hackbash

[NB - I broke the images in this post. Sorry.]
I’ve been banging on about hyperlinks a bit lately, but they’re a pretty important part of writing online. Done well, embedding links within your copy can provide context, give a route to further reading, or even act as punctuation or emphasis. Taken together, the benefits improve [...]

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Look, I’m probably the last person in on this, but on the off-chance there’s someone still missing out: spEak You’re bRanes.
It’s a blog entirely built around comments left on the BBC’s Have Your Say website, where the public are invited to, you know, have their say, on topical matters.
No need to go into close detail [...]

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Just the other day I was singing the praises of the humble hyperlink, but today I’m reminded that perhaps not everyone gets it.
For example, I’m breaking the Top Gear website’s terms and conditions by including a link to them in this sentence. Why? Because they prohibit third-parties from linking to any part of the site [...]

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A while back, the BBC caused a ripple of excitement (at least for this blogger) when it started to furnish stories with social bookmarking links.
Far more significantly, perhaps, BBC News has just embedded a YouTube video directly into an article.
I’m not a regular reader of the BBC’s entertainment stories, but this is the first time [...]

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For all my protestations that there’s no great secret to writing for an online audience, after a few months in the job I’m beginning to notice a couple of more subtle differences in the way that it’s possible to use language when writing for the internet.
One area where this keeps coming up is with hyperlinks [...]

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I love the BBC’s most emailed and most read lists, partly because they help you spot interesting stories you might have missed, but largely because they show you where its readers’ collective mind is at: in the gutter.
Every now and then, particularly prurient and snigger-worthy stories resurface as a new wave of people dig them [...]

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Now I’m as partial to the odd cheeky piece of optimisation as the next digital marketing agency-based journalist, but the lengths to which some news feeds are being stretched is hilarious. Kwik-Fit Insurance News for example, which a colleague alerted me to earlier this week.
So dogged is their determination to rank highly for ‘women’s car [...]

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I recently wrote this article for the Press Gazette; some basic SEO tips for journalists. It’s nice to think that I might be developing a reputation for knowing what I’m talking about, but in fact the deputy editor found me through this blog.
I find that hugely encouraging. It’s not often as a journalist that you [...]

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A moment, if you will, to mark a milestone dear to our hearts. Some time this week, BBC News Online marks its tenth year.
Though I frequently knock it, there’s a lot to love about the site and what it represents - the availability of almost its entire archive, for example.
Charmingly, unlike most other sites out [...]

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Good to see the Financial Times opening up - a bit. You can now access 30 articles per month if you’re registered with the site, although my registration confirmation took about three hours to come through yesterday. Best not to wait until the moment you need to see something before signing up.
Anyway, the use of [...]

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