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