malcolm coles

John Terry’s been “nobbing” Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story – and of the fact that there was an injunction. This all fell apart on Friday. The case raises some interesting issues:

Despite the superinjunction, you could find out about the [...]

I pointed out this morning that the Express was talking utter rubbish claiming that the BBC was keeping up twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. The real numbers were in the 000s.

It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC’s followers. That is all.

NewsNow revealed this morning that it’s heard that News International will soon be blocking NewsNow from crawling The Sun’s site – just as it has done with the Times.

This has now happened, as the Sun’s robots.txt file shows.

I wrote yesterday that I was sympathetic towards NewsNow and its ongoing row with newspapers, especially the Times. I’ve now decided that I’m not.

NewsNow crawls the Times site in order to gather information for its paid service to businesses.

I am sympathetic towards NewsNow over the newspapers attempts to block it linking to them. The site has been blocked from showing Times Online stories. But I think it’s campaign is a little overblown:

Tanya Gold has written some anti-iPhone drivel in the Guardian. I’m not going to link to it or its 17 questions. (Nothing to say? Why not ask lots of questions? Is that a good idea?)

But wait. What’s that in the advertising slots on the page? Oh, yes, an advert for the Guardian’s iPhone app.

Ever wonder which of the Express’s obsessions it’s most obsessed by? Here’s what the archive search tells us …

If Murdoch wants to put the Sunday Times or the Sun behind a paywall but still wanted Google to index his content, he would have to join first-click free.

If he decides the Sun is really the Wapping News Journal and joins Google Scholar, then the rules would be different. He could have his content indexed without having to let anyone see it unless they paid a subscription. On top of which, Google would give his content priority if was the original source of a story.

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I’m tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.

As well as the Sun misjudging its readers’ mood over Gordon Brown’s handwritten letter, Daily Mail readers also seem to be sympathetic to the Prime Minister.

The best rated comments on its story are those with sympathy for the PM. The worst rated are mostly criticising him.

The Daily Mail has been lambasting football clubs for playing games without wearing “the poppy that symbolises respect for the nation’s heroes”.

But where’s its poppy, eh? Other papers are wearing poppies – why is the Mail a poppy refusenik newspaper. SHAME.

The Sun is running a pretty despicable campaign against Gordon Brown – and the majority of its readers don’t agree with the paper’s stance if its website comments are anything to go by.

The Guardian has changed its comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one.

With the old system, once you loaded a page, some javascript would go off and look up the comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments. It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript. And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.

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….

Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.

June 2009 saw the Mail Online unexpectedly overtake both the Guardian and Telegraph in the ABCes, partly on the back of US traffic and Michael Jackson stories.

Fast forward to September and the story is the same as earlier in the year – Guardian first, Telegraph second and Mail third. So what’s changed? To find out, I’ve compared the ABCe figures for UK and foreign visitors in June and in September. The difference between the Guardian’s performance and that of the Telegraph and Mail is revealing.

The PCC is supposed to deal with complaints about sensitive matters. To cope with this, it should put in place (1) scaleable web hosting to ensure it can cope with any surge in traffic and (2) top-quality security measures to ensure its backend is secure.

It appears to have done neither.

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 [...]

Update According to Google, at 2.45pm, Jan Moir is the 42nd most popular search in the last hour. The Mail must be loving the traffic they are getting. So, why don’t you try contacting the advertisers on that page to let them know what you think of their brand sitting alongside the story? Try retweeting [...]