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!