Archive for April, 2010
Five reasons to be suspicious about any data published by You Gov
For the past few weeks it has felt as if balanced journalism has taken a break and that everything is propaganda.
I suppose it’s wise to be suspicious of everything until 6 May has passed, and in particular it’s a good idea to question any information published by the opinion pollsters You Gov. Here’s a five reasons why.
1. Loaded questions
Here’s an example of a You Gov question, posted on a Digital Spy forum two days ago. In the words of the author: ‘Notice anything missing?’
27 April 2010 – Still No Lib Dems?
Click image for full-size – original can be seen here
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2. More loaded questions?
It’s difficult to tell how balanced You Gov’s questions are without going through them all, but from the evidence of this Twitpic image and the comments beneath, well – you can make your own mind up.
“Everything scares me about the Liberal Democrats” – 22 April 2010
Click on the image to view full size. Original posting can be seen here.
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3. Fixed debate polls?
As Michael Crick explains in this blog post, You Gov ran their post-debate poll following the second televised debate at a rather curious time. Between 9.27pm and 9.31pm, to be precise. The debate finished a 9.30pm – meaning:
In Crick’s words:
This may explain why Yougov gave David Cameron a better rating than the other post-debate polls did last night. For Nick Clegg ended the debate with a very powerful closing speech, probably the best of the evening.
According to the BBC video system Clegg didn’t start speaking until 9:29:18 and finished at 9:30:47
So many of those polled by You Gov last night must have voted without seeing his final speech. [link to Crick's blog]
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4. Stephan Shakespeare (the CIO)
You’d think that the most important aspect of any poll is that it is unbiased. And who’s You Gov’s CEO – the man ultimately responsible for making this so? Stephan Shakespeare, an ex-Conservative parliamentary candidate for Colchester and the owner of Conservative Home.
Perfect. Craig Murray offers his description of Mr. Shakespeare here but if that is a little too, er, biased then you can have a look at his Wikipedia entry.
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5. Nadhim Zahawi (the founder)
A follow on from the last one. Nadham Zahawi founded You Gov 10 years ago and was its CEO up until February this year when, of course, he stepped down to stand as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Stratford.
It’s just the type of business arangement that I used to experience during my time in Madrid. Florentino Perez would be proud.
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Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any information published by You Gov was false is any way. They might send me a letter or something.
Image credit: secretlondon123
On why Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy ‘a bigot’ sparked a perfect social media story
The perils of going out for a loaf of bread in Rochdale
Yesterday was an unusual day and one that Gordon Brown will never forget. Personally, I feel quite sorry for him. You can accuse him of being short-tempered, autocratic and blinkered if you will, but one thing that I don’t think Gordon Brown is, is disingenuous. Today that’s exactly how it looks and I hope it doesn’t become the slip that characterises the end of his career. That would be unfair.
As some people have already pointed out, Brown was dreadfully unlucky yesterday. The audio fell straight into the Rupert Murdoch’s hands rather than anyone else’s; the sound was sweet and crisp and Gillian Duffy turned out to be a respectable lady with the perfect background for the Tory press to exploit.
But there was also some other factors that combined to make the incident into a perfect social media story. Here they are:
1. Time
Brown closed his car door a little after midday and Andrew Sparrow reported that ‘Gordon Brown has been caught on a microphone…’ at 12.18pm.
Britons were sat before their computers with their lunch hours approaching – time to discuss, blog, tweet or whatever. For Gordon Brown there was another seven hours of campaigning to go before the evening, and the story had the whole day to play out.
2. Quality content
Shortly after Sky News producer Tami Hoffman had noticed, analysed then broadcast the audio it was being uploaded to streaming sites across the Internet. What’s more, it was high quality.
Within half an hour the video was featured on Brightcove and shortly after that it was uploaded to Audioboo and any newspaper or blogger could feature. With content to link to, people linked – circulating the story far quicker that the television could do alone.
3. Exposure
Social media excels when exposing perceived wrongs. Look at the Trafigura case last September or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death. Now here was the Prime Minister using scandalous language to describe a potential voter.
Just the type of thing to tweet about.
4. Narrative
The story lingered. First Gordon Brown was in Jeremy Vine’s radio studio, then he was back on his way to Rochdale, then he was in Gillian Duffy’s house and then he was on her doorstep, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Many newspapers live-blogged the whole thing and evening into the evening people were still tweeting about whether or not the Sun had paid £50,000 for a story.
It was very much like watching a long episode of Neighbours, albeit with deeper, Scottish accents. At 3.42pm, when Gilliam Duffy’s door swung open, Andrew Sparrow wrote something on the Guardian blog that summed it all up:
“Everyone: the door has opened. This is live blogging at its best. More follows.”
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Image credit: Downing Street
Nick Clegg – More popular than John McCain (in America)
Foreign wars and General Elections
From a young age I was told by my father that foreign wars existed to teach Americans geography. I suppose what he was trying to say is that Americans tend to limit their interest to their own country, unless something is at stake.
It’s clear enough that as the General Election campaign drags on, British politics will stay under the magnifying glass at home. But are people in the US taking as much interest in our TV debates, blogs, partisan newspapers and politicians as we took in Obama’s and his election 18 months ago?
Nick Clegg and John McCain
Here’s a useful graph from Google that suggests that they are. Collecting together data from the past month you can see that the search terms “David Cameron”, “Gordon Brown” and “Nick Clegg” are generating around about the same interest in the US as is “John McCain.”
Click on the image below to enlarge
No Cameron, No Brown
In fact, in the days following the first leaders’ debate on 15 April, the first mass-search data for Nick Clegg was recorded and in the days that followed he remained – off and on – more popular than the old republican.
This suggests a couple of things. Firstly that Clegg was relatively unknown across the Atlantic a week ago, and – secondly – that people have been interested enough in him to type his name into Google.
12 days after that first leaders’ debate Nick Clegg is still generating more searches in the US than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, which in itself is a curious fact. In fact, Google searches for Cameron and Brown have tailed off completely – leaving Clegg and McCain up there on their own.
Perhaps we don’t need to have wars to get Americans interested in other countries after all. A General Election might just do.
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Image credit: 1Flatworld
BBC News: one headline, seven nouns
Headlines and Googleability
Just a short one. I’ve blogged before about Googleability vs. Creativity in print and web headlines, and how search engine optimisation is currently doing to the English language more or less what Doctor Beeching did for the railways 45 years ago. This is an interesting case in point.
Yesterday evening the BBC News website published a piece on the government’s evacuation plans for Britons stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The title for the article, impressively enough, was
‘Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures.’ (visual)
Yes. That’s one headline with seven nouns, leaving BBC News journalists looking like they had been instructed to shoehorn as many keywords into the headline as possible. Is it really necessary? Do the BBC – who already have such strong web-presence and brand identity – need to pander to the search engines in this way?
Still, perhaps one of the subs realised that they had got carried away, for when I looked this morning they had changed the headline to ‘Volcano cloud Britons could return via ‘Spanish hub’ – almost equally ugly, but at least down to four nouns. (Which is plenty).
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Image credit: atibens
Original story via @Sarah_Bakewell
Having fun with the iPhone camera
Lost in Morocco
I last saw my digital camera in the Moroccan coastal town of Agadir on Boxing Day last year. I’ve no idea what became of it, but in my imagination it was spirited out of my pocket by a shifty chap with an ambitious moustache and squinty eyes. Anyway, my point is that since then I’ve not had a camera at all – just the iPhone.
Now the iPhone’s camera has a pretty dismal reputation. There’s no flash so you can’t do anything in the dark, it’s a little slow so you can miss spontaneous moments, there’s no zoom and you’ve got no control over the majority of its settings.
Still, the camera’s simplicity gives it a sort of honest charm and over the past five months I’ve not bothered to replace the old camera and, instead, I’ve preferred to rely on the iPhone.
Doing this is a flexible, dynamic way to collect images. As you have your telephone with you almost all of the time you have far greater potential a capture a wide range of everyday shots. With apps like Photoshop for the iPhone, CameraBag and Camera Plus Pro you can edit on the fly, and with the ability to email and subsequently publish them instantly – giving you the sort of inertia with it all that keeps you going.
Here are a few shots from the last few months.
1. BT Tower – April 2010
2. Mali – January 2010
3. Warren Street – April 2010
4. Pentonville Road – March 2010
5. Nigeria – January 2010
6. The British Library – April 2010
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My disclaimer is that I am not a professional photographer and I know less about photographic theory than I do about advanced weaving. I’m just enjoying having a play.
I’m glad to see that there is a Flickr group for ‘Photos taken with an iPhone‘, and if you’re on Flickr, then I’m here.
Google Caffeine: run as fast as you can
Search (or mathematics)
A friend who works for the Times once told me the following story. The digital department had spent many hours redeveloping their website. They had tinkered with the site architecture, the wireframe and page design, and they had experimented with different types of content: audio, visual and interactive.
Everything was ready to be demonstrated to the man from Google who was visiting their offices in Wapping as part of a tour of British publishers. He listened to everything that he was told, before politely enquiring, ‘How long does it take one of these pages to load?’
This is a useful story for people involved with developing websites. Google were, are, and will be for some time to come, a company of mathematicians. For the most part, their brains do not function in the same way that a publisher’s might. They deal in quantifiable data: in server calls, backlinks, IP addresses and – among a hundred other metrics – load speeds.
Google’s announcement on Friday that it is going to discriminate against slow-loading websites is not much of a surprise. Here is a basic list of three things that could slow website or blog down:
Three things that slow down a website
- Too many images on a page (or too many unoptimised images). If you run a blog, you might want to consider cutting down the number of posts that are loaded on the home page. Do you really need to show 10? – If you have a large website, filled with many images, then you should have a spite map to cut down the number of server calls.
- Too many analytics packages Many websites are stuffed with analytics packages that are designed to spy on the visitors like the Stasi spied on the East Germans for 30 years after the War. If you’ve got Clicktale, DC Storm, Google Analytics and Crazy Egg set up on one page, then you should really consider taking a few of them off.
- Too much external embedded media If you link to Twitter, You Tube and Delicious from your blog or site, then you have to wait for each of these to respond every time you load up a page. Out of all of these, Twitter is the most likely to hold things up.
Tools
Obviously the speed that any webpage loads is determined by many different factors, not least the speed of a user’s Internet connection. Here are a couple of resources that you can use to test out loading time/speeds:
Web page analyzer – good for calculating page size, composition and download times
Yslow – From Yahoo – good for suggested improvements
Web Page Test (org) – full of charts, graphs, datawaterfalls and other good things
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Image credit: miss blackbutterfly on flickr
Newspapers, reflections
Some notes on the newspaper
In the early years of the twenty-first century a newspaper looks like a clumsy thing. Outdated within hours, virtually worthless after its first purchase, expensive to produce, impossible to correct, difficult to distribute and, shortly afterwards, to destroy.
Not so 300 years ago. While everyone is arguing over the end of newspapers, it is quite interesting to also have a look at their beginnings.
At the start of the 1700s the newspaper was considered a great technological step forward. London led the way and by the middle of the century there were as many as 130 regional publications in circulation across the country. The newspaper had become an institution.
More than merely reporting happening events, newspapers provided useful information about meetings, prices – especially of corn and wheat – trade returns, bills of mortality and adverts.
Here’s an article from early on in the century, describing the bizarre effects that newspapers had on some obsessives:
(From the Bristol Mercury, 2 Aug. 1712)
About 1695 the press was again set to work, and such a furious itch of novelty has ever since been the epidemical distemper, that it has proved fatal to many families, the meanest of shopkeepers… spending whole days in coffee houses to hear news and talk politics, whilst their wives and children wanted bread at home, and their business being neglected, they were themselves thrown into gaol or forced to take sanctuary in the army.
By the end of the century, the newspaper’s place was so entrenched in society that the poet and naturalist George Crabbe was motivated to write a nimble poem in their honour:
I sing of NEWS, and all those vapid sheets
The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets;
Whate’er their name, whate’er the time they fly ;
Damp from the press, to charm the reader’s eye
- G. Crabbe – the Newspaper (1785)
A flaw, perhaps?
But at the same time other were noticing that newspapers were not without fault. The fact that each day they had to be filled to the same degree and length was seen as clumsy by some – one of whom was Henry Fielding, who wrote early on in The History of Tom Jones (Book II, Ch I)
Thought we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writer, who profess to disclose the revolution of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian who, to preserve the regulatory of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable areas when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage.
Such histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. They might likewise be compared to a stage coach, which performs constantly the same course, empty as well as full. The writer, indeed, seems to think himself obliged to keep even pace with time, whose amanuensis he is,
Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.
My reader then, is not to be surprised, if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapter very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly…
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These are some notes from an essay I have to write on the earliest days of the newspaper. Most of the examples come from Asa Briggs’ book – How They Lived – and the photo at the top is from mofotos‘ Flickr stream.
A Staffordshire shake up
Spring cleaning
With a few afternoon hours on a public holiday to spare, I thought it would be a fine thing to give My Digital Notebook’s design a bit of a shake up. And with bigger pictures, videos and slideshows, I think that this theme works rather nicely.
For the last five weekends I have been back at my parents’ home in Staffordshire having a bit of a break, doing a little writing and some reading. And this photo of the fields above Dovedale (about 20 miles away) is going into this blog to remind me just how much I enjoy going home.
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Image credit: UGArdener