A very nice website created to promote Orange’s unlimited texts on on one of its tariffs. It goes on forever and is full of fun stuff … geddit?
Created by digital agency Poke, who’ve documented the site here. Apparently, there’s a Christmas version on the way soon.
You’re probably already very familiar with the Ad-Block extension for Firefox.
Now there’s a new kid on the block, Tubestop. Tubestop prevents YouTube’s brand new overlay ads from spoiling your videos. It works by substituting the player on Youtube’s pages (which inserts ads) with the one that appears embedded in web pages (which doesn’t).
This is a short guide to creating an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one. I’ve posted it here because I keep forgetting how to do it. Hope it’s useful. NB: it won’t work for sites that require a log-on, such as Facebook groups.
Step One: Problem Pages
I try to remember to visit the site of my old colleagues at startups.co.uk for news related to starting online businesses. The reporting is good quality and they quite often get stories that aren’t covered in my regular reading. However, they don’t have an RSS feed and so it falls outside my regular updates through Google Reader.
Copy the address of the page you want to generate a feed for to the clipboard. It needs to be the page that lists all the recent stories on the site, or section of the site, not one of the pages for individual stories.
Step Two: Go to FeedYes
The free online service FeedYes creates feeds from pages that don’t offer one. There are various other alternatives, but this one works, so I’ve stuck with it. You have to register to use it, but this takes five seconds, and you could even use a fake email address if you wanted.
Step Three: Create a new FeedYes Feed
It’s the first option in the navigation. Here you enter the address you copied from the site. Also give it a tag, such as ‘internet’ and specify the language, if it isn’t English.
Step Four: Prune the Feed
FeedYes grabs all the links on the page and creates a list. You then click on the first item on the list that is a proper news item, rather than a static link such as a navigation link or special feature. In the next step, you click on the last item that contains news. This allows the service to identify the code that indicates a news item.
Step Five: Save the Feed Address
The service gives you an address that looks something like this:
http://www.feedyes.com/feed.php?f=aJEC6T5Uz0h52Rfj
You can use FeedYes as an RSS reader, but I can’t really recommend that. Instead, copy the address to the clipboard and switch to your normal reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, or an offline reader) and choose the option to add a new feed.
Paste in the address and …Ta-da! You’re done. You’ll notice that unless you’re very lucky, you won’t end up with a full content feed - it depends on how much is printed on the page you’re working from. Nonetheless, it means that you are now getting updates from sites that otherwise might have fallen off your radar.
If you work on an older site yourself, you could use this method to generate a feed for your own news pages. If that’s the case, I’d recommend putting the feed URL through the feedburner service to give it a slightly more elegant address, such as mybrand.feedburner.com. You can also add niceties such as a custom logo and options like ‘digg this’ and ‘add to del.icio.us’ to each story.
Somehow, I’m on the beta programme for the BBC iPlayer. I can’t for the life of me remember applying for this, but that’s becoming fairly irrelevant to the truth nowadays. Sadly, there aren’t any invites and so-forth I can offer to readers - this is the BBC, remember. They do things differently there.
It’s reasonably stable, though annoyingly, it works better on my work PC than the one I’ve got at home. I’ve got five episodes of Dr Who to watch at work and nothing at home - which seems to be the wrong way round. I suspect I need to tweak the security settings on Norton Firewall - it tends to have zero tolerance of new applications.
Video quality is fine - it’s a windows media file encoded to around the same quality as your television, so much better than YouTube. The system involves a fair amount of rigmarole, though. Titles are advertised on the website for the player (IE7 and a plug-in required); you download them into your ‘library’ (a further download) and then watch them in a player application (included with the library), basically a skin for Windows Media player. There’s no streaming - the high quality of the video means that a 30-minute programme might take up 200MB of hard drive space.
The library available is pretty good - I haven’t explored it all by any means, but it includes material from all the digital channels as well as the terrestrial ones. There are probably more than a couple of thousand programmes already available for download. And they’re not just the last week’s offerings, it seems. One of my Dr Who episodes is from the first of the new seasons with Christopher Ecclestone. But it’s a tad random at the same time - I’ll put that down to the beta test wanting to include a little bit of everything.
There’s the much-vexed issue of DRM. The files are protected through Windows Media, are made available on the website for four weeks, and then are only watchable for four weeks after that. This is clearly not great from a consumer’s perspective, especially one that pays the license fee for this stuff to get produced in the first place. On the other hand, (a) the corporation has to raise money from other sources, like DVDs, as well as the license fee; (b) their IP should be protected anyway. I’d hope that the option to re-download - or, better, to simply re-authenticate -material once it has expired will exist. But I won’t know the answer to that for another four weeks.
I spotted this on netimperative this morning:
Waitrose to embrace social networking with ‘Facebook’ for food
According to reports, supermarket chain Waitrose is planning to add social networking functions to its web site to allow shoppers to swap recipes and chat on message boards.
The retailer wants to encourage the one million people that visit its web site each month to debate topics such as organic food and to trade culinary tips. Users will also be able to upload recipes and pictures with their homemade dishes as part of the £1m revamp of the web site.
The company has an archive of 4,500 recipes on its web site and plans to add 20 new ones each month. Users will be able to create their own e-scrapbook of recipes, complete with notes.
My first thought was that it’s interesting that ‘facebook’ has become an abbreviation for all social network sites. MySpace and bebo still have more users, don’t they? But I guess that Facebook has ripped through the media industry to such an extent that it’s become viewed as the social network.
Second, I also had a look at waitrose.com, to find all of these “planned” features are already there. Oops. I think someone mis-read the press release. Still, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, etc. Happens to us all.
But I do also wonder about the wisdom of all this, and this is a little idle speculation. If you shop for groceries on the Internet, doesn’t that tend to mean that you’re rather pushed for time? You can’t spare the hour or so to pop into the shops for your food, so you alt-tab out of Excel (I expect) and into Explorer to procure the delivery of the necessary carbohydrates to keep going. Is that person going to be trading culinary tips and family recipes while they’re at it?
Also, there are very good existing social networks for foodies. There’s Group Recipes - which is excellent, btw, Yahoo Food (also good but US-centric) and the Daily Plate (a bit diety). How about if they’d used the million pounds to make a ‘buy the ingredients’ widget on one of those sites? Or a brand channel? Or just some adverts? The residents of those networks are the antithesis of the too-busy-to-shop-properly types that are likely to end up on Waitrose.com. They are really interested in food and trying new things, plus they’ve got time to spend on websites reading and talking about it.
They might also have thought about spending the cash on having a little brand consistency - half the pages on their site have johnlewis.com addresses, for goodness’ sake. And what’s the point of partnering with Ocado for deliveries? There’s already a WaitroseDeliver site up and running, incidently, that I’d never heard of till today.
Lastly, I think everyone who follows this space will be aware that there are already far too many social networks, and that yet another one starts to seem painful. I recently begged an invite for Pownce - but you know what? Having logged in and played with the settings, I simply can’t be bothered to even begin to recreate my friends network from Facebook/Twitter/Blogging. I’m far more likely to join the recipes group on one of my existing networks, or add some food blogs to my reading list, than I ever am to join a supermarket’s social network.
Still, I expect they’ve done their homework rather than just take the blithe advice of some hotshot social media consultant… obviously.
Congratulations to Shaun Shull, the inventor of new social media monitoring site Zudos. By coming up with a name whose only rhyme is ‘kudos’, they’re almost guaranteeing good headlines. Which I have awkwardly resisted.
The same thing goes for something like del.icio.us - you’re almost compelled to write about ‘tasty features’, ‘yummy deals’ and other such pap. Not so sure about flickr, in this regard, which rather invites headlines along the lines of ‘on the blink’…
But I digress. Zudos is an aggregator and a search for social media. You start with a blank screen and enter a name. It returns blog posts on the subject, YouTube videos, del.icio.us bookmarks, podcasts, tagged photos, mainstream media sites and voted stories from Netscape.com.
My first impressions are that this is a rather excellent tool for anyone involved in PR or reputation management. Suppose you work for a large multinational, for example - getting the latest from all of these sources on your desktop whenever you need them would be a godsend when it comes to both taking a barometer of the world’s opinion and acting on individual cases. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to search for these things elsewhere - but nowhere can you do it on a single screen. It also works really well - results take about 3-4 seconds to compile.
Missing features? It’s a bit churlish to complain, but a combined RSS feed for your results would be golden. It’s a shame that there’s no digg or reddit results, either, since I believe these both have larger audiences than Netscape.
Subscribe to the Sense Worldwide newsletter for genuinely interesting internet news that you haven’t already read a million times on blogs that think reading Techmeme is the same thing as finding inspiration. I used to think, in this age of RSS and at-your-convenience distribution, that the email newsletter was dead. It isn’t. There are a couple of other really good e-bulletins that I’ll provide pointers to once I’ve … ermm… unearthed them from my heaving inbox.
From this week’s bulletin, the Pulse Laser blog, and more specifically, this post about the enjoyment of packaging. Admittedly, it was first posted back in November, but I missed it then and was grateful for the pointer.
The fetishism of packaging is really interesting. I’m a Marlboro Lights smoker, and the introduction of their new silver pack, with its side-opening mechanism is fascinating. It opens as though it was a Zippo lighter. Now cigarette manufacturers can’t advertise in the UK, I’m guessing that their options for marketing are looking rather limited. The idea of getting a new brand on to the market must seem pretty daunting. Gimmicky packaging like Marlboro’s and the Benson and Hedges ’silver slide’ mechanism seem like a clever way to generate word of mouth about their products. I know it works - the first time everyone saw me opening the new Marlboro packet, they said, “ooh - that’s fancy.”*
You may be looking at your screen thinking, “Ian, it’s a packet, and you are a sad case,” and that may be true. However, as the marketing gurus continually point out, we’re not buying things any more, we’re buying experiences. Compare the experience of opening a Dell laptop box and the experience of opening up an iBook. Why do Apple spend all that extra money? Because they aren’t selling a computer, they’re selling a supposedly superior way of ‘living a digital life’. If they can make taking possession of your new machine feel like Christmas, then kudos to them. They are spending extra money on making me, their new user feel better, even though I’ve already bought their product. Apple want a partnership with me; Dell just wanted to flog me a laptop.
The newsletter also points to this wonderful blog - unboxing.com - which is entirely about the pleasures of packaging.**
*Yes, I know cigarettes are dirty and horrible and dangerous and expensive.
**And yes, I know fancy packaging is environmentally unfriendly and ultimately pointless and that I used to talk about commodity fetishism as a cardinal sin when I was younger and more principled.
A very big Yay! for the eminent Doctor Duncan Barnes who has used the clever screen-scraping technique that he employed to create full feeds from the BBC to produce an RSS feed for the NMK website! The feed should probably be described as ‘beta’, since we’re still tweaking and I haven’t yet made it public to the NMK readership, but if you want the stuff I’m writing sans alcool, then you should subscribe here*.
Duncan is planning revisions to his script that will render the feed more faithfully in the next couple of months. However, the Feedburner address shouldn’t change. Have noticed that Bloglines sometimes doesn’t register new items (i.e. highlight the feed in bold) but clicking on the feed will show them nonetheless. Feedback about performance in other RSS aggregators would be great.
*All rights reserved. Following these instructions may reduce your house to rubble.
We often go on, don’t we, about the sharp division between old and new media? About the wailing and gnashing of teeth that characterises the shift from one to the other.
So it’s nice to see a new product that perfectly marries the two. And with footnote, we’re talking about very old media. It’s a collaboration between the National Archives (the American ones) and third-party developers to create a way of finding and annotating old documents using Adobe Flash technology. Sadly, it costs $9.99 a month to subscribe, though a free membership will let you see what is available, and allow users to create project pages collecting various documents.
Solution Watch has a very thorough write-up.
Future (disclosure - wife worked there with the editor, some friends work there - sorry, everyone, for what follows) has launched tech.co.uk. It’s a site, sorry, “new technology portal” that does “the latest news, reviews, features, blogs, buyer’s guides and forums”. How about that for differentiation? As more and more ad spend goes online, it seems that every publisher needs to push out more and more inventory in order to be able to tell potential advertisers that their sites do a bazillion impressions and are way ahead of the competition.
I wouldn’t like to pass judgement on the quality of the site. It’s been running two days and it wouldn’t be fair. However, I do think that the days of this kind of mega-tech-site are numbered. Without full feeds, I’d rather go to the blogs for impressions about the latest news, and I’d rather go to the better-established and better-connected engadget or gizmodo or Tech Digest blogs for stuff about gadgets. One of the first pieces asks if the iPhone is a white elephant. I don’t know about that, and the article sheds no light, but I do know a publishing white elephant when I see one.
This is a site whose target audience is lazy media buyers.
It’ll probably work, then.