Puffbox

A great new addition to the BBC News site is the 'Most Popular Now' page. A very pretty Flash app, or a more boring HTML page, tells you which stories on the site are attracting the most clicks (and from where). You can browse through top-level data for the last seven days too, if you click on the 'around the site' tab.

There's a mini-version in the right-hand margin of all (?) News stories, showing the 'most read' and 'most popular' stories. Isn't there a risk this could skew the figures? If you make it easier to find the most popular stories, more people will click on them, which keeps them at the top of the 'most popular' list. It could all be a bit self-perpetuating.

What do we learn? BBC News readers have the same fairly low-brow interests as the less reputable sources. Alongside continuing interest in Iraq and Israel stories, we have Big Brother, a cat chasing a bear, and 'rethinking the clitoris'.

Ex-BBC man Euan Semple is right. It's pretty shameful for the BBC to use a picture of a glum Bill Gates on their top Technology story (which is a bit mad in itself), reporting Robert Scoble's departure. Granted, the initial choice (a cropped screengrab) wasn't great, but it's not as if a quick scan of Flickr wouldn't have found hundreds of usable pictures (and, admittedly, some very definitely not), many of which were actually taken yesterday. Not a great choice, on the day the BBC celebrates its Webby – with a TV package, no less.

Update: they've gone back to the screengrab. Less bad, but still bad.

Today’s Dilbert cartoon is neither fictional, nor exaggerated. When I worked at Microsoft, I noticed an amazing phenomenon, driven mainly by the fact that everyone had wifi-equipped laptops. People would tap away merrily on their keyboards, and you naturally assumed they were taking notes of the meeting. More often, though, they were on MSN instant messaging – sometimes with people in the same room.

I remember one particular instance where we were negotiating commercial terms with a potential supplier… and in addition to the conversation ‘above the table’, there was a silent conversation happening amongst our guys via MSN, agreeing tactics on how to get the best deal. New technology just gives us so many new ways to be rude.

I'm genuinely shocked that Microsoft should have lost the services of Robert Scoble – described by the Economist as the company's Chief Humanising Officer. Scoble is rightly seen as the 'poster boy' of blogging, giving us an insider's view of the world's biggest software company, warts and all. In many respects, he defined the concept of 'corporate blogging'. In fact, he did actually write the book on it. But all this will soon come to an end, when he moves to Podtech.net, a startup company 'dedicated to podcasting'.

You can read all sorts of things into this. A confidence crisis following delays to the release of Windows Vista, originally Scoble's particular evangelical remit – he isn't the only person I know to be leaving a very cushy job at Microsoft just now. Or perhaps, it's a midlife crisis for a man in his early 40s. Maybe he felt he'd done all he could with Microsoft. Or maybe there's a serious future to podcasting after all. (I remain to be convinced!)

Regardless, it's the end of an era. Microsoft needs a new 'friendly face', urgently. And podcasting suddenly got interesting again

Last time I mentioned photo management software, I came out in favour of Picajet. There’s a lot to recommend it – but one major catch. Although there’s a facility to export all your photo information as XML, there’s currently no ability to import it again. So, let’s say, if you’re forced to reinstall Windows, and you think you’re being clever by backing up all your Picajet data, so that you can restore your exact position after the reinstallation… well, you can guess the rest.

Which brings me back to (guess who) Google again, and Picasa. The one huge thing in its favour is that it stores things like tags (or, if you like, keywords) in the photos themselves. So if you lose your Picasa data, you’re fine, as long as you didn’t lose your photos too. I still don’t find myself warming to Picasa… it’s surprisingly difficult to locate the photos most recently added to your library, for example. But so far, it works.

I’m spending a lot of time just now looking at the metadata (descriptive information) which gets stored in digital photos. It really is amazing how much your photos know about themselves… and how much potential there still is, since the metadata specification allows for the inclusion of GPS data, if your camera can produce it. Your photos will be able to put a dot on a map showing precisely where they were taken, and (even better!) the direction the camera was facing at the time. Wow.

Tagging, though, remains a pain. Which is why it’s worth keeping an eye on people like riya.com who have in auto-tagging. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I hear good things about their system for automatically recognising people’s faces (once you’ve ‘trained’ it).

This sounds unfeasibly clever… and yes, pretty cool too. Software will listen to the sound in your room, work out what you're watching on TV, and deliver relevant content from the web. 'And, all of this would be done without users ever having to type or to even know the name of the program or channel being viewed.' Blimey.

As if to underline the point I made yesterday about the insanity of the Telegraph’s new ‘slow news’ policy… the Guardian announces its plan to do precisely the opposite.

The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a “web first” service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper. The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for “once-a-day” publishing.

I can’t help feeling this is an odd area of debate, though… it illustrates just how far we haven’t come in this  new media revolution. How could they rationally justify sitting on an article for several hours (or more?) when it has been written, subbed, checked, signed off, the lot?

We’re seeing all news channels encroaching on each other’s turf. Broadcasters are producing written stuff, print media are moving into broadcasting. It’s all just content, guys. There’s no such thing as a cycle… the world keeps turning, the news keeps happening. The only thing we should be beholden to, is the news itself.

Still nothing on the Telegraph Upload blog, incidentally. 🙁

Er, is the Daily Telegraph really planning to consciously slow down the appearance of its online content? A posting on the Guardian‘s website seems to suggest so.

The Daily Telegraph website is to put its online content up later in the day in a bid to encourage more of its online readers to buy the printed newspaper. “We hope that a new content management system will allow us to time content to go up online, at the moment our system doesn’t allow us to do that automatically,” said Telegraph Media Group new media director Annelies van den Belt. Ms van den Belt said it was planned that individual section editors would decide what time content from the paper was posted online. Later posting could increase newsprint sales, “as long as we give them added value and relevance online and in the paper.”

I bet it won’t. This won’t give me any added incentive to buy the newspaper. In fact, it makes me more likely to go somewhere else entirely. How can you possibly have a news website which doesn’t deliver the most up-to-date content? Even if it’s only the feature material, rather than hard news stuff, you won’t get away from a perception that the Telegraph site isn’t interested in fast updates.

I look forward to seeing what the team’s Upload blog has to say about this. You are going to say something chaps, aren’t you?

And the winner of ‘best way to follow the World Cup when you’re stuck at your desk’ is… remarkably… Microsoft. Their desktop widget has all the scores, all the groups, the full playoff tree, and a built-in RSS reader for whatever news feed takes your fancy. Full marks, too, for switching from ‘soccer’ to ‘football’ depending on your language preference (US or UK English). Ah well, anything to keep people away from the official World Cup site, brought to you by one of their main competitors…

Any UK users of Skype… if you log into your account page at Skype.com today (or very early tomorrow), you can claim ten free minutes' outbound calling! Not a Skype user yet? Well, here's your cue.