Category: minimeta

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Blogging – according to the BBC

You would have thought, would you not, that the BBC, one of the country’s leading internet content providers, would have an online sight for a flagship programme about the internet. Your act of imagination, however, would outpace the creativity of the organisation in question.

The programme strand? The Alan Yentob vehicle Imagine. The particular episode? It was called http://www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk – A history of the World Wide Web. And yes, they went so far as to buy the domain name featured in the title, but if you go there what do you get? You used to get a redirect to the BBC 1 television listing for the day the programme was broadcast. Now, even worse, you get an error message.

How completely feeble is that? Very feeble indeed, I should say.

The programme itself wasn’t bad at all apart from the endless lingering and pseudo-arty shots of Mr Yentob used as padding for an audience the BBC obviously regards as feeble-minded and therefore incapable of consuming information without tedious and lengthy visual trickery.

They had some of the usual suspects – Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” fame and a man from MIT with a very impressive but disturbingly lop-sided beard whose name I can’t remember.

The section of the programme devoted to blogging wasn’t bad… but then again it wasn’t too good either. If you removed Mr Yentob and the artsy camerawork it would have been a great deal better. In my opinion at least. Luckily you can judge for yourself since somebody’s put that section up on YouTube.

I don’t usually watch the television at all, but I knew about this programme because one of my friends, the gorgeous Natalie of Blaugustine was featured in it. We watched it, a merry band of friends and supporters, round at her house, surrounded by wine and snacks.

It was such a shame that they didn’t mention Augustine interviews God, shortly to appear in book form, but I suppose you can’t have everything. However I thought the overall blogger involvement was too short, too fragmented and rather over-quirky. But I might be a touch biased.

If you want to see quality blogger video in action, look no further than Natalie’s own thank-you to her loyal readers.


Click To Play (popup window)

I think she should work on Imagine… how about as the presenter?

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Superb new search

Of course GV does have lovely shiny things of its own (see previous post if this seems cryptic).

Global Voices has a brilliant new search function. It’s in the yellow strip towards the top of the page. It’s the work of the planet-sized-brains of our tech maestros, Boris and Ethan. The latter has his own post on the heart-warming involvement of a large internet company in the development process.

Please try it out and see how it works. Feedback is warmly welcomed.

Update: Only a GV member, I hope, and as it were, would immediately think of testing the facility with this particular search.

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In which I become a citizen journalist

That tornado again. I took a few snaps on my way to collect the secondborn from school and put them in a flickr set called “Tornado” with the comment “It lasted 10″ and injured 6 people but the media converged as though to some kind of national emergency.” Well, it was irritating being pounced on by reporters wanting to know what had happened “the day the sky went black”, as one of them put it. I mean, really. Was it such a slow news day?

Somewhat to my surprise I subsequently received an automated invitation from the citizen journalism outfit NowPublic asking if I would care to contribute my pictures to their article on the subject.

1 invite

I’d heard that NowPublic had a whizzy automated application which allowed quick and easy importing of photos from flickr which weren’t already available under a Creative Commons license so I was intrigued to see it in action.

Clicking on the link took me directly to NowPublic’s site and the detailed form shown below (click on it for a larger version if you want to read the small print):

2 form

I signed on and clicked upload and lo! the story in question now had my pictures as illustration rather than the lifts from a newspaper and the BBC websites which had been there just seconds before:

3 story

(The strange box with the f in the middle is my browser’s flash animation blocker hiding a piece of video of the storm as it passed over another part of London.)

Each photograph uploaded now has a trackback to the story in which it appears added as a comment.

All very clever and nifty. The only way in which it seems not to have worked entirely as planned is the fact that of the 13 photographs selected for uploading in the original request only five made it to the site, but that may have been a deliberate throttle of which I am unaware.

So. How do we make something like this for Global Voices?

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Curl

curl

Zooomr, a social photo-hosting/sharing site, is giving away free pro accounts to bloggers. I’ve had a Flickr account, one way or another, almost since they started. But there’s no harm in looking at the competition.

In this case I like the ease of geotagging, the way that nearby geotagged pictures appear on the photo page (see here, for example) and the little icons which pop up on mouse-over for each picture. There are also trackbacks which show you if/when your picture has been used elsewhere on the web and you can add an audio track to a picture.

The downside (on cursory inspection) is that there do not appear to be any slide shows at all, let alone the full-on BubbleShare-like functionality I’d love to have on my photo-hosting site of choice. Also I don’t like the styling included in the “add picture to blog” option. You can’t see it above because I’ve removed it all, but doing so for every picture uploaded would be a pain.

While digging about on Zoomr I also found Newzpile which is a hugely useful tool. It’s a search interface for twelve different sources of social/citizen-generated digital web content. One search box combs them all.

And there’s a nifty ticker service too, but which seems to be based on mainstream media sources. Although the fields of interest for the ticker content are currently pre-defined I feel sure that it won’t be long before users can make their own.

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Plant a tree in ’73

That was the slogan. I’m old enough to remember it, trays of tiny trees ready for our small fingers to thrust into holes dug by others.

National Tree Planting Year 1973 (with its slogan of “Plant a Tree in ’73”) led to the founding of the Tree Council to bring together organisations working for trees. It ran the first National Tree Week in 1975. Now up to a million trees are planted each year as a result of this winter festival.

I’ve planted a tree in the sidebar – an attractive button linking to the monthly Festival of the Trees.

If you get wood and like hugging it, or just delight in the arboreal, you too can have such a gizmo on your page. Just copy the code below and paste it into your blog:

Festival of the Trees

This month’s carnival coincides with the UK’s National Tree Week, the start of the tree planting season and a nationwide celebration of trees and woods. So it would be great if there were lots of UK entries!

Submit your tree-related links to this month’s gracious host – Jade of Arboreality – by November 29. Her email is: jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com, and remember to put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

Don’t stint with the linky-love – suggestions needn’t be to your own blog alone, if you find something on the web that you think tree fans should see please put that forward too.

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Plant a tree in '73

That was the slogan. I’m old enough to remember it, trays of tiny trees ready for our small fingers to thrust into holes dug by others.

National Tree Planting Year 1973 (with its slogan of “Plant a Tree in ’73”) led to the founding of the Tree Council to bring together organisations working for trees. It ran the first National Tree Week in 1975. Now up to a million trees are planted each year as a result of this winter festival.

I’ve planted a tree in the sidebar – an attractive button linking to the monthly Festival of the Trees.

If you get wood and like hugging it, or just delight in the arboreal, you too can have such a gizmo on your page. Just copy the code below and paste it into your blog:

Festival of the Trees

This month’s carnival coincides with the UK’s National Tree Week, the start of the tree planting season and a nationwide celebration of trees and woods. So it would be great if there were lots of UK entries!

Submit your tree-related links to this month’s gracious host – Jade of Arboreality – by November 29. Her email is: jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com, and remember to put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

Don’t stint with the linky-love – suggestions needn’t be to your own blog alone, if you find something on the web that you think tree fans should see please put that forward too.

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Calling all GV readers

We need your help. Tell us what we’re doing well, what not, what would make us better.

We have a survey. It is the product of much careful thought. It will help us a great deal if as many consumers of our product tell us what they think. It won’t take long to complete. Click on the link above to take part.

Thanks!

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Time passes

anenome

Pretty isn’t always perfect. Or vice versa. At least so I like to think. Which is a roundabout way of introducing the sort-of incorporation of the previous incarnation.

Thanks to the ingenious brain of Mr Hg, much cappuccino and vast slices of very good carrot cake at the local wi-fi-ery, there are now archives dating back to the primordial sludge that was the inception of frizzyLogic, over there in the left-hand sidebar.

There’s nothing as complicated as a content management system or even a database since all that sort of useful stuff was destroyed. It’s a series of static html pages cunningly attempting to give the impression of a continuum. And there are very few images because of course the flickr account is gone beyond recall. But it’s better than a poke in the eye with the proverbial.

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Stone tower

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

stone tower, originally uploaded by turn toward the light.

This is testing the “blog this” facility from flickr.

The picture was taken on my recent holiday to the Island of Arran.

This is the drawback to this method of posting – tedious to make links. And I suppose the category will be set to the default.

I wonder what it will look like.

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More things to do

No sooner have I find a solution to one challenge than more arise:

  • find a comment-closing plugin which works with wp 2.x;
  • do I mean, with the redirect, try to redirect anyone going to http://www.frizzylogic.org/ to seamlessly appear here? I think I do;
  • sort out the “about” page;
  • what is this php thing, and how does it work?
  • how do you make the pigeonholes (aka “categories”) appear in name order? or add the number of post in each category after the name? and suchlike funkadelia;

Oh, and I also wanted to see what two posts on the same date would look like.