Puffbox

I’ve been using Linux on and off (mostly off) for ten years. Every so often, someone declares that it’s ‘finally ready for the desktop’, and I download a version or two, to test those claims. Today is the big launch of the new version of Ubuntu (v7.04 – as in month 4 of year 07), which has established itself as the most friendly face of Linux… and you know what? This might finally be it.

I’m writing this minutes after booting up from the live CD. It all worked first time: all Windows drives mounted ready for action, and even my Wacom tablet worked (which I think is a Linux first). They make confident promises about wireless networking too, which I haven’t tried yet, but was ultimately why I aborted my last Linux experiment.

The key, embarrassingly enough, may be the ultra-cute ‘desktop effects’ which are only offered as a ‘technology preview’, and aren’t enabled by default. If you download Ubuntu, enable them – trust me on this. The ‘wobbly’ effect as you drag a window is just gorgeous, not to mention the transparency effects, the minimise/restore animations… yes, it’s enough to win my heart already.

I’ve got a big empty partition on my hard disk, waiting for a distribution worth committing to. I can still think of a few must-have applications which would stop me switching away from Windows; but with Firefox and OpenOffice on board, that’s 90%+ of what I need covered. I’ll keep playing with the Live CD for now… but the day of installation may be at hand.

Announced today… Hitwise, purveyors of fascinating website usage data, have been acquired by data hoarders Experian. The price – approximately $240m. More here. Some interesting trivia within: Hitwise has over 1,200 clients, with its top ten clients only accounting for 5% of sales, and does 36% of its business in the UK.

The new Sky News site is finally live, and it’s an improvement. Mind you, having had basically the same site for six years, it had to be.

As you’d expect for any major site relaunch at the moment, it’s got lots of white, lots of grey gradient graphics, and some nice Flash/javascript effects. Reasonably close to the on-air look, without being overwhelming. Designed with a 1024×768 screen resolution in mind, so it feels expansive, but there’s actually surprisingly little content ‘above the fold’. (Or maybe that’s just because of this morning’s picture lead.)

The single best thing they’ve done is the way they’ve made video work with the stories, embedding it YouTube-style alongside, and delivering it in Flash. This should really boost the traffic to Sky’s video material.

On the minus side, there are (perhaps inevitably) A FEW TOO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS. I’m a bit disappointed they haven’t been able to do more with picture galleries, which were always a great traffic generator – I’d have suggested using Slightbox or something, easy to implement with an instantly richer experience. They’re persisting with left-aligned imagery on stories, which just doesn’t work in a dynamic page rendering environment.

But perhaps most disappointing of all is the continuation of their chaotic approach to blogs. Still hosted at Typepad, all on separate accounts, with some – but not yet all – migrated over to the new look. The new site’s page of ‘blogs’ omits the blogging efforts by the highest profile correspondents (Boulton, Brunt, Wilson), and most curiously, has zero mention of the ‘Viewpoint’ blog by viewers editor Paul Bromley… which hasn’t seen a single post this month. (Surely these haven’t been dumped? – most of them had fresh material posted yesterday.)

Instead, it heralds more new blogs – Europe correspondent Greg Milam; something called ‘Your Stories‘ which sounds like a promotional page for their email inbox, rather than a blog anyone would actually read; and an ‘Editor’s Blog‘ – kicking off with a post by someone who isn’t actually the Editor.

Overall – I think it’s a good site by ‘web 1.0’ standards. But it doesn’t do enough to lift itself into ‘2.0’, and as such, I fear it might be a missed opportunity. The web is increasingly about informality, speed, frequency, sociability. All of which should play into Sky’s hands, as a small but agile operation without the monolithic baggage of its main rival, the BBC. But the potential remains unfulfilled.

There’s something thoroughly depressing about the comments made by Greg Dyke who – for a few brief hours this afternoon – was going to be the joint Tory-LibDem candidate for London mayor. The Guardian quotes him:

‘I didn’t want to be a Conservative candidate or a Liberal candidate. I said I didn’t want to stand for any political party. I was interested to see if you could change the mould of British politics. The answer is, you can’t.’

I don’t know much about Greg Dyke, but his ‘cut the crap’ philosophy whilst at the BBC held much appeal. Can my idealistic streak survive this kind of downer?

(PS: the headline isn’t a typo… I just don’t want to trigger any obscenity filters.)

It seems to be a UK standard that you write the numbers from one to ten as words, but anything from 11 upwards should be written as figures. I’ve had drummed into me in several workplaces, and I’ve forced it on others; it’s also in the Economist and Times style guides. (The Guardian says numbers begin at 10… typically awkward.) But Jakob Nielsen makes a good case for a different approach, based on semantics and skim-reading.

In essence, he favours using figures in any situation where you’re referring to an exact number, including single figures; but to say ‘hundreds’ or ‘thousands’ as words, because you’re using those words as vague descriptions of a quantity, rather than a precise number. It’s hard to argue with the logic in this; but I wonder if I’m too ingrained in the old way to change now?

Dan Gillmor points to the ‘blog-style’ coverage of today’s Virginia Tech shootings in the local Roanoke Times, saying ‘It’s the right format for this kind of event.’ With developments coming in every few minutes, I absolutely agree. Short text items, posting anything/everything as soon as it comes in, chronological presentation. In fact, why not go a step further, and do it in true blog format?

Presumably our more blog-friendly media outlets in the UK (Telegraph, Guardian, maybe the Beeb) would be able to instantly create a new blog instance within their existing systems, to cover any similar stories over here. Others – including those who pride themselves on breaking news coverage, like Sky – might do well to have an installation of WordPress sitting quietly in a corner, waiting to be called into action. (It might be worth having this off-site, too – just in case.)

Pssst! Heard a whisper that the new Sky News website should be going live one night this week.

UPDATE: actually, there’s a new promo on the Sky site giving a sneak preview of the new design. It confirms my understanding, that the new site goes live in the early hours of Thursday morning.

With so many bloggers attending last night’s ‘open house‘ at the new Telegraph offices, I’m sure we won’t be short of reports on the proceedings themselves. (Here’s what David Wilcox made of it… including a short video featuring yours truly!) But what struck me most was the number of people who went along in their capacity as ‘commenters’ on the various Telegraph blogs.

I confess, it wasn’t ever something I thought of as a capacity in itself. But there were lots of people who wanted to define themselves as active participants in the Telegraph brand, more than just mere readers or consumers. For editorial and commercial reasons, that kind of commitment and enthusiasm is crying out to be built upon.

But how? The one thing blogs don’t yet do well enough is development of the conversation. Yes, it’s great to have the ability to add a few lines summarising my own thoughts… but then what? I might go back to see if my comments sparked any responses, from other readers or from the original author, but I probably won’t. My comments hang off various posts on the same blogs, with nothing to hold them together. I want to be a stakeholder, and given the effort I’m putting in, I probably deserve some kind of recognition; but I’m just a recurring voice in the cacophony of comments.

For a while now, I’ve had a notion of ‘a blog of comments’. Every time I add a comment to a Telegraph news story (for example), it would get aggregated on a ‘personal profile’ page… in other words, a de facto ‘news blog’. You automatically see the headline (and first paragraph?) of the story I commented on, followed by what I thought. It lets me write what is effectively a news-driven blog, but does a lot of the copy-and-paste work for me. Not just somewhere to write, but built-in inspiration on what to write, too.

Commenters would get a degree of status and recognition, and become an extension of the journalistic community. There are numerous benefits for the Telegraph too; it encourages buy-in into the brand, boosts overall page impressions, and does good things for SEO.

Intriguing, then, to see what happens in a month or two when the ‘My Telegraph’ functionality appears. Shane and co didn’t say much about it, but it was definitely mentioned that readers would be able to create their own blogs under the Telegraph umbrella. (Shane? Ian? Care to expand?) But if the Telegraph doesn’t do it, one of the big news brands will.