Charles Arthur’s Opinion column in today’s Guardian starts with the provocative claim that "Blogging is dying," and hastily modifies that to "The long tail of blogging is dying." If I’m following this correctly, this means that the big name bloggers are still writing and still being read, and that organisations like the BBC – and the Guardian itself – still regard blogging as worth doing (or worth encouraging others to do for them!) but that the many people who started a blog because it’s so easy to start a blog are now bored with blogging, and have opened FaceBook accounts instead. Or Twitter…

This makes sense. There have always been a number of ghost blogs out there – like ghost towns, spaces where someone set up a free blog one wet afternoon, and never blogged again. Not to mention the people whose web designers told them they needed a blog because it was cool and trendy, but who never took to the process of blogging. If that bubble has burst, and the people who made it have moved on to the next big thing, I’d call that a sign of health, not of death – but then, I don’t have an editor urging me to provide catchy headlines.

Charles Arthur’s argument actually spins off his analysis of how people respond to the Technology section of the paper. He acknowledges that this is anecdotal, which it is, of course, and also concerns only those blogs whose interests are technological; but I found it very interesting, nonetheless. It seems that very few people actually send in responses written on paper – no, really very few: "months would go by without any arriving". Most of the feedback received is by e-mail. But once the Guardian started treating blog commentary about its articles as feedback, "blogs quickly began to make up the majority of content." And then Twitter came along…

If we assume that any letter published over a name and address has been sent in by e-mail (snail mail being so rare that it’s safe to discard it) then here are some rapid breakdowns:

Today’s Guardian (25.06.09)

E-mails: 4; blogs: 3; Twitter: 5

11.06.09

E-mails: 3; Blogs: 6 (of which two from the same blog); Twitter: 2

04.06.09

E-mails: 4; Blogs: 4; Twitter: 1

I don’t really know what to make of that. The e-mailed responses tend to be longer, the tweets are often, though not always, low on content (a response to an article on price increases on Adobe software reads in full: "Not good news for us creative types who rely on Adobe software" – inevitable, given the length restrictions of the medium, but less than ideal for reasoned discussion).

Or am I just sore because the Guardian decided not to publish my (e-mailed) letter, commenting on two (extracted from blogs) comments about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, about which I have written before and begin to think it’s time to write again)?

The blog is an astonishingly versatile way of publishing material on the web – and Roger has just pointed me to a very neat and ingenious use of the medium.

Blogger Jeremy James explains that his late father, David, was a keen photographer, and a lover of poetry. He attended many poetry readings in the north-east of England, and took photographs of the readers, the audiences and whatever detail of the venue or the event caught his eye. He put together a number of these photographs, with commentary, into a little book which he tried without success to have published. On his death Jeremy and his brother found the ring binder which contained the book, and it occurred to Jeremy that the chapters would work very well as blog posts.

Poets in a Lens, the resultant blog, is a charming memorial to a man with broad interests and talents – it is also a wonderful record of poetry readings in the north-east in the seventies and eighties. Many of those pictured are still on the scene: there’s a lovely picture of a young Peter Mortimer, another of Cynthia Fuller, and an almost unrecognisable Neil Astley. I remember that wallpaper in the Colpitts, too!

On our home page we say that we “… have been designing websites since 1996 (and the World Wide Web has only been a reality since 1995).” Earlier today a client asked me ” I just wondered what your criterion/is/are in choosing the year you state the www became a reality?” Always happy to justify what we say, here’s the essence of what I told her:

I’ve had to delve back since I first made that claim well over five years ago. There’s a timeline here, though I did not use that when I originally made this claim. The key phrase is “became a reality” and that was based on the number of internet users, particularly private individuals rather than business use. It was the invention of the graphical browser that got things moving. Mosaic in 1993 was the forerunner for Netscape Navigator whose first full release was in December 1994. Internet Explorer 1.0 was released with Windows 95 in August 1995. These programs meant that ordinary people rather than geeks like me could start to use the net.

The foot of this page has a chart of the number of internet connections, you’ll see they start with 16 million in December 1995. Today it’s over a billion and a half.

I signed up for internet service on 28 June 1996 and shortly afterwards I uploaded our first web pages.

A few days ago I was reading through an old copy of The Guardian… Well, I admit, it was a ten year old copy of The Guardian, and those who know how difficult I find it to discard a newspaper unread will be laughing at me. But once in a while this approach turns up something interesting. In this case it was a piece in the Online section headlined "Portal Combat" – and, in passing, searching the paper’s site for those two words suggests it’s time to retire that phrase before it collapses from overwork – which, amazingly, you can still read online.

The perspective of ten years made two aspects of the article particularly interesting. First, the subject is speculation about who will win the battle of the portals – Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo! I remember portals; the idea was that if you could provide a site which enough people would use as the start of each venture onto the internet, you could sell advertising on it. Which is sound as far as it goes, but I haven’t heard much about portals lately; I suspect that most people, if they change their start page from the manufacturer’s settings at all, start at a page they would visit anyway. I consulted Roger about this: we both use start pages which we constructed ourselves, and keep on our own computers – and we both admitted that these were in need of an update. I’d be interested to hear what start page other people use: a newspaper perhaps, or a search engine?

Which brings me to the second striking change in the ten years since this article was written. The printed version gave a table (not reproduced in the online version) of the "Top 20 web sites" – the 20 most visied sites in the US in February 1999. Top of the list was ‘AOL Network’ followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Lycos, Go Network and, at number 6, Geocities. Amazon (described as ‘books’, because we might not know) was at number 11 and eBay scraped in at number 20. The online version of the article ends with a list of "useful portals": altavista, AOL, broadcast.com, excite, geocities, go, lycos, msn, ukmax and yahoo!

Neither list includes today’s most visited web site: Google.

Those of us who spent at least part of last weekend at our computers had a ringside seat at an on-line rumpus. On Sunday, reports started appearing that sales rankings were disappearing from books on the Amazon web site – mainly but not exclusively books with gay and lesbian themes. The word was being spread via Twitter, the micro-blogging feature on mobile phones which allows users to tell each other "I’m on the train" (or, famously, "I’m stuck in a lift!"). Twitterers added the tag #amazonfail to their tweets on the subject, and suddenly here was an instant campaign.

No, I didn’t find out about it from Twitter. I prefer the internet to the mobile phone, so I read about it in a blog (Cheryl Morgan’s blog, in the first instance, although very soon I was reading different accounts of what was happening in all sorts of places).

The removal of an Amazon sales rank matters, and not just because authors and publishers check them obsessively to see how well their books are selling. Amazon also uses the sales rank to organise books that appear in search results – so de-ranking a book means that a customer is less likely to find, and to buy it.

After the first shock, most people came to the conclusion that Amazon was not deliberately black-listing books, being homophobic or adopting fundamentalist religious values. So what was going on? As usual, there were conspiracy theories (Amazon’s system had been gamed by troublemakers) and cock-up theories (Amazon is a large complex system in which it’s easier to make mistakes than to correct them). A day or so later, it does seem as if someone made a genuine mistake. Yes, it’s hard to imagine what they thought they were doing, or why the system allowed them to do, unchecked, something with such extensive results, but still, genuine error. The sort that can be fixed by repairing the damage and apologising profusely.

And that, finally, is what Amazon is doing. Although authors who complained were told first that this was indeed Amazon policy, then that it was a ‘glitch’, a mere technical error, the company did finally admit "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection." And sales rank figures are reappearing on books which had been de-ranked. Perhaps Amazon were just unlucky that this public relations disaster happened over a holiday weekend (when Easter and Passover coincided), and that’s why the initial response was was the sort of minimal ‘your letter has been noted’ that only irritates the complainant further. I’d say though that if you give people the power to foul up on this scale, you’d better make sure that a highly skilled apologiser is on duty at all times!

Many of the web sites I maintain link extensively to Amazon. Some of them have Amazon Associateships, whereby the owner of the site receives a small percentage of sales made through Amazon. I was not looking forward to untangling those, and to finding alternative ways of promoting book sales – and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to doing it in a rush, all at once. But it isn’t good for one shop to have a monopoly, and this weekend’s upheavals have been a reminder of that. I already try to encourage people to order books through their local independent bookshop, if there is one. Now I’ll be on the lookout for other alternatives, too.

We designed and help with the web side of the Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger competition. As part of this, we set up an email address debut.dagger@ …

This afternoon we have just received an email addressed to “Debut”. Now I know sales people like to get on first name terms, but so rarely has a sales message been undermined so spectacularly literally from the first word. The company concerned, so you know whom to avoid, is called Cvent.

Northumberland-based publisher Red Squirrel Press is one of our liveliest clients – it takes a special sort of energy to launch a poetry collection with three separate events in ten days, and still be prepared to launch not only a novel but a whole crime fiction imprint the following week! All this without sacrificing quality: Valerie Laws is a tremendous poet, and I’m looking forward to the launch of her fiction debut, The Rotting Spot, next week, but that shouldn’t overshadow another fine book, Alistair Robinson’s first collection, Stereograms of the Dead.

So last Thursday we ventured into Sunderland’s Bridges Shopping Centre for the last of Alistair’s three launches. Contrary to what people from Newcastle will tell you, there are many good things about Sunderland, but The Bridges isn’t one of them. Perhaps, in hindsight, we chose the wrong place to park: it should have been conveniently close to the bookshop, but it meant that on our way to the event we had to find our way out of a department store with no sign-posted exit, and on our way back, after the shops were shut, we had to trace a wide circle out of the shopping center and in again, up the stairs and down again. Waterstones was a haven of life, and warmth – and books – among the dark shuttered shops, and the coffee bar upstairs would be the perfect intimate venue, if it weren’t for the loud humming of the fridge.

Poetry triumphed over all these obstacles, though, and an appreciative audience of friends and family, students and fellow-poets, not to mention Cornwell Internet, enjoyed a lively tour (with props) of some of Alistair Robinson’s recurring themes. Vinyl LPs were brandished for the benefit of the younger members of the audience, who might not otherwise have grasped that the ‘stereograms of the dead’ are the stacks of records encountered in charity shops, the residue of house clearances.

This image from the poem The World of Mantovani is typical of what most appeals to me in Alistair Robinson’s poetry: it’s funny and clever and reflective, all of them in turn and sometimes all at once. He’s observant, too, and brings his observations to life – almost literally, in Polystyrene, in which the fragments of packaging caught in the wind become a flock of tiny creatures exploring the street, or Sand Shoes, which begins with a pun but carries on to justify it. Life’s Little Indignities is a photograph, something funny glimpsed, recorded and shared. (No, I won’t give away what – read the book!)

The Guardian‘s Thursday Technology supplement used to have an entertaining column called ‘Technobile’. I enjoyed reading it, and was sorry when it reverted to technophilia. I rarely read the current Technophile column, since I’m not in the market for the new and shiny gadgets it assesses each week, largely enthusiatically.

But last week’s instalment (which I can’t find on the web) caught my eye. It described a service called MrSite, a cheap and simple way for people to build their own web sites. Just because I’m a web designer, it doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to people designing their own sites. I want clients who are already convinced that they need a web site, and if that means trying out something small-scale and home-made first, that’s fine. So I was interested to see what the review had to say.

There’s only one thing wrong with MrSite, it seems, and it wasn’t worth discussing in the text of the article (only appearing in the ‘pros and cons’ summary at the end) – "browser differences mean site doesn’t always look the same" In other words, despite restricting users to a fixed template, MrSite still can’t deliver standards-compliant sites, which will display correctly in all compliant browsers. The reviewer didn’t seem perturbed by this, but I’d call it a drawback – and it also made me wonder whether the sites meet accessibility standards (and can be used by disabled visitors).

The real problem, I suspect, is that the ‘Technophile’ column is not an in-depth scrutiny of whatever product is featured in any given week, but a user assessment – which can be informative if the reaction is "this mobile phone is easy / tricky to use" or "these headphones are comfortable, but the sound quality isn’t very good." But the user of site-building software is not just the person who builds the site, but everyone who ever visits it – and their experiences may be very different. At Cornwell Internet, we do our best to ensure that our sites work over a range of browsers, new and old, PC and Mac, voice and visual, and on different screen sizes, too. That’s part of our job.

Ah, well, as I say, it’s not in the nature of the column to pick up this sort of issue; but then I turned the page to the Ask Jack column, and found a letter headlined ‘Not a Firefox fan’ which illustrates the same problem. The writer complains that "Firefox seems unable to display numerous websites properly" In fact, of course, Firefox is displaying the site ‘properly’ (according to the rules), the site wasn’t designed ‘properly’, it was designed to be viewed through all the idiosyncracies of Internet Explorer – possibly even using the MrSite software! It would be asking too much in the way of cross-referencing, I suppose, for Jack Schofield’s reply to make this point – but a reply published in yesterday’s paper spells it out!

And no, if you’re wondering, I didn’t write it – though the reason this post appears a week after the article that sparked it off is, indeed, that it incorporates the text of a letter not published by the Guardian!

I had a note yesterday from a client which set me thinking about links.

I had updated the web site of Nicholas Rhea (the author of the Constable books, on which the long-running Heartbeat TV series was based – real name Peter N. Walker) with a news item which had been sent to me by Peter’s wife, Rhoda: a report in the Times Business News quoted UBS, the Swiss bank which acts as ITV’s broker, as warning that cutting popular series like Heartbeat was weakening the company – and I’d added a link to the original report.

Rhoda very kindly thanked me for doing this, and added:

…thanks for putting in the links. So much better than cluttering up the page with too much stuff. I like the way links are highlighted so you can click straight through if you want the full story…

My immediate reaction was: "Me too!" – not so much about how I’d chosen to display the links on the site, although that’s something I think about in every site design: I want links to be obvious enough that the visitor will know they are links, but I don’t want them to be a distraction to someone who wants to read straight through the page.

But what really struck a chord for me was just how useful links are. Mostly I take this for granted, but when I stop and think about it, the ability to link to further information – whether within or outside the site – is one of the things I most value. I love the richness that comes from being able to footnote any point with an unlimited amount of further information for those who want it, the ease of directing others to resources I have found interesting (or illuminating, or just entertaining), the flexibility of constructing sites so that information can be found easily and put into as many different contexts as I like.

The ability to hyperlink is so valuable that I am saddened when people avoid using it (because they don’t want to encourage their hard-won visitors to leave the site) or treat it as currency, something to be exchanged ("I’ll link to your site if you’ll link to mine"). Ultimately, these are strategic decisions that each of us must make for ourself, and it’s up to the client whether the site is generous or frugal with external links. But if it’s my choice, I’d rather build a site that is so rich in information that people will want to return to it.

Thursday brings the Guardian‘s Technology supplement, a curious mixture of news and reviews of computer games, mobile phones and government computerisation projects. There’s always something interesting in it, though.

This morning it was the Ask Jack column, in which Jack Schofield acts as agony aunt for people having trouble with their computers: what does this file do, is this virus a serious threat, how do I…?

Sometimes we haven’t a clue what the answer is, but sometimes we have. And when someone wrote in last week and asked how to convert a PDF file to Word – well, we do this all the time. At least, we are very accustomed to extracting text from the various forms in which clients send us the content for their web sites. So when Jack suggested that if all else failed, you could always print out the PDF onto paper, and then scan it back and use OCR software (Optical Character Recognition – and I persist in regarding it as magic!) to turn it into text – yes, you could, but Roger was ahead of him.

And here’s the original query with Roger’s response, just as it appeared in this morning’s paper.