Puffbox

Worthy of note: the website, launched on Monday, for people to upload holiday snaps taken at the Ocean Club holiday resort, Praia da Luz which might yield clues as to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

They want anything in the two weeks before she went missing with ‘people in them who you don’t know as opposed to scenery shots or pictures of just your own family’. It’s a fairly basic file upload facility; pictures will be imported into the Childbase computer which (according to Sky’s Martin Brunt) will ‘scan the photos and recognise anyone who appears a number of times. It can also compare images with known sex offenders, both British and Portuguese.’

What has happened to that family is truly horrible – and gets worse as each day goes by. But I still have a very uncomfortable feeling about certain elements of the coverage.

I only joined Facebook a few days ago, and only then because I felt it was something I had to know about. So far, I’m disappointed. It doesn’t seem to be great at anything. The photo-sharing element is mediocre. The ‘notes’ feature falls well short of any serious blogging application. The calendar element is OK, I suppose. RSS support is patchy. Maybe it only shows its true worth when you throw your entire life at it, and force all your friends and family to do likewise. Seems to go against the grain of other 2.0 apps, which allow – and sometimes encourage – you to consume the data outside. Or perhaps I just need more mates. (Charlie Brooker’s take on Facebook is worth a read, incidentally.)

Glad to see it wasn’t just me who couldn’t access the Telegraph’s website yesterday (and still can’t this morning). The Guardian says it was a distributed denial of service attack. The blogs and my.telegraph sites are on a different server, and were not affected…so it’s a bit of a shame that nothing’s been posted by the Telegraph guys themselves, to say what’s happening. (Unless I’ve missed it.)

I’ve always liked the Google Analytics website analysis tool… mainly because of the pricetag. (Zero.) It gave you all the top-line usage statistics you’d be looking for, and a lot more besides, but it always felt a bit too fussy. Google bought the product in, took away the subscription model, but didn’t really get round to applying its trademark ‘beautifully simple, simply beautiful’ house style. Until now.

I logged in this morning, to apply tracking code to my new puffbox.com WordPress-based blog/site, to be confronted by the new interface. And yes, this is Google all over. An entry screen packed with the sort of info you’d be looking for immediately. Huge Flash-based graphics, with interactive elements you’ll recognise from other Google products (eg Finance – which is looking great these days too). The ability to send scheduled reports by email, or export to PDF. When they say it’s ‘easy enough for a layperson to understand, but also offers the sophistication experienced users need’, they aren’t exaggerating.

One of the main reasons I opted for WordPress as my blogging tool of choice was its ‘pages’ feature – in other words, the ability to have content outside the chronological blog presentation. It’s a very simple addition, but it turns WordPress into a pretty comprehensive CMS option. Now I see Typepad – the blogging tool of choice for smaller or more suspicious businesses, thanks to its rapid set-up and minimal cost – is offering the same functionality. Too late to win me back, but it does make Typepad a more serious long-term option. Why do I still love WordPress? Because upgrading from v2.1 to v2.2 yesterday took seconds, and made me smile as I did it.

Chelsea finished a disappointing sixth in the league table of football websites published by comScore: Man Utd are top, Liverpool second, Arsenal third, then Real Madrid and Barcelona completing the top five. So Roman’s Empire will be hoping for a traffic boost with the launch (effectively) of its own RSS reader, based on UK firm Zebtab‘s platform.

Zebtab bills itself as ‘the ultimate widget (offering) ‘snackable’ rich content and entertainment including audio, video and pictures direct to desktops’. It’s basically your classic ‘desktop alert’ tool, with the benefit of having multiple content sources in the one application. Their promotional material doesn’t mention RSS, but today’s Guardian piece on the product says it’s ‘based on a form of RSS content feeds, but avoids technical jargon… Though widely used by bloggers and technology sites to syndicate and monitor new content, the acronym has deterred more mainstream adoption of RSS. Zebtab aims to make the technology invisible.’

We’ve seen others try to simplify RSS by launching branded applications, not least the Guardian incidentally… and fail to make much impact. I thought IE7 would have done more to drive it home, but I think they missed the opportunity. Vista’s sidebar could yet be RSS’s salvation… and whilst Zebtab’s aim is laudable, I don’t fancy their chances.

I read that Sam Roake, credited with the success of the Webcameron site, has left the employ of the Conservative Party, for reasons yet to be disclosed. I’m inclined to agree with Guido Fawkes (which could be a first) – the relaunched Webcameron does seem to have taken something of a backward step, and Dave does need to cut his blog posts down a bit. (Littler and oftener, please.) If anyone fancies running the site, you need to get your application in before 29 May. Shame they didn’t proof-read the job advert’s error-strewn copy: maybe that’s one of the vacant position’s responsibilities?

A very interesting post from Kevin Marsh, head of the BBC’s college of journalism, reflecting on the Panorama fuss earlier in the week: ‘This is how it is now and will be more so in days to come. And it’s not a bad thing for Big Journalism. If the argument for investigative journalism is that things done in the light are done with more integrity and accountability than things done in the dark… then the argument for investigating journalism – for audiences and those journalism puts in the news to investigate journalism – is unanswerable.’

First task of the day: uninstalling Internet Explorer v7, and getting used to v6 again. I’ve decided that too many clients are still sticking with IE6, for reasons I don’t immediately understand. But since you can’t (easily) have both on the same (XP Home) machine, I’ve had to make the choice… and the only sensible choice is to ensure you’re coding compatibly with the vast majority of clients. A relatively painless process, thankfully, with no obvious signs of side-effects. But it still feels very odd to be taking a backward step. I thought it was being forced on people automatically?

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the video of Panorama reporter John Sweeney losing his rag whilst filming for tonight’s BBC1 exposé of Scientology. It’s quite an extraordinary interviewing technique.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=hxqR5NPhtLI]

I must admit, I was immediately cynical; we’ve had a run of Monday morning items on the BBC news agenda which have been blatant adverts for the Panorama show later in the day. (This has been the subject of some discussion on the BBC’s Newswatch slot.) So I didn’t immediately realise that it wasn’t the Beeb who had released the clip.

It’s actually been posted on YouTube by a user called ‘johnalexwood’, who includes in his biography that he is a ‘Scientologist living in East Grinstead’; his wife works for the Church of Scientology London, and his favourite book is Dianetics, often described as the bible of Scientology. So he is not an impartial observer to the exchange.

It makes for an interesting game of tit-for-tat news management. Broadcast-quality pictures can be produced on a camcorder costing barely £100; broadcasting facilities (via YouTube) are free; and the broadcasting process itself is trivially simple. Journalists used to be ‘superpowers’: they were the ones armed with cameras and airtime, and hence able to act with impunity. Now the interviewees are armed too.

And you know what? I bet the Beeb don’t mind too much… I’ll definitely be watching the show tonight. I hadn’t planned to. And I bet I’m not alone in that.

UPDATE:  there’s a very nice piece from John Sweeney himself, buried on the BBC site, in which he writes: ‘Davis had been goading me all week, and on the seventh day I fell into his elephant trap. He shouted at me and I shouted back, louder. If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe. I apologised almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it to my boss, my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, the Director-General of the BBC.’