Puffbox

Surely the most obvious change in the few weeks since John Ryley became the Head of Sky News has been the increased promotion of the channel’s website. It seems like on the way into every ad break, there’s a web promo – interestingly, usually for a story not receiving much coverage on-air. You’ll probably also have noticed the new animation intruding on top of the on-screen clock, pushing the sky.com/news address.

OK, cards on the table – this is a very personal subject for me, having been one of the driving forces in the Sky News web team for nearly three years. We never felt we got a fair crack of the whip from our TV colleagues, and as the BBC raced ahead into online publishing, we made do with a setup not much smarter than you could have put together at home, with a half-decent PC, a standard Sky digibox and any old editing software. So this is not a moment before time.

But the sad reality is that the Sky website – and its underlying strategy – hasn’t moved on much in several years. (In fact, they’re still using some promo images I put together back in, um, 1999 I think?) With Ryley at the helm, it’s time for some fresh thinking… and, I’d suggest, a radically different approach online.

It’s time for Sky to drop the ‘UK News’, ‘World News’, ‘Business’, ‘Money’ sections – as they did with the long-doomed ‘SciTech’ earlier this year (although its RSS feed is still turning over… erm guys?!). The BBC does this much deeper, much better. And unless things have changed dramatically since I left, the traffic just isn’t there.

Online, Sky News must embrace what Sky News on TV is best known for – immediacy.

The homepage should be a large-scale treatment of the big story at any given moment – and when I say ‘large scale’, I’m talking a full-screen presentation using Flash MX (or something). We had numerous successes while I was there with a philosophy of ‘throwing everything at the big story’… and this is the logical conclusion of that approach. How to do that with limited resources? Easy. A maximum of ten stories on the go at any one time, but ensuring that each of those includes the very, very latest information. All killer, no filler. Lots of still photos, with the occasional bit of video thrown in.

And really, really push the blogging thing. Efforts by Jeremy Thompson and Adam Boulton are a decent start, although the generic skynews.typepad.com doesn’t really engage. Give all the senior correspondents (rather than the presenters) their own blogs, and encourage them to post something every day (not unlike at the Telegraph). Be brave, and think about doing something with ‘user generated content’.

Otherwise, Sky’s in a really difficult situation. The BBC left them for dead (despite protestations from some of us); and if they’re not careful, the print-based media will do likewise. The trend across all the newspapers – serious and now even tabloid – is to get into the ‘rolling news’ business via the web. Sky’s web audience is there for the taking – unless Sky decides what it’s trying to do with its website.

Steve, Adam… you know where I am. 🙂

Guardian photographer Dan Chung is doing some interesting experiments in ‘voiced 360′ photos‘. (You’ll need Quicktime to see them.) Yet another example of a specialist in one medium muscling in on another, of course. 😉

The BBC’s former social media guru, Euan Semple points out that the Corporation’s head of news, Richard Sambrook now has a public blog. Somewhat disappointingly, this will run in parallel to his Beeb-only internal blog which is often quoted as a great case study of senior management blogging within big organisations. Somewhat intriguingly, it’s hosted (hey! guess what!) at Typepad, rather than on the Beeb’s own blogging platform.

I’ve never seen the ‘Secret Sambrook’, but I’m wondering what could be so sensitive in it, that it needs to remain locked behind the firewall. We don’t really need another blog pointing to Jeff Jarvis; we need an insight into the strategy leading (arguably) the world’s leading news organisation. And hey, due to the unique way the BBC is funded, surely we all have a right to understand the thinking driving the internal decisions? It’s our money you’re spending, Richard.

When times get hard, the Signal vs Noise blog by the guys at 37signals keeps me going. It’s always good to have someone reminding you why you love this business, and how it can work.

A post today prompts an interesting debate about agile work processes in big environments, like the public sector. My heart is with the 37signals view:

The problem is when you build confidence with documents, you are nailing yourself down to assumptions that are probably wrong (assumptions always seem to fall by the wayside once things get real). Yeah, you may feel better that you have a recipe written down. But if it’s a recipe for failure, what’s the point?

Bingo. Documentation does not get the job done – ever. More than anything else, you need to be working with good people you can trust, and to let them do what they’re good at. If you trust them, don’t put them in a straightjacket. Don’t be scared to let them tell you how it should be done.

But there is a point to documentation: it defines the battleground when (or being optimistic, if) it all goes wrong. See it in those terms, and its purpose – and indeed, its practical importance – become clear.

I read ages ago that the magic way to remove permanent marker ink from a whiteboard was to scribble over the top of the marks with a normal dry-wipe pen, then wipe it off as normal. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. I finally got the chance to test the theory today, in a meeting at a supplier’s offices… and it bloomin’ well works.

Thanks to Stuart Bruce for pointing to the new Labour blog ‘Let’s Talk: Renewing Labour‘. Party chair Hazel Blears invites you to ‘put forward your views on how we renew our party and deliver to the next generation a party which is fighting fit and ready for the future’. From there, it’s basically a blog that wants to be a discussion forum. And it’s a bit on the purple side. I think it works. (Although not perhaps the purple.)

The ‘posts’ act as introductory texts (and are by definition read-only), with readers invited to add their opinions below. It’s quite a nice way to offer a focused forum (presumably with a degree of post-moderation)… and one has to assume it’s much quicker to set up and manage than a proper forum arrangement. Oh, and it’s another new type of blog to add to the list. Interesting to see what volume and level of comments it gets.

Another source of statistical goodness: Hitwise has opened a collection of ‘data centers’, giving a free teaser of the sort of information they collect. The UK one is here (and I’m not even going to gripe about the spelling of ‘center’ – oops); the US one is here. Granted, there isn’t much here in terms of volume, and you know a lot of it already anyway – but it’s worth bookmarking nonetheless. It’s nice to have one-click access to the most popular search terms for various industry sectors, for example.

Of course, it’s still w-a-y short of the intelligence on offer – free of charge – from Yahoo’s Overture ad network. This page will tell you the exact number of search queries across their network for a given keyword, and queries containing that keyword. Sure, it’s only Yahoo, so it’s based on less than 10% of all searches… but it’s surely enough to be considered representative. I still think this is the web’s best kept secret.

Prompted by a comment from Mel Starrs, I’ve been trying to think of the different ‘types’ of blog I’ve come across. I think I can see Mel’s four, and raise her a bit. If I’ve missed any, please add details in the comments.

The ultra-personal: my family, my pets, my life. Unlikely to be of interest to anyone outside one’s immediate family or social circle, and even then, not necessarily all that interesting. Most commonly found on: Myspace, MSN (sorry, spaces.live.com), Livejournal, Vox.

The expert: a diary of events and thinking in a work context, offering ‘an insider’s view’. Usually written by outspoken/gobby individuals who think they have something to say, and are arrogant enough to think the world wants to listen. Examples: you’re looking at one. 😉

The corporate: a blog written explicitly on behalf of a business or organisation. Attempts to give a glimpse ‘behind the scenes’, seeking engagement with either the customers or the sales channel. Tend to make greater use of industry jargon, and assume a certain personal or professional ‘buy-in’ (otherwise, why would you care?). Not to be confused with expert blogs written by people whose employers who don’t know what they’re up to.

The project noticeboard: somewhere for work colleagues in multiple locations to keep each other informed of news and developments. Written by its readers for its readers. A great alternative to lengthy email chains, especially if you have access to an RSS client. Typically found inside the company firewall, or at least password-protected.

The real-time magazine: large-scale professional publishing operations like Engadget, which could just as well be done as normal, run-of-the-mill websites (albeit without things like comments). They usually try to keep a more casual tone of voice, though.

The list of links: ‘weblogs’ the way they used to be. A flowing list of interesting finds on the web, or these days, items in the news. Offered with a few lines of commentary at most. Arguably though, these have evolved into people’s lists of del.icio.us bookmarks, or ‘stories I dugg’ (complete with comments).

The not-a-blog blog: a news website which makes use of the tools developed for blogs, but which opts out of bloggy features like commenting. Typically won’t even use the word ‘blog’ for fear of terrifying line managers. A growth area, given the inflexibility of many corporate CMS solutions, the speed of deployment and the sheer simplicity of the blogger’s toolkit. Most commonly found on Typepad, given the can’t-refuse £70-a-year pricetag.

I’m pretty sure every blog I can think of is one of these types, or a combination of two. Any of them can be individually or collectively written, but I still think you should decide which you are from the outset, and stick to it. It may well be irrational, but I still instinctively see most blogs as personal to a single author – and looking down my own watchlist, very few are joint efforts.

(I’m not including ‘moblogs’ or ‘photoblogs’, since most blogging tools have done a good job integrating those sorts of features into their core products. I don’t see them as separate types any more.)

If you’re a blogger, and you’re going away for a while… please, don’t feel compelled to get a locum in (as the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond has done). Your blog written by someone else is no longer your blog.

A blog is about giving me an insight to someone’s brain. (And yes, it’s usually someone in the singular.) It’s a personal thing, an intimate thing, a stream of individual consciousness. I read it because I want to know what you think, how you think. If I wanted to read somebody else’s thoughts, I would. On their blog, not yours.

Substitutions like this almost seem to give blogs some kind of official, institutional status. Hence the title of Shane’s posting: ‘The blog must go on.’ I disagree. If the performer in a one-man show is unable to perform, the show is cancelled. There is no understudy.

(PS: I used this title before in a piece on David Miliband. I think it’s the same point, although I didn’t make it explicitly at the time. Blogs themselves are purely a channel for the author to express their thoughts and opinions.)

Spotted as Typepad’s blog of the day (or whatever it is) – Innocent Drinks, makers of fine smoothie beverages, which I would happily live on if they were a bit cheaper.

I’ve always loved their style of communication – very chatty, more like a postcard from your mate than corporate-speak, even down to the list of ingredients on the label. So I guess it was always going to embrace the blog thing. And they do it very successfully – humanising the brand, explaining the policies, etc etc. An example well worth following.

Yet another corporate blogger on Typepad, incidentally. That £70-a-year price tag, for full ‘pro’ privileges, is just too good to turn down.