Archive for December, 2007

In the very best of blog traditions the end of December marks the point at which we look back and soberly (if that’s possible at this time of year) digest the events, products and advancements made in our digital world in the last 12 months.

One of, if not the, biggest events of 2007 was the opening up of the Facebook walled garden to anyone who wished to register. What this did, in simple terms, was introduce millions of people to social networking and associated tools such as RSS, content aggregation, photo and video sharing, perpetual contact and all the other tools now used on a daily basis by the 60 million or so registered users.

From a technology perspective the iPhone has shifted the usability of mobile devices forward in a giant seismic leap, where all the other vendors were just shuffling forward in an apologetic manner by adding little more than memory and increasing complexity. The inclusion of a proper browser, not a rubbish cut down version, seamless integration with mac desktop applications as well as a host of third party apps already released, not to mention the iTunes and YouTube stuff this is the first truly integrated pocket device that people actually want to use.

Services such as Twitter and Tumblr gained momentum and grew their user base and I think will see wider adoption next year, though 2008 predictions are for a later post. Jaiku was bought by Google.

RSS adoption gained pace through 2007. Google Reader came out as most used feed reader.

There were a few big headlines in the digital music world in 2007. Radiohead revolutionised the music industry (and God, doesn’t it need it) with their ‘pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth’ sales model for their album ‘In Rainbows’. What their actual revenue from sales was, the band will not say. However, what they did say was that it made more than all of their other albums put together when measured on downloads alone. Some sources put it as high as £5 per album while others as low as £2.90.

Last.fm was sold for £140m to CBS. Not much more to say other than the fact that it wasn’t the only service to either get bought or receive major investment.

Video went mental. Joost came out of beta, the BBC’s iPlayer launched and project Kangaroo was announced which will aggregate BBC, iTV and Channel 4 content into one player in 2008. Even the Queen, 50 years after her first televised Christmas Day address to the nation, has a YouTube channel.

That’s a tiny snapshot of what’s gone on this year. In a post to be published soon I’ll be looking at what excitement 2008 has to offer. As a starter for 10, video is going to be bigger than ever and the big corporates are going to get all social.

It’s official. The best way to generate traffic to your site is to start blogging. Matt Cutts says so. As head of Google’s Web Spam team, if anyone knows about driving traffic then he should.

As mentioned in his keynote speech at PubCon Search marketing conference in Las Vegas, it’s something I’ve half suspected for some time myself after looking at stats for a given site’s visits compared to blog traffic for the same site.

Just look at the way blogs work. Regularly updated content. Well structured content which is search engine friendly (depending on platform choice). The ability to aggregate content with RSS keeps users engaged, thus promoting return visits. Having good content will encourage in-bound links. The potential for community building around commenters has the potential to increase the keywords added to a post which may help drive the post up the rankings.

As a very low effort but high impact way of getting a message out there and dipping your toe in ‘community’ it is unbeatable.

(via FutureLab) 

The BBC has gone and got all Web 2.0 and ‘AJAXy’ with their new beta home page design.

Announced on their blog last week, it uses the now tried and tested blend of gradient fills and large type as well as the drag and drop functionality of sites such as iGoogle, Facebook and Netvibes.

Initial impressions are good. It works very smoothly with only the odd display error here and there but hey, this is the beta launch. It utilises RSS and javascript to allow the user control over what content is displayed and where it sits on the page. There are a few things which would be nice to have and I’m sure they’re in development, judging by the number of blog comments highlighting these things.

Firstly, the ability to drag news categories around within a channel. When adding news feeds to the news panel they appear in the order in which the user adds them with no mechanism for reordering them. The only way is to remove all feeds and add them in the order in which you would like them to appear.

Secondly, the overriding colour on the page is dictated by the main hero panel selection. By swapping between the four options the entire page colour scheme changes. This is, though clever, overkill. Why should the colour of my news feed links be dictated by the fact that I’ve clicked to view the ‘Live Music’ tab on the hero panel?

All in all I think it’s a step in the right direction. Though they’re probably a year to 18 months, if not more, behind the curve as far as interaction design utilising these technologies is concerned. Aren’t the BBC meant to be blazing trails in this area having a roster of 21ish agencies and a development team of 20+ people to work on this one project?

One thing that really brought a smile to my face is the resurrection of the old-skool BBC analogue clock in the top right of the screen – a lovely touch.