Cute Animals Singing Christmas Songs

Great video of animals singing a Christmas song:



Thanks to the Guardian for pointing it out here.

France calls Google predator

Strong anti-Google sentiments from French publishers reveal a stuck-in-the-mud attitude prevalent throughout much old media. But who's right?

Interesting comments and round up on journalism.co.uk: French publishers vs Google: ‘You are becoming our worst enemy’

Also this video:



Laura Oliver who posted the article observes:

Google, secrecy about its algorithms and dominance of the online ad market aside, is looking forward; newspapers are trying to protect and control what they perceive as news and the news business. The problems they are facing, some related to Google and others not, should show them that this self-interested attitude can’t be maintained and their perception of ‘news as we know it’ is out-dated.

Movember is over!

Brooker Crushes

I have just, literally moments ago, discovered that I am not alone in my fondness for Charlie Brooker . . .

It started with a feed from the Guardian into my iGoogle page and now he's on TV and those clever techies have even erected a digital shrine in the form of charlian.co.uk: All Charlie, All the time.

Presidential evolution

From Dave Winer's Scripting News blog:

'I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . . '

I was catching up with the excellent Speechification blog and was directed by their recent post to The Poetry Archive, which was set up by Andrew Motion almost 10 years ago.

The title of my entry is of course lifted from T S Eliot's The Waste Land. You can hear the poet himself reading his poem here.

Google's making us smarter

No point paraphrasing - here's John Battelle's latest ripost to Nick Carr:

Well, Nick, sorry, but here's at least one study backing up my contention:

A new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for the brain. Searching online triggers areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

A study at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web.

"There's so much interest in exercising our minds as we age," said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active."

To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Hear Baroness Greenfield's thoughts here on the impact screen-based technologies are having on our capacity for deep reading.

Deep Cove, Vancouver

Me, in Deep Cove.

Now back in London with much redder hair x

Giles Coren and his rants

To: the Times subeditors

From: Coren, Giles

Chaps,

I am mightily pissed off ... I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do ... It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh." It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best."

Well, you fucking don't. This was shit, shit subediting for three reasons.

1) "Nosh", as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German "naschen". It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, "nosh" means simply "food". You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the "a". I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, "nosh" means "a session of eating" ...

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y. I have used the word "gaily" as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed "a" so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing ... And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.

Right, Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.

All the best

Giles

See here for more of the same.

Now watch the video:

Vancouver sunrise

This will probably be the first of many many pictures that I post here which capture the wonderful week I've just spent in Canada.

This picture was taken by me - jet-lagged - from my hotel room in Vancouver very early in the morning.

Where newspaper websites went wrong

Another great post from Scott Karp:

Newspapers were once THE most important filters for news. But they gave up this role on the web, because they didn’t see that the web analogue to what they did on the front page in print was NOT taking the same content and putting it on a website front page. In fact, you could argue that this is the single biggest mistake that newspapers have made on the web.

What they failed to see is that the web analogue to the newspaper front page is LINKS to where the news IS. That’s Drudge.

The web is about CONNECTIONS, and newspaper website front pages don’t connect anything to anything. That’s why they have so little influence.

Vancouver arrival

I'm here in Vancouver staying in the stunning Fairmont Waterfront. Below is a similar looking room to the one I'm staying in with a view over the harbour.



I'm here with a group of journalists on a sustainable tourism press trip organised by Rocky Mountaineer. We've been looked after very well so far - had a wonderful dinner in the hotel's restaurant last night after a tour of their rooftop herb garden.

Today we have the morning to ourselves so I think some of as are going to met up and go for coffee and perhaps a cycle round the park or a trip to the aquarium. Then in the afternoon we're being taken on a green tour of Vancouver before dinner at C Restaurant with Lexi Beston.


Can't wait!

Old newspapers

It is almost one month since my last blog post, which is shameful. I handed my MA dissertation in one week ago and now no longer have an excuse for not resuming where I left off.

Noticed this on the Google blog:

Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. Let's say you want to learn more about the landing on the Moon. Try a search for [Americans walk on moon], and you'll be able to find and read an original article from a 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we'll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.

---

Several months ago I progressed from intern to freelancer but, now that I am no longer studying, I am on the lookout for a permanent position. I don't enjoy job-hunting and wish I was being paid enough to stay where I am!

Also slightly worrying is the fact that all the positions I have found so far are for web developers. My html is pretty hopeless and I am clueless about Javascript.

My Plan B is to write a bestseller and never work at all.

Fox hounds adopt baby deer

I know, I seem to have a funny animal story obsession at the moment but this one is so cute.



Source: MailOnline

Sheep on roof

Source: MailOnline

Personal newspaper survey (again)

Dissertation deadline is now only one month away and it's time for another survey.

If you would like to fill it out, it will only take a couple of minutes, please click here.

Thanks!

Summer Travel

Please check out the smarter travel week over at the TravelRants blog

For the next seven days, Travel Rants will be rant free. I know, it’s shocking, but it’s that time of the year where the schools will soon be closing and everyone will be heading off on their summer holiday. So next week we will be promoting healthy and smarter travel.

Wordle word cloud

Guardian buys paidContent for $30 million

It was announced this morning.

Jeff Jarvis flagged it up here and directed us to Kara Swisher's scoop here.

Jarvis, whot writes for the Guardian, couldn't be happier:

I can say from firsthand experience that the Guardian people are just great to work with: brilliant, challenging, civlized, witty, strategic. (And they don’t pay me enough to suck up to them.) Rafat has always been my premier example of what web journalism and entrepreneurism can product. I know no staff that is more dogged in its pursuit of the story than Paid Content’s.

Incidentally, Jeff wrote this cracking piece on his Buzz Machine blog the other day that really got me thinking:

Whether it’s Google or someone else, the idea is right: Newspapers should concentrate on what the are supposed to do and stop trying to differentiate themselves with technology.

Part of the problem is institutional ego. Newspapers have long thought they are — in your head, hear Dana Carvey as SNL’s Church Lady saying this — special. When publishing systems arrived in the ’70s, papers wasted millions of dollars each specing and sometimes building their own customized systems, refusing to admit that what they did — typing, hooking graphs, fitting heads — was no different from any other paper. After I left the Chicago Tribune in the late ’70s, they created a one-of-a-kind CMS that was such a disaster the company dispatched its own vaunted Task Force investigative journalists to probe the failure.

So take the advice, papers: Get out of the manufacturing and distribution and technology businesses as soon as possible. Turn off the press. Outsource the computers. Outsource the copyediting to India or to the readers. Collaborate with the reporting public. And then ask what you really are. The answer matters dearly.

And a note to others — Google, the AP, et al: There is an opportunity here to be the platform for news. Takers?

Bob Wyner's comments are illuminating and hats off to Edward Roussel from the Telegraph for such insight. Edward Roussel from the Telegraph for such insight.

State of the Web 2008

Great illustration by Matthew Inman depicting the state of the Web in Summer 08. Click here for the full thing.

Red Head

This could be what my hair looks like . . . time to rinse and find out

Back to the drawing board

Several weeks without a blog entry is pretty poor going. My hard drive crashed and the ever imminent dissertation deadline have kept me from Carly's Blog. Now, however, I have a new laptop and I am once again online and clicking away.

The story that I just keep coming back to is ony by Nick Carr in the current issue of The Atlantic. With the brilliant title Is Google Making Us Stupid? it was bound to cause a stir. Responses have come thick and fast and it's been a struggle to keep up with all the conflicting views that have emerged.

My favourite has to be from Scott Karp who is responsible for the great Publishing 2.0 blog.

Also worth checking out is the piece by John Battelle: Google Making Nick Carr Stupid, But it's made this Guy Smarter

Bill Thompson: Changing the Way We Think

And for fairness' sake, Andre Sullivan in The Times: Google is giving Us Pond Skater Minds

There are more, but the WiFi connection on my train is a bit dodgy so I'm not going to list any more now.

As part of my dissertation I've made up a survey about online news and the way that people access it, which anyone reading this should feel free to complete - I'd be grateful for your thoughts.

As I made up the questions quite a while ago and have already received quite a few replies, I can now see that it's far from perfect so apologies if any questions are confusing!

Click Here to take survey

Unicorn sighting

How wonderful is this:

ROME — A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."

Sadly, it's not a real unicorn but a genetically flawed deer that was born in captivity in the research centre's park.

Speaking to a reporter from USA Today, Tozzi goes on to say that this could explain reports of unicorn sightings in the past. One-horned deer are not unheard of, but the central positioning of the horn is very unusal.

[Source]

[Image courtesy of Yahoo News/AP]

Cracking!

Saw this in the Independent website, had to share it.

Day of joyous procastination

Ok, it's obvious I'm not at work today. I have discovered BookRabbit and developed a new obsession. Check this out:



Oh how I wish I owned books with as many different coloured spines as this person.

BookRabbit lets you sniff around other peoples' reading habits and stacking preferences; you can also buy books that are as cheap if not cheaper than Amazon and shipping is free - result!

For a better explanation of the merits of BookRabbit and other virtual bookshelving sites, read Hermione Buckland-Hoby's blog post on Guardian Books.

Chatty cats

I know, I know, I promised great literary volumes . . . but for now you'll have to content yourselves with the chatty Teletext cats . . . I just love these guys!




I was inspired by the cracking squirrel video posted by the secret squirrel herself here.

Weston spooky mare

This is spooky Birnbeck Pier in Weston super mare.

As you can probably tell it's deserted and seems to be begging to be turned into the setting for a horror film.

My weekend in Weston deserves more time and effort than I can afford at the moment to devote to writing about it. I will endeavor to collect my thoughts and report back later this evening.

Image courtesy of Synwell Liberation Front via Flickr

Leaping Nutter!

I just could not believe this story when I read it in the Mail, but then I saw the pictures!

This man drank 6 cans of beer, took some photographs of the sunset and then leapt across the Grand Canyon - my stomach twists just thinkihng about it.

Future Web

I haven't posted for a few days because I've been panicking about my exam, which was yesterday and was fine.

Saw this post on the Publishing 2.0 blog and thought it was quite interesting. It's about proprietary applications/networks like Facebook and whether they are the future of the Web. Here's an extract but it's worth reading Scott Karp's article in full.

• Google CEO Eric Schmit has wondered in the past why some companies are still “betting against the internet“

The web is made possible by open, interoperable standards for content and communication, e.g. http, HTML, hyperlink, SMTP, etc. — will the future of the web be based on closed, proprietary standards for content and communication?

No company can touch Google’s ability to monetize the use of the open web — the more people use the web, the more money Google makes. Can Facebook compete with Google by eschewing the open web and open standards? Or is Facebook betting against the internet?

Hmmmm…..

We-Think

This is the video that Charles Leadbeater showed at the talk I went to see at the British Library a month or so ago. It's really worth 4 minutes of your time.

Blocking out censorship in China

This is a new ad campaign by French group RSF, which is targeting regimes that restrict freedom of the press.

Yellow flowers

Isn't this lovely?

Work

Just realised I haven't really posted about work for ages!

It's getting pretty interesting. I've discovered the joys of Microsoft Visio and have been spending ages painstakingly mocking up the perfect travel website homepage.

All to no avail of course because we're changing tack and making a stealth bid for a new CMS that I don't think I'm allowed to talk about! Hopefully this should make it easier to play with layout and structure, and will make us more self-sufficient and better integrated with the mothership.

Speaking of mothers, my mum has started going to military training twice a week. She lives in Scotland but there are lots of classes taking place across the country - there are 14 separate locations here in London. If anyone is interested visit their website, which is impressive in itself. You can watch a class online and sign-up for a free trial session.

Ugly mug

I saw this ages ago and keep forgetting to put it up.



I just love this picture!

It's from a Lonely Planet article about Off-beat London, which is worth checking out because I live here and I wasn't aware of everything on the list.

Digital shift - get over it

Is it nostalgia that makes us cling to print?

Jeff Jarvis flags up Colin Crawford's comments on International Data Group's transition from print to digital and leaves us with the following ruminations:

Yes, print is a burden. It’s expensive to produce for it. It’s expensive to manufacture. It’s expensive to deliver. It limits your space. It limits your timing. It’s stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each user. It comes with no ability to click for more. It has no search. It can’t be forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. It usually brings unions. And you really should recycle it. Wow, when you think about it, print sucks.

Today I have also been reading a lot about the World Editors Forum and the revelation that, in order to compete with the Internet, newspapers of the future will become free and place more emphasis on comment and opinion.

According to Reuters, who commissioned the report with WEF:

Some 86 percent of respondents believed newsrooms should become more integrated with digital services as two in three believe the most common form of news consumption will be via electronic media such as online or mobiles within a decade.

According to 704 senior news executives surveyed, the greatest threat to the industry was the declining number of young people who read newspapers while the increasing emphasis on speed meant only 45 percent of editors thought the quality of journalism would improve over the next 10 years.

Press Gazette also reported on the findings saying that:

Despite the threats from new media to traditional business models, 85 per cent of editors were either somewhat optimistic or very optimistic about the future of their papers – the same figure as last year.

It's not clear from the accounts I've read so far why there is so much positive feeling - I think I would be very worried. IDG have found a way of making online advertising bring in more than print - but they are the exception rather than the rule I think.

The New York Times has an interesting in-depth piece about the privately-owned publisher's success. IDG targets a niche audience and produces titles such as InfoWorld and PC World. In April 2007, InfoWorld became a Web-only publication.

There were nervous months after the switch as the company awaited the reaction from advertisers and readers, but before long InfoWorld’s Web audience was growing and its business improved. Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

Across the company, the remaining print publications still typically play a vital role, but a lesser one — physically smaller and financially diminished. In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.

One of the reasons cited for the company's success is that even the still largely print-based products like CIO have a 'web-first' business model at their centre. Crucially, 'there are no print and Web barriers'.

As the then-editor in chief of InfoWorld, Steve Fox, noted just before the transition to digital was made:

. . . the most fundamental difference between print and online was the ability to measure precisely how many readers view a particular article on the Web — and how those results influence editorial decisions on what to write about.

The link to the business is direct. When a person views a Web page, ads are automatically presented on the page and the publisher collects a payment.

The new chief, Eric Knorr, has said that while page views are important, they are not everything - if they were, you'd always be reading about the same handful of topics. This is a good point.

And InfoWorld has also embraced other opportunities afforded by Web technologies and used these as a jumping off point for further interaction with its readership:

Without the physical limitations of print, Mr. Knorr said, it becomes easier to explore topics more deeply. InfoWorld presents a stable of bloggers, including 19 freelance writers, who are authorities in niches including data protection, green technology, open source software and cloud computing.

The goal, with reporting and blogging, Mr. Knorr said, is to create “thought leadership and depth” in several subject areas online, and also set up InfoWorld conferences around those topics.

The article closes with this pertinent observation from journalist turned venture capitalist Stewart Alsop

“What’s happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

Spam birthday

Spam is 30 years old today according to John Naughton writing in today's Guardian.

In the same article, he also refers to a new book coming out entitled The future of the Internet: and how to stop it by Jonathan Zittrain.

Generativity has brought us the web, instant communication, Skype, e-commerce and other wonderful things. But it has also given us spam, viruses, botnets, cyber-crime and other evils. Zittrain fears a future in which people will access a tightly controlled, over-regulated network using 'tethered' (non-programmable) appliances, such as the iPhone, which can be remotely controlled by their manufacturers.

It's a plausible, though not yet inevitable, scenario which can be avoided if we think and act intelligently. If we don't, then we will have gone from virtual utopianism to real dystopianism in a single generation. Have a good day.

Naughton on Boris

Great post from John Naughton:

Bertie Wooster elected!

Yep. He’s London’s new Mayor. And all the while he thought he was running for the Wine-Tasting Committee of the Drones Club. Much public entertainment lies ahead.

Bad news for the Supreme Leader, though. The game’s over. And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Gordon Brown’s competence/incompetence. It’s simply that Labour’s time is up. Three reasons for this:

Events, dear boy, events: the long boom is over; house prices are on their way down; negative equity beckons; the feel-good factor has evaporated.

All governments run out of steam. I had dinner recently with a senior civil servant. I asked him what the atmosphere is like in Whitehall. He said that it felt like the beginning of the end — that the government had basically run out of ideas, that ministers were exhausted and becoming demoralised.

The great British electorate isn’t very interested in politics: Labour has been in power so long that it’s become boring. The man on the Clapham omnibus thinks it’s time for a change. It’s nothing to do with a belief that Cameron & Co are wonderful, or even competent. There’s no evidence yet that they could run a whelk stall. Their main merit is just that they’re not Harriet Harman/Gordon Brown/Jack Straw/Jacqui Smith/Hazel Blears…

Prada

This is absolutely exquisite:


Check out the animation by James Jean and music by CocoRosie here.

I want a Prada bag!

Telegraph rise in poles

How exactly does a digital newspaper gain an extra 5 million unique users in one month?

The Guardian thinks it is something to do with overseas traffic.

Having spent the past few weeks analysing its travel page, I think that it's definitely better in many respects than it's competitors.

Although, I'm still very interested by The Dirty Weekend Guide to Europe that appeared on the front page of the Times travel section.

Daredevils

The new extreme sport, swimming in a natural pool 360ft above the base of Victoria Falls



For the full Times Travel article about Devil's Pool, click here.

So it must be true!

So, this is it, print journalism is truly over . . .

Server troubles

Funny start to the week. I had a kind-of half day today because we had a revision session in the morning, which was not uplifting. Also, even though I know I shouldn't be bothered by it, everyone else seems to have a much stronger grasp of xslt than I do. And - I got a rubbish mark for my proof-reading exercise.

A release went out today, which was fine-ish except a few things were forgotten and something weird has happened with some images on the local server which only I have been playing with recently . . .

This morning I saw an interesting funeral procession commence from the funeral parlor across the road. I think I counted 6 stretched black cars and a beautiful black carriage pulled by 4 black horses.

Stinky London

I have to admit I didn't notice the stench yesterday, but everyone in the office did.

People in Angel, Shepherd's Bush, Richmond - everyone seemed to have been aware of the smell. This is what the Mail had to say by way of an explanation:

Police, fire and water services were at a loss to explain the manure-scented cloud which afflicted great swathes of the South.

But with the wind in the East, it soon became clear that our Continental neighbours were to blame - and almost certainly the Germans.

Over there it is muck-spreading season for farmers wanting to nourish their crops. In a country where pigs make up the of livestock, there is ample supply of particularly pungent muck to spread.

And the fear is that, if you've already smelt it, things are unlikely to change the rest of the weekend.

German weathermen admitted that a change of wind direction had sent the smell, or "der gestank" as they call it, across the North Sea just as the stuff in the fields ripened to stomach-churning levels.

From the moment commuters set out for their offices and children to school the stink was detected yesterday morning from Suffolk to Surrey, west to Berkshire and even down to the south coast.

No respecter of royalty, it even lingered over Windsor Castle. A spokesman at the Berkshire town's tourist office said: "When I left home this morning the smell was virtually unbearable but we haven't had any complaints from anyone so far. I think the Queen is in. I hope she has her windows closed."

Germany's heavily-regulated farmers have been allowed to sprinkle nature's delight on their fields since February 1. But with the cold winter weather lasting into spring, most have waited until now.

Hauke Jaacks, a farmer in Rissen, sprayed more than 5,000 gallons on his 25-acre plot.

"Sorry about the smell," he told his countrymen. "But you have to put up with it. I need the grass to grow to feed my cattle."

At the German Embassy in London nobody was willing to apologise for the smell. Staff had not noticed anything unusual in the air and pointed out if anyone was looking for another country to blame, the French coast was "much nearer."

Mail Online beta launch

Did anyone catch the beta launch of the new Mail Online website?

It's only available office hours Monday to Friday at the moment.

The Guardian is not too keen.

It's definitely cleaner than the older version.

What does anyone else think?

E-reading

The first day of the London Book Fair saw David Nicholas talking about e-books and the Google generation - something that was the focus of a recent CIBER research study.

I thought they didn't appeal to me, but maybe that's because I haven't tried out the Kindle yet.

Potential

I think I met someone with a job title I would like to have - content strategy director.

We had a Blue Peter session yesterday cutting out lots of modules - from our own site and from others - and shuffling them around on a giant paper version of the current homepage shell. There is so much we want to cram in!

Our editor is off to Tenerife tomorrow - something about dancing on a cruise ship?

What do we think about Europe's green light on the mobilephones on planes issue? Shane Richmond is not impressed:

I don’t begrudge people their chats. I’m sure they’re important: I just don’t want to hear them. And if there was one benefit of being crammed into a tiny, uncomfortable seat and fed terrible food for several hours it was the absence of people yelling into their phones.

Equally disenchanted with the whole idea, unsurprisingly, is Ariel Leve:

The only thing worse than being seated next to a crying infant for a transatlantic flight is being seated next to a crying infant whose mum is talking into her mobile exploring the possible explanations for the tears.

“She started four hours ago. She’s been crying the whole time. No, her nappy is dry. Yes, I burped her. Wind? You think it might be wind?...OK, I’ll tell her it’s you.”

(Pause) ‘Sweetie, daddy’s on the phone. Here. On the phone. Talk to him. It’s Da-da. DA-DA. You don’t want to talk to him? You don’t want to talk to dada?”

(Pause) “She doesn’t want to talk to you. I’ll call you when we land.”

Apparently, Air France is testing out the technology at the moment. When they make the announcement telling people they can use their mobiles, the standard response is puzzlement followed by a lot of people taking out their phones and saying 'Hi darling, you'll never guess where I'm calling from . . . '

Meeting Minutes

I gave my first presentation yesterday to the editor and publisher. I think it went well.

I had spent much of last week meeting people from different departments of the company umbrella and getting their perspectives on which areas the site should be developing. Of course, everyone who has an interest in the site has their own agenda; but there were a lot of interesting observations.

For instance, the site, at the moment, is top heavy. The modules at the top are big and bulky and overshadow the ones near the bottom. This is having an effect on newsletter sign-up, which is situated in a small blue box right at the foot of the page. Having spoken to one of the people who deal with this - the newsletter and the reader offers that are incorporated within it - on several of the company's sites, I learned that, when this module was transferred to the headline banner and reduced to a simple email-only registration, take-up increased significantly, and consequently, I would imagine, so did sales generated by the increased visibility of the integrated offers.

One thing that crops up repeatedly, is that people are not clear exactly what the USP is. Are users being encouraged to go there to book holidays/click on ads/enter competitions and then leave; or should they be invited to linger, research destinations and contribute content of their own.

We know we need to generate a lot more content. The scroll is short right now. When the new homepage goes live, the length will probably be doubled. There will be, I hope, more dynamic content and more content generated by the users - comments on travel issues perhaps, or advice on specific travel experiences.

We've even talked about the possibility of featuring a customizable area that would offer users a space where they could select their own favourite destination/currency convertor/weather-where-you-are etc.

I've been looking at the other newspaper travel sections and observing that they all get people in by putting more of their content on the homepage via thumbnails and brief text hyperlinks. We know we need to do this as, at the moment, too much content is hidden behind scrolling banks of images that people are not finding.

I'm now at the stage where I'm starting to construct wire frames and mock-ups of how the site might look in terms of layout and potential module scenarios.

After, that is, I get to grips with the complicated spreadsheets I'm being sent by all our partners. At least the ones that I produce are full of lovely colours!

Snowy April

I awoke this morning to a vision of anachronistic festivity. If I could work out how to do it I would upload the photos I took on my mobile of snow-kissed Camden.

Unfortunately, my technological prowess has thus far failed me. I have, however, found that I am not alone in my early morning snap happy action. My friend down the road just sent me this picture:




And Seamus McCauley has also posted on Virtual Economics with his images of snow-covered daffodils.

Fate of newspapers

Buzz machine post by Jeff Jarvis, which includes a reminder about Britannica's forum next week on the fate of the newspaper industry (I wish Nick Davis was talking. I'm looking forward to reading Flat Earth News and being able to participate in the very loud reaction its publication has provoked. I'm also really keen to get hold of The Big Switch whose author - Nick Carr - will be talking at the event).

The latest bad news is word that Journal Register, publisher of the New Haven Register and 21 other daily and 310 nondaily newspapers, could go bankrupt. The article argues that this is more a problem of debt service than operations — but then it goes on to say that “its operating performance has declined” with EBITDA expected to fall from $90 million to $70 million in a year.

If I can get some money into a program at CUNY — and as part of a conference on new business models for news I’m holding there, probably now in September — I’m thinking about hiring MBAs to create drastic models of new newspaper businesses, such as:
* The free newspaper — here’s an argument that the Guardian should go that way.
* The online-only newspaper — that has happened in Madison.
* Selling off printing, production, and distribution arms — as suggested by Dave Morgan.
* Break them up into a bunch of niche products — as suggested by NewMediaBytes. That could mean selling the sports section separately (or making it online-only); it could mean turning out a whole bunch of products from golf to parenting to food.
* Go hyperlocal.
* Turn all the reporters into independent agents — as I sort of suggested here — and the newsroom and news product into just a packager and ad network.
* Jettison everything but real reporting — which is a smaller proportion of an editorial budget than many would like to admit — and charge more for the product to a highly interested audience.
* Distribute a local supplement inside national papers: USA Today, The Times, or the Journal.
* Become a local magazine with an online component covering breaking news, local calendars, and such. (Except I think that local magazines are in as much trouble as local newspapers.)
* Become an ad network.

What else? Note that I did not suggest foundation or public support. I think that’s a pipedream. Journalism either is or isn’t a business. I think it is, but not like the one we have now. And we’d better get to reinventing it or it could well die. The Journal Register could just be the first.

Whoop. Whoop. Whoop. That’s the alarm going off, newspaperfolk.

: LATER: Note that the Britannica blog is holding a forum this week on the fate of newspapers. I’m looking forward to Clay Shirky’s call for experimentation.

Being super lame I am going to bed at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night.

Nitty Gritty Thursday

I can't believe how quickly this week is going.

And now how fast the working day goes.

My boss was away for a few days so I thought I should show some initiative and get cracking with everything I remembered him having mentioned as being a good idea.

I love working on the home page. Having installed Fireshots and reacquainted myself with Powerpoint I am now happily immersed in the task at hand.

I've made contact with as many people as possible from the illegibly scrawled list randomly compiled at our meeting on my first day. People from different parts of the company - I wish I could remember some of their titles now - who have some connection and definitely an opinion about the site, where it's not working and how it could do its job better.

I see now why my boss would want to take on someone like me - not only is he too busy to be running around having airy fairy hypothetical meetings and playing with Firefox add-ons - it's also much more likely that his colleagues will respond frankly to someone they don't know. Also, I'm just a student - they're not likely to want to impress me; far more likely that I, in my wide-eyed, eager-to-please ignorance, will be serious and attentive and just grateful that a grown up is agreeing to have a serious conversation with me at all.

I had two meetings today - one with someone from the hard-copy newspaper and the other with someone from a sales orientated background. They said completely contrasting things, which couldn't be better for me in terms of my research. Both raised interesting points about the site.

A particularly salient observation that, embarrassingly, hadn't really occurred to me is that there is no such thing as good travel news. It's always about queues and plane crashes and never about peaceful sunny beaches - so why put it on your front page if you're a travel website? Why would someone want to buy a holiday from a site that's full of floods and droughts and terrorist attacks - and won't these have been reported in the main news site anyway?

Another issue raised was about scrolling. Our website has a remarkably short front page - especially compared to its parent site which seems to scroll for miles. I was thinking about this this evening when, serendipitously, I came across this post on 10,000 words.net:

Another misconception held over from newspaper days is that everything must be kept above the fold — the imaginary line at the bottom of the browser where a user must scroll to see the rest of the content. Well the fold is an unnecessary design limitation.

"The fold" goes back to the days when newsstands were still relevant and important content was kept above the fold of the newspaper to grab the attention of passersby. Unlike newspapers and magazines, web browsers have scrollbars, a magnificent and less cumbersome invention. While the best and most important content should be placed near the top of the page, most users will indeed scroll to explore more of the site.

Clicktale found in its 2006 study that 76 percent of users who encountered pages with a scrollbar scrolled somewhat (up to two to three pages) and 23 percent of users scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page.

That's enough shop talk for now though. I should be researching the future of the printed word as part of some coursework I'm still working on.

It is with only a slight cringe that I admit that on the day it is due in, I am being taken to see Wicked at the Apollo by a friend; and I can't wait!

The real work begins!

At last . . . !

I was getting worried I was going to be Excel-ing for two months. But today I sat down with two colleagues - editor and publisher - and had a brainstorming session.

The homepage of our site is to undergo a renovation and it will be my job to gather information, talk to people in-house and critique the competition. I'm still going to be responsible for weekly reports and advetorials, but my main duties will be to research, harvest, analyze and present.

I will also continue to test the site on the local server before a fix is released. There's one due to go live tomorrow.

I feel excited about going into work now. The site has a lot of potential that isn't, as yet, being realized. I would want loads of interaction - more focus on blogs and comments - but this might not be right for our site.

Travel Mail is intentionally designed to seem like a unique enterprise - ie it doesn't look anything like any other section of the umbrella website. Brand identity is felt to be strong - and will be made stronger by strenuous logo endorsement and a re-working of the strapline.

I can't wait to get stuck in. And now that it is officially summer time, mornings and hometimes will no longer feel like cave-dwelling.

pre-Edison sound recording

I heard about this on radio 4 this morning - 17 years before Edison's phonograph, Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had made a recording of Clair de Lune - but I managed to miss Charlotte Green's subsequent fit of giggles:

According to the Daily Mail:

Green's stern but smooth news-reading voice has become an article of faith for many traditionalists who listen to her bulletins on Radio 4's Today programme.

However:

Scott de Martinville's invention was useful for the scientific investigation of sound waves but could not play back its recordings - unlike Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph.

But while the 10 second track played, it is claimed someone in the studio told her that the noise sounded like a bee buzzing in a bottle.

After this, her famously unswerving composure evaporated into a mixture of giggling, wheezing and what sounded like weeping as she tried to carry on.

Repeated attempts to resume her news-reading were aborted in new fits of laughter, as listeners at home were left open-mouthed by the bizarre antics.

Thankfully:

Today programme editor Ceri Thomas yesterday defended the news-reader's behaviour.

He said: "We had hundreds of emails coming in about it. Now inevitably there were a couple that didn't think it was great but 98 per cent of people thought it was the highlight of their morning. I am not going to encourage it every day, but these things happen, it's live.

"She's a professional, she knows she is not there to giggle. But that noise was wonderfully ridiculous and I suspect a lot of people in the same position would have done the same.

Click here for the BBC version of things and an audio of Ms Green's giggles.

User under-generated content?

Interesting post from the Europe a la Carte blog about the value of user-generated reviews and the EU's imminent ban on faux-bloggers:

From next month “flogging” or misleading commercial blogging will be outlawed by the European Union. Under the new rules companies who post glowing reviews of their own products or services or pay others to enhance their reputation. will be liable to prosection.

It’ll be interesting to see if transgressors will be tracked and prosecuted. It sounds like the EU might have to employ an army of investigators. I also wonder if prosecutions will be successful as that will hinge on whether the information posted is likely to affect the buying decision of the average customer.

For a start what is an average customer? You could even argue that recent publicity about flogging should have made the customer aware that user generated reviews are not always reliable or honest.

In some respects perhaps the new rules are a little late. I recently wrote about the declining appeal of user generated reviews due to information overload as well as mistrust of the content.

End of the Week

I am writing this very quickly before I leave to catch my bus.

I wanted to provide a link here to Charles Leadbeater's website

More people than ever can pariticpate in culture, contributing their ideas, views, information.

The web allows them not just to publish but to share and connect, to collaborate and when the conditions are right, to create, together, at scale.

That is why the web is a platform for mass creativity and innovation.

Round Two

A very brief post:

Had a more interesting second day. Did a lot of testing and found a few bugs that need fixing. I'm also going to be let loose on the content side of things and tackle some of the propotional spaces.

I went to see Charles Leadbeater discuss his new book 'We-Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production' at the British Library this evening. It was truly inspirational and has given me too much to think about to start discussing right now.

I also had my new desk delivered. There's a bit of a bash in one corner but I need one too much to think of sending it back.

First day of real work

What a morning - I left in plenty of time to catch the tube only to hear that the District and Circle lines were both down between Edgware Road and Earl's Court - exactly where I wanted to go. Thankfully, the number 27 came to the rescue and got me there just in time.

The building I am working in is quite amazing - a vast atrium with water features, escalators, spiral staircases, swipe cards, security men - the lot.

I learned some interesting things about web analytics and the powerful tools that companies use to make sense of statistics. I remember having a lecture about this kind of software from someone from one of the other London universities - you can tell exactly what people are doing on your site, how long they're spending in one place, where they entered the site and how many pages they clicked through.

I also spotted a couple of bugs and tomorrow I think I'm going to get onto testing patches.

I liked this Travelvine entry. I'm not keen on Facebook and I don't have a MySpace or YouTube account, but I do enjoy my rss feeds, del.icio.us, Twitter and, of course, blogs and blogging.

As I will be probably be spending a lot of time talking to people about advertising space in my new job, I'd be interested to know how other people feel about this - I seem to naturally faze out content that isn't part of the site . . . or maybe it registers in the back of my mind and prompts me to buy stuff whithout me even realizing . . . ?

Pre-placement nerves!

Firstly, I would like to thank Darren, Karen and Nicola for your comments on the first entry of my re-launched blog. When I was blogging the first time round it was purely as a means of communication between some friends who were working on a project together.

Having looked at both Karen and Darren's blogs, I see that mine is a bit sparse in comparison! If I manage to convince my new boss that I should be sent away on field trips, I'll fill it full of lovely photographs.

I found this report from a roundtable discussion earlier this year that I thought was interesting. I think that the idea that people don't necessarily go online to book holidays, but rather to research destinations, hotels etc; is completely right. Choosing a holiday isn't like buying a DVD from Amazon . . .

I shall post tomorrow with details of my first day in (gainful?) employment.

And incidentally, I went to see Much Ado About Nothing this evening at the National, which was really wonderful.

Start again

Ok, I'm going to try to start over with this blog and maybe invite some new people to contribute. Tomorrow I am starting my 2 month placement at the Mail Online. I will be working on the Travel section so I've spent most of the afternoon Google-ing travel websites and looking at other online papers' travel sections.

I've already found a couple of really interesting blogs in this area:

• Europe A La Carte Blog

• Travelvine

Some at the sites I've looked at so far are better than others. For instance, travel sites that place emphasis on the user experience rather than pushing an Amazon-esque shopping basket mentality, are vastly more appealing - I think, at least.

I would be really interested in any advice or opinions, so please feel free to comment!

Carly

Happy New Year!

First entry of 2008!

Today we hand in the Internet Technologies website project, what a relief.

x x x