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A warning...

By Adam Tinworth on January 18, 2012 12:02 AM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Today is a day of protest all over the web, against legislation proposed in the US that many, myself included, believe will do serious damage to the web.

Many sites, including Wikipedia and Boing Boing are going completely dark for the day. My own little voice is joining the chorus of protest with something a little different the first time (and only the first time) you visit the site today.
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Gone away...

By Adam Tinworth on November 17, 2011 1:09 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Holiday Fun
...back soon, rested and refreshed. :-)

Changes

By Adam Tinworth on September 29, 2011 5:03 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Saying goodbye to LewishamIt has been a week of changes, which is one of the reasons for my silence on the blog. The big change came on Monday, when we finally completed the sale of the flat I've lived in for the last decade and a half. For a short while, I am no longer a property owner. Instead, I'm a happily renting with my wife in a town on the south coast, and positively relishing not having a home in London for the first time since, as far as I can recall, 1990. After two decades I am officially no longer a Londoner. And yet, I'm not tired of life. ;-)

And that means some changes for this blog. During 2004 and 2005, this blog was often focused on Lewisham and its surrounds. That phase has long passed, and apart from some recent quick flings with my past, it's not coming back. This blog is now firmly around the intersection of journalism, social media and technology, and I have other places for other subjects. Most particularly:

And there's assorted other stuff, too, but those are the blogs that have inherited what were once parts of this blog's remit. So feed free to dump this feed if you don't care about journalism/social media/technology and pick up one of the others instead...

And, as the week was already one of adapting to change, I made the decision to change the software running this blog. The last time I mentioned this, I was choosing between Movable Type 5, Melody and WordPress. I dismissed WordPress first. Although I create the majority of new blogs I set up on the platform, the effort of migrating the 3000+ entries on this blog, plus all the assets, and then getting the URLs all lined up just didn't seem worth the benefits I'd get. Melody fell next - I like and respect what the team behind it are doing, but they haven't yet persuaded me that they're in it for the long-haul. Perhaps if version 1.1 was out by now, I might have chosen differently. But it isn't, and I didn't. 

One Man & His Blog on Movable Type 5
And so, this blog continues its eight year history on Movable Type, finally hitting version 5 with this software upgrade. (5.12 for the pedants). 

A new start this week, on lots of levels. And lots of stuff to talk about. Onwards, to the future... ;-)
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Giving OM&HB a little CloudFlare

By Adam Tinworth on September 22, 2011 4:43 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Image representing CloudFlare as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

A brief diversion into administrivia. People with no interest in self-hosted blog platforms can move right along. There's nothing for the like of you here. :-)

This blog has languished somewhat, from a technology point of view. Apart from switching to Disqus for the commenting, I'm essentially running on the same bit of software I've been using for four years now - nearly half the lifetime of the blog... That has to change sometime soon, and I'll make the decision between Movable Type 5, Melody or the more challenging shift to WordPress sometime later in the year, when I gave a little more personal bandwidth to get stuff like this done.

In the meantime, and in the quest for faster loading of the blog, I've activated a service called CloudFlare:

alittleflare.png
It's acting a combined content distribution network, security service and all-round site speeder-upper (a technical term, you understand...). I've had it running for around four hours now, and all seems fine. Load times are noticeably down on what they were before, and I'll be interested to see if that has any influence on site traffic.
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Birth of the Author(ship)

By Adam Tinworth on August 26, 2011 4:28 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Ah, a tenuous Barthes joke. It must be the Friday before a bank holiday...


Pretty well, as it turns out:

Google Authorship for my blog
Within a few hours of adding authorship mark-up to my blog, the home URL was showing up as authored by me, with a user avatar pulled from my Google+ profile. Now how about articles?

Google Authorship on an article
While it's not yet showing for older articles, everything I've published since I added the authorship tagging is showing up in Google search rather nicely. It's also interesting to note that Google has already revamped the "user pic on the far right" design it started with to one that's more integrated with the article snippet. 

Oh, and this grab illustrates why it's a positive thing:

Authorship versus aggregation
My blogs posts often get aggregated by places like The Media Briefing, Mediagazer and (occasionally) AllThingsD. The nice thing about the authorship markup is that my original post stands out much more clearly in the search result because of the combination of the userpic and the byline. I have no problem with people aggregating and linking through to what I write, but I'd rather I got the search traffic in the first instance.

So, far, I've mainly seen individual bloggers getting their markup sorted for this. I can imagine that there's a degree of discomfort within many publishers about allowing their staff to "claim" content in this way. I can't see the harm in it myself - you don't have to anchor the author link straight to the Google+ profile as I've done; there's a method which uses your site's author pages as an intermediary, with the article linking to the profile and the profile linking to Google+. But my gut tells me that many publisher would much rather that their brand log was there as an author - and with brands not supported in Google+ just yet, I can't see that happening in the short term. 

Google Authorship, Open Graph and other techie challenges

By Adam Tinworth on August 25, 2011 5:02 PM | Comments | 1 TrackBack
An Open Graph templateInspired by a talk by Martin Belam yesterday, I've spent a little time today exploring things like Open Graph metadata and Google Authorship. 

This stuff is right on the edge of my (very) limited techie abilities. I'm a journalist, not a coder, dammit... ;-)

However, if all has gone according to plan, entries from the blog should now look at LOT better if shared on Facebook or Google+, and my smiling face should start appearing in Google search results opposite my posts. Let's see if it all works, shall we?
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Hiatus: Concluded

By Adam Tinworth on June 10, 2011 4:29 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
German Town
And...I'm back.

This blog has been on something of an unannounced hiatus, as I took a holiday in Germany, for a friend of my wife's wedding, and I decompressed both from the internet and from the busy couple of months beforehand. I was nearly completely offline while in Kassel, and that actually came as a blessed relief. I took an awful lot of photos, and read two books...

Things are about to get busy again, and indeed have been frantic for the two whole days I've been back at work. But normal blogging service resumes here. :-)
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Happy New Year

By Adam Tinworth on January 1, 2011 9:20 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Happy New Year

My Top 10 Posts of 2010

By Adam Tinworth on December 31, 2010 10:09 AM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks

2010 is staggering towards the finishing line, all but spent in the convulsions of iPad lust, paywall panic and Wikileak wailing. It's been quite a year for journalism, but one that's been more marked by wishful thinking and panic than actual progress, to my mind, anyway.

Let's see if the facts bear that our shall we? Here are the top 10 posts published on this blog in 2010 by traffic:

  1. Internet Stat Porn 2010 - It's just a video. This is testament to the power of the words "internet" and "porn" in a headline...
  2. On Those Times Paywall Numbers - Golly gosh. A post on The Times and paywalls topping the (non-porn) charts? Who'da thunk it? A link from Greenslade helped with that...
  3. A Reader's Safari - a surprise to me, this one. A post about the new Reader feature in Safari, which strips all extraneous page clutters to present a clean reading view. Perhaps people are more interested in clean web design than I thought...
  4. Who Cares About The Front Page? - A small rant, this time about people who equate journalism with national newspapers. Frankly, the thoughtless abuse of the word "journalism" has been one of my bugbears this year.
  5. Science Online: Cultures Clash Over Infographics - data journalism poster boy David McCandless gets a roasting from scientists over his axes and other points of weakness. The highest viewed conference liveblog post - and it's not from the "big" events like Like Minds or Le Web. Niches are the future...
  6. iPad Magazines - Not Beating The Web - Ah, the iPad. Probably the second biggest driver of traffic to my  blog this year other than paywall discussion (and stat porn). It's depressing how little has changed in the six months since this was written. iPad magazine apps are still, in the main, rubbish.
  7. What Does Facebook Like Do For Blog Traffic? - Traffic was largely driven to this post by Facebook Likes. Of course.
  8. Factchecking, Wikipedia and Basic Journalistic Credibility - Yes, so journalists' brains turn to mush when confronted with the internet, and they do stupid things like copying information from Wikipedia without fact-checking. Lots of tweets and comments for this post - something of a hot button issue, clearly.
  9. The Paywalled Times - An Online Private Members Club. Oh, look. The Times. And paywalls...
  10. news:rewired: Crowdsourcing - the second liveblog of the top 10, this time from the first and best of the news:rewired conferences. (Of which there were three this year - at least one too many, I think.) Good old verbal punch-up between the new media hacks and the old school types. Simmering resentment boiling over; that sort of thing. All good fun.

Disappointingly few surprises in there. The obvious targets are all hit: paywalls, iPads and the desperate hope that a magic bullet will turn up and allow us to save journalism with one shot. Somehow this list feels, well, predictable to me. It feels like it needs shaking up a little more; it needs an injection of ideas from outwith our bubble. And that pretty much confirms what I suspected was my mistake with OM&HB in 2010 - but that's fodder for another post.

Merry Christmas

By Adam Tinworth on December 25, 2010 7:22 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Christmas Pressies
A very merry Christmas to all of you who read these thoughts of mine. I hope you all have a great festive season and I'll see you in the new year.
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