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Chocolate, the internet and the BBC engage

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: February 12, 2010Posted in: General, New MediaTags: , , , , , , ,
Chocolate, the internet and the BBC engage

I get sent a lot of press releases and I ignore almost all of them. Especially the ones that send me a top ten list and talk of a new groundbreaking methodology behind their results.

But I couldn’t pass by on one that gave a list of brands in an order that isn’t what you’d normally expect to see.

This particular list by Hall & Partners puts Cadbury and Google at the top and measures brands British people most engage with.

In the top five of this lis are a confectionary company, three new edia companies and the BBC.

Google takes the number one slot as the brand British people most engage with and personally I can see that – it’s a lot of people’s homepage, it is almost everybody’s search engine and it’s apps are becoming more prevelant in the mass user base.

Then there’s Cadbury – most people love chocolate.

Amazon takes the third slot in this research and the BBC is in fourth with Facebook taking up the fifth – I thought Facebook may be higher than Amazon as Facebook sucks you in but I guess not.

The rest of the list includes more common consumer brands like Marks & Spencer, Sony and Dove.

But one surprise is Microsoft – I thought they would be a LOT higher, especially as they’re the most used OS by a long way but I guess the ‘average’ user doesn’t notice the OS.

Is it that MS Windows has become so much part of the furniture that people don’t realise who it’s by? Or is the fact that Microsoft is in the top ten and NOT Apple a sign that Windows does hit the mark in terms of user recognition but the iPod doesn’t?

Or is this just yet another silly survey?

Photo credit: by ell brown on Flickr (Creative Commons)

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Thinking about the Apple iPad with ‘man maths’

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: February 9, 2010Posted in: GeneralTags: , , , , , , , ,
Thinking about the Apple iPad with ‘man maths’

I’m not going to write a review of the Apple iPad, that would be completely pointless as the most I’ve seen of it is a couple of hands on videos and a few photos.

However, based on that and the spec that’s been released I’ve decided I REALLY want one.

But first let me explain how I came to that conclusion, how I made use of the logic behind ‘Man Maths’ as James May would call it to work out it was good value for money.

First lets take a look at where I think this device sits in the gadget spectrum.

Spectrum: phone

On one side of this spectrum you have the mobile phone – the standard candy bar style of mobile phone – the Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc…

Next to that we have the smartphone – at the moment a whole range of companies have operating systems in this space: Microsoft, Apple, Blackberry, Google (Android)…

But the dominant three (excluding Windows because Windows Mobile is just crap to use) are Apple for the iPhone, Google for Android and Blackberry for … well the Blackberry.

The first is a device that allows you to make phone calls with the internet and simple applications as a sideline – the second group reverses that.

But they are both shades of the same part of our spectrum and so one of these two devices is needed for the ultimate geek kit bag – my device of choice is an Android phone.

The iPod also fits within this area.

I’m going to jump around a bit here by telling you I don’t intend to explain the third part as everyone knows what it is – that’s the full laptop. Instead lets skip back to the middling zone.

Spectrum: Ultra-portable

So lets move on to the second part of the spectrum – again there are two sides to the this part as well – the netbook and the tablet.

The Netbook, described by Steve Jobs as, and I understand I’m paraphrasing a little “not very good at anything”, is the mainstay of the ultra-portal laptop.

I have one and I use it all the time – it’s really light so I can take it away with me without having an extra load on trips to deal with and I’ve got the Samsung NC10 which is powerful enough for everything I need.

However, it’s still a pain in the rear having to pull it out of the bag, open up the screen, turn it on, wait for Windows to load, wait for it to connect and then get started.

Then you’ve got the problems faced with having a smaller screen, the resolution on this isn’t bad but it is still a pain – especially for real estate hungry apps like Wordpress and Wave.

So we move on to the tablet – this isn’t really a new idea, Steve Jobs didn’t just pull the concept of a tablet out of thin air – the tablet concept has been around for a while now and in theory it’s a better approach to mobile computing than a small laptop.

However, every time I’ve looked into this in the past the implementation has been universally shit – a laptop without a keyboard attached – not great for quick, on the move web browsing, reading, writing and viewing.

Before I get on to the iPad – there’s a side market to this, a more recent development in the eBook reader – basically a tablet computer designed for reading large amounts of text relatively easily and in comfort.

The current gold standard, albeit pig ugly, is the Kindle from Amazon – using eInk to make reading more comfortable – it has an always on internet connection so you can buy books on the move without having to be in a WiFi zone.

Man Maths

Now we have the iPad. Some say a giant iPod Touch, some say a heavily locked down and crippled device that is useless for anyone but the most basic users.

Personally, I say it does what I need, it is better than the other options and at $499 for the most basic options – pretty good value for money.

And here is how I justify that claim using the technique pioneered by James May from Top Gear but perfected over many a generation of manhood – Man Maths.

An Amazon Kindle (I can live without eInk as I happily read books on my LCD screen anyway) costs around £311
A new Samsung NC140 costs  around £300
An iPod Nano costs around £120

The iPad can do the same things all of the above can do and is just one device that will turn on quickly and be easy to use.

So, at over £700 for the three separately - even if Apple sell the iPad $ to £ with the basic 3G model costing £630 it’s still cheaper than the three items.

See – man maths in action.

Although I REALLY WANT ONE there are two reasons why I’ll wait until version two or three with two probably out for Christmas and three out by next Easter.

No multi-tasking

Having the ability to listen to music from Spotify (there WILL be an app) in the background while working ona document or even writing a blog post is essential – the iPad currently doesn’t allow that.

However, this is something I expect they’ll introduce eventually under a hail of Apple fanfare as some miraculous and revolutionary new feature.

No camera

My first thought when Steve Jobs started talking about this device was ‘fantastic tool for video conferencing’ but a lack of multi-tasking (writing notes while talking with someone in another office) and a lack of camera makes that impossible.

Also – what’s the microphone like on the device? In fact does it have a microphone?

The camera is obviously held back so they can release version two or even three with an ‘added extra’ and given the track record of doing something OTT – it will probably have at least two camera on front and back.

So in summary – will I get an iPad? More than likely but will I get it as soon as it is released? No. I’ll wait until they’ve had a couple of versions out.

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Am I confusing people by linking in line text?

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: February 8, 2010Posted in: General, MediaTags: , , , , , , , , ,
Am I confusing people by linking in line text?

I know inline linking is important, I do it all the time and I understand how it helps keep the information flow going and aids the user journey from one site to another or between two sites.

And I understand how linking large chunks of text, describing the thing your linking to helps with Google Juice and page rank – that’s all obvious.

But what I’m really wondering is, and I’m thinking here about the person reading the article and not the money I might make from ads or the Juice I’ll get from Google – does linking long bits of text cause problems for novice users and skim readers?

According to an article on the Read Write Web, research by Jakob Nielson shows people only spend 4.4 seconds for every additional 100 words written on an article with more information and words.

The research also found that people read around 20% of the text on an average page and that they will spend some of the limited time on the page working out navigation and looking for images.

I’m not convinced this is people only reading the first 20% of the article, although they are more likely to be reading the first 20% properly – I think it is people reading the first few paragraphs and then skimming through the rest.

I don’t mind people skimming my articles, when I’m writing for the BBC I’ll write with all the main information in the first four paragraphs and then expand underneath that.

The idea there is that people can get everything they need to know about the article by just reading the first 70 words or so – but I prefer to be able to write more conversationally on my blog.

Should link titles be kept very short in the body text?

Having to tell a story within four paragraphs and then being able to continue it after that makes it a lot harder to write in a conversational way – it’s no impossible, just more difficult.

So, if you do decide to do what I’ve done on my blog and attempt to hold people for longer, to converse with them throughout the post and try to keep their attention – you need to be careful about post clutter.

For example

When I add an image to this blog I always make sure it is aligned to the right, that keeps the left hand side clear for text.

I’ll try to put sub-headings into very long posts to break it down and make it easier to skip through bits you’r not bothered about, or even to get a ‘rough idea’ of what’s going on.

I try to write very short paragraphs, ideally no more than one point per paragraph to make skim reading even easier.

And I’ll make sure any body links are clearly identified – brighter blue, bold and or underlined.

But that is what made me come up with the idea for this blog post.

I was reading a post the other day, can’t remember exactly what I where it was but I know it had a very long body link.

This link was spot on for Google Juice etc, it linked the explanation of the site it was linking to – it explained why it existed.

Unfortunately I nearly missed half the paragraph of text because my brain has been trained, over years of internet use to skip the link.

I just didn’t notice it and my brain just automatically stopped read at the last word before the link and picked it up with the first word after the linked text.

Here is an example of an SEO friendly link taking you to a Facebook group asking if a sausage roll can get more fans than Cheryl Cole that has nothing to do with this post but should help explain my point.

If your brain works anything like mine it would have read ‘link taking you to a …. that has nothing to do’ filling in the bit in between with the word group.

So the question I’ve been asking myself is – does long body linking cause problems for skim readers?

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Google change results page for Chrome users

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: February 2, 2010Posted in: General, MediaTags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Google change results page for Chrome users

Google started introducing an expanded right hand side bar (under a plus button) to let you filter the results a while ago – it let you show results from within a time frame or from a certain type of site.

Now, for users of the Chrome browser that side bar is more blocky – a sort of 1990s style channel bar – that lets you filter by the different types of Google results including Images, Maps, Videos, News, Blogs, Updates, Books, Shopping and Forums.

You can also filter by time (although that is in a traditional Google style text link) and further results including Social, images, shopping sites, previews and change view to related, standard and timeline.

That’s not the only difference though – the Google logo is much larger, the search button is blue and the ad block at the top of the search area is more prominent.

What with the addition of extension and native support for Greasemonkey – the speed of the browser and the fact that it just looks better than everything else – Chrome is getting better with every release.

Even now, having to go into Firefox to take the screengrab on the left above felt clunky and old.

See the results page.

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Time to pay for premium content?

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: August 3, 2009Posted in: General, NewsTags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Time to pay for premium content?

Jeremy Clarkson writes a column for The Sunday Times, in fact he writes two as he writes a motoring column and an opinion column, although the only real difference is a bit of a car info at the end of the motoring one.

You can read both these columns and a fairly substantial archive on the Times website – published first thing in the morning on a Sunday, every Sunday – often before most people will have seen the paper.

He also writes a column for The Sun, another News International product, this column goes out every Saturday and there was a pretty substantial archive for that one as well.

The big difference between the two, other than the style of writing Clarkson employs for the different target audience, is the fact that eventually the Sunday Times columns will end up in a book.

Well, that was the big different until the end of June when The Sun decided there was value in NOT putting Clarkson, and a number of other celebrity columnists, on their website.

Image representing Rupert Murdoch as depicted ...
Image via CrunchBase

Instead there was a banner on the front page on a Saturday telling people to buy The Sun to read his column which is a pretty interesting development.

What with News International owner, Rupert Murdoch, announcing an end to ‘free content’ on the web, the removal of the Clarkson columns from The Sun website raises a few interesting ideas about how Newspapers can monetise online.

You see I don’t think any paper will be able to make any money out of ‘general news’, what with the BBC, Google, Yahoo, AP, Channel 4, Sky and ITN – it’s just not going to happen. Also it only takes on to give it open and ad-supported (say hello Guardian) and the whole thing falls apart anyway.

No, I think papers will probably keep their news content free and open but instead charge for the premium stuff and this will work even better if can take out a subscription to multiple papers in one go – or even multiple services.

For example, News Corp/News International is in a prime position to put their premium stuff behind a pay wall – the celebrity columnists, The Sunday Times, the News of the World, games, The Literary Supplement, The Rich List, The Educational Supplement…

If you said ‘look here is a lot of free news content you don’t have to pay for but if you pay a £5/month premium subscription you will get a digital edition of the paper and access to all this extra content – put video behind the pay wall as well and maybe even the ability to comment.

In fact the comment thing alone may be enough to get people paying – if I come across a story with a load of comments that REALLY irritate me I NEED to respond – put the ability to respond behind the pay-wall and you’ve got a new customer.

Ideally I’d pay a fixed amount per month for access to premium content across all the newspapers – say an extra £10 a month for across the board access and even more ideally this would be an ‘added extra’ on my broadband account.

If I could pay my ISP an extra £10 for full access to every national newspaper (assuming they go behind a pay-wall) I would rather do that and let them pay it on to the papers, than pay the papers directly.

I think it is inevitable that some of the content we’ve taken for granted as being free will go behind a pay-wall eventually, I’m not sure it is the best model, but if they all do it I think people will get used to it as a new ‘norm’ eventually.

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Um… Veoh?

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: July 21, 2009Posted in: General, New MediaTags: , , , , , , ,
Um… Veoh?

There are a seemingly endless number of video sharing websites – some trying to carve out a genre niche, others going for the crown YouTube superglue to their head when Google took them over.

One of those sites is Veoh, a site that hit the headlines (sort of) recently when they started blocking access to their site from a number of countries around the world including Malaysia, Pakistan and parts of Eastern Europe.

And one of the things that make Veoh slightly different to the others is that it allows for the publishing of full length and high quality videos and is often the source of television programmes and music.

Veoh also uses peer-to-peer technology for its distribution which helps keep the cost of bandwidth down and describes itself as freeware technology.

It is a pretty interesting service and makes it easier for independent content creators to publish what is an equivalent of ‘local access television’ but in a more resource friendly and creator friendly way than Google does with YouTube – although YouTube has the simplicity, money and user base.

In reality Blip.TV is a much better piece of technology for independent content creators as it allows for podcast distribution of those same videos you uploaded to the website – including creating an iTunes page.

But the point of this post isn’t to talk at length about Veoh but more specifically about the restrictions. I got an e-mail from someone suggesting they couldn’t use Veoh in Jersey – that when they tried they got the following message:

Veoh is no longer available in JERSEY. If you are not in JERSEY or think you have received this message in error, please go to veoh.com and report the issue.

Which, to be honest, isn’t particularly helpful if you are in a restricted area – you can’t go to veoh.com to report the issue as when you go to veoh.com you get the message above.

Anyway, I decided to give it a go and see if I could work out if this was true or some localised fluke. I was at work and the computers at work connect through a BBC proxy, so are actually online through a UK IP address – it worked fine for me there.

So I tried it on my mobile (Sure C&W) which connects through a Guernsey IP and I got an almost identical error to the one above but with GUERNSEY replacing JERSEY as the location.

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Then I tried it through a Jersey Telecom ADSL line we have coming into the officer as an ‘outside line’ and I got the not available in Jersey message. I tried it on an Airtel-Vodafone mobile and got the same error as JT.

Anyway I got home (at about 10pm after photographing the armed siege in St Helier) only to be baffled by the fact that it works fine, I get the full Veoh service from my Newtel Solutions ADSL line.

But it still doesn’t work on my Cable & Wireless mobile or on my Jersey Telecom mobile with a PAYG sim card inside it – or for that matter my wife’s Airtel-Vodafone mobile (I believe in trying out all the networks).

So for some reason Newtel Solutions customers in the island CAN access this video sharing website whereas customers of all the mobile networks and Jersey Telecom – can’t.

There are a few explanations of that. The main one is that Veoh works on an ‘accepted IP’ list – where an ISP is responsible for submitting its IP address range to Veoh to have the site accessible (where appropriate) in their region and Newtel are on the list.

The BBC uses a similar system to this for its iPlayer and other GeoIP restricted services – that’s why every now and then someone gets the international version (with ads) of the BBC site or gets locked out of the iPlayer Video content even though they’re in mainland UK.

The other is that Newtel Solutions has, for some reason, got their IP address range listed as UK and not Jersey – but that doesn’t make a massive amount of sense.

It’s also possible that, between sending Veoh an e-mail from work asking for an explanation, taking photos of the siege and returning home – Veoh started unblocking IP ranges from the Channel Islands.

Either way – watch this space as the hunt for Veoh continues.

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Tagged with the UK

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: July 6, 2009Posted in: Beach, General, New MediaTags: , , , , , , , ,
Tagged with the UK

There are a lot of differences between Bing (Microsoft) and Google maps – I won’t list them all here but lets say Bing has a bit of catching up to do.

But there is one particular difference that annoys me, the others just mildly irritate – they put (U.K.) after Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

OK so you’re probably thinking – but I thought they were in the UK – well if you’re thinking that you’d be wrong.

Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are British Crown Dependencies – not part of the UK, not part of Great Britain, but autonomous juristictions that pass legislation through the Crown.

So seeing (U.K.) under Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man on the Bing Maps was a bit of a red rag and bull scenario.

Normally I would have just let it go though – it didn’t bother me THAT much, or at least not enough to stir me into action.

But, as you probably already know I’m working on an interactive map of my own for the BBC and as the BBC uses Bing Maps, and as my interactive map had Jersey as a focus – I needed to find a solution.

So I did a search for more details on Bing Maps and found a blog post by Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation.

He was raving about the number of interactive maps on the BBC using Bing – and they are fairly impressive.

So I left a comment saying:

I’m working on an interactive map for BBC Jersey that should go live in August looking at the islands beaches.

My only concern is that they label Jersey and Guernsey as UK and I KNOW I’ll get complaints about that from islanders as Jersey isn’t in the UK.

I can’t say I REALLY expected a response but to his credit I DID get this in reply – not a solution but at least an explanation.

Ryan – good eye. Guernsey is not part of the UK, but it is controlled by it, since Guernsey is a dependency of the UK and not an independent nation state. We currently label dependencies with a parenthetical “controlling power” suffix, so that is why you see the “(UK)” after the name.

It seems this may cause confusion. In our data model, that island is not part of the UK, but I can see how that subtle distinction might be lost given the way it is labeled. We’ll have have to investigate how to make this more clear, but at least you’ll have an answer for your customers if/when they ask.

CP

So I took that response and spoke to people that work around creating the maps for the BBC and was able to get a fault ticket raised with Microsoft over the issue.

An e-mail came back hours later saying that they agree with my analysis – that it shouldn’t have UK at all – and will contact the third parties responsible for the maps and data to see if it can be changed in the next update cycle.

So in the next few months Bing maps should no longer say (U.K.).

And they even found a solution for third party uses of Bing maps – so the BBC uses – that involves replacing the tiles in question and scrubbing out (U.K.).

Wonderful!

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New search for Beeb

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: October 8, 2008Posted in: New MediaTags: , , , , , , ,

When you go to bbc.co.uk at the very top of the page is a search box. This isn’t particularly unusual as there is a search box at the top of almost every page – including this one.

What is different, or at least slightly more important about the BBC search box is the fact that it sits on top of the third most visited site in Europe.

This fact alone made BBC Web Search one of the most popular online. But that puts the BBC in an interesting position, because really it shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be replicating a service that exists already and is available in dozens of different flavours.

BBC Search

The main point of the BBC search box was and still is to help you find content on the MASSIVE bbc.co.uk website – not around the rest of the web.

Well now the BBC seem to have reset the focus – although you can still tick the ‘The Web’ radio box on the homepage to get to the old web search engine – it’s been removed from the normal results and isn’t checked by default.

Now the focus is squarly on finding BBC content and the layout has seen a massive improvement.

First it’s been moved into the new template style – so its centre aligned and wide with the BBC deep BBC black bar across the top.

BBC Search

But the box layout has stayed in place – it just looks and works better now it has more room to breath and show itself off.

In the main column you get the search results – so I searched for Jersey and got all the results on bbc.co.uk for my little island.

It also breaks the results down by site as well and gives you the news & sport results with a time stamp to show how old they are.

Then on the right hand side you have a box with TV & Radio results – that pulls data from /programmes and underneath that you have the news & sport results.

Then at the bottom you have a couple of BBC selected ‘also on the web’ results with a link to the full web search underneath that.

At the top, below the BBC bar you get three boxes – a chance to refine your search results by type of result. This used to be a choice of BBC, News & Sport, Web and A/V (if I’m remembering correctly).

Now it gives you the choice of All Results, News & Sport and TV & Radio Programmes. Which has really only been possible since the launch of /programmes – a site that gives EVERY BBC show its own place on the web.

BBC Search

This seems to be restricted to shows on network stations at the momen and shows aired since /programmes first went into beta – but my understanding is that it will eventually include ALL BBC shows from all time.

BBC Local Radio shows should be added to /programmes by early 2009 – not sure about the BBC Archive shows – they may already be in there.

The /programme pages are also fairly text heavy at the moment – unless its a current show, in which case it should have an iPlayer window.

But a post on the BBC Internet Blog suggests this will be expanded to include video clips of the shows as well – this got me wondering whether /topgear will be converted into a /programmes site given the size and investment in topgear.com by BBC Worldwide.

The other area is News & Sport.

BBC Search

This pretty much speaks for itself to be honest – its results from the BBC News & Sport websites. On the left you get the text results – direct links to stories (that you can sort by date or relevance) and on the right you get Audio and Video clips.

I was thinking it might have been nice to have been able to play (especially the audio clips) the clips directly from the results instead of having to go to the page first – but then I thought that might make load times so painful it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

All in all its a nice change, not sure the results are going to be any more helpful – I personally use an advanced Google Search when I’m looking for stories I’ve written (although you can search for my name, Ryan Morrison, on BBC search to find ’some’ of my articles.

Find out more about the update on Fabric of Folly and the BBC Internet Blog.

Here’s a big image of the search results page for you.

BBC Search

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Government + Sense of Humour = Um…

By
Ryan Morrison
Published: August 19, 2008Posted in: Entertainment, GeneralTags: , , , , , ,

Clarkson for PMA while ago a petition was launched on the number 10 petitions website that saw nearly 50,000 people call on the Prime Minister to make Jeremy Clarkson the … well Prime Minister.

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