Puffbox

On my to-do list for today: a list of ten reasons why you should be using WordPress. So helpfully, glancing through this morning’s RSS feeds… Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announces ‘a $29.5 million round of financing’.

The numbers don’t mean a lot to me, although apparently it’s ‘massive’. Much more interesting is the fact that one of the investors is the New York Times. CEO Toni Schneider also reveals: ‘we are also entering a partnership with the Times to expand their existing WordPress blogging infrastructure and to create new ways of connecting WordPress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers.’

Plus of course, at last week’s Crunchies awards, WordPress won both ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and ‘Best CEO’. That list is writing itself.

Quick update: did we know that About.com (ranked #141 by Alexa, whatever value you choose to put on that) is built on WordPress? We do now.

Wikipedia describes Loic LeMeur as a ‘serial entrepreneur’. Having built up and sold several French internet businesses, he recently left his senior job at Six Apart (Typepad, Movable Type, etc) to start a new video venture, Seesmic. And in a nutshell, it’s video-Twitter.

Overnight I got an invite to the ‘alpha’ version, and I’m afraid Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher hits the nail on the head. ‘Seesmic already has a number of UK advocates and users, but some have been less than impressed by its somewhat tricky interface, calling it crappy, buggy, bloated and just plain crap.’ Having registered this morning, I’m trying to get into it now, and I can’t. I’m staring at a black screen. Not good.

And here’s the problem. In another article today, Mike also suggests that Joost, the great hope for peer-to-peer online TV ‘won’t last the year’. He quotes a commenter on newteevee.com:

The main problem is that there is only very limited adoption among the user community. Far fewer people connect to the system than was originally hoped. Of course, this is mainly due to quality the content (or rather, lack thereof). It turns out that a lot of people download it once, then find out that there is nothing really good on there, then just never reconnect again. Or only sporadically, just to be reassured that there still is nothing interesting.

… which perfectly sums up my experience with the product. The excuse of being an ‘alpha version’ is no excuse. It didn’t justify Joost, and it won’t save Seesmic unless things get better, quickly – even if there’s a market for a video-Twitter… and personally, I’m not convinced. (How many video MMS messages do you regularly send/receive?)

Meanwhile, the BBC’s revitalised iPlayer is building up a decent reputation as a serious element in the BBC’s output. Not least with my two-year-old daughter: on several occasions recently, we’ve only narrowly averted a tantrum by having episodes of In The Night Garden just a couple of clicks away.

I think I’m bored of Facebook. There, I said it. I’ve spent too long wading through ‘Friend X just added pointless application Y’ notifications. I’ve joined countless groups, getting and giving precisely nothing other than an entry in my newsfeed, and a +1 to their membership total. That’s before we even mention zombies. Or superpoking. Or funwalls.

The only thing keeping me consistently interested has been the status updates. A steady flow of snippets from friends and contacts, which provokes the odd smile, an occasional insight, and regular ‘just so you know’ notes. I’ve got the RSS feed from my Status Updates page running in a sidebar on my desktop, and it’s a cute little thing which makes staring at a monitor all day just a little more bearable.

But I’ve taken the first step away from Facebook, by adding the TwitterSync application – and effectively outsourcing my Facebook status updates to Twitter. I actually signed up to Twitter exactly a year ago (give or take 24 hours), but only now is it entering my daily existence.

The official Twitter app for Facebook has the annoying habit of adding the words ‘is twittering:’ to the start of your Status Update; but TwitterSync doesn’t. I’ve been using it for a week now, and updating both sites simultaneously, and I bet most friends haven’t noticed.

Switching, of course, opens up all sorts of possibilities. I’ve tried numerous different ways to interact with Twitter. For now, my weapons of choice have been the Tweetr desktop application, built using the Adobe Air runtime; and the mobile interface via Opera Mini on my phone. (I quite liked the twibble app for S60 phones, but it only worked for me via wifi.)

And Twitter’s open approach allows for automated interactions. So for example, someone has written some code that sends details of any items in the BBC’s ‘mega stories only’ breaking news RSS feed to a Twitter account. So effectively, the BBC breaking news strap is your friend – and when it has something to say, it appears in your ‘feed’. (The same fella has done one just for Gooners too: cheers!)

Now of course, there are all sorts of reasons not to like Twitter. The jargon can be overwhelming initially; and it’s had reliability issues, not least earlier this week. But I’m now seeing it as the best bit of Facebook, done properly. And I kind of wish more Facebook friends were using it instead. I think that makes me a convert.

So I guess we know what big things Shane at the Telegraph was talking about (presumably?). The Guardian reveals that there are to be ‘seven new (online) TV programmes, including … a weekly political talkshow featuring Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe.’ And as the Telegraph’s Guy Ruddle isn’t shy about declaring, ‘It is political TV with bias.’ So… Doughty Street with brand names, then?

I must admit, I’d missed the fact that ‘As part of a resource reallocation, Telegraph.co.uk stopped its daily news podcast and its Telegraph PM pdf download at the end of the last year.’ But I’m not entirely surprised.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that podcasts will find it hard to bag a slot in most people’s daily lives (except perhaps for Tube commuters). But TV-via-broadband is definitely a goer. As mentioned here before, I’ve now got a Wii in the living room – and its main use has been as a big-screen web browser. Sitting down for a bit of YouTubing is becoming a regular event, and feels entirely natural.

Interesting to see ‘previously a-politicial’ NHS blogger Dr Crippen laying his political cards on the table, and joining the new multi-author blog CentreRight.com, a subsection of ConservativeHome. (Thanks Iain.)

Looking closely at the ‘about us’ text, CentreRight.com declares itself to be ‘a hub for the British conservative movement’ – note the small ‘c’. And I guess by some people’s standards, Labour are a centre-right party these days. But as an offshoot of ConHome, there’s no doubting where its political affiliations lie. Playing devil’s advocate for a moment… OK, so now we know Dr Crippen’s political ‘agenda’. It’s hardly a shock. But does it make him more or less trustworthy as a ‘front-line blogger’?

It probably shouldn’t. If you care about your work, if you care enough to blog, why shouldn’t you become more closely involved with those who may/will eventually run the NHS? (In that sense, it’s actually admirable: someone prepared to put his money where his mouth is.) But whilst his writing may not change, people’s reading of it may well do. Sad but true.

Earlier this morning, a contact asked me to provide a list of reasons why I think a Whitehall department should adopt an open-source tool like WordPress. Then at lunchtime, James Higgs (ex Interesource) reflects on the headache caused by ownership of code in the event of company collapse:

For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust.

True enough; that’s certainly one approach. But as James points out, ‘open-sourcing’ the Interesource code in the first place would have avoided this: ‘not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones.’

It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.

James has some interesting thoughts on WordPress itself, incidentally. My own feeling (which won’t come as any surprise) is that I’ve been able to make WordPress do pretty much everything I’ve ever asked of it… everything from blogs to ‘proper CMS’. I absolutely agree with the principle of ‘do the simplest thing that could possibly work’: and increasingly, that’s WordPress, especially if you’re lucky enough to be starting from scratch.

Commendable transparency from Shane at the Telegraph, regarding the collapse of their technology partner Interesource. I must admit, I’d completely missed news of their demise (as apparently had Shane… and Wikipedia, still referring to them in the present tense.) They seemed to be carving out a decent niche in the news/politics field, with the Telegraph work and the Conservatives’ Stand Up Speak Up site. I also know they were talking seriously to one other Major Media Brand (but that the figures they were quoting were rather, er, high).

There isn’t much detail about how it all went wrong: no hint from the archived content on the Interesource staff blogs, and the little detail offered by those suddenly jobless doesn’t sound pretty. Meanwhile, the Telegraph guys are working on something with ex-Interesourcer James Higgs’s new operation.

I guess this all explains why the Mirror is now using Movable Type for its Kevin Maguire blog, having used Interesource’s irPublish platform until recently – by my reckoning, until the week before Christmas. The Maguire header still contains an entry for blogs.mirror.co.uk – which gives Page Not Found. But we’ve still got doggysnaps, I suppose.

The launch of Google’s new Charts API last month didn’t make many ripples, or then again, maybe I was too busy to notice. But I’ve just used it in anger for the first time, and it’s fantastic.

The ability to create graphics dynamically, by passing values in a URL query string, isn’t anything new. But as ever, Google goes far beyond the call of duty. You can have line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams and scatter plots. You can configure the size, the axes, the labels, the data markers and the colours (including backgrounds, fill areas and even gradient effects)… and include it in your page as easily as any other image. Just glance down through the examples on the API documentation page, and see how much it can do.

Once again, this is the kind of tool I just wish I’d had access to five years ago. I can’t tell you the agony I went through whilst at National Statistics, trying to get the IT department to buy or code me something like this.

The only catches are a limit of 50,000 queries per user (?) per day, and the rather arcane method for calculating and communicating the data values. This is just crying out for a simple web-based form to produce the necessary query string.

You want examples? Sure. Here’s last night’s Iowa Caucus results:

I’ve also added a pie chart to the blog’s sidebar, showing how many people have got round to switching from my old RSS feed to my new Feedburner feed. 🙂

If you’re a subscriber to my RSS feed, I need you to change your settings. Keep reading.

At some point this evening, this blog will record its 50,000th page view as registered by WordPress.com’s built-in stats system. It’s taken me precisely two years and ten days to reach that milestone: I wrote my first proper blog posts on 23 December 2005, making (as it turned out) some observations which still ring true. Just as well, really.

Will the champagne cork be popping? Probably not – as it happens, we’ve got a bottle of Joseph Phelps Napa Valley red lined up for tonight. (But I digress.) The reality is, ‘total page views’ means absolutely nothing in a blog context. The figure which means much more to me is the number of RSS feed subscribers… round about 100, as best I can measure it, with 70% using Google Reader, and 20% Bloglines. And in all likelihood, since I’m quite happy to distribute my ‘full content’ feed, I bet those 100 hardcore readers rarely (if ever) contribute to the ‘page views’ total.

So, having hit the magic/meaningless 50k mark, it’s time to do something I’ve been putting off for some time. WordPress.com has served me well, but with so much of my work these days centring around local WordPress installations, the only sensible thing to do is move away from wordpress.com, and blog properly on my puffbox.com company site.

In preparation for this, can I ask all RSS feed subscribers to switch to my new Feedburner-based RSS feed, located at feeds.feedburner.com/simondickson. Then, when I make the jump over to the new puffbox.com, I’ll repoint Feedburner to the new feed URL, and you won’t miss a thing. I’ll still be blogging at wordpress.com for a couple of weeks, but the plan is to launch the new puffbox.com in time for Jeremy Gould’s UKGovWeb BarCamp at the end of the month.

Granted, it’s all a bit geeky, but New Year’s Day gave an interesting insight into the workings of Google’s search ranking algorithm.

As the Google Operating System blog explains, when Google started indexing new pages ultra-rapidly (ie within minutes) last year, it created a rod for its own back. A key component in their calculation is ‘how many people link to this page?’ – but how can anyone be expected to link to a page that’s just been created? Their conclusion, derived from observing activity around Google’s special logo marking 25 years of TCP-IP, is that newly created pages get an ‘artificial’ boost.

I’ve always felt news was the natural territory for the web, and on occasions I’ve been criticised (probably with justification) for seeing it as the be-all and end-all – but this further reinforces my view. It’s also a bit depressing to see the extent to which people are prepared to ‘game’ Google’s results, in pursuit of a few PPC advertising dollars. I’d love to be able to say that I always prefer fresh content, and generally I do – but if it’s in the spammers’ interests to artificially generate fresh content, we could be facing problems down the line.