hackbash

Earlier at work I chanced on the latest issue of Marketing Magazine. The second story is a survey, commissioned by the mag, which trumpets: “British Airways’ YouTube videos win public favour“.

Which is total cock.

The story explains how BA responded to the first of two cabin staff strikes by publishing videos on YouTube which, the magazine’s research suggests, are “winning over customers”.



Leaving aside any consideration that the one video I watched was a dry exercise in corporate spin, the article’s interpretation of the primary survey results is flawed.

The survey asked 1,000 consumers about BA’s campaign. Of those who’d seen it, “nearly 19% had an enhanced view of the airline”. Sixty-four per cent felt the same about the carrier, while “only 17%” said they had a diminished opinion of it.

The margin of error

There’s not much between 17% and 19%. If your sample size is 1,000 it’s 20 people.

But more importantly, look at the story’s exact wording (my emphasis):

The survey of 1,000 consumers, carried out with market research company Toluna, found that the majority of those who had seen BA’s campaign have either retained or improved their perception of the brand.

Which implies that not all of the sample had seen the campaign.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. The video I link to above has around 22,000 views at the time of writing and BA’s total YouTube views run shy of 130,000. Unless people are gathering in stadia to watch BA’s channel uploads on a single PC, that suggests hardly any of the general public have seen BA’s YouTube videos.

Charitably assuming that, perhaps, 10% of the Toluna sample were familiar with the campaign, that two percentage point difference amounts to two people.

Statistics are bent and twisted all over the backwaters of the news to make convenient arguments for vested interests. I’d always assumed that the liberties people took came from a need to further their own agenda. Perhaps that’s the case here, but I find myself wondering if it’s simply that marketers and PR workers can’t do the sums.

Or that they can, and they assume the rest of us are too stupid to undo them.

Tags: BA, magazine, marketing, maths, PR, spin, statistics, survey, YouTube

A couple of years back I was bleating at how it was a bastard to proof on Word 2007 because it couldn’t display consistently-sized spaces. Shame on me for not recognising characters ‘optimised for readability rather than layout’.

Yes, it turns out that Word’s separation of words with seemingly random amounts of fresh air is all about readability. As assessed by the Andrex puppy, I can only assume.

If you’re in the unlikely position of, you know, having a professional interest in copy with the correct number of spaces, it turns out there is a way to fix it:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Scroll down to the Display settings
-Tick Optimize character positioning for layout rather than readability
-Click OK to save the change

Incidentally, I discovered this when setting up a new netbook. With only 600 pixels of vertical resolution I was looking for ways to free up screen space, and particularly found myself wondering whether the huge Office Ribbon was strictly necessary.

If you’ve been using Office 2007 for a while, though, you probably know which of the ribbon views the various functions you use are on. Right-click the base of the ribbon, select Minimize the Ribbon, and revel in your liberated screen space.

Tags: 2007, layout, Office, proofing, ribbon, tips, Word

I feel like they know me already.

Tags: Advert, Facebook, genealogy, shit

Conventional wisdom has it that digital doesn’t degrade gracefully. That unlike, say, the random fuzz introduced into a conventional analogue TV picture by interference, you get the blocky, stalled or jittery breakdown more familiar to digital viewers.


It’s generally true, but not always, as I think the image above – produced when a network fault stopped playback of the video embedded in this Jalopnik post – shows.

Tags: art, degradation, FAIL, interruption, Lancia, rally, Stratos, technology, video

By now, surely the only person who hasn’t seen this Renault Clio being shunted sideways down the A1 (M) is the truck driver responsible, so just in case he’s reading:

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.

Tags: A1 (M), Arclid Transport, bbc, copyright, media, Renault Clio, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, The Sun, The Telegraph, video, Weatherby, YouTube

Tags: childish, Google, single entendre, titter

Interesting blog post yesterday from BBC News editor Steve Herrmann, essentially asking “how should we link?”

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.

Tags: bbc, hyperlinks, links, policy

One of the things about being a freelance technology journalist is that things like a telephone line and the internet are, you know, useful.

Imagine my joy then, on discovering last night that my phone line was misbehaving. It has subsequently died.

I can’t really begin to convey my contempt for BT just now, but hey – I’m going to try.

First off, I’d like to congratulate them for a period of just over seven months during which I was neither disconnected by mistake, nor were my calls excessively noisy, nor did my line spontaneously fail. Credit where it’s due.

But regular readers may recall that for the first nearly-three-years of living here I did experience noisy calls and very slow broadband.

Then, about seven months back, my line went dead. It actually wasn’t the first time (see link above) so I didn’t panic until, when I tried to report a fault, I wasn’t allowed to. It turned out there wasn’t a fault, because I’d been cut off.

It’s a difficult one to follow, this. When I first moved in my dad had helped me out by setting up some of my accounts. This had included the phone. Almost three years later he moved, from an entirely unconnected address to another entirely unconnected address – having his own problems with BT in the process, I should add.

That was the time my phone line died. It turned out that despite no request having been made, my line had been stopped along with dad’s. I subsequently discovered that mine had, BT say, been in my dad’s name all along – despite the distinctly me-specific information on all of the bills me-not-he had paid in the meantime.

Massive pain in the cock

This happened just before I went away for 10 days, and by the time I’d returned my broadband had been stopped (BE couldn’t provide it without a phone line to provide it on), I’d been reconnected with a different phone number and it was down to me to get BT to reunite me with the old one. I was also left to restore my internet access for which, understandably, I was charged.

I had intended to pass this cost on to BT along with a bill for the several pounds’ worth of mobile phone calls I ran up trying to resolve the issue, but life’s too short. So, it seems, is the period for which BT is able to maintain an acceptable level of service.

I am now properly fucked off. I have no words of wisdom to offer, but I do have a question: Given that we can buy our ADSL where we like yet it mostly gets into our homes over BT equipment, why exactly is it that we must still rent our landlines from BT and not, say, our broadband providers?

In fact, why do we still need a landline in 2010? What’s the reason I can’t just ditch my phone altogether, pay O2 just to provide broadband over what was once the landline, and use skype and my mobile as necessary?

Hmm?

Tags: BT, fault, phone, rant, service

Noun: pseudo news; Fact x Importance / SEO

Tags: definition, psews, SEO

I don’t know. Seems I’m still feeling pissy about the polluting effect of SEO on content. While Google News seems to have temporarily extinguished Autobulbs Direct, a host of similar sites are cropping up in its results, blabbering on about how the weather could delay prestige car hire customers (people) or how British commercial vehicle hire users (lorry drivers) are safer than their foreign counterparts.

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.

Tags: Google News, hyperlinks, newsfeeds, optimisation, optimised, psews, search engine optimisation, SEO