instead, sadly, I fear it’s going to have to be another Windows machine. Same problem. Vista is due out at the end of the month, but there’s very little information on manufacturers’ or retailers’ websites about what they will be selling, as and when. I’m also not seeing much in the way of ‘buy it now, get Vista free later’ deals.

If anyone knows of any good (future-proof) deals, please pass them on!