hackbash

How’s this for a paper trail? Dave writes a blog post bemoaning the distance between him and Marmite, I take a photo of my breakfast and post it on Flickr, somebody writing about whether wholemeal bread is healthy asks to use it to illustrate their post, I end up blogging about the whole thing.

Correct: no […]

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As regular reader(s) will know, I read BBC News Online a fair bit. Even so, I’ve never noticed this before. I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s in such a story of prurient interest, but there you go.
So, searching the Beeb for Newstracker reveals that, at least in theory, this has been running since 2004. It’s seemingly […]

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I expect I’m not alone in noticing some entertaining needling between the Guardian and Telegraph in recent months, as the two scrap for first loser when it comes to web views - the BBC leads by a mile, The Mail snaps at their heels.
No doubt it’s driven by valid concerns and genuine differences, the most […]

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Or: Why newspapers should wake up and smell the link etiquette.
Been meaning to post on this for a while… now Mark Higginson has gawn done it, with this incisive observation on how annoying it is when websites insist on treating themselves as a final destination rather than one point on a journey.
He takes the […]

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There’s been a bit of Twitter-bashing around the office recently - mainly by those who haven’t tried it.
Some of the carping might as well be saying that ‘conversation’ is pointless because a lot of folk spend all day talking about Amy and Britney. It’s not about the most popular content of the medium, it’s about […]

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Sorry, I know, I know, it’s about the BBC again, but I’ve just realised that there’s an increasing vogue on BBC News for bunging up a bit of video without sound, or without any commentary, detail or analysis.
Hell, even I can do that (I wouldn’t bother watching this, incidentally: it’s not that interesting)

And, while I’m […]

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I’ve come to a mini-realisation. There is no getting away from IT.
Let me fill you in - I used to work in tech support, which was OK, but there’s only so many progress meters a man can take. If you laid mine end to end they’d probably reach Belgium.
My plan was to begin my career […]

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OK, let’s see if you can spot the flaw in this particular child-protection idea simply by reading the following standfirst:
Sex offenders’ e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children.
Any inkling why that might not work?
Frankly, I find it astounding that anyone could even write […]

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I’m particularly bleary-eyed this morning, so I’d read half a story before I noticed, but the BBC seems to have changed the layout of its stories. Interestingly, they haven’t changed the front page (yet?), so the two don’t match particularly well.

UPDATE:
Ah, must have caught them mid-change, here’s the new front page. I like it - […]

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Love this find from Tamsin M - a top piece of SEO-jiggy news, to rival the stuff we’ve seen before.
New and used car drivers ‘paying more than ever for fuel’
To be clear, the story is that drivers - all drivers - are paying more. But ‘used car’ is the host site’s desired ranking term, […]

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