Puffbox

Does the new design of Technorati mark the demise of the ‘web 2.0’ style? It just looks a lot more, well, like a normal website. Three columns. Small-ish fonts. Minimal use of colour gradients. Dave Sifry explains what’s going on:

While we love expert bloggers, we’ve also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.

In other words – Technorati has grown up, got its hair cut, and bought some sensible clothes. Depending how you want to look at it, this is the mark of a company entering maturity, or the death of idealism. It’s probably both.

Newsnight deputy editor Daniel Pearl has a brilliant piece on the BBC News Editors blog today, which presents the real truth about ‘interactive TV’. Forget the red button, forget the technowaffle… it’s all about the PC keyboard. And the fact is – it’s working.

Blogs are giving him feedback as to what people like and dislike on the programme. Blogs (via Technorati) are telling him what people are talking about, and hence influencing his choice of running order. Oh, and there’s the open secret that BBC staff’s email addresses all follow the same basic format… so if you know someone’s first and second name, and you can put a dot between them, then you’ve got an email address direct to them. This is true interaction between TV and its viewers.

Incidentally, speaking of Technorati… I’m just putting the finishing touches to another blog-based project for a Major Government Department (not my usual one). We’re still shying away from offering full comments or trackbacks, for fear of spammers. But following an idea Ben Hammersley instituted for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, it’s dead easy to link people directly to a Technorati search, to see what other bloggers are saying. It’s no extra effort for you, and critically, it distances you from anything which might be legally dodgy.

Even my PC setup is having trouble dealing with this heatwave. I spent most of the morning offline and cursing my ISP… until, in a fit of desperation, I swapped my rather warm wireless broadband router for an old freebie one I had lying around. Perhaps significantly, the old one had been sitting in a dark cupboard. And it worked. First time.

As Heather at Hitwise points out, it’s a good time to be in the weather business. Interesting to see the BBC site far and away the market leader – when sites like Metcheck or uk.weather.com have much richer data. Ah well, you know what they say about turning to the Beeb in times of national crisis…

From the Press Gazette today: ”Website must come second’ says Independent’s Kelner’:

Speaking to an audience of senior media industry figures at a Press Gazette Breakfast With The Editor event on Wednesday… Kelner said: “If you have an exclusive story at five o’clock to go in the following day’s newspaper, the idea that you would put it on the website for nothing strikes me as complete madness. Our relationship with our own website is one where the paper is first and foremost, and the website comes second. Until there is a model for making money out of a newspaper website, we’re not going to plough millions of pounds into it.

So was the Guardian’s chief exec lying when she announced a £1m profit for the Guardian Unlimited websites?

It comes as absolutely no surprise that the Independent’s editor doesn’t think much of the web. You only need to spend a few moments tackling his own paper’s website. Or, as Roy Greenslade notes, looking at his circulation numbers.

Web-first may not be the solution to the dilemma of newspaper economics. But web-second isn’t cutting it either.

Thanks to the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond for pointing to this.

More positive cashflow for the BBC’s Ashley Highfield. Media Guardian reports that following today’s announcement of BBC restructuring, the new head of Future Media and Technology ‘will see his budget soar from £250m to almost £400m with the task of speeding up the digitising of 1.4 million-plus hours of TV and audio content.’

But as the article on the Beeb’s own news website points out, Highfield’s empire ‘will lose the responsibility for creating websites for BBC programmes, as funding for these will now go directly to programme producers.’ I think that’s a significant, albeit inevitable move. Further evidence that online production really isn’t that specialised any more. Further reinforcement of the notion that everything is ‘just content’.

Meanwhile, Ashley and co can concentrate on a predominantly technical area which remains complicated: video delivery. With Sky offering me unlimited use of a 16MB broadband line for £10 a month, it’s time to really deliver on the promise of the multimedia revolution.

One quite amusing side-effect of writing a blog is seeing evidence of the individuals and organisations who are keeping tabs on what the blogosphere says or thinks about them. Keep an eye on the sites referring traffic to you, and watch out specifically for names like Technorati and Feedster. The referring URL should tell you what specific search query generated the traffic to your site… and by implication, the personalities taking an interest. Yes, I can see you. You know who you are… and so do I. 🙂

I still can’t help wondering – is Sky’s heart really in the online business? Today’s announcement of free broadband is definitely a good deal, and a big one – as Chris Price writes on Tech Digest, it nails shut the coffin of ‘paying the best part of £30 for connection speed of 2Mb/s or even slower’. The ability to set your Sky+ box over the mobile airwaves, and shortly over the web, are potentially awesome developments. I don’t think they get enough credit for their Sky By Broadband service, either.

But where’s the content, guys? So far it’s been more than a little lacking. Adam Boulton’s weekly podcast seems to have died a death – despite the last four weeks surely giving more than enough material worth discussing. Technofile is surely crying out for special treatment, but no – just a rehash of what went out on air. Let’s hope they’re using the downtime between football seasons to come up with something special.

I finally succumbed: today I bought an iPod. I had some bad experiences a year or so back with an iPod Shuffle, and I never was a fan of iTunes. But the release of the Nike+ sport kit changed my mind in an instant. I’m a keen runner, and I’ve been considering treating myself to some kind of electronic assistance. Full-on GPS was just too expensive – and this came along at just the right time.

The Nike+ add-on comes in two bits: a ‘chip’ you attach to your running shoe (with bloggers finding innovative ways to attach it to non-official kit); and a receiver which slots into the bottom of an iPod Nano. Then, when you run, the iPod tracks the time you run, the distance you cover, and spits the data out to a website application at the end. And while you’re running, you can get audio updates over the top of your music. All for a ludicrously cheap £19 if you’ve already got the iPod Nano.

It’s a brilliant way to extend the reach of the iPod product: and I’m a case in point. I’ve never felt the need for an iPod – other cheaper MP3 players have been fine, thank you. But this was definitely a have-to-have-it purchase. And it’s fascinating to see a consumer product linking into both cutting-edge hardware and a social networking web app.

Sadly though, my distrust of Apple continues. They failed the sticker test. And I still don’t understand why I have to download a 56MB software updater which: a) takes up a slot in my Start menu; and b) includes updates for every flavour of iPod in circulation, not just the model I have. Actually Apple, why are you selling me a product – from your own official store – which needs an update on day one?

But I’m dead excited at taking my new toy out for a run. Just as soon as the temperature drops below, let’s say, 30 degrees C.

I’ve just spotted that the Five Live Breakfast programme now has its own blog. It’s been running for a couple of weeks, yet I don’t remember it ever getting mentioned on-air.

But I’m wondering if it’s maybe ‘a blog too far’. I wake up to the show every single morning. By any metric, I must count as one of its most dedicated listeners. But much as I hate to say this… I just don’t buy into the ‘brand’. I just don’t care about Five Live Breakfast. And I don’t feel any need or inclination to sign up to its specific blog.

The problem with continuous news channels is that there is no programme identity. Don’t get me wrong: the programmes do their utmost to create one. Sky News keeps trying it, but its most recent attempts at ‘appointment to view’ television – the Sky Report at 7pm, the James Rubin Carcrash at 8pm – just got canned. (And rightly so.)

But I do care about Sky News as a 24-hour output, and likewise, I do buy into the brand of Five Live itself. I don’t wake up consciously at 6am so I can listen to Nicky Campbell. (In fact, being honest, I listen to the programme despite Nicky Campbell.) But I do ensure that every radio in the house is tuned to Five Live (car and bathroom included). And I probably switch it on, as soon as I walk through the door.

So give me a blog from Five Live as a whole, with high-quality input from everyone involved, and I will subscribe to it. But giving blogs to individual shows on the station? No, sorry. You’re just getting carried away with this now, Beeb.

My photo management software of choice is still Picasa – although only with reservations, as I think there are a few things it could be doing better. My photo website of choice is still Flickr… if you’ve ever used it, you’ll know why. But how do you make Google’s photo product talk to Yahoo’s photo product?

The answer is staggeringly simple – and another example of how Flickr just keeps getting it right. I discovered yesterday, whilst demoing to my mother in law, that it’s possible to drag-and-drop from the main Picasa window into the Flickr Uploadr application. (Definitely on Windows XP, anyway.) Bingo – best of both worlds!

I’m tending to use Flickr as the place for my ‘best of’ collection; the stuff I think other people might possibly be interested in seeing. Everything else stays on my hard disk, and is catalogued in Picasa. I’ve got icons for Uploadr and Picasa on my otherwise minimalist desktop, for ease of access.