The BNP as MEPs?
I have no doubt that minds far greater, and far better educated in matters of politics than mine, will debate for some time yet how it came to be that the British National Party has secured itself a seat in the European Parliament.
Since I am a political atheist (yup, I don’t believe in politics, Santa Claus or council tax…) I’m not going to comment, but the indignant coughing and spluttering from tonight reminded me of the rally I attended at the start of 2007 when Oxford Union was due to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin and “controversial historian” (to quote the BBC’s news article) David Irving to speak.
I don’t claim to know where or how to draw the line between the right to free speech and one’s obligations to allow others to live without fear of xenophobic attack, but I wonder if this is another sign we’re heading down a dark path.
Feel free to read more about this result on the Times or BBC sites (since I already have these articles open in Firefox). I’m off to bed. G’night :o)
Posted by Alex on Mon 8th June 2009
Ross/Brand – how not to let a molehill become a mountain (version 2,137)
This thought-provoking blog entry by the BBC’s Steve Bowbrick on how the BBC might have been able to avoid the media storm is well worth a look:
This is interesting for me: in my last job at Portsmouth students’ union, I remember trying – and failing – to express as eloquently as Steve has exactly why openness in a crisis is A Good Thing, and this school of thinking – be open and honest with your stakeholders and always maintain a dialogue – is one I really do believe in (uhhm, unless you’re MI5…).
Well worth a read, especially if you’re in a position of power in any company. Or if you’re bored ;o)
Posted by Alex on Tue 18th November 2008
Hero worship: Andre Jordan of A Beautiful Revolution
Insightful, witty, heartbreaking, funny, cruel, shocking, occasionally bordering on bad taste – A Beautiful Revolution is the work of 40-something Andre Jordan. Most of the content consists of striking pen sketches, telling stories of his day-to-day life (frequently touching on his hopelessness with women – something I can empathise with only too well… ;o).
I’ve been a reader of the site for a year or two now, but never knew any more about the author until now, ‘cos I just stumbled across this interview on the BBC’s Ouch disability website: BBC – Ouch! – Close Up – 13 Questions: Andre Jordan.
He also turns some of his work into artwork for sale, and if I was in the market for some artwork, this would be where I’d spend my money first. If I had any money, of course.
Well worth a look – seriously, go check out the interview, and then his website, now.
BBC – Ouch! – Close Up – 13 Questions: Andre Jordan
Posted by Alex on Fri 18th July 2008
Homeless tourism
I've just come back from Ravelin Park, where SADO Ben Norman and RAG bods Jenny Leggott and Sarah Blatchford have been bedding down for the night with only cardboard, damp sleeping bags and tarpaulins (err, and each other…) for warmth.
No, they're not trying to recreate a summer picnic atmosphere – not at this time of year, anyway. The event is the University-organised “Sleepout”, which has been planned to raise awareness for the homeless population of Portsmouth.
There were around 25 bods milling around when I left, including three Purple Door staff (one of which is Alice Hickman, the University's Volunteer and Work Experience Officer and Ben Norman's oppo, who I may have met before…), two security guards, and a full tea urn.
It looks like the choice spot for the night will be under a pair of large tarpaulins which have been erected between two trees in a loose-but-functional impersonation of a giant tent. The area surrounding the shelter was intertwined with the string holding the shelter up, leaving the whole area slightly resembling a giant spider's lair… Ewww, spiders…
Hopefully everyone will have a fun – if chilly – night and get some sleep into the bargain. This kind of event is good (as long as it serves its purpose to raise awareness for the homeless, naturally) and it would be great to see the University collaborating with the Union more often to publicise such events. Pugwash News is always available to help, of course.
Ms Blatchford has my camera at the moment, so once it's back I'll get some photos online. In the meantime, look out for pics and even (possibly) some footage on BBC South Today and in the Times Higher Education supplement – when the Uni want to promote something, they don't 'arf go for it… :o)
Find out more on the University's website.
Posted by Alex on Wed 30th January 2008
Bit of a reshuffle…
I'm just grabbing two minutes' free time between meetings, so I thought I'd put a quick update on here about UPSU.net, which has seen a lot of new things going on over the last month or so, not least the new JobShop (which I'm going to do a full write-up about shortly).
The UPSU.net homepage has had a bit of a reshuffle; UPSU and BBC news headlines have been condensed into column 3, and column 4 has been freed up to make way for the forthcoming “latest photo galleries”, reprioritised “forthcoming events listing”
Posted by Alex on Thu 24th January 2008
Where does UPSU Media stand?
Radio 1's Newsbeat have responded on the BBC's Editors' blog over their coverage – and Radio 1's handling – of the banning and subsequent un-banning of the word “Faggot” from Fairytale Of New York, and how Newsbeat's coverage may have triggered the public backlash against the “overzealously PC” attitude of the radio station.
The interesting aspect for us at the students' union is how Newsbeat works within Radio 1, as well as the BBC's non-profit objectives which aren't entirely dissimilar to the union's.
Newsbeat operates as a news team within Radio 1 – vaguely similar, perhaps, to the way Pugwash News operates within UPSU. Newsbeat's coverage of Radio 1's censorship has been objective and arguably fair – entirely as any quality journalism should be – but the issue here is that, in effect, one part of Radio 1 has caused a backlash against another part of the same organisation for its handling of a potentially sensitive matter.
Within the editorial teams responsible for the Pugwash, Pugwash News and UPSU News output, discussions have often centred around the “what if” scenario of whether and how the Union's media should publicise a story which levels criticism against the Union. Questions have ranged from the broader “can we criticise the Union?”, “should we criticise the Union?”, and “if we do, how would we go about it?”, to some occasionally hilarious potential (and entirely theoretical) scenarios which I obviously can't relate here without libelling myself…
Rod McKenzie, editor of Radio 1's Newsbeat, writes on the BBC Editors' blog: '[this issue] raises some interesting dilemmas for us though: without Radio 1's 10 million plus audience Newsbeat wouldn't exist. But what happens when the station itself IS the news? Does this cramp our journalistic vigour or make us feel we shouldn't take on “the mother ship”? I don't think it does – nor should it ever do so. If we argue that our job is to report the news without fair or favour for other organisations, why should Radio 1 be exempt from that rule? I think pulling our punches would be failing our listeners – Radio 1's listeners. That's just my view.'
Apologies for the lazy journalism – quoting such a large chunk of Mr McKenzie's words – but that paragraph pretty much summarises the way student media should act towards its parent institutions, at least at Portsmouth, but in the wider context of student journalism as well. Our editorial teams should never feel that can't report on something they feel is in the interest of their readers simply because their story might level criticism at the Union or the University.
The counter to this argument, of course, is that this freedom can only work as long as the student journalists maintain a professional approach. Anyone with common sense might wonder whether, on hearing about a story which might criticise them, the Union might feel compelled to “pull” – cancel – the article, preventing it from being published.
This is where we come to the grey area which I think is somewhat unique to student media: the Union should never be allowed to prevent the publication in its media of an objective, balanced and fair article which levels criticism at the Union, but it would be remiss of the Union to play little or no active role in ensuring the content produced in its student media was legally and morally acceptable.
This balancing act is a relatively new consideration for student media in Portsmouth as, until the start of this year, there has been little if any culture of news journalism at the Union, so this issue hasn't been covered before (as far as I know!).
The way the Union and its student media teams work together to judge what is and isn't ok to publish – based on whether a story is fair and balanced, and not on whether the story will make the Union look bad – will probably need a little more fine-tuning over time, but I'm confident that the foundations are well in place now, so that when Pugwash News decides to publish a story calling me all the names under the sun (and I have no doubt they will at some point… ;o), I can't pull the story just because I don't want the world to know I'm a numpty!
What it boils down to is this: unless the students of Portsmouth can be confident that UPSU Media isn't just a propaganda dissemination service for the students' union – and, no, I'm not saying it currently is – then it can never be taken seriously by the students it targets.
So much of UPSU Media is brand-new that everyone involved knows that we have a long way to go in many areas, but the one thing I'm confident of is that we have some of the best student journalists and one of the strongest voices Portsmouth has seen in many years. Let's keep it up!
Posted by Alex on Mon 7th January 2008
What have photos and jobs got in common?
I've been skyving from work again, and while I was catching up on some blogs I should read more often but don't, I spotted on Derivadow.com – a blog written by one of the tech bods involved in the BBC's new media projects, e.g. the iPlayer – a post about Flickr's new Places application, which basically gives each place on earth it's own homepage listing photos which have been “Geo-tagged” in that location.
The interesting part for me, apart from a very random camel, was how Derivadow gets so excited about URLs and making good, easy-to-remember web addresses which make sense.
This is something I've been working on for the last couple of days with our new JobShop application to make sure we can maximise the site's ease of navigation, and to make sure we can get the most out of Google's search index of UPSU.net, all of which is really important if the UPSU JobShop is going to remain a primary choice for students seeking work during their degrees in the face of all of the competition out there.
… I was going to give an example of some of the URLs, but even I have limits to how geeky I'm prepared to be…
Posted by Alex on Wed 26th December 2007
More little touches: rolling out better accessibility for UPSU.net
I know I should be doing coursework, but while doing some research on the BBC's Access 2.0 accessibility blog for my final year embarrassment project, I realised that the alternative high-contrast stylesheets I put together to provide a text-only version of the UPSU.net homepage could be very easily rolled out to all the other pages on UPSU.net with a couple of simple code changes.
So, now, if you're a Firefox (or similar browser) user, you can change the stylesheets on-the-fly by going to the “View” menu, and choosing a different page style – 2 or 3. Layout 2 – light text on black – is designed to be easier for partially-sighted and dyslexic visitors to use, while style 3 – dark on white – should make also make viewing easier for visitors with certain requirements.
Naturally, this isn't a complete solution to our commitments to providing greater accessibility on UPSU.net, but it's a short step from here to enabling every page to respect the settings of the homepage's high-contrast choices, and also to allow visitors to choose a different level of accessibility as they browse around the site.
One day, maybe, I'd love to see UPSU.net making use of the accessibility features the BBC are trialling on their homepage layout customisation tool.
As always, I'm keen to hear feedback from everyone who visits the site, although I'd much prefer to read the reasoned and well thought-out criticisms over the ranty, angry comments (but anything's better than the tumbleweed of a quiet blog… ;o), so please let me know your thoughts on accessibility, or UPSU.net in general.
/al – I need to get out just a teeeeeny bit more….
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th April 2007
Life On Mars is back tonight – yehay!
I'm not a massive police drama fan… I only watch The Bill, Road Wars, Crime Fighters, Police Uncovered, Undercover Police, Police Under The Covers, aand… No, honestly, I'm not a mahoosive fan, but I really enjoyed the first series of Life On Mars, so it's great to see it returning to our screens tonight (9pm, BBC 2 for those of you too lazy to go find the information on t'interweb).
Check it out – it's ace.
Posted by Alex on Tue 13th February 2007
Note to self: learn this (the BBC’s 15 web principles)
(Caution: shameless geekiness ahead): These are, apparently, the BBC's 15 Web Principles which underpin everything they do online. The list comes fresh-ish from the BBC via. TomSki.com, a personal blog written by a member of the BBC. They make a lot of sense (well, to pixel-pushing geeks like me, anyway…):
- Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
- The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
- Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people's content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
- Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
- Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don't restrict your creativity to your own site.
- The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
- Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
- Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
- Remember your granny won't ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
- Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
- Consistent design and navigation needn't mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they're on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won't ever get lost.
- Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
- Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
- Link to discussions on the web, don't host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
- Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it's your users' data. Best respect it.
p.s. Re. copyright: the list (probably) belongs to the BBC, while the content is lifted from this page on www.tomski.com
Posted by Alex on Thu 18th January 2007