The BBC, that bastion of Britishness, has launched two new iPhone apps for both news and football. Sadly for our UK cousins, they’re not actually available in Britain at all.

The BBC apps were originally due out in April, but were delayed following the Newspaper Publishers Association’s complaint, lodged with the BBC trust, that such a strategy would damage the “nascent market”. At the time, if you remember, there were a lot of questions being asked about how the BBC was spending its licence fee, and so the apps were put on ice.

Now, however, they’re being offered as an ad-supported service outside the UK, where complaints about the licence fee and the UK market don’t apply. And how lucky we fans of the BBC news service are- these applications are absolutely excellent.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism •Tech
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While I’m relatively sure that the only people who still read my blog are those who signed up to the RSS feed a long time ago, I’ve gone ahead and redesigned the site today.

Well, that’s not quite true. I designed and coded this from scratch, so I had to learn most of the skills first- it’s more a a multi-week project. As a result, I’m rather worn out now, and will save the blog post on my learning curve for another day. For the moment, let me just say I’m sure I’ve managed to break some things (categories, obviously) and I only have placeholders for the About, Portfolio, and Contact sections at the moment. And I’m aware that Cufon font replacement is quite slow, though I’ve no idea why.

Well, all for another day. If anyone spots some errors that need fixing, let me know. Even better, let me know how to fix them!

Posted by Dave Molloy in •Tech
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There’s an excellent piece in the Sunday Times today on Japan bribing voters of the International Whaling Commission to lift the moratorium on whaling.

I recommend reading the extended piece, linked to above, and not just the summary report on the paper’s front page. It’s a wonderful piece of proper investigative journalism, and the care the team took is apparent. For example:

On Friday the Guinea fisheries ministry denied Japan had paid any money to its delegates and claimed Sylla was not involved in IWC matters. Sylla was briefly put on the phone to say he had made everything up.

However, a reporter who telephoned the ministry earlier to check Sylla’s credentials was told he attended IWC meetings and had recently been at preparatory talks for Morocco as a stand-in IWC commissioner.

Wonderful. It’s been a long time since I thought that being a journalist was about shady parking lots and informants, but hot damn, every time I read a piece like this I can’t help but get excited like a kid. Hidden cameras, government bribery, and even a mention of prostitution. Cracking stuff!

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism
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I’ve had trouble convincing some of my friends to try Twitter; most of the non-media types aren’t on it. Every time I do have that conversation, though, I come back to the same argument. It’s not Facebook. Its power lies not in socialising with friends, but as a tool for connecting with individuals in a specific area of interest, and sharing content and news in a timely manner within that network.

Lately, Twitter has been less useful than itwas, and I’ve been checking it less and posting a hell of a lot less. It only dawned on me the other day that I wasn’t heeding my own advice. I was following too many people form too many different areas.

I’ve culled my list of over 100 people I was following back to 47. For me, around 50 is the magic number. It’s enough to dip in and out of whenever I want, and to be able to catch up with the flow of information without feeling overwhelmed. Selective following is also the key to getting the most utility out of Twitter: in my own culling process, I stopped following plenty of people I know personally and who are pretty interesting. But those people often used Twitter amongst friends for social reasons, or for a completely different network than my own. For social interactions, Facebook is a much better platform. Personally, I use Twitter for following the thoughts of those people in media on the subject of media, so I also unfollowed plenty of journalists and so on who Tweet their personal business more than anything else.

The tool I used for this whole process was ManageFlitter.com. It’s an excellent free service that will show you which people you follow are not following you, who’s inactive, talkative, shares links, etc.

If you’ve been less in love with Twitter recently than you were before, try a little spring clean. It really does change the entire feeling of your stream.

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Posted by Dave Molloy in •Tech
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