I would normally reserve a link like this to the linklog, but this one gives me the chance to say, “Told you so, neeeh!”

Richard Thomson says: You Scotland — RIP?

A couple of weeks ago, a video appeared on YouTube featuring Tommy Sheppard, former Labour apparatchik and owner of ‘The Stand’ comedy clubs. The film was a request for feedback from the founding fathers of a website called ‘YouScotland.com‘, asking whether or not they should continue with their venture.

That their video has at the time of writing had only 257 hits and attracted precisely zero viewer comments, is probably all the feedback they need.

Back when YouScotland launched, I wrote a rather critical post. It looked as though I was wrong when their viral, The Best Wee Numpty in the World, proved to be immensely successful.

But since then, nothing again. I have to admit that before Richard Thomson’s post, I had completely forgotten about YouScotland. I suppose it is natural that YouScotland was going to quieten down a bit once the election was over. But these are the people who thought they could kick-start a second enlightenment. One funny video then disappearing without a trace isn’t enough to achieve that sort of thing.

Looking at site’s failings, I think Richard Thomson hits the nail on the head. And I can’t help feeling that I was right when I wrote my first post about YouScotland in February. The virals made me have a re-think, but it looks like my initial gut instincts turned out to be right.

Funniest of all about YouScotland was the fact that they tried their best to sound like a state-of-the-art Web 2.0 campaigning machine. But the middle-aged clique who ran it fundamentally misunderstood what Web 2.0 is all about. I’m afraid it was a real disco Dad moment.

Even more embarrassingly, they seemed to misunderstand how grass-roots movements form. Hint: grass-roots movements tend to form from the bottom-up, not at the say-so of a clique.

And now that the SNP are in charge, they can’t really point at Scottish Labour and complain about the establishment any more. Change happened. They can’t use the same old anti-establishment rhetoric, because a pro-independence party is the establishment now!

They were also not helped by the fact that they didn’t seem to be very different to a lot of pro-independence organisations, or the established pro-change movement as a whole. Why be bombarded with requests for donations at YouScotland when it didn’t offer anything different?

Ah yes, those requests for donations. In Tommy Sheppard’s latest video, he says that the only way YouScotland could continue is if all of its users donated “a minimum of ten pounds”. Ten pounds!! What?!

I mean, really, how expensive is it to make a website like YouScotland (which was shoddy anyway)? There are any number of political movements who do not go around cap in hand — and they certainly do not ask for a minimum of £10.

As I said in my original post about YouScotland, it costs nothing to set up a blog. While I accept that you could not expect a website like YouScotland to be made for nothing, you have to ask what they were intending to spend the money on?

I mean, say that YouScotland managed to get 1,000 members (in some ways, quite modest for a revolutionary, rip-roaring grass-roots movement). If each member donates a tenner per year, YouScotland would have £10,000 to spend every single year. I mean, what on earth was that website going to have on it for it to cost that much to make?!

Try to visit YouScotland today and the website will not load. If I had donated some money in the run-up to the election, I reckon I would feel pretty short-changed.

Here is something that I’ve been pondering about quite a bit recently. A few years ago it was all bad news for bloggers who have jobs. Getting sacked because of your blog stuck fear into so many that it the concept even spawned its own word: dooce.

People who have been dooced are not in short supply. There was Joe Gordon who wrote unflattering things about his employers. Rather more unfairly there was Petite Anglaise, who was seemingly sacked for merely existing. Or something. And of course there is Heather Armstrong.

Because of all this, there is a bit of a fear about employers discovering your blog. I guess that is a bit old-fashioned now. More salient is the issue of MySpace and Facebook accounts being discovered. Blogs must seem relatively benign compared to some MySpace profiles.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a dilemma. What do you do if you are a blogger who is hunting for a job? I am getting to the stage where I am starting to think seriously about this issue. By this time next year I am supposed to have graduated and be doing a proper job. I now have to contend with the fact that large swathes of my personal life and opinions are out there in the open.

I’m not upset or angry about that. I was always aware that it would be the case. But it’s an interesting problem to tackle. It is pretty much accepted that nowadays employers will Google job candidates as a basic check.

True, you could blog anonymously. But I let that cat out of the bag years ago. Anyone searching for my name will find my website, this blog and my accounts for Bebo, Jaiku and Twitter — all on the first page of results.

Thankfully, while the general advice to blogging workers a few years ago was to keep it under your hat, nowadays I am seeing more and more people saying that having a blog is actually a boost to your career prospects. I am still not entirely convinced. Sitting in a Web 2.0 bubble, it is easy to say that blogging is great. But in my day-to-day life I still feel as though blogging is something that many people scoff at.

I mean, it is probably fair to say that blogging is a hobby for me. And hobbies are generally spoddy, right? Trainspotting, stamp collecting, fishing. It’s okay to be a nerd if it’s a hobby. Yet I would probably still be more comfortable listing ‘philately’ as a hobby than ‘blogging’. If somebody asks me what I did last night I will usually say, “Oh, nothing really. Just relaxed a bit.” But in reality I probably spent three hours blogging.

That is not because I am ashamed of my blog. Far from it. But the fact is that if I was to say to somebody that one of my biggest achievements was my blog, people would think I was the most utterly lame person alive. “Oh, you’ve got a blog? I had one of them once. So, who reads your blog? Your mum?”

The unfortunate fact is that for most people out there, a blogger is at best a wannabe writer who is not talented enough to be a professional. At worst, a blogger is a rambling, incoherent, narcissistic teenager.

The crux of the matter is this. You and I know that blogging can be a pretty worthwhile activity. But what does the person reading my CV think?

It could go either way I guess. I am in a hairy situation because my CV is rather bare. And as excellent as my current workplace is, I am guessing that it will take a bit more than filling shelves to impress potential employers.

The truth is that blogging probably is one of my better achievements. It has certainly been my main extracurricular activity over the past few years. So I think I will throw caution to the wind and stick it on my CV. After all, chances are that they will find it via Google anyway. I am also convinced that my years of blogging has given me lots of skills. That is actual skills, not M4D 5K1LL5.

Rhys Wynne has blogged about the skills that he has gained from blogging. And, via Rhys Wynne, I have also found this list of useful skills that bloggers have.

I mostly agree with them. I will explain why tomorrow.

Update: I have now posted the list here.

I don’t say this often, but I have to hand it to the Daily Mail. And I’m not being sarcastic! Because their website is really rather good.

Last week some journalists got all excited because the latest ABCe figures came out, telling them just how many people are reading their words. Marcus Warren from The Telegraph (or TCUK as it is apparently now known… Christ) said:

As is always the way with statistics, everyone has something to crow about in last week’s ABC Electronic figures for July, most notably the Daily Mail. Theirs was certainly the headline-grabbing performance , one so impressive that it appeared to shock most of the blogging media pudits into silence. All power to the Mail then.

Telegraph link via Martin Stabe.

The Media Guardian report says that the Daily Mail website was visited by 11,865,039 unique users, over three quarters of whom are visiting from outside the UK. (Insert your own “they come to our country stealing our bandwidth” joke here.) This makes it the most popular newspaper website apart from Guardian Unlimited.

It’s astonishing in one way because just a few years ago the Daily Mail did not even have a website. Now it has one of the most popular in the country. You have to admit that their website is pretty slick compared to a lot of newspaper websites.

This is probably helped by the fact that it is relatively new. A lot of newspaper websites were designed several years ago. In the intervening period they have had to shoehorn in features like RSS feeds, blogs, comment systems, social bookmarking and goodness knows what else. These websites are now cluttered full of stuff that they were not originally designed to accommodate. Sometimes jumping from page to page presents you with jarring differences in style (hello, Guardian Unlimited).

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, produced a slick website that had all of these features from the get-go. Maybe a few years down the line the Mail’s website will also begin to creak heavily due to old age. But there is something else that sets the Daily Mail website apart from the others.

The Mail’s website makes heavy use of images. Each article is full of images, and they are not tiny little ones stuck in the corner. In fact, most of them take up the same width as a paragraph. It looks fantastic.

On many other newspaper websites, all too often you could find yourself reading an article that does not have any images in it, even if the original print version did. This is especially irritating when the article actually makes reference to the image. This is not much use if you are using the website where you can’t see it!

Perhaps for this very reason, whenever I follow a link to the Daily Mail’s website, I usually find myself exploring one or two more pages before going away. Its design and approach actually encourages me to read further, even though I am the sort of person who would not touch a hard copy of the Daily Mail with a bargepole!

Holyrood Watcher has recently been complaining about newspaper websites. He seems to have been set off by the website of the Sunday Herald. And who could blame him? It is a truly dire website.

I mean, just look at it. If you read the bit in the top right hand corner that says “Est. 1999″ you might be tempted to think that this was the last time the website was touched. But no. The Sunday Herald must be one of the few MSM websites that has actually become worse over time.

Compare today’s front page with a few from years gone by that I have found on the Wayback Machine. even better in 2002.

Today? It is almost as if they want to turn visitors away. The older versions hint at masses of content to choose from. Check out the navigation links on the left-hand side of the old sites — nowhere to be seen today. Now there is just a list of three stories from each section, with no images like the old websites. Astonishingly stale and not at all enticing.

I have only spoken about the design so far. There are also the technical problems that Holyrood Watcher mentions. I missed what happened last Sunday, but I know the problem with words running into each other. In fact, it seems to happen on practically every article these days. Check out the first few paragraphs of this week’s main story:

SEVEN PEOPLE, including two girls, were last night being heldoverthekillingof 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Five were arrested in raids yesterdayaroundtheCroxteth area of Liverpool, wheretheschoolboy was shot on Wednesday.

Police were granted an extension to detain the sixth, a boy of 15, who was arrested on Friday.

Theyarresteda seventh teenager last night. The 19-year-old man from the local area is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder.

This takes the total of people in custodylastnighttoseven.Nine have been arrested in total, with two currently on bail.

I mean, how does this even happen? Is it not easy to fix? It really is as if nobody checks to make sure the website is working properly. I don’t understand why they do not just move the Sunday Herald’s content onto The Herald’s website, which is miles better.

Holyrood Watcher also makes a good point about The Scotsman (which is down at the moment of writing!). In this era of Web 2.0, blogging and all the rest of it, what use is their potentially interesting content doing behind a subscription wall?

I don’t know how much traffic newspaper sites get from blogs, but it must be quite a lot these days. Yet The Scotsman locks away the content that bloggers would be most likely to link to. Newspapers that persist on locking their content away need to look to The Guardian, the most popular newspaper website around. It seems to survive perfectly fine without having to offer any “premium” content.

I have no complaints about the design of The Times website. They recently radically overhauled the design of the website and it looks tip-top now (although a lot of people probably still wonder — why lime green?). And they managed to achieve it all in one go, unlike the uncomfortable bit-by-bit redesign of Guardian Unlimited.

But, as Holyrood Watcher points out, where is Ecosse now? David Farrer complained about it way back in February. He was told that it would come back, but it is still nowhere to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted Ryan Morrison saying:

BBC News is in need of a major redesign to bring it inline with the web2.0 world. There are so many new concepts, ideas and services surrounding the new web that the old News Template is creaking a bit.

He has a point. As I mentioned before, most of the newspaper websites have been struggling to smoothly integrate Web 2.0 features into their old websites.

But I think the BBC News website is a lot better than its rivals from the press. The pages are not nearly as cluttered and are still pleasant to look at. This is no doubt helped by the fact that they do not contain obtrusive adverts that the other sites have to carry.

Of all of the news sites on the internet, I like BBC News the most by far. At the moment my second port of call is Scotsman.com, but only because the current “under reconstruction” nature of Guardian Unlimited really gets on my nerves.

For more on newspaper websites, check out Martin Belam’s astonishingly in-depth posts at Currybet.

NB. This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.

I was explaining how, sitting here today, it is difficult to see why anyone would want to sign up to a social network that isn’t Facebook.

While MySpace used to be the market leader, it was always far too annoying and buggy to remain on the radar for long. Every time I visit MySpace I just get bombarded with spam. Most friend requests are either from awful bands, fake people or are just plain spam. Visiting MySpace is like wading through a thick, stinking swamp. With pink glittery things in it.

By contrast, I don’t recall ever seeing a single piece of spam on Facebook. Not even a spammy friends request.

As for Bebo, at least you can say they are not just burying their heads in the sand. I never really saw what Bebo had going for it, apart from being slightly less worse than MySpace. But that’s not saying much. They have recently launched a minor redesign, which looks like a desperate attempt to be perceived as Web 2.0.

But Bebo is a pretty tired site now. As I said above, many of the site’s features are now watered-down copies of other websites. Take the “sayings” feature, a recent feature which is a copy of Twitter in every way. Except the Bebo version does not link to your mobile phone, and is generally a bit rubbish.

I guess the “me too” thing is quite clever, but I think it says something about Bebo users if they can’t even think up an original thought. And what is with those Skittles emoticons? Why? They seem immensely popular as well.

My biggest beef with Bebo is the fact that you can’t post a link on your profile. That is the stupidest thing ever. Is not the WWW supposed to be all about links? Even worse, when you just type in a URL, Bebo puts spaces in it to prevent the text from spilling over the narrow columns — so these URLs become broken because of Bebo.

But despite all of these niggles, I don’t think Bebo is in any immediate danger of going south à la MySpace. Bebo attracts a different audience to Facebook. You get a lot more young people there, which you might be able to tell if you clicked the link to the popular sayings above. They won’t be tempted by Facebook at the moment. But what about when they grow up?…

As for LiveJournal… aaah. MatGB’s brilliant post on this matter sums it up (and that was what spurred on many of the thoughts that led to these posts). He thinks LiveJournal is dying, and he is probably right.

The only reason I have a LiveJournal is because I got it years ago, when it was still vaguely popular. One-by-one, my friends that did use it stopped. I can think of only one “real lifer” LJ friend that still posts on LJ. My posting there has slowed to a trickle (once every 2 or 3 months, really) and just about the only person who ever posts comments on my LJ now is MatGB.

When Vox was released, I said that I would probably choose Vox over LJ if I didn’t already have an LJ account. Now it is difficult to think of a website that I would actually prefer to sign up to rather than LJ. Hell, even when MySpace came along, LiveJournal suddenly looked a bit old-hat. Dare I say it’s a Web 1.0 website trying to survive in a Web 2.0 world.

It might be different for me. LiveJournal always seemed to be a bit different. It’s got a community that I just never found myself able to become a part of. For this reason, I reckon LiveJournal will probably keep many of its current users until they die.

But MatGB hit the nail on the head. If you didn’t have a LiveJournal account, why would you sign up for one today? Why would you, when you can sign up to Facebook? Six Apart have pissed off a lot of LJers, and their recent accidental deletion of up to 500 legitimate LiveJournals does little to instil confidence in the people running LiveJournal.

In short, Facebook is in prime position to collect up a huge proportion of the users of social networks. It already attracts all sorts of people who weren’t tempted by MySpace or Bebo. And because of the smart way Facebook has allowed itself to grow, that looks set to continue. At the moment, it is unthinkable that Facebook will drop the ball like Friendster, MySpace and LiveJournal all did.

While the refusal of Facebook to sell out to Yahoo! for $1bn might be seen as arrogance, on the other hand I think Facebook are really clever not just to become another one of those companies that gets bought by Yahoo! / Google / Microsoft / eBay.

I get the feeling that a lot of the Web 2.0 startups that have been sold to larger companies have become a little bit fusty. I no longer see the appeal in Flickr at all, and when was the last time you saw something new from del.icio.us?

I get the impression that for too many startups, their entire business model is based on crossing their fingers and hoping that Google buys them. I mean, where does Twitter get all its money from? Eh?

Facebook is ambitious, and it’s willing to stand on its own two feet. That’s really admirable. And while I’m not an expert in either technology or betting, who is to say that Facebook won’t be one of the web’s very biggest companies in a couple of years time?

Update: Forgot to include a link to this post from a former social networks-skeptic who has joined Facebook.

Update: Would usually del.icio.us this, but it is quite salient to this post, so: Wisdump: The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking.

The only time I’ve had a conversation using that Meebo Me widget was last night, when somebody from Meebo thanked me for using it — he found my post via Technorati you see.

The conversation was pretty much along the lines of:
“Thanks for using our widget!”
“No, thank you for inventing it!”
“No, thank you!”
“No, thank you!”
…and so on.

Today they’ve posted this on their blog, and now I’ve posted this on my blog! I feel all warm inside.