Blog posts about me – Malcolm Coles.
It’s so quiet in the south of England – and probably the rest of it too. So once everyone’s home and the ash has cleared up, how about we keep the airports shut?
Join my Facebook group: Let’s keep the airports shut – the ash means it’s nice and quiet everywhere.
Read the full post ...I’ve summarised the bits about the website plans from the BBC’s strategic review, to save you having to read the whole long, rambling document.
Read the full post ...I’ve blogged about Jan Moir and the PCC over at libdemvoice.org. Why not read it and leave a comment? Here’s a taste:
Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?
Read the full post ...I wrote a guest post about when you should pay professional rates for great copywriting – as opposed to 2p a word via some content mill, or even less for some automated keyword spewer.
If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).
Read the full post ...
The htaccess file on my blog – and other sites on the same shared server – was hacked. I’ve fixed mine now.
Read the full post ...I added a best-of-2009 tag to a few posts to save me actually having to write anything. They’re here if you want to take a look …
Read the full post ...I’ve guest posted over at The Media Blog: The Mail needs to clamp down on its racist readers. The Mail Online has a serious problem with its moderation policy and racist comments….
Read the full post ...
It was oneletteroffmovies day on Twitter on Saturday – turning Top Gun into Top Gum, and Pirates of the Caribbean into Pilates of the Caribbean etc. My contribution was “BT – one alien’s struggle to get broadband so he can email home”. And then BT started to tweet me …
Read the full post ...
The furore over Jan Moir has thrown up several interesting SEO issues. Here’s a basic one – how should you link to something you detest?
The problem with linking
Put simply, Google counts a link to a page / website as a vote for that page / website. So everyone who blogged about, and linked to, Jan [...]
There’s a lot to remember when you’re running around in a social media storm, as Jan Moir discovered last week. It would seem that updating meta descriptions isn’t high on the list …
The meta description on the Jan Moir article about Stephen Gately’s death still reads: Our columnist asks why no-one will face up to the sordid reality of the Boyzone star’s demise.
Read the full post ...
Update Rachel has commented below that she and others on a Facebook group had been even more proactive and along with others had been phoning the press offices / media buyers of the relevant advertisers. So I’m not sure I should claim too much credit for this …
Original post: Oh my God, we’ve won. I [...]
Someone in my clearly massive fanbase has made a video in which the xtranormal characters argue with each other about how to pronounce my name properly.
Read the full post ...Ah. When doing a wordpress upgrade, make sure you don’t overwrite the wp-content file, won’t you. I just have, so I’ve lost all my images, plugins and lord knows what else …
I could have sworn I clicked on wp-admin to FTP over. But apparently not … Wonders if host has backups … Wonders why only [...]
Interesting post by Martin Belam on advertisers telling people to search for the phrase “Where can I find the UKs cheapest cars” (link is to his blog).
Read the full post ...I went on Sky News a couple of weeks ago to talk about the publishing of Baby Peter’s killers’ names on the internet – despite the court order banning naming them. Here’s the clip.
Read the full post ...
I’m giving up comparing websites using Alexa.com’s data. Checking the accuracy of Alexa data using ABCe numbers led me to believe they were good enough to rely on. But the Times reckons the Alexa numbers in my latest post relating to referrals from the BBC were rubbish – and the Guardian agrees.
Read the full post ...Instead of lambasting the BBC for the “chilling” effect of its online activities, and blaming the problems of online news sites on the BBC “dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market”, News Corp chief James Murdoch should thank the BBC for all the traffic it sends his way.
The BBC is responsible for about 870,000 visitors a month to Times Online and 1.1 million to thesun.co.uk (see methodology, below).
Read the full post ...The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).
Read the full post ...
The Express has a new homepage beta. I was rude about it on Twitter today. I thought I should be more constructive. So here’s a wireframe for an alternative.
The idea is that the 4 main areas – each dedicated to one of the Express’s obsessions – pull in content from around the web (including the Express’s own) in real time and link to it.
Read the full post ...I’ve written a guest post for econsultancy, entitled: Murdoch CAN charge for content online, but can anyone else?
Read the full post ...