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Random

Why Content Publishers shouldn't host weblogs…

This is a post about why mainstream content publishers shouldn’t host weblogs on their sites – and the special circumstances under which they might be able to make it work. Firstly the reasons why they shouldn’t do it:

  • If you have an established and authoritative brand associated with the fact-checked information that you publish, you run the risk of diluting that image by having your logo or URL associated with content published by members of the general public.
  • This is much less of a problem with discussion forums and community sites than it is with weblogs, because weblogs can use any voice they like (from authoritative to playful) and mostly don’t need to allow any means of conversational redress from other users – ie. it’s easier to confuse a weblog with the brand’s main content.
  • There is also an associated problem (familiar to anyone hosting user-generated content) with legal liability – it’s considerably easier to remove a legally dubious post from a discussion board than it is from a weblog, because webloggers view (with reason) the space as essentially theirs, and immune from intervention from on-high.
  • There is no reason to assume that being in the position to encourage the take-up of weblogging will mean that you’ll keep the ones you want to keep using your service. In fact:
    1. The longer someone has been weblogging, and the more invested they are in it, the more likely it is that they’re going to want to get a domain name of their own.
    2. These same people are also likely to want to use extended functionality at some point and will probably try and move to a dedicated application or provider who can more adequately fulfil their weblogging needs.
    3. A dedicated long-term weblogger may not wish to be associated with the brand of your service any more and may choose to leave.
  • The effect of this is that dedicated, popular and authoritative webloggers will leave your service, leaving behind only new webloggers, and abandoned or ‘low-quality’ sites.
  • And the final reason not to host weblogs is that there’s no need to do so. If you publish compelling and blog-worthy content on your site then it’ll get just as much take-up in webloggia as if you were hosting the weblogs themselves.

Now the special cases – the ways to approach something like this if you’re determined to do it:

  1. There’s value and utility in the information you can glean out of a database of people’s weblog posts. These can help inform editorial decisions and make it possible to spot emerging news / public interest stories. This information (and the multiple ways it can be used within your site) is simply valuable. If you have an established brand, you are more likely to be able to get a decent amount of it.
  2. Probably the best way to implement it after this stage, then, is to use an associated brand and publicise it heavily on your main site. That way you’re putting in that element of distance that stops you being quite so heavily associated with what is written, while still reaping the benefits from it…
  3. And to counter natural migration from your service (indeed to capitalise upon it and monetise it) then:
    1. Firstly, make it possible for your webloggers not only to leave, but also to come back. People resent being put into a position where they are ‘trapped’ into using only one personal publishing tool, and may publicise this as a reason not to use the service in the first place.
    2. Secondly, give them a clear upgrade path – give them various levels of functionality which they can move between. You can try and monetise this if you wish. If the functionality is good enough, people will pay.
    3. Thirdly, use the fact that your running a high-profile publishing business as an opportunity to reward the weblogs you host that you think are particularly good. This is a hell of an incentive to be ‘one of the fold’.
    4. Fourthly, not only don’t try and force people to stay within your design and branding, but make it possible for people to migrate from the branded presence completely. Many webloggers will want (at some point) to purchase a domain name of their own and get more powerful server functionality and access, but many won’t know how to approach this kind of stuff. If you can build mechanisms to keep this process as simple and as easy as possible, then you can keep your webloggers happy, keep them using your service, and in the process get a cut on the price of the domain name, charge for the enhanced hosting (or the removal of adverts, if you’ve used them) and you still have access to the content they’re producing.
Categories
Journalism Personal Publishing

The Ostrich of Journalism…

God what a stupid article. What a profoundly stupid article. I mean let’s not even start with the condemnation of Google as the closest thing to an online Superpower, because while there may be some truth to it, at the moment it’s pretty much just unsubstantiated scare-mongering. But reopening the ‘weblogs as journalism’ debate again? Now that really is stupid. Particularly if you’re not going to make any effort to look past the obvious towards a slightly more nuanced and intelligent reaction. For god’s sake, internet expert, push it a little further.

“Blogging is not journalism. Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion. Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else – often the much-maligned mainstream media.

Now I have no interest in getting involved in this “are they” / “aren’t they” debate – except to repeat my scandalous assertion that in fact news journalism is etymologically a subset of “journalism” – ie. journal writing – making news journalism in many ways a ‘special case’ / subset of weblogging. But I have to be honest, the idea that the limit of this whole debate could be ‘are weblogs going to replace journalism’ – well it pisses the crap out of me. Because while some journalists are sitting around complaining about about how you can’t trust anything you read unless it’s had an editor to correct the grammar, the actually interesting and significant debates are being totally ignored.

These are the debates about what effect an empowered and vocally reactive readership might have on journalism, or the debates about the implications of the huge traffic peaks that can happen when all of webloggia turns your way. These are the debates about how incredibly useful and important it would be to gauge statistically which news stories actually do matter to people, and what it means when hundreds of thousands of people decide to take the news they’ve been given and do something with it – push it further, do their own research – on occasion refusing or challenging the initial piece. How would that change the job of a journalist? What effect would that have, will that have, in two / five / twenty years?

In fact while these journalists are busy shoring up their own defences neurotically against the unlikely threat of freelance weirdos like myself putting them out of a job, they’re studiously resisiting every opportunity to actually interact with this huge distributed community.

This kind of facile superficial reaction would be totally acceptable if it came from well-established print journalists unfamiliar with what’s emerging online. But from technology journalists it smacks of disgruntlement, paranoia and a profound refusal to think past the most obvious conclusion they come to. These are individuals who have been told by some idiot at a dinner party once that their industry is under attack and have decided it’s time to put these “upstarts” in their place.

The whole thing is based on a really simple misconception – they keep viewing each individual weblog as if it was competing with the New York Times. But instead of doing that, they should be looking at how hundreds of thousands of (proper media) readers have completely shifted from passive reception of news to repurposing it, commenting upon it and – on occasion – challenging it… If they don’t do that, if they don’t shift from building defences to looking for the opportunities, then they really are going to be put out of a job – not because they’ve been squeezed out by other webloggers, but because some other companies (maybe even that tiny Google start-up everyone’s talking about) will find some way to do it first and do it better…

Categories
Random

Thursday Microcontentage…

There’s a great big thing in my head at the moment – all conceptual and wiggling – that I’ve been trying to write all day. So far, no luck. I’m stuck about two-thirds of the way through. So to pass the time, here’s a few links from around the web that I’ve been meaning to write up for ages.

Categories
Design

BBC News redesigns…

The newly redesigned BBC news launched last night – the redesign being an attempt to keep the basic UI and architecture of the site intact while bringing its design in line with the rest of the BBC. The most substantial change is the shift from a 640px to an 800px wide layout, which has some clearly positive consequences. The available space for the articles themselves is now substantial, but not so wide that your eyes have trouble finding the beginning of the following line. However, the redesign isn’t perfect, and if I was forced to pick holes with the way it has been restructured they would be:

  • I miss the news being in one column. The single column format – much like the weblog format – highlights chronology, promotes the idea that the material is novel, cutting-edge, breaking news. Having three news stories grouped at the top is an interesting shift with one obvious advantage – it allows them to decide what story demands the most emphasis rather than which story is simply the most timely. Unfortunately it now feels more like feature-content than news content.
  • The internal home-pages (cf. Scotland) don’t seem different enough from section to section. It’s quite easy to get disoriented within the structure of the site – as if you were in a huge building where all the rooms looked the same. I think this problem could be very simply resolved by sizing-up the signage (increasing the size of the page-heading alone would probably help considerably).
  • The “good recent features” bar that spreads horizontally across the front page and sectional home-pages (three pictures with taster-copy on a beige background) produces some HTML layout issues. Primarily, it restricts what you can place in the top section of the third content column. The Education section has a prime example of the problems it can cause. There’s too much copy inside it, which is pushing the horizontal bar down the page, leaving a block of white space in the middle of the central content columns. And if you limit the length of the text on that side, you can end up with nasty gaps of white space there as well. It might not sound like much of an issue, but I wonder what it looks like with text-zooming on or unorthodox font-sizes.
  • Fundamentally, my main issue is that there’s clearly more screen real-estate available but there doesn’t appear to be the same amount of actual news on the page. I suppose the only way to do that would be to measure the area of all the illustrative images, the number of stories linked to and the number of characters spent on the page on the stories involved. Has anyone got the time to do this?

What are your thoughts on the BBC News redesign? Leave a comment here and then head over to the discussion taking place over at Metafilter.

Categories
Health

On people who can't smell…

Last night I cooked myself a meal on my gas hob. This morning, on the way into work on the bus I became convinced that I hadn’t turned the gas off. I had to get off the bus halfway through my journey, find another bus and return home to check. Fourteen hours had passed.

For most people this kind of situation would be unthinkable. If the gas was lit – how many times would I have had an opportunity to notice the flames? If the gas was not lit, how strong must the smell get? How obvious must it have been? Except, of course, that (along with all my other freakishnesses) I have no sense of smell. Or if I do, it’s so ludicrously truncated and ineffectual as to be useless. The signals that other people take for granted just aren’t present for me.

For the most part, I’m highly suspicious of gas appliances, although it’s practically impossible to find a rental flat without them. And if you don’t believe that it’s a real issue, then I’ve got an example for you. When I lived with my ex-flatmates Kate and Mella, on at least two separate occasions they returned to the flat to find it stinking of gas. On one occasion the cooking flame had been blown out by a breeze and I simply hadn’t noticed. Not getting any heat from the hob, I’d simply assumed it was off. The flat, slowly but surely, had been filling with gas (with me in it) for getting on for fourteen hours. I’d had a terrible headache all day and had no idea why…

Here are some interesting facts (and links) about (and for) people who can’t smell (which is known as Anosmia):

  • Anosmia Foundation
    A slightly melodramatic association attempting to get Anosmia considered a disability and taken more seriously as a problem. While clearly not being able to smell does cause difficulties in life (from safety issues, food appreciation and anxiety about personal hygiene), I’ve never considered it a particularly serious problem. Maybe I should reconsider…

  • Congenital Anosmia Pages
    Most interesting for its reader feedback, where people talk about their experiences of limited or total lack of smell – the most scary ones being associated with horrific cases of food poisoning and gas leaks. I never eat anything that’s even vaguely past its sell-by date, and often throw things away even if they just look a bit dodgy.

  • Dangers and Safety Precautions Related to the Olfactory Dysfunction Anosmia
    Some interesting points here that I hadn’t fully considered: “Household cleaners can be a risk factor because the odor of the chemicals will not be noticed to warn the person that the chemicals are toxic and should be used in a well- ventilated area. Warning labels should be read as a reminder of the chemicals involved in such things as hair products, bathroom and kitchen cleaners, insecticides, etc. Our sense of smell keeps people aware of automotive troubles.”

  • Diagnostic pathways
    How to diagnose what may have caused anosmia by following a simple flow-chart.

  • The Cranial 1 Quick Sniff
    Diagnose problems with your sense of smell with this astonishingly weird smell flick-book thing. Every home should have “single-use odor presentations for the testing of olfactory function”.

  • Anosmia Yahoogroup
    An Anosmia mailing list for sufferers and their friends discussing treatments, information and providing support for those who have lost their sense of smell later in life.
Categories
Random

Google buys Blogger…

The only news today in the blogosphere is that Google has bought Blogger. I have an almost infinite amount to say about this subject, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have time to say it for a few days. Apologies…

Categories
Politics

Why I didn't go on the Stop the War march…

Today 750,000 people in the UK converged on London to take part in the “Stop the War” march. And here – if such a thing is possible – is where I try to put into words my reasons for not being one of them.
Pretty much everyone I know from work went on the march. Many other UK webloggers marched too. Friends of mine of every political persuasion were there. But I wasn’t. Why? I keep asking myself what holds me back. Why don’t I feel able to throw myself behind such a huge and popular cause?
It isn’t because I’m a fan of Saddam Hussein. That’s for certain. And it’s not because I believe that the US has no interests in the area that it’s trying to protect. And I know that I find the rhetoric of many pro-war people terrifying – designed to incite fear, hatred and a sense of revenge. And the links between Al Qaeda and Iraq? Speculative at best. We probably have more obvious and stronger links with these organisations. After all, someone worked to keep the USSR out of the Middle East…
In my heart I think the reason I’m not standing up with everyone else against this war is because I think there are two very separate issues that need to be detached from one another and I think I’ve been scared that this march conflates them.
To start off with, I don’t have any reason to be against a “moral” war – if indeed this is one. Indeed, I would not even be against a pragmatic war. We may be have been the ones who put Hussein where he is today, we may have sold him the weapons, we may have propped up his regime, we may have interests in the area – but if he poses a threat, if his regime is bloody and dictatorial, then this makes us more responsible, not less. If anything something should be done because we fouled up so atrociously in the past.
What I am against, and I think it’s something that I share with a good proportion of the people on that march today, is the feeling that the United Nations is an institution that shouldn’t be bullied, dismantled or circumvented. Fundamentally, if I’m against anything here, it’s the rejection of the checks and balances of the international community. If you’re having problems with the way they do things, then you try and change the minds of international community, or you work to change the institution in a way that makes it work more effectively. You don’t get to ignore the law just because no one can stop you breaking it. There’s too much to be lost – a world of stability that we’re still nowhere near, but which we’ve been fighting for over the last six decades. More, even. It’s the noblest goal I can think of. But it has to be a world of stability that we reached through reaching a consensus, and not by imposing our opinions – our values.
I’ve had the news on in the background all day, and a good proportion of the people on these demonstrations don’t seem to be protesting war at all. They just want a war that’s conducted in their name – if it is proven to be necessary – to go through the proper process, to be undertaken as a solemn responsibility of an organisation that represents all the major peoples of the world. That’s all. If I’d known that this morning, I think I might have joined them…

Categories
Random

The Valentine's Day Link Massacre…

It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, that most accursed of all days. Accursed for all time because of the way the saint in question was beaten with clubs and beheaded for worshipping the ‘wrong’ super-powered fantasy figure. The same day of disaster and terror that saw the gangland executions of seven mobsters in 1929. This day of poisonous snacks and symbolically ripped-out bodily organs. Like the Roman Saturnalia only without any of the fun and with a hell of a lot more Meg Bloody Ryan, is there really anything worse than Valentine’s Day?

Well I can’t make the stupid day go away, but I can distract you with frivolous trivia and trashy links!

  • Interview with IHT.com’s designer
    I spent ages trying to find out about who built iht.com when it first launched, and now there’s a whole interview with its creator over at new-favourite-weblog ordinary-life.net.

  • Faith – the TV series?
    As Buffy approaches what seems like it should be an ending, what comes next? Could it be a Faith TV series – maybe with support from Willow the witch? If so, count me in…

  • Rogue Semiotics on UpMyStreet Conversations
    Now this is why we build Conversations in the first place: ‘”How much do I love UpMyStreet? Well, a decent amount, particularly as it serves the basic but essential community function of being like standing in the greengrocers for five minutes.”

  • Sea Lions Guard US ships
    ” The sea lions have been trained to carry a special clamp in their mouths which they can attach to a suspicious person, Commander John Wood, Special Operations Officer Naval Forces Central Command, told Reuters” [Thanks Meg]

  • Poor Old Adam loses his job in Apple Store
    “When I went to pbzone.com my heart sank, my knees went weak. it was that oh fuck feeling that you know when something really bad has happened.”

  • Sharon and Grant get married
    The nicest site I’ve ever ever found in my referral logs.
Categories
Random

Tove Jansson's Moomins

Recently, in a visit to Covent Garden’s fashionable Magma graphic design store, my eyes found themselves irresistably drawn to a reprint of a Tove Jansson Moomin picture book from the late 1950s. The book – called unselfconsciously
The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My [cover] – tells the story of how young Moomintroll stumbles upon Mymble, whose mischievous daughter has become lost in the wilds of Moominvalley. Each page is a stunning piece of design and artistry conveying an incredibly atmospheric – and uncomfortably scary – world. I bought the book immediately – there’s work inside that reminds me of the woodcut artist and typographer Eric Gill. This is not the kind of childrens book that people seem to make any more.

There aren’t really enough really good sites about Tove Jansson or the Moomins online – certainly not that convey the full impact of her artwork – but I’ve compiled a few useful links for anyone who wants more of an introduction to her work:

Categories
Random

Dumb Theories about Buffy…

So how do I do this without spoiling things for people in the UK who don’t know what’s going to happen? And how do I do it without sounding like a total dork? How – in fact – do I talk about Buffy Season Seven (as being shown in the States at the moment) without giving too much away? It’s a tough one, certainly. Perhaps an impossible one… Nonetheless, I must take my strength from the example provided for me by my televisual heroine! Battle on against all the odds! Fight for what is right! Kill all the vampires! Um.

Ways in which Tom increasingly resembles Xander Harris:

  • Frankly not as thin or as devastatingly hot as used to be.
  • Knows too much about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Books.
  • Hair unruly.
  • Considers Anya to be Goddess but wouldn’t have married her.

Ways in which Tom increasingly resembles Andrew:

  • I think I’m kinda gay.
  • Knows too much about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Books.
  • Looks good in black.
  • Occasionally kills people to look cool to hot guys. Did I say kills people? I meant gave people lovely presents and help with their homework and stuff. Phew.
  • Has never successfully slaughtered a pig.

Dumb Theories about the End of the Series:

  • Buffy can’t be a slayer any more.
  • Something important – significant – has to be sacrificed.
  • There have to be a couple of happy endings. Anya / Xander?
  • Buffy and Spike are not meant to be together forever.
  • “Cos you gotta have Faith…”

Other ways I could humiliate myself in front of my weblogging peers:

  • Tom Coates baby pictures.
  • “Why I was wrong” – a series of articles examining every thing I’ve said on my site over the last three and a half years that subsequently turned out to be completely wrong.
  • The plasticbag.org ‘Comic Relief’ special?
  • Everyone likes stories about digestive problems…

I think maybe it would be for the best if we just forgot I ever wrote this post. Let’s all just move along. Nothing to see here. Just too much caffeine and not enough good TV.