Author Archive
Google Ngram: a new writing tool?
New tools – how can writers benefit from using the Internet?
Much of the publishing industry’s interest in digital media spins around questions of marketing and packaging books. But last December I gave a presentation at a conference which explored how writers could also take advantage of a range of new tools, to save themselves time and increase the depth of their research.
While writing Damn His Blood, I used several new resources at one point or other – most of them falling under the Google umbrella of products. Google Books was probably the most prominent of all them. Google estimate that around 130 million unique books exist in the world and, of them, that 15 million had been scanned by the end of last year. All these books are keyword searchable, and they were handy for early explorations of a topic and for starting points before I set off for the library.
Similarly useful were Google Maps and Google Street View. For the poor (in the monetary sense) author, snared in an inflexible routine and unable to afford the train fares for everywhere they want to describe in prose, going for a walk in Google Street View is a worthwhile pastime. On top of these was the British Library Newspaper Archives, which have been gradually opening up over the past few years and contains thousands of pages from nineteenth century publications. And, finally, there was Delicious – a handy repository for all of the links.
There are many other services I could mention, and I’m sure that in their own way a new generation of writers are sifting the Internet in their own way. But just the other day I spotted Google’s Ngram Viewer – which was the catalyst for this post and something that I thought was worth a mention.
For those familiar with Google Trends, then Google Ngram works within a similar interface. But as Trends enables you to compare the popularity of search-terms on the Internet over a set period of time, Ngram allows you to plot the changing popularity of specific words of time – something that it does by combing the data from Google Books.
You can narrow the timeframe to a period you want, and all the results are plotted on a graph. Below is an example that I’ve just processed – showing four words that have gone in and out of fashion over the past few centuries: countenance, digital, jolly and awesome.
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But while this is obviously useful to the curious or armchair etymologist (if such a person exists), is it of any practical value to the writer? I’m not immediately sure, though words are writer’s tools and it is always useful to know as much about them as possible. A decline in a specific word is usually going to be tied to the downfall of a sub-culture, a fashion or a belief. The words that we use tell you lots about who we are, and what were our thoughts and preoccupations at a given time. Google Ngram lets us visualise this.
In this second graph, I’ve put in the words ‘phrenology’ (a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain character traits are indicated by the size and shape of the skull), and ‘scientist.’ They’ll serve as an example for what I talking about.
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It’s interesting to see the high water mark of phrenology in the 1820s and 1830s plotted here, and you can see just how quickly the theory fell out of popularity. Likewise you can see that hardly anyone used the term scientist until the 1860s – and therefore to describe anyone – such as Priestley or Jenner – as a scientist in 1800 would be anachronistic. (In fact the word scientist was not invented until 1833 – and there’s an interesting article on this here).
So, in its own little way I think that Google Ngram does have its place. It’d be interesting to see what words came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, or earlier in the dark days of the wars or McCarthyism in the fifties. For editors and subs it’s a useful fact-checker, and – like most of the innovations from Google Labs – everyone else can spill quite a bit of time over it too.
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Image credit: Dani Sarda
Ian Tomlinson, interactive maps and digital journalism
How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism
Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.
The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.
The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.
Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.
This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.
Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.
Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.
I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.
The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.
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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.
The Decisive Moment – Flickr, the Royal Wedding and the Death of Osama Bin Laden
Night and Day
The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.
Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.
More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.
Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’
Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.
Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.
Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.
While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:
Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.
Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude
UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.
HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.
And some others: (mostly unlicensed)
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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr
Royal Wedding Photo Set
I suppose it was a sense of occasion which pulled me out of bed at half past six this morning, and drew me off to Westminster to take a few photographs of the Royal Wedding crowds.
I’ve put a set up on Flickr. This post doesn’t stem from any deep interest in those getting married, rather it is just a little document to record that ‘very strange but happy and peaceful atmosphere’ that exisited in London today.
And in other news, this website has just benefitted from a redesign. I hope you like it.
iPhone Photography: 360 panoramas and stereographing
A different perspective
I’ve used a few iPhone photo apps over the last year, but I have never seen 360 Panorama before. A web-developer friend of mine, Xavi Esteve, put together this post of a stereographic photograph that he had taken using the app – and I thought I’d have a go.
It’s not too easy to take the perfect panorama – but as most mobile photos feel more like a work in progress than a finished article, I don’t suppose that it matters too much. Mine is a 360 tour around a room at my family home in Staffordshire that is flattened down to make the image about – which is called a stereographic.
If you do manage an acceptable stereographic, then it can give a beautifully stilted snapshot of your surroundings. Xavi’s works nicely among the fish and chip huts and amusement stalls at Brighton but I imagine that it could work quite nicely in various other surroundings: in stadiums, at conferences or music festivals and so on.
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Here’s a link to the complete photo on Flickr
Another busy autumn
Autumn 2010 is bearing a distinct resemblance to autumn 2009. It’s busy. But the excellent new PC Site website that we are just finishing off at work will be my last. After three years I’m going to try my hand at something a little different.
If you want to keep up with my writing work, then I’m blogging a little more regularly on my posterous blog.
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Photo of the Boris Bikes – full photograph on my Flickr
New School Year: Google 2009-10
Bad news. Good news?
Every August or September, Google seem to enjoy shaking everything around a little.*
In the last few weeks there has been a significant change to their organic search results algorithm – which basically means that a single domain can be returned multiple times for a keyword search on the first page. Malcolm Coles wrote about this last week.
And then at the top of the search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you speak in acronyms), there will be an equally severe adjustment in their paid search policy. Basically, Google used to protect brands by forbidding advertisers to use trademarked terms within their ad copies. Not anymore. From 14 September, resellers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to use brand terms (iPhone, Easyjet, Nike and so on) in their adverts, pushing up their quality score, bringing down CPCs (costs per click) and generally making the whole thing much more competitive. There is a Net Media Planet blog on this (disclaimer – I work there) – if you want a little more detail.
Treated separately, both of these stories are interesting, newsworthy and will have consequences for advertisers and site traffic. Taken together, they add up to something of a little more.
Control of their trademarks gone, brands will lose out to resellers in the paid search listings. But if they do see their amount of paid search traffic drop, though, they will have the opportunity to claw it back by dominating the organic results. Google have taken with one hand and given back with the other.
Some thoughts:
- Paid search on profitable keywords/brands will become much more competitive and brands might well see sales impacted
- SEO Managers working for big brands will have the opportunity to dominate the first page of the organic search results for important keywords
- The user search experience might be affected. I suspect Google anticipate that the paid search results will compensate for the lack of variety further down the page. Will it?
So, these are a few of the changes to look forward to in the next few months. I’m sure that SEO’s will already be finding ways around these changes (they always do).
And, in the meantime, here’s a video about what might be coming next. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
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* Of course, Google is always changing, fiddling, tweaking and rattling about their algorithms. At certain times, though, their changes are more significant. See this article on their recent Mayday Change, and another on the famous Florida Update, back in the day.
Image Credit: Hans S on Flickr
The Journalist and the Murderer – the art of interviewing
Interviewing and ethics
“In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), [Janet] Malcolm described the inevitable betrayal involved in the journalist-subject encounter; the subject will regress like a patient in psychoanalysis, childishly trusting their questioner, only to discover that the journalist is not a compassionate listener but a professional with an agenda and a story to construct.
Thus, according to the book’s oft-quoted opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
(Taken from The Journalist and the Biographer – Sydney Morning Herald)
Frost Nixon
This snippet of the Nixon interviews with David Frost in 1977 (sorry – it can’t be embedded – you have to click on that link) encapsulates the point perfectly. It shows Frost poised, concentrating. Head down a touch, eyes up. Meanwhile Nixon’s body language is defeatist: shoulders thrown back, head bobbing about, hands outstretched before him.
It’s a fascinating snapshot of the journalist at work.
Interviewing as an art
Interviewing is a learned art as much as a natural-born skill. I thought I’d add some examples below of encounters – some famous, some not – that have stuck in my mind.
All of these interviews throw up different challenges. Some have more successful outcomes than others.
1. David Dimbleby runs into a grumpy Gore Vidal on the night of Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.
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2. Devina McCall in caught wretchedly in a clash of style – between pop tv and rock music in this interview with James Dean Bradfield.
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3. Al Capp takes on John Lennon at his Bed-In in Montreal
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4. Jeremy Paxman interviews George Galloway on election night 2005 – and goes straight for the throat
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5. Trouble between interviewees – a famous incident between Gore Vidal and William Buckley in 1968
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6. And back to Lennon again. This is an old favourite and great work of art: a 14 year-old Beatle fan meets Lennon at around the same time as the Al Capp incident
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image credit: taijofj on Flickr
Journalism Degrees. A failed experiment? Looking back a decade on.
Much maligned: media studies.
One week and one day before 11 September 2001, Michael Hann, who is now Film and Music Editor at the Guardian, wrote a feature: Media studies? Do yourself a favour – forget it.
The best part of a decade on, it’s interesting to have a look back at this. On job prospects, he said:
This autumn, students around the country will enrol for undergraduate journalism degrees, probably imagining that their three years of study will place them in the forefront of those students seeking jobs in the media when they graduate…
…many will face disappointment. Undergraduate journalism degrees are a new creation in this country. Even a decade ago, it was accepted that studying journalism as a student meant one of two things: either the pre-entry courses run by the bodies that oversee journalists’ training, or one of the postgraduate courses run by a number of institutions, headed by the Oxbridge of journalism: the one-year courses at City and Cardiff universities.
It’s hard not to claim cause and effect, when, in the last few weeks alone, there’s been a blog post by Lara O’Reilly on the scarcity of opportunities for recent grads and another on Journalism.co.uk which runs to similar lines by Joseph Stashko.
So maybe Hann was right? Or maybe not. Listen to this:
In their desire to gets bums on seats and fees in accounts, too many colleges and universities are running courses that do not provide students, even after three years, with the skills they need to get a job. Worse, because they need the money the students generate, they fail to identify students who are simply not good enough to work in journalism and warn them of their shortcomings. Why would anyone do a journalism degree if they thought they would not get a job at the end of it? They would not. But don’t tell them that: we might lose the cash.
Every editor who takes work experience students has had the same experience: a student in the final year of a journalism degree who will never get a job. I have seen students who, literally, could not string a sentence together. Not one of their tutors had ever sat down with them and explained the bitter facts of life: you can’t write, can’t sub, can’t interview, won’t ring round – you’re unemployable in journalism.
People like that have always wanted to be journalists and they have always been disappointed. The difference now is that they waste three years of their lives and thousands of pounds before they find out. And course tutors collude in it.
This point is more difficult to square – and a decade on Hann will probably have to concede that this was an unfair caricature. Those starting off in journalism today might not be any more or less talented than those a decade ago, but they are certainly much better prepared.
Student media. (c.2001)
Around the same time that Hann was writing his piece, I was about to start my degree at Durham. It was a small, odd place in comparison to the county that I had just left. All crooked houses, towering cathedrals, stone bridges and cobbled streets. After a bit I started writing for Palatinate, the student newspaper – which at the time was about all the early journalism training that we were expected to get.
@rebeccats might well back me up on this, but I confess that we weren’t especially good. None of us had had any proper training in how to give a news story shape; half of the features were indulgent and wore on like a church sermon and the whole thing – a broadsheet paper with accompanying arts supplement – was cobbled together on a doddery Mac by a group of aspiring writers who had all of the design nous of a gibbon.
If you look at student media a decade on, the landscape has changed entirely. Students like Joseph Stashko (who is a journalism student at UCLan) are running hyperlocal sites such as Blog Preston in their spare time. Josh Halliday – who did his BA at Sunderland – has blogged his way to a trainee job with the Guardian, and up at Birmingham City University, Paul Bradshaw has set up a course which is so far in front of the rest of the industry that a good chunk of the media travels up their JeeCamp Unconference each year to see what might be happening next.
While this all might be reflective of a rather jumbled up industry, it is far more democratic than how it used to be. A decade after Hann’s article and journalism grads are unquestionably better qualified and prepared to enter the industry than they were before. Good students are now fully NCTJ trained and in addition they know about design, they know about coding, they know about data and they have the tools – both hardware and software – to get the job done quickly and sometimes brilliantly.
During our degrees we didn’t have any of this training. We just learnt in public by occasionally making a hash of things, knowing that we’d have to go off and do a postgraduate course at some point in the future. With Halliday’s appointment – the kind of position that you’d have expected to go to a breezy-bequiffed English Lit or History grad back in the early 2000s – it’s clear that nowadays the industry is taking journalism undergraduate degrees seriously.
(Have a look at Paul Bradshaw’s list of recent successful grads at the bottom of this post to see more examples of top jobs going to graduating journalism students).
One Blair, one Bush, one photo
One incident from my time on Palatinate sticks in my mind particularly. It was in about 2003, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when President George W. Bush arrived to visit Tony Blair at his Sedgefield home. Bush ate a pub lunch while surrounded by a scrum of security and then disappeared off the sky in his helicopter.
The most we managed on the event was a grainy photograph at 150 paces and a short news piece. I wonder how that story would have been reported now with trained bloggers and teams of student journalists: Twitter, AudioBoo, Posterous and all the rest of it. It’s would be a good measure of how student reporting has moved on.
But where are the jobs? There has been a 24% increase in applicants for journalism courses over the last year and the industry is being squeezed. You can’t help get the feeling that trying to get all the journalism graduates into relevant jobs is like trying to jam an elephant into a thimble. So on that count, I think Hann’s first point stands – and that journalism educators and universities should make this fact as plain as possible to student applicants. After all, no torture is equal to that of encouragement of hope.
I still think, though, that the good grads (have a look at Lara O’Reilly if you want an example of one) will still do well and find their way. They’re already better prepared than a load of us lot were back in the summer of 2004 and what the best ones need now more than anything is a little luck.
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Paul Bradshaw has recently begun a series on successful journalism students who have gone on to great jobs in the media. To see all nine of those profiled so far, have a look at the New Online Journalists.
(Image: Prebends Bridge in Durham, by BigBadsWorld on Flickr)
Add ons for Firefox and other tools
My Firefox Add Ons
This is a list for myself as much as anything. So, Peter. The next time that your computer breaks and is wiped clean by IT – then these are the main things that you need.
Delicious Bookmarks – Access your bookmarks wherever you go and keep them organised
Firebug – Web development tool
Fire FTP – An FTP client for Firefox – and a pretty good one at that
Fireshot – For screenshots of entire screens which can be edited and saved as JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP
Google Toolbar for Firefox – A bunch of Google Tools and the (in)famous green page rank bar
LinkDiagnosis – For examining link competition
NoDoFollow – Highlight links in a document and splits them between follow/do follow
SearchStatus – Displays the Google, Alexa, Compete and Linkscape rankings of a website
YSlow – measuring loading speeds – more important with the advent of Google Caffeine. It also contains Smush.it – a good free tool from Yahoo for optimising web images
And a couple of software packages
Jing – for screenshots
Traffic Travis – for keyword reporting and backlinks
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Image credit: Olaya B
Raoul Moat and Nineteenth Century Newspapers
Nineteenth century newspapers
I spent Saturday searching through newspapers at the British Library branch up in Colindale. It’s an odd enough place with pale blue walls, stiff wooden doors and an atmosphere that is best described as a mix between a 1960’s comprehensive and an old village hall. It’s not too difficult to detect that the old building will be closed in 2012 and that – in the meantime – it is more lingering on than existing outright.
Still, the newspapers are what make the place and there are some fabulous collections stored there. I’ve always enjoyed reading 19th century newspapers. They’ve a knack for savage clarity and pithy expression. Of course, they might be inaccurate, prim, judgemental and filled to the rafters with quack medical adverts, but nowadays, while browsing through them, these are things to enjoy rather than endure.
Best of all, of course, are the news snippets. Something like NIBS, I suppose, published weekly in a section usually titled ‘Home News.’ Here’s an imagined version of how they might have reported the Raoul Moat case. It’s a bit of a tonic from all today’s over-reporting.
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Manhunt
Saturday evening last. In a most calamitous incident Raoul Moat, of Newcastle Upon Tyne, did shoot dead with a shotgun one Chris Brown of the same neighbourhood. Moat, aged 37, a known villain, did, by the same weapon, moments after, shoot a subsequent victim, Samantha Stobbart, through a window, causing near fatal bleeding. A terrific chase was made after Moat by the town magistrates until the wretched criminal was discovered some days afterwards near a river in the village of Rothbury, close to this city. Moat, who exhibited many signs of rough living, held a shotgun to his temple in the most violent and effecting manner for a period upwards of six hours, raging wildly at the magistrates and agents of the law who had beset him on all sides. At a little after one o’clock in the morning, the lamentable man, who demonstrated very many signs of the hardest sorrows and most deranged ravings of the mind, did launch himself forever into eternity with the aid of his gun. An inquest was held on the body the following day by Ms Sue Sim, JP, Coroner. Verdict – lunacy.
Image credit:Effervescing Elephant
The 2010 FIFA World Cup – in Google Trends
As the South African World Cup draws towards its end, I thought that it would be useful to have a look at what Google Trends has made of the competition.
The Players
It’s a simple process. I’ve just pulled out the names of five players – Robert Green, David Villa, Lionel Messi, Arjen Robben and Diego Forlan – who I feel have had (for one reason or another) notable tournaments. And this is what Google Trends comes out with:
(Click image above to enlarge)
It all started off with a big spike for Robert Green after the USA game – testimony to the awfulness of his error and, quite probably, the fact that people knew little about him. They had to type his name into Google to find out more.
The most hyped player, Lionel Messi, has had consistent attention all the way until Argentina’s exit the other day. David Villa’s popularity has rocketed up in the past week with his cluster of goals, as has the Uruguayan, Diego Forlan’s. Villa’s spike after his goal against Paraguay just about beat Robert Green’s earlier on in total number of global searches.
It’s interesting to note that, in comparison, barely anyone has been interested in Arjen Robben, the best Dutch player – despite the fact that he has scored two goals in four games and been an important part of a team that might win the whole competition.
The Coaches
(Click image above to enlarge)
Here’s the same exercise performed for a handful of manager/coaches: Vicente del Bosque, Diego Maradona, Fabio Capello, Raymond Domenech and Bert Van Marwijk.
It’s plain to see that Maradona is the most high profile coach on this list – followed by Fabio Capello, who has about two thirds of the global interest. Raymond Domenech, who presided over the French shambles, briefly rivalled the two of them in interest but has now slipped off into obscurity while – interestingly enough – no one seems to be too interested in searching for information about the coaches of either of the finalists – Vicente del Bosque of Spain and Bert Van Marwijk of Holland.
So. If we consider Google Trends to be reflective of general interest in a topic, then, these graphs suggest that it is far better to let the players and coaches get on with it – with less of the microscopic scrutiny – rather than whipping ourselves up in the usual frenzy.
As if.
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Here are the Google Trends results for players and the Google Trends results for coaches – in case you’d like to try some different ones.
Image credit: Eustaquio Santimano on Flickr
Digital jobs (four of them)
We’re getting busier by the day at Net Media Planet. So busy, in fact, that we are currently recruiting for four new positions.
So, hopefully you’re looking for a job in digital media. Hopefully you’re bright and passionate and you know a lot (or a bit) about Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and you’d like to find out a bit more.
The Times has said that we’re the 16th fastest-growing private technology firm in the UK. We’ve won a truck load of awards in the search industry and digital publishing and we generated something like £80 million in revenue for a long list of clients last year.
So, if you’d like to work with us this is what you could be:
1. PPC Analyst:
What you’ll do:
We are looking for someone to join the team and take on the role of PPC Analyst, reporting directly to the Head of Search. You’ll manage campaigns for A-brand clients such as Dell, Adobe, McAfee and Singapore Airlines – becoming an expert in what Jason Calacanis has called the most important industry of the twenty first century.
What you’ll need:
A 2:1 degree in maths, statistics or another quantitative subject along with top analytical skills.
Read the full job spec here.
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2. Account Manager
What you’ll do:
You’ll report to the Operations Director and you’ll manage big client relationships with anyone from Apple to Microsoft. You’ll identify new business opportunities, prepare proposals and participate in pitches.
What you’ll need:
A couple of years experience working in a client facing role – preferably within the search industry. You’ll be analytical, with a great knowledge of PPC and you’ll have a deep-set interest in online marketing.
Read the full job spec here.
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3. Frontend developer
What you’ll do:
You’ll work with the Publishing and Projects team and you’ll be responsible for making sure that all of our top websites look good, work across all browsers and load up in super-quick time. You’ll have loads of scope to grow and you’ll have a lot of freedom – and what’s more you’ll be working with big clients.
What you’ll need:
You’ll need to have excellent CSS, HTML, Javascript, AJAX (JQuery) as standard. You’ll need to have experience working with big websites and you’ll be working with Facebook, WordPress and APIs – so experience there is beneficial too.
Read the full job spec here.
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4. Business Development Exec
What you’ll do:
You’ll work with the business development manager searching for new business right across the affiliate industry and beyond. You’ll manage relationships with affiliate networks and merchants so the company can make the best of any emerging opportunity.
What you’ll need:
A couple of years in a sales-based role and/or previous experience in digital media.
Read the full job spec here.
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If you would like to apply for any of these roles – just send a CV over to peter at netmediaplanet . [com] and I’ll pass it on.
Image from Flickr
Twitter art, Irkafirka and tweet #3125
Art, an octopus and social media
Strange things happen in social media. Last night was stranger than normal.
Yesterday morning I was using Twitter to complain about doing Excel spreadsheets at work. I felt, I said, like #afishoutofwater – or, I then wrote, exercising a Spanish idiom, ‘Como un pulpo en un garaje.’ – which translates into English as ‘Like an octopus in the garage.’
Less than 12 hours later a website called Irkafirka published this:
Oddly, I first saw the illustration moments after getting home from El Camino Spanish bar in King’s Cross. And waking up this morning I imagined that I’d probably had a little too much sangria – but, after checking, it’s quite real.
It all stems from an idea that Irkafirka’s founders have had to illustrate a random selection of tweets then publish them as quickly as possible. On their website, they write:
The Rules:
1. Irkafirka is as fresh as possible. We aim to post illustrations within 24 hours of the tweet that inspired them.
2. We are not aquainted with our chosen tweeters. Tweets are chosen by a random process of dipping in and out of the massive data deluge that Twitter has become.
3. Suggestions are warmly welcomed but almost certainly ignored. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a price. You want a commission, you’ve got to pony up. Call it becoming a patron of the arts.
4. We aim to post illustrations daily, but we have jobs, family and cinema tickets, all of which have to take priority from time to time.
5. If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.
6. We can break any of the rules except 5.
There are more illustrations on their website. I think it’s a wonderful idea that will work brilliantly over time – just so long as they can keep it going.
I’m after a copy of my tweet #3125 to hang on the wall, and when I asked if I could buy the artwork they responded with:
Nothing more for me to say to irkafirka then, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I BLOODY LOVE IT.
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Image from Flickr
The Internet: five years ago
2005: social media?
About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:
Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]
Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.
There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.
For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.
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You Tube
Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Google
In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.
You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.
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Blogger
In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.
In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.
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WordPress
WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’
Indeed.
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Facebook
Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.
Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.
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The BBC
Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.
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The Guardian
And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’
From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Flickr
Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:
‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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And in 2006 … Twitter
Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr
Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine
Andrew Sparrow on Live Blogging the General Election
14,000 words per day
It’s worth taking a moment to thank Andrew Sparrow for locking himself up in the Guardian’s offices for the last month and producing a great live blog of the General Election campaign and the eventual change of government.
He’s written an interesting piece on the practicalities of live blogging and how writing up to 14,000 words a day gave him a unique insight into the campaign. Sparrow’s a fan of the art and so am I. Live blogging is another skill that should be incorporated into practical journalism qualifications.
Interestingly, he writes:
“If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.”
It’s a great line, and it certainly has merit. But Sparrow’s blog was also a collection of information from elsewhere: quotes from MPs on Twitter, the recording of Gordon Brown and bigotgate on Audioboo, the photos of Cameron and the Queen on Twitpic and so on.
Therefore, perhaps I could amend Sparrow’s statement slightly and suggest that social media is the first draft of journalism?
Anyway. Here’s a very quick sketch of how news was reported throughout the General Election campaign.
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Image credit: C4Chaos
The General Election 2010. Ha ha ha.
Image credit: My David Cameron
How to laugh at a politician
On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.
And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.
1. My David Cameron
A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.
The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.
2. #itsnicksfault
After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:
“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”
3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian
Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:
According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.
[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]
4. The Daily Mash
Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:
Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]
BNP launches aryan spread – [link]
Brown to be turned into glue – [link]
5. The election debates and social media
As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.
6. Matt on the General Election
A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.
7. Nope
Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.
Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.
UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.
8. The Peter Mandleson Experience
And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.
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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.
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