mediajunk

As part of the "Internet and Society" section of this blog, we will be conducting a series of interviews with people whose lives have become intertwined with the internet in some way.

To kick-start this series, what follows is an interview with Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole fame. As the Wikipedia article on Slugger O'Toole puts it:

[The blog is] focused primarily on news and comment about Northern Ireland. From the beginning it has drawn its readership from a wide spectrum of opinion both inside and outside Northern Ireland.

Mediajunk:What is your own background?

Mick Fealty: I trained as a Youth Community Worker in Belfast , then worked in Community Arts in England for about 10 years. I got used to exploring problems through open-ended participation. My work took me around Europe to a lot of schools and colleges.

I then ended up working for a knowledge consulting company based in Dorset. We were working with NGOs and government agencies such as the British Council.

Mediajunk:Were those skills to prove useful in facilitating dialogue on Slugger?

Mick Fealty: Yes. One of my roles when working as a consultant was to moderate a series of e-debates between ethicists and scientists; people in NGOs and people and commercial research, who lived in different parts of the world, and logged on at different times.

I learned that when people get passionate, particularly online, they often get very personal. Routinely, I found myself stripping out the first paragraph of whatever anyone contributed to a debate, to remove the personal remarks.

And, even though the respondents didn't know that I had stripped out the first paragraph, I would have to do the same with their replies! Nevertheless, I realised that if you can sidestep people's passions, some genuine debate is possible. Some of the basic rules on Slugger arose from that.

Mediajunk: So how did Slugger O'Toole come about?

Mick Fealty: The company I'd worked for downsized in 2002. I continued to work with them as a freelancer, but it gave me time to think about what I wanted to do. While I'd previously worked in Community Arts in Northern Ireland, I'd never really made a political "intervention".

I looked at the political situation. My analysis was that the Peace Process had the potential to deliver historical outcomes. But we had two partners: one was very confident, another was reluctant and looking over its shoulder.

I decided that I would deliver some intellectual capital into the unionist community, because I felt they needed it most. The idea was to write a paper, based on interviews and other research.

Blogging was taking off and it seemed to me that blogging was the perfect research tool for capturing the narrative up to when the paper would be published.

So, on June 5th 2002, I started Slugger on blogspot.com.

I had no idea that my research tool would turn into a dialogue tool, nor that I'd have to use some of the moderating skills I'd learned before.

Mediajunk: What is the significance of the name?

Mick Fealty: Before the redesign, the blog was called 'Letter to Slugger o'Toole' [a reference to the Irish Rover ballad, where Slugger O'Toole is 'drunk, as a rule'] because trying to explain NI is like trying to talk to a drunk man. You have to be prepared to repeat yourself over and over again, and to talk in small chunks.

Mediajunk: How long did it take for Slugger to take off?

Mick Fealty: I was new to blogging and it had the site up and running three weeks before I figured out how to read the visitor logs. I discovered there the blog was getting around 90 visitors a day, yet I hadn't told anyone about my it, apart from three work colleagues.

So I bought the sluggerotoole.com domain. By the following February we had got some funding and a writing team in place. My company helped redesigned the blog, and moved it from Blogger to Movable Type, which had better commenting features. The design that we created then is pretty much the design that's there today.

Mediajunk: Comments -- and visitor participation -- have become a very important part of Slugger. Was it always that way?

Mick Fealty: At first, none of the visitors published comments. They started when we published the transcripts of interviews and focus group reports, mostly with the unionist community, which we were doing as part of the initial research effort. Normally you wouldn't publish your research until it was all completed but we thought it was the right thing to do in the context of this evolving, emergent communication channel.

So lots of comments started coming in, even from people who had participated in the focus groups.

Mediajunk: Did you ever publish your final research paper?

Mick Fealty: Yes, it is called, "A long peace: the future of unionism in NI" and is available for download as a PDF on Slugger.

Mediajunk: Your original objective for the blog was as a research tool. Once you'd published your research, what was the new objective?

Mick Fealty: Blogs are emergent technologies. Blogging as content is the similar to blogging as technology -- both of them grow and build. As you iterate the material, you get a better sense of how the blog as a whole will expand.

Originally, we were perceived as a unionist mouthpiece. When David Trimble lost the election, the focus shifted to nationalism, because the crisis of confidence moved to the nationalist side -- although it is not as deep as the crisis unionists had.

So, the blog is continually evolving. For example, I believe that the way we use Flickr is unique. About two years ago, a colleague of mine set up a Northern Ireland photo group on Flickr and made me the moderator. That group now has an umbilical relationship with Slugger -- you'll notice that there's a NI-related photo on the top of each page.

This is a visual interpretation of Northern Ireland through the eyes of its citizens. Sometimes the picture is of a flower in a back garden; sometimes it's a cityscape; sometimes a political mural; sometimes graffiti, sometimes a shipyard, a Georgian building. People get together and talk about these pictures, and about Northern Ireland, in their own sub-groups on Flickr.

This is an example of something emergent, something we never anticipated.

Incidentally, we are doing our first ever Slugger audio broadcast. It's something we're going to run with through the election campaign.

Mediajunk: Best of luck with that Mick, and thanks for your time.

You can participate in the live broadcast on Sluggerotoole.com at around 9pm tonight, or you can listen to the archived version after that.

I've just been looking at the 100 most popular websites with Irish internet users, according to Alexa.

Alexa measures the popularity of websites by analysing the information that come from users who have installed the Alexa toolbar. As the Alexa entry on Wikipedia states:

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical internet behavior.

I would go further and say that people who install the Alexa toolbar are probably unrepresentative of internet users as a group. As a member of Webmasterworld puts it:

It takes a special type of person to install a toolbar. You would need to be on a high speed connection to put up with the extra downloads involved each time you look at a page. You need to have some internet savvy, and be particularly interested in getting detailed "credibility" data for web sites you visit. I believe that this represents a bias away from the casual mainstream user.

Thus, Ryanair.com is not in the top 10 on Alexa's list (it comes in at a lowly 40), which I find hard to believe. Nevertheless, there are some other surprises that prove insightful:

Bebo

Bebo.com, the social networking site, is at number 4. The Sunday Times claimed last year that Bebo had half a million Irish users -- not bad, in a country of 4 million people -- and said it gets 6,000 new Irish users a day. (Google says that "bebo" was the most popular emerging search term of 2006.)

Foreign Sites

Alexa has proof, if proof were needed, of the rapidly-emerging Polish and Chinese communities in Ireland: 6Spark.com, a site for Chinese ex-pats is at number 12, while Onet.pl, Poland's leading portal, is at number 19.

Indeed, 10 Polish sites appear in the Irish top 100, which also features websites from Malaysia, Latvia, Russia and Lithuania.

Homes

The Celtic Tiger generation's obsession with property is reflected in the Alexa listings too, with MyHome.ie appearing at 49 and Daft.ie at 15 -- though the latter is more popular with renters.

Dating

I expected to see dating sites in the Irish top 100. I didn't expect, however, that the only dating site I'd find would be adultfriendfinder.com -- where consenting adults are looking to find other consenting adults for ... adult "friendship", of course. Catholic Ireland, eh?

Travel and Tourism

A surprising number of Irish people look at travel websites such as Ireland.ie and Choose Ireland, which both feature in the top 100.

The rise and rise of open source software (OSS) continues. Free OSS versions of operating systems (e.g. Linux), desktop applicationss (e.g. OpenOffice) and Content Management Systems (e.g. Mambo) are among the most popular in their categories.

What's surprising is that we use so few open source apps. After all, Sourceforge.net -- home to most OSS -- currently lists circa. 140,000 projects.

Why hasn't OSS penetrated more markets? Well, OSS is typically designed and developed by hardcore geeks, who do so partly to escape the annoying constraints of developing commercial software. These annoying constraints, however, are often directly related to the end-user's needs. As the author of usability classic "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" puts it:

The open-source movement is arguably a haven for these frustrated programmers -- a place where they can write code according to their own standards and be judged solely by their peers, without the advice or intervention of marketers or managers.

So, what can we do to improve the usability of open source apps? One initiative that's worth a look is OpenUsability - a site that aims to match open source developers with usability engineers.

Which usability engineers would be interested? That, in my opinion, is the rub. Most usability experts worth their salt are busy with the projects keeping them gainfully employed. Professional usability engineers and information architects are rarer breeds than software developers.

Would-be experts -- the equivalent of armchair football managers -- are more common and more likely, in my opinion, to respond to OpenUsability's call. After 20 minutes' browsing the members section, I found a dozen members who claimed on their profiles to be usability experts. None offered credentials (neither qualifications nor work experience) to back up these claims. A few provided website links but the sites were unimpressive. One even had a Flash intro -- the cardinal sin of website usability!

The biggest flaw in OpenUsability's premise is that developers decide whether or not to implement usability changes. In my experience, developers will stubbornly resist changes recommended by a usability reviewer. The more labourious the fix, the stronger their resistance.

The OpenUsability project must overcome these issues if it is to make open source software more user-friendly.

My girlfriend and I regularly go on short city breaks. Once or twice a year, we'll go on a longer holiday. For both of these, we use the web (of course).

We've done this so often that we now have a tried-and-tested method for creating our own package holidays online, which I'd like to share with you:

Finding and Booking Cheap Flights

For US or international travel, meta-search sites like kayak.com or mobissimo.com are useful. In Europe, however, you'll rarely find better prices than Ryanair's.

Tip: use Ryanair's find lowest fares option if you want to book a dirt-cheap flight to a destination and you're really flexible with dates (i.e. you don't care when you go, if you can get a return flight for less than 80 euros!).

Finding and Booking Great Accommodation at the Best Price

I never stay in any hotel without checking it out on Tripadvisor.com first. In fact, here's the way I normally use Tripadvisor to find a hotel in any given city:

1. Look up the top 10 hotels in the city (or the top 20, if it's a big city).

2. For each of these hotels, identify those within your price range.

3. Starting with the top-rated hotel in your budget, read the reviews and look at the candid photos (pictures taken by visitors who have actually stayed in the hotel). If you feel you need more information about the hotel, try Venere.com -- which also has the best hotel location maps.

4. If you like a hotel, find its own official website. DON'T book directly through Tripadvisor. Avoid generic hotel booking sites such as hotels.com, expedia.com, hotels-in-city-x-generic-website.com, etc.

These days, hotels tend to have the best prices on their own websites, and they may also have special offers. Its also useful to email the hotel directly (sometimes this is the only option anyway, as they won't have a booking engine) as they may offer you a better price than the ones advertised, particularly if you're staying more than two nights, or if you're booking for a group of six or more people.

Tip: A hotel's own website usually has a quirky home-made look-and-feel, and it won't offer bookings at any other hotels. You may have to go to page 2 on Google or beyond to find it.

If the room rates on the official hotel website are much higher than the average price for that hotel as displayed on Tripadvisor, THEN try Venere.com, expedia.com or hotels.com (usually in that order) to find a better price. Remember, however, that generic booking sites are all taking a commission, so chances are they won't have the lowest rates, despite their claims.

Okay, so this process takes several hours, but effectively you are acting as your own travel agent. In our experience, you'll make huge savings this way, and get great accommodation.

Warning: never use the phrase "the internet changed my life" as a chat-up line at a cocktail party, its veracity notwithstanding.

The BBC recently asked its website visitors to tell them what difference the world wide web had made to their lives. The many contributions make you realise how revolutionary this new medium has been. As one commenter says:

I check online to find the meanings of words, available services, bus times, prices of things and anything you could think of about a hundred times a day! How did we survive without it!?

Since it first exploded into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, the internet has challenged traditional forms of media production, ownership and distribution.

Online versions of newspapers were one of the earliest examples of this shift.

Then came the battle between the "big six" music companies and Joe Internet User, which came to a head in the infamous legal action against Napster. Big Business won that battle - but may have lost the war. The geeks got cleverer (of course) and brought out new ways of downloading that didn't depend on a central server. They invented the bittorrent.

While Apple showed the music industry how it could capitalise on the internet as a major distribution channel, the front-line of the internet community showed smart users how to get music for free. Few cared that copyrights were being breached. Indeed, the left-leaning, front-line internet community generally believes that copyright law is immoral, favouring only greedy publishers and distributors -- not artists, as it was originally intended (see for example this interview with Lawrence Lessig, evangelist of the Creative Commons initiative).

So, the media industry won the first battle -- but it may be losing the war. This time people are downloading movies, not just music. Pirate copies of movies (usually filmed off a screen) become available for free download in torrent form as soon as they are released in theatres. When the first DVD appears, a high-quality torrent will find its way online.

Indeed, torrent creators typically use better compression technology (MPEG-4) when copying DVDs, so the torrent version of a movie may fit onto a CD, with no perceivable loss in quality.

Little wonder then that the entertainment industry are urging us to upgrade to High Definition (HD) DVDs and TV. But, wouldn't you know it, those cheeky internet chappies have managed to make torrents out of HD movies too...

People are paying big money for domains again. In 2006, the most expensive domain name was diamonds.com, which sold for 7.5 million US dollars.

But, like speculative art dealings, most domains are sold to fellow domain-purveyors, hoping to make a significant return on investment down the line.

Others are raking in so much moolah from Google Ads, they can afford to make big investments in domains for their MFA (made-for-adsense) sites.

According to dailydomainer:

Of the 100 highest-priced domains sold in 2006, only 18 have been developed, 8 redirect to a developed site, 5 are affiliate sites, and 6 are currently under development. 9 domains don't work at all and a massive 54 show PPC (pay per click) ads.

Interesting that dot coms are still the best sellers. Dot eu? Eeeweeegh!

We've launched two new websites designs already this month, and I'm quite pleased with both of them, I must admit.

For Don Conroy's website, our brief was to showcase Don's painting in particular. We also created some custom tools that allow Don's marketing team to upload new paintings to the gallery, along with titles, descriptions and prices. Thumbnails and links are created automatically. We've also incorporated an updateable news section. The incumbent site was aimed at children, so we've kept that and labelled it as Don's site for young people.

We also launched our redesign of the Kilroy's College website. This was (and still is) a very interesting project because the client has very specific goals and a deeper-than-most understanding of the web, analytics, etc. We conducted usability reviews, wireframe mockups, graphical mockups, with (several iterations of each) before coming up with this new design.

Both designs represent new directions in style for Mediajunk. Both are also usable, accessible and XHTML/CSS standards-compliant. It just goes to show that a you don't have to sacrifice aesthetics when complying with standards and best practice.

SEO practitioners have long suspected that Google takes a hard stance on "duplicate content".

Now this hunch has been confirmed, as Google has been awarded a patent for what it describes as a "'method and apparatus of estimating similarity".

The obvious application of this patent is to hide duplicate pages, or pages that are roughly similar, from searchers. Instead, Google will present only the page that it deems to be the "original" (how it decides this is a question for another day).

Google has had to take this action in response a sneaky trick known as "page-jacking", where search engine spammers identify a page that is already showing up in the top 10 of the SERPs for a particular keyword, then copy that content -- usually with some changes -- to their own website.

However, the patent may have other applications -- such as helping teachers and examiners to detect plagiarism. The sale of essays, assignments and exam answers online is big business, as this Google search for "buy essays online" shows.

Google is for searching, right? Well, not entirely. You can use the Google search bar to perform some other useful functions. Here are three:
1. Calculator
I use Google's calculator function a lot - particularly when working out VAT.

2. Currency Convertor
I discovered this one today. Up to now, I'd been using xe.com. I don't know which is more accurate. Google's rates are provided by Citibank. XE's rates are "mid-market rates" taken from "a variety of sources." My guess is that XE's are more accurate, but the difference is usually minor.

3. World Clock
The "time in city x" function is particularly useful if you are about to send an instant message to someone in another country, particularly a business contact. Just because someone is online doesn't mean they are at work!