Puffbox

There’s something faintly surreal at the lengths Helen Boaden goes to, to rebut Iain Dale’s claims that the BBC was biased in its reporting of the weekend’s Tory red tape review. If you wanted evidence of how ‘proper’ media is taking bloggers seriously, here it is.

Sadly Sky News reporter Derek Tedder’s experiment in Twitter-driven journalism seems to have been short-lived: there’s been nothing from him since mid-yesterday afternoon. Press Gazette’s Martin Stabe has plenty of additional detail, including a few quotes which Sky EP Julian March probably should have polished up before handing over. I certainly don’t remember ever using the phrase ‘tits and arse’ in the weekly traffic reports I pioneered during my Osterley days.

Actually… we don’t seem to have an updated Sky web video bulletin since last week. Full marks for experimentation chaps, but it’s starting to smack of attention deficit disorder.

Over the weekend, I finally took the plunge and installed Ubuntu Linux on my still shiny-new laptop. Contrary to Microsoft’s promises, Vista hadn’t made me go ‘wow’, not once. It was taking ages to boot up, and I really don’t like its networking functions. With virtually nothing on the new laptop, certainly nothing I needed to worry about losing, it seemed like the right time to try something risky.

Just as well: the Vista C and D drives were destroyed by the partitioning process. So I’m now using a Ubuntu-only laptop, as opposed to the dual-boot machine I had intended.

So far it’s an enjoyable experience, but I do want my Vista setup back – after all, I did pay for it. Like most Acer machines, my laptop came with a hidden partition, which should let me reinstall the factory Vista setup painlessly. Except it won’t. I’ve got a support call in with Acer HQ, but my guess is that since the hidden partition has swelled up from 2GB to 56GB, I need to repartition again.

Of course, Dell would have to pick today to announce the availability of pre-installed Ubuntu machines in the UK market…

Some fantastic experimentation going on at Sky News, with reporter Derek Tedder microblogging from the Heathrow climate change camp. He’s sending a steady stream of concise updates via an account at Twitter, with photos being uploaded to a Sky News account at Flickr. It looks like he’s using a Nokia N73 cameraphone, and twittering via IM.

This is precisely the kind of innovation Sky should be doing: free to do, using widely available tools, and on a story which (for now) won’t have any major impact on anything or anyone. If/when it all kicks off, presumably at the weekend when ‘direct action’ is threatened, it could really come into its own.

Oh, and incidentally… I note the Flickr account has been active for ages; and until now, appears largely to have consisted of uncredited viewer-submitted photos of the recent flooding. Which is as clear a breach of the Flickr community guidelines as I can imagine:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.

This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.

At the present time, with 36 of the 37 pages being other people’s flood photos, I’d say that qualified as ‘primarily’. Danger, danger.

Hot on the heels of their showbiz-only app comes a full-on Sky News Facebook app. I still like the idea of RSS-to-Facebook, but to be honest, once I’d added the showbiz app, I forgot all about it. On reflection, why would I look at my own profile for content updates? Meanwhile, I’m seeing a steady stream of updates from Five Live, because it’s a ‘friend’. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Sky could change its status each time it has a (decent) ‘breaking news’ story: ‘Sky News is reporting that…’.

Radio Five Live has a new logo. I’ve always found it a bit weird for radio stations to have logos – but in these days of converged media, with screens on your radio, and radio on your TV, I suppose it makes sense. It’s a big number 5, in a circle, so it can’t have cost much. 🙂 I only know this because it just popped up in my Facebook news feed. This stuff works, folks.

The new website for The Guardian Weekly is the first really interesting development we’ve seen from Faringdon in quite a while. In print, it’s really a ‘best of’ selection from the daily newspaper, plus the Observer, Washington Post and Le Monde. Online, it’s going for something completely different.

The site splits in two. The ‘blue section’ is professionally produced editorial, ‘all linked by the common theme of reporting the experiences of individual people’. Blogging by proxy, if you like. The ‘brown section’, My Guardian Weekly, goes all social-networky. Once you register, you can submit articles for inclusion in the ‘blue section’; you can create a ‘watchlist’ of friends; upload photos; send ’email’; submit comments on ‘blue section’ articles; and see yourself, and fellow registered users, on a Google Map mashup. Oh, and it looks much more Guardian-y, too.

There’s also the intriguing notion of a ‘campaign on a major issue chosen entirely by Guardian Weekly readers and website users’. Social networking with a centre-left purpose? Intriguing.

Comparisons with the Telegraph’s equivalent service are inevitable. The key difference is that the GW site brings the users into the ‘proper’ editorial. My.Telegraph gives you a blog, but keeps you at arm’s length from the real journalism. GW doesn’t give you a blog (per se), but invites you to be part of the real journalism. Personally, that feels like a more engaging offer. But I guess they’ll have to set the bar relatively low; readers need to feel there’s a high likelihood of their writing being accepted.

Only the niche-market Weekly product for now… but I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to see this as the ‘beta’ for a new Guardian Unlimited.

Lloyd Shepherd hits the nail on the head. If Google News is going to start hosting original news content, in the form of comments from people involved, then it has moved from being a search engine for published news, to being a news publishing rival. I always felt that news publishers’ anger at Google News was misplaced. Far from building a business on other people’s content, Google News (surely?) acts as a generator of extra traffic for those very news publishers. But this changes things quite dramatically.

Or rather, it won’t. I just don’t see how it can possibly work. ‘Email us your rebuttals, and include some kind of identification method’? I’d have thought Google’s efforts would have been better directed at some kind of ‘related blog posting’ function. Maybe I could register my name with Google News, and when it sees me mentioned in a news story, it could check my blog for a relevant posting. (A bit like Technorati, but with proactive rather than reactive indexing, maybe?) I wouldn’t have thought it would be too difficult to find corresponding keywords.

It wouldn’t have to be blogs, necessarily. It could include press releases, speeches, transcripts, etc etc. Anything which counts as primary source material. So for example, any time you saw David Miliband quoted, you’d hit the Foreign Office ‘latest news’ page, and see what you could find. Any time something is quoted from the Commons, you’d scan the (almost real-time) Hansard transcript. Doesn’t that keep everyone happy?

Over at the Telegraph, Ian Douglas has some interesting ideas about your local cinema. It follows in the wake of comments by Dave Winer, prompted by his trip to see the Simpsons movie.

Home technology is rapidly catching up with cinemas, in terms of quality and pricing. You can buy a setup relatively cheaply, which is at least as good as the local multiplex, and has added conveniences. (I speak as someone who just bought a famous-name 42″ LCD TV for under £700. There are some benefits to being flooded, I guess.)

The exact same thing happened to amusement arcades: when the PlayStation brought true arcade-quality gaming to the living room, they failed to deliver something better. And there are few more depressing places than a seaside amusement arcade these days.

Sky News has launched its first web-only news bulletin: Martin Stanford presents a six-minute dash through the headlines, with a bit of shameless YouTubing. (If that isn’t already a word, it should be.) Hugh Westbrook’s post on the Sky editors’ blog doesn’t actually say it’s going to be a daily thing, but that’s certainly the implication.

The choice of lead stories is a bit on the low-brow side – Madeleine McCann, Pete Doherty, ‘Bond girl Jane Seymour’ (?!), the National Lottery… and not a single mention for the day’s biggest ‘proper’ story, foot and mouth. But take a look at the ‘most popular stories’ lists on any website, even the hallowed BBC, and you’ll see this is what people actually read online.

The ‘yoof’-style editing reminds me, ironically enough, of the BBC’s recently-axed StoryFIX, which was trying to do something similar… albeit a bit more quirky, and a bit less newsy. With that in mind, I’m not sure I’d have chosen Martin Stanford to present it. Leaving aside his genuine interest in all things technological, Martin is now one of the more ‘serious’ presenters on the channel, probably second only to Jeremy Thompson in terms of gravitas. This deliberately flimsy content isn’t his natural territory, and despite his best efforts, it shows. The rather conventional screen makeup – newsreader’s head and shoulders, studio set with a map backdrop, big strap across the bottom – seems a bit too ‘TV’, too.

It’ll be intriguing to see how this project goes forward. It’s an attempt to produce a ‘news bulletin’ which accepts the reality of the web audience’s (dumbed-down?) interests, and will sit alongside the ‘proper’ headlines. Is online video just a distribution channel for existing TV material, or is it a distinct medium which requires a different editorial approach? The relative traffic levels may reveal all.