Puffbox

I did my best to sit through the first hour of France 24 – and yes, that is pronounced Fronce van cat’ – on Sky Digital (channel 515)… but I just couldn’t do it. Ten minutes of news bulletin, followed by 20 minutes of filler. And in the first hour, ‘filler’ included two runs of the same mini-documentary, two runs of a pointless global weather forecast (Africa hot, Scandinavia cold), and two (consecutive!) runs of a France 24 promo. Oh yes, and a blank screen at one point. And the Washington correspondent saying ‘pissed off’ in a live two-way. And some spelling mistakes in the on-screen graphics. You could blame it on opening night nerves… except it actually started online last night. Ooh la la.

The most striking part is that it’s principally native French-speakers talking in English, or film overdubbed in English. And whilst the French presenters have (for the most part) exceptionally good levels of English, their accents are invariably American. Ironic when the whole raison d’etre of the channel is to act as a balance to the American view of the world.

Frankly, it looks amateur – rolling news done on the cheap. And when it’s a single press of the remote control away from the uber-slick Al Jazeera English, it looks even worse: the contrast with Doha’s action-packed ‘look how cool we are’ opening hour is stark. Quel dommage, les gars.

Meanwhile online… the new France 24 website is up and running too. And there are some good signs: trilingual presentation, a good number of blogs, a clutch of RSS feeds, comment functions on every story, even a bit of Ajax. But I’m not sure about the innovative (ahem) homepage presentation: clicking on a headline brings its excerpt up in the main homepage panel, rather than taking you to a page on the story itself. And it’s not very smart to go live with a lead sports story that’s 48+ hours out of date.

For a few years now, Steve Rubel has been something of a guru in terms of public relations and the web, and his blog is required reading. He and colleagues from major PR agency Edelman have just unleashed something called StoryCrafter, which:

basically breaks down a press release into its core parts, leaving it up to you – the journalist (citizen or pro) – to decide how it should be put together. Most importantly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, trackbacks and comments.

There’s an example here. The initial comments aren’t very encouraging, but I think they’re missing the point. This isn’t about a new web tool for creating press notices. It’s about a new way – rather, a new way of presenting them. And good on them for that. In my journalism days, I spent too long deconstructing someone else’s prose, before turning it into my own. The bullet-point approach will make PR people feel less creative, but it’s what their customer ultimately wants. It’s still rough round the edges, but this feels right.

Interesting to see the comments facility; but this should be a perfect situation for trackbacks (effectively ‘other sites linking to this one’) to come into their own.

I had a play on Nintendo’s new Wii games console earlier this week, at the Science Museum’s Game On exhibition. Nintendo has prioritised gameplay over graphics in its new device… and seeing it in the context of how games have developed over 50 years, the Wii’s visuals looked really disappointing. But the fun comes from its innovative motion-sensing wireless controller. For example, you play tennis by swinging the controller in your hand, like a racquet – which makes for a very different, and very enjoyable, gaming experience.

But I love this email which Nintendo have (apparently) had to send out to new purchasers in the US. It’s basically a human nature warning, as opposed to a hardware defect. I wonder how many people have smashed their controllers by (a) dropping them; (b) tossing them against the wall; or (c) whacking them against the side of the telly?

(Most fun at the exhibition, incidentally: playing Guitar Hero on the PS2 for the first time. Basically it’s another ‘press buttons in time to the music’ game, with the added excitement of a guitar-shaped controller, and a classic rock soundtrack. But as a proper guitar player myself, I found it really difficult, as my hands wanted to form the appropriate chord shapes, rather than just pressing the coloured buttons!)

For the first time in ages, I’ve got a bit of time to play with some of the new technical toys out there on the internet. And today, I finally ventured into the world of Prototype and Scriptaculous. This stuff really is blow-you-away fantastic. Interactive effects like we never would have dreamt of, back in the old days, and shockingly simple to implement if you know what you’re doing.

I’ve used it to make an important improvement to the MP Map I produced earlier in the week. People complained that they missed the region selection buttons. Well, there’s no missing them now. 🙂 They now sit in a window which hovers over the main map. If you want to move them from their starting position, just click and drag. If you don’t want the menu taking up any of your valuable monitor space, just close it up.

I’ve added a new site to the findless.co.uk family, which brings a completely new perspective to English and Scottish premier league football news. Specifically, the vertical perspective. 🙂

I’ve been meaning to put together a Google Maps mashup for some time, and having worked out how to import and process RSS feeds for the health and safety and education search engines,  it seemed like a good idea to mash these into the mix as well. The result is a map showing pointers for every top-flight soccer stadium in England and Scotland, as close to the pitch’s centre spot as I could manage. Click on the pointer, and you get some basic club information. Plus – and this is the clever bit – the latest news for that particular club, sourced from the BBC’s RSS feeds.

It’s all stored in a database, so theoretically it should be easy enough to pump the same information into a different mapping service. Time permitting (and it’s not likely), I might try to send the data to Microsoft’s equivalent service, as their UK satellite photos are much better.

For anyone technically minded, the feeds are pulled in using Ajax, to minimise the load time of the page, and the impact on both servers. It’s the first time I’ve done any Ajax programming, and I’m feeling quite proud of myself. 🙂

Just how easy is it to set up a cash-generating business in the world of web 2.0? Well, with a little time on my hands to experiment, I decided to find out. And within three working days, and for a total cash outlay of £30, we are live.

A month or two back, Google unveiled a new feature which allows you to ‘create your own search engine’. Basically, you specify all the sites you do or don’t want to be included in searches, and Google does all the other boring stuff, like hosting, ranking, indexing, and all that. If you’re an expert in your field, and you know ‘all the good websites’, you can create a search function with all the benefits of Google’s expertise, all the benefits of your experience, and none of the bad stuff. It’s effectively bringing the editorial function to the chaotic anarchy of search, and the implications are truly huge.

You’re welcome, then, to www.findless.co.uk – a new editorialised search engine network. Why ‘findless’? Well, aside from hopefully being memorable, it sums up our philosophy that ‘less is more’ when it comes to search results. We’ve all seen the heatmaps: startling numbers of people instinctively click on the first search result in the list. All the more important, then, to strip out all the sites whose SEO may be great, but whose content may be lacking. Most people we’ve asked immediately think it’s an odd choice of name… but pretty soon, they get it.

We’re starting with two areas, chosen because we (my wife and I) have worked in the fields in question, and know the good sites without having to think too hard. One is health and safety, the other is education. Coincidentally, in both cases, the quality information is spread very widely, and you may not instinctively know where to look.

The homepage template features a great big search box, with a great big font – all very 2.0. Beneath, we’re running the headlines from selected websites in the field, driven largely by the sites which bother to offer RSS feeds. The effect, hopefully, is close to a pre-emptively personalised Google homepage. We’ve also stuck an Amazon affiliate box on there, just to see what happens. Type in your keyword, press ‘submit’, and Google basically takes it from there. The basic layout template is ours, but as a trained eye will instantly spot, we soon hand over control to Google, its results and its adverts.

The feedback loop is covered by (guess what) WordPress. If people want to suggest a site for inclusion on our whitelist (which we list in full), they can leave a blog comment, and we’ll have a look. But we’re maintaining absolute editorial control. If we like a site suggested by a reader, we’ll include it. If we don’t like it, we won’t. Yes of course it’s subjective, but that’s kind of the whole point.

How so cheap? We’re using hosting provided by Danish company one.com, whose basic package comes to a trifling £0.90 per month (ex VAT), for 1000MB of disk space and no (formal) bandwidth limit. Even including a £9 setup fee, and domain name registration, it still totals barely £30 for a year’s service. All accounts include a MySQL database, and are ASP/PHP-enabled. Powering the feedback loop / blog area, naturally, is the open-source WordPress and having done it a few times now, installation was a breeze. The Google function is free, paid for by their cut of the pay-per-click advertising revenue. I’m using a free PHP script to pull in the RSS feeds, and cache them. Google Analytics is keeping track of usage.

I’m not expecting this to fund my retirement; in fact, if it covers its costs, I’ll be delighted. But it’s been fun to go from zero to revenue-generating business in a matter of a few days, and a useful learning experience. I’m more convinced than ever that tools like PHP and WordPress are the future of small and even mid-sized websites for individuals and businesses. The cost of raw materials is, increasingly, negligible if not zero… but the need for experienced experts is paramount.

I’d love to hear what people think of it (unless you want to complain about the formatting problem in IE6… I know all about it already, thanks!). Please leave a comment, either here or on the findless blog.

Just a quick note to say that, subject to final confirmation, my current main engagement with the Department for Education and Skills has come to an end. So the good news, dear reader, is that I’m available for hire. If you have a web strategy problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find me… etc etc.

I’ll say more about my time with Education after a period of quiet reflection. But keep your eyes peeled for the one piece of work I’m most proud of, or certainly it was when I left it – going live in the next few weeks. 😉

A first sight of the new French government-backed news channel, France 24, as posted on YouTube. (You did just say ‘vingt quatre’ rather than ‘twenty four’, didn’t you?) Judging by this promo, they didn’t spend much of their budget on things like verbs or punctuation. Launch date TBC.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=-RcoSH3o_Mg]

I completely agree with Peter Preston’s thoughts in Sunday’s Observer about the demise of the TV critic. The mass audience moments are gone… I mean, can you remember the last time you had a conversation about ‘did you see X on telly last night?’ But the core need – to ‘connect and share experiences’ remains. You just have to look harder to find the right community to share with.

I’m absolutely convinced there’s a market out there for a brilliant TV community website. The UK needs a site with reliable previews of stuff you want to watch, before it’s broadcast – or at least, pointing to a further ‘viewing opportunity’ (ie repeat) later in the week. There’s just too much out there, in too many places, and you need people to ‘mark your card’ ahead of time. These previews would be followed up by the community’s comments. It’s a site I would use every single day, but nobody has built it yet. So I might. 🙂

Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s chief adviser on political strategy for the next few days at least, reckons it’s all our fault if e-democracy remains a distant dream. The BBC reports that, in comments to an unidentified conference, he said:

‘We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government… The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands…. At a time at which we need a richer relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had, to confront the shared challenges we face, arguably we have a more impoverished relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had. It seems to me this is something which is worth calling a crisis.

‘What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It’s basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are.’

If that isn’t an attack on Guido Fawkes, I don’t know what is. And whilst I agree with the sentiment (and have said as much here in previous weeks), I don’t think it’s at all fair to tar the entire blogosphere with the same brush. There are too many good people out there trying to stimulate good political debate. Yes, it’s embarrassing that Guido remains the #1 most visited UK political blog… but even a quick glance through Iain Dale’s Top 100s would reveal countless more constructive attempts.