Puffbox

There’s an interesting post on Martin Stabe’s Fleet Street 2.0 blog about local newspaper group Archant‘s plans to use mapping for news presentation. Geotagging (as described by Archant’s Ian Davies) is a pain in the back end, as it’s often impossible to pinpoint the exact spot relevant to a particular story… but it’s the only way to do it.

Otherwise you just end up with algorithm-based guesswork, as in this example. Ben O’Neill does a really good job with limited detail to work from… but inevitably you end up with false locations. Like at the moment, a story from BBC Somerset is positioned inexplicably in Coleraine, Co Londonderry. Or a piece on the World Bank is plonked in Mousehole, Cornwall. (And FYI: the World Bank is not based in Cornwall.) I also note a recurring problem with the new Northern Ireland First Minister, and a town just west of Glasgow, but I suppose that’s bound to happen.

It’s funny this subject should come up today because, although it’s too early for me to blog about it yet, I’m currently working on something related to maps and news presentation myself, on behalf of a major UK news outlet. It’s the sort of think a geek will look at and say ‘duh, I could have programmed that.’ But we’ve designed the production interface for speed and simplicity, allowing stressed journalists to produce something really quite intricate with minimal effort. And I’m convinced the potential is huge, bringing a new level of interaction to the presentation of the Big Stories. If all goes well, it should see its first use (of many, I hope) in June.

As (exclusively!) revealed here earlier in the week, the Guardian has introduced a new ‘network front’ page at www.guardian.co.uk. It’s a now familiar formula, expanding to fill a 1024×768 resolution, with bigger fonts, bigger pictures, and bigger gaps. The ‘downward wipe’ rollover effects on the promo boxes are the cutest touch I’ve spotted… but don’t all the usability studies tell us people respond to words rather than images? Yet you won’t see the text until the image has grabbed you. Inevitably, the immediate reaction is negative… but doesn’t that always happen?

Crucially, it turns out not to be a site redesign. This one ‘entry point’ page is probably the single most popular page on their site, so it’s fair enough to concentrate efforts there. But I don’t think anything else has changed beneath… and it now looks even more out-of-date than before.

The ‘raft of changes’ promised by Emily Bell could really do with an outboard motor. Creative editor Mark Porter describes it as part of an ‘18-month programme to redesign and rebuild every part of GU’… but frankly, it’s already 18 months too late.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say the Telegraph’s new ‘My Telegraph’ blogging platform is revolutionary. Others – specificially, The Sun and Express – have opened ‘personal’ areas within their sites, but both are underwhelming. ‘My Telegraph’ has clearly been put together by people who ‘get it’.

A (relatively) brief registration process gives you a blog with a unique selling point: the address has ‘telegraph.co.uk’ in it. Don’t underestimate the value of this: having seen the attendance at the recent Telegraph bloggers’ Open House, it’s clear to me that people in the UK are happy to define themselves in terms of the newspaper they read. I was very clearly among an audience of Telegraph People (and I have to say, at times, it felt a little uncomfortable). A lot of people will take great pride in quoting their URL: my.telegraph.co.uk/myname.

Shane Richmond and co deserve a lot of credit for developing a blogging platform which includes relatively complex functionality, but makes it very simple. Huge buttons with friendly icons, lots of in-context instructions, a ‘wizard’ approach to blog authoring, sensible URLs for the individual blogs, and a spacious design all make it a very welcoming experience. The ‘blogs I read’ list, which lets each blogger point to his/her friends elsewhere on the platform, will encourage a good amount of casual browsing.

At the moment, though, it’s a fairly self-contained area. The ability to ‘save’ blog posts, and the listing of my ‘comments’ on other blogs, seem to be restricted to the MyTelegraph section… not the journalists’ blogs, and not the (real) newspaper content. Personally, I think I’d have looked to merge the ‘reader blogs’ and the ‘journos’ blogs’ a bit more, maybe even going so far as to close down the ‘blogs.telegraph.co.uk’ section and migrate the ‘professionals’ over to the ‘amateurs’ platform. (Version two, perhaps.)

I’m provisionally impressed. But the project will stand or fall purely on the basis of the community it develops. Having met many of the dedicated Tele community at the recent Open House, I’m convinced they have a ready supply of people wanting to take part. All the elements are in place. But if they think the hard work has just finished, I’m sorry – it has only just started.

Is a redesign of the Guardian website F-I-N-A-L-L-Y on the cards? I’ve just been forwarded an email from Emily Bell (editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited), responding to a design query raised by a friend of mine, advising him to ‘have a look on Thursday’. Oooh, exciting. And very brave, if we’re expecting A Historic News Story to break on Thursday. (Apologies if this is widely known, and I’ve just missed it.)

As a French graduate (albeit some years ago), I was really looking forward to a ‘compare and contrast’ session this evening, as the Presidential election result was revealed at 7pm ‘heure de Londres’. State-backed TV5 was naturally taking a live feed from state channel France 2; but hooray, BBC Parliament said in its listings that it was to take TF1‘s coverage. Which it did… for about two minutes. Then suddenly, moments before the clock struck vingt heures, someone flicked a switch, and they too took France 2. Pourquoi?

This sort of ‘educational’ coverage is something the Beeb should be doing more of; especially where they can do deals with fellow state broadcasters (although in this case, TF1 is private). Instead, we ended up with two channels running exactly the same coverage. Quel dommage.

If you happen to come across a blog at puffbox.com which appears to be stealing my content, don’t worry. I’m in the process of setting up my own server elsewhere, and I’m experimenting with the FeedWordPress plugin. The plan is to post everything at my existing simondickson.wordpress.com blog, and have it mirrored over to the new one. (In the short term…)

TechCrunch reckons that Yahoo is about to close down its Yahoo Photos service, in favour of the infinitely better (but still smaller in terms of visitor numbers) Flickr. It’s really only surprising that it’s taken so long: Flickr is probably my single favourite website out there. Great content, great functionality, great community. But I’m wondering why I had to surrender my Flickr ID in favour of a Yahoo login, if this move was coming.

They also say that ‘Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos’. You have to admire YouTube, but it’s just a bit ugly. I’m dying to see what the Flickr mob will do with video sharing.

I mentioned yesterday that The Spectator magazine had started its blogging efforts by ‘buying in’ a couple of existing blogs. But there’s something very odd with their technology: if I look at the RSS feeds for the two guest blogs (Stephen Pollard and Clive Davis), both are showing all items as having been published on 5 May 2007. Check your calendars, folks… that’s tomorrow. The Coffee House blog’s feed avoids the problem, by having no dates whatsoever.

(All the feeds have a curious ‘rss.txml’ filename, which I’ve never seen, and no ‘generator’ tag to identify the publishing system being used. Anyone recognise it?)

Intriguing to see what’s happening over at The Spectator, which has just ‘bought’ two blogs: Stephen Pollard and Clive Davis. Both have abandoned their former blogging arrangements, here and here respectively, to blog exclusively under a Spectator banner. (The magazine has also launched its own ‘house blog’ this week, called The Coffee House.)

Pollard is relatively well known, I suppose, in the right circles – and has a Technorati rank of 22,560, which is decent but not stellar. On the other hand, I’m afraid Clive’s is a new name to me… and his former blog barely scraped into the Technorati top 100,000. (To be entirely fair to Clive, he did also have a Blogger-based blog, but that only just scrapes into the top 900,000.)

Initially, it seemed an odd thing to do. Neither blogger has a huge audience, so it’s not going to boost traffic significantly. Potential SEO benefits, perhaps. But on reflection, it’s a perfectly natural move for a publisher. They already pay columnists to produce articles to appear in print; I guess this is an identical arrangement, albeit with a higher turnover of content. It’s what magazines do. Whether it’s right for websites? – that remains to be seen.

When the Telegraph announced it would allow people to have their own blogs under the Telegraph banner, I wasn’t the only one to wonder if people would be prepared to abandon their own former blogging platforms, to join someone else’s. Clearly the Spectator has found a way to do it; but I wonder what commercial terms they’re talking.

I have plans of my own for this blog in the not too distant future; but if any news organisations want to offer me loads of cash to transfer to their servers… it’s not too late for me to reconsider those plans. Click here to start the bidding. 🙂

When I attended last month’s Open House event at the Telegraph, I mused (during a chat with David Wilcox, posted on Google Video) about the status of journalists:

I just wonder if someone really had fire in their belly for a subject today, would they feel a need to become a journalist? Is journalism in itself as attractive and glamorous a career as it was five or ten years ago? (With blogging) I’ve got a platform to say what I need to say. And in many respects, I respect the people who don’t work professionally as writers, as communicators, as PR – because I want to hear from the people who ‘do the job’.

(By the way – having just done it, let me say it’s a very odd experience to transcribe your own words..! Sorry about the repetition of the word ‘respect’ there. Terrible.)

Shane Richmond, who straddles the two camps in his role as leader of the Telegraph’s blogging efforts, offered one (very valid) point in response: ‘when you phone people up and say “I’m calling from the Daily Telegraph”, stuff happens.’

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I’m very interested to see this week’s article in the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, in which he notes:

In the midst of the Virginia Tech story, I was at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas, where two talented video bloggers – Zadi Diaz, of JetSet, and Amanda Congdon, ex of Rocketboom – both refused the title ‘journalist’ because of the baggage it brings, the expectations and demands. They don’t want to be on that side of the gate. They insisted – not unlike the Virginia Tech witness-reporters – that they are merely doing their own thing. They just want to be linked.

The only way (news organisations) can expand is to work cooperatively with witness-reporters, community members, experts, people who publish on their own, finding and sending readers to the best and most reliable among them. How? Via the link.