Puffbox

BT Tradespace is a project, launched a few weeks ago, which hadn’t come onto my radar until today. Currently in beta, it’s ‘a new service by BT to enable small businesses to create an online presence in minutes, with no technical knowledge needed, that they can use to promote themselves using blogging, podcasting, photos, and many other features.’

Translation: it comes across as a Myspace kind of thing, driven by Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology, with a bit of Digg thrown in. The heart of the service is the blogging component, labelled ‘News & views’ – presumably so as not to scare the non-tech audience away. There are components for photo sharing, events calendars, and ‘featured items’ – plus the ability to upload podcasts, which is surely beyond most of their target audience? Lots of RSS feeds everywhere too, which (of course) we like. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping is built in, and you can have the site owner’s ‘business card’ sent to you by email or text message. There’s also the ability to make a free phone call to the site owner… but I haven’t investigated it yet.

I’ve actually had real trouble getting into it. Mostly, that was my foolish preference for Firefox; a quick switch to IE, and it all worked nicely. (Only to be expected from a Sharepoint-based system, I suppose.) But partly also because I know how these things work already, and I’m looking for the established – admittedly geeky – jargon. Still, everything seems to be there, albeit sometimes under a different name.

It’s an interesting project – still in its earliest days, with membership only just into three digits. But it costs nothing to sign up to… so why not give it a shot? Get in there quick, and grab yourname.bttradespace.com while you still can.

The BBC has started an Election 07 blog, with the ‘political editors from across the UK’ covering developments ‘throughout the Assembly and Parliament elections’. Currently it’s dominated by next week’s Northern Ireland elections, and hence by NI political editor, Mark Devenport. To an Ulster native like myself, that makes it extra interesting – but I can imagine it turning off a lot of people. Ulster politics is an acquired taste, and is almost certainly incomprehensible to the outsider. I don’t think it works to lump it in with Scotland and Wales.

The guys at the Telegraph deserve a nod for their marking of St David’s Day…

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus to all our Welsh viewers. Now, please do us a favour and sort out the train line around Newport. I spent far too long there, before and after my beloved Arsenal’s Carling Cup Final appearance on Sunday.

Now, what do we get for St Paddy’s, chaps?

I’ve been having a few problems with a Netgear wireless network base unit. With the normal support channels not really helping me, I resorted to contacting the Customer Service staff. The Netgear UK website declares:

Should you have any customer service issues, please feel free to contact UK Customer Services at: [email protected]. Please allow up to 24 hours for a response during normal business hours Monday to Friday. Please note that the team responding to this email address are not technical support.

I did contact them. And more than two and a half weeks later, despite numerous follow-ups, I’m still waiting for an acknowledgement of my complaint. There’s a serious problem with either the website editing, or the company’s concept of Customer Service. Neither should be excusable.

Update: would you believe it, I’ve just had a response, and a very positive one too. See, the power of blogging? 😉

Yes Charles, yes Alan, I’m sure your new initiative is purely about provoking a policy discussion within the Labour Party. I’m sure it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the leadership question.

Others will be much better placed to talk about the politics of this. I’ve finally managed to find the website, and it’s located at www.the2020vision.org.uk. I can imagine a few completely unrelated websites suddenly seeing an increase in traffic: such as Andrell Education, or this US initiative on energy security. Both 2020vision.org.uk and 2020vision.co.uk have been registered, but neither presents a website – which is going to confuse a lot of people. At least if you saw the wrong site, you’d know you were in the wrong place.

The site itself is running on the Expression Engine blogging platform, so there’s lots of scope for comments on site content – when eventually there is any site content. Currently it’s very sparse indeed – everything seems to be ‘coming soon’. According to the homepage there’s no news, no speeches, no policy papers.

But Charles Clarke’s launch speech promises:

We will post speeches, articles, policy papers and blogs which address these matters. We’ll start on Friday with the subject of identity management, about which a Channel 4 Film, the Insider, is being broadcast on Friday evening. The website will link to all those which address the debates about our political future, and it will stimulate involvement and engagement from individuals throughout the country. And the2020vision will organise throughout the country events to encourage and stimulate discussion and debate about these political and policy questions. Our funding, from donations, will be published on the website and declared to all the relevant statutory bodies.

It doesn’t yet look like a great experiment in social networking or collaborative authoring, or anything like that. The platform is certainly capable of it, though. Whether that’s really where their focus lies is, of course, still to be seen.

Complaining about the outdated list of RSS-consuming methods in The Times reminds me of something I meant to flag up before. ReadWriteWeb has analysis, based on two (admittedly contradictory) sources, of the most popular web-based RSS readers. It looks like Google Reader has taken over from Bloglines as the number one, apparently by a significant degree. The global figure would seem to be backed up by the data for this particular patch, with Google Feedfetcher now topping my own feed stats.

Personally I’ve stuck with Bloglines thus far… it does what I want it to do. The only reason I might want to switch over to Google is because I use all their other stuff – mail, search, etc – as my default choice.

I don’t want to be picky… actually, who am I kidding, I live for picky. But I don’t really understand why The Times (of London) feels the need to reinvent the industry-standard RSS icon.

Actually, it seems symptomatic of a general not-getting-it: they haven’t thought to include auto-detection of feeds in the appropriate places, and their feeds themselves are not compliant with the standards. The feeds don’t declare themselves as XML in the first line – and since there’s no character set specified, it fails the classic UK site test: can it do pound signs? (It can’t. And surely they checked that? Don’t headlines in the business feed typically include a pound sign?) Plus there’s no such language code as ‘en-uk’; rightly or wrongly it’s officially ‘en-gb’.

Nor do they make reference to the market-leading methods of consuming RSS: their list (Feedreader, Newsgator, NetNewsWire) looks like it hasn’t been dusted down in a couple of years. No reference to IE, Firefox, Outlook 2007, Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, live.com, netvibes, etc etc etc.

Some of this is so basic that it shocks me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Firefox fan primarily because of the range of available extensions add-ons. One recent find – and it’s a true godsend – is URL Fixer. If you’ve ever cursed yourself having typed an address ending mistakenly in .ku or .cmo, you’ll know you need this. Sits in the background, and corrects you when it thinks you’ve screwed up. Which is exactly what you want it to do.

Bigger, bolder, blacker. Sky News responds to News 24’s toning-down of its on-screen graphics by making yellow its colour for breaking news, and loading up a new fatter font for its big headlines. Blue has more or less disappeared from the colour palette – replaced by heavy use of black. Yes folks – red, white and black, same as News 24, same as a tabloid newspaper (in the old sense of the word).

The SKY NEWS logo is now a rotating cube, presumably a deliberate reference to Fox News, their much-derided cousin across the Atlantic – and, frankly, I’m surprised they would do anything to invite comparison. The time rotates too, to be replaced by the date, which is surely an enhancement nobody ever wanted. And I suspect there are still some glitches, since the morning weather symbols are disappearing off the edge of my widescreen TV, which has never happened before. (And apparently I’m not the only one.)

Overall, the response on viewers’ editor Paul Bromley’s blog is not good. Perhaps that’s inevitable in matters creative, especially when you’ve got so many people who take these things so seriously. But in Sky’s defence, fair play to them for leaving all the bad stuff up there, for all to see. Mind you, criticism like ‘worst graphics in the history of television news’, though, is so extreme that you can’t take it seriously.

I’m not going to condemn them, myself: they are functionally successful, and that’s really all that matters, although they aren’t perhaps the choices I would have made – admittedly, coming from a screen design background that is entirely web-based. It’s still basically the same (increasingly tired) formula: clock, logo, ticker. It’s about time someone really re-thought the requirements.

No changes on the website yet… meaning, not for the first time, the web presence is out of step with the on-screen presentation. But I understand a new Sky News website design has long been scheduled for Easter or thereabouts.