I haven’t done a music recommendations post for a good while – but stumbling upon Mixcloud the other day, it occurred to me this site has a lot of potential.

It’s an attempt to converge radio broadcasts, mixtapes and podcasts into the one search-friendly environment – and it works pretty well for finding stuff you haven’t heard yet.

Big media organisations can draw on the knowledge of professional researchers and experts, who will suggest suitable music for audio or visual packages.   Trying to find an equivalent to this wisdom isn’t easy online, albeit searching LastFM for other people who share some of your tastes, and Amazon’s Listmania! lists can both help point you in interesting directions.

Mixcloud offers similar help – just search for an artist you know (you may need to filter the results, using the tabs above) and you’ll find plenty of mixtapes where that artist has been shoehorned amongst others – sure there’s no guarantees that everything will be useful, but I got some interesting results when searching for Serge (Gainsbourg) - including a few French psychedelia artists I’d never heard of before.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, mind – but there’s plenty of potential in here for most tastes.

So The Spectator is first to peep above the parapet on the story that will not be gagged: #Trafigura.

Gallus Alex Massie has chosen to take those legal bullies on, after taking stock of the wave of outrage expressed across the social media.  A calculated risk no doubt.

I find it interesting, though, that he chose to attack the BBC for not (at the time of writing) having run a story on this (they since, of course, have).

Had Alex done a little research he would know that the BBC were are in the process of being sued for libel having previously reported on this waste scandal, broadcast on Newsnight, on 13 May 2009.

You can hardly accuse them of not having done their part.

Meanwhile, a quick search of trafigura site:spectator.co.uk shows that the Specator’s interest in this story spans as far back as….today. 

Now that’s a smart bit of bandwagonry.

Last week, John Gapper reported (in the FT) on the underreported death of Reinhard Mohn, founder of publishing behemoth Bertelsmann.

The piece strikes an elegiac note, revisiting the well established old media struggling to come to terms with new media meme.  But two more recent stories would tend to suggest that the era of the mogul are far from over.

Yesterday brought us news that Google’s plans to create its own Library of Babel are being opposed by Angela Merkel.  The extent to which this old school protectionist step was inspired by her good friend, and heir to the Bertelsmann dynasty Liz Mohn, can hardly be ignored.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s Organ Grinder, Peter Preston gave us an insight into just how James Murdoch’s influence has informed the proposed Times+ online subscription platform, toward implementing a Berlin wall round the News Corp empire.  Murdoch Junior’s tirade against the BBC and Ofcom in August have led some to  the conclusion that a Faustian pact has already been signed between the Murdoch empire and the Tories with a view to carving up the future media market.

Others may speculate, but one thing’s for sure - there’s life in the old media dynasties yet.

Andrew Keen continues his crusade against the amoral and amorphous blob consuming us all, in today’s Telegraph.

While I find his particular brand of techno-pessimism a welcome counterweight to some of the techno-utopianism that exists out there, one or two aspects of today’s polemic (issues he raises time and time again) merit taking issue with. Namely:

As Clay Shirky argued last weekend at Ryerson University, the Internet has so confused and collapsed the distinction between audience and author that the ethical rules of the old economy no longer work. The old dichotomies of content and advertising, once governed from above by all-powerful, centralised organisations like the FTC and News Corp, have been made increasingly redundant by the internet.

The implied monopoly on ethical rules embraced by the ‘old economy’ frankly doesn’t line up with this surfer’s day-to-day experience, neither of new media nor old.

To imply that the Internet is a moral wasteland seething with swivel-eyed, loony-tune demagogues, and free-riding spongers, does a severe dis-service to the millions who contribute their well-reasoned opinions, expertise and knowledge.

There is also an implicit golden-ageism about the old media here, which just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps Andrew might further elaborate on just how ‘all-powerful’ the FTC has been historically, with regard to enforcing ethical standards on the US broadcasting media. For example, Commercial Alert, and Sourcewatch both provide several examples and research demonstrating the creep of product placement into news programming there.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have seen a clamour for reform of the Press Complaints Commission. A range of voices from outwith the old media (MediaWise) and within (The Media Standards Trust) are now using the Internet to mobilise, and hold old media to account on policing their ‘ethical rules’. These groups wouldn’t exist if everything in the garden were rosy.

While it is true that the online medium brings with it ethical challenges, to frame the changes we are living through as, in effect, barbarians storming the gate, does no credit either to the new media, nor the old.

Open communication and transparency should be at the centre of media standards. And online can be a very effective platform upon which to develop these virtues.

Last week Delicious announced some new options, the most useful of which falls within Search refinement and graphing features.

Having had a quick play, it occurs that – yes, this is a welcome move, both from a visual and ease-of-search perspective.  The new feature lets you filter down to results saved in the last five minutes, rather than the previous day – which is welcome as far as real-time newsgathering is concerned.

What’s not so useful, however, is that it doesn’t seem possible (I assume, based on several tries) to lift an RSS feed from your search results – the generic feed which shows up once your search results are returned/filtered is of little help when narrowing your focus.

If you are looking to keep uptodate with delicious saves as they are made without making use of a delicious widget in iGoogle (and the like), it seems you have to continue down the manual, delicious/tag/<tag name> route.  But this also means (I assume) that you can’t combine a search term with a tag – which seems a bit like a missed opportunity.

Found this little beauty on a trip to Richmond library earlier today…

Casting an eye over the Telegraph home page a moment ago I spotted a typo which encapsulates the importance of chunking as an intellectual (i.e. human) process in the rendering of news online. 

The above chunk on the homepage points to the following story within the site. 

There’s nothing wrong with the original title or sub-header. There is plenty of space on this page to provide a lengthy, indicative title, and a thorough description of the story in the sub-header underneath.

But the homepage can’t offer this story so much space, or certainly not if the font is to be of a legible size.

So it’s left to the copy editor to adequately summarise this information in such a way that the essence of the story is conveyed. Not always an easy job.

Though there is clearly a mistake here (we’re all human, after all), what this process nonetheless demonstrates is that this sort of job cannot be automated – it has to involve human input, as no algorithm no matter how sophisticated, is yet capable of dealing with formal grammar. And even if we do get to a stage where programmes can interpret language in a meaningful and consistent way, they will still lack the ability to connect with the reader in an intuitive way. Which may be the only way to express a complex story in the small amount of space many stories can claim on a home page.

While it’s not necessarily the journalist who undertakes chunking like this when they file a story, it is certainly an important consideration when it comes to putting together amateur news sites, blogs, or microblog teasers.

Aside from offering useful reminders on ‘i before e’ exemptions, and the proper placement of apostrophes, news style guides sometimes offer an insight into the values of news organisations, and the social mores of their audiences.

Take guidance on use of the words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ in news, for example.

The BBC suggests its (radio) journalists accord with the following code:

…some people believe the word “homosexual” has negative overtones, even that it is demeaning. Most homosexual men and women prefer the words “gay” and “lesbian”. Either word is acceptable as an alternative to homosexual, but “gay” should be used only as an adjective. “Gay” as a noun – “gays gathered for a demonstration” – is not acceptable. If you wish to use homosexual, as adjective or noun, do so. It is also useful, as it applies to men and women.

The Times style guide says:

gay fully acceptable as a synonym for homosexual or lesbian.

And the Guardian style guide says:

gay: Use as an adjective rather than a noun: a gay man, gay people, gay men and lesbians not “gays and lesbians”

Meanwhile, in the US news producers including AP, New York Times & Washington Post have all been working from the same principal for a long time now:

The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post all restrict usage of the term “homosexual” — a word whose clinical history and pejorative connotations are routinely exploited by anti-gay extremists to suggest that lesbians and gay men are somehow diseased or psychologically/emotionally disordered, and which, as The Washington Post notes, “can be seen as a slur.” AP and New York Times editors also have instituted rules against the use of inaccurate terminology such as “sexual preference” and “gay lifestyle.”

By contrast with this earnest and sensitive approach, some of those ‘culturally traditional’ sources in the US continue to persevere in their battle for control of language with such zeal that absurd consequences can abound – see The Dangers of Auto-Replace.

Getting back to Blighty, the Telegraph style book offers markedly different guidance to any of it’s UK competitors:

gay: permissible in headlines if essential but use homosexual in text.

There is no sense of equivalence here. Instead, this coded compromise hints at the pervasive nature of the permissive web surfer.

For ‘essential’ we surely can’t discount ‘essential to search traffic’. Words in <title> tags take precedence over terms used in body-text when it comes to search ranking, the significance of which becomes apparent when you bear in mind that last year 50% of telegraph.co.uk traffic came via search.

Off-line, The Telegraph balances alienating the ‘pink pound’ against reaching out to the paper’s older, more socially conservative readers to whom the term ‘homosexual’ is preferred to ‘gay’.

Online there is not yet such a thing as a ‘pink pageview’ – search favours the majority term over the minority one (check Google Trends for the runaway winner here). This simple market truism might have financial, as well as political consequences for any news outlet swimming against the tide.

But of course all of the above style advice is intended for the present – so what of the future?

Politics (and potential offence) aside, if telegraph.co.uk’s core readership, who might comprise a future subscription-base, expect to read (and find) news containing those terms they prefer rather than those terms the rest of society uses, then this might present another facet to the development of niche online news.

Of course it could be argued that this approach would risk alienating younger readers whose preferred choice of terminology may render certain words and phrases obsolete.

But this assumes that a hardcore of younger people (and future subscribers) won’t align themselves to a political outlook which prefers usage of one term over the other, which given the nature of politics seems unlikely.

It could equally be argued that people don’t care sufficiently enough about the political and social significance of these (or any other) terms, to the extent that it would influence their decision to spend money on information provided elsewhere free-of-charge.

But on the other hand, web usability tells us that reader-experience is core to creating successful online copy and branding, and that developing trust (which might include the consistent use of preferred words and language) is key to success on the web.

The waybackwhenmachine is often used as a cache cow on slow news days.

And so today’s Telegraph has a ‘story‘ on what various ‘popular sites’ looked like back in the day (I wonder how popular number 18 was back then, hmmm….).

It has been meticulously (and no less predictably) exposed by an audience who know more about the source and the article’s content than the journalist who wrote the piece. Nothing new or awful there, for anyone familiar with the mantras of networked journalism at any rate.

But all this could have been obviated if only the author (and/or editorial, and/or CMS) factored in some very basic web etiquette.

First – these screengrabs exemplify all the downsides of reverse-published shovelware – none link through to the original source in archive.org, which means people can’t check the details for themselves – transparent this ain’t.

Take the Google screengrab – The Telegraph tells us that Google was launched in 1996, which seems to be correct according to Google’s own official history – albeit the fledgeling search monolith was called Backrub back then.

But when you go to Google’s entries in archive.org you will find there aren’t any prior to 1998.

Fair enough – newsroom pressures and all that, getting the earliest available entry is near enough – but clearly the earliest working entry (02/12/98) is different from the version they have chosen to publish.

Which again is no sin (aesthetic considerations and all that) – *unless* that is, you value data in the same way you value information when it comes to journalism.

If the journalist (or editor) in question had interrogated this data in the same way he/she has been trained to interrogate an interviewee, he/she may have decide that the porous nature of this secondary source (inconsistent archiving, multimedia is often missing etc.) might necessitate getting in touch with the primary sources (i.e. Google et al) to triangulate findings, and enquire after these earliest images where they aren’t available.

More depressingly, this article embodies how we are sleepwalking into a future where the origins and history of the web are not consistently being kept for posterity, history, culture – you name it, despite archive.org’s best intentions.

Though going route-one would have improved this article, a future where the visual history of the web is held in private hands only, is no solid foundation for history.

For a while now spam has become an increasingly trying problem in Twitter.

Until last Tuesday, my experience with spammers had been broadly restricted to blocking those unsolicited followers, with their rudey pics and uncomfortably-informal tweets.

But that evening, while listening to the West Ham vs Millwall game on the radio, I decided to have a quick scout to see who out there was sharing their experience of the bedlam at Upton Park. What I got was a dose of the bedlam that spam is bringing to real-time search results on a hot news topic.

Most of the spam I saw at different points on the night were quite easy to spot, where trending words like upton or millwall were being dumped unceremoniously into text and links about Viagra, making free money and the like.

But spamming can be more sophisticated than this – spammers lift what looks like perfectly valid text and topics while depositing links to dubious sites (and possibly malaware) on the end, and can even retweet-spam your own content to their own ends.

Danny Sullivan who has experienced these matters first hand, suggests the following ways real-time search engines could help us avoid spam:

1. Accounts less than a day old don’t get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
2. Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
3. Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe

But while there are some services (not all of them publicly available yet) gearing up to deal with this problem, real-time engines already provide a range of ways to help users spot and deal with misleading content.

In terms of spotting spam, link previews and follower counts are included in some engine’s search results, to let you see what you’re clicking on, and see how trustworthy (or at least how active) your source is.

In terms of ridding your results of spam, there’s always boolean. While it would be really useful to have an updated index of popular spam terms which could be filtered, you can always get your hands dirty and use the – (AND NOT) operator to do your bidding – providing, of course, that boolean is supported in your engine of choice.

So here’s what I found in the search results of various engines:

Engine

Link previews

Follower count

Boolean support

I’ve discounted Tweetmeme in this comparison because traditional MSM stories tend to dominate amongst the Re-tweets, and I wanted a comparison in terms of breaking news, not ranked results (as is similarly found with OneRiot). Also, I haven’t included those aggregators and metasearch engines like Addictomatic and Surchur because they don’t deal exclusively in real-time search.

Although advanced Twitter search doesn’t offer a follower count option, it does offer the option to ‘expand’ shortened urls. It allows full (and intuitive) boolean search, real-time geo-search, and the option to only return tweets with links in them – making it a far more robust alternative to Geochirp.

As such it is easily the most utilitarian of the engines out there, but hats off to Icerocket for being the only who provide a follower count.

Twitterfall doesn’t tell you how many followers a Twitterer has, but it lets you preview the url (Rather than the page itself), which is pretty time-saving (by comparison with the more time-consuming offering in Scoopler). Twitterfall also supports boolean. However, I personally still find the interface confusing (removing searches, pausing searches, scrolling through results etc).

Those engines which focus on a particular niche in tweeting (Geochirp in terms of geo-location, and PicFog in terms of multimedia) are the least reliable in terms of dealing with spam – neither support boolean.

So in conclusion, I’d say if Advanced Twitter search were updated to incorporate Icerocket’s follower count, it would be hands-down winner.

Reading through one of Paul Bradshaw’s slideshows, I was impressed by a word cloud created by Eric Ulken, which summarises the technical knowledge required in various online journalism job descriptions (from January 2008).

Which got me to thinking – I wonder where we are in terms of converged journalism in practice in the UK today.

What are those skills being sought by journalism employers today, and to what extent do they support notions of convergence in journalism?

So I took the latest 25 results from journalism.co.uk’s jobs feed.

I then manually scraped the job descriptions from 24 results from this search of guardian jobs for the term journalism, and took the 10 results for a search of the BBC jobs site for journalist.

Once I’d dumped all this content in a .txt file (nb: this file is very messy) I then iteratively stripped out lots of unhelpful words like ’skills’, ‘knowledge’, ‘experience’, ‘role’ ’salary’, and any numbers, as well as those repeated BBC-speak terms – they have a core template of qualities for pretty much all of their jobs.

Caveats apply – for example, I noticed at least one job description saying technical skills were *not* necessary – so I’ve removed that particular term.

So here are the results:

Text cloud for UK journalism jobs

After ‘news’, ‘radio’ is the biggest term, while the terms ‘broadcast’ and ‘writing’ are roughly equal, a tier down the pecking order. What to make of this given the weighting of BBC jobs isn’t absolutely clear, but the fact that ‘online’ is smaller than any of the above in this analysis can’t be ignored.

The prevalence of B2B jobs, and their impact on journalism is certainly reflected in the relative popularity of words like ‘business’, ‘client’, ‘financial’,'industry’, ’sales’, and ‘market’.

These results include several non-traditional journalism jobs, such as for communications officers for charities and PR companies, and a number of B2B jobs in financial journalism.

Speaking of PR, churnalism watchers will be drawn to the relatively high distribution of PR jobs in these journalism listings, as evidenced by the term ‘communications’.

All references to ‘equipment’ (quite small) come from the BBC jobs – suggesting that technical skills are not so highly prized, as those traditional journalistic domains, including ’stories’, ‘production’, ‘judgement’ and even ‘live’.

Elementary aspects of the profession, such as ‘current’, ‘daily’, ‘ideas’, ‘events’, are pretty easy to find.

One final thing that really jumped out at me was the size of ‘team’ in these results.

Journalists are often portrayed as an individualistic bunch, which is something I’ve had reinforced by experience, and there’s no doubt that a competitive edge informs newsroom politics.

But these results demonstrate that teamwork is nevertheless clearly a valued attribute in all sorts of journalism. And those who make good team-workers within the confines of the office are likely to make good collaborators with the former audience out in hyperspace, as news continues converging.

FleetStreetBlues gives the lowdown on the latest online hoax to catch UK online broadsheets cold.

The hoax site at the centre of this story (since disappeared, but the contents of which are still viewable via cache) is registered to an address in Stoke Newington.  However, most of its content was lifted hook line and sinker from the Mayor of Baltimore’s official site – including the contact details for various officials who could have been called at any time to verify the validity (or otherwise) of the message.

Lecturing aside, FSB suggest this howler owes a debt to the army of interns drafted in to man the press in silly season – but that’s not really the story here.

For me the most disappointing thing about this hoax is not the point it succeeded in making, but its predictability; its leaden-footed lack of ambition, which seems to be an upward trend in online hoaxing these days. 

Now of course – let me be clear - I am in no way underplaying the importance of journalists checking the reliability of information they find online – the hoaxer has a point. 

Message.  Received.  Over.  And.  Out. 

But is the corollary of such hoaxes that we should have algorithms writing the news as well as syndicating it?  It’s not like hoaxes didn’t exist before the Internets (i.e. before journalists had to deal with the demands of 24-hour news).  But anyone can now leave an online banana skin for unsuspecting journalists to slip on, and this speaks to the underlying vanity which seems to inspire more than a few hoaxers today.

There was a time when online hoaxes were a bit more grand in their intentions, and a bit more nuanced in their approach - like sticking it to irresponsible multinationals, or creating a new sex craze.  They worked so well because they aimed beyond the target of journalists not checking their facts, to engage with wider social issues.  Afterall, whose perfect?

But today we have one-dimensional hoaxes such as David Milliband on Twitter, and fabricated quotes by Maurice Jarre. Both of which make a valid point, but the same one over and over and over again – every few weeks it seems.

We have a justified groundswell against churnalism these days, and I say we should take a similar aproach to those uninspired and self-indulgent hoaxes which bring nothing new to the table, and which (worse still) aren’t even that funny.

Lets have an end to hoaxsploitation,  stereotrickery and hoodwankery.

Last week brought news that the Daily Mail are going to stop pre-moderating comments on their website.

Legal issues aside, this move was seen as a good way for the Mail to make the most of it’s existing community, and widen it further still, because:

Having users comment on articles is a great way to increase engagement with a website, and have people coming back to keep up with ongoing debates, making for a stickier experience and more page impressions.

So what a shame they went and spoiled it all this week, by ripping off another longer-established online community – the Mumsnet forum.

I only hope this cheap shot doesn’t sour relations between the Mumsnet community and the wider pool of responsible journalists and broadcasters, who are genuinely interested in reporting their experiences and opinions, as opposed to reverse-publishing their comments without consent to pad out the day’s edition.

Still it goes to show – there’s few things stickier online than a spot of cut-n-paste

Search can be a time-consuming business.

It’s therefore often a good idea to refine your search to those parts of the web most likely to yield relevant results. Which is where Google’s filetype: function has always proven itself handy.

This function allows you to refine by the type of content you are concerned with finding – like PDFs (.pdf), Word documents (.doc), or Power Point slides (.ppt).

Refining by filetype allows you to take advantage of the context which prompted that content to appear on the web in the first place.

For example, if you are after an expert in seismology for a package you are putting together on earthquakes, one way to refine your searching is to acknowledge that a good few experts in the field will have published the Power Point slides they present at conferences and public debates. You can therefore use the filetype: operator to tighten up your results.

It’s a fuzzy way to search, but can help you avoid commercial sites which often clog up results in research-based search.

However, there has always been a problem with the filetype: function in Google – it requires browsing down through file titles which have not necessarily been named in a way which reflects the content contained within them.

Which is where Bing’s contains: operator can come in very handy.

Rather than just bring back the file in question, it brings back the page containing the file – providing context for your results.

Let’s take an example – say you were interested (for the purposes of news-gathering) in finding out what data are available via those Freedom of Information requests published on whatdotheyknow.

Compare results for:

site:whatdotheyknow.com filetype:xls (in Google)

…with…

site:whatdotheyknow.com contains:xls (in Bing)

While Google returns more results, the browsing quality of those results is poor by comparison with those returned by Bing. You can’t know what data is contained within a file called Sheet_1 without clicking through, which seriously slows down the browsing process. And even when you click through to the file, the purpose of the information you are looking at won’t necessarily be clear (or at least obvious) from content within the file.

By contrast, in Bing’s results these data are presented in the context which led to them being published in the first place. You can see the title and nature of the FOI request, and other useful bits and pieces of information which can help you decide what you need faster.

In searches such as these, it’s a good idea to cover all the bases – so don’t forget to cover all the relevant filetypes, including (for example) searches on the .docx filetype if you are interested in Word-processed content (this is the default Word filetype in Microsoft Office’s “Open XML” versions), or the .ods filetype when searching for spreadsheet data (the Open Office alternative extension to .xls).

A nod to Paul Bradshaw for tweeting this great article in Read Write Web on the various ways Tweeters can archive their Tweets.

There’s some info in here that should concern any journalist wishing to make full use of Twitter, beyond the very basics of sharing and gathering breaking news:

At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this “date limit” has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter’s search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is “around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow…

This is something I noticed myself recently when trying to collate a list of Tweets on our recent CIJ Summer School from earlier last month – several Tweeters had used the #cij topic, but when searching for these quotes a fortnight later, I was alarmed to see many had seemingly disappeared from Twitter’s index.

In the (understandable) gold rush for currency in social (or real-time) news, its not uncommon for more staid (and less sexy) issues like provenance to get forgotten, or at the least down-graded.

But ten days is a horribly narrow time limit for any journalist trying to eke out stories, issues, potential contributors, or other newsworthy trends – indeed, by comparison even with the relatively shallow sources for mainstream news (i.e. Google News – 30 days) it is tiny.

Artist’s impression: the window of opportunity in Twitter search

Still, while there is clearly value in the (admittedly vague) hope that most of us will diligently go about archiving their own Tweets for future use (and for the greater benefit of us all), all is not lost – a touch of advanced searching in Twitter’s main rivals will often do the trick nicely.

Personally, I’ve found the most useful Tweets I’ve ever seen (in work, and leisure) contain links – high-value social discovery. So with this in mind, it’s a good idea to include in your search some key url-shortening domains – see the following search for Tweets on the issue of micropayments in news:

micropayments news (tinyurl OR bit.ly) site:http://twitter.com/

Better still, once your results come back, hit the ’show options’ tab at the top of the page:

You can then refine using the Custom Date Range option – see these result from 2007 – 2008.

But as ever in search, its no good relying solely on Google to do your research for you, so try the same search in Bing and – as sure as eggs is eggs – you’ll get a different number of results (the initial Google search yielded 143, to Bing’s whopping 234). While this discrepancy hints at content potentially being lost forever in-between these two indexes, it is at least gratifying to know that some of it is findable in future.

I’d like to think that another possible value in searching for Tweets in either Google or Bing could be that spam is less likely to be indexed, though that could well be wishful thinking on my part.

It’s a shame that Twitter has organised its folder system with the statuses folder nesting within the username – as this prevents a strict search of statuses only, but heyho – you can’t have everything.

Ever since Google News lost its RSS button in search results (leaving my browser to do the job of notifying when RSS is available), I’ve noticed a feed I’ve got for a search on FOI OR “freedom of Information” is rendering some weird results in my reader pane, here (check the description text):

When you click on one of the links, you get a new page opening up with the following message:

Now that’s not to say that the feed no longer  works – copy and paste any of the titles which come back in my original feed into Google and you’ll find the article.  But it’s an unnecessary extra step.  And what’s worse, if you now try and save a new boolean search in Google News as RSS (lets say the same one above), you’ll find you can’t.

If you click on the More Information tab in the Feed Code Error page, it says A semi colon character was expected. followed by a lot of RSS that actually shows the links to stories, along with the error code.

Fair doos, boolean isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – but for some of us it is important. Any chance we could have it back, please or if someone could tell me if I’m going wrong somewhere?

Yesterday’s front-page splash in The Mail (Bonuses for doctors: How GPs are earning up to £380,000 a year) generated quite a bit of interest in the wider press; spreading as far as (note the use of shock quotes)  The Telegraph, the Evening Standard and The Sun.

It also generated quite a bit of user feedback in the Mail’s own pages – here is the most popular user-response on the story from yesterday: 

Now, leaving aside a couple of factors, namely:

• The emphasis on one (incomplete) source of data, in the form of the FOI request which generated this information, and;
• The fact that the journalists in question could quite easily have obtained official figures for comparison with this data via the NHS Information Centre (but chose not to publish) and;
• The fact that both the TaxPayers’ Alliance and The Patients Association got right of reply on this story, while only the BMA were given the chance to represent the other side of the argument…

…the sharp contrast in opinion between the press and user-feedback is worthy of note.  Much of the critical feedack on the Mail story seems to be of the special-interest variety – many critics claim to be doctors.  But they put forward persuasive arguments against a story that has quite a few holes.

The Pulse rightly notes that just because the data is questionable, that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t matter:

…the figures may be inflated, but do they nonetheless raise some real questions. It might be due to rural payments, dispensing income or another, unspecified reason. But the GP in Norfolk who, even after expenses of all kinds are deducted, takes home £310,000 a year is doing very well for his or her self indeed.

The media must ask awkward questions of public services, and we need a healthy debate as to what’s right and wrong – what is working and what is not.

So when it comes to ensuring this debate is played out online, it would make sense for those taking part – whether in the press, or in medicine, to be seen to be taking their roles seriously -  after all, health is an important matter.

So with this in mind, ask yourself - is this a responsible thing for the Mail’s ’Health reporter’ Daniel Martin to be broadcasting to the world:

Of course the Mail’s contempt for Twitter (and those who use it) is legendary, but perhaps Mr Dacre might do well to publish a 20-page or longer guide to the social network phenomenon for Mail employees.

While going through the layout and structure of some of the UK’s online papers, I noted something interesting in telegraph.co.uk – their HOT TOPICS section.

They aren’t particularly making a song and dance about it – it’s not in their site A-Z, and a search of the telegraph.co.uk site only brings back pages which feature the HOT TOPICS bar (at the bottom of the page). And neither are they unique in using it – hot topic sections can be found on thisislondon, and the mirror, – but telegraph.co.uk is the only online broadsheet trying this (at the time of writing).

Still, you will find it hard to miss on the telegraph.co.uk hompage – it’s directly below the persistent navigation, offering a range of news themes to look at – but only a handful, that’s the key.

I’m not sure how long they’ve been experimenting with this, as I can’t check in the waybackwhen machine (thanks to telegraph.co.uk’s long-established use of robots.txt – I just hope someone somewhere is storing this stuff for posterity – or the development of online journalism right now is going to be pretty hard to pin down for future historians).

But it strikes me as an interesting take on web-native navigation within a news site, which raises some serious issues for how people now find things online.

It comprises a mix of (editorialised) running issues (today it’s banks and finance, the ashes etc.), in addition to key (or popular) areas of the site set out for promotion (James Cracknell’s column). It is taking the traditional newspaper notion of a ‘package’ to it’s natural conclusion online – offering a simple way to present long-running news events, organised around (perceived) user-need, rather than high-minded ideas of how to organise information.

Speaking of which, this simple overview of content soon gives way when you click on any story within the site (say Migrants to get tips on claiming benefits on path to citizenship). HOT TOPICS is now relegated to the bottom of the page, and the reader is presented with no less than four rows of navigation across the top of the page, comprising:

• A top row of global navigation, followed by;
• A thorough list of sub-divisions in local navigation, followed by;
• An alternative, and more news-driven (as opposed to conceptually unified) level of local navigation, followed by;
• A list of section breadcrumbs, suggesting a simplified, and alternative, top-down route to the story.

Compare it with guardian.co.uk’s two simple rows of navigation; a colour-coordinated global list, above a shade-graded bread-crumb-like local navigation, and it looks incredibly busy.

So is this deep-structure navigation within the site a reflection of their readers’ needs? Do the Telegraphs’ generally older hardcopy-readers require more signage when it comes to getting around the website, than the Guardian’s comparatively younger (and more web-savvy) hard-copy readership? Or are these different levels of access aimed at different user groups within the telegraph.co.uk community? Hard to say…

But back to HOT TOPICS – where has this idea come from? A cynic might argue this is a top-down take on Twitter’s bottom-up Trending Topics – that it represents a visual (as much as a conceptual) corruption of the ‘democratic’ idea of user-determined news we are becoming increasingly used to.

But that would belie two factors; the (likely) possibility that these topics are informed by web and site search/traffic trends, and the fact that other web-native news aggregators have been doing something (admittedly more complicated but) similar for a while now – see NewsNow with it’s Hot Topics, or Yahoo News with it’s Hot Topics.

Regardless of where the idea has come from, or indeed how ‘hot’ the topics in question actually are (Swine flu still features, despite news it has likely plateaued breaking on the 30^th of July), it has one very powerful advantage which might make other online newspapers sit up and take note.

This particular method of organising content will make it easier for telegraph.co.uk to mould it’s navigation to changing events in a way which is impossible while maintaining an intellectually rigid, top-down interpretation of subject matter – (as hardcopy publications have been using since Caxton).

And that is an invaluable advantage when you risk being scooped by the man on the street as much as by your commercial competitors.

Hello world.

As of September 1^st I will be an employee of Brunel University, where I’ve been drafted in to teach (and research) multi-platform journalism.

I am really, really excited about this – in fact I hope it doesn’t seem too dorky to have it on record that this is as close to my dream job as I’ve come. Well, cat’s out the bag now…

I will be leaving behind day-to-day work at the CIJ, which makes me genuinely sad – I’ve met some inspiring, and incredibly talented people along the way, but more importantly made some very good friends too.

But I’m not going far, and I will be keeping my ties with CIJ close – indeed I’m hoping a couple of research projects I got involved in at the CIJ will develop into academic projects at Brunel.

In the coming months I’ll be blogging and twittering from my own accounts a lot more, as my successor takes on the responsibility of keeping the CIJ News Blog, and website up-to-date. 

After a bit of thought, I’ve decided that for the most part I’m going to continue  focusing mostly on tips, tricks and sources for journalistic research here, given how comprehensive (and good) a job other folks are doing in other areas of online journalism.

I will likely put my teaching ideas out there for peer-review now and then, but for the most part it’ll be back to where I started – and I’m very much looking forward to getting to know you all again…

Nothing rhymes with ‘orange’.

But when it comes to search there is an altogether different problem with this word (and many others).

If you’re searching for the colour orange, it’s unlikely that references to the company of the same name, will be relevant to you.

And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be grand if your search engine took steps to differentiate colour from company?  Afterall, the latest Find- option in IE8 allows you to do it on individual pages.

Providing surfers with a means of case-sensitive searching is one such option – and it used to be available in some free engines (notably Alta Vista).  Today though, only semantic search engines factor in case-sensitivity in search – which is understandable, given they *understand* the difference between orange the colour (and fruit), and Orange the company.

I suppose it could fairly be argued that some aspects of semantic search should obviate the problem of case-sensitivity in any search, but given how far away a reliable, general purpose semantic engine seems at present, wouldn’t it make sense to incorporate this option into the Googles, Bings and Yahoos of this world?

While there has previously been some confusion about case-sensitivity in Google results, (since resolved) it is nonetheless possible to try case-sensitive searching in Google via this bespoke appengine.

That said, there is an important caveat  – those titles or sentences which start with the word Orange are (of course) capitalised, so it can be a bit of a fuzzy way to do things.

Still, it’s an interesting project, and well worth a look.