OK, so it’s a little stiff-kneed, but this is actually a perfect promo video for its audience – honest, well-edited and informative. I’ll live without the tricksy cuts and in jokes: I wanted to go try and site at the end of watching the flick.
Best sites
29
Jul 09
The little trio of journalists that could
I work in an industry that’s obsessed with its own demise. The newspaper business spends its days planning its own funeral party (crisps, anyone?), while ironically enjoying an online gold rush (in traffic, anyway). My Google Reader feed is a river of contradictory figures and silver bullets. Snake oil salesmen? The web wrote the book.
But in the midst of seemingly self-destructive second (third? fourth?) industrial revolution, there are some remarkable things. I got lost for 30 minutes today studying the stats for one of our sites. I won’t go into detail or name names, but three guys had produced 1000%+ leaps in traffic through the power of what we used to call journalism. Good stories told well, and usually before any the crowd had spotted the signals.
As I said, I won’t name them (internal rivalry is rife, and there’s nothing worse than being handed an apple – ‘specially by me), but you know who you are. Regardless of how this one works out, you deserve to prosper: any endeavor that has that kind if energy and imagination can’t be allowed to fail.
14
Jan 08
CoverItLive: blogging goes real time
God knows how many people will use it, but huge credit to the Einsteins behind CoverItLive.
Sign up for an account (which is free, by the way), and you have instant access to a turbo-charged blogging tool that blurs the line between blog and instant messaging.
All you do is add a line of code to your site that embeds the CoverItLive console into your page. Continue reading →
5
Sep 07
Gliffy: share those boxes and arrows
Now this is cool. Just spent the day brain-souping a new site with a few colleagues, and reached the point where we needed to work on individual sections. Problem is, we also needed to see what each of us were up to.
A quick Google, and up pops Gliffy. For years, I’ve been an OmniGraffle addict – for a Mac user, it’s the easiest way to rapidly map an idea or a web page. While Gliffy may not be quite a razor refined as ‘Graffle, it’s frighteningly easy to use, and comes with the not inconsiderable benefit of being sharable.
Sign up for a free account, log in, and you can create a new page in seconds. Boxes are all drag and drop, everything’s re-sizable, and nothing appears to glitch out. You can save your doodles into folders, or export stuff to jpeg for later digestion.
The $20 a year paid account may not bring major benefits for the casual user, but is laughably cheap if you’re a serious wireframer: paying the cash removes the limit of image uploads, and gets rid of the subscription nag-ad at the top of the frame.
Too many online collaboration tools are willfully obstructive: Gliffy seems to be a genuine peach.
16
Aug 07
Multimap reborn: Google Maps now has rival
One from the Mediocre Coincidence Dept. I’m boring a colleague senseless today on the sheer awfulness of Multimaps compared to Google Maps (yep, I’m that dull). Hey presto, I open a browser this evening to find a brand new Multimap.
And… it’s excellent. In fact, it actually looks as though they’ve spoken to people who use online maps. You search by your postcode, and it finds the location quickly. Alongside, it shows a menu of nearby utilities – petrol stations, railway stations and the like. Select one, and pegs appear on the map.
The only downside appears to be a fixation with banner advertisements, which are doing their level best to overwhelm the maps. But that’s a niggle: if you’re a Google Maps fan, take five minutes to give it a spin.
16
Aug 07
AOL relaunches picky YouTube rival
I’d mentioned the Mullet Strategy a while back. Its principle is simple: business up front, party at the back.
In practical terms, it means letting the world lose on contributing to your site (the party), but making sure you have a gang of crack editors ensuring that only the mavellous makes it to the top-level pages.
15
Aug 07
Musicovery: lose hours just playing
Just stumbled across this, and lost the next 30 minutes. I suspect it’s not that new (I seem to remember a develop buddy mentioning it a while back), but what the hell – it’s shockingly addictive.
15
Aug 07
USAToday records massive traffic hike
File this one under ‘What The Hell Do I Know, Anyway’.
I admit to hating this year’s re-launch of USAToday. In particular, I hated the panel from hell that dominated the home page – 30 seconds to load in the early days of the re-launch, and determined to hide a good headline behind a small picture. I also took an instant dislike to the OTT inegration of social networking, if only because it allowed people to post ‘AGhhhgGGG…jrrrr’ (or something like that) on the home page.
Which only goes to show that I obviously have no taste, because the site has just annonced a 20%-plus leap in traffic year-on-year – or does it…
The release is careful to point to a big Simpsons competition and an exclusive JK Rowling interview being ‘major drivers’ behind the boom. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Neilsen/NetRatings figures with those two events factored away.
In the meantime, I’m happy to share my news trawling between the rather wonderful new CNN and the stalwarts at the Beeb.
USATODAY.com Reports 20% Year-Over-Year Increase in Traffic: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
