You failed
…charge of our children’s education for a decade have been driven by an ideology that one-off exams under pressure are a better judge of pupils qualities, rather than continuous assessment. And then when it came to a year when you couldn’t hold exams, they were given months to prepare, and produced an absolute fiasco. As education secretary and as a government, this was your one-off exam. I don’t think people think you’ve prepared very well for it,…
Bug Brain Check-Out?
…nking”. I remember on one occasion spending a lengthy amount of time doing comparative searches on the BBC website and Google itself to demonstrate the results could be replicated, and also gave him some free SEO advice about not having a sitemap file or optimised title tags etc, that ran to well over 1,000 words. He replied in about five seconds that it was clear I was a paid agent and a liar etc etc without even having possibly taken the time to…
Remembering how search engines reacted to the Columbia Shuttle disaster
…earch engine results by hand. We used to have a taxonomy system behind the search engine to recommend “Best bets” at the top of the results. I noticed that there had been a spike in searches for the country Colombia as well as for the correct name of the shuttle, so I set up “colombia” as a synonym of “columbia” and fixed it so people were getting the right news even if they had spelled the spaceship’s name wrong. Secondly, I blogged about search…
Closing Mustardland β the end of the Archers messageboard
…ing a digitally enabled one-to-one relationship with the audience. Hosting communities on the BBC website created a false expectation that users were part of an official feedback loop. So, Nigel explained, then they felt that their comments weren’t being listened to by the programme makers — “but then we’d never really made that promise.” This was very much the case when I used to help host the Points Of View section of the BBC’s messageboard in t…
βFrom Search to Socialβ – BuzzFeed, Facebook, Metro & UsVsTh3m at #SMWLDN
…dvantage of being able to start afresh, and it was striking to me that the examples of social media success I’ve heard about in the last couple of days from Quartz, BuzzFeed itself, and UsVsTh3m, are all free of the legacy constraints of trying to support any non-digital media. If Pinterest went out of business, BuzzFeed could quickly shutter that DIY section. A lot of legacy print operations are still producing a raft of expensive supplements for…
Friday Reading S12E06
…2021) – although the version that went out as a newsletter appears to have come through completely mangled. “I read Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland earlier this year which has allowed me to profoundly sharpen my perspective on how colonialism and empire shaped a lot of British thinking and popular culture without people realising it, and I think the Evil of the Daleks is a classic example of that. Kemel, played by Sonny Caldinez, is the only charact…
Friday Reading S07E08
…their Glasgow office. My old haunt Trinity Mirror have a lot of vacancies open for local democracy reporters – applications are open until 28 December. Find them on here. WIRED has an editorial internship vacancy. Six months, paid at minimum wage. The PGCert in Data Journalism at Birmingham City Uni takes place over 8 months and is part-time – applications open now Ms. magazine to looking to produce 12 teen girl-written articles in 2018 – find ou…
βEvery story starts with an audience of zeroβ – Jay Lauf of Quartz at news:rewired
…my friend from the Guardian Chris Moran is always keen to point out, that search traffic doesn’t come from the robots, the traffic comes from human beings typing words into a search engine. But Jay’s broader point, that news organisation expend a lot of effort on this and it maybe delivers 25% of their traffic, holds true. His third game was the “social” one. Making up the 60%-ish of your traffic that isn’t homepage or search driven, this consist…
A one-line review of (nearly) every gig I’ve been to in September 2023
…shows – but there was a suitcase full of modular goodness so you couldn’t complain. Manilla Filters at Cambridge Open Stage, The Blue Moon, Cambridge M-Orchestra, Electronic Open Stage, The Blue Moon, Cambridge, 14 Sep – Some dickhead with a blog, a laptop, some songs about ghosts, and a selfie in the bogs. m-orchestra at Cambridge Open Stage, The Blue Moon, Cambridge Under The Sun, Electronic Open Stage, The Blue Moon, Cambridge, 14 Sep – Really…
“How can you build debunking beats into your newsroom?” – notes from a panel session at #ijf17
…e kinds of situations. Again, it is something that worries me. It is media companies being pushed into spending resources on debunking information that is posted to further a political agenda. That seems a good cause to me. However, it is also resources wasted on people who are just posting fake info for the lolz, which seems a tedious thing to be up against. Alison Gow, digital innovation editor at Trinity Mirror Alison Gow bought a really useful…