Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke.
The high profile release of Grand Theft Auto IV this week has seen a number of groups use the inevitable publicity for their own means. Newspapers, online sites (yes, including this one) and blogs eager for pageview-generating stories about the hit title lap up stories from pressure groups, hoping to ride in on the search results or the Digg/Slashdot/Reddit homepages the masses consume. This potent and symbiotic relationship is well documented, and at no time is it more visible than during a big event - and GTA IV will probably be the biggest we'll see this year.
Not the least publicity hungry of these parties is, of course, our old friend Mr Jack Thompson. He waded in with a typically unmeasured rant calling the 18/Mature (depending on jurisdiction) rated game "the gravest assault upon children in this country [the USA] since polio". So far, so predictable.
Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke.
With all the hype surrounding the Macworld Expo and coverage Stevie's keynote has produced, you could be forgiven for believing that the Macbook Air is the be-all and end-all of the petite laptop market.
Sure, its going to be a solid product with all the traits of expert engineering that makes Apple systems highly buyable even when sold at their higher-than-norm premium price point. The MagSafe power cable, the magnetic screen hinge, the solid hardware-software integration are all going to be there. However, the key selling point appears to just be a kudos factor that probably won't affect the average consumer - the thinness. Whilst it might be an excellent bragging right when it comes to your mates in the office, I fail to see how this translates to making the Macbook Air a fundamentally better product. It will take up marginally less room in your bag (and you won't need those Firewire devices or ethernet cable due to lack of ports) and weigh less, but will it make it more usable? Probably not - it still won't fit properly on an aircraft tray table.
In making a purchasing decision a buyer will go through a process often expressed as "AIUAPR". This acronym stands for the phases a buyer almost always moves through before laying out the cash...
- Awareness
- Interest
- Understanding
- Attitudes
- Purchase
- Repeat Purchase
Despite the rise of the internet and all the hype surrounding Google etc there is still no advertising medium quite as good at raising awareness for the average consumer as TV. Other advertising mediums such as radio, outdoor and ambient media still have their niches in ad buyer's media mixes, however along with TV all these often fail at the "Interest" stage and have almost definitely finished being consumed before the potential buyer has hit "Understanding". This is why infomercials and home shopping channels whose revenue depends on people handing over the cash there and then spend so long describing each apparently simple (and usually crap) product.
Therefore the best way to ensure your "Awareness" and "Interest" spend is more likely to be converted into a sale, by moving the buyer down this decision chain, is to provide more information than you can fit in the average TV/radio/outdoor advert. A website of course can fulfill this task well by conveying a lot more information about a product than these traditional adverts ever can - often presenting such information in a more persuasive form with interactivity.
The BBC have launched their new homepage that has been in beta for the last few months - it looks and feels great. To get this out the door through the restrictive BBC standards and ancient infrastructure is one hell of an achievement. Good work.
However, the customisability of the page is completely knobbled by the lack of content and some basic persistence problems. The page lacks fundamental functionality that even the most basic Pageflakes-a-like customisable homepage has baked in.
For starters, the layout isn't saved in anything other than your cookie so I have to customise the page on every machine I use. This persistence problem gets even worse when you try and use other BBC systems. When I enter my postcode to customise the homepage, this information doesn't appear to be used to modify the content on any other site, and I still get asked for my postcode or place name elsewhere - /weather, /whereilive, and the customisable news homepage (a competing homepage... on the same site - only at the BBC!) for example.
I don't usually go in for these chain letter, MySpace style questions about yourself things, but as I've been tagged in one by non-other than the big man himself Mr Forrester, I'll do this one. He called me "a funny geezer" too.
Here are the rules...
- Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
- Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
I was born on Friday 13th. This is the standard 'fact about myself' I roll out in those team building things - I'm sure more a few people have heard me say this one several times. It's usually accompanied by a chorus of "well, that figures" afterwards.
I've gone and done a bit of early spring cleaning, and the result is a load of stuff on eBay.
Alternatively, checkout the rather cool widget...
Surfing around some blogs I came across Adam Bowie's post about Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. I'm a big Brooker fan, from back in the day when people bought these paper objects called magazines and Charlie wrote in PC Zone through to TV Go Home, Nathan Barley and now this BBC Four series.
Anyhow, Adam referenced the iPlayer URL of Brooker's end of year special of Screenwipe which I'd really like to see but missed due to being on holiday. I'd heard that the Flash version of iPlayer was released so I readied myself for a dose of Charlie's rantings to be streamed to my Mac and clicked the link. It wasn't to be. "Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is no longer available - sorry!" the error message says. All very well - the rights aren't cleared for the BBC to stream this after 7 days, I understand that, but ultimately I'm very disappointed.
The tour of Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Pangkor Laut, and Georgetown has begun. Have some photos below, or there are more over at Flickr.
Over at play.tm we've made a mobile site, at m.play.tm. This was made possible by a few different technologies and conventions all coming together. Google Adsense for Mobile for monentisation, XHTML Mobile for the markup, and the apparent de-facto standard of putting mobile sites on the subdomain m.[yourdomainname].
With all our content in the a database its no problem to output it to the simplified version of XHTML for use on mobile browsers, the design process was simple too - you can't display much on a tiny phone screen. Google Adsense adverts on non-mobile sites are embedded in the page using Javascript. The JS is executes and passes the page's URL to the script and Google's server-side code spits out the relevant ads (using Google's crazily complex algorithms to get to best ads, undoubtedly).
Mobiles can't usually execute Javascript, and the extra HTTP call creates added latency, which mobile pages are sensitive to. To get around this Google mobile ads are added to the page server-side, using whatever scripting language you choose. I guess Google figure that if you're savvy enough to create a mobile site then you are savvy enough to understand server-side scripting. Unfortunately Google only provide Perl, PHP, JSP and ASP v3 samples. As the main page generating parts of play.tm are written in ASP.net I created this function (based on the ASP v3 function Google provides), which of course you are welcome to copy and probably improve for your implementation (a mention and link would be nice though!):
Its all gone a bit negative around here (abusing ITV, dismissing bbc.co.uk 2.0, and listing crap URLs), so I think I should write a bit about what I'm up to.
In the constant scaling battle that is running a large and growing content site a key decision is to choose where you put components of your systems. Do you insource, outsource or a mixture of the both?
So, on play.tm we've recently been moving around quite a few pieces of this jigsaw. To give a bit of background - we've got several million pages of content ranging from text to images to video, and we deliver this to around a million users a month. We're a small company where budgets are tight, but we operate in a competitive marketplace where expectation of the user experience are high. Most visitors have broadband, are experienced digital natives and we're competing with everyone from the world's largest media conglomerates to individual bloggers for their eyeballs and ultimately advertising revenue. To minimise budgets and maximise quality of user experience we are constantly striving to improve our technical infrastructure to punch above our weight.
