Puffbox

Delighted to see Sky’s Tim Marshall has joined the ranks of the channel’s bloggers. Very few manage to mix serious news analysis with a down-to-earth style as well as he does… and again, it should be a tone which is tailor-made for good blogging. I still rank him as one of my absolutely-must-watch TV news correspondents, even though my lasting memory of him will always be when he once lay flat-out at my feet, in a bid to stretch out his bad back. A great bloke, and that’s despite his Leeds United affiliation.

A few weeks back, I pointed to David Wilcox’s piece on ‘the new politics’, and his point about publishing material in a way which helps the blogosphere engage with it. I think his point goes much wider than just government consultative material.

Having been otherwise occupied at noon, I didn’t see what turned out to be a fiery PMQs – so I went looking for video coverage. Surprising even myself, the first place I looked was Sky News. Video highlights would be easy to find, and would play instantly, thanks to their Flash-based delivery method. Wrong on both counts as it turned out, but interesting to find myself making that choice nonetheless. Sky, your biggest asset is currently video. Make more of it. (Clue: I’m about to suggest how.)

So, over to the BBC – who did indeed have the key five-minute extract as a ‘clean’ video clip. Exactly what I wanted, except that being the Beeb site, it was in a popup window, in RealPlayer. Extra desktop clutter, extra load time, extra hassle. I know it’s only a few seconds, but it simply doesn’t have to be that way.

Neither, though, would have given me exactly what I’d wanted: the video extract, as a Flash clip, which I could embed in my own blog, and write about. Take the example of the writeup on Iain Dale’s leading political blog. He begins: ‘I don’t know how other people saw it…’ So…

Q: What’s the one obvious thing that’s missing from his blog post?

A: The ability for us all to see it.

There’s an opportunity here for both parties. Sky could start offering more uncut video like this, and offering it in a Sky-branded Flash video player. It could easily be justified on commercial grounds: increased clickthrough to their site, maybe even a built-in advertising space, online promotion of their TV coverage, or even just to do it before the Beeb does.

The Beeb, meanwhile, could – or arguably, should – do something similar, justifying it as part of their civic and cultural enrichment effort. They have a new strategic partnership with Adobe (PDF), not just to rework iPlayer, but to provide ‘the majority of streamed video and audio content on bbc.co.uk’ via Flash. If this is in the works, can I suggest embeddability is included on the list of requirements. BBC Trust guys, please take note.

PS: Apologies for the awful pun in the title, but once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t resist. Don’t put me down as a Dire Straits fan or anything.

Rules, even golden rules, are made to be broken. Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox article puts forward a remarkably strong case for prioritising the first two or three words in any headline or paragraph. Usability studies show that the eye scans down the left edge of any text; so you need to get the most relevant keywords into the opening of your sentences. And if that means breaking the golden rule of web writing – active voice, rather than passive – then so be it. He advises:

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.

Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second. Here, too, you might want to succumb to passive voice if it lets you pull key terms into the lead.

I’m used to SEO advice clashing with good writing guidelines, but this is the first time I’ve seen it happen with actual usability.

Top 100 rankings are always going to attract attention; all too often, the underlying ranking mechanism is a bit suspect. UK website Blogstorm has tried to calculate a ‘Top 100 UK blogs‘ based on Technorati and Alexa data: and leaving aside the limitations of those sources, it’s only working off a relatively small ‘universe’ of just 1,400 UK blogs. Some odd ones get included in that elite bunch; a large number of obvious candidates get excluded. But I suppose it’s a start.

Is Dave Winer’s ‘outline’ view (ie ‘expand and collapse’) of the New York Times, based on its keyword tags, worth getting excited about? Possibly, although maybe not for a while yet. Dave’s first attempt is proof that something can be done here. Precisely what that ‘something’ is may take some time to emerge. (It’s surely crying out for some kind of ‘tag cloud’ view, though.)

I was a bit surprised to learn that the first major clash / head-to-head / love-in in the latest Lib Dem leadership race was only up the road in Newbury; I hadn’t heard a peep about it. Further research led me to a Lib Dem site I hadn’t seen before: Flock Together, a Google Map-based mashup of local ‘social events, policy discussions, campaigning sessions and forthcoming conferences and by-elections.’ Very simple, very effective. Even better, you can get RSS feeds out of the central engine, feeding information back to your local site.

(The Tories have something similar, more directly focussed on by-elections, and not quite as friendly.)

Labour have traditionally been seen as lagging behind in the online stakes… but one innovation I’ve just spotted on their site is Labour:Central, which seems to be a ‘members only’ version of del.icio.us, based primarily on a Google Toolbar add-on. It’s prettier than del.icio.us, which might be reason enough for it existing, although it completely lacks a ‘personal touch’. Just a bunch of links with (frankly) pretty uninspiring excerpts, most too short to be meaningful. In fairness, it is labelled a beta – but I wonder if it’s even the right project to be trying.

So is Labour trying to get its online act together? There’s good and bad in this report from one local activist’s attendance at a recent party seminar. Tangent Labs are Labour’s main online agency: their boss was apparently ‘focused, personable, coherent and passionate about the possibilities of web based campaigning for the Labour Party’… but then revealed that the day’s main purpose was to sell them ‘the new WebCreator package, the ‘official’ Labour Party site creator. Priced at £411 per year!’

Blogger Ricky asks an interesting question: is it better for all local party sites to look the same, or different? Consistency would reinforce the sense of voting for a party, and a candidate for Prime Minister; and of course, for many people, that’s what elections are about. But would unique sites for each candidate be a boost for local campaigning? There’s no need for a single CMS these days, in a world of RSS feeds, mashups, APIs, etc.

A study of 33,000 web professionals by the highly respected A List Apart website found that those describing themselves as ‘information architects’ were most likely to earn the ‘big money’. Having struggled to find a suitable one- or two-word job description for myself and my business… ladies and gentlemen, Puffbox is hereby designating itself as an information architecture practice. 🙂 Which, on reflection, probably makes a lot of sense. There’s a load more useful data about the industry in here too. Well worth the PDF download.

Another sensible move over at the BBC news editors’ blog, with the daily ‘BBC in the news‘ postings being (presumably) replaced by a del.icio.us account. The ‘clippings’ posts did feel a bit out of place alongside the growing number of more substantial blog postings… plus of course, by going down the del.icio.us route, they get the chance to:

• include online sources alongside the conventional media: particularly important when there’s such fervent debate about the BBC in the blogosphere;
• ‘crowdsource’ the process by receiving items via the del.icio.us ‘for:’ protocol; and
• bring the content back into their own sidebar automatically via RSS feed.

Nice work.

There’s good reason to feel optimistic about Radio 4’s new Saturday evening edition of PM – sorry, iPM. Peter Rippon is the editor behind both PM and Broadcasting House, both of which manage to deliver serious material with a cheeky grin. It’s precisely the sort of tone which could allow a web-literate weekly magazine show to succeed.

The PM show has a long record of electronic engagement with its particularly keen audience: by phone, fax, email, daily newsletter, blog, Flickr stream, you name it. It isn’t unusual to have dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments on an individual post. It even has a community-managed backup blog for the (apparently frequent) occasions when the official blog is ‘screwed‘. Plus, in Eddie Mair, they have the perfect man for the job. It’s almost a case of ‘what took them so long?’

They’re trying to push the boundaries on the new show’s blog, with the initial posts tracing its progress from rough notes to early running order, and presumably onwards. It’s particularly smart to be soliciting user input well ahead of broadcast, rather than during or after it. I’ll certainly be checking out the podcast when time permits.

As if to prove the point I just made, along comes news that the BBC has done a deal to offer its services free via The Cloud wifi; and that we’ll be getting a Flash-based streaming version of the notoriously XP-only iPlayer ‘from the end of the year’. Here’s a specific story – more than one actually – which bloggers could really get their teeth into. Suck them all into a ‘virtual group blog’, and bob’s your uncle. But how did they possibly choose tonight to announce it??

In theory at least, a Flash-powered streaming iPlayer is a win-win all round, tackling at a stroke virtually all the concerns I expressed in my initial analysis. Instant access to the shows, with full-screen quality if we assume the latest version of the Flash player (with the H264 codec) will be mandatory. Cross-platform compatibility, instantly silencing iPlayer’s main criticism. Plus in all likelihood, a much nicer user interface… maybe even an AIR-based desktop client? And for Adobe, this gives them a terrific ‘poster child’. TechCrunch’s post last week about the precarious position of Joost suddenly seems extremely well-timed.

Of course, the tie-up with The Cloud will prove much more controversial. It’s probably the right thing to do, giving us widespread access to content we’ve already paid for, using the least bandwidth-intensive mechanism available. But if there are to be ‘a number of relationships with wifi operators’, surely it would have been more politically astute to announce deals with several networks at once? Instead it’ll just fuel more anticompetitive talk… and distract from the genuine step forward on iPlayer.