A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker

Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.

To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).

As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on - at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:

Jokes aside - Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.

Tags: Charlie Brooker, google, search engine, Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk, The Guardian

While we were away… EveryBlock, LoudounExtra, BBC plans and more

In case you hadn’t noticed, Journalism.co.uk was in Sweden last week covering the World Association of Newspapers annual conference and the World Editors Forum.

So no one misses out, here’s a round-up of what went down while we were away:

Guardian: BBC ends ‘licence fee’ plans for international news website
The Beeb has dropped proposals for subscription-based access to BBC.com

WSJ.com: Analysis of hyperlocal news site LoudounExtra.com
Following the departure of Rob Curley, chief architect behind the Washington Post spin-off site, WSJ asks if the site has found its audience a year into the project.

Editor&Publisher: 94 newspapers join Yahoo partnership
A total of 779 newspapers now have access to the search engine’s advertising technology and HotJobs ads.

Daily Mail: Sir Ian Blair advocates use of celebrity news videos as evidence in drug trials
Footage, such as the Sun’s infamous Amy Winehouse video and of Kate Moss snorting a white substance, should be presented to the jury in such cases, Blair has said.

Guardian: BBC’s new plans for personalisation of website
Plans to create a new rating, recommendation and personalisation system across bbc.co.uk will be put to the BBC Trust, according to the corporation’s latest programme policy statement.

Editor’s Weblog: Washington Post launches online publishing company
The Slate Group will feature a host of digital titles including Slate and The Root, with additional launches planned.

Telegraph.co.uk: Update on revamp of community blogging platform MyTelegraph
Communities editor Shane Richmond says a relaunch date will be announced by the end of next week.

Matthew Ingram: Globe and Mail removes pay wall
Number of subscribers was not enough to maintain the wall, says Ingram, who works for the paper. Some readers remain unconvinced, he says, pointing out one comment: “You can’t shut us out for a few years and then expect us to come back just because it’s free.”

MediaShift: Everyblock releases first special report
The hyperlocal data and news site has mapped information from a recent Chicago police bribery investigation as part of its first special report.

Tags: advertising technology, Amy Winehouse, BBC, BBC Trust, Chicago, Chicago police, Globe and Mail, hyperlocal news site, Ian Blair, Journalism.co.uk, Kate Moss, Matthew Ingram, news site, Online publishing, Rob Curley, search engine, Shane Richmond, spin-off site, Sweden, Telegraph.co.uk, The Root, The Slate Group, The Washington Post, World Association of Newspapers, Yahoo

Guardian publishes string of anti-Telegraph stories - cue spat

While the Daily Mail allegedly has a gentlemen’s agreement with the Telegraph not to write about each other’s parent company, it hardly seems worth pointing out that no such pact exists between the Guardian and the Telegraph online.

Over the last month a series of articles published by Guardian.co.uk has alleged various problems with or criticised Telegraph.co.uk.

The latest links the MyTelegraph section with the BNP for a second time in little over a week, detailing a blog post on the platform by BNP member Richard Barnbrook entitled ‘Blame the immigrants’.

The Guardian first made the connection between the party and MyTelegraph with an article looking into managing online communities that discussed MyT under the provocative headline ‘Platform for free speech … or hate?’ and went on to say one user ‘publishes BNP campaign literature and flyers’ on the site.

On both occasions the Telegraph emphasised the free speech ethos behind MyT, which is policed by readers who are relied upon to report offensive material.

The policy seems to be working - Barnbrook’s post has attracted over 30 comments including several from the hang ‘um and flog ‘um brigade alongside more measured anti-BNP responses.

MyTelegraph’s problems at the end of last year, as the technology firm behind its development went into administration, were also documented recently by the Guardian:

“Telegraph Media Group’s community media site MyTelegraph ‘is on life support’ until it receives an overhaul this summer, the company’s communities editor said today.

“Shane Richmond told the PPA Magazines 2008 conference that the site had suffered periodic downtime, slow page-loads and instability since the company which built it, Interesource, went in to administration late last year.”

I was there, he did say that, but then again he’d already blogged about it months before.

But then again, again. He DID say it, so it’s fair to report him saying it.

In addition to this last month’s ABCe figures showing that the Telegraph site passed the Guardian for the first time to become the UK’s most popular newspaper website in terms of unique users, seem only to have fanned the competitive fire.

The Guardian was the first to delve into the Telegraph’s recent rapid growth in unique users - from 12,283,835 in February to 17,036,081 in March, and 18,646,112 in April - suggesting a switch in internal measurement tools may have prompted the surge.

Continuing the series of pieces on the Telegraph’s online traffic - and there are a few of them now - the Guardian suggests that a review of online traffic measurement announced by JICWEBS last week was sparked by publishers concerns over the Telegraph’s recent growth.

All fair news pieces from the Guardian? Surely there can be no complaint with their reporting factual news? Well, yes there can.

After the publication of the latest Guardian piece today, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond came out fighting, accusing the Guardian of hypocrisy and arguing that if the charge leveled at the Telegraph is one of giving a platform to racists and fanatics then it is a charge that could well be applied to the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.

“How about we take the view that when you have an open platform, whether it’s My Telegraph, Comment Is Free, or the internet itself, then you have to accept that a multiplicity of views will be expressed on it and that some of those views will be unpalatable to some people,” he wrote.

“If the Guardian’s attacks on our site are motivated by genuine concern, then they should look closer to home first. However, I suspect that this sustained criticism has more to do with sour grapes over recent audience trends.”

Stories about other publishers are fair game and healthy competition between the titles is to be encouraged.

But take the BNP stories and the numerous stories about the Telegraph’s web advances en masse and one may begin to wonder when healthy news reporting begins to border on the obsessive?

UPDATE - the ‘debate’ continues with a post from Shane Richmond in response to a comment left by Comment is Free editor Matt Seaton on his Telegraph.co.uk blog

Tags: BNP, community media, Guardian.co.uk, internal measurement tools, Matt Seaton, online communities, online traffic, online traffic measurement, Richard Barnbrook, Shane Richmond, Technology, Telegraph Media Group, Telegraph.co.uk, The Guardian, the Telegraph, United Kingdom, web advances

Guardian review of MyTelegraph is ‘out of touch with internet age’

Speaking in a blog post of Friday, Shane Richmond, communities editor of Telegraph.co.uk, explained that staff from the Guardian had been putting questions to users of MyTelegraph in preparation for an article about the blogging site.

To pre-empt the attack article, Richmond posted the answers to the questions asked of the site, which covered alleged links between MyT and BNP propaganda and Enoch Powell, while also asking for examples of the best blog posts contributed.

“To me, the tone they strike is politically correct and out of touch with the internet age. The internet encourages free speech, has lower barriers to entry and places greater onus on individuals to decide for themselves what is acceptable. Is it the case that Comment Is Free only within Guardian-approved limitations?” wrote Richmond.

The aforementioned article, published today by MediaGuardian, compares and contrasts MyT with the Guardian’s own Comment Is Free platform and the Sun’s MySun.

“A cursory glance reveals that while it has some powerful and well-written blogs, My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters. . . Such comments appear on all websites, the Guardian included. The difference with My Telegraph and similar sites overseas is that the newspaper is providing the platform for others to start the debate. On most comment sites, bloggers sanctioned by the newspaper group typically do so,” it reads.

While it’s interesting to consider the different approaches taken to moderation and user-generated content by the Telegraph and the Guardian, in the spirit of open debate on the subject, wouldn’t it be worth mentioning the Guardian’s recent debacle with one of its ’sanctioned’ bloggers? The debate started by this blogger, wasn’t allowed to continue - I wonder if this would have been the case if the post had appeared on MyT.

Tags: Enoch Powell, internet age, Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk, The Guardian

PPA Magazines 2008: Community stats for Telegraph.co.uk

According to Shane Richmond, communities editor of Telegraph.co.uk, articles on the site’s Your View section receive an average of 166 comments a day, while 2,000 comments a day are recorded across the main site.

MyTelegraph, which is one year old on Friday, now has 18,000 registered users and will be rebuilt this summer with new tools for uploading content introduced and plans to integrate MyT content across the main site.

Richmond added that a feature rating the posts of other MyT bloggers, which had been scrapped at the request of users, was something he hoped to reintroduce to the site.

Tags: Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph to offer open OpenID

Shane Richmond is claiming a first for telegraph.co.uk, saying that from the end of next month it will become the first newspaper in the world to provide OpenID to its readers.

OpenID is a technology that allows people to carry the same user names across several different websites, thus removing the tiresome process of having to log-in 137 times each day and remember the plethora of necessary passwords.

OpenID claims are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly 10,000 sites supporting its logins.

The system is growing in popularity with publishers. AOL and Microsoft are amongst a host of other using it. At the very basic level for them it means less time having to vet and manage user accounts, as well as removing a barrier to a greater level of interaction with users.

However, some users may be put off by by the security issue of effectively placing all eggs in one basket.

Plenty more innovation expected from the Tel in 2008, adds Mr Richmond:

“I could describe this as the biggest development of 2008 but I won’t. I know what else we’ve got planned.”

Tags: AOL, microsoft, Shane Richmond

BBC director general answers readers questions online at Telegraph.co.uk

Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, put himself up for some close public scrutiny yesterday when he agreed to answer questions from Telegraph.co.uk readers live on the site.

“I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a more potentially hostile environment for him,” writes Currybet’s Martin Belam in his excellent summary of the event. However, he notes that Thompson got a relatively easy ride in the Q&A.

Judging by the questions posed, the application of regional and clipped RP accents across the Corporation appears to be one of the main issues of contention for the readers of the online version of The Telegraph.

A few questions - offering enough for more than a cursory skim read - about criticism of the coverage of the Madeleine McCann story and Parliamentary scrutiny, did pop up. But these were subjects that the DG could tuck into with gusto.

A question about access to BBC TV in Australia got this interesting answer:

“I would like to be able to offer people around the world on demand access to more of the BBC’s domestic content – and maybe to complete home services. We’re working on that.”

The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond notes: “We let our Q&A guests choose the questions they answer and our more cynical readers will probably argue that the more difficult questions are overlooked.”

It’s something to bear in mind. On the whole the questions selected were of the reactionary kind and easy for a shrug off - I would have liked to see more sustained questions about the Corporation throwing money at platforms, channels and programming that painfully attempts to reach out to certain demographics with little or no obvious success - yes, BBC3 - what are you for?

Tags: Australia, BBC, Mark Thompson, Martin Belam, online version, Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk

God, no? Is it list and predictions time already?

Yes, it’s that time again, the season of favourites lists, bests of, highlights of 2007, and rough guesses of what may happen in the coming 12 months.

I’ve brought together the few lists I have managed to find in between crazed bouts of gorging my way through East Sussex’s entire supply of mince pies and crapulent afternoons spent selecting the wine for the Christmas party (finally decided on Blue Nun – half bottles).

For what it’s worth, my predictions for the next 12 months are a pocket-sized Second Life for the Asian market, Google car insurance and marriage counselling by April and some kind of Granny app for Facebook so you can check on the vital signs of elderly relatives.

• Best journalism film of all time, bar none – cue ‘no, this is better,’….’no, this one,’
• Regret the Year. Twelve-months of comical mistakes brought to you by Regret the Error
• Yahoo!’s list of the year - favourite sites and causes on the web in 2007
• US news source of the year - by top ranking stories on Google News
• Top ten search terms of the year
• The Jeff Jarvis list of stuff from 2007
• Internet TV, 2007, a year in review
• Guardian predictions for 2008
• Press Gazette twitters from journalists about what they learned from 2007
• Shane Richmond’s review of the year in webby tech, month by month

Tags: car insurance, Christmas, Christmas party, google, Internet TV, Jeff Jarvis, search terms, Shane Richmond, United States, Yahoo

Online journalism in 2020…bloggers strike, iToilet and more

Paul Bradshaw has video blogged a post from 2020 about the end of the Bloggers Strike, Apple’s new iToilet, Facebook’s ‘GDPcalculator’ app, and a graduating generation who’ve never known a world without the mobile web.

Failure of the iToilet has always been a pet grumble of mine, glad to see someone has finally been brave enough to voice these concerns.

Paul put the guest blogging vid together to fill in for Shane Richmond @the Telegraph while he’s away - guest spots have also gone to John Hagel and Andy Dickinson.

Tags: Andy Dickinson, John Hagel, mobile web, Online Journalism, Paul Bradshaw, Shane Richmond

Round-up: Open house event at The Telegraph on political blogging

Debates about blogging, political or otherwise, could go on forever. Credit must go to the Telegraph team for getting this one going - it was just starting to get a bit more interesting before time ran out though.

Still, some interesting issues raised, if not too many conclusions.

• Firstly, and this is something raised on this blog before, are journalists who write blogs the same as bloggers?

Iain Dale noted that Mail On Sunday bloggers have to submit their posts to the lawyers first. This was a common experience with one member of the audience, a blogging journalist at Telegraph.co.uk, who said the profit interests of the group’s owner would always impact upon the blogging process in this way.

Lloyd Shepherd pointed out that while legal costs are the only costs not to have gone down in the new digital age, the law is becoming more sensitive to cases where content might not have actually been seen by that many people.

• Iain Dale downplayed the notion of a blogging elite. Yet how come everyone in the room (bar me…) were on first name terms and often didn’t have to introduce their blog first?

Mick Fealty, writer on Northern Irish political blog Slugger O’Toole and the Telegraph’s blog Brassneck, explained that ‘top blog’ lists are not intended to reinforce an elite, but ‘about trying to get people to break out of their daily online habits and go and look at something completely different’.

• There’s a lot of cross-over between ‘traditional’ journalism and blogs (maybe this was because there were a lot of journalists in the room…): in-depth investigative coverage, face-to-face networking and contact making.

Major differences between the two discussed last night were the ability of blogs to talk to people and not at people, and their capacity to democratise. (Not a strong enouch distinction was made for me.)

One Telegraph blogging journalist pointed out that the BNP website receives more hits than all the other political parties’ sites combined - yet when blogging about this he didn’t link to the BNP’s site.

So can blogging democratise political coverage by the media, while the media adheres to an establishment view of politics as a three party system?

Lots of summaries of last night’s event have already been posted - here are a few to get you going (am I perpetuating a blogging elite by just linking to these few?):

• Shane Richmond (from the organiser’s mouth)
• Lloyd Shepherd (from Messy Media and a speaker at the event)
• Simon Dickson of Puffbox

Tags: face-to-face networking, Iain Dale, Lloyd Shepherd, Mick Fealty, online habits, Shane Richmond, Simon Dickson, Telegraph.co.uk