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Archive: 2009 February

The new look to vee8

26 February 2009 22:17

Categories: Admin

Hi everyone. As I’ve said before, I wanted to redesign vee8 to better fit the direction it is going in. Today I’ve launched the new look. Just thought I’d write a post explaining what’s what. Before I start, you might have gathered that it is not totally finished yet. But I thought it would be better to unleash it and see what feedback I got so that I could incorporate suggestions into the tweaks I make over the coming days.

I thought this would be a quick redesign. As you can see, the look and feel is much the same as it was before. But what I thought would be quite a basic tweak to the theme turned out to be much more major. Fingers crossed I have got everything working the way I intended it to.

First of all, you will notice that on the home page the daily links posts and Twitter posts are now separated from proper articles. Links and Twitter now sit in the “splash and dash” section in the grey box to the right.

After toying with the idea of going with a three column theme, I decided it was too claustrophobic and squashed-up looking. In the end, I decided it was better to do away with the sidebar. Looking at the site stats, it became apparent that the many links in the sidebar simply aren’t used very much at all. So I have removed it to make way for the new splash and dash section.

Apart from extensively testing it in Firefox 3, I have only had a quick look at how the site looks in three other browsers. Surprise surprise, it looks a bit weird in Internet Exploder. But if you see any other quirks please let me know. Just one note — I know I need to fix the comments section, and that will be the first thing I do once I get back under the hood.

I also need to update most of the pages, which now appear in a navigation bar just below the masthead. You will see that the archives, which used to reside on the sidebar, now have their own page. It’s not finished yet (most notably I have not put in the circuits yet), but will be in due course.

I am also trying to work out what to put in the grey box (which currently contains “about” and “latest comment”). I think a list of the latest comments would look good, and maybe one other thing. If you think of it as having four sections, each residing in one corner of the box, I am thinking of using one of them to promote my other projects. Any suggestions for what the other corner should contain would be most welcome.

Also, I think I remember our regular correspondent Ponzonha requesting that I add the facility to subscribe to comments by email. I haven’t forgotten this and I will definitely implement this before the start of the season.

Generally, I will be adding more stuff to the site in the near future. So this is the perfect opportunity to suggest anything you’d like to see. And any feedback on the new look would be much appreciated. Thanks!

8 comments

The Scottish press in freefall?

24 February 2009 20:18

Categories: *, Current affairs, Media, Newspapers, Scotland, Technology

It’s no secret that the Scottish media is going through a particularly tough time at the moment. In a sense, the past decade or so can probably be described as one long tough time. Job cuts have been piled upon job cuts. With sales plummeting, advertising revenues shrinking and the uncertain world of new media, the credit crunch is simply the icing on the cake.

Just yesterday it was announced that seventy jobs at Trinity Mirror will go once production of the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail merges into a single operation. That amounts to a quarter of editorial staff.

The state of the Scottish press was one of the subjects discussed on Newsnight Scotland yesterday (from 18:07). BBC Scotland’s business and economy editor Douglas Fraser (himself a former Herald journalist) noted that when The Herald and the Sunday Herald did something similar, more people requested redundancy than the Herald Group was actually looking for. On his blog he wrote:

It doesn’t say much about working at those heavier titles to find management has even more voluntary redundancies than they had wanted.

It’s worth remembering also that last year staff at those newspapers held strikes in protest at cuts. But it might not be just the Herald group of newspapers which has become a more difficult place to work. Costs at all newspapers are constantly being cut, but the newspapers are churning out just as much content as before. If anything, they are producing more content as a result of the 24 hour news cycle, and the need to keep websites constantly updated.

Today I have received an email informing me that North Lanarkshire Council has (presumably accidentally) published details of shortlisted candidates for the role of Head of Corporate Communications and Marketing. The job went to Stephen Penman, who used to be deputy editor of the Sunday Herald.

I am reluctant to elaborate too far further in case it annoys any of the people concerned. But the list has been published publicly, albeit without forenames, so you may be able to join the dots. My informant seems certain that the list contains a number of big names from various newspapers and public affairs firms.

No doubt the job of Head of Communications at a local council tends to attract candidates with a background in journalism and public affairs. But the calibre of these applicants is quite striking. There is an Associate Editor for the Scottish version of a major UK-wide newspaper; Group Content Editor for a major Scottish newspaper group; possibly Group Political Editor for a national newspaper group and a columnist for a Scottish newspaper. There is also at least one person, and maybe two, who currently work for private sector public affairs / PR companies.

Whatever you make of it, it has spurred someone to email me. He says: “Considering these names there is a rush to get out of the dead tree press and the private sector and into the safe harbour of the public sector.”

It’s pretty clear that the Scottish press is in turmoil just now. With devolution, there is more politics going on than there used to be, and it is the media’s job to keep on top of it. But ever since devolution, Scottish papers have increasingly struggled to make ends meet in the face of the internet revolution. The government is stronger, but the media is weaker — and that’s a dangerous situation to be in.

It seems likely that this town ain’t big enough for both The Scotsman and The Herald. Many see it as a foregone conclusion that both papers will be dead before long unless something radical is done. Recently Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of Scotsman.com, wrote a blog post on what such radical action may look like.

With the latest news coming from Trinity Mirror, it looks as though Scotland’s main tabloid newspaper will similarly struggle. It seems as though even in the best case scenario for the Scottish media, a lot more jobs are going to go and the Scottish press is going to be a lot weaker.

7 comments

BBC announces plans for 2009 F1 coverage

24 February 2009 13:40

Categories: News, Opinion

Today the BBC has announced further details of its F1 coverage, which will start in just a month’s time. We already knew who would be presenting the BBC’s F1 coverage, but today we have found out more about just what the BBC will be offering the viewers this season.

Television coverage

The BBC have released full details of the television schedule for the whole season. All of the races and qualifying sessions will be broadcast on BBC One, with the exception of Brazilian qualifying which will be broadcast on BBC Two (as it will clash with Final Score). Races at unsociable hours will be repeated in full later in the day, just as ITV did.

Highlights

What is interesting is that the hour long highlights package will be broadcast on BBC Three. But it will be much earlier than ITV’s offering. While ITV begrudgingly broadcast their highlights as late on Sunday night as they could possibly get away with, the BBC promise to broadcast highlights at 1900 on the day of the race, with the exception of Brazil of course when it will be broadcast at 2300.

Practice sessions

In addition, all practice sessions will be covered on BBC Red Button. This is fantastic news. In 2008 ITV provided live coverage of Friday Practice — but not Saturday Practice. Moreover, ITV only showed it on the internet, meaning that it was a poor quality offering. The BBC will now give fans the opportunity to watch practice sessions at television-standard quality for the first time in the UK.

Red Button

There will also be a number of interactive offerings. On race day, viewers will have a choice of three streams:

The FOM World Feed (what we’re used to getting), with the option to choose between BBC One or Radio 5 Live commentary.
Rolling highlights
A split-screen offering, with the FOM World Feed, on-board action and a leaderboard (the FIA timing screens?)

After the race has finished, there will be an hour-long interactive analysis programme with Jake Humphrey, David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan.

Internet

All sessions will be broadcast over the internet on the BBC’s website. Users will have the ability to choose from a number of different streams — everything that you can get on television, and perhaps more? Moreover, at least one feed will be offered in “extra-high quality”, which the BBC say will be “near-televisual quality video”. There will also be live text coverage, and visitors will be offered the opportunity to vote and discuss the big talking points of the race.

All coverage will be available to watch again on the BBC iPlayer. Users will be able to download videos within 7 days of broadcast, though downloads will self-destruct in a plume of smoke after 30 days.

Website

The BBC are promising that a much-needed relaunch of their F1 website will take place before the season begins. We are promised blogs from Jonathan Legard, Andrew Benson and Jake Humphrey as well as one from an “F1 mole” (hmm, that rings a bell…). Murray Walker’s video review of each race has already been well publicised, but we are now also promised videos and text columns from Martin Brundle and Mark Webber.

If the BBC get this right, it could turn out to be one of the very best F1 websites around. It sounds very promising.

Radio coverage

There is a separate press release concerning radio coverage. It had already been confirmed than Anthony Davidson will be the co-commentator on Radio 5 Live, alongside David Croft. This is mixed news for a number of reasons.

First of all, it should be pointed out that the BBC has pulled off a major coup by signing Anthony Davidson for the entire season. The driver still clings on to hopes that he will get a race drive. But with empty seats in short supply, it looks like Davidson has chosen to develop his career as a commentator.

Davidson has had a few stints as a commentator, on ITV as well as on BBC Radio. He is very good at the job in my opinion. He seems almost as natural behind the mic as Martin Brundle. He effortlessly explains to the listener what a driver is going through, and his technical knowledge of the current cars will almost certainly be second to none among commentators throughout the world.

Sadly, this means that Maurice Hamilton will no longer be a regular commentator on Radio 5 Live. This is unfortunate as I enjoy listening to his comments and opinions. I am sure we haven’t heard the last of him though. I hope he stays involved with some of the podcasts he has worked on in the past — particularly The Inside Line, which I have praised a number of times here.

Otherwise, though, the Radio 5 Live team remains the same. David Croft is perhaps not the best commentator around, but he is a likeable presence with a great enthusiasm for the sport. I’m particularly looking forward this year to watching practice sessions on BBC Red Button, where the commentary will be provided by the Radio 5 Live team. Practice has always been an enjoyable listen, in a Test Match Special sort of way.

There is also good news on Radio 5 Live’s Friday night preview show, 5 Live Formula One. Martin Brundle and David Coulthard will make regular appearances discussing the latest issues in F1. I can’t wait to hear what the pair will come up with. Both are colourful analysts of the sport, and they have worked with each other for many years, so the chemistry will no doubt be super.

What’s missing?

Rumours on message boards had suggested that there may be the option to watch highlights of each Grand Prix all day after the race. But there is no mention of that in the press release.

It looks as though there will be no HD coverage after all. This is a major disappointment. The BBC have hinted in the past that they would jump at the chance to broadcast F1 in HD, so this looks like it’s Bernie’s doing.

And where is the information on the support races? This is what I was most looking forward to learning about today, but looking at the BBC’s press release you wouldn’t know they even existed. I would be gutted if GP2 didn’t end up on terrestrial television, after the races were shown live on ITV4 last year. I am hoping that red button coverage will be announced at a later date.

5 comments

Putting the social into social bookmarking

20 February 2009 00:24

Categories: *, Internet, Technology, Television

Recently, Twitter has very much gone mainstream (at least in the UK). Even for a while before that, Twitter has been becoming more than just a microblogging service. It is certainly about a lot more than the famous prompt, “What are you doing?”, suggests.

Twitter is used by different people for a wide variety of purposes now. But due to the space constraints, it requires a fair bit of creativity on the Twitter user’s part. Twitter has almost developed a language of its own.

Very quickly, a convention developed whereby @username signified that this tweet is a reply to one of that user’s recent tweets. Twitter recognised this and built the functionality into the system. Later on, #hashtag acted as a tag for your tweet, the idea being to make it easy to find tweets on certain subjects using a site like #hashtags or Twitter’s own search function. Even more recently, the retweet (now commonly signified by RT) has emerged as a popular way to share other people’s great tweets.

What does this have to do with social bookmarking? Well, a large amount of retweets are just interesting links. That means that a lot of original tweets are just interesting links. But hang on — isn’t a social bookmarking service like Delicious more suitable for sharing interesting links?

It should be, but it’s not. Now let us get one thing straight here. I am a huge fan of Delicious. I have been using it for over four years now, and in that time I have amassed a collection of 7,493 bookmarks across my three accounts. And I won’t stop using it any time soon.

But sometimes, I find it much more satisfying to just paste a URL into Twitter and share the link that way. It is pretty clear that a lot of people do too.

Take the two most recent posts on this blog: ‘Why are newspapers hiding their niche content?‘ and ‘The Edinburgh Twestival‘. Both of these posts were shared around a bit on Twitter.

Certainly, you would expect that for a post about the Edinburgh Twestival. People interested in that post are likely to be Twitter users. This post was shared by five different people (including, it has to be said, me) on Twitter. Four of them were retweets of my original tweet. Google Analytics suggests that 15 visitors landed on the page from the Twitter website (and that doesn’t include any visits that came from Twitter clients, Twitter streams embedded on webpages, etc.). No one shared it on Delicious.

As for the post about RSS feeds, it was shared by four people on Twitter (including me again), one of which was a retweet. It was also shared by four people on Delicious. But three of those people are also the three people who shared it on Twitter! Delicious doesn’t timestamp entries, but I am pretty sure all of them posted to Delicious after posting it to Twitter (let me know if I’m wrong about that). Very probably, two of them discovered it through Twitter rather than anywhere else. So far, the post has had 18 visitors from Twitter, and just five from Delicious.

So is Twitter doing the job of sharing interesting links better than Delicious, the daddy of social bookmarking sites? Almost certainly. And it struck me why while I watched the video currently sitting on the dead / dormant Ma.gnolia website. Ma.gnolia was another social bookmarking website, that was recently taken down for good by a massive database problem. The video is a post-mortem on Ma.gnolia, but it also feels a little bit like a post-mortem on social bookmarking as a whole.

During the interview, Larry Halff points out that the biggest link-sharing website is not Delicious as is commonly suggested — it’s Facebook. It reminds me of the often-forgotten fact that the biggest photo-sharing website is not Flickr, nor is it even Imageshack or Photobucket — it’s Facebook.

This is not because Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing your photos — far from it. Nor is it remotely as good as Delicious for link-sharing. But Facebook is certainly the best place for sharing your photos and link-sharing. That is for one simple reason: Facebook has more users, meaning that you can reach more people more quickly. It’s what Facebook like to call the social graph. It doesn’t matter if the functionality is a bit basic. What matters is that all your friends are on it.

Twitter is no Facebook. While most of my “real life” friends are on Facebook, Twitter has just a smattering of my real life friends. But I follow a great deal of people whose content I just find interesting — bloggers and other online associates with whom I have built a digital acquaintanceship over the years.

Most importantly when it comes to reaching a large amount of people, I know that Twitter is extremely addictive. I know that dozens of my Twitter followers will have a Twitter application of some kind open. I am watching the messages from them tumble down the screen all the time. It feels like I’m having a conversation. I know that I will reach a lot of people by posting a link in Twitter. Then I could have a conversation with people who are interested in that link.

That sense of vibrancy just isn’t there in Delicious. The reason? This social bookmarking service just isn’t social enough. Its social functionality basically extends to being able to add other users to your ‘network’, and being able to inform them of links you think they will find interesting by using a special tag. And that’s it. There are no comments. There is no conversation. There is near enough no social. Just lists of links.

Is there the scope for a TweetDeck-style Delicious application? You could leave it open all day and watch the links from your friends stream in, just as we watch our friends’ tweets. You could use the notes section to leave comments (have a conversation). There could be special tags that allow you to use the notes section to reply to your friends.

I have seen people tag their bookmarks as via:username to signify how they found the link — but Delicious doesn’t appear to recognise it in any special way. Twitter were really smart to capitalise on the @replies convention, because it has made Twitter much more of a social tool. Delicious feels stagnant in comparison. But it seems like it could be easy to fix. So why don’t they?

8 comments

The (very brief) history of Virgin in F1

19 February 2009 19:35

Categories: History, News

There seems to be a fair bit of excitement in the F1 world over the idea that such a well-known brand as Virgin may associate itself with F1. Despite the megabucks involved in the F1 world, and the massive worldwide exposure it can provide any brand, it is fair to say that F1 has failed to attract most of the major brands in the world.

Aside from tobacco companies, a few alcohol companies, and latterly electronics firms and a few financial institutions, it is interesting quite how many big brands have never touched F1 with a barge pole. Coca-Cola? Nowhere to be seen. McDonald’s? Nope. Virgin? It could be about to happen.

It wouldn’t quite be the first time Virgin has been involved in F1. A few articles have pointed out that Virgin Mobile had a relatively minor deal with Jordan in 2002. That is the full extent of Richard Branson’s involvement in F1 to date.

There was something else in the back of my mind. I remember in 1999, Arrows (then led by the big-talking and ambitious Prince Malik ado Ibrahim) was very proud of itself for bringing the Virgin brand into F1 for the first time. It had secured a minor sponsorship deal with Virgin Records, whose logo appeared in a tiny red area just in front of the cockpit. You can just about see it if you use your imagination while looking at the picture on F1 Wolf’s 1999 liveries post.

But with the world of the Virgin brand being rather complex, Richard Branson had nothing to do with it. As this article on Grandprix.com, written when the deal was made ten years ago, points out, Virgin Records had been sold to EMI seven years earlier.

So if a deal between the Virgin Group and Honda goes ahead, it won’t be the first time Richard Branson has been involved in F1, and it certainly won’t be the first time the Virgin brand has been in F1. But such a deal would easily eclipse the earlier forays, so it will still be momentous for F1.

Not bad for a sport that’s supposed to be in the doldrums. No wonder Bernie Ecclestone is so enthusiastic about the prospective deal.