I’ve whinged about regional settings before, but it turns out I’m bilingual. Who knew?

While the Mail has since tracked down the unhurt 31-year-old Clio driver, details were thin on the ground on Thursday last week as the surely-it-can’t-be-real video started to spread. Without much background we decided not to run it.

But I’ve been fascinated by the way that mainstream news sites covered the story, and by the way that they’ve all felt free to use the video (which, let’s face it, has to be seen to be believed).

The footage was originally posted by the YouTube user dogswick. His notes explained that it wasn’t his film, but that he’s a friend of the truck driver involved, who had been given a copy.

Video diary

Looking at different papers’ approaches, I wonder how some stand with regard to copyright law. The Sun didn’t bother sourcing the story or its stills, and felt entitled to repackage the video into its own flash player, complete with an advert prequel.

Perhaps that’s what you’d expect from the tabloids, but the Mail did much better, reproducing stills from the clip that were each credited to ‘dogswick / Youtube.com’, and embedding the original video at the foot of its article.

The Guardian also embedded the YouTube video and had managed to speak to haulage firm Arclid transport. The Telegraph had less information and reposted the video in its own player, albeit with a credit to dogswick and YouTube.

Finally, the BBC had the most in the way of background, but while it linked to the YouTube homepage it repackaged the video into its own player. While Steve Herrmann’s link policy post acknowledges that a link from BBC News can generate an overwhelming amount of traffic, this is YouTube we’re talking about.

Anyway, you get the idea. No two sites seem to have the same approach, but at least those embedding the original video are acting within YouTube’s terms. Of course, even then we may all be infringing someone’s copyright if it turns out dogswick didn’t have the right to post the video in the first place, but that’s his lookout.

And I’d love to know exactly what’s happened there, because after getting some half-million views he’s decided to take down the video.

I wonder why? The approach from ITN might explain it – as many subsequent comments on his channel imply – but I have an alternative theory.

Might his mate, the lorry driver – now suspended from his job and the subject of a police investigation – have administered the sort of shoeing that would have Malcolm Tucker taking notes?

I wonder if dogswick knows what hit him.

As Herrmann points out, the BBC has always provided relevant links – something I think is essential to good web journalism – but to date it hasn’t seemed comfortable bringing them into the body copy. That’s where the majority of the web seems agreed they should be – perhaps because the context tends to make them self-explanatory.

But the post is interesting not just because of what it asks, but because it shows the importance of clear linking policy to journalists. It shows how news organisations are only too aware of the value of links to the reader.

It’s also interesting for something it doesn’t mention – the value of links to the receiving site which, if they come from a goliath like BBC Online, is immense. This adds an extra dimension to considerations such as those raised by commenter Bob Almond – will you link to the websites of controversial or illegal newsmakers?

The BBC’s strategy review sets out that it should double click-throughs to third-party sites over the next three years. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply bringing the links into the body copy would achieve this.

I’m fascinated by this stuff, because it’s shit, but also because if Google News is going to allow it it drives home a depressing realisation: from day one, Charlie and I could have put all our ‘journalist’ crap aside and just rewritten optimised press releases as news – don’t think nobody wanted us to. We’d have hated ourselves and gained even fewer readers, but clearly they’re not the point.

So I’ve been thinking more about exactly why companies want psews on their websites. Make no mistake that it’s all about the optimised links, but a quick chat with @randipdhesi helped me better understand what’s going on. They’re not getting link equity from Google News, of course, but they are getting a degree of traffic, and there’s always the chance that people linking to the news story will – like I did – forget to add a no follow.

Linking 101

By omitting this, and thus conferring its (limited) authority to another site through a link, Hackbash is suggesting to Google that it rank that site more highly for search terms similar to the anchor text used. By way of an example, I know of a jolly good B&B. At the time of writing, search results for that exact term all relate to a pub in Hampshire. Within a day or two, now I’ve written that, the B&B closer to my heart should rank alongside it.

So that’s part of it, although of course you can’t control the text with which people link to your site*. But third-party sites that link to yours confer a more general sort of authority on it, and by careful management of links within the receiving site this ‘Googlejuice’ can be distributed in a controlled fashion.

By ensuring that any part of the site that attracts inbound links contains only optimised links that point to the site’s own product landing pages, a company can channel some of its incoming link love to its products. This helps them rank more highly when people search in Google for product-related terms. Like prestige car hire, commercial vehicle hire or fucking car lights.

Randip makes the point that a newsfeed is particularly attractive, because there’s no shortage of third-party sites who’ll syndicate, or simply rip off its content. In some cases the links stay intact, resulting in an optimised link to a product page from a third-party: the best of all worlds.

Tamsin’s written on the iCrossing blog about how Google’s useless in a crisis. To an extent that’s unsurprising; something as fast moving and serious as the Chilean earthquake is always going to generate a challenging amount of information and, as Tamsin says, much of this came via sources created specifically for the job. Google’s search algorithm wasn’t designed to reach an instant value judgement, and yet increasingly it needs to.

But news aggregation relates to established and ongoing sources, and as such it’s an area where a search engine has the time to fettle and refine its service. By now, Google News should be shit-hot. It’s tempting to say it’s half-way there.

* Search agencies, including iCrossing, do ask, and some webmasters are happy to oblige.

I came to it late – about two weeks ago, truth be told. I’d been struggling with IE, and have never liked FireFox enough to settle on it, resulting in an unhappy, slow and memory-hungry mix of both, depending what I was doing.

The billionth intrusive, annoying and slow FireFox update made me give Chrome a proper look. Within a day it was the default on the three computers I regularly use, chiefly because it:

-doesn’t crash
-starts quickly
-opens new tabs quickly
-has tear off tabs
-actually fucking remembers passwords if you ask it to
-doesn’t have an intrusive update every time you open it

But even once you accept that it’s just going to work properly and be useful, the details keep giving:

-if a site isn’t in your favourites, the star icon on the favourites button is unfilled. If it already is, the star is full.
-Chrome remembers the last favourites folder you saved a site to (Internet Explorer 8; why did you make this such a monumental pain in the cock?)
-the status/preview bar at the base of the screen is only as big as it needs to be, and it only appears when it has anything to tell you. It’s repositioned to avoid your mouse cursor
-the default new tab screen (detail above) is actually useful; containing thumbnail views linking to your eight most visited sites
-whether you type an address or search in the address bar, the appropriate result appears straight away
-Chrome can sync your favourites between multiple computers

It’s ironic, really, that I’ve discovered how good Google’s browser is at a time when I’m increasingly disappointed with the quality of its search results, but there you go.

Looking at the actual feed page it seems like there’s a problem – an 11 hour-time lag between a tweet and its appearance on the BBC page.

That and it looks fugly.

Good, then, that Facebook has no such plans – but not all good.

I know many who hate Facebook, but after a couple of years I’m still finding it a (mostly) useful way to keep up with a wider circle of friends. And in a couple of years, it still hasn’t shown me an advert that interests me.

Bless them for including the thumbs up option, but I don’t think there ever is going to be an advert I like. Which is why I think I’d be prepared to pay a micro-subscription if it meant I wouldn’t see all the ones I don’t.

Spotify charges a tenner a month to keep the marketers out of your music, but Facebook’s content is cheaper because it’s made by us. With that in mind, perhaps a reasonable price for Facebook Premium would be 50p?

Facebook has said in the past that it’s not charging, and ruminations on a premium account tend to focus on extra functions it might offer.

If I was going to pay, I’d want less.

I got a worrying email last night from a friend and ex-colleague, letting me know that he’d had a phishing message purportedly from my Last.FM account.

Oops, we both thought – I’d been hacked. I went in and changed my password.

I subsequently discovered an email to me ‘from’ another colleague that also looks very much like a phishing attempt. Interestingly, this email refers to a new Shoutbox message that doesn’t appear in my Shoutbox on the site itself.

It’s quite possible I was phished or that someone guessed my rather weak password, but the fact that there’s no message on the site when the email says there is suggests that something more sinister may be afoot – if the email isn’t from Last.FM, how would the phishers know my email address, which isn’t published on my profile page?

And although they could easily use my profile to find the people I know, these things don’t tend to rely on someone actually sat at a computer spending time on stuff like that – they’re normally automated.

So what’s going on here? Has somebody got hold of Last’s email database yet they’re unable to read the passwords? Was I phished? Or is there simply an easy way of finding someone’s email address from their Last profile?

**Update**

OK, I had to write this in a hurry and have now had time to take a better look. It is a straightforward case of my account being hacked or me having been phished. Working on a couple of theories…