News
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.
—
Photo of the Boris Bikes – full photograph on my 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
–
Image credit: Olaya B
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.
–
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.
–
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.
–
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.
—
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
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.
—
Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.
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
—
Image credit: miss blackbutterfly on flickr
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.
—
Image credit: UGArdener
The iPad and the Book
Interactive publishing
Along with the wheel, the engine and perhaps the bow and arrow, the book has to be one of our greatest inventions. And anyone interested in the future of it should probably take a look at the wonderful video (down at the bottom) that was released on Paid Content earlier on this month.
The video gives us a snapshot of how Penguin envisages its readers (if that’s the right word for them) might interact with books on the iPad.
It’s impressive stuff. You can point, paint, tilt and rattle at various prompted points, with each of these actions causing some different effect or other. It’s something of a mash up between an etch-a-sketch, a coffee table book and a computer – and it’s got quite a few people rather excited.
For me, this looks like an interesting step forward: turning publications into something far more interactive than they have ever been before. But I think it’s important not to muddle the arrival of the iPad up with the fate of the book.
3,000 years on
Reading a book is a solitary pastime, which requires concentration and reflection. All told, it is probably one of the most intellectually rewarding activities we have. To suggest that that might be replaced by the iPad seems, to me, to be a little short sighted. To give an analogy, it would be a little like replacing a gentle lie down on the beach with half an hour on a trampoline.
I saw Professor Iain Stevenson lecture at UCL last week on the future of the book and he said a great many sensible things. He pointed out that books are a durable technology (the original codex has been about for 3,000 years now and has not been replaced by anything more efficient), they are intuitive and attractive.
People can forge deep personal connections with books that I can’t ever imagine that they will do with an iPad. This emotional attachment is intangible but strong. People remember where they bought books and why they bought them. No two books are identical: some are marked; others scuffed, torn, stained or bulging at their bindings after an involuntary swim in the bath tub. (Heaven knows what would happen if the iPad went into the bath).
So, what Penguin demonstrate here is a new type of interactive publishing. I expect we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of it over the next few years.
A little more reading (and listening):
Shelf life: The future of the book – UCL Podcast
The Future of Reading in a Digital World – Clive Thompson in Wired
The Decline and Fall of Books – the Times
Charing Cross: the fading world of books – infographic from the Guardian
How Penguin will Reinvent Books – Paid Content
A list of 22 online tools that (might just) make your job easier
In a bid to save you all time and fuss, here is a list of 22 tools to help you to successfully tinker with the Internet.
Images & Design
The Multicolour Lab. Search for creative commons license photos by colour.
A colour palettes for designers from Colourlovers.
Has your image/photo been copied? Try Tineye.
Use of language
How easy is it to understand your website, or is it full of gobbledygook?
Has your content been copied? Try Copyscape.
SEO
Website Grader. A good, overall SEO analysis of your site.
This site is great for testing website speeds and download times.
To find out who is backlinking into your site? Try this.
Domains
Do you want to find out who owns a domain? Nominet.
123. To check domain availability and to buy your own.
Reverse IP – View all domain names hosted on an IP address from domain tools.
Translating websites
For a quick translation use Google’s translator tool.
For a proper translation, it’s best to stick with the Institute of Translators and Interpreters.
Search
Here’s one of the better Yahoo Pipes.
Google’s News Time Line. Useful as a backwards time-machine, helping you to construct the arc of a story.
For the latest search trend, best try Google Trends.
Downtime
When an Internet site isn’t working, look at this.
Analytics
Crazy Egg. For heatmaps and click data.
Get a quick screenshot on Firefox.
Use this site to decode the latest Twitter hashtag.
Word On Tweet. To find out what the world is talking about.
Odds and ends
Fatfingers is good for misspellings on eBay.
–
A long list. I hope some of you find it useful. And yes. I realise that this post is a cliché.
–
image credit: Emily Barney.
City University and digital notes
From print to the pixel
I’m giving a talk at City University on ‘Journalism in the Digital Age’ next Monday for Barbara Schofield’s undergraduates.
Here are six articles/resources that I’ve asked the students to read/explore beforehand. They’ve all come from my delicious account, which is now one year old and is starting to be useful.
–
1. British Journalism Review. How SEO is Changing Journalism by Shane Richmond. [link]
2. Online Journalism Blog. Basic Principles of Online Journalism: B is for Brevity by Paul Bradshaw. [link]
3. 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students [link} (lots of good resources)
4. Save the Media Blog. ‘Old Journalism’ standards that shouldn’t die by Gina Chen [link]
5. Clay Shirky’s Blog. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky [link]
6. Peston’s Picks. What future for media and journalism? By Robert Peston [link]
(Updated with some extra suggestions)
7. Reuters: The rise of Social Media and its impact on mainstream journalism [link] (via @priyal)
8. Bitch Buzz. The Future of Journalism: just get on with it by Rebecca Thomson [link] (via @rebeccats)
9. The Guardian: In praise of the subeditor by Kim Fletcher [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
10. Internet Evolution. The audience still exists if you believe it by Nicole Ferraro [link] (via @Matt_Parsons)
–
What would you recommend that I add to this list? What are the best articles on the state/future of journalism that you’ve read this year?
Could you add something below? I’ll put it on the list.
You will be compensated with alcohol, cake or chocolate when I see you.
–
image credit: moriza
A brief history of breaking news
The Message and the Messenger
Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.
For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.
1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)
“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –
(From William Hague’s biography of William Pitt the Younger (2004))
–
2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.
Here are the first two verses of one:
The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…
–
3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking (the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)
Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.
–
Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.
When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.
This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.
Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.
–
4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest (the news arrived in London one day later)
There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:
The full story is recounted in the Press Gazette
–
5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy (there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)
It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.
–
6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana (no delay)
By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.
–
7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings (reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)
July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.
To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.
image credit: alfie
–
8. 2 October 2009 – The Rio Olympics
The story was reported within seconds across all broadcast mediums – this is how I received the news via Twitter
—–
Top image from Flickr
Net Media Planet in the Tech Track 100
Well done everyone
It is about time that I got around to adding this snippet of news. We’ve just been voted number 16 in the Times’ Tech Track 100 list.
You can read a PDF of the report here.
Above is a picture of my big boss, Sri Sharma, looking like he is about to predict the lottery results.
—
Update: Here is a little post on how the image of Sri (above) was created.
Summertime blogging, anyone?
image credit: dbdbrobot
I’m looking for someone to work in our content department for the next month or so. You’ll be writing blogs, web pages, news and feature articles and anything else related to online content production.
Net Media Planet is the fourth biggest search company in the UK. We work with Dell, McAfee, Disney, O2, Symantec and Singapore Airline. We are based on Great Titchfield Street, which runs between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park.
It’s paid work and will be a brilliant introduction to digital publishing. You will be expected to listen to quite a bit of David Bowie.
Interested? Get in touch:
Peter [at] netmediaplanet [dot] com
Paid search and the #budget
Thanks to @matthewncube for pointing this one out to me. Three people are bidding on the UK adwords platform for keywords related with today’s budget. Nice to see the Conseravtives in the digital bed with Anne Summers. Full picture here.
One big online mash up
Two blogs and one Flickr account. Twitter, Delicious and Technorati as standard. Blip FM and Spotify for music, and Facebook to keep up with friends. I’ve decided to add a little bit of structure to this web 2.0 business before it runs entirely out of control.
So here we go:
- I’m going to keep this site updated with thoughts on journalism, digital media and any issues to do with online search that pop up at work.
- My other blog, elvillano, is going to be the place for my print journalism (the stuff that doesn’t make it online). It’ll probably get a couple of posts a month.
- I’ll try and keep up my Twitter account when I can – mostly with journalism and media links, but also with a bit on what I’m up to or complaints when I’m crying over the Villa score.
- Facebook is for anyone I know and could sustain a conversation with in a bar for more than ten minutes without having to mention the weather.
- Delicious for links to good online content.
- Flickr for whenever I take a picture that is better than awful.
That’s it. And if you haven’t already heard it, I recommend that you have a little listen to Ben Walker’s ridiculously good and very funny Twitter Song, which sums all of this up very nicely.