Puffbox

Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of new media and technology, earned a base salary of £281,000 this year according to the Corporation’s own website – an inflation-busting increase of 14.7% on last year. He picked up an additional £30,000 in annual bonus, expenses and benefits: although, when you lump it all together, it’s actually down on last year’s total figure of £320,000.

This, you’ll be pleased to hear, is all part of the BBC’s continuing efforts ‘to bring (executive) pay into line with the external market’, having identified in 2004 that ‘BBC executive base pay had fallen significantly below market median levels.’ And in case you’ve forgotten it from maths at school: the median is the midpoint in a series of numbers, whereby half the data values are above it, and half below it. So apparently, half the people in comparable jobs are being paid more. Er, really?

All thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded. And yes, my TV licence is due this month. Purely coincidental.

It’s no Watergate, but the Prescott-Anschutz story gets front-page treatment in today’s Media Guardian, which calls it ‘first big British political story to be driven by bloggers’.

But what makes me cringe is the sidebar inside, in which Britain’s self-proclaimed no1 political blogger Guido Fawkes decides to open up a European front in the utterly pointless war between bloggers and MainStream Media:

Go to the Oxford Union and ask our future political class who they read more often – the Times’ Peter Riddell or Guido Fawkes’ blog? Next ask them who they trust more? It is no contest. With 200,000 hits a month and rising, my politics blog is more trusted than the Times’ pompous political columnist… Big Media is going to be disintermediated because technology has drastically reduced the cost of dissemination.

Yet arguably the most significant blogging in UK politics (sorry Guido) is happening in the MainStream Media: think Nick Robinson, think Comment Is Free. Let’s concentrate on the real battle out there: it isn’t between MSM and blogs, it isn’t even between left-wing and right-wing. It’s between those who give a damn, and those who don’t.

Microsoft’s announcement of a tool to bring the OpenOffice file format into Word 2007 includes a quote from Andrew Hopkirk, director of the UK’s National Computing Centre’s e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) Programme:

Electronic document translation between different fixed formats is always going to be somewhat inexact. Like human language translations, concepts and specifications will differ in detail. This tool promises to be a very significant development in the trend towards practical open document standards and, critically, customer-friendly means to move between them. It can only be good for the IT industry’s customers and product and service innovators.

Of course, the really customer-friendly thing to do would be embrace the open standard, rather than developing their own, regardless of the apparent reason for doing so. A weak standard universally adopted is still better than no standardisation at all. But I’m not naive enough to think that’s going to happen. (Likewise, wouldn’t it just be easier for IE7 to adopt the Gecko layout engine?)

Oh, and before you rush off to download the tool, be warned: if you aren’t running Word 2007 and .NET 2.0, you’re stuck with a command-line version for now.

Delighted to see my old mates at Sky News going deeper into blogging. From a press release today:

From Monday 10 July, Sky News will be publishing, News Brief, a news blog looking at the day’s news agenda every weekday morning at www.skynews/publicity (sic) (for the press) and www.sky.com/news (for the public)

This idea has a lot of potential. My conclusion from my two (brilliant) years working at Sky News was this: the viewers want to be ‘part of the team’. There is a very large segment of the audience who consume news almost as a hobby. They actively choose to watch the news, instead of feeling they have a civic duty to do so. (I say ‘they’, I mean ‘we’.)

This blog could be a great way to bring people into the newsroom, and into the brand. Tell them about the nitty-gritty of the morning editorial discussion. Tell them what you’re expecting to happen later in the day, and (importantly) when. Share a bit of the office banter. There’s almost an argument for someone to work on it full-time through the day? – community management takes effort.

The BBC’s new Editors blog goes some way towards this, but it’s crying out for Sky’s characteristic ‘lighter touch’.

They’ve also announced that the channel’s resident geek, Martin Stanford will take over the 8-10pm weeknight slot – with a promise of ‘an interactive ingredient to include viewers’ experiences and reaction to the stories covered’. They make optimistic noises about people contributing via 3G videophone or webcam… but they’ve been soliciting this sort of material for ages, and I have yet to see it being used in anger.

With five-megapixel digital cameras slowly edging under the crucial £100 barrier, and the price of storage media in freefall, it’s suddenly possible for anyone to become a decent photographer. How?

Step one is to buy yourself a reasonable camera. There’s no point spending a fortune; they aren’t generally built to last any more, and besides, you just know a smaller and smarter model will come out as soon as you’ve spent the money. I’m a careful purchaser, and I’ve got three obsolete digital cameras sitting at home as it is (not counting cameraphones!). Amazon is always a good place to do some price research.

Around £100 will buy you the camera you need. Aim for the highest numbers of megapixels and optical (not digital!) zoom – but spare a particular thought for the type of memory card. The different manufacturers favour different formats; and if you’ve already bought into one type of card, for other devices you already own, it makes sense to stick with that.

SD cards are probably the most flexible, and are getting ridiculously cheap. Amazon has a Viking 1GB SD card for a real bargain price of £13.20 – on my 5MP camera, that’s enough for nearly 400 photos, even at top quality. And that’s the key to it, folks.

In the old days, you had maybe 24 exposures per roll of film, meaning just 24 chances to get it right. With a 1GB card on board, capacity is no longer a concern. You can take 24 pictures of the same thing, maybe on a rapid-fire function if you have one – and, unless you’re really unlucky or really incompetent, at least one of them should be half decent anyway.

The more megapixels, the more slack you have. If you’re starting with a 5 megapixel picture, you have scope to trim bits off the sides, and still have enough pixels to make a large, good-quality print. Plus you’ll have the luxury of being able to review your photos on the camera’s built-in screen, as you take them. If you can’t make something of even one of your attempts, try again.

I’m not saying you’ll be deposing the Guardian’s star snapper Dan Chung. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from his (excellent) blog, it’s that even the pros rely to a large extent on technology and luck. Don’t be ashamed of doing likewise yourself.

Despite heroic efforts over the last few weeks, my home PC’s hard disk finally gave up the ghost this weekend. I’ve ordered a new one, but it’s going to take Amazon a week to get it to me. What to do in the meantime? Time to try Linux again.

Probably every 18 months or so, I go through a phase of wanting to try Linux. The concept of the Live CD – where you download a single file, burn it to a CD ROM, and boot your PC from it without actually installing anything – gives a no-risk way to try Linux out. And it’s the perfect solution when you don’t have a working hard disk in your PC.

The bad news, though, is that it’s taken most of my weekend, on and off, to find a Linux version which worked with all my main hardware, and saved my settings reliably. I’m still having a nightmare installing OpenOffice. And I’m supposed to be good at these sorts of things. Mere mortals have no chance.

In the end, I plumped for Puppy Linux. I’ve toyed with it before, and knew it picked up my network and sound card without much intervention. It’s a reasonable 70MB download, which shouldn’t take too long on a broadband line. Burn it, boot it, and you should have enough to get you going.

And the first extra program I downloaded: Firefox. I’m doing almost everything through it these days. It checks my Gmail accounts. It gives me one-click access to my RSS feeds on Bloglines. It lets me see my bookmarks as stored on del.icio.us. It lets me post to my blog via Deepest Sender. As I’ve said before, it’s not far off an operating system in its own right these days.