Puffbox

Sky News is going all BBC Backstage, inviting developers to do something clever with their XML feeds. The prize? – tour of the studios, meet the talent, share the £10,000 prize pot. See the Facebook group for details and feed URLs. I’m not sure whether this is an inspired piece of ‘open sourcing’, or an attempt to get some design and development work done on the cheap. Knowing Sky, possibly the latter: you wouldn’t get much built for £10k, let alone an indeterminately sized share thereof.

Inviting people to look at your feeds is a risk: even after a quick scan myself, I’ve spotted a few oddities. Why deliver the title as CDATA? Why the empty enclosure field? Why not actually enclose the story images? Why make it so horrible to hack the various URLs? (OK, I know the answer to that last one: Vignette.) Etc etc.

But it does point to one crucial fact: if you’ve got good RSS, you can virtually rebuild your entire website around it. Web services don’t necessarily have to be any more difficult.

The BBC has finally launched a ‘BBC Internet Blog‘. Even the name itself seems a bit anachronistic. But if we’re going to get ‘senior staff from BBC Future Media teams talk(ing) about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC’s presence on the internet’, I guess it’s fair enough. I’m just wondering why they didn’t do it six months ago, before iPlayer damaged its previously bulletproof online credibility.

By launching a ‘proper’ BBC blog, they’ve taken the opposite path from Microsoft – whose internal teams are permitted, or indeed encouraged, to blog, but do so away from microsoft.com domain. (Usually on MSDN, more recently on Spaces.) Many of those likely to contribute to the BBC site – eg Nick Reynolds, the ‘editor‘ of the new blog – already have their own external blogs, where they’ve been quite happy to discuss and disclose their internal work. Would have been an ideal opportunity for a ‘virtual group blog’…

Incidentally, I’m indebted to Nick’s blog for the discovery of bbc.co.uk/programmes. A potentially staggering resource, with a page for every show broadcast on the BBC, including episode guides and broadcast times (plural), with categorisation by genre, format and tag. It definitely needs a usability lift, but if you can see the underlying potential here… er, blimey. For starters, imagine what you could do with schedules via RSS or iCal? (They’ve already got hCal support in there, if you look hard enough.)

Er… is the BBC News website really ten years old this week? I remember it evolving quite fluidly from Politics 97 – which, I’m delighted to discover, is still (largely) live on the Beeb site, as far back as The Day After Election Day 1997. Oh what a night…

Very interested to read about yesterday’s internet/politics seminar at Queens University Belfast, organised by Mick Fealty, the man behind Slugger O’Toole and more recently the Telegraph’s Brassneck. I’m particularly taken by one passage in the report by blogger Alan In Belfast:

Blog posts tend to be dominated by a single voice, a consistent set of values and personal background that command what’s written ‘above the line’ in the main post. Blogs differentiate themselves by their voice. And while there is still a melee of commenters ‘below the line’ (in popular blogs anyway), it’s centred around a sophisticated starting point in the original post. And with discipline – and an eye for libel – the commenting can be proactively gardening, pruning the straggly branches, and removing the poisonous weeds.

On reflection, this is probably the conclusion I reached myself, but never quite put into words (although I probably wouldn’t have used a gardening analogy).

Forums generally aren’t successful, in the same way decision-making by committee generally isn’t successful. The blogger sets the tone, and enforces an appropriate ‘door policy’, as is his/her right. I’d add that the blogger ought to be posting regularly, always driving things forward – which ought to stop any threads becoming too lengthy and/or circular. There are lessons here, people.

Expect similar discussion at next week’s Telegraph open night on political blogging. Hard to imagine a more illustrious guest list; if you’ve got any interest in this field, you really ought to get your name down.

This gagging order on naming the (allegedly) blackmailed Royal is making the legal system look ridiculous. In an idle moment, I did a one-word search on Google News UK. I didn’t even have to leave the first page of results to find the individual’s name: helpfully it featured in one of the extracts, along with a picture too. Which begs the question… is Google breaching the ban? They may not have written the words, but they’re certainly republishing them on their own (supposedly UK-targeted) pages.

I’m in the market for a UK hosting arrangement, which will allow me to offer clients end-to-end WordPress-based solutions: design, build and somewhere to put it. I’m not looking for anything special – just your basic Apache / MySQL / PHP5 arrangement with a do-almost-anything admin front-end. Don’t need to worry about huge storage space (yet anyway), but I’d rather avoid anything that imposes a traffic limit. UK-based, naturally. Under a grand per year, and ideally, well under.

Basically I’m looking to pay someone to take the whole hosting worry off my hands, so I can do my thing. They look after the maintenance, monitoring, etc etc etc. If it goes wrong, they fix it first, then tell me it went wrong but they already fixed it. I’m dealing with some v-e-r-y high-profile clients, so not only do I need to be confident myself, I need them to be confident in my confidence. If you see what I mean.

At the moment, Heart Internet seem top of the shortlist, but there are plenty of players in the reseller field. So, over to you guys. Who would you recommend? Or indeed, advise against? If you don’t fancy using the comments, there’s a feedback form over at puffbox.com. Convince me you’re genuine, and I might even quote your affiliate code. 😉

The next time I get into that RSS argument – you know, the one where people say ‘yes but only a tiny number of people use it’ – I’ve got a great response. It only takes one.

The area I’m getting most excited about just now is RSS-based syndication. Yes, actual syndication. Putting your content on my website, and vice versa. Better visibility for your material, and better usability for my users: instead of telling them they’ll get ‘the latest news’ from your site, I show them what that latest news actually is. And even better, it manages itself: neither of us has to lift a finger.

It’s getting easier and easier to do this. The PHP development language now includes a ‘simple XML’ function, which lets even a non-expert like me write some lines to process it. There are several excellent ready-to-go functions written in PHP: I’ve had good experiences with lastRSS. An RSS widget comes as default on something like WordPress. Personalised homepages. Desktop sidebars. The list goes on. But it’s all dependent on you providing an RSS feed to process in the first place.

Of course it would be great if more people were using RSS as their primary ‘front end’ for the web. But if your feed has only one ‘user’, with that ‘user’ displaying your latest headlines to dozens, hundreds, thousands of visitors to another site, it’s more than paying for the development effort you’ll have to put in.

At long last, Media Guardian has had its facelift, following the formula of other recent Guardian redesigns. It’s wide, it’s long, and it looks like it’s having a few (entirely forgiveable) first-day hiccups. It looks fine… much like every other 1024-wide news site redesign I’ve seen recently. But you know what? I find myself barely caring. I almost never look at the site’s homepage, and I almost never use its in-page navigation. With all their content coming to me courtesy of their RSS – sorry, ‘webfeed’ – I never need to. (Maybe that’s why Jason Deans seems so matter-of-fact in his write-up on the OrganGrinder blog.)

Incidentally: I note the site’s individual sections now have their own separate RSS feeds… and they’ve moved the Media Monkey gossip column into a blog format, so it’s got its own RSS – although, er, actually it’s Atom – too.

The most interesting development, I suppose, is the addition of a ‘video’ channel: Flash-based streaming courtesy of Brightcove, in a larger-than-usual 460×345 window. A rather odd mix of offerings so far: a few ‘proper’ TV news packages, a few stupid behind-the-scenes things, a few clips / trailers / free adverts. I’m sure it’ll work itself out in time.

Delighted to see Sky’s Tim Marshall has joined the ranks of the channel’s bloggers. Very few manage to mix serious news analysis with a down-to-earth style as well as he does… and again, it should be a tone which is tailor-made for good blogging. I still rank him as one of my absolutely-must-watch TV news correspondents, even though my lasting memory of him will always be when he once lay flat-out at my feet, in a bid to stretch out his bad back. A great bloke, and that’s despite his Leeds United affiliation.