Puffbox

Yesterday it was News 24’s new graphics, today it’s BBC coverage of Celebrity Big Brother. Somebody at Media Guardian has clearly been tasked with monitoring the BBC’s blogs, and turning each day’s pieces into a shocking exposé. Please stop it. It’s unquestionably a good thing for editors to be prepared to engage with their audience, and take the criticism as and when it arises. And hey, guess what – if you invite feedback, sometimes it won’t be praise. This in itself is not a story.

Regular readers may be aware of my little side-project, Findless – which aims to provide shortcuts to frequently sought information. We’ve done a few Google-based search engines with a ‘whitelist’ of recommended sites, tailored for the health & safety and education sectors. There are a couple of map-based mashups, featuring English and Scottish Premier League football news, and your local MP.

Most recently, I threw together a quick inflation calculator called Inflation Buster, which lets you compare prices for any two years – as far back as 1750. I’ve used a few javascript tricks to offer slider-based date selection, and in-page results. It’s not pretty, but it’s really just a technical proof-of-concept.

Just to let you know that Inflation Buster has just been updated to include the new 2006 inflation data, and I’ve fixed some IE7-related presentation problems. So for example, if you’re wondering what level to set your kids’ pocket-money, based on what you got as a child, we’re here to help. I also upgraded the project blog to the new version of WordPress, which was remarkably quick and straightforward. It isn’t often that an upgrade or installation routine manages to make me smile, but WordPress did. Love those guys.

The dollar-pound exchange rate is heading ever closer to the magic £1:$2 point, which suddenly makes it all too easy to compare prices on both sides of the Atlantic. And the first victim of such calculations, I suggest, will be Microsoft. Brace yourselves, TVP.

US residents will be expected to pay $239 for an upgrade from Windows XP to Vista Home Premium. A quick bit of mental arithmetic reveals that to be about £119.50 sterling. But according to stories circulating here at Christmas, you should be expecting something closer to £200 – or higher.

Oh, and to make matters worse: Microsoft will be making it available as a download to North American purchasers, who use the exact same internet that we do in the UK, at those same lovely dollar prices. I look forward to seeing them justify it.

I’m personally getting a bit tired of Second Life. I thought the hype had died down, but then Sky News runs two (or was it more?) packages in the Technofile slot saying how great it is. So thanks to Jeff Jarvis for some hard numbers, which I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

At this morning’s session, John Markoff (New York Times) admits that he hasn’t gotten past the opening and I admit I have not either. It’s small. They have 334,000 “regular visitors,” (David Kirkpatrick of Fortune magazine) says – though that’s only people who come back after a month while 2.6 million have come and most, like Markoff and me, give up.

Er, yeah. Me too. (I keep threatening to try it again, though. I refuse to accept the possibility that I’m just too old for it.) 87% of your registered user base seems a lot to have lost, especially after such a long and painful install/registration process.

Climbdown! Backtrack! A deluge of complaints! Oh the humiliation! The Guardian eagerly notes that the BBC’s new News 24 on-screen graphics haven’t been universally popular. Or to put it another way, the BBC proactively explained what they were doing, and offered a forum for people to voice their opinion on it. They have listened, and now they’re acting on the feedback. This is unquestionably a good thing.

The Guardian – who, at the same time, trumpet the success of their Comment Is Free debate – should be ashamed of their choice of words here. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the media and public life in the UK. If you dare to talk to your audience, and – heaven forbid! – listen to their responses, you are portrayed as weak. No you’re not.

My verdict, for what it’s worth: I think it’s an improvement. Good riddance to the OUTRAGEOUSLY LARGE FONTS. But doesn’t it look a lot like Sky News now, eh?

This might be useful for more than just the next series of the brilliant QI… you know how Tony Blair said he used to sit behind the goal watching Newcastle footballer Jackie Milburn, except it turned out that Milburn retired when Blair was only 4, and there weren’t seats at St James’s Park at the time? Well, cue Alan Davies…

Yes, it actually turns out that it isn’t true. (If you believe this piece on the Newsnight blog, that is.) He never said it. Yet it has passed into folklore as fact… and I reckon, if you asked people for ‘evidence’ that Blair is a liar, that’ll be the first or second example that springs to many minds. Google reckons it has 1450 pages mentioning both Blair and Milburn – and a quick scan doesn’t reveal many trying to debunk the story. The top two hits are both from the Guardian: the second one declares it to be an urban myth… but sadly, the top one propagates it further.

I particularly like the line from New Statesman editor John Kampfner, in an article on his website reproduced from the Daily Express: ‘Who can forget the Jackie Milburn reminiscences?’ Er, strictly John – who can remember them? When they didn’t actually happen?

Yesterday, Edelman reported that Brits’ trust in politicians has hit rock-bottom. Lower even than media. Well, maybe – just maybe, that’s a bit harsh.

Interesting to see leading blog platform WordPress following in the footsteps of leading Linux distribution Ubuntu in pre-announcing the precise day of its next release. From one perspective, it’s brave stuff. But I’m personally a firm believer in the timeboxing approach of project management approaches like DSDM – where resources are fixed, time is fixed, and deliverables are variable. Pragmatic decisions about ‘what’s realistic for this release’ are no bad thing.

PR agency Edelman published its annual global Trust Barometer survey this morning, and as ever, it’s fascinating reading. British interviewees have lost faith in pretty much everything since last year, with government’s score dropping by half, falling below the media’s trust rating. We trust business more than we trust NGOs, a reversal of last year’s positions, although both fall markedly.

Technology is the most trusted industry sector worldwide, with healthcare and biotech coming second and third in Europe. Intriguingly, banks score relatively well for the US, China and India – but very poorly in Europe and Japan. The media business comes bottom, more or less across the board.

Swedish and Canadian firms are rated the most trustworthy overall, with Russian companies the most distrusted by pretty much everyone. American firms continue to rate relatively poorly in Europe, with Brits being most negative of all – yet Swedish and British-based companies are considered more trustworthy by Americans than their own!

It’s all summed up by David Brian, Edelman’s top man in Europe:

The growing trust in ‘people like me’ and average employees means that companies must design their communications as much on the horizontal or the peer-to-peer axis as on the vertical or top-down axis. CEOs should continue to talk with elites, such as investors and regulators, but also provide critical information to employees and enthusiastic consumers who spur the peer-to-peer discussion. Third parties with credentials, like academics and physicians, are also critical.

A flick through the presentation slides is highly recommended.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with the open-source Drupal content/blog management system, which has just reached version 5.0. It has a lot in common with WordPress, but it’s much more powerful and much more flexible. However, perhaps inevitably, it’s much more complicated as a result.

Probably the best starting point is to think of it as a blogging tool for multiple authors. The familiar tools of blogging are (generally) in the box to begin with: RSS, categories, comments, etc. If you want to extend your blogging-with-comments into a proper discussion forum, you can do that. If you want to offer distinct category lists (ie taxonomies), you can. If you want to have different types of pages for different uses, you can. And so it goes on. At first glance, there isn’t much in this space which it can’t do, as long as you’re up to the config task. It isn’t best-of-breed in any particular facet, but it’s a great way to tie it all together.

I’d still recommend WordPress for most low-level blog-style projects – which, in my experience, covers most things people actually would want to do. But if you do need to take things to a higher level, Drupal looks like an exceptionally good bet… if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty. A basic understanding of PHP should be enough to get you started, though.

Drupalsites.net gives plenty of demonstrations of Drupal in action, and it shows the huge variety of uses.