Puffbox

I think it’s a bit much for Sky News to be heralding a ‘newly designed site’ – when in truth, all they’ve really done is shuffle the below-the-fold links on their homepage. The special Madeleine homepage has disappeared from the navigation (although curiously, they’re promising to keep updating it?), and there’s a new Media section which is too lite to cause the Guardian to lose any sleep.

On the upside though, Steve Bennedik’s piece on the (occasional) Editors’ Blog points tantalisingly to ‘an attractive new video player which will include the facility to build playlists and play full-screen’. Attractive doesn’t count for much. But playlists are certainly interesting, albeit a technology I was trying to get them to pursue seven years ago; and with the new Flash player supporting HD-quality video through the H.264 codec, the prospect of full-screen video sounds intriguing.

A question for anybody reading this here blog from a Whitehall web team. (Yes, I know you’re out there… just cos you’re too shy to raise your head above the parapet!)

I’m doing some preparatory work for a website which has implications for (and hopefully, buy-in from) several central government departments. Here’s the theory: if you write your material into our new site, we’ll pump it back to you as RSS, and you can do all sorts of clever XML-y things with it at your end. The same material becomes available to two (or more) websites, and everyone’s a winner.

So here’s the question: if you went to your IT / web support / techie team, and said ‘can we consume and republish data from this RSS feed on our pages somehow?‘… how would they respond? Answers in the comments or, more likely, via the secrecy of the Puffbox.com feedback form. Please guys, surprise me…

S & S next door have very kindly let me borrow their Wii while they’ve got the builders in. So I’m taking the opportunity to try out the web browsing.

It’s much better than I expected, but then again, it’s ‘powered by Opera’, who specialise in making the web work in odd places. Typing with the wireless controller is getting easier by the second but it’s not really sustainable. Page browsing is a dream though. As if Guitar Hero wasn’t reason enough to buy one..!

Ooops. Looks like somebody had a camera handy when they showed the new BBC homepage at Saturday’s Google-hosted, BBC Backstage-organised BarCamp. Not a lot to get excited about, really – although the prominent button top-left to ‘customise your homepage’ is intriguing.

The BBC World Service has done an excellent mashup page in support of its Bangladesh River Journey looking at the effects of climate change. News / diary / blog articles are being submitted to the main news website; a Google map tracks their journey; photos are going on Flickr; there’s even a Twitter microblog. Fascinating to see a big publishing operation like the BBC using free open-to-the-public tools like this, to great effect. And it’s within reach of anyone with a suitable story to tell, too.

But there’s more, as the BBC Backstage blog explains – there’s a whole API behind it, so you could theoretically extract all the data and do something yourself with it. Although to be honest, I can’t think of much they aren’t already doing. Still, a nice precedent to set.

I’m not going to add much commentary to this one: an excellent list of ‘23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies‘. Many obvious, some less so. I’m especially curious about smaller fonts making people read more intently (assuming they’re interested in the first place); and single-column presentation performing better than multi-column.

Is Fatboy Slim a DJ? All I know is, I was nearly 14 minutes faster than him in freezing conditions up and down Brighton seafront yesterday morning. 🙂

Others will cover the release of Amazon’s e-book device in much greater detail than I ever could. But of particular interest to this blog: monthly newspaper subscriptions. For just $6 a month – that’s just three quid! – you get an electronic subscription to the Irish Times, delivered over the airwaves to your new Kindle device. That’s quite a compelling offer, even once you factor in the $400 to buy the device in the first place. Other major US titles are available, at between $6 and $14; you can also get Le Monde and the FAZ for $15.

Don’t overlook this, by the way: Amazon is also selling Kindle subscriptions to some of the leading blogs, including Boing Boing, Slashdot, The Onion and Techcrunch. And wireless wikipedia access is free: Douglas Adams would be delighted.

If you think YouTube has transformed television, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I’ve spent most of today playing with YouTube (and its little-known RSS feeds), for a piece of work to be unveiled next week (er, probably). The plan was to embed the latest handful of videos from a given YouTube account into a site’s homepage: and it proved remarkably easy, with some rudimentary PHP and a bit of lateral thinking. The effect is really, really nice. Don’t be surprised to see more and more sites doing this.

Then there’s news that YouTube is planning higher-quality video streaming. I wasn’t previously aware that YouTube stored the video in whatever format you uploaded it, and converted it to Flash ‘on the fly’; I always assumed it was the other way round. Now YouTube is saying they’re working on ‘a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it… high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months… all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent.’

The web’s political TV channel, 18 Doughty Street has announced that it is to close next week – to relaunch itself with a new name and a new Westminster studio next year. Iain Dale reveals they have a new chief exec on board, and will be bringing a ‘more netty feel’ to their programming. Fair play to them: they’ve already achieved something significant, proving at the very least that ‘it can be done’. Faster and cheaper broadband, a YouTube-literate population, plus a continuing lack of political coverage on proper telly… expect more to come.