Matthew Revell

Ha! Here’s a good joke: Joi Ito posts that someone has come up with two new punctuation marks, then tried to patent them!

The new marks are a question mark with a comma-like symbol replacing the usual dot. The other is - you guessed it - a similarly deformed exclamation mark.

Here’s what IP Updates, the site that originally reported the patent application, quotes as the patent’s abstract:

Using two new punctuation marks, the question comma and the exclamation comma: and respectively, inquisitiveness and exclamation may be expressed within a written sentence structure, so that thoughts may be more easily and clearly conveyed to readers. The new punctuation marks are for use within a written sentence between words as a comma, but with more feeling or inquisitiveness. This affords an author greater choice of method of punctuating, e.g., to reflect spoken language more closely. Moreover, the new punctuation fits rather neatly into the scheme of things, simply filling a gap, with a little or no explanation needed.”

As an aside, I suggest that, before inventing new punctuation marks, people learn to use the punctuation we already have! What the hell is that colon doing in the first sentence?

It’s not that I don’t love the evolution of language. However, I believe this sort of thing has more to do with vanity than filling a gap so far unnoticed by the rest of the English speaking world. Everyone wants to be remembered for something; pre-ordering a gravestone with “He gave the world two new punctuation marks” would probably give some people an ego boost.

Every day, I begin sentences that stumble, then crash into a horrible mess of ideas. My solution is to step back, reconsider what I want to communicate and then divide it up into clause-sized chunks. Lazier writers would love two marks that offer them permission to litter their writing with the constant shifting of spontaneous, conversational English. This is the written equivalent of uptalk; as perfectly exemplified by Alyson Hannigan’s character in American Pie, “And this one time, and band camp…”.

I cannot think of any situation in which either of these two punctuation marks would help written communication. Please use this blog’s comments to prove me wrong.

Now, if the - I cringe to write the names - question comma and, ugh, exclamation comma are to be taken seriously, why patent them? The reasons why this would never generate any income are too numerous and obvious to bother listing here. So, it must be back to the old ego thing: why invent two new punctuation marks unless you can show the world it was you? All seems very primary school to me.

Also see interrobang

I’ve fiddled around with programming since my Sinclair ZX81 days. I used to do quite a bit but I was always too impatient to read manuals, when I was a teenager, so I never really made it as a coder. I still enjoy being able to cobble things together and I have a couple of mini-projects that I’d like to write myself:

• a content management system: not a website content management system, but just somewhere I can log content, and associated metadata, for various media
• a holding area for character, plot and other ideas for my novel.

I’m sure solutions exist. Hey, I could even use a spreadsheet; where’s the fun in that, tho’? Python has always looked like a cool language and a lot of cool people recommend it. So, I’m going to give it a go.

Don’t worry, this blog will remain focused on web content and web marketing. However, just as I plan to continue blogging about radio, from time to time, I may also talk about Python occasionally.

Actually, my pal Aq has asked me to log every single thing that I experience as a Python beginner. I’m sure he’ll then harvest all my brain-drippings and turn them into a profitable book, or something. If the Python stuff becomes too frequent, I promise I’ll start a separate Python blog.

Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, has described a technique for gaining a one-off, massive rise in traffic to a blog.

He suggests writing a funny post and perhaps adding a picture of a scantily clad woman, so that humorous-link sites, such as Fark or, for British readers, B3ta might pick up on it.

Now, Rick doesn’t claim that this is the path to commercial blog success. However, even if you just want a quick burst in traffic, I recommend avoiding such tactics. I foresee several problems:

• it offers a freak spike in traffic, not sustainable growth
• the visitors you will attract are looking for something funny/someone scantily clad, not the normal content of your site
• you may alienate your core readership.

Of course, Rick would agree that there is only one way to grow a commercial blog: offer well-written, relevant and interesting content that would be difficult to find in that configuration elsewhere.

I believe that traffic, for traffic’s sake, isn’t helpful in building a successful commercial blog.

I admire anyone trying to launch a web design studio, particularly in a small town.

How do you cope with a market that, for the most part, doesn’t understand your business? Then there are some elements of your competition who have equally as poor a grasp and claim to undercut you by hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds?

Argweb, jointly of Stourbridge and Cologne, have come up with a nice scheme to get in the local paper. The post code of their Stourbridge office begins “DY”, for nearby town Dudley. So, they’ve printed a stash of “I love DY” tshirts, in the style of the “I love NY” shirts, and launched a website selling them. Brilliant! Tap into local pride + press the “local story” buttons of the regional press = media coverage and local good will. If they’re lucky, they might even sell the shirts, making back their minimal costs.

The local paper, the Express and Star, has run a story on the shirts, with subtle-enough a sales pitch for Argweb so as not to appear to be full-on advertorial.

I’m pretty sure the journalist had a grin on his face while writing the article:

For instance, while a New York tourist website pompously describes the city as the “capital of the world”, Dudley people for decades have spoken with pride of coming from the Capital of the Black Country.

Cringe-worthy comparisons between Dudley and New York continue but it’s all rounded off with a neat call to action, including the URL of the tshirt website.

Few people are going to take the tshirts seriously but I’m impressed with Argweb’s handling of the local press: they knew exactly which boxes to tick. Unfortunately, Argweb seem to be a little too keen on Flash-based websites. They clearly understand how to create appealing designs but make few concessions to the web as medium.

Anyway, I’ll have to ask my Cologne-based colleague if their local paper has a story on “Ich liebe Kolne” tshirts.

This summer, companies are taking an interest in search, again. Two years ago, no one was seriously talking about competing against Google.

However, we all knew Google’s dominance would eventually be challenged. Yahoo! bought Inktomi (search) and Overture (distributed keyword relevance text advertising), to compete directly in the two areas that have made Google a success. Microsoft has also thrown its weight behind getting search, although many will never trust them to offer non-biased results. Even Amazon has had a go, although its skinned version of Google - A9 - is hardly innovative.

There are new names, though, hoping to find the relatively quick, word-of-mouth driven success that Google has had. IceRocket.com is one of them. It looks like Google and, some of its results are generated by Google. IceRocket brings together a few nice ideas - thumbnails of each search result, a quick view of the site in an iframe, a meta-search of FaceParty style sites - but there are problems that need to be sorted, if it’s to have any real success. The quick view, for example, takes just as long as opening the link in a new tab but gives you only a tiny window through which to see the content. Thumbnails are available for only around 20% of the results returned. And without their own deep crawl of the web, no number of bells and whistles will help them to make a major impact on search users.

If IceRocket is a little “me too”, then Blinkx’s approach, at least, appears to be original. I say “appears” because I’m sure similar, admittedly less ambitious, widgets have been around before.

Blinkx appends a small blue bar to the title bar of certain applications - MS Office, IE, Mozilla/Firefox, some email apps. It then scans the content of the current document and offers what it promises are relevant local files, news stories, web links, blog entries and products.

Here’s the problem: very little of what it has offered me has been relevant. Looking at the press for Blinkx, someone in their PR team is fond of the phrase “Google killer”. That puts a mighty weight of expectation on the service. I’ve been generous to Blinkx: I’ve given it a whole morning. People who don’t write blogs or work for computer magazines, will give it five minutes; that’s if they can be persuaded to install it in the first place.

“Google killer” means that Blinkx will give me better information than Google, in a more effective form. Blinkx sits on top of my window and changes colour very slightly when its found something that might be relevant. Click one of its tiny icons and, depending on which one you’ve stumbled on, it gives you either:

• news
• general web results
• blog entries
• products
• video and audio
• local files.

Products is where Blinkx hopes to make its money and you have to elect to click on it - “please advertise at me”. Admittedly, what its thrown up has been fairly relevant.

News has only been relevant when I’ve been looking on news sites. It’s let down by the first link almost always being to the actual story I’m reading.

Video and audio, apparently one of Blinkx main USPs, has given me nothing. (As an interesting aside, one of Blinkx’s co-founders claims this will mainly throw up BBC content, as “the BBC posts its digital TV free on the internet”, which is news to me.)

Local files has given me nothing. I gather from the Blinkx website that this is because it takes around a day to index your local files. Call me impatient, but nothing else the tool did made me want to keep it on my system that long.

Blogs: my favourite one. It seems that there are seven blogs, which it cycles and none of which were relevant to anything I was looking at.

Web search, the all important one, has not given me a single result.

So, as soon as I’ve published this post, I’ll be uninstalling Blinkx. Google is a success because of its simplicity: you go to Google.co.uk, type in your search, it gives you relevant results. There’s nothing to install, nothing to learn. Blinkx is only for Windows (Mac coming soon), providing they’re using a compatible browser and are happy with very poor results (in my experience). Oh, and it takes hours to become fully usable.

Perhaps Blinkx has a future, if some UI problems are tweaked and they don’t pitch it as a Google killer (they really don’t want to kill Google, when they rely it on its search results). If it was sold as a local search system, that happened to include web searching, users may be prepared to wait a day or two for it to get up and running and to learn how to use it. Competitors to Google should be easier to use, not harder.

Maybe I’m just not using it properly but that’s because of the ways it’s been sold to me. Bad marketing also effectively killed Tivo, in the UK. The advertising spoke of pausing live TV: that’s a cool feature but probably the least important to most people. The Sky + marketing - a rebranded Tivo with a digital satellite decoder built-in - has focused on watching what you want, when you want. It’s been a relative success. So Blinkx, forget killing Google: improve your UI and focus on local search.

I welcome competition to Google: we need it. I just don’t think we’ll find it in a product that has none of the advantages of Google but, instead, has gathered a little too much publicity, through an echo around various blogs, many of whom seem not to have used the thing.

A List Apart has an article on how to use CSS to create attractive, standards compliant HTML emails. You can read the article yourself. What’s interesting are the ten pages of reader comments.

As with many things internet related, there is great strength of feeling over HTML in email, amongst a very small group of people. Of course, many of these people believe themselves to be a hundred times more important than other internet users. Nonetheless, they repeatedly miss the point.

If you want markup, then please, put a link to the markup in the email, and I’ll go read it if I want.

You don’t seem to understand a fundamental thing, you have no right to demand ‘return receipt’ via log analysis.

If done in a standards compliant, responsible manner, why can’t some email have nice layout? You don’t give a reason!

One reader posts that if his boss demanded HTML marketing emails, he’d refuse:

So this is one point I would NOT concede to my boss. Just tell him, listen, HTML emails are bad and they WILL reflect badly on the company as they will clutter the mailboxes of our prospective clients, increase their download times and put us in the same league as spammers, which EVERYONE hates.

We all know bosses can be wrong, but why make yourself look foolish by peddling outdated prejudices against something?

Or what about the guy who is so desperate to cling onto plain text email that he’s prepared to look silly:

A simple plain ASCII text email will go miles further than HTML email or even CSS styled email.

Chaps, the game’s over: you lost control of the internet around eight years ago.

Why does HTML email ignite such ignorant comments? The reasons given by HTML email haters are, primarily:

• Email is meant to be plain text
• HTML email looks like spam
• They have an inexplicable hatred of anything that wasn’t around in 1993.

Oops. I think I’ve stumbled on it. These guys hate HTML email because it’s not part of the internet that used to shelter them from the real world. It doesn’t fit in with their command-line, text mode geekdom. One person commenting on the A List Apart article perceives exactly what the problem is:

Because they’re all tech-geeks, living in a pure uncorrupted binary world. The hardcore Linux warriors at my office are just the same.

HTML email doesn’t have to be an image tag, displaying a huge GIF. It can be a subtle, well thought out usability improvement. It can also be done in such a way that the majority of email clients can view it properly, as the article promotes.

We - the HTML email writers - realise that it isn’t suitable for every single email. Sometimes, though, it’s the best thing for the job. Anyone who says plain text email is the perfect communication medium, in all circumstances, is deluded.

Why do I let this bother me? Because this sort of person tends to be very vocal and to give projects and ideas a bad name. Just like the same type of person in the Linux community, they manage not only to miss the point themselves, but also to make it a lot harder for the real message ever to be heard.

Link

Sport doesn’t interest me. In particular, though, I find the Olympics distasteful. On every level, it’s about money and yet its organisers try to promote an Olympic ideal of sport for sport’s sake, fair play and international cooperation.

So, while much television is given over to this festival of people who’ve wasted their lives trying to run faster, I’m going to listen to the radio. I’ve marked off a few of the radio programmes that interest me. I thought I’d share them, just in case they’re also of interest to you.

Sunday 15 August 2004

20.00 - 20.30 : BBC Radio 4 : A World in Your Ear
If “From our own correspondent” brings a British view of the wider world, “A World in Your Ear” gives you the country’s own perspective. Through clips of English language radio from around the world, this show does exactly what radio should: transports you somewhere entirely different, for a few minutes at a time.

Monday 16 August 2004

20.30 - 21.00 : BBC Radio 4 : Shanghai Jazz

I’ve become increasingly interested in China, lately. This is another of those great Radio 4 programmes that gives you a glimpse of another country’s life, in ways that don’t make the headlines. A BBC reporter has gone along to a Shanghai jazz bar and found out about the people there, including the exclusively over-75 jazz band.

Tuesday 17 August 2004

20.00 - 20.40 : BBC Radio 4 : Dirty Wars

First of a two-parter, looking at the side of biological science that’s dedicated to creating a deadlier bomb. Includes an interview with Colonel Ghadaffi’s son, on how he helped convince the world that Libya has a lovely regime, where everyone is happy. John Simpson mentions, in one of his books, that a large banner was once on show in the terminal of Tripoli’s airport It read something like, “Committees are everything”. I assume you do have camels in Libya.

22.00 - 01.00 : BBC 6 Music : Dream Ticket - featuring live set from Air

Forget the rest, just listen to the headline set from French duo Air.

Wednesday 18 August 2004

09.30 - 09.45 : BBC Radio 4 : Made in Shetland

How do the inhabitants of the Shetland Isles make a living?

16.00 - 16.30 : BBC Radio 4 : Thinking Allowed

Laurie Taylor, this programme’s presenter, is one of my favourite radio people. His gentle humour and inquisitiveness always manage to make the programme’s subject - sociology - relevant, vibrant and interesting.

23.30 - 00.00 : BBC Radio 4 : Box Jumpers

Debbie McGee (!) looks at the life of the magician’s assistant.

Thursday 19 August 2004

09.00 - 09.30 : BBC Radio 4 : Engineering Solutions

How ace is Adam Hart-Davies? Never has a man, in day-glo cycling gear, offered such enthusiasm about science. In this programme, he talks to the team behind a new bridge. It sounds like it could be dull but with Adam Hart-Davies it’s bound to be worth a listening.

11.00 - 11.30 : BBC Radio 4 : From Our Own Correspondent

This is what your radio was made for; not Brittney, not Westlife, not Busted.

14.15 - 15.00 : BBC Radio 4 : Afternoon Play - The End of the Pier

Normally, I’d do anything to avoid a Radio 4 afternoon play. This one, though, is about a couple who walk down Southend Pier. As a Southend boy, with a great love of world’s longest pleasure pier, I had to include this.

16.30 - 17.00 : BBC Radio 4 - Material World

What a fantastic day for Radio 4! Quentin Cooper looks at new techniques for repairing skeletal damage and slowing the ageing process.

Friday 20 August 2004

16.00 - 16.30 : BBC Radio 4 - Word of Mouth

For any lover of language, Michael Rosen is the ideal bloke to have a chat with in the pub, I’d imagine. Word of Mouth gives us the chance to have something like that chat, with him. With a look at dead words, the battle of Latin v English names for plant-life and a piece of the euphemisms used by travel guides, you may just be able to forgive the section on the words used in Olympic commentary.

16.30 - 17.00 : BBC Radio 4 : The Message

I saw Jenni Murray give a speech for a librarian’s dinner once. She was the only worthwhile bit of the day. In this week’s programme, she covers the way politicians and the the media use each other, as well as bit on Restoration.

22.15 - 23.30 : BBC Radio 3 : Mixing It

Definitely hit and miss, this one. It’s a showcase for experimental music you’ve never heard of. Every now and then, there’s something that truly reminds your what’s great about life.

23.30 - 01.00 : BBC Radio 3 : Jazz on 3

If you listen to this and, at the end, you still don’t like jazz, then you’re just wrong. It’s presented by Jez Nelson - even his name is almost “jazz” - and it’s on stupidly late.

Saturday 21 August 2004

11.30 - 12.00 : BBC Radio 4 : From Our Own Correspondent

Rightly so, this programme is now twice weekly.

13.30 - 14.00 : BBC Radio 2 : The Day the Music Died

I found this on Saturday. Was quite amusing. Andrew Collins, and a couple of other semi-funny chaps, talk about the week’s musical happenings, from a comic perspective.

21.00 - 22.00 : BBC Radio 2 : Beckology

A review of Beck’s career. I wonder if we’ll find out what a devil’s haircut is.

Sunday 22 August 2004

09.00 - 10.00 : BBC Radio 4 - Broadcasting House

Sundays on Radio 4 wouldn’t be right, without Broadcasting House. The show that Eddie Mair truly made his own, is now in the capable hands of Fi Glover. It’s news and current affairs but presented in absolutely the best way for a Sunday morning.

13.30 - 14.00 : BBC Radio 4 - The Day They Made it Rain

One day, in the 1950s, there was a devastating downpour in a small part of Devon. People were killed, lives were ruined. This programme examines if the unusual amount of rain was due to early cloud-seeding experiments. It’s a repeat but well worth listening to.

Well, that’s some of what I hope to listen to. Let me know if you’ve found anything cool, by adding a comment.

It looks as though I may have lost much of ContentPeople’s content.

ContentPeople was a site that I started early last year, with a former colleague Matt Beech. We wanted to offer practical advice, tips and general interest articles to online content professionals. Neither of us had time to do it justice, so it kinda’ fizzled out.

Recently, though, I’ve had a couple of requests to restart the site. I’d quite like to. So, I trundled off to find the MySQL database that held all the content. It’s gone. My old webserver seems to have been completely cleared out. Not even archive.org has most of the content.