Twitter - from the past!

Ever watched a recorded TV programme and wished you could see what the reaction was on Twitter? Now you can!

Together with the brilliant developers at Raak, I've (beta) launched Tweet Rewinder.

It's a mobile web app that lets you rewind your Twitter timeline and see tweets from the past unfold in real time

So you can jump back to the time a TV recording had actually been on, and then watch what people were saying in sync with the programme.

You can do the same thing with certain hashtags (there's a list anyone can use or users of the paid-for service can choose their own hashtag to capture - whether it's a TV programme, news event or conference).

Anyway, if you go to www.tweetrewinder.com, you can watch a video that explains how it works and sign up for the beta version (which works best on a mobile phone right now). But here are some screenshots. (You can follow Tweet Rewinder on Twitter, too).

Going back in time

Choose your timeline or a hashtag, then choose the time

Tweets from the past in real time

Then watch tweets from the past unfold in real time

There's also a write up at The Next Web.

Let me know what you think!

The name change means that of the main UK national newspapers sites, only the Guardian and the Express keep their URL as their masthead. The Telegraph, Times, Mail, Sun, Mirror, Express and FT all just have their name as their logo now.

Newspaper website logos

Anyway, so what's changed about the Telegraph? Here's a before and after look at the homepage (click it to make it bigger):

Telegraph homepage. Left: before. Right: now

According to the Telegraph, the purpose was:

To harmonise our look across all print, web and mobile and apps platforms; better showcase our outstanding multimedia content; and highlight the depth of our coverage across the site.

Changes include:

• dark borders (which I like - it sort of forces your eyes onto the central bit of the page),
• colour-coded navigation (sport is green, finance is red etc)
• a serif font for headlines (again, I like - nicer than the old very heavy headlines, and maybe a nod to the print style).
• There's also a new image/video gallery on the homepage (it's quite a long way down but is a good way to feature larger photos etc)

Interactive content promos

Further changes include:

More and bigger pictures, better packaging of our content within articles and improved topic pages with links to much more of our archive, and better integration with our blogs.

There's a useful column to the right of the stories, which is fairly similar to the Guardian's approach, to encourage sharing and listing related topics.

The Telegraph has also included some nice visual adverts for interactive tools (see pictured example) in that column.

All in all, it's not a massive change, as they say. But it all seems for the better. Reaction on Twitter seems fairly positive  and you can't ask for more than that!

Here's the Yahoo trending list from uk.yahoo.com on monday night. They all look very UK, including Corrie and Man U vs Newcastle...

Yahoo: trending topics

And here's the Google trending list at the same time, featuring a plane crash in America, David Hasselhoff's roasting on a US comedy show, a US TV show (Weeds), and a film that's in, er, America.

Google's trending list

Please, please fix it.

Modern Toss

Completely unrelated to my usual blogging, but if you like Modern toss, then there's an exhibition on in East London ...

Apparently it's going to involve a three ton marble fly; two eggs in a cage fighting over a pin; a talking, stuffed bird moaning about sitting on a twig and Mr Tourette’s incisive summing up of the international banking crisis ...

The exhibtion is on at Maverik Gallery, 68-72 Redchurch Street, E2, 22 June – 4 July 2010. Even more details here.

If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).

Anyway, click here to read when it's worth paying top dollar for professional copywriting.

Carry grapes and use them to control the screen (via Lewis Milford).

Use North Face E-Tip gloves which have special pads to control the screen (tip by Marc Munier).

Back in 2006, the iGlove Multi gloves came out which had patented Playpoint technology on the the thumb and forefinger tips for better contact with the Click Wheel on an iPod. Apple has now patented an iGlove for use in the cold with its touch-screen mobile phones:

Apple's proposed solution is a "high tactility glove system" – a glove made of two layers, with a thick, probably woollen outer layer, and a thin internal conductive layer, replicating the human finger which can conduct electricity.

In the fingertips of the outer layer there are "apertures" through which the user can thrust his finger to press any bit of the screen while still protected by the inner layer.

(Thanks to Steve Ritchie for that one).

Tom Whitwell suggests sewing a stitch of conductive thread through the fingertips of any gloves, and they will then work well.

Dots gloves have space-age dots (or dots as we call them) in the finger tips. They are the iphone golves that feel gloveless apparently. (Thanks to SharkSEO for the tip).

Got any others? Leave them in the comments below.

Sadly, a quick glance at paywalls shows that publishers - and Johnston Press in particular - need to massively improve the way they promote the benefits of subscribing ...

Awful attempts to sell content subscription

Northumberland Gazette

Northumberland Gazette paywall

For a start, if you're selling content, maybe make it look good? Don't refer to "the n/a site" ...

And let's sell the product. What's good about a premium subscription? What do I get, and how does it benefit me? I think some marketing advice is desperately needed here.

Worksop Guardian

Worksop Guardian paywall

This is the other half of Johnston Press's experiment - pointing out you can only read the story in full in the paper.

Could this be more underwhelming? Let's not talk about the great content in the paper or the benefits of reading or anything ... And let's not make the upsell message stand out, either.

Fairly poor

NMA

NMA paywall

First things first - this is your main marketing message. So a greyish font on a lilac background does not stand out.

Second, try to SELL THE BENEFITS. I can get full access to the website - great. But why is this good? What are the events and supplements. I know this subscription will most be paid by companies, but that's no reason not to do some proper marketing.

FT.com

FT paywall

(Click for a bigger version if you can't read it). I guess the FT may have tested this and it works. In which case ignore me. But to me it doesn't do a very good job of selling the benefits of registration for free (let alone subscribing). I can see some more articles. And some tools I've ever heard of that aren't described. Woo hoo.

Much better

Telegraph Clued Up

Telegraph Clued Up paywall

(Again, click to make bigger). Now we're getting somewhere. A description of the benefits (prizes, different puzzles, 5,000 to do), some proper thought into how the subscription is described and a strong call to action. Good.

Tmes Crossword Club

Times Crossword paywall

It's a bit hard to read, but look - a list of member benefits! That's how to sell ...

Which?

(Click to make bigger, plus disclaimer - I worked on this redesign). You can see what you would get in context, there's a description of the benefits AND a strong call to action. Which? lets you browse round all the content and just hides the best information - the ratings.

Conclusion

Are publishers embarrassed by paywalls? Do they not understand how to sell? Do they not understand how to sell online?

I'm not sure what the issue is - but some publishers who want people to pay for online content clearly need to give a lot more thought to their marketing ... They should stop DESCRIBING it, and start SELLING it.

Like most bloggers, I'm plagued by comment spam - but I've found a good way to spot spam: Backtype. It's designed to let you see all the comments you've left on many blogs - but you can use it to check comments that other people have left that link to a specific URL.

Oh noes. 502 bad gateways ...

Let's start with Matt Call who left a comment, giving his URL as freecallindia.info, saying that:

"I had difficulty navigating past your website because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error. Just thought to let you know."

Blimey, that's helpful, right - I should be worried. I was a bit suspicious that his surname was "call" and it linked to a telecoms site with call in its name. So let's check out Backtype, and see comments linking to that URL.

Freecallindia: notice any similarities ...

Ah. There appear to be over 100 comments, all saying the same thing, all left by several people with different first names but the same surname.

I'm an authority

Some guy apparently from onlinecarinsuranceclaims.com left a comment about what an authority I am. Thanks. Finally, some recognition. But then I checked what other comments on blogs linked to that site.

Onlinecarinsurance: notice any similarities ...

Yes, a series of comments (more than I've shown here) about insurance, menace and huge corporations. Preceded by one saying:

Nice strategy Ajith.. though they say every backlink counts but I prefer dofollow links.. So I do check pagerank, type of link that are allowed.

Right, thanks for the heads up.

Maybe he did think it was a nice post ...

Someone giving thesoftstuff.net as their URL left one of those "nice post" comments. They're always spam, true. But, you know, maybe this guy meant it, and thesoftstuff.net sounded OK ... Let's use Backtype to check the comments he's left on other blogs.

Thesoftstuff: notice any similarities ...

Nope.

Some others ...

You get the idea:

• Randy, who gave his URL as crushandshred.com, left a reasonable sounding comment. Check the blog comment profile for that site, and you see a lot of people whose surname is Crushed leaving comments ... Update Randy has commented below that he always leaves useful comments, which his original one might have been. His latest one is certainly useful.
• Alex from instanthealthinsurancequotemaryland.com gave me a tip on an SEO post. He informed me that "Appropriate keywords make your search simple and also help your data searching quick too". Seems he gives out this advice a lot ...
• Then Danni from AcneTreatmentDigest.com came along. His comments fall into two types. He had a lot to say about the death of Patrick Swayze - now he leaves the same message on loads of blogs about how "using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%".

These were all the undeleted comments I had awaiting moderation. Good old Backtype. Let me know if you spot anyone with backlink profiles worth a look.

With the old system, once you clicked to read a story, the web page would download, and some javascript would run. This would go off and look up readers' comments and display them. This wasn't terribly accessible - if you couldn't or didn't run javascript, you couldn't see the comments.

What you used to see with JS turned off

It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn't run the javascript (so couldn't see the comments). And if your mobile didn't run javascript (like mine), you couldn't read the comments either.

With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text on the page - so the comments are readable by anyone, javascript or not.

This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. If you notice any problems, they've asked you to point them out.

The problems with the old system

You can read some of the background to the change - ie comments by me bitching to various members of the Guardian about how awful the old system was on the Guardian site:

• here (where I point out the old new system surely breached the Guardian's accessibility policy),
• here (where I got a bit frustrated) and
• here (where there was an interesting (to me ...) exchange between me and the Guardian about what was going on).

The only problem now is that a couple of links to my blog that I dropped in the comments section have broken This is only a problem for posts shown on the search results page - on the actual posts, the links work fine.

Although I'll guess they'll add nofollow to links in comments soon anyway, to avoid the Independent's problem with spammers... (Update A Guardian commenter, below, says future links in comments will be nofollowed - but existing links in comments will stay without the nofollow tag).

Google already indexing comments

Google has already indexed the text of one of my comments

This screenshot shows how Google has already indexed the comments on the page shown - a search for the text of my comment returns the page. With the old system, it wouldn't.

It turns out she died of an unrelated tumour. But Google's results will give parents second thoughts about letting their daughters be vaccinated, even though the injection will save 00s of lives a year.

YOU can help do something about this.

If you can publish a web page ...

The results Google shows are heavily influenced by two things - the number of links to a page, and the text that's used for a link.

So, please, if you have any way to publish a web page (you have a blog, say, or you work somewhere that publishes online), then link to these URLs:

• http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hpv-vaccination/Pages/Introduction.aspx
• http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/Vaccines/HPV
• http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Cervical-cancer-vaccine-QA.aspx

Ideally, use some link text like cervical cancer jab or cervical cancer vaccine to link to those pages, like this: cervical cancer jab information and cervical cancer vaccination and Q&A about ervical cancer vaccine.

The more of us who link to it, the higher in Google's results that page will appear, counteracting the ill-informed media scaremongering. My aim is to get these NHS pages into the top 10, and preferably top 3, of a search for relevant terms.

If you can tweet, or you have a friend with a blog

Why not publicize this plan? You can tweet this blog post using the button at the top. Or if you know someone with a blog, why not ask them to add a link to the relevant NHS site.

If you've already blogged about this

Already published something about this online? Why not go back to that post / story and add a link to the NHS page. If you've linked to a misleading news story in your outrage over the media's reporting, why not add rel = "nofollow" to your link? That will stop Google counting your link as a 'vote' for the page.

Look in the HTML view and change something like this:

<a href="http://tabloid.com/misleadingstory">cervical cancer jab</a>

to this:

<a href="http://tabloid.com/misleadingstory" rel="nofollow">cervical cancer jab</a>.

At the moment, many outraged bloggers have linked to the scaremongering tabloid stories, giving them a boost in google's results. Adding nofollow like this will avoid this problem.

If you are in the NHS

Er, I think you need some SEO advice. The page I've suggested you link to is the one recommended by NHS Choices. However, it doesn't have cervical cancer jab in the title - I suggest you change this.

If you need any help

Leave a comment if you want some advice on the best way to help deal with this. You can see all my posts charting the history of this media scaremongering here.