Puffbox

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.

Well done to Charlie Beckett for getting his piece on Monday evening’s BBC Trust seminar online so quickly, practically before I’d left the building. And he managed to hit the nail on the head, when he says ‘consultation is a process not a product… in the new networked world’. Maybe that’s why we’re having so much trouble identifying the right way to make formal consultation work online: maybe the whole premise of the question is wrong.

Perhaps the only way to engage with the blogosphere is to be a part of it, and play by its rules. A BBC Trust blog, as a ‘continuous assessment’ exercise rather than an occasional fixed-period ‘examination’, would turn the spotlight on specific matters as they arose. The legalistic process demanded by the licence fee will always require a ‘final report’: perhaps this could be an end-of-year review of how various developments had been received, and the extent to which the BBC acknowledged it and (where appropriate) responded.

But what form should that blog take? For a while now, I’ve been working up an idea for ‘virtual group blogs’ (for want of a better term), whereby relevant posts on existing blogs could be aggregated into a single place – and this might be an ideal use case.

The Trust would take on the role of moderator, on several levels: choosing which bloggers to invite in, ensuring appropriate political and geographic balance among those bloggers, monitoring the suitability of individual posts, moderating the comments which would hopefully ensue. And with the bloggers being entirely free from BBC control, they would naturally be raising sensitive topics, in a way that Trust staff might not feel comfortable (despite their nominal independence). I’m pretty sure I know how this could be implemented technically, and it’s a lot easier than it probably sounds.

Many thanks to David Wilcox for the invite; and a pleasure to meet people like Charlie, Antony Mayfield and Mick Fealty in the flesh for the first time. Quite an odd experience to have such a significant percentage of my ‘blogroll’ all in the same room.

Media Guardian is reporting that ‘ITN is to launch a channel on YouTube to deliver a range of entertainment, sport and film programmes’: well, it didn’t take too much detective work to find the page, at youtube.com/itn.

Immediate thought: what does the N in ITN stand for these days? There’s no actual ‘news’.

Instead, the Guardian pieces tells us, ‘an average of five entertainment clips – the same as are provided by ITN On to customers such as MSN, Yahoo!, Virgin Mobile and 3 – will be posted on YouTube each day.’ There’s a weekly Bollywood Insider bulletin, and a daily (?) ‘EPL News’ football roundup…. clearly not aimed at a UK audience, for whom the name EPL is a joke. And anyway, since ITN doesn’t have the rights, the one thing you won’t actually see in the bulletin is any actual English Premier League football. Why are they even bothering?

(Incidentally: if you want proper EPL action, I heartily recommend the Virgin website – lengthy highlights packages in very good video quality, even blown up full-screen.)

The only really interesting bit is that ITN will be ‘one of the first UK media companies to exploit YouTube’s new in-video ad format’. I haven’t spotted any usage of it in the wild yet… but if you haven’t yet seen the adverts-on-video method, there’s an example on the Google blog.

The New York Times was caught last week testing the concept of putting real, actual readers’ comments on its homepage… and above the fold, too. (To quote my favourite film of all time: ‘don’t look for it, it’s not there any more.’) Very interesting development, but all sorts of implications – legal, financial, ethical – to it.

I’m not the slightest bit surprised to learn that the BNP website is the most visited UK political party site. Before anyone misinterprets, let me say I’m entirely opposed to their politics. But they are a real political party, with real seats on real democratic bodies, and they put forward real candidates in real elections (sometimes winning them too). The democratic purist in me says it isn’t acceptable to actively blank them. No wonder people actively look them up online, to see who they are, and precisely what they stand for: nobody else is telling us that. The website isn’t exactly up to much, but it’s there, and it contains the stuff if that’s what you’re looking for. But don’t misinterpret ‘high readership’ for ‘high support’: I dare say plenty of people, like myself, were looking out of sheer curiosity, rather than any kind of active or even passive support.

In the interests of left-right balance – the same goes for the Greens. They have even stronger representation, with two MEPs and a ‘real’ parliamentarian in Westminster, and their politics are increasingly mainstream – ask the Nobel committee. But then again, as long as they refuse to play the political game, they’re going to miss out on media coverage. They’re starting to ramp up their online activity (a blog, YouTube…) but I don’t personally believe it’ll be enough unless they opt to have a ‘proper’ leader when it’s put to the vote next month.

Monday will be an interesting test: the Greens are to announce the results of the elections for their chair and dual ‘principal speaker’ positions. A big deal. Will it get any kind of a mention?