Puffbox

Late last night, the walkout-leading junior minister Tom Watson finally posted something on his blog. I don’t want to be too critical; I’m sure he had a lot to do, clearing his desk and watching a pretty dull England game. But with nothing on the blog, there was nowhere appropriate for the debate to begin.

All he posted were the details of his resignation letter, and Blair’s reply, with no commentary beyond a jokey headline. Nothing we didn’t already have in the public domain; the whole lot was published on the BBC site before lunchtime. But it’s a start, and it’s something for people to tack their comments on to.

And oh boy, do they comment. Tom is going to find it uncomfortable reading: a lot of articulate and apparently reasonable people disagreeing vehemently with his actions. But I guess that was only to be expected.

A quote from one of the many obituaries for Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin really jumped out at me:

I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.

I was never a huge wildlife fan. I would never sit down to watch any of the BBC’s big-budget nature documentaries. But I would – and did – watch Steve Irwin. Not so much recently, to be honest; it got a bit repetitive and wearing. But that’s not my point. I watched the show purely because of his passion and enthusiasm for the subject.

Likewise Mark Kermode’s film reviews on Five Live. I haven’t been to the cinema more than three times in the last three years (for various reasons); but I always make a point of listening to his review slot. Same goes for Top Gear – one of the best things on British TV. An hour of unashamed good fun. And yet I don’t know anything about cars, nor do I particularly care to.

Why? Passion. Like him or not, Jeremy Clarkson really really cares about cars. He puts his all into the performance, and it makes for great telly.

If you’re not passionate about what you do, maybe you should be doing something else.

Suddenly it’s all happening in the world of newspapers.

The Telegraph is reported to be preparing to launch a ‘”click and carry” afternoon news service, in print, audio and video form in the next few days’ – following in the footsteps of the Guardian’s G24 exercise in PDF automation. The Times is trying to generate some buzz around its Comment Central blog by comment editor Daniel Finkelstein – following in the footsteps of the Guardian’s much more ambitious Comment Is Free.

The Sun’s website isn’t as dramatic a redesign as some would have you believe – most of its much-heralded new video content is no more than US-voiced Reuters reports, which don’t really follow the Sun’s editorial line. But one can only applaud the video versions of its Dear Deidre photo-stories.

Those outside the capital will be missing the battles at major Tube stations each evening, as the two new freesheets compete for our attention. TheLondonPaper is probably the better looking of the two, both in print and online. Meanwhile, the launch of London Lite is an excuse for a redesign of its supporting website, ThisIsLondon – with news remarkably low down the left-hand nav, reflecting the paper’s aim of being more of an entertainment guide.

Of the two, I think I have a preference for London Lite – it feels more like a ‘proper’ newspaper, sitting somewhere between its two stablemates Metro and the Evening Standard. Yesterday’s edition of TheLondonPaper was extremely short on news: its page three consisting of a picture of Kate Moss in her pants (apparently crashing the entire internet); and a couple being seen having sex in the open air. Oh, and a two-page spread about how pole dancing can apparently keep you fit. Liter than Lite.

But these new arrivals clearly recognise the need to do something with the whole social network thing. I’m struck by London Lite’s liberal use of the word ‘blog’ at every opportunity. TheLondonPaper seems equally keen to build interaction with its readership, as demonstrated by its placement of ‘contribute’ as the first link in its website’s primary nav: there isn’t much evidence of it so far, but then again, it’s only been publishing for a few days.

Tim Harford‘s current BBC2 series ‘Trust Me I’m An Economist’ can be occasionally infuriating – but I guess that’s the nature of economics. After several years studying it at university, I still saw it more as an art than a science. Too many ‘if’s.

Although he doesn’t refer to it in his write-up, this week’s episode made some interesting points about asynchronous information – where one side in a negotiation knows more than the other. He used the example of a second-hand car salesman: he knows the whole truth about that car you’re looking at, but you’ll never know if he’s telling you the whole truth (unless you negotiate some kind of no-strings cooling-off period).

Then, reading an equally challenging piece by Seth Godin about the futility of job interviews, I recalled an incident that happened to me recently. I went to speak to someone pretty well-known in the UK new media industry about a possible job opportunity. I already read his blog on a daily basis, so I knew a surprising amount about his interests and opinions. When he asked a question, I knew what answer he was looking for.

It was a very uncomfortable experience. One side did know more than the other… but this time, it was the buyer (me) rather than the seller (him). I suppose I could have just repeated his opinions back to him; he would have thought ‘wow! what a great guy!’ Instead I tried to ‘explore the situation’ a bit; I realised we were breaking new ground in post-blogging etiquette, and I wanted to see where it would go.

It didn’t go anywhere.

The price of those little SD memory cards continues to plummet. You can now get them via Amazon for a startlingly low £7.75. How on earth does Argos think it can justify a £69.99 pricetag?

At prices like these, there’s almost no point thinking about more complex ways to connect your devices. Engadget has details today of a video recorder from SanDisk which can use ‘any composite video source such as your set-top box, DVD player, or TiVo’. Record your video, take the card out, pop it into your PDA, and away you go. (And yes, this is finally happening – I’m starting to notice more and more people watching video on the train.)

Add some kind of EPG / Sky+ functionality to simplify the recording process, and I’ll bite your hand off.

It’ll be worth keeping an eye on David Cameron’s (apparently) one-off blogging effort during a trip to India. The first posting is half-text, half-video. It’s also half joking-in-departures, half earnest-piece-to-camera. It’ll be an interesting case study to see which approaches win out.

Interesting to see Jakob Nielsen’s latest thoughts on the subject of writing for the web:

‘Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.‘

I’ve written and delivered a few ‘writing for the web’ courses in my time; my more recent attempts have featured a chunk about search engines and SEO. I wonder how many ‘writing’ trainers include that? It’s a fine example of technical and creative skills meeting head-on.

Naturally, the inverted pyramid thing still applies… but I’ve always considered that to be basic ‘good writing’ policy anyway, regardless of the medium. It’s the concept of the search engine which marks ‘writing for the web’ out as being a new and different discipline.

Just as an aside… I notice that Nielsen’s approach to the URLs of his columns changed about a year ago, from a yyyymmdd.html approach to a ‘pretty URL’ based on keywords (chosen manually, I suspect). It’s a reminder that the Address Bar is another area for potential keyword loading. Use it wisely. (The WordPress blogging tool is especially good at this.)

Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins always has interesting insight… this time, she reveals Britain’s Top 10 blogs. So what is everybody reading? Silly videos, a sex diary, celebrity gossip, soccer (with Arsenal topping Liverpool, ha!)… and politics. Mainly right-of-centre politics too. I’m intrigued to note that 7 of the 10 are UK-based.

It’s also worth pointing out that the ‘serious’ blogging platforms – Typepad, WordPress.com – don’t make the top ten blog platforms. The market seems to be dominated by Windows Live (ie MSN) Spaces and Myspace, with Livejournal leading the chasing group. If I can generalise outrageously for a moment… those are what you’d probably call kids’ sites. The younger generation is growing up with blogs as part of their normal media diet.

(It’s probably worth echoing Heather’s caveat: ‘we are reporting website visits, and not blog readers such as RSS and ATOM feeds.’)

There’s a new version of Internet Explorer version 7 out… and significantly, it’s now being called a ‘release candidate’ rather than a ‘beta version’. Writing on the IE team blog, product manager Dean Hachamovitch says: ‘You may not notice many visible changes from the Beta 3 release; all we did was listen to your feedback, fix bugs that you reported, and make final adjustments to our CSS support.’

Working with the frequent releases of IE7 beta versions has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s good to have a sight of where the product is going. But on the other, it’s always a nervous moment when you open your page designs in the latest beta/RC version.

There’s no hiding from the fact that IE7 will be the planet’s dominant browser, within a few weeks of its final release, scheduled for the end of the year. Users won’t get a choice, as it will be forced upon them. So the only sensible thing to do is to be as prepared as possible… and that means testing against whatever the latest IE7 version is.

Dean’s statement that the adjustments to CSS support are ‘final’ at least implies that things won’t change dramatically between now and release. (There’s also a quote from a Microsoft spokesperson saying ‘That would be our hope, that this is the last (release candidate) before we release.‘) Hopefully that means we can stop worrying about a potential CSS crisis on our lovingly crafted page designs. But it will still be a nervous moment, the day I download the final version for the first time…

The latest member of the BBC blogging club is Radio 4’s PM programme. The editor, Peter Ribbon tells the BBC Editors blog:

‘We’ve decided to do a blog because I strongly believe the intimate relationship PM listeners have with the programme is similar to the sense of belonging successful online communities have.’

He’s not kidding; the numbers of comments on the early posts are approaching three figures. But he continues:

The massive take up of the PM Newsletter has reinforced that view for me. The newsletter will continue, for now, but the blog allows listeners to talk to each other without us getting in the way and not just when we are on air.

The interesting words there are ‘for now’. There’s little doubt in my mind that blogs (and by extension, RSS feeds) are replacing email as the one-to-many communication channel of choice. I find it much more convenient to read feeds than email newsletters or alerts; and from a producer’s perspective, the overheads involved in creating and maintaining a blog/feed are much lower. Certainly all my professional focus is on RSS; when we do our big migration to a new platform, we’ll only be continuing with existing email alert functions.