Puffbox

Well done to the UK Independence Party* for a cute little stunt in connection with tomorrow night’s new BBC1 political drama thing, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard. It’s the story, if you haven’t seen it previewed, of a supermarket manager(ess) who ends up Prime Minister within a matter of days through only-just-plausible methods.

Her party is the Purple Alliance – but the Beeb didn’t get round to registering the predictable web address purplealliance.org.uk (or indeed .org). One Chad Noble of political site UKIPhome bagged it on Sunday afternoon, and there’s a barebones web page up there already, describing UKIP as the non-fictional equivalent – ‘a real voice of opposition, whose values form an alliance of libertarian and small ‘c’ conservative values.’

The Beeb did remember to register purplealliance.co.uk – over three months ago. (Nothing there yet, though.) But any political knowledge would have revealed the political preference for the .org domain. D’oh!

* Update: Apparently it’s not an official UKIP thing, but the action of one particular member. Still, fair play. (Thanks for letting me know via the comments.)

A word of warning to TypePad template designers. If you’re trying to use ‘MTEntries lastn’ to specify the number of blog posts to pull out, it stops counting after 30 days. If you haven’t written anything in the last 30 days, you’ll get an empty list.

This came as news to me, having spent the best part of an hour tweaking every conceivably connected option to try and make it work. I keep a spare blog under password-protection for development purposes, but none of the sample posts in there were within the 30 day limit. Hence the blank page.

Yes, of course I’d looked up the Typepad documentation to see what might be causing it. So of course I’m more than disappointed that nobody has thought to mention this, in the nine months (or more?) since the change was apparently implemented. Thank heavens for the blogosphere. I’d still be hacking away if I hadn’t found this.

Typepad – I expect more from a paid service. When you take my money, the expectations rise exponentially. But that is no excuse. Sort it.

By way of comparison: I sent some feedback to wordpress.com this morning. It was a bit of a stupid point on reflection… if I’d bothered to look, I’d have found the solution to my problem on the ‘Options’ page. I got an email within hours from the mighty Podz (hi Podz) explaining why my suggested solution wouldn’t work, and recommending a better one. This is on a free service. WordPress 1, Typepad 0.

Surely the most obvious change in the few weeks since John Ryley became the Head of Sky News has been the increased promotion of the channel’s website. It seems like on the way into every ad break, there’s a web promo – interestingly, usually for a story not receiving much coverage on-air. You’ll probably also have noticed the new animation intruding on top of the on-screen clock, pushing the sky.com/news address.

OK, cards on the table – this is a very personal subject for me, having been one of the driving forces in the Sky News web team for nearly three years. We never felt we got a fair crack of the whip from our TV colleagues, and as the BBC raced ahead into online publishing, we made do with a setup not much smarter than you could have put together at home, with a half-decent PC, a standard Sky digibox and any old editing software. So this is not a moment before time.

But the sad reality is that the Sky website – and its underlying strategy – hasn’t moved on much in several years. (In fact, they’re still using some promo images I put together back in, um, 1999 I think?) With Ryley at the helm, it’s time for some fresh thinking… and, I’d suggest, a radically different approach online.

It’s time for Sky to drop the ‘UK News’, ‘World News’, ‘Business’, ‘Money’ sections – as they did with the long-doomed ‘SciTech’ earlier this year (although its RSS feed is still turning over… erm guys?!). The BBC does this much deeper, much better. And unless things have changed dramatically since I left, the traffic just isn’t there.

Online, Sky News must embrace what Sky News on TV is best known for – immediacy.

The homepage should be a large-scale treatment of the big story at any given moment – and when I say ‘large scale’, I’m talking a full-screen presentation using Flash MX (or something). We had numerous successes while I was there with a philosophy of ‘throwing everything at the big story’… and this is the logical conclusion of that approach. How to do that with limited resources? Easy. A maximum of ten stories on the go at any one time, but ensuring that each of those includes the very, very latest information. All killer, no filler. Lots of still photos, with the occasional bit of video thrown in.

And really, really push the blogging thing. Efforts by Jeremy Thompson and Adam Boulton are a decent start, although the generic skynews.typepad.com doesn’t really engage. Give all the senior correspondents (rather than the presenters) their own blogs, and encourage them to post something every day (not unlike at the Telegraph). Be brave, and think about doing something with ‘user generated content’.

Otherwise, Sky’s in a really difficult situation. The BBC left them for dead (despite protestations from some of us); and if they’re not careful, the print-based media will do likewise. The trend across all the newspapers – serious and now even tabloid – is to get into the ‘rolling news’ business via the web. Sky’s web audience is there for the taking – unless Sky decides what it’s trying to do with its website.

Steve, Adam… you know where I am. 🙂

Guardian photographer Dan Chung is doing some interesting experiments in ‘voiced 360′ photos‘. (You’ll need Quicktime to see them.) Yet another example of a specialist in one medium muscling in on another, of course. 😉

The BBC’s former social media guru, Euan Semple points out that the Corporation’s head of news, Richard Sambrook now has a public blog. Somewhat disappointingly, this will run in parallel to his Beeb-only internal blog which is often quoted as a great case study of senior management blogging within big organisations. Somewhat intriguingly, it’s hosted (hey! guess what!) at Typepad, rather than on the Beeb’s own blogging platform.

I’ve never seen the ‘Secret Sambrook’, but I’m wondering what could be so sensitive in it, that it needs to remain locked behind the firewall. We don’t really need another blog pointing to Jeff Jarvis; we need an insight into the strategy leading (arguably) the world’s leading news organisation. And hey, due to the unique way the BBC is funded, surely we all have a right to understand the thinking driving the internal decisions? It’s our money you’re spending, Richard.

When times get hard, the Signal vs Noise blog by the guys at 37signals keeps me going. It’s always good to have someone reminding you why you love this business, and how it can work.

A post today prompts an interesting debate about agile work processes in big environments, like the public sector. My heart is with the 37signals view:

The problem is when you build confidence with documents, you are nailing yourself down to assumptions that are probably wrong (assumptions always seem to fall by the wayside once things get real). Yeah, you may feel better that you have a recipe written down. But if it’s a recipe for failure, what’s the point?

Bingo. Documentation does not get the job done – ever. More than anything else, you need to be working with good people you can trust, and to let them do what they’re good at. If you trust them, don’t put them in a straightjacket. Don’t be scared to let them tell you how it should be done.

But there is a point to documentation: it defines the battleground when (or being optimistic, if) it all goes wrong. See it in those terms, and its purpose – and indeed, its practical importance – become clear.