BBC Vision website launches

As previously posted, my job requires me to have an overview of the whole of BBC Vision's online portfolio. Until recently, my record of new site launches comprised a TextEdit document on my laptop (edited on a daily basis) and an Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive (updated, er, less frequently). A couple of weeks back I decided that a far better tool for maintaining and sharing this information would be a simple blog.

As well as being naturally geared towards the chronological presentation of information (with posting dates corresponding to approximate site launch dates), a blog also enabled the easy addition of screenshots (captured using the super-useful WebShot) and tags to enable filtering by various metadata facets (e.g. commissioning genre, associated broadcast channel). Crucially, it also enabled me, in keeping with the renewed spirit of openness, to open up data which had no reason to reside within the confines of the BBC's firewall. I haven't had time to tart up the design yet although it feels like less of a priority in the age of feeds (here's the FeedBurner feed).

For a less Vision-centric view of recent BBC website launches check out Ryan 'Up Your Ego' Morrison's post on Wide BBC pages.

Track buzz around your blog posts with AideRSS

Just discovered AideRSS, a neat little service from a small Canadian company which analyses RSS feeds and assigns each article a PostRank™ (wonder what inspired that trademark? ;-) based on the number of times it has been bookmarked, dugg, blogged about, commented on and tweeted. Ostensibly a tool for readers to filter which articles are worthy of their attention, it also functions as a handy way for content creators to gauge the buzz around their missives. Above is a snapshot of some of the highest ranked posts on this blog in recent months, the most popular of which (a comparison of 15 lifestreaming services) was bookmarked 83 times using del.icio.us and generated 34 diggs, 33 blog posts, 20 comments and zero tweets.

Socialmeter (below) performs a similar function for individually input URLs, scanning assorted social sites to generate bar charts and an overall score. YackTrack, as the name suggest, focuses exclusively on tracking conversations and commenting.

Related fabric of folly posts:
The word on the web: 7 keyword trending tools
5 lessons I've learnt from blog stats
Google Trends for Websites

Mark Kermode BBC video blog

Every so often you get to be involved with a project which is not only professionally satisfying, it also resonates with your own personal obsessions. Kermode Uncut - the newly launched BBC video blog - has been one such project, marrying my passion for blogging with my fan-boy enthusiasm for the film criticism of Mark Kermode. Long-standing readers of this blog will know that I listen religiously to his weekly Radio 5 Live film review podcast with Simon Mayo (see My media consumption diet) and that his wife was my one of my tutors at University (see 8 random facts about me). Suffice to say, I didn't have to think for long before taking Nick Cohen (Multiplatform Executive for BBC Knowledge) up on his offer to help shepherd the project through its initial development phase.

So, why a video blog (or, if we must, vlog)? Well, anyone's who seen or heard Mark's review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will understand how much of his reviewing is in the delivery and what a missed opportunity simply sitting him down at a keyboard would have been (excellent though his writing for Sight & Sound and The Observer is). It also felt like an opportunity to innovate with the BBC's blogging platform. With the possible exception of the Blue Peter blog (which Wikipedia credits as the BBC's first video blog), the BBC's blogs have been predominantly text-led to date, which was also starting to feel like a bit of a missed opportunity for an organisation which knows a thing or two about creating compelling video content.

Video blogging first started genrating buzz back in 2005 (aided and abetted by the launch of YouTube), but is still to go mainstream in the way that text blogging has, despite a few high-profile successes (e.g. Rocketboom, lonelygirl15). My hunch is that this may change in the coming 12 months as mobile video cameras continue to improve and sites like Seesmic, Qik and Kyte get users more comfortable with talking direct to camera (interestingly it was the Beeb that did much to pave the way for video blogging with Video Nation).

Certainly the typically more intimate, authored tone of a video blog is a good fit for Mark as this wonderful post on his past experience of the Cannes Film Festival demonstrates.

Props to: Nicholas Jones, Stevan Keane, Hedda Archbold, Nick Cohen, Claire Cook, Neil Bramah, Al Boley, Aaron Scullion and anyone else I've forgotten (as I invariably do).

The word on the web: 7 keyword trending tools

Unquestionably one of the most powerful ways in which products and services get promoted, word-of-mouth is not only notoriously difficult to generate; it's also very hard to measure. Pre-digital, finding out how 'talked about' your brand was meant arming yourself (or, more likely, a costly market research agency) with a pencil and clip-board and trying to find a representative sample to quiz, either by phone, mail or face-to-face. The arrival of email made contacting a large number of potential respondents much cheaper, quicker and easier but still relies on self-selecting individuals and only captures claimed, rather than actual, behaviours.

And then Google happened. For the first time, a small but significant slice of the world's interactions were being indexed and made searchable. The first tools to mine this data were somewhat limited in scope; Google Zeitgeist (launched in 2001) presented a small selection of top ten lists and charts of popular search queries, which tantalised the stats geeks amongst us with what could be discerned if open access to the database was granted. We had to wait five years, but in May 2006, Google did exactly that when it took the wraps off Google Trends, which enables users to chart trends for the search terms of their choosing.

Whilst knowing what keywords people are searching for is useful (and an important success measure in its own right), it doesn't necessarily directly correlate to how much your brand is being talked about. Fortunately, a new breed of products is emerging which focus on tracking keyword usage on blogs and in other community spaces. Icerocket's Trend Tool, Trendpedia, Technorati charts and Nielsen's BlogPulse Trend Search all attempt to trend word usage in the blogosphere, whilst the recently launched Facebook Lexicon collates keyword data from people's Facebook Walls and Twist charts keyword recurrence on Twitter.

The potential applications of these keyword trending tools are already myriad and my suspicion is that they are just the tip of the iceberg. Obvious next steps include mashing up the existing data sources to provide both aggregate and comparative trends across the various forums/services (e.g. Facebook users talk more about X than Y, whereas Twitterers talk more about Y then X) and beginning to contextualise the mentions to make more qualitative assessments (e.g. X % of keyword mentions were in a positive context, Y % were negative).

Below is a sample chart for each of the services I've mentioned, illustrating some of the interesting possibilities for this data in different market sectors.

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends



BlogPulse Trend Search
http://www.blogpulse.com/trend



Technorati charts
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/01/77.html



Icerocket Trend Tool
http://trend.icerocket.com



Trendpedia
http://www.trendpedia.com



Facebook Lexicon
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon



Twist
http://twist.flaptor.com

TV character blogs

Interesting discussion at work the other day about fictional TV characters blogging which prompted me to do a quick trawl of the web for existing TV character blogs, the results of which are below, ordered by launch date. Whilst UK broadcasters are only just starting to dip their toe in this particular pool, a couple of the US networks have really embraced the concept. NBC was first out the gate in February 2005 with Nigel Blog but it's ABC which has been the most prolific to date, launching ten character blogs since October 2005.

So, the $64,000 question: do they work? Well, that depends on your success criteria. For the commercial TV networks, the bottom line is ad revenue and that means getting eyeballs to your blogs (or their RSS feeds) either to generate direct revenue from online ad sales or to increase engagement with the associated show and shore up its on-air audience. Hard numbers for these blogs aren't easy to come by as most of them are hosted on sub-directories of their parent network's site (of which more later). For those with their own domains, monthly uniques range from the low thousands to a peak of 25,000 for Robin's Daily Dose (see below chart from Compete).



As to whether these blogs pass muster on editorial merit, opinion seems very much divided. Steve Rubel describes character blogs as "a complete waste of time because a character is not and never will be human", although his comments seem mainly directed at marketeers, prompting a intelligent response from Rok Hrastnik on the marketingstudies.net blog, arguing that blogs are now reaching a more mainstream audience who don't care about "the rules" as defined by the early blogging adopters and just want to be entertained.

Assuming that your persuaded that there's either financial or brand building merit in creating a TV character blog, what are the other decisions you need to make before launching your blog? Here's a quick run down:

1.) Which character to choose

The most common approach is to pick a relatively minor character who is able to proffer observations on the key players without threatening the main thrust of the narrative (e.g. Joe the barman in Grey's Anatomy). Probably the most notable exception to this is Hiro from Heroes who has emerged from a large ensemble cast as one of the most popular characters in the series. Another thing to bear in mind is how plausible is it that this character would keep a blog? Whilst blogging is undoubtedly becoming a more mainstream pursuit, there are still some characters who feel a more logical fit for the medium.

2.) Who's going to write it

Pretty fundamental this one, the most obvious choice being the writers of the show's broadcast scripts who are used to writing dialogue for the chosen character. Potential pitfalls include a lack of enthusiasm/engagement from the writers who are used to writing teleplays for sizeable primetime audiences; agreeing a remuneration rate agreeable to all parties (lack of precedent) and how to handle comments (see point 4). Alternatives include a writer more comfortable with blogging but unconnected with the on-air writing process; the actor who plays the character on-screen (Judah Friendlander writes Frank Talk, Masi Oka contributes to Hiro's Blog and Rainn Wilson regularly scribes for Schrute-Space); or, if you really want to go out on a limb, a bunch of superfans (not sure anyone's gone down this route yet, although I think it would be fascinating to try).

3.) Frequency of posting

The frequency of posting differs wildly on the blogs surveyed below, ranging from the regular-as-clockwork weekly posters to the extremely sporadic. The issue here is managing users expectations and encouraging repeat visits (especially important when that most basic of blog features, the RSS feed, has been omitted). A related question is whether to continue blogging whilst the show is off air, increasing costs but potentially maintaining audience engagement between seasons. The recent WGA writers' strike forced many of the below blogs to cease updates for the duration, resulting in some creative explanations for the bloggers' absence: "Joe and I have been on a hunger strike for several weeks so I haven’t had the strength to blog" (from Grey's Anatomy's The Nurse's Station).

4.) Whether to enable comments

Often cited as one of the fundamental ingredients of what makes a blog a blog (along with reverse chronological entries, permalinks and subscribeable feeds), comments present an interesting dilemma for the authors of character blogs. On the one hand, you have comments which threaten to shatter the carefully constructed narrative universe by alluding to its artifice. On the other, you have comments which seek to engage directly with the character. Dealing with either is fraught with difficulties (do you pay the author to respond to comments in character?) which is why so many character blogs either ignore comments or switch them off altogether.

5.) Where to host the blog

There appear to be three main options when it comes to deciding where to host your TV character blog. One is as part of your TV network site which has the advantage of piggy-backing on existing infrastructure and Googlejuice but demands a greater suspension of disbelief amongst users as the artifice of the blog is made all the more apparent by the surrounding network livery. Another option is a dedicated domain name (e.g. http://www.jessandtess.com/) which can help to maintain the artifice that this is a genuine blog and feels pretty essential if you are going to show the URL as part of the on-screen drama (see point 6). That said, most of the below sites with a dedicated domain name have heavy network branding which arguably counters the main benefit of an off-portal URL. A third option is to use a third-party intermediary such as MySpace, which worked pretty well for FX with The Carver (http://www.myspace.com/thecarver) - 68,000 friends and counting.

6.) Whether to reference the blog in the on-screen drama

Not easy to do in a way that doesn't feel forced, weaving a TV character's blog into the on-screen narrative is another interesting call. Finding a way of rewarding users who are reading the blog with extra insights, without penalising those who aren't is a difficult balance, although somewhat easier in the wake of shows like Lost and Heroes which achieved this masterfully (see earlier post on Why Heroes raises the bar for multiplatform media).

Anyway, enough rambling, here's my round-up of existing TV character blogs. Let me know in the comments or on your own blog if you've come across any others or have a strong opinion about the merits (or otherwise) of TV character blogs.

Nigel Blog
http://blog.nbc.com/nigelblog/



Show: Crossing Jordon
Network: NBC
Active: February 2005 - March 2007
Comments: Yes

Schrute-Space
http://blog.nbc.com/DwightsBlog/



Show: The Office
Network: NBC
Active: September 2005 - present
Comments: Yes

Dave's Diatribe
http://www.didyouseethelights.com/



Show: Invasion
Network: ABC
Active: October 2005 - May 2006
Comments: Yes

Natalie's Blog
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/monk/webexclusives/blogs/teeger34.html



Show: Monk
Network: USA
Active: January 2006 - September 2007
Comments: No

Margene's Blog
http://boards.hbo.com/blog/Margenes-Blog/700000143



Show: Big Love
Network: HBO
Active: March 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

The Nurse's Station
http://www.seattlegracegossip.com/
og/Margenes-Blog/700000143



Show: Grey's Anatomy
Network: ABC
Active: April 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

From the Desk of Detective Sergeant David Gabriel
http://alt.tnt.tv/closer/blog/



Show: The Closer
Network: TNT
Active: June - July 2006
Comments: No

Hiro's Blog
http://blog.nbc.com/hiro_blog/



Show: Heroes
Network: NBC
Active: September 2006 - June 2007
Comments: Yes

The Emerald City Bar
http://www.emeraldcitybar.com/



Show: Grey's Anatomy
Network: ABC
Active: October 2006 - present
Comments: Yes

Barney's Blog
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/how_i_met_your_mother/community/barney_blog/



Show: How I Met Your Mother
Network: CBS
Active: March 2007 - present
Comments: No

Frank Talk
http://blog.nbc.com/frank/



Show: 30 Rock
Network: NBC
Active: March 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Creed Thoughts
http://blog.nbc.com/CreedThoughts/



Show: The Office
Network: NBC
Active: May 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Jessica's Reflections
http://www.jessandtess.com/



Show: One Life To Live
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Robin's Daily Dose
http://www.drrobinscorpio.com/



Show: General Hospital
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Kendall's Hart to Heart
http://www.kendallhart.com/



Show: All My Children
Network: ABC
Active: July 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

McCallister & Me
http://blogs.abc.com/mccallisterandme/



Show: Brothers & Sisters
Network: ABC
Active: September - October 2007
Comments: No

"Hmmmm" by Randy
http://blog.nbc.com/randy/



Show: My Name Is Earl
Network: NBC
Active: September 2007 - present
Comments: Yes

Toxic Shark
http://www.toxicshark.co.uk/
Show: Casualty
Network: BBC
Active: October - November 2007
Comments: No

Cam's Blog
http://blogs.abc.com/camsblog/



Show: Big Shots
Network: ABC
Active: October 2007
Comments: Yes

Marmaland
http://blogs.abc.com/theclog/



Show: Carpoolers
Network: ABC
Active: October - November 2007
Comments: Yes

Confessions From The Front Desk
http://blogs.abc.com/dellsblog/



Show: Private Practice
Network: ABC
Active: October 2007 - November 2007
Comments: Yes

Encyclopedia Britannica offered free to "web publishers"

Neat idea from the Encyclopedia Britannica who must have finally got bored of only ever being cited as an example of how established business models have been undermined by the internet and the cost of failing to respond to that change quickly enough (see below chart for headline traffic comparison with Wikipedia).



The scheme is called Britannica WebShare and is described as "A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles".

I signed up (here) yesterday afternoon giving this blog's URL as my "Web Content Site" and by 10pm had received an email confirming I had been granted access. It's not 100% clear what their definition of a web publisher constitutes although the registration form has a disclaimer at the bottom stating "This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify" and the FAQ advises that "If you go online and start a blog with one post just to get a free subscription to Britannica, we may say no".

In addition to unlimited personal access to the Encyclopedia, the WebShare initiative also encourages publishers to share the love by linking to individual articles which readers can access without being able to then move laterally through the site. So I can point you at this recently added article about Beck, which you can access, but to browse further you'd need to register for your own account.

They've also hopped on the widget bandwagon, offering embeddable 'clusters' of thematically grouped articles - below is their US Presidents widget (full list of available widgets here).



Whilst it may ultimately turn out to be too little too late for the EB, it's encouraging to see an 240 year old publishing company implement a fairly major rethink of its strategy and open up its content to the very people whose Wikipedia contributions have contributed to its decline.

My only criticism would be how poorly (if at all) the pages render in Firefox and Opera on a Mac. Sort it out guys.

5 lessons I've learnt from blog stats

Prompted by recent stats-related posts from Nick, James, Robin and Jemima and the imminent arrival of my 70,000th unique visitor (it could be you :), I thought I'd publish this blog's traffic stats for the first time and share five things I've learnt from them since I signed up for the rather marvelous StatCounter back in April 2006.



1.) In space, no one can hear you blog (it takes time to grow an audience)

As the above chart illustrates, my first year of blogging was essentially just me shouting down a well. Admittedly I wasn't posting very often and when I did, it was in a rather scattershot fashion, without any real unifying theme beyond the strange meanderings of my mind. Well the latter hasn't really changed any, but I did start posting more often and towards the end of 2006 traffic started rising and has continued trending in that direction ever since (recent weirdness excepted - see points 4 and 5). The moral of the tale: keep writing (regularly) about what you find interesting and eventually some like-minded souls will find your blog.

2.) Small can be beautiful (think quality not quantity)

Whilst there is unquestionably the potential for addictive/compulsive behaviour around anything which can be charted, be wary of actively chasing extra visitors in order to keep the graph heading upwards. Small can most definitely be beautiful when it comes to blog readerships (or any other online community for that matter) and a huge influx of new visitors can easily cause you to question if not the wisdom, then certainly the desirability, of crowds. Last summer's round-up of DIY live video streaming services earned me not only lots of new visitors but also what remains my all-time favourite comment on this blog: "You are on serious crack. You run a Mickey Mouse blog and your biased rating system proves it." (Thanks for the feedback, do come again...)

3.) A subscriber in the hand is worth two in the bush (check your FeedBurner stats)

Just like the print magazine business, a key measure of success for any blog is its subscriber base. Whilst there will be a proportion of regular readers who like to keep it old school and check back for new posts by visiting the blog, the vast majority will subscribe to the RSS feed instead. As a result, your feed stats can be more meaningful than your site stats in tracking the growth (or otherwise) in your regular readership. The below chart shows how subscribers to this blog's FeedBurner feed have recently overtaken daily unique visitors to the site (although this does coincide with a change in domain name which has reduced traffic to the site - see point 4, below).



4.) Changing domains can lose you traffic (but is worth it in the end. probably)

Despite reassurances from Google that all traffic to my old blogspot address would be seamlessly forwarded onto my .com domain, the stats tell a different story, with unique visitors dropping from 1,500 to 680 in the week following the move. Unfortunately the longer-term impact of the move is being masked by a comparison piece I wrote on lifestreaming services which caused traffic to spike to a record 2,000 visitors a couple of weeks later.

5.) Being Dugg isn't all that (beware the locust effect)

I take a perverse pleasure in reporting that my most dugg post to date (the aforementioned post on lifestreaming services) received a measly 35 diggs. Whilst Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit, et al. can be a boon for introducing new readers to your blog, they can also herald something of a false dawn, more akin to a swarm of locusts, who arrive on masse, eat all your bandwidth and then piss off, never to be seen again.

Right, that's me done. Anyone else care to share their learnings from blog stats...?

Related fabric of folly posts:
Towards a more meaningful conception of online performance

Reading recommendations - the people vs. Amazon

I'm off on holiday in a couple of weeks (praise the Lord) and have started turning my attention to my holiday reading list. Whilst it's true that I have a whole bookcase of unread tomes (silently reprimanding me for how little time I manage to carve out for dead-tree format reading these days), I'm always on the look out for new recommendations, especially in the run up to an away break.

Whilst you might expect any self-respecting geek to turn to Amazon for literary pointers, I have to confess to being somewhat underwhelmed by their feted recommendations functionality. Sure, it's useful for directing you to other books by authors you've previously purchased or books in a similar genre, but it fails to deliver much in the way of genuine serendipity (I don't need a computer to tell me that if I liked Atomised by Michel Houellebecq then I might also like Platform by Michel Houellebecq).

Which is where you, dear reader, come in. Following on from the successful vote to determine which mobile phone handset I should upgrade to, I'm once again asking for your help - this time in broadening my literary horizons with answers to the following three questions:

1.) What's the best fiction book you've read in the last 12 months?
2.) What's the best non-fiction book you've read in the last 12 months?
2.) What's your favourite book of all time (fiction or non-fiction)?

Feel free to respond to some of all of the above questions either via the comments section below or on your own blog. I look forward to reading your recommendations.

Related fabric of folly posts:
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson
The Tortilla Curtain

On turning three, leaving blogspot and becoming a dot-com

fabric of folly is three years old today so, to celebrate, I've decided to take the plunge and move this blog off the much maligned blogspot domain (with it's 77% splogs) and on to my previously dormant .com address. Whilst I'm guessing I may take a hit in terms of Googlejuice, all old links should be automatically redirected and, thanks to FeedBurner (yet another Google property), there shouldn't be any disruption to my RSS feed (let me know if you spot any weirdness).

If you'd like to join in the birthday festivities please feel free to make use of the newly added tip jar in the column to the right (replicated below for the terminally lazy / those using feedreaders). The default donation is 10 pence so don't be shy... ;-)



Related fabric of folly posts:
On being misidentified as a splog
Blogger beta & fabric of folly 2.0
Losing my blogging virginity

Photo: Damgaard. Used under licence

Lily Allen take-away widget

Building on the success of Seven Ages of Rock's embeddable video and adhering to number five of the BBC's Fifteen Web Principles ("Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site"), I'm pleased to note the launch of the below take-away widget in support of Lily Allen's forthcoming BBC THREE show. The widget offers a choice of video, a form to register your interest in getting involved and an opportunity to vote on which of two bands get their UK TV debut on the show each week. The widget is also available as a Facebook app (natch).


Full terms and conditions

Also noteworthy is the way in which the programme's production process is being opened up to the public via a deliberately work-in-progress website (described by Lily on her MySpace blog as "a bit crap at the moment, but we'll be updating it more and more everyday, and it's going to be amazing soon"), a Production Blog (written by the team at Princess Productions) and a YouTube group (inviting users to upload stuff that will make Lily laugh).

It's going to be interesting to see how all of this new activity dovetails with Lily's existing online presences such as her official EMI site and her MySpace profile (473,000 friends and 10.7 million profile views at the time of writing...)

Related posts:
Why Seven Ages of Rock rocks
Interesting times for the BBC online
2007: the year of the widget?

On being misidentified as a splog

It's not everyday Google accuses you of being a spammer but that's exactly what happened yesterday when Blogger sent me the below email alerting me that this blog had been "identified as a potential spam blog" and blocking me from posting until they had reviewed the site.



Mercifully, they were quicker than the promised four business days in reinstating my access, although I'm still none the wiser as to why it was singled out in the first place. Maybe my writing naturally displays the hallmarks of "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text" ;-)

A (hopefully) more plausible theory is that I'm suffering as result of actual spam blogs scraping this site and reproducing my copy. A friend had alerted me to this back in November after he chanced upon a duplicate of a post I'd written, but I wasn't sure what (if anything) I could usefully do about it (here's the original and here's the splog: http://inn4g.handigu.com/Mogopop (you'll have to cut-and-paste it as I don't want to give the bastards any Googlejuice).

Whilst I applaud Google's (arguably belated) moves to crack down on spam blogs hosted on blogspot domains, I can't help wondering whether giving bloggers an opportunity to validate the legitimacy of their blogs before blocking them from posting might be a smart move.

Bruce Parry blogging from the Amazon

Very excited about Amazon. No, not the online retailer (like they need the Googlejuice), but Bruce Parry's latest adventure and one of the BBC's first blogs to launch in support of a TV series. For the uninitiated, Bruce Parry is a former British Royal Marine instructor who now makes his living presenting anthropological documentaries such as the acclaimed Tribe (known as Going Tribal in the States) and the children's 'Serious...' strand (e.g. Serious Desert, Serious Arctic, Serious Andes).

Building on the success of Long Way Down (which had a pseudo-blog built using one of the BBC's content management systems), the Amazon production team have been blogging using Moveable Type since mid-October, when their epic journey began (in Miami airport). In addition to text entries, the team are also posting photos and embedded video clips (see below), which really enhance the offer. There's also an Interactive Map, overlaying the team's blog entries onto a Google Map so you can chart the narrative geographically.

What's exciting to me is the way in which the team are using the web to extend the life of the broadcast way beyond a single moment of transmission, to cover the whole production process (see Dan Hill's seminal piece on The Social Life of a Broadcast) and the blogging platform in particular, to provide an authored and serialised version of that narrative which users can engage with at any point.

It's not all been plain sailing of course - laptop problems forced the team to dictate some entries to the team back at base in Cardiff via satellite phone and they've had to implement a frustrating, but necessary, 3-5 week delay in actually putting the posts live to protect the security of the crew (watch the below video from coca country to understand why).



Huge props to Andrew Dudfield, Jo Pearce and the rest of the multiplatform team in BBC Wales for getting the blog up and running and looking so slick on the BBC's current installation of Moveable Type (no mean feat!) and David Felce for shoring up the platform (see Robin Hamman on 18 Months of Blogs on the BBC Internet Blog).

Amazon with Bruce Parry will air on BBC TWO in 2008.

Disclaimer: I work for the BBC. The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

8 Random Facts About Me (tagging meme)

Meme alert. Have just been tagged by Gary Hayes (of Personalize Media and The Project Factory) and tasked with sharing eight random things about myself and then tagging eight others to do the same. Whilst I share Steve Woodruff's reticence on the basis that it's slightly reminiscent of those hideous email chain letters, I'm not being threatened with disastrous consequences if I don't do it and I'm always loathe to turn down an invitation to talk about myself, so...

Here are the rules:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here are my 8 things:

1. I eat with my knife and fork in the 'wrong' hands (i.e. fork in my right hand, knife in my left). Not sure why.
2. I can put my feet behind my head (though not at the same time).
3. I've demoed DAB digital radio and podcasting to HM The Queen (not sure she was really feeling it).
4. My father appeared on Mastermind on 23rd March 1986 (unfortunately he wore matching yellow socks and tie, swore after giving a wrong answer and, er, came last).
5. I play the piano, guitar and harmonica. All very badly.
6. I lost 2 stone (c.13 kilos) aged seventeen when I fell in love for the first time (bless).
7. I am wholly at the mercy of Steve Jobs. In the last 4 years I have bought one iBook, 2 PowerBooks, 2 MacBooks and 5 iPods (a mini, a classic, 2 nanos and a touch). Rest assured most of them have now found new homes.
8. One of my tutors at university was Linda Ruth Williams, leading authority on erotic thrillers and wife of Five Live film critic, Mark Kermode.

That's my eight. I'm now proffering the baton / throwing down the gauntlet to this unsuspecting lot:

James Cridland (done)
Jo Twist
Martin Belam (done)
Nick Reynolds
Richard Titus
Robin Hamman
Roo Reynolds
Tom Coates

Blog Day 2007

In support of the 3rd annual BlogDay, which takes place today, I'd like to commend the following five blogs to you dear reader. Go bookmark!

Somewhat Frank - the musings of Virginia-based Frank Gruber who spends his days as a product manager at AOL (but don't hold that against him) covering Web 2.0, technology and life.

maxgadney.com - Witness a book being born as Max (a colleague at the BBC) talks through the illustrations for his work-in-progress Visual Miscellany of World War II.

James Cridland's blog - Ex-Director of Digital Media at Virgin Radio (now also at the Beeb) James posts on radio, digital platforms and occasionally, beer. Always worthwhile.

Roo Reynolds - Roo works as a Metaverse Evangelist (now that's what I call a job title) at IBM's Hursley Park lab in Hampshire and posts on a eclectic range of topics which pique his interest.

Wonderland - the brainchild of Alice Taylor (no relation) with a couple of other occasional contributors. If you only read one blog on gaming make sure it's this one.

Technorati tag: BlogDay2007

My digital life in numbers

I seem to have hit a bunch of digital milestones recently. Here's a summary:

• 100 blog posts (viewed by 20,000 unique users)
• 350 eBay deals
• 800 del.icio.us bookmarks
• 1,500 Flickr photos (viewed 35,000 times)
• 12,000 Last.fm tracks

(mental note: get out more).

fabric of folly widgetized

Thanks to yourminis fabric of folly is now a widget (embedded below) which can easily be added to your desktop, startpage, blog or social networking page. Nice.

Looks like 2007 is indeed turning out to be the year of the widget.

How many posts is too many?

You can't have too much of a good thing, right? Not so, suggests a recent poll on why readers unsubscribe from blogs. The (admittedly unscientific) survey on ProBlogger found that "too many posts" was the most common reason for readers unsubscribing from a blog's RSS feed, way ahead of "infrequent posting" and "uninteresting content".

Whilst the methodology and sample size (109) can hardly be described as robust, the sentiment struck a chord with me. It also bought to mind a recent Read/WriteWeb post on The Attention Economy, which argues that the information explosion precipitated by the Internet is causing a scarcity of attention. We no longer read, we skim. And we vote with our feet.

This chimes with my recent experience of trying to keep on top of 40 odd feeds via Bloglines, some of which are populated with new posts upwards of 40 times a day. Catching up with all my blog reading only to return a few hours later to find dozens of unread posts elicits a bailing-out-a-sinking-ship feeling in me, which is why I too have started voting with my feet. Is Ubergizmo a half-decent gadget blog? Yes. Are the posts generally interesting? Yes. Do I have the time/inclination to read 40 Ubergizmo posts a day? No. Have I unsubscribed as a result? Yes.

"But you don't have to read them all!" I hear you cry. Well, that's true but I don't want to have to scroll through all those posts to see if there are any that really float my boat. Not when I can subscribe to Gizmodo UK which publishes a far more manageable number of posts per day.

Of course, one man's over-posting is another man's under-posting and there's clearly no optimal posting frequency (there are no doubt some readers eagerly refreshing their browsers every other minute in anticipation of the next Ubergizmo missive).

Maybe the problem isn't that there are too many posts, but that I need a more effective filter. Perhaps it's outmoded of me to attempt to source my reading solely by author/publisher. Which is presumably where Spotplex is hoping to come in. The recently launched Digg-alike differs from the daddy of all popularity sites by tracking user click-throughs (rather than votes) to determine which posts should make the front page.

Whilst it's nice to have an alternative barometer of the blogosphere, Spotplex doesn't (yet) take account of my personal tastes or those of my friends (which Bloglines kind of does do, albeit in a dumb way). I'm thinking maybe I need some sort of mash-up of the two which indexes my favourite blogs, but prioritises the most popular posts, as well as filtering the wider blogosphere against my profile for posts which may be of interest to me.

On the basis that pretty much anything I think of in Web 2.0 space of late seems to have already been realised somewhere, I'll wait for someone to point me in the direction of a Spotplex/Bloglines hybrid. Until then, I'm off to cull some prolific posters from my blogroll...

Blogger beta & fabric of folly 2.0

So I decided to take the plunge and port this blog over to Blogger beta despite having read one or two cautionary tales. Those of you not reading this via an RSS reader will note that I also took the opportunity to give the site a much needed lick of paint (new logo, wider columns, bigger Flickr photos, yadda yadda yadda...)

So, what of Blogger beta? Is it as troublesome as everyone says? Well, it all depends on who you are and what you're after. If you're a newbie blogger looking to create an attractive and functional blog without getting your fingers covered in HTML goo then it's really not a bad choice. The drag and drop interface works well for basic layout changes and the labels (categories) are a nice addition. If, however, you're a seasoned blogger who's used to tinkering under the hood then it's likely to prove a frustrating experience.

I certainly wouldn't recommend moving an established blog over unless you've got a whole day to kill. In fairness, you are warned that your template may be affected by the move, although it's only once you've done the deed that you realise quite how many bits and pieces you had setup - the sidebar content, the FeedBurner feed and the Flickr login will all need reinstating/updating. Ultimately more annoying is the omission of some pretty basic bits of functionality, like making an image a link, although presumably this is the sort of thing that will be ironed out before it leaves beta.

The biggest boon from my point of view is the dynamic publishing - no more waiting for your whole blog to republish following a minor template tweak. The new spellchecker also impressed me as a simple but brilliant innovation - instead of a popup taking you through the text word by word, it simply highlights all the queried words for you to scan and correct as necessary using on-click dropdowns.

Whilst Blogger beta is undoubtedly an improved offering for blogging newbies and may be worth the pain for some intermediates, it is unlikely to tempt the pros away from Typepad or WordPress.

Blogcasting

Online text-to-speech apps are helping to blur the lines between blogging and podcasting. One such app is Feed2Podcast which uses text-to-speech conversion to instantly turn any RSS feed into a podcast. No need to register, just paste a compatible feed into the dialog box on the homepage. Admittedly there's only one choice of voice which is the classic Stephen Hawking style speech synthesizer. It also doesn't always cope well with punctuation.

Talkr offers a similar service, although you must register in order to generate a podcast and it got my postings back-to-front so the most recent blog entry appears last in the audio feed. On the plus side, the female voice synthesizer is a fraction easier on the ear and it makes a better fist of trying to interpret images and other metadata associated with the post. It also pronounced Flickr correctly whereas Feed2Podcast has to spell it out.

It's interesting to note that some traditional print brands are already exploiting this strange convergence of technologies. The International Herald Tribune's recently launched AudioNews service uses ReadSpeaker software to convert its articles into MP3s which can then be added to a custom podcast.

You can listen to a podcast of this blog (created using Feed2Podcast) here or subscribe to it using iTunes on either your Mac or PC.

Everything has a price (even this blog)

Intrigued to see whether Google's algorithms deemed this fledgling blog more link-worthy than the lyrics of a vintage Beck song (O Maria, from the criminally underrated Mutations album), I typed fabricoffolly into the search behemoth. In amongst the links to my LastFM and Audioscrobbler profiles, I was surprised to discover a link to the fantasy blog share market, BlogShares which values my musing at 1,000 blog dollars.

Eager to place my net worth in context I searched for plasticbag.org, the award-winning blog of BBC colleague Tom Coates and was suitably humbled by the B$230,314 valuation. Time to pull my blogging socks up methinks...