Puffbox

Gerry McGovern hits the nail square on the head this week. ‘For many websites, quality navigation is enough. In fact, search may be a negative… because it’s really hard to get search right… Having a search engine can also be used as an excuse not to organize content professionally.’

I’ve had similar arguments in the past – and for many people, including Gerry himself as he admits, search is one of those things you just need to have. I disagree. Search is just one navigation tool. It might be right for your website; it might not. There’s no such thing as a ‘given’.

For anyone involved in blogging, this is worth a look. The BBC has just completed a policy on blogging – written, it turns out, by the bloggers themselves via a wiki. Since the BBC often becomes a de facto model for everyone else in the UK, you can expect to see the model picked up elsewhere.

I’m delighted to be supporting National Working From Home Day, although 3.30pm was a bit late to realise I was doing so. I’m doing the vast majority of my work from home these days, and I’m finding it a terrific experience generally. Definitely a lot more productive than trapsing into a central London office every day. The only catch is that two or three days can pass with me barely leaving the house.

A great piece by Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins (‘Triple H’?) charting the rise of bebo.com and its imminent leapfrogging of everyone’s current favourite kidz community, Myspace. Bebo is certainly a lot prettier than Myspace, and the tie-up with Skype hints at a more open approach. But I wouldn’t count Myspace out yet… as I still think the connection with the music business will be its defining characteristic. I’ve noticed a growing number of bands’ websites including a prominent link to ‘our Myspace pages’ in their primary navigation (eg The Streets). Bebo, meanwhile, looks like it wants to be Friends Reunited for those who haven’t left a school yet. I feel far too old to even register for it.

There’s a new beta version of Skype available, with the (possible) incentive of cheap SMS text messages. It looks like it’s 5.5p per txt within the UK, which may compare favourably with your mobile tariff. Or may not, depending. Still a nice gesture, though.

Once you’ve upgraded, you might want to try something called ‘Skypecasts‘, which look like big audio chatrooms / lectures (up to 100 participants). The sessions currently on offer don’t look especially inspiring, but it’s an interesting concept. How you ‘chair’ a discussion of 100 people is, initially at least, a mystery to me.

A story on the BBC News website says that according to a BBC-backed poll, people trust news websites, like BBC News, more than governments. Normally one would frown on such self-congratulatory stories. But we forgive the Beeb, because we trust them. This is all becoming a bit circular, and my head is beginning to hurt.

The full poll results are available in PDF form. But the key bits on the UK audience are:

• TV remains Brits’ main news source (mentioned first by 55%), with internet (8%) trailing just behind radio (12%). I’m a bit uneasy about this ‘mentioned first’ measure, though, as I don’t know which one I’d say first. In fact, I don’t know which one I’d place first. It’s radio in the early morning, internet through the day, and TV at night.
• We trust national TV (86%) almost twice as much as we trust web news sources (44%). Oh, and apparently we trust national TV more than we trust our own friends and family (78%). How depressing.
• The BBC is still, by far, the most trusted single news source (32%). I’m surprised to see ITV News (8%) ranking higher than Sky (7%), albeit marginally.

The most scary stat of all comes from the US data: the most trusted specific news source is ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News. Who was it said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth?

The BBC’s rush into blogging continues. Of particular interest among the half dozen blogs launched over the Bank Holiday weekend: the Sport Editors, tech editor Alfred Hermida’s coverage of the BBC-backed ‘We Media‘ conference, and ‘Planet Earth Under Threat‘ – which, leaving aside the startling title, will track the progress of a Radio 4 series due for broadcast later in the year. A range of projects, all interesting in their own right. Worth following, but Nick Robinson remains the king. (It’s been interesting, incidentally, to see him beginning to engage with the readership a bit more.)

I’m not sure whether to be impressed by the BBC’s new online Programme Catalogue. On the surface, and a pretty ugly surface it is too, it’s just a web front-end on an impressive database. If there’s something worth celebrating, it’s the fact that people have been doing such sterling work maintaining the database in the first place. (One interesting aside, though: according to ex-BBCer Tom Coates, it’s built using Ruby On Rails. I haven’t seen that mentioned widely.)

Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s a gem of a function struggling to get out. Ever wondered what was on TV the day you were born? Take this example – http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1985/7/13 (Live Aid day, not the day I was born) – and change the year, month and day at the end. Cool. But I wonder how many visitors to the site will have spotted it?

The homepage of England's Football Association includes news feeds from both the Press Association and the BBC. The top story on the PA feed: 'FA offers England job to Scolari'. The top story on the BBC feed: 'FA chiefs offer Scolari England job'. Guess what… no mention whatsoever among the FA's own choice of lead stories. Ridiculous.

Sky is back in the internet-via-set-top-box game, with the launch of its Sky Net service. There’s plenty of information about it in Tracy Swedlow’s interview with its boss, Ian Valentine. He claims to have 600 sites ‘registered’ with the new service, which uses WTVML (oh great, another markup standard) to deliver a web-like experience to your telly. Yes, we have heard most of this before, with the ill-fated ‘Open…’. But Valentine reckons that Sky Net is different:

The thing about Open… was that it tried to compete with the Internet rather than work with it, and as such it wasn’t open at all. Open… wanted to build and host a service for you…  basically, they created your storefront, and charged a lot of money to do so. It just wasn’t competitive with the Internet. What we’re doing now costs very little, and allows companies to leverage their existing e-commerce offerings.

The ‘launch services’ aren’t especially inspiring at first glance, offering a web-lite kind of experience – driven, for now at least, by a dial-up internet connection, and charged at local-call rate. I just don’t accept that tech-savvy ‘early adopters’ will appreciate the convenience of surfing the internet from the living room sofa; certainly not at dial-up speed.

This is what Sky Digital probably should have done five or perhaps even ten years ago. But they didn’t, and both the market and user expectations have moved on. I’m not even sure there’s room at the bottom of the market for this. You can have a perfectly good Dell PC, including a flat LCD screen, delivered to your door for under £300; and Carphone Warehouse will give you ‘free’ broadband. Who needs this?