My Digital Notebook

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.

Twitter

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.

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A long list. I hope some of you find it useful. And yes. I realise that this post is a cliché.

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image credit: Emily Barney.

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.

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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)

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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.

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image credit: moriza

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))

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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…

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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.

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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.

(From The Titanic and Silent Cinema by Steven Bottomore)

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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image credit: stitch

The End

I’m lucky enough to be one of the first eight people through the doors of City University’s new MA in non-fiction creative writing, and as it is coming to an end I thought I’d add this post.

It is a unique and brilliant course – the first of its kind on the country.

In the first year you read a book a week for two long terms – ripping each one apart for its narrative arc, structure, use of language and dialogue, characterisation and ‘truthfulness’ (not all non-fiction books are 100% factual), and then in the second year you get sent off to write your own one.

The work that we’ve all come out with spans several genres. There are memoirs on the art scene in LA, the culturally adrift Chinese community in Canada and another on Poland, war and jazz. There is a brilliant sociological account of race and sport (from Viv Richards to Barack Obama’s basketball court); a journalistic account of the infamous storm which resulted in the first ‘White Christmas’ and another which I can’t even mention for legal reasons.

Digital publishing

I’m fully aware that ‘I’m going to write a book’ is rivalled as a cliché only by walking into a guitar shop and sitting down to play the intro arpeggios to Stairway to Heaven.

To that ends I’ve tried (honestly) to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, but over the next months I might be trying some new ways of circulating my work that bends the traditional publication model.

These are some questions that I am thinking about:

1. Is digital better than print?
2. Is there a better way to do things?
3. How good is the Kindle?
4. Is a book sacred?

I’ll try not to annoy you all as I’m going.

Some snippets of our work are currently being put into an anthology. For any of you that are interested, here’s a working snapshot [replete with a stray typo - don't worry, I'm on it ] of my first two chapters here.

Nick Griffin and the lost and found

By now Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been well dissected.

I’m not going to add much to what has already been said aside from agreeing with the Times, who borrowed a nice descriptive line from P.G. Wodehouse, comparing the BNP leader to Roderick Spode, Bertie Wooster’s nemesis and all-round pantomime villain.

Or, as Wodehouse said:

‘Big chap… with the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’ [link to article]

But from a search perspective, the case is worth examining a little more closely.

Ever since Obama’s beautifully executed digital strategy prised open the doors of the White House, commentators have been speculating about the effect the Internet will have on the next British General Election, which is at the very most only 195 days away.

Some already seem to be suggesting that it will be the Facebook election and swung by social media.

And (interestingly) just this week Charlie Beckett speculated that guerrilla videos might have an impact.

But nobody has said very much about search, especially paid search.

Paid Search and Keywords

For those of you that don’t know, paid search refers to the paid for adverts (referred to as sponsored links) that appear at the top (known as the blue bar) or to the right hand side of the search results.

Paid search rankings are secured by bidding on certain keywords in the Google Adwords Platform. Traditionally they have been most used by advertisers who have used paid search (or ppc/paid per click) to boost their online sales and increase brand awareness.

Political parties should (and will) start to use paid search in the same way very soon.

By ranking at the top of Google’s search results for desired keyword terms, a party, a company or an individual can control their digital footprint far more closely.

Let’s take an example from 22 April this year.

Here you can see that three people are bidding on the keyword term “budget 2009”. The first is direct.gov an information site run by the government who are hoping to increase awareness of their site.

Secondly we have the Conservatives. Budget day is obviously important for them and they have put in place a paid search strategy to direct the maximum amount of traffic to their website.

Thirdly we have some clever marketing by Anne Summers, who drily advise searchers that: ‘There is no recession in pleasure.’ Very nicely done.

It is a useful case study that shows how a political keyword term can be integrated into a paid search campaign.

Throughout the conference season last month, all the major parties missed opportunities in paid search. Off the top of my head, here are some keywords which might have been useful to marketing strategists at Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem HQ:

“gordon brown speech”

“labour party conference”

“tory party conference”

None of these were picked up on. For parties that are desperate to get their message out, it must be viewed as an opportunity missed.

Now we come to Nick Griffin. His appearance on Question Time has undoubtedly been one of the political events of the month, and it has been particularly keenly watched online: followed on Twitter and analysed in the blogs.

Here are Google Insights into searches for the keyword term “Nick Griffin” over the last seven days:

And if you click here you can see the rising number of Delicious bookmarks that have been saved under “nickgriffin”.

So last night it was interesting (and thank you to @matthewncube for pointing this out) that Channel 4 had opted to bid on the ‘nick griffin’ keyword. Here is what their advert looked like:

By appearing alone at the top of the Google search results for one of the most popular keyword terms on the Internet, Channel 4 might have doubled or tripled their site traffic.

Along with social and traditional media and SEO, paid search marketing has a role to play in the construction of a truly holistic digital strategy. So far we have seen political parties (or perhaps just the Conservatives) dipping their toes into Adwords, but their attempts so far can only be described as a scattergun approach.

Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference. Already this year Jason Calacanis has called it the most important industry of the twenty first century. For a quick visual indication of the difference that it can make to a website’s traffic, have a look at what happened to Spiralfrog on Flickr.

It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again.

The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?

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image credit: the G on Flickr
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Update: Martin Belam has written a post on this subject. It’s good for further perspective.

By Harold’s Planet.