Key stats include that Facebook’s user base has doubled in the last two years, that there are slightly more women than men using it and that 25 – 34 is the largest age group.

I’m indebted to the fascinating archives of Mulley Communications for historical usage numbers. Damien Mulley has been running a blog since 2003, and has been tracking the growth of social media for years.

Larger version (900px wide) available by clicking here.

A long time ago, I wrote that in an ideal world, student newspapers should be able to figure out a way to move content between InDesign and an online content management system automatically; there’s no reason why XML can’t be read by either.

Well, not only is it possible, but the Bangor Daily News has spent the money to get it done, and, in an enormous display of generosity, has released the code publicly.

This blog post summarises the information perfectly, and nitty-gritty details are available on their development blog.

This is fantastic system for low-budget operations like student newspapers or locals that simply can’t afford an enterprise solution like the incredible Woodwing. And it focuses on a web-first solution, which is something often talked about but rarely practised.

I’m very interested to see who takes advantage of the open source code. If I were starting as Editor of my student paper again, I certainly would.

Many people who ask about it simply say they don’t see the point. In my experience over the last month or so, it’s a fantastic device which is not only contributing to a rediscovery of reading for pleasure, but helping me consume digital-only content in a whole new way.

Digitally portable, beautifully readable

I was always a bit of an excessive reader.

Then I bought a smartphone.

Suddenly, I had a near-infinite supply of always-available reading material. Sure, there was a small enough screen, but that was a small sacrifice for the sheer flexibility. I started occasionally forgetting to slip a book into my bag when leaving for work. Then I stopped altogether.

What I didn’t realise, of course, was that I was simply enamoured with my new and shiny gadget. It was sexy, but it wasn’t a good replacement for the pretty good technology of a bound paper book.

The Kindle is.

Describing the screen is a little like describing a colour the reader hasn’t seen before: it needs to be experienced. When I first opened my neat little package from Amazon, I reached to remove the cellophane sticker telling me to charge it, and continued to search for its edge for about 90 seconds before realising that there was no printed sticker. I was looking at the screen.

The end result is that I carry an enormous library of content with me everywhere. If I get bored of what I’m reading, I move to another topic. This has worked wonders for getting me reading quality work again. I’m browsing through Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans one minute, then moving to a classic Arthur C. Clarke science fiction novel.

That’s not even the best part.

Enjoying digital content

One of the main reasons I took the plunge to buy the device was this blog post from British journalist Dave Lee on why the Kindle is his favourite gadget. The bit that really intrigued me was this:

Nobody reads anything online. We think we do, but really we read the first few bits of text, skim around, check out the hot pictures (if it’s the Daily Mail…) and move along to something else. That’s not reading.

I love the Kindle for reading websites. Its built-in web browser is absolutely awful, with slow screen refresh and painful navigation. Luckily, thanks to Instapaper, I don’t need it.

Instapaper and products like it clip the text from long web articles and save them for later reading: and they can send it wirelessly to other devices. This is where I’m getting the most value from. Using sites like the incredible Longform.org or LongReads.com to find examples of wonderful extended features and beaming them to the paper-like screen means my appreciation for digital content has skyrocketed. Long web articles are no longer a chore, but a pleasure.

I’ve been reading about the search for MIA soldiers at the bottom of the ocean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of cutting-edge DNA research being used to save a child’s life and a first-hand account of the crippling highs and lows of chronic insomnia; none of which I would have bothered reading on a monitor.

If you’re waiting to take the plunge, do. You won’t regret it.

I made some updates to this site today.

It’s been almost two years since I set about building my own blog from scratch: partly because I wanted to get started blogging, and partly to teach myself CSS and modern HTML (having last built a site at 14 years old using frames, and then tables). I didn’t want an entire redesign from scratch, so I kept the basic paper-on-wood look, but cleaned it up a bit. The above image is the Photoshop draft of the last version.

I figured it was time for a lick of paint for two reasons: firstly, I’d like to blog more (though we’ll so how long that lasts); secondly, it’s been a long time since I’ve done any web design and the skills needed a workout before I forgot everything.

All in all, I enjoy this kind of work. Solving a niggling problem in CSS feels great, like figuring out the solution to a particularly tricky puzzle. I’m sure my code is full of hacks and inefficiencies (and likely redundant rules for the old version), but I view the effort of coding this site as an education in basic web design. Emphasis on basic.

Powered by ExpressionEngine, font replacement by Cufón using Glypha, and using the iPhone GUI of Leehan + Tax. Indebted to Envato’s From Photoshop to HTML for teaching me how.

Click for larger version. If you’ve been following the passage of the Finance bill through the Oireachtas this week, you may have noticed how much political posturing there is, and how little valid discussion of the issues there has been. for context’s sake, I’ve plotted the number of days this year’s bill has spent or is scheduled to spend being debated in the coming days against last year’s Bill. When you actually look at the number of days being spent like this, it suggests there will be enormous problems with the enacted bill. It might have been better for all involved to debate this bill at length.]]> Politics, 2011-01-28T18:57:44+00:00 http://www.davemolloy.net/blog/whos_been_talking_about_elections http://www.davemolloy.net/blog/whos_been_talking_about_elections#When:17:53:39Z

Words are a lot of fun.

I was reading RTÉ news and spotted Eamon Gilmore criticising the government and making reference to the election, which it struck me he’s been doing a lot of lately. So I moseyed over to the fantastic KildareStreet.com to have a look at exactly how much he’s been saying it.

169 times this year, as it turns out.

As a matter of fact, he’s used the word election this year so much that it accounts for 48% of every use of the word by him since 2004. Compare that to Cowen, at 32% (and take into account he’s announced it and answered questions on it, so he hasn’t always been bringing the topic up) or Kenny at 34%, and it seems like Gilmore has his eyes on the prize.

Now, obviously there aren’t any earth-shattering conclusions to be drawn, but like I said, words can be fun.

Interesting nugget: none of the party leaders use the word “election” most. That honour goes to John Gormley (preying on his mind, perhaps?) followed closely by Micheál Martin.

If you visit it today, that’s not what you’ll see.

The site’s barren, and the lack of interest in supporting it has left journalism.co.uk editor Laura Oliver with no option but to shut it down. I used to be a contributor, and popped along recently to catch up on the debates and maybe start writing a little again. After all, it’s driven more traffic to this blog than any other activity of mine. But what’s there is little changed since I left. Worse, a lack of maintenance appears to have left the site with a bunch of broken links.

But the most disheartening thing is that Laura, who took on the job when previous editors went and got hired by major news organisations, did her part getting the word out there and recruiting interested parties, and they just didn’t care enough when it became clear it would actually involve sitting down and writing. She claims that she had more than enough sign-ups, and that people just didn’t deliver.

@davemolloy Hi Dave - Oct debate q was posted but had no responses despite 100s of sign ups - unfortunately am going to have to kill it
...
@davemolloy it’s a real shame, but it may be a time thing - lots of interest, then people went back to uni/training

Now, I’ll accept that I haven’t contributed a post in a long time. But this really, really annoys me. I should have been pushed out due to inactivity by brighter, better, younger stars. On one of the most prominent UK industry sites, they can’t attract people willing to contribute a few hundred words once a month? And this business is supposedly over-saturated with talented people who just can’t get a break?

Bullshit.

I’m seeing this elsewhere, too. At Una Mullally’s excellent Dancing About Architecture (a music journalism lecture series) over the past four weeks, I’ve seen the apathy so-called hopeful journalists have in abundance. The venue was packed to the rafters on week one with an extensive waiting list, yet by the end, the wind and rain of a cold November meant that many didn’t bother to turn up. I was sick myself one week, but it was clear that many people who had reserved a place simply didn’t bother. And they missed some excellent stuff, with week three being positively inspirational.

I’m working a day job 9-5 to pay the bills and not spending nearly as much time as I would like, and really, as I need to, on my fledgling journalism career. I’m not working hard enough, and that’s my own fault. But when I see this kind of lark, I stop worrying and kicking myself, because I’m probably still doing more than most of these people. It’s easy to say you’re going to work in the industry, but clearly, many just aren’t that interested.

Jokers.

If you’re looking for an excellent young journalist’s discussion/blog/source of info, I highly recommend http://wannabehacks.wordpress.com/, five lads trying to break into journalism by different methods.

Lots, actually. Thanks in the main to links provided by my scientifically inclined journalistic friend @martinjmckenna, I’ve been reading a bit about the issue. It seems like the scientific community as a whole is sick of journalists reporting new reserach in broad strokes and completely failing to comment on the value or validity of claims. As you can read in Robbins’ follow up article, the use of weasel words and ambiguity is driving readers of science journalism insane.

They’re called ‘Scare quotes’ and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you’re a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.

Should journalism be impartial?

Of course, the easy answer is that news journalists should be impartial, and that’s somehting the BBC takes very seriously. Good for them- I wholeheartedly agree, and the BBC is one of the few sources I trust to be truly fair. But science journalism isn’t about hard facts. Science itself is constantly being revised, and it’s about evaluating the best research available at any time to draw the most accurate results possible. It’s not about absolutes, and it’s all about the relative value of research.  This is expressed much better than I can in a post by Ed Yong on discovermagazine.com. In a nutshell:

It’s about being knowledgeable enough to make a decent stab at uncovering the truth and presenting the outcomes of that quest to one’s readers, even if that outcome lies firmly on one side of a “debate”.
It’s about doing the actual job of a journalist, by analysing, critiquing, placing into context and so on, as opposed to merely reporting.

It’s a damn convincing argument, and one I think can’t really be put down. So why isn’t the BBC doing this? Is it just a tired news journalist not bothering with hard research at the end of the day?

Give the Scientists Control

The most interesting part of this for me is that the BBC have an amazing science department, full of intelligent graduates with a passion for their subjects. They produce fantastic documentary series and interesting and insightful popular shows like Bang Goes the Theory. I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the presenters of BGTT, Irishwoman Liz Bonnin, earlier this year, and the genuine excitment she had for her area of study (wild animal biology) was evident. More importantly for this topic, she had lots to say about the BBC:

“There’s a massive pool of scientific knowledge. I feel very much like part of a family for the first time in my scientific career ... The fact that I wake up every morning and work at something I’m really, truly passionate about is I think, quite rare. It’s a blessing to be doing what I’m doing.”

...

I’m pinching myself most of the time. I’m so fortunate… a lot of our staff would have PhDs, let alone Master’s… it’s an absolute priviledge.

She actually sold it much better than that with her tone and clear admiration. So why are the broadcast science team not curating the science news? I know that scientific knowledge doesn’t make a person a quality writer, but that’s what editors are for. Informed and expert opinion is the heart of good writing, especially within such a complex and important subject area.

Hand the reigns over to the experts, lads.

Her name is Paper.

See, I’m the type of person who needs to trick myself into working. I’d consider myself highly productive, but it’s not by nature. No, like many of us, I play games with my time, trying to make my calendar, my to-do lists and documents as fun as they can possibly be. Whether it’s my new favourite, the Pomodoro Technique, or the good old reliable Getting Things Done system, I’ve got an arsenal of anti-procrastination tools at my disposal that serve me well. And they need to be perfect.

Mind tricks, see?

I got hooked on these tricks and mind games by my good friend the photo editor back in 2007. He was always impeccably well-organised, and would constantly remind me of the editorial duties I had forgotten about several times during the course of the day. Eventually, I asked about the secret and he showed me how to make a list of projects and associated actions on the good old A4 pad. I’ve never looked back and am now a convert to the church of GTD.

Of course, this organization guru of mine soon purchased an iPhone, and when we talked again about the system months later, he showed me a selection of the shiny apps to help organise your life. Needless to say, when I purchased my own slice of the Apple smartphone pie, I eagerly downloaded the magic apps that would increase my efficiency 1000%. With gusto, I showed my purchases to my mentor. And he said:

Oh, those? I stopped using them ages ago. I prefer paper. Paper works.

...or something to that effect. I, of course, didn’t listen, and my productivity took a massive nosedive.

Scribbling is good

See, the problem with digital solutions is that they’re inflexible. They always have too many or two few features, or different options that don’t play well together. You might be able to view a project summary page, but probably not alongside its associated notes or support material on the same page. Hell, the supporting documents are probably on paper anyway. Maybe you’ve found the perfect program, but it doesn’t support one key feature of your workflow. Let’s face it; we all customise these systems a little. We’re all individual little snowflakes when it comes to efficiency.

I like scribbling in the columns. It makes my system better. My calendar needs arrows and circles to show related events and important appointments. I soak up visual info faster and more efficiently, and it’s far easier to edit and annotate.

I’m also more efficient when the key piece of organisational equipment I keep with me has blank pages for brainstorming and doodling. Ideas flow more freely: if you don’t believe me, grab a piece of A4 and start throwing down ideas now. I bet you’ll be surprised at how fluid it is compared to typing.

Flexibility

I’m actually using a Filofax I picked up in town for €25 now. It’s a simple, elegant solution, and so far I love it. It beats my previous number one paper tool, a flimsy and battered Moleskine, because it’s endlessly customisable. Sections can be reordered, added to or thrown away, and you can download or create custom pages, like they’ve done on DIYPlanner.com. I have to-dos (action lists) and projects (sorted alphabetically) at the front, followed by the calendar. It’s flawless so far. I might mix things up a bit in the coming weeks to experiment, but the compact ring binder format is so very useful for that very reason. If you’re not a fan of bulk, there’s an amazing compact GTD moleskine solution out there.

The best thing about the paper system for me is that i can relax more. It’s a constant, visible reminder that everything is safely recorded and not forgotten. I know my data is safe on my mobile device or in the cloud, but I don’t feel that it is. With a solid piece of kit, I don’t worry. And that’s worth anything.

Paper works. Some things, like contacts, work best on a smartphone for obvious reasons. But low-tech can be better, and often is. If you’re dissatisfied with your current system, give the old girl a ring. She’s just as steadfast as she always has been.

But there is a geolocation service that offers real value to the end user, has a dedicated user base, and is tons of fun to use. And it’s the mobile version of the popular Yelp social reviews site.

This service provides value to the user by showing them top-rated cafes, bars etc nearby, nails the social element with weekly newsletters, check-ins and and tips/comments, and, best of all, is making a genuine effort with real live people to build a community. Which knocks the competition out of the park.

I singed up to Yelp on the iPhone after a quick Google search for a good bike shop in Dublin yielded user reviews. Convinced that our tiny nation wouldn’t have any real content, I downloaded the mobile app to prove myself right. I wasn’t right. Within a minute I had read multiple user reviews of several nearby bicycle shops, and decided to try one I had never seen before (which was excellent, by the way).

There is a good sizeable chunk of content there, and it’s growing by the day. A lot of it is powered by a small group of people with a prolific output, but that’s ok: it means that the content is there for the new user to gain value from the service. Which is precisely what a lot of other services that launch in Ireland lack. Perhaps- and this might be crazy- perhaps there is an actual community officer for Dublin/Ireland? Madness, surely?

No. A few days later, I was pleasantly surprised to find this message in my e-mail inbox:

Hi Dave,

I wanted to drop you a quick note and introduce myself. I’m the Community Manager for Dublin. Just wanted to say hello!

Glad to see that you have signed up to the fun! I hope you join your fellow Dublin Yelpers in sharing opinions on the local places you love, hate, need so badly you would run red lights to get to, or can’t stand so much you would rather eat hot coals than step foot in again.

All of your diverse opinions help make up The Weekly Yelp (http://www.yelp.ie/weekly), our newsletter that highlights current happenings in and around Dublin. Each week I comb the site to find the most useful, funny, and cool reviews that give a local’s perspective on where to spend your time, money and daily caloric intake…

Finally. Someone gets it. For these types of services to work, there needs to be a person or team responsible for the growth of content in an area. That was always Foursquare’s problem. The aforementioned Annie L is one of the most prolific users on Yelp Dublin, and from what I can see she’s constantly replying to user queries in the talk pages (which are chat areas with questions about the city). Hell, that same e-mail mentioned that “elite” contributors get invited to beer pong games as a reward.

This approach deserves to get noticed. Finally, someone is showing little old Dublin a little attention. And this is god damn useful. Standing on Fishamble St and wondering where you should grab a coffee with that old friend you just bumped into? Sorted. I’d love to see this grow more and justify the company’s decision to invest in Dublin.

You’ll find me on Yelp as davemolloy, and should sign up yourself here! Now, I must go and review my local pub.