Winter/Spring Colour Palette 2006-2007
Seasonal colours from the Modern Life selection
Persistent readers of Modern Life will be aware that the colours you see on site are not static: They revolve around with the seasons, with a new scheme on the first of every month. Each set of colours is hand-picked, adjusted, and designed to fit in with the month and season in question. [read more...]
UK Blogosphere: Top 10 British Blogs
Underepresented, undersubscribed and dominated by the US?
You may be able to guess by the .co.uk domain name and the Anglo-centrism of Modern Life, but to clarify, I hail from England in the United Kingdom. With all the buzz about blogs in the UK media (notably the BBC, Guardian and the Times Online, amongst other forward-thinking publications), one would have thought the UK blogosphere would be a shining example of how to embrace new media. Right? [read more...]
How to get RSS right
5 tips to help get subscribers, keep subscribers
RSS is an essential part of growing a blog’s audience, and most get the fundamentals right. Some, however, don’t exactly embrace RSS as a medium – and occasionally those who do offer some limited, broken feed that simply isn’t worth subscribing to. Here are some pointers to keep your syndication on track. [read more...]
Colour Lovers - Colour Trends and Palettes
For some inexplicable reason, the Web 2.0 Colour Palette post I wrote back in August 2006 has been perennially popular – over 150,000 pageviews since the posting, and phrases like ‘web 2.0 colors’ have been consistently top in my search engine keyword referrals. That suggests two things to me – first, the five minutes I spent back in August putting that post together was definitely worth it, and secondly – there are a lot of people interested in colour palettes. [read more...]
Ethical Blogging 101
On what can be deemed acceptable, and otherwise.
Blogging is an area that can be fraught with legal and ethic issues - in many ways these reflect the way journalism is affected by ethics and the law, but with blogging there's one significant difference - anybody may start a blog on just about any topic. The barriers to entry normally associated with the press are effectively gone - and passionate folk now have near absolute free reign to write whatever and however they please. [read more...]
New offensive spam doesn't pull any punches
...or should that be paunches?
Spammers have always played on people’s insecurities to hawk their wares, but the worst of it is usually contained within the Viagra/Cialis-type emails that extol the night-long benefits of generic pills. A seemingly new trend is the all-out mud-slinger spam, intended to provoke an emotional response, presumably… [read more...]
Tracking hot trends with Trendio, Web 2.0 style
I love statistics. Whether it’s my Techorati ranking, web server log files or my FeedBurner subscriber numbers, the numbers that shape my work are a fascination. I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of bloggers out there too – surely most must have obsessive-compulsive like desires to keep up to date with figures? [read more...]
Why is RSS adoption so abysmal amongst UK newspapers online?
Old media, meet new
The transition from old media to new media is inescapable, and for most the daily dose of news via the internet is now perhaps more common than the newspaper on the doorstep in the morning. Why then, are the RSS subscriber numbers so weak? [read more...]
A Strange Sense of Familiarity
The topic of enterprise-level collaborative software came up at work today (as such things are wont to do on a Friday afternoon), and 37signal's Campfire was brought up. As with most of 37signals stuff, it's well thought out and beautifully presented, but upon my first glance at the campfire homepage, I was struck with a pang of familiarity... [read more...]
BBC Manchester Blog Workshop
Thursday 22nd February 2007
I attended the first BBC Manchester Blog Workshop on Thursday eve, partly out of curiosity and partly to see what sort of folk might turn up. With nary a clue of what to expect, I walked the short distance from my place of work to the BBC Manchester offices, arriving a short while before the start of the workshop at 6pm. [read more...]
