It’s a really great series, and I encourage you to listen to it.

At one point in episode 4, Stephen sings the Nokia ringtone.

So, here it is for your edification, and delight.

Feel free to set it as your iPhone’s ringtone :-)

All together now, “Derr-nerr-nerr-nerr Derr-nerr-nerr-nerr Derr-nerr-nerr-nerr Nerr!”

As you've discovered I will become @ITVLauraK in September! Thanks for all the lovely tweets - Back in Westminster tomorrow

22/06/2011 13:31 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BBCLauraK

Laura Kuenssberg

Which got me wondering.

Why doesn't @BBCLauraK simply rename her account to @ITVLauraK in September? Or are her followers the BBC's property?

22/06/2011 13:48 via Shkspr's SSL DabrReplyRetweetFavorite

@edent

Terence Eden

Twitter allows any user to change their name and keep all their followers. All of Laura’s followers, friends, favourites, tweets, retweets, and lists will dissapear when she swaps to a new account.

Or will they? Is @BBCLauraK the twitter account for the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent? Or is it Laura’s account?
If the former, I’d expect it to be taken over by her successor and renamed @BBCgordonGopher (or whoever).
If the latter, it makes sense for her to rename the account to @ITVlauraK (or whatever).

Looking at her feed, it’s broadcast only with almost no “personal” tweets. Certainly no “Urgh, hungover” or “Trains late again!” tweets.

So, it probably makes sense for Laura to hand over control of the account when she leaves.

Impact On You

How much work tweeting do you do from your Twitter account? If you left your job, would your bosses be able to demand you surrender the account to them?

Sure, if you’re tweeting from @NameOfYourCompany – it’s their account. But if you’re @CompanyName_Bob – do you get to keep it when you go? What if you’re just @You – and you tweet about the company you work for – what happens to all that good-will when you go?

Work Phone vs Work Email

When I first joined Vodafone nearly a decade ago, I was given a mobile phone number. Our office was quite revolutionary because there we no desk phones! Of course not; we were in the mobile phone business.

This confused some people greatly. I’d give them my number and they’d say “yes, but how can I reach you at your desk?”
And I’d say “Errrr…. I always have my mobile with me. Assuming it’s me you want to reach, ring that number. Why would you want to talk to someone who happened to be sitting near where I work?”

Since then, I’ve kept the same mobile number. If you want to reach me – that’s the number you call. No matter who I end up working for, that’s my number. When I move roles, I take my number with me. When I leave a job, I take my number with me.

Yet I don’t take my email address with me. Mails to terence.eden@vodafone.com will go unanswered – I hope!
I can understand that – I don’t want confidential documents forwarded to me. The domain name would make it look like I was still affiliated with an old employer.

But my phone number comes to me, Terence Eden. Wherever I am. Whoever I work for.

My Twitter account – @edent – is personal. It’s mine. No boss can take it away from me.

What about yours?

As part of the Wikimedia Derby Backstage Pass a group of participants were invited around the mothballed Silk Mill Museum.

You can hear the full interview on the BBC iPlayer

As the iPlayer removes shows after a week, I’ve liberated the clip of me chatting away.

Thanks to Mark Ansell for performing the interview.

A couple of pictures of odd signs hidden away in the museum.

More photos available on Richard Mackney’s blog.

This leads us in to the amusing territory of “hiding” human readable data in the code.  I say “hiding” because we are hiding it from the scanner – not from the human.

One of the more famous examples of this is Duncan Robertson’s BBC logo.

What works particularly well is the fact that the BBC logo is already black and white, and fairly blocky.

Aliens!

After my sojourn alien hunting in Paris, I realised that there is another blocky character which most people will recognise – the humble Space Invader!

In this first code, I’ve made the Invader small and hidden her in some blank space.

Because she’s around the same size as the surrounding pixels, any error she generates is cancelled out.

We can also use Duncan’s technique and obscure part of the code.

How Not To Be Seen

While the boys of Monty Python can tell you how not to be seen, for computer vision, it’s rather different.

Essentially, what most QR scanners do is look at a greyscale view of the image in front of them.  The lighter the colour, the more likely the optical recognition algorithm is to see it as “white”.  This allows you to put dark coloured QR codes on to a light coloured background and still have them read.

So, in theory, we could fill up every pixel of white space with a different light colour and still be perfectly readable.

In this example, I’ve filled in some of the white space with light green.

When seen in greyscale, the green is discarded and no extra error is introduced.

Other Examples

Optiscan have gone a whole lot further and coloured in the entire code

They claim that their app will quite happily read this code. As it’s iPhone only, I wasn’t able to verify – but as a rule, increasing the colour complexity will reduce the chances of a phone being able to successfully read your code. It’s a fine balance between readability and aesthetic improvement.

The excellent QR Monkey has a blog post detailing several different techniques for prettifying your QR Codes.

Another example of how far you can go is this QR Quilt from Rubi Studios.

In short – you can go pretty wild with your QR designs. Just remember to up the error correction and make sure that contrast between the colours you use is sufficiently high for most scanners. When in doubt – test!

Here’s a typical example.

BBC Advert

Intercontinental are a premium brand. No doubt their mobile advertising is really good. Right?

First Impression

Intercontinental Advert Page 1

We start off with a mobile friendly page.  Almost.  There are five flaws here.

1. Large image.  While visually appealing, consider that not everyone has a fast mobile Internet connection.  They may also have to pay per KB.  Is there a way to use multiple, smaller images to make things just as appealing as well as being quick and cheap?
2. Exposing a hyperlink.  It’s rarely a good idea to show the http:// and other inner workings of your systems.  It breaks the understood convention of the web and exposes your URL structure.  In this case it also shows that the website you’re sending people to neither belongs to Intercontinental nor the BBC.
3. Hyperlink colouring.  Convention is that links are in blue – or at the very least a different colour from the rest of the text – and underlined.  This allows customers to quickly and easily see where the clickable parts of the site are.
4. This is a mobile advert – where is the mobile mindset? Why am I signing up for an email newsletter?  Why not a monthly SMS or MMS?  Why not a mobile video showing how wonderful the Intercontinental is? Why not a mobile voucher to present at my next visit?  What a missed opportunity.
5. Bearing numbers 2 and 3 in mind, is “The Real” clickable? If so, where does it lead?  A consistent style helps with navigation.  Clearly explaining what lies behind a link encourages clickthrough.

Speaking of clickthrough – let’s go and sign up for this e-newsletter.

Disaster!

Regular readers of this blog know what’s coming next.

Not exactly mobile friendly

Yup. It’s a desktop web page which is totally unsuitable for mobiles.  Poorly formatted, hard to use and generally a disaster.  How much did they spend on mobile advertising?  Could they not have spared a few € for a mobile friendly sign up page?

Back a Step

Let’s go back to that first page and click on “The Real”.  Maybe it’s the real link to the mobile sign up form?

The Real

Ah! Now we see why InterContinental were advertising on the BBC – they have a tie in show.  The link right at the bottom goes back to the first page, what about www.bbc.com/thereal ?

Notice that, yet again, we have a different style of URL.  It isn’t underlined, it isn’t a different colour, but it is clickable.  This is the third style of URL on this site – totally confusing.

Let’s click (you all know where this is going, right?)

Calamity!

Non-Mobile BBC Site

To be sure, this is a lovely site – but it’s not exactly what you’d call mobile friendly.  What is the point of putting a link to a slow to download, expensive and poorly rendered desktop page within a mobile advert?

It doesn’t have to be this way!

The BBC excels at producing mobile tie in content.  Take a look at the mobile friendly Doctor Who page.

Doctor Who Mobile

Mobile formatted, downloads, videos, loads of interesting and engaging content.  Just the way it should be.

Conclusions

There is one important lesson to be learned here.

Make sure all of your site is mobile friendly.  That doesn’t just mean all pages are suitable for mobiles – it also means that the offer is suitable for mobile.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about seeing Russell Howard’s Good News. I was (only slightly) gutted not to have appeared on the broadcast version of the show.

Then, this morning, one of my colleagues stopped me in the lift…

Hey! Saw you on TV last night talking about Dorset Blue Vinney.

And so he did!

You can watch the full episode for the next few days on iPlayer – or skip straight to 54 minutes in to see my bit.

Big thanks to Russell Howard and the Good News team for making my day.

On Tuesday, as a birthday treat, I managed to snaffle some tickets for Russell Howard’s Good News. While I’m a great admire of his, I hadn’t seen the show before and didn’t really know what to expect.

During any show, there are slack moments where cameras have to be repositioned, lights adjusted or other bits of TV nonsense. Normally it’s up to the warm-up act to keep the audience entertained – however Russell is obviously no slouch in the comedy department and kept up a witty banter with the audience throughout. At one point he was asking what we’d spend a £45 million Lotto win on.

Bizarrely, in a moment of silence while the audience contemplated a win of this magnitude, I shouted

CHEESE!

I struggle to think why. Why did I shout “Cheese!”? Why, when he asked what variety of cheese, I replied “Dorset Blue Vinney“. For some reason, it was the only one of the Cheese Shop Sketch cheeses I can remember.

As a testament to how popular twitter is now, before I’d even made the train home I received this tweet.

zanytk

(Tom Kendall)

@edent I'm gunna rub Dorset blue vinnie all over you!

On 17-11-2009 22:06:35 from Tweetie in reply to Terence Eden

Still, at least no-one tried to get me laid!

Sadly, the bit was cut from the TV screening – much to the consternation of some audience members.

jessyka19

(Jess Taylor)

@bbcgoodnews YOU LEFT CHEESEMAN OUT, HOW DARE YOU! :@ best bit!

On 19-11-2009 22:59:38 from web in reply to Good News Team

Do yourself a favour, apply for tickets to some of the shows on offer. Big name shows like Strictly Come Dancing often fill up quickly – but it’s easy to get free tickets for sitcoms, pilots and game-shows. As well as a great night’s entertainment you also run the very small chance of seeing the back of your head during the closing credits!

“[Blog posts are] a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Today Ofcom published the responses it had for its consultation on plans for the BBC to encrypt its HD broadcasts.

The blogosphere went nuts! DRM? Not on our watch.  Boing Boing mobilised its army of commentators, the BBC published two blog posts which quickly filled up with comments, Facebook statuses were updated and all these links were retweeted until our fingers were worn to their nubs.

No doubt Ofcom has collapsed under the weight of public opinion. How can the BBC possibly hope to get away with their feindinsh plans with such a backlash?

90 People

Ninety.  Less than one hundred.  Smaller than the viewing figures for BBC Three.  That’s how many people could be arsed to type a few dozen words to Ofcom, spell check them, then hit send.

More people signed a petition asking for a Yorkshire sign to be erected on the M1 than responded to this consultation.  Now, maybe my finger is off the pulse, but I haven’t seen major blogs crying foul over Yorkshire’s lack of signage.

On The Plus Side

You can read my response on their site.  Like all the others I’ve read, it’s against the proposals.  I haven’t read every response, but the twenty or so that I downloaded were all against the plans.

I know that there’s typically low turn out to consultations of this kind.  Organisations know that for every person who bothered to complain, there’s more waiting in the wings quietly seething.

But only 90 people?  I realise that the power of retweeting helped free Iran from a stolen election, but sometimes you actually have to do something.  You don’t even need to get off your computer.  Find an email address, write a few sentences and let those in charge know how you feel.

This will help get you started.

• List of government consultation websites
• Public Consultations in your area
• Ofcom Consultaions

Ever since I took GCSE and A-Level statistics, I’ve had a healthy appreciation for the way they are presented to the public.

I vividly remember my grandmother shouting at the television one night. The news presenter had said “20% of people polled – that’s nearly a quarter…” Before she could finish, my grandmother loudly interjected, “Nearly a quarter? It’s exactly a fifth!”

The way people see, hear and understand statistics is very complex. It’s a rich mine of study for economists, neuroscientists and anthropologists. Given its complexity, shouldn’t we me making it as easy to understand as possible?

I’m going to show you a few poorly presented statistics from the BBC News site. I pick on the BBC only because it’s the site I read most often. Other news services are just as bad.

BNP

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the apparent bump in the polls the fascists got following their Grand Wizard’s leader’s appearance on Question Time. Here’s how it’s reported.

BNP support in poll sparks anger

The opinion poll carried out after Mr Griffin’s appearance found 22% of voters would consider voting BNP in a future local, general or European election.

Two-thirds of the 1,314 people polled by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph dismissed voting for the party under any circumstances, with the rest unsure.

When asked how they would vote in an election tomorrow, the proportion supporting the BNP stood at 3%, up from 2% a month ago.

However, more than half of those polled said they agreed or thought when asked if the party had a point in speaking up for the interests of “indigenous, white British people”.

I don’t want to comment on the validity of the poll – but the way in which its results are presented make it really quite difficult to gain a quick understanding of the situation.

The stats are presented in four different formats.

• Numerical: “22%”
• Verbal: “More than half”
• Fractional: “Two-Thirds”
• Relational: “x% up from y%”

This means that within 4 paragraphs the user has to switch their mental model of how the statistics are represented 4 times.  It makes it hard to easily compare the statistics on offer.  It leads to confusion and, ultimately, ignorance of what is being reported.

In the above example, what percentage of people were “Unsure”?

Off the top of your head, is two-sevenths greater or less than 22%?  By how much?

Political Party X has seen its support drop by nearly a third to just over 40%.  What was the party’s original level of support?

These head-scratchers become easier when expressed in a common base – or when set out graphically.

Florence Nightingale is credited with creating the Pie Chart in order to explain to non-statistical civil servants the problems she faced in the war. While Pie Charts have some usability problems, there’s no reason why a suitable graphical representation of the numbers can’t be shown.  It allows those less versed in numerical reasoning a chance to evaluate the data presented.

The joke at the top of the page is based on the classic Binary Joke.  It relies on your confusion between base-10 and base-2.  When you mix and match different ways of expressing statistics, you might as well be mixing binary, decimal, and hexadecimal.  When reporting on statistics, clarity is the key to comprehension.

The Good
Once again, it’s impossible to feel anything other that gratitude and humbleness in the face of the sheer amount of effort, determination and self-sacrifice that goes in to making a “happening” on this scale. Kudos to Amanda, Ben and everyone else who worked so hard.

Getting people all over the world to raise (hopefully) a million bucks for Charity : Water certainly goes on my #Awesome09 list.

As always – it’s the people you meet which make the evening. It’s bizarre trying to recognise someone from a 48*48 pixel avatar – this often means spending a large portion of the time staring at random strangers’ chests trying to read a name-badge.

There’s a myth that in some languages the word “stranger” translates into “Friend I’ve Not Yet Met” – so it is with twitter. I was surrounded with people who I felt I knew intimately, yet I’d never so much as shaken their hand before tonight.

The net result of all this was that everyone was so friendly. Any other venue in London, if you accidentally spilled someone’s drink you’d get stabbed. Here, you were more likely to get a hug.

Which was nice.

The Bad
I’m obviously a grumpy old man – but here’s my run down of what people could do to improve the next London Twestival.

1. I appreciate that there’s a paucity of cheap / free venues in London on a Thursday night. But if you’re going to pick one a mile away from the tube, in some grim back street, it might be an idea to put up a few signs directing people – or even a few volunteers.
2. The queuing system sucked. I don’t know what the hold up was at the front, but it took us around 45 minutes to get in. That certainly put a dampener on my evening.
3. You can’t control the weather – but you can plan for it. If you can see that there’s a long queue of people standing about in the snow – go out and explain to them what’s going on. People are happier when they know why there’s a delay and what’s being done about it.
4. If there’s a long queue of bored and hungry people, bring out some food or (non-alcoholic) drink. I saw lots of organisers wandering past the queue with crates of food. They didn’t even throw so much as a bag of Doritos our way.
5. Twitter is a meritocracy. If you’re the organiser and you spot one of your mates – or a BBC journalist – in the queue, don’t let them jump the queue! It’s the sort of thing which builds resentment.
6. Actually check the tickets. By the time I arrived at the front, the notion of a ticketing system had all but been abandoned. There were funky 2D Barcodes on there which should have speeded up the check-in process.
7. Either pre-print name-badges in big letters, or make sure you have enough thick black markers on the front desk. Loads of people had been reduced to writing their badges in biro. This made it really hard to read who someone was.
8. Have more than 2 people on the coat check. I’m here to part and meet people, not join another queue just to hand over a coat (see point 12)
9. Keep food, drink and raffles in a fixed location. I saw lots of people chasing after the last reported sighting of the raffle tickets and the burgers. If people can’t find you, they can’t give you their money.
10. The food. What a farce. Despite being given a ticket for food, I couldn’t find anywhere to spend it – nor could anyone else. There was a chap wandering around giving burgers away – but he didn’t know where the rest of the food was, or if there was anything vegetarian available. I subsided on a few dropped Liquorish Allsorts. Rubbish.
11. The raffle. Grrr. Possibly the most annoying thing about the night.
• Hard to find raffle tickets
• No validation on the tickets (I saw people dropping both halves of their ticket in and only keeping one stub from the several they purchased.)
• Filling in the tickets took an age. Not sure how this could be improved – certainly give the raffle sellers more pens so that multiple people can fill in tickets at the same time.
• Timing was bad. The website said you had to stick around to claim your prize. A bit unfair given that our names and phone numbers were on there.
• Lousy rules – the website said you had to stick around until “halfway” through the evening” for the draw. I’m obviously an old man because I don’t consider after 2300 to be halfway through the evening. We don’t all work in PR – taking Friday as a hangover day isn’t always an option.
• To make matters worst, the first few prizes were announced – then the raffle was seemingly abandoned! I got bored at this point and left.
• I should point out that I’m probably just bitter that I didn’t win the Lego Death Star…
12. Coat check. When you have “tired and emotional” party goers who just want to catch the last train back home – put more than two people on the coat check. Make sure that the coats are in some sort of order so your coat can be found.
13. The final testament as to why I’m an old man. The music. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the music, but the point of twitter is that it’s a conversation. It’s rather hard to have a conversation when the music drowns out everything.

The Ugly
It would appear that I am genetically unable to be photographed in a flattering light.

Photo by Webwandering.

Photo by Annie Mole.

Photo by Annie Mole.

Although it was very nice of LJRich to interv
iew me for the BBC!

Amazing to see nearly everyone in that video using the fantastic Dabr for tweeting from their phones..

So…
I hope I haven’t upset anyone with this post. I am genuinely in awe of the organisers for getting a global event of the ground and raising a whole heap for charity. I just wish that a bit more logistical effort had gone in to the London Twestival.

TTFN.

In short, the iPlayer is now responsible for 5% of all data traffic in the UK. That figure is growing.

The problem is that the ISPs have been selling “unlimited” internet connectivity when their capacity is severly limited.

The ISPs are trying to make up for their lack of investment in their systems by getting the BBC to pay to upgrade the ISP’s networks. That’s not going to happen, nor should it.

So, what does this have to do with the iPhone and mobile networks?

Well, simply put, mobile networks are next in the battle for bandwidth.

Currently the BBC iPlayer works on the iPhone via WiFi – EDGE just isn’t fast enough. But once a 3G or HSDPA iPhone appears, the iPlayer will work over the network’s infrastructure.

iPlayer streams weigh in at about 250MB per hour. Watch one half hour programme a day and you’re close to 4GB per month. That’s either a heafty bill for you or for your network provider.

Now, so far, this is just an issue for O2 and the other iPhone carriers, right?

Wrong! Wrong on two counts.

Firstly there are a huge number of unlocked iPhones. They’re running on every network from here to Beijing. Unlocked 3G iPhone users are going to want to use their phones to access services like iPlayer – they are going to be very data hungry.

Secondly, more and more mobile devices will be able to access bandwidth intense streaming video. The Nokia N95 already has a Flash player built in which can access full YouTube videos. Firefox Mobile has Flash built in. Future devices will have high quality Flash or h264 players as standard. The BBC could release an RTSP service – that would give them access to virtually every 3G customer.

Mobile network providers need to make sure they’re ready to handle the demand that their users are going to place on the system.

If they don’t, we’re going to end up with a busy tone on the mobile Internet – and that will just drive customers away.

There are only 2 problems….

1) I can’t download the shows
2) I can’t stream the shows to my phone (Nokia N95 and Blackberry 8800)

Now, the BBC have released a version of the iPlayer for the iPhone. As usual, the BBC has some great technical information on how it all works.

Basically, the iPlayer version delivers mp4 files to the iPhone. How can you grab those mp4s to watch at your convenience on your device? It’s a doddle….

1. Get Firefox. It’s a better web browser than whatever you’re using at the moment.
2. Change your user-agent to “iphone” (hard step 1 – see below).
3. Install this Bookmarklet - drag that link to your bookmarks toolbar. (Thanks to HubLog)
4. Go to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and click on the show you want to watch
5. Click on the Bookmarklet. You can now save the show to your computer.
6. Watch show on your computer (I use VLC) or copy to your phone/media player to watch it (hard step 2 – see below).

Ok, so here are the hard steps.

To change your User-Agent you can either type “about:config” into the Firefox address bar and change “general.useragent.extra.firefox” to “iphone”. Or you can install User Agent Switcher.

To watch it on your phone depends on your phone. My N95 would only play the files through CorePlayer and my 8800 would only play the sound. You may have to do some video jiggery-pokery to get playback on your device.Video files are around 100 – 120MB for 30 minutes. Resolution is 480*272 – not HD (or even SD!) but good enough for viewing on the phone and as good as anything you might download from a torrent site. Frame rate is PAL 25fps, sound is stereo.

Have fun!