Name: Josie Allchin
Occupation: Online production assistant and journalist - makes text, photos and video work on the web. Hopefully.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Of all the places to be surrounded by Game of Thrones fans, I didn’t expect it to be on my estate in West London. This makes me smile every morning when I walk past it. Winter is coming!
Site review: Scoutzie
Mobile app designers are showcased on this simple but beautifully laid out website.
The premise behind this site is simple - to give mobile designers the acknowledgement they deserve in view to get them more work. You can browse by design (categorised into designs for iPhone, Android, iPad, Windows, responsive etc), or by designer, whose profile will be accompanied by their designs are contact details. If you’re looking for something specific you can also post your own job ads.
The nice thing about the site is that it features well-know apps (such as Instagram) to new, upcoming and lesser-known apps and designers.
It be good to be able to browse more specifically, perhaps by region or genre, but right now it’s good enough just to scroll through endless pages of beautiful designs in a way mobile apps haven’t been presented before.
Oh wow, this is combining two of my very favourite things: notebooks and LEGO. Thanks albotas for pointing this out. They look magnificent.
A Little Bit On The LEGO Side: Moleskine will be releasing a limited edition collection of LEGO themed notebooks March 1st. Each notebook will include a LEGO bookmark, stickers, and - wait for it - an actual LEGO piece built into the cover!
(via Freshness)
One hour of video is uploaded to YouTube per second…
… But just think about how much rubbish that includes
YouTube unveiled some spectacular data yesterday - a video (above) and a brilliant website visualising just how much “one hour per second” means.
Well, it means a lot. An insane amount, so much video in fact that in 3 minutes 27 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the International Space Station completes 135 orbits of the earth - 8 days 15 hours of video.
But think about the kind of content you see on YouTube. Yes there are the good things - music videos, cartoons, web series, TV comics, old ads, short films, documentaries, bloopers etc etc.
But then there are cat videos, awkward teen vlogs, bad pranks, more cats, bad music covers. Just look at the related videos bar on any search and there’s going to be a significant chunk of random, useless crap.
So one hour of video of video per second? That’s a mind blowing amount of of cyber rubbish.
Site review: Teefury.com
T-shirts? Woo! Crowdsourcing? Woo!
The basic premise of Teefury is simple - the general public submit their designs and the best are chosen to be printed up and sold as limited edition t-shirts for one day only - and yours for only $10 (about £6.40). The designer gets $1 for every shirt sold and everyone’s happy - people are making a profit and the rest of us get to own awesome clothes on the cheap.
Designs can be broadly categorised into TV, popular culture, gaming and film. So think along the lines of a Game of Thrones themed tee designed in the style of an American football team shirt: “The Winterfell Dire Wolves” Or, one advertising the annual 5k Zombie Walk, or “Night of the Living 8 bit” (zombies with 8-bit heads).
Once you’re on the site buying is easy. That day’s t-shirt design will be advertised on the homepage, you name your size and you add to cart. And that’s it.
The sheer simplicity of this genius of idea cuts deep into the mindset of the trendy consumer. People want individuality and there’s no point in denying that a t-shirt is a statement of just that. People want cheap and they want the buying process to be easy. Want to get involved as well? Just submit your own idea.
With each day’s new design you’ll get a Q&A with the artist and the ability to comment, share your purchase on Twitter and Facebook and engage with other Teefury fans in the forum.
Teefury is one of only a few perfect examples of creative, dynamic uses of the web going on right now. And what’s more, it’s just really, really cool.
Pic: today’s design by harebrained
Site review: HMRC’s online tax return
Tax doesn’t have to be taxing? It would be great deal less taxing if the HMRC got their navigation and user experience in order.
Now don’t all fall around with excitement at the prospect of several paragraphs COMPLETELY DEDICATED to the government’s self assessment tax return online platform (oh jeez, kill me now).
But considering the many thousands of people who will be rushing around in a blind panic trying to navigate their way to a fine-free start to the new tax year, I can assure you this website is on a lot of people’s minds.
Go to www.hmrc.gov.uk and you will be greeted with the calming expression of Moira Stewart looking upon you as though she were a reassuring nurse, telling you it’ll all be over before you can “hurry up and gimme a rebate”…
The eye then glances to the top left-hand corner, where helpfully we see the “log in” button. Great, off we click…
… OK, we appear to have been taken to another log in page with a long list of text that seems to blur the longer we stare at it, panicking again as we notice that Moira Stewart’s calming expression has seemingly disappeared.
As we begin to refocus the big green header text informs us: “Log in to HMRC online services”. Wait, I thought I’d already clicked to do that on the page before?
As your eyes stumble down the list of possible links that may apply to you… Corporation Industry Tax? No… Alcohol & Tobacco Warehousing? Nope… Duty Deferment Electronic Statement (DDES) service… I don’t think so, you suddenly realise that amongst all of these horrible, horrible combinations of words that apparently refer to ACTUAL things, you’ve missed the link at the top saying “Self Assessment”, which got lost in this awful text-heavy needless second log in page.
OK, OK, yes it was the first thing in the list at the top of the page under the green header, but one is not of completely sound mind just before filling out a tax return. And whoever designed this process clearly did not take this into consideration.
So finally we get to a log in page that actually asks us for our log in details. Great. We already went through hell trying to find our user ID, but that’s a matter for another blog post. We’re here, hurrah. Breathe… And off we go. We imagine Moira Stewart waving us off in the distance.
I could go on - about how after we’ve logged in there’s yet another page giving us more options we thought we’d already chosen, how the navigation once you’re actually filling in your tax return is unintuitive and clunky, and how it would really useful to have a glossary of terms handy.
But for now, HRMC, you need to work on having less clicks and better signposting. It’ll entice a lot more people to do their tax return online and make it easier for those of us who faint every time we think about numbers.
Internet 2011 in numbers - Social Media
- 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
- 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
- 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
- 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
- 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
- 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
So… Online video is kind of big at the minute. Everybody’s making a big fuss about how to do it right, how to do it wrong, how much you need to do, what equipment you should use, how much budget you should put towards it etc, etc, etc. But in my experience, online video can be really, really simple. As the animation above demonstrates:
1) Get hold of a simple camera (not a washing machine, as it might look like)
2) Get someone who’s had a couple hours of experience behind the camera
3) Find someone else who’s comfortable talking about stuff
4) Hey-presto, there you have some simple, awesome video.
We’ve been doing this as work recently, and I’m pleasantly surprised with what we’ve managed with very little resources.
(Both of these it’s-early-days videos shot and edited by me)
Geek Pillow Talk: Update For New Contributors...
And thank YOU!
Well, haven’t we had a successful first week? Thank you all for following us. It’s still at the stage where I can thank you all individually too, so thank you:
The world keeps spinning in the face of Big News
It’s been an interesting morning in the world of web and content production.
Of course you can’t have escaped the news that Apple co-founder and (recently) ex-CEO Steve Jobs has died at the age of 56. But in amongst the massive influx of tributes, tweets, stories and memories the world still spins and the working day must continue. It also presents a number of interesting problems for the media to navigate.
Despite being a story that doesn’t quite come under our remit, were we going to write anything? Of course, stupid question. Firstly, if we didn’t then we would be the odd ones out. Given the magnitude of the story, it would be inappropriate not to. Secondly, our readers, even though they’re a specific group, will still be interested in the news. And if they come to us for their specific news anyway, why not give them something they’d be interested in otherwise.
But we must be careful: our readers won’t come to us purely for that news, that’s what the wider media is for - so once we start to move away from the basic “x has happened”, we can start angling analyses, comment and other news stories to what we are about. (It also happens to make it easier that Steve Jobs and Apple are so interrelated with so many things we do write about anyway).
But there’s other news going on as well. What about that? Well, we can’t ignore that either. We’ve written some good content on Apple and Steve Jobs, but it can’t fill all of our front page because as stated, it’s not exactly our remit. So we find a balance, giving appropriate space to the big news of the day and news specific to our sector.
And here’s the big one: Twitter. Twitter is full of people. Sometimes they’re angry and they gang-up on others. Sometimes they all club together and sing the same song - today is one of those days. I woke up this morning to find, perhaps, 70% of my Twitter feed to be about Steve Jobs, the other 30% not about Steve Jobs. Unsurprisingly, that 30% looked distinctly out of place.
Twitter is one of our major outlets for promoting stories - out of all our social media channels, Twitter brings us the most traffic. But when is it appropriate today to tweet a story that’s not Steve Jobs? The last thing we want is people tweeting back at us saying we seem insensitive and out of touch.
But this morning I bit the bullet and tweeted a story out about Starbucks in the flurry of our other Apple-related tweets.
Using Bit.ly to track clicks from Twitter to the story, it appeared that the Starbucks story scored way more clicks than any of the Apple stuff we’d Tweeted out. In the back-end of the website I could see that Starbucks had got double the page views than Steve Jobs did.
Even though Steve Jobs is the big news of the day, this actually doesn’t surprise me. A story focused on our sector compared to one that is only loosely related is what our readers - readers involved in our sector - will click on.
So even in a storm created by Big News, the world does indeed keep spinning.
Phew.
