Browsing Archives of Author »Mike Ellis«

Links in print

October 28, 2010

13

I’m working on the new Eduserv website right now – content inputting, structuring, trying to hang the whole thing together – and the question came up the other day about how best to deal with incoming links from printed materials. We do a fair amount of these at work: brochures, leaflets, case studies – that… [Read more…]

Some brief thoughts on borrowing content

October 26, 2010

0

One of the great things about WordPress as a publishing platform is the way it deals with incoming links, comments and trackbacks. Linking is the currency of the web, and WordPress gives you the maximum possible intelligence on who is linking to you, where traffic is coming from and who might be citing your posts.… [Read more…]

The diminishing returns of size

September 28, 2010

7

I gave a workshop last week to a bunch of museums in the North East entitled “Bootstrapping the Web”. Well, actually, it started off as that but following a questionnaire asking what they’d like to learn, the focus changed a bit to “How to do social media well”. I’m hoping the attendees learnt something –… [Read more…]

Urban Augmented Reality: Q&A

August 20, 2010

1

Some time ago, Jacco Ouwerkerk contacted me having seen the interview I did with the Museum of London. He directed me towards a hugely exciting Augmented Reality application called UAR – “Urban Augmented Reality” which launched in the Netherlands in June 2010. Here’s what we talked about. Q: Please introduce yourself, and tell us about… [Read more…]

Terribly successful

August 16, 2010

3

Imagine a web application as it should appear in 2010. Now lower your expectations in absolutely every way. Design? Absolutely terrible. We’re talking default and mixed fonts, no thought given to typography, spacing. Bad 1995 animated GIFs scattered around.  Terrible Photoshop, or more likely MS Paint skills – that kind of gratuitous dropshadowbeveladdsomesunglareandanotherlayer thing you… [Read more…]

Quantity or quality?

August 12, 2010

3

This might seem like an odd question, especially given the vast (vast) quantity of effort that goes into digitisation, rights checking, caption authoring and so on. But I’m also a fan of taking a step back at least every so often and asking odd, obvious and possibly stupid questions. The question is in part prompted by… [Read more…]

Streetmuseum: Q&A with Museum of London

June 1, 2010

11

Streetmuseum – a rather lovely iPhone app by the Museum of London – launched a few weeks ago, and almost immediately began to cause a bit of a buzz across Twitter and other social networks. It’s hardly surprising that people have responded so positively to it – the app takes the simplicity of the Looking Into the… [Read more…]

The paywall experiment

May 25, 2010

6

Shortly the Times will begin its Great Paywall Experiment, locking out all but paid (£1 a day, £2 a week) subscribers. It is very easy to laugh at Murdoch for taking this approach, but actually it’s a pretty good thing that someone has the balls/stupidity/temerity/whatever to do it. Many people – me included – have… [Read more…]

Quality, functionality and openness

May 10, 2010

16

It is against an increasingly bitter backdrop of argument between Apple and Adobe (Flash! No Flash! HTML 5! Openness! Closedness! etc…) that I found myself a week ago with a damaged iPhone. An accidental dropping incident from Son1 added a seemingly minor dent just next to the power button, and hey presto – a device… [Read more…]

Linked Data: my challenge

March 22, 2010

28

What with Gordon Brown’s recent (just an hour or so ago) announcement of lots of digital goodness at the “Building Britain’s Digital Future” event, the focus sharpens once again on Linked Data. I’ve been sitting on the sidelines sniping gently at Linked Data since it apparently replaced the Semantic Web as The Next Big Thing.… [Read more…]

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