Puffbox

Stephen Fry started blogging last week. Already, in Bloglines alone, he has nearly 400 subscribers. Now I love Stephen Fry to bits… but he’s averaging 7250 words per posting. Blimey. I’m sure his new piece on the modern notion of fame is fabulous, and I’d love to read it whilst travelling tonight, but I’m not sure my battery will hold out.

Newsnight editor Peter Barron points to an interesting Mayo/Steinberg moment this week. On Tuesday night’s show, David Miliband was being Paxman-ed about Burma: unable to answer a specific point, he promised to clear it up by publishing the missing information on the web later on. Not on the FCO’s main site, nor indeed on his shiny new blog… but over on Newsnight’s own site.

Arguably this was a risky tactic, and were I still working there, I might even have been inclined to advise against it (although it seemed to be a spontaneous decision by the Foreign Sec, judging by the video recording). By handing over the text, you’re handing over control of it. Who knows how the BBC might present it, or what else they might put around it?

As it turned out, Newsnight did publish it… and they followed it, on the same page, with responses by their own production staff, and from the UK’s Burma Campaign…. followed by a further FCO follow-up. All shown without additional commentary. And you know what? It’s a brilliant example of adult, reasoned debate. Here are the viewpoints, all in one place – now you decide.

I’m proud to be Bloglines subscriber #1 to Westmonster, the new political blog out of Lloyd Shepherd’s Messy Media stable. Initial reactions are favourable: relevant content, tightly edited, and with that increasingly familiar ‘chatty’ style. But they’ve gone heavy on the site’s design, lots of Flash and javascript… and whilst it looks great, it’s infuriatingly sluggish to scroll on my (not quite top-spec but perfectly respectable) desktop PC.

With the Sky News political blog adopting a similar approach, this is getting to be quite a busy niche… Incidentally, have you seen the new banner image atop adamboulton.typepad.com? All a bit ‘crouch, touch, hold, engage!’ for me…

There really is a ton of stuff happening at Sky News just now – clearly the benefits of putting some big names on the TV side into the online operation are beginning to come through. I think it’s absolutely the right thing to switch the focus of Adam Boulton’s blog to rapid-fire ‘rumours, whispers and gossip’. More Guido than Robinson, I guess. Then there’s the forthcoming ‘your photos’ site, which I got a sneak preview of, earlier this week – nothing too extravagant, but by the time you factor in moderation etc, it’s more difficult than it sounds. Not to mention preparations for the general election, whenever it might eventually come. (I hear there’s a feeling among some senior staff that October is a definite maybe.)

There’s now a ‘business edition‘ of Google’s Custom Search service, which lets you effectively ‘build your own Google’, featuring only the sites you want to be searched. It’s got all the functionality of the world’s favourite search engine, because it is the world’s favourite search engine.

The business edition takes away the adverts; and the results come in as XML, so you can dress them up however you want. Of course it costs money, but for $100/year for a 500-page site, rising to $2250 for a 300,000-page site, you’d be extremely hard pressed to buy, install, maintain and manage an in-house search engine.

Talking to a business contact today, the question came up of launching a search engine aimed at a particular content niche. The free version of Google Custom Search isn’t really an option; but you know what? – this might well be.

More new web-influenced programming to come in a couple of weeks on Sky News: look out for Sky.com News (geddit?) at 7.30pm on Tuesdays to Fridays, with half an hour of ‘the most clicked stories on the Sky News website, and further analysis of one of the most popular stories, as well as opening up online discussions to studio debate. There will also be a rundown of the best popular online video and news from around the world as caught by Sky News viewers.’

Inevitably, the host will be the channel’s resident geek, Martin Stanford. He’s been into this territory before, of course: a relaunch at the same time last year introduced, and then rightly abandoned, various attempts at phone-in and webcam-in interaction. Then last month, they trialled a web-only video bulletin; with little follow-up, I assumed they’d gone cold on the Digg-TV idea. So I’m not yet sure it’s fair to call it ‘a radical step’ (as quoted on Media Guardian). But there are intriguing aspects: for one, the show will carry on through the TV advert breaks, if you’re watching on the web.

When I mentioned the launch of my recent NHS project, I noted there were a few other things in the pipeline. One of these is a hosted forum at netmums.com, which has already attracted near enough 100 postings in 24 hours (give or take). Just what Mayo & Steinberg had in mind.

I suppose it isn’t untrue to say Sky News has resurrected its Technofile strand – a programme which yours truly graced on regular occasions between 1998 and 1999. But at just four minutes long, it hardly qualifies as ‘web TV’: that’s equivalent to a couple of packages, or a single high-profile interviewee. I must admit, I expected more – although it’s great to see Martin Stanford back doing what he enjoys most.

Meanwhile, the channel’s website has restored its Technology channel, populated principally by content sourced from Pocket-Lint (the previous day, in most cases). I’m still not convinced that Sky can or should support multiple news channels like this: for me, it’s much more sensible to focus on what you do best – in Sky’s case, speed over depth. They can’t match the BBC’s resources, so they shouldn’t try to match the BBC’s method. I’ve seen them try countless syndicated content deals over the years, and few have had any real impact or longevity.

Having used OpenOffice happily for years now, I was naturally interested to try out IBM’s revived Symphony office suite, which uses the same code base. My advice if you’re similarly inclined: don’t. It’s prettier than OpenOffice, and seems to include a few innovations which the base product should really adopt (eg a single tabbed instance in the taskbar), but it’s noticeably slower than OOo. But these are just side issues compared to the two things IBM have done completely wrong.

First off, they make it incredibly difficult to actually install. The download server clearly isn’t coping with the demand; and they make you go through so many registration hoops before you even get to a download page. Why make me register beforehand? Why not just throw it open to the world, and allow P2P download for everyone’s mutual benefit? If registration is an issue, how about after installation… or even better, after the beta phase?

But that’s nothing compared to the fact that it automatically snatched all the relevant file associations away from my OpenOffice installation. For me, with a product that is so clearly in beta, and only of interest to the sort of early-adopters who will already be running OpenOffice, this is utterly unforgivable. How dare they do this?

I’m now spending time I don’t have, trying to restore my file associations. I’m genuinely angry. If this is IBM’s attempt to endear itself to people like me, providing an improved version of a trusted open-source tool, they just got it badly, badly wrong.

The new Reuters video search tool is one of the more impressive things I’ve seen in a while. Working with facial recognition specialists Viewdle, they’ve done a remarkably good job of indexing 600-odd hours of footage for beta-testing purposes. Type in a person’s name, and they’ll link you directly to recent Reuters footage featuring that individual. Not only that, but it’ll link you directly to that person’s first appearance in the relevant clip; and give you ‘bookmarks’ to jump to other appearances in the same video. Simple idea… but it actually works.

I really like the ‘search suggestions’ auto-completion function; type in a few letters of your search query, and not only will it show you any matching names it recognises, but it also shows you a thumbnail image of the person’s face. By far the most useful example of ‘autocomplete’ I’ve seen so far.