06.22.06
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British corporate/brand blogs

What are the big name corporate and brand blogs in the UK? The New Pr Wiki – an invaluable resource for anyone into business blogging – has a list of CEO/leadership and corporate blogs, which I have shamelessly reproduced below. But are Thomson and Guiness really the only big brands blogging in the UK? Surely there must be more than that?

UPDATE: Have added more to the list, and slightly rearranged things so we have business blogs, whether by individuals, and whether branded or not, and official household name consumer-facing blogs. Are there any more of the latter?

2nd UPDATE: Added even more, and have been pointed at this BritBlogs category by Stuart Bruce. I am not going to sift through it for additions, because I’m not sure that’s going to actually achieve my aim. I’ll admit, I was hoping to see more household names.

British business blogs

Matt O’Neill, Activ Media

David Rossiter, Analyst Insight

Andy Hayler, Kalido

David Terrar, Managing Director, D Squared C

Conchango

David Ferrabee, Hill & Knowlton

Joel Cere, Hill & Knowlton

Niall Cook, Hill and Knowlton

Sally Costerton, Hill & Knowlton

Richard Charkin, Chief Executive, Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Chris Lewis, CEO, LEWIS PR

Jon Silk, LEWIS PR

Ellee SeymourProActive PR

Richard Gaunt and Glenn O’Neil, Benchpoint

Interactive PR (not sure if this is a business or a group of like-minded individuals)

James Warren, director of web relations, Weber Shandwick

Mark Shanahan, Leapfrog Corporate Communications

David Phillips, ManagementClarity

Michael Blowers, Media Evaluation Research

Andrew Brown, Mediaklik

Andrew B. Smith, Object Marketing

Antony Mayfield, Harvard Public Relations UK

Rainier PR Breakfast Bulletin

Justin Hayward, MS&L

Simon Collister

Alan Moore, Managing Director, SMLXL

Melanie Surplice, Factiva

Softalk

David Tebbutt, Managing Director, Brainstorm Software

DrKW Telco Tech

Drew Benvie, LEWIS PR

David Davis, PR consultant (is that a business blog?)

Audacious Communications

Adrian Cronin-Lukas, Director, Big Blog Company

Custom Communication

Blog Relations and The Angel Blog

Mark Borkowski

Paul Woodhouse, The Tinbasher

Modern Marketing

JP Rangaswami, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, UK

“Consult The Guru PR & Marketing Blog

Dan Leach Dot Com

Edelman UK

Thomas Mahon, English Cut

Dave Jennings, CEO, Envigour Systems Ltd.

Headshift

LEWIS PR – LEWIS 360°

Logicalware

Mark Rogers, CEO, Market Sentinel

Net Resources

Net Resources

Stephen Davies

Stephen Newton, Public Relations Consultant

Public Relations Online

Stephen Waddington, managing director of Rainier PR

Neil MacLean, Reputation Plus

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing, Guardian Newspapers

David Upton, Director, Stirling Reid Limited

Stuart Bruce, Founder, Bruce Marshall Associates LLP

Jackie Danicki, Engagement Alliance

Baukejan and Vanessa

Eie Flud

Score Communications

Real Oasis

CheapFlights

NuBricks

British* household name consumer-facing blogs

Thomson Holidays

The Guinness Blog

Glenfiddich

The Observer**

I’m on the hunt for more British business blogs – of all types – so please add suggestions in the comments!

* OK, English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish… not that I want to split hairs, frankly.

** Note, I didn’t include the Guardian blogs because they are subject focused, whereas The Observer blog is about The Observer… or at least, it was the last time I looked.

06.19.06
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Thinking about ‘de-linearising’ media

Fantastic post from Tristan Ferne on the nature of time-based media, complete with little diagrams and everything. It’s a follow on from the Annotatable Audio project that Tristan worked with Tom Coates and others at the BBC on, and it sets my head a-spinning.

What if…

The problem with a radio show-related blog post is that the discussion is not only distinctly textual, it’s also decontextualised because the blog post is separated from the audio. If you don’t hear the show at the time it’s broadcast, (or during it’s ‘play again’ period of a week, on the Beeb at least) then commenting on it is hard – you can only comment after the fact. Even if you do hear the show, the blog doesn’t allow you to comment easily on a specific aspect of the broadcast discussion without having to reiterate that point up front. So whilst the blog is a valuable tool, it still limits the conversation.

What if you were making a discussion radio programme, and you could firstly chapterise it issue by issue, and then sub-chapterise it by caller, or by point made, and then people could both annotate the audio, adding in links and supporting/refuting evidence, and could leave audio comments using Skype or Odeo or whatever on specific sections of the programme.

I’ll admit most of this post is informed by conversations with Kevin (we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about innovation in journalism recently), but I think it pretty much applies to any type of show where you want discussion, whether they are radio or podcast. I think there’s a huge opportunity here not just for podcasters to make their shows more interactive, but for big media to find new ways to reconnect with their audiences.

06.14.06
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Renaissance journalism

Last week, I took part in a chat amongst journalists, designers and progammers on an internal e-mail list about how we work together. It was touched off by the e-mail interview with Adrian Holovaty at the Online Journalism Review.

One of Adrian’s sage bits of advice:

It all starts with the people, really. If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what’s possible.

He says hire programmers, which news organisations are doing. But even journalists – like myself – who can’t programme but still know what’s possible are important. I took one programming class, ever, and that was Pascal back in the late 80s. I dropped it after one semester when I realised that my brain just didn’t work that way.

Yet my journalism school specifically and my university – the University of Illinois – more generally prepared me well for what was to come. I learned about all aspects of journalism, including design. I got the basics, plus I did lunch with the developers who worked on Mosaic, so got an early introduction to the web. There are journalists who aren’t programmers who know what’s possible, and quite honestly we are just waiting to be unleashed so we can get on with it.

What’s holding us back? Lots. As journalists, we’re obsessed with today’s deadlines. But too often, that focus comes at the cost of innovation that, for most of the internet, happened a while ago. We haven’t burned the business cards as Jeff Jarvis suggested and are stuck with organisational structures that concentrate solely on putting out a daily newspaper or feeding the beast of the 24-hour broadcast news machine, but which aren’t flexible enough to free up innovators to work on other projects. In a world of Google and nimble start-ups, news organisations need to invest in a little R&D and give us room to experiment.

Instead, the hungry innovators get pigeonholed, even when our skill set defies categorisation. I’m a journalist, a blogger, a podcaster, a cameraman, a photographer, a hacker (albeit not a very good one). As my partner in podcasting, Ben Metcalfe, says, if I were a town, I’d be San Luis Obispo, halfway between the content capital of LA and the geek creativity crucible of Silicon Valley. Don’t try to shoehorn me into your org chart. You’re org chart is part of the problem. You’ll get less value from me in an old school position than you’ll get if you let me do what I love: Get up every morning, work like a dog and create a brand new medium.

I am passionate about journalism, and I’m passionate about what journalists, designers and programmers can achieve together when unleashed on this amazing canvas called the internet. I get excited thinking about what I can do with all of this new fangled mobile communications technology. How does that transform journalism? Live, immediate, raw, real. Must read, must see, must participate in, be a part of content. That’s what it does.

Second class citizens, still

And while you’re at it, as Adrian says, stop treating us geeks like the hired help. Adrian uses the term IT Monkey, I believe. New media isn’t new anymore. In the UK, online advertising spending surpassed radio in 2004, and it is expected to surpass national newspaper spending this year.

And notice this:

Excluding internet spending, total UK media advertising would be in recession with television, national and regional press all reporting revenue declines this year, it said.

This isn’t the lates 90s when people said of the web, “Show me the money”. The money is there. The audience is there. The news industry needs to shift its priorities both in hiring and spending.

How to change?

There are some small organisations like the Lawrence Journal World and Lawrence.com in Lawrence, Kansas (where Adrian Holovaty worked before joining the Washington Post), Nord Jyske in Denmark and many others, who understand multimedia, participatory media and are doing it really well. These are small shops where the editors, journos, developers, designers work together in a much more seemless and collaborative way.

But while Adrian is doing some great stuff when it comes to the innovative packaging and presentation of news at the Washington Post, what other possibilities are there? What could we achive when programmers, designers and programme makers work together during the whole process, rather than just the last few steps? Add in a little WiFi, 3G, radical in the field/on the ground newsgathering, and right away you’ve got a journalistic revolution.

I’d love the chance to focus on a single project, with the web at its heart and with on-demand audio and video. (No broadcast – broadcast would subsume this project. The media could be used on TV or radio, but it’s not a goal unto itself.) I’d work with a multi-skilled team with overlapping skills so they are literate in each others’ specialities and understand the challenges each will encounter. They would be the sort of people who understand that web isn’t just a publishing medium. Community and participation would be central to this project, both for promotion and co-creation. This is an X-project. A news incubator.

There are a couple of key issues that I need to think more about. Some stories would be perfect for this treatment, but not all. Some audiences would eat this up, but not all. We should focus on the right stories for the right audiences – you might call them ‘edge cases’ but perhaps ‘early adopters’ is a better way of thinking of them. IM, RSS, sharing. Mash ups. New news. News for the MySpace generation.

News has to evolve if it is to survive. And there are already journalists and geeks with mad ninja skills just waiting for a chance to show the world what can be done.

06.04.06
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Comment is F**ked

First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies.

As Steve Yelvington said this week:

Editors, please listen. If you’re not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you’re placing your future at risk.

The Guardian seems to understand this need for participation to be integrated with its traditional content, but as with many media companies: “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles. Ben Hammersley, European alpha geek and one of the people behind CiF, knew there would be risks:

Perhaps the most prominent liberal newspaper in the anglophone world, opening a weblog for comment and opinion, with free and open user commenting is, to put it mildly, asking for trouble. … This means that we have to employ a whole combination of technological and social countermeasures to make sure that the handful of trolls do not, as they say, ruin it for the rest of us. Frankly, it gives me the fear.

Ben was right to be concerned. Honestly, I wish there were a clearer headed assessment of the risks involved with blogging by media companies. Don’t get me wrong. I think that media companies should blog, but the risks aren’t as simple as they may appear and something on the scale of CiF is of course going to have problems. The Guardian appear to have focused mainly on the risks posed by commenters and have put a lot of energy into figuring out how they can have open comments without falling foul of UK libel law.

But people are people, and you are bound to get abusive, rude or irrelevant comments. Any publicly commentable website will reflect the cross-section of society that reads it, so it’s inevitable that some comments will not be as civil and insightful as we would prefer. Trolls happen.

Just this week, Engadget had to temporarily shut off its comments “because of the unacceptable level of noise / spam / junk / flaming / rudeness going on throughout our boards”.

Where the Guardian has fallen over is in their assessment of the risks posed by their choice of columnist to blog on CiF. Rather than thinking about who would make a really good blogger, they seem to have made the same mistake as the rest of the big media who have tried their hand at blogging: They’ve given their biggest names blogs, despite the fact that these people have no idea how to. Now a bit of a tiff has kicked off between the Guardian’s stable of columnists, the commenters on Comment is Free and the bloggers there. (Thanks to my colleague Nick Reynolds at the BBC who blogged about this internally and brought it to my attention.)

Catherine Bennett writes a column so full of uninformed generalisations about blogging in the UK, specifically political blogging, as to completely lack credibility. She seems to be trying to discredit the Euston Manifesto, a net-born political movement in the UK, by painting it as the creation of a sexually obsessed, semi-literate male-dominated blogging clique. I’ll leave it to you to follow the link to the Manifesto and draw your own conclusions.

Another Guardian columnist, Jackie Ashley, defends professional columnists, and says: “To those of you who think you know more than I do, I’m eager to hear the arguments: just don’t call me a fucking stupid cow.” Polly Toynbee asks commentors: “Who are you all? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?”

Ms Toynbee why don’t you step out from behind your byline and tell us a little about yourself instead of belittling us? It’s usually worked for me when trying to dampen an online flame war.

I’m sitting here reading her column, and I really don’t understand how she expected this to put out the fires. She asks for civility and for people to tell us who they are, but then she says of one of her anonymous detractors:

What do you do all day, MrPikeBishop, that you have time to spend your life on this site? I suppose the answer may be that you are a paraplegic typing with one toe and then I shall feel guilty at picking you out as one particular persecutor.

What do you expect when you respond to ad hominem attacks with patronising ad hominem attacks? Do you really see this as a solution? Are you treating your audience with the kind of respect that you for some reason think you deserve by default?

Ms Toynbee professes to answer her many e-mails, but I do get the sense that the Guardian’s columnists are simply not used to this kind of medium, they are not used to getting feedback in public where they can’t just hit ‘delete’ to get rid of a pesky critic.

Suw – who I should inform Ms Bennett is female and blogs, thank you very much – likened such old school thinking to this:

It’s like them walking into a pub, making their pronouncements and then walking out. Later, they are shocked to find out that everyone is calling them a wanker.

An interesting comment on CiF from altrui May 18, 2006 12:04 (I can’t link directly to the comment):

One observation – those who respond to commenters tend not to be abused so much. There is a certain accountability required among political commentators, just as there is for politicians. Until now, opinion formers have never really had to justify themselves. I can think of many of the commentariat who write provocative and incendiary pieces which cause no end of trouble, yet they carry on stoking up argument and division, without censure or even a requirement to explain themselves.

Two issues here: Columnists are not used to engaging in conversation with their readers; and the readers have had years to build up contempt of specific writers and are now being given the opportunity to revile them in public. A lethal combination of arrogance and pent-up frustration – no wonder CiF has soured. Question is, can the Guardian columnists learn from their mistakes and pull it back from the brink?

A few suggestions. Don’t treat your audience as the enemy. If you’re going to talk down to your audience, they are going to shout back. And quite honestly, I would say to any media organisation that your best columnists and commentators don’t necessarily make the best bloggers. Most media organisations thinkg blogging is simply snarky columns. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

It’s a distributed conversation. Ms Ashley says: “As with child bullies, I wonder if these anonymous commenters and correspondents would really be quite so “brave” if they were having a face to face conversation.” You’re right, and I am in no way defending some of the toxic comments that you’re receiving. But step back. Read your column as if it were one side of a conversation and think how you would respond.

Many columnists seem to use the British public school debating trick that really is a form of elitist trash-talking. Belittle your opponents as much as possible. Most will lose their heads, and therefore the argument. But, again, step back. Would you ever address someone face-to-face in the patronising manner of your columns and honestly expect anything approaching a civil response? It seems that your debating strategy has worked all too well, and your audience is so angry that they are responding merely with profanity and vitriol.

Again, having said all of that, I’m glad that the Guardian aren’t letting growing pains stop them. They are choosing one of their best CiF commenters to become a CiF blogger. Bravo.

05.31.06
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NowPublic NowFunded

I was the first person to blog about the launch of Michael Tippett’s participatory news network, NowPublic, which marries news stories from the media and public with “crowd-sourced” media such as photos and videos. I saw Michael demo NowPublic last February at the fabulous Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. Over a year later, just a few weeks ago, Michael, Kevin and I met up at a conference in London and had a really nice evening talking about everything, almost except NowPublic.

I’m delighted to announce that NowPublic has raised a healthy US$1.4 million in angel financing, lead by Brightspark Ventures. Congratulations to co-founders Michael, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers and all the angels involved.

NowPublic met with early success when U2 played a ‘secret’ gig in New York. The photos posted on the site were fantastic – a realtime record of a gig posted without the aid of paid photographers or the traditional media. As an event of national and international interest to U2 fans, it was a bit of a no-brainer for people who were there to take and post photographs.

Since then, NowPublic has become one of the fastest growing news networks, with (and here I quote from the press release) “over 15,000 reporters in 130 countries and over 2 million unique visits a month. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff.”

But what is news? We frequently thing of news as being events that have national or international importance, but much more news happens at a local or hyperlocal level and these are the types of events that we are less likely to share because they don’t ‘seem like news’ to us. We also tend to think of ‘news’ as being the same as ‘current events’, but in actual fact it spreads far wider than that, into technology, science, sports and beyond.

This is where NowPublic has huge potential – to be a repository of hyperlocal and focused news that is defined not by the sections in your newspaper or the packages on the 1 o’clock bulletin, but by the people who are involved or who witness what happened. We can make our own news – we just have to remember that what we are experiencing is newsworthy.

I myself have contributed to the site a paltry once, when I reported on a “five alarm” fire in San Francisco last July that happened just a few blocks away from where I was staying. I could have contributed more often, and one missed opportunity in particular springs to mind.

Kevin and I were walking to Holborn station in London, only to find that area sealed off. To find a tube station shut is not that big of a deal in London, but the fact that the surrounding roads were sealed off and the place was swarming with police was much more unusual. Had I had any presence of mind, (or a decent cameraphone), I would have taken some snaps, posted them on NowPublic and asked if anyone knew what had happened. Something patently had, but the traditional news outlets didn’t cover it, and the London Underground site never even mentioned the closure of the station. Yet there was news there – I could smell it. My curiosity nearly killed me.

But much participatory media happens at the behest of an authoritative source – XYZMediaCo requests photos of a specific event, or a news anchor invites people to text or email in questions. Under some circumstances – such as the London bombings or the Buncefield fire, the media can be inundated with images and reportage. But we, the public, frequently forget that smaller events are news too, and retraining us to think more critically about what is news is a hefty challenge I am sure that Michael will relish.

05.29.06
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How many news outlet staff actually read their own RSS feeds?

I don’t have a TV. I also don’t have a radio. I get my news the same way any self-respecting geek does, via the intarwebthingy. It used to be that I would pop along to news websites and see what was going on, but then Dave Winer invented RSS and that saved me all the fuss and bother of having to figure out whether a site had been updated or not by conveniently feeding new articles into my aggregator. Wonderful.

Blogs, you see, have been using RSS for almost as long as it and they have been around, because blog software is written by geeks, and geeks do like to save themselves some effort whenever they can. RSS was invented in 1997 when Winer created an XML syndication format for use on his blog. Now no self-respecting blog is without a feed. Yay us.

News outlets, on the other hand, suffer from Chronic 90s Web Buzzword Syndrome, which means that they are still thinking about ‘stickiness’ and ‘eyeballs’. I don’t know about you, but the thought of sticky eyeballs quite makes my stomach churn. However, they have – slowly, painfully, and with no small amount of looking over their shoulder to see if the Big Nasty Sticky Eyeball Eating Monster was creeping up behind them – adopted RSS. Despite the fact that bloggers saw RSS as a no-brainer, the media had to think long and hard before they committed to using a technology which made it easier for people to find out what they had published on their websites and which could, therefore, drive lots of traffic their way.

But they’ve got there. Sort of.

I’m glad that The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC et al are using RSS. I am, at heart, a lazy wossit, and I much prefer my news to come to me, rather than for me to have to go out and find it. However, I am afeared that the media has not quite paid enough attention to RSS, making the consumption of news via my aggregator a painful and unpleasant experience.

Firstly, no one seems to have figured out that when you change a story, the changes show up in some aggregators. I use NetNewsWire, and it’s set to show me the differences between old and new versions of an RSS feed. It’s true to say that sometimes NNW misinterprets what constitutes a change, but it also exposes all the real changes made to news stories.

The BBC seems to have the biggest problem with constantly changing RSS feeds. I brought this up once with a meeting of senior BBC news execs, and they failed to understand why this is a problem. It’s not just that it’s irritating – changing a story even a little bit causes it to be republished which then flags it up as ‘unread’ in my aggregator, even though I have actually read it. It’s also that changing stories after they have been published is unprofessional and damages the news source’s credibility. When I link to a news story, I want it to say the same thing next week as it said when I linked to it.

When I explained this to the BBC’s news execs, they cried in exasperation that they couldn’t possibly be expected to be right all the time, and where do you draw the line between a major update, which gives the story a new URL, and a minor update? Well, that is a good question. Another good question is, why do you even do minor updates? Perhaps better sub-editing, along with not rushing too fast to publish, would help get rid of the need for minor updates, and any major changes to the story are dealt with by a new article? Or perhaps there is an even better way to deal with additional facts coming in, such as saying ‘Update’ in the article, or some other methodology that I haven’t thought of that doesn’t screw with the integrity of the original.

To be fair, not all of the BBC’s RSS output is affected. Out of nearly 40 items from the BBC in my aggregator at the moment, five have changes. That’s only ~13%, which you might thing is negligible, but I think that figure should be zero.

You’ll also find, when you click through to the site, that the first paragraph is different from the excerpt that’s published in the RSS feed. Considering how concise some of these first paragraphs on the site are, it makes you wonder why the BBC are writing separate excerpts at all, and particularly makes me question why those excerpts get edited. Seems like make-work to me.

Here are a few examples from today, picked in sequence from headlines published around the 15:30 mark and including the copy from the website as well. I have replicated the additions (in italics) and the deletions (strikethrough) exactly as they show up in NetNewsWire, so you have to take into account its inherent over-enthusiasm for marking things as changed.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

Five hundred UK holidaymakers are sent home after their Hundreds of passengers whose cruise ship was detained because of holidays were ruined by a severe virus.virus outbreak are to be offered refunds.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

A travel company has apologised and offered a refund to hundreds of passengers whose cruise holidays were ruined by a virus outbreak.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people are killed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Violent disturbances rock Kabul after a deadly traffic accident involving a US convoy crashes, triggering a riot.military convoy.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people have been killed in the Afghan capital Kabul after a traffic accident involving a US military convoy sparked mass rioting.

Race against time in Java quake

The United Nations warns that the task of bringing taking aid to the survivors of the earthquake in Indonesia is “enormous”.“enormous”, the United Nations warns.

Race against time in Java quake

The task of helping survivors of Saturday’s earthquake on the Indonesian island of Java is “a race against the clock”, the United Nations has warned.

Worse than the BBC is Google News. By it’s very nature, Google News is all about change, but by god that screws with your RSS feeds. Out of about 80 items, 68 had changes. Now, Google News aims to track news stories from multiple sources, so it is inevitable that their items should change frequently, but it makes it completely useless in an RSS aggregator, because every time I refresh, the items that I had read become marked as unread again because Google News have either done something as minor as changed the timestamp from “5 hours ago” to “6 hours ago”, which is not hugely useful, or added a new source, or substantively changed the copy.

This breaks Google News’ RSS feed in terms of usability. There’s just no way I can continue to have Google News in my RSS reader.

Now, what the BBC does get very right is its timestamps. Items published today have the time published as their timestamps, and items published yesterday and before have the date.

Would that The Times could learn that timestamps are important. Instead, RSS items from The Times are timestamped with the time that I refresh my aggregator, not the time that they are published. I have my news feeds grouped in one folder and I read them en masse. News is highly time-sensitive, and I want to read stuff as it comes in, so having an accurate timestamp is essential. The Times, however, hasn’t figured this out yet. Instead, I get a cluster of items grouped around a single timestamp, and when I refresh, I not only get new items, I get repeats of old items with the new ‘timestamp’. This is not helpful.

For example, I learnt that ‘3,000 UK troops are Awol since war began’ both at 11:09 and at 13:58; and that ‘Abbas threatens Hamas with referendum over blueprint’ both on 25th and 26th of May. These items are in the same feed, and appear to be identical, yet they are showing up twice.

The Guardian is pretty good, compared to The Times, Google News, and the BBC, in the way they treat RSS, as I would expect considering they have people like Neil McIntosh and Ben Hammersley to advise. They get timestamping right – the clusters of articles all being published at once is more to do with their editorial time-table than bugs in their RSS feed.

But there is still room for improvement. Whilst they do edit their RSS excerpts, sometimes just as pointlessly as the BBC, they do it a lot less often, so my main criticism would be that they are inconsistent in their excerpt writing habits. Some articles get a sentence, others get two bullet points; and sometimes the excerpt (and headline) is the same as on the site, and sometimes it isn’t. I have to say, I’d prefer a single sentence excerpt and headline which was the same as the site.

A few examples of what I mean.

Ghost ship washes up in Barbados

· 11 petrified corpses found in cabin· Letter left by dying man gives clue

After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados

· Letter left by dying man gives clue to investigators

· Dozens of others thought to have perished en route

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

A climber who was left for dead on Mount Everest has been found alive.

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

· Team forced to leave Australian at 8,800 metres

· ‘I imagine you’re surprised to see me,’ he tells rescuer

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Nicolas Cage has bought a 40-acre undeveloped island in the Bahamas for $3m (£1.6m)

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

Monday May 29, 2006

The Guardian

Wherever you go, people stare at you. Paparazzi take pictures, fans ask for autographs, absolute strangers wonder aloud if they once met you at a party. For the hard-pressed celebrity there’s only one way to get away from it all: hide on your own desert island.

The surprise in all this is that the one newspaper who gets it spot on is The Independent. I really can’t fault their RSS feed at all. Timestamps are reliable, and again reveal their editorial timetable with many articles being published in the small hours and few being published during the day. Their excerpts vary in length, but some of the longer ones are more useful than those of other news outlets. Personally, I like longer excerpts because I would rather skim a two sentences that give me a better feel for whether I want to read the article than have just one short sentence that doesn’t tell me much.

Some examples, again with the copy from the RSS and the copy from the site:

British journalists killed in Iraq

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

British journalists killed in Iraq

PA

Published: 29 May 2006

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Published: 29 May 2006

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I have lost everything,” he said.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

By Kathy Marks in Bantul, Indonesia

Published: 29 May 2006

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I “I have lost everything,” he said.

I like the fact that the RSS feed and the website copy are identical. To me, that’s ideal – what I see in RSS is what I get on the site. I also can’t see any evidence of changes, although I will say that this RSS feed is new in my aggregator so maybe this point will clarify itself over time.

Now, all this criticism may seem like pointless nit-picking. Perhaps some it is down to my inner editor screaming for consistency and my inner blogger begging for honesty, but certainly some of this has a direct impact on the usability of RSS feeds for the reading of news.

I want news. I have no problem with the idea of clicking on a link in my aggregator and reading the full article on the news outlet’s website – this is not a plea for full posts (although hell, that’d be great and if Corante can put advertising in their RSS feed, so can anyone, but that’s not the point I want to make).

It’s a plea for journalists and media IT staff to think a little harder about how news is being read these days. RSS is not a fad, and it’s not going to go away. It is going to flourish, with more and more people using it to get their news from many disparate sources. It is in your best interests to ensure that your RSS feeds work, that your editorial policies take into account the effect of new technology on the transparency of your medium, and that you strive at all times for honesty even if that means owning up to your updates (note, ‘update’ does not necessarily mean ‘mistake’).

Google News is revealing your reliance on syndicated content, and RSS is revealing your edits. If you want to remain credible, you must adapt. In an increasingly competitive world, where people choose which news sources to read not just based on content but also on usability and accessibility, can you really afford not to?

05.28.06
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Webinar: News as conversation

It was live from North London as I did a ‘webinar’ Tuesday night on the nitty gritty of how we do a global interactive radio programme five nights a week on the BBC World Service. Francois Nel from University of Central Lancashire invited me to take part in their Journalism Leaders Forum. You can watch the whole thing here.

First off, we try to eavesdrop on conversations around the world, virtually get a sense of what people are talking about in cafes and around water coolers the world over. What are the most viewed, most e-mailed stories on major news sites? What are bloggers talking about? We check Global Voices, the global blog network based out of Harvard. What are the stories coming picked up by BBC Monitoring, our global media monitoring department? We do a roundup on our blog and ask the audience what is important to them.

With the help of our audience, we settle on topics to discuss that day. We often post debates on the Have Your Say section of the BBC News Website. We use a discussion system based on Jive Software. People can not only comment, but also leave an e-mail address and phone number. Personal information apart from name and place don’t appear on the public site, but we can log in and see those contact details to invite people to join our on air discussion.

Our blog is beginning to gain some momentum. We’ve got on average four comments per post, and I’m really pleased on how the blog allows the conversations to continue long after our on air discussions finish. This is what I meant by saying that blogs can overcome the limits of linear media. We’ve only got one hour on air, but our audience can explore other threads of discussion online for weeks to come.

We’ve had some amazing conversations grow out of it. I remember recently when we had a south Asian sailor calling on a sat phone from a ship in the Molucca Straits talking to another Asian Muslim living in Stockholm being asked questions by a caller from Austin Texas in the United States about recent violent clashes between Hamas and Fatah factions in the West Bank and Gaza.

We’ve still got more to do. As I said on the webinar, we’re still building community around the programme. People often say that the BBC has a huge audience. Recent figures show the BBC World Service has 163 million listeners. But a sense of community is different from a large audience. Community is a sense of ownership, belonging and participation. The greater the community we build around the programme, the more the audience will feel a sense that this is their programme. As I’ve said before, building community around a global discussion programme is difficult. Community develops around several shared things, place or a shared passions or interests.

Another question asked was how to make money with blogs. Suw often says that she doesn’t make money with her blog but because of her blog. There is a lot of truth even for us in traditional media. I remember in the late 90s people in traditional media said that the web was great but there was no way to make money with it. Now, many media websites turn a profit, a profit not necessarily that is replacing revenue lost from their traditional business, but a profit. And I believe that blogs can renew our relationship with our audiences.

It’s not simply a commercial relationship. A lot of my colleagues ask me why I blog. I found that when I wrote the blog during the US elections in 2004 that it reminded me a lot of the relationship I had with my readers when I first started out in journalism as a local newspaper reporter. I was part of the communities that I wrote about in western Kansas. That was one of the things that made journalism a fulfilling job for me.

Even though in 2004, I was writing the blog for people all over the world, I felt I was writing for a community again, not just readers. I got more response from the blog I wrote than almost anything I have done for the BBC. I think there are a lot of opportunities for news organisations to embrace blogging to renew our relationship with our audiences. While I won’t outline a business model with facts and figures about a return on investment, I know that blogs can help us create compelling content. And that is the start for any media business model.

05.23.06
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Xtech 2006: Wrapup

Well, Xtech ended on Friday afternoon, and I’ve had the weekend to recover and to think about it all. Actually, I’ll need a lot longer than a weekend to process all the stuff that I took in, but it’ll be fun cogitating on everything I heard. I think Edd Dumbill and Matt Biddulph lined up some fantastic speakers, and having produced a conference myself in the past, I know just how much work it is.

The talks that stood out for me were:

– Matt Biddulph, talking about putting the BBC’s programme catalogue online.

– Paul Hammond, on open data and why there isn’t more of it about.

– Tom Coates, doing his web of data talk, which is always good.

Had some fun conversations too, with a whole host of people, including but not limited to: Teh Ryan King, Brian Suda, Thomas Vander Wal, Jeremy Keith, Simon Willison, Matt Patterson, Jeffrey McManus, and Jay Gooby. I’m sure I’ve missed someone off: sorry if that’s you!

The next Xtech will be in Paris in 2007. Can’t wait.

05.22.06
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Creative procrastination

Derek Powazek, with whom I worked at Technorati for a week or so last summer and whose design chops I highly rate, writes about how important is it to let things stew sometimes. This is what’s missing from my life right now. Although I’ve had more time lately – sitting on planes, waiting at airports – which is already combining with some really cool conversations with some really bright people and threatening to splurge out of my brain just as soon as I get a moment free.

05.19.06
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Xtech 2006: Jeff Barr – Building Software With Human Intelligence

Amazon have released a number of APIs, but going to focus on the Mechanical Turk.

[He has ‘ground rules’ and says ‘please feel free to write about my talk’. Er… command and control anyone? Give me a break.]

[Lots of guff about Amazon.]

Artificial artificial intelligence.

The original Mechanical Turk was a chess playing robot. No one could figure out how it worked. Turns out there was a ‘chessmaster contortionist’ inside.

So the MTurk is powers by people. Machines can’t tell the difference between a table and a chair, whereas a person can do it immediately.

HIT – Human Intelligence Task.

Can check people have the appropriate skills, e.g. be able to speak Chinese or tell a chair from a table.

So you make a request, say what skills etc. are required, figure out the fee you’re willing to pay. Workers go to MTurk.com. 45 types of work, can filter by price or skills required etc. Transcriptions are very popular. E.g. CastingWords.com do transcriptions of podcasts. Question and answer kinds of things.

You decide if your workers get paid, but there are ratings on both sides, so you can rate the employers as well as the workers.

Software Developers

– can use APIs with this to include humans in their applications

Businesses

– can get stuff done that humans need to do

Anyone

– can make money

– new businesses feasible

Public use – massive scale image clean-up, i.e. which picture best represents the thing it’s of? Got Slash-Dotted to death. People did greasemonkey scripts to help them doing it. Had so many people doing this that they ran out of images. Had more workers than work for a while.

HIT Builder, helps you create your HIT (task thing).

Could use it for market research or surveys. E.g. wanted a survey for developers, so added some qualifications to weed out the non-developers by making people answer questions like ‘which of these four aren’t programming languages’.

Translations services.

Translate written transcripts to audio.

Image Den, photo editing and retouching, e.g. removing red-eye, cutting things up etc.

CastingWords, podcast transcription service.

Need an Amazon account to work, which requires a credit card, and that’s their way of trying to ensure no child labour.

[I think this could possibly have been an interesting talk, but it wasn’t. I like the idea of having APIs for something like MTurk, but this guy was really dull. I guess I could cut and paste from the back channel to spice things up a bit, but that might be mean.]