Posts by John Lettice 172 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2007
That's absolutely clear. You were always going to go onto the database whether you accepted the ID card or not, and you're still going to go onto it under the current plans. The difference now is that as ID cards are 'never' (ahem) gonig to be compulsory, your right to refuse the plastic is not going to expire when they do make them compulsory.
Blunkett HAS changed his mind, in that he has flipped from being the foremost promoter of the cards to arguing for their abandonment. Certainly he still thinks everybody needs to be logged and is viewing the passport as an alternative mechanism for doing so, and certainly Blunkett Plan B would if adopted look and feel pretty much like Blunkett Plan A. We mentioned this on The Reg two months before the Beeb got around to it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/23/blunkett_id_switch/), and Jerry's well aware of that.
Do try to keep up.
We send them back. I understand that there is a class of reviews operation that takes money for reviews and gets kit in exchange for favourable ones, but I do not see that as a legitimate approach. When you get on to question three, we don't promise favourable reviews in order to get access to the kit in the first place, either.
Actually most outfits big enough to have their own sales operation have a reasonable amount of control over the behaviour of the ads on their site. The reputable ones will also have dos and don'ts and red lines (we certainly do), and you've even got some control of what comes in from ad networks, in that if you find an ad unacceptable you can tell the network you don't want that ad again, or maybe you just don't want that advertiser again.
What you can and can't tell them to do, of course, relates to what they want and what the market as a whole is prepared to accept. And what you might deem acceptable doesn't always match what the readers deem acceptable. Bandwidth is a trickier one to define rules for, and I doubt very much that the advertisers are currently prepared to accept limits, although some of them will listen to arguments about massive loading times. But I don't think anybody's whacking you with 40 gigs per banner, so it's seem to me it's a loading time issue, not one of cost.
Google makes the most money because of huge volumes, incidentally. Its ads are actually pretty inefficient by everybody else's standards, and while I hear and agree on quality, Google really isn't the benchmark.
As for the lying publishers that several of you have touched on, it seems to me that this assumption is built into the proposal. Practically all publishers will say their ads are not intrusive, sure, but if you disagree you block them. The point of the proposal is you are presented with the choice, not that the publisher gets a get out of jail badge. It really is not the guy's intention to give site owners control, quite the reverse.
As I understand it the 'problem' with Asian fingerprints is a myth. One of the most successful ID card systems in the world is the Hong Kong one, which uses fingerprints at high throughput booths at the border with mainland China. The vast majority of users of this being Asian, I think it likely you have a fingerprint issue special to yourself. But yes, they do get very ratty at US border control if your fingers are bust, don't they?
I skipped the generation side, on the basis that a plan that doesn't look like getting a serious number of electric vehicles on the road isn't going to be troubling the grid greatly. But you're probably right about efficiency, and if you look at the two grey bars at the bottom of the chart you'll see that's covered. Given that this is something that will be done by the manufacturers and via EU regulations, in the short to medium term it'll probably have more impact than the DfT crapping on about the UK taking "a lead in this sector."
Can I use my You* workstation for a home-based business?
"No." (it says here) "You agree to use the You* workstation as your primary IBM workstation for 2 years with only incidental personal use."
Actually, this and other limitations will be to do with the loves avoiding the machines being taxed as a benefit in kind. So no savage discounts, no serious home use, no flexibility. Which is what makes it a crap deal, of course.
If they've got the entire prison history of the UK for the past 50 years somewhere, the Ministry of Justice ought to buy it off them. We sure as hell haven't even got a decent database of the current prison contents, and given our track record the chances of us ever successfully building one are slender. (-:
Actually you are ever so slightly mistaken. The Swiss rejected EEA membership in a referendum, and Switzerland instead negotiated an EEA-like deal which it describes as a series of bilateral agreements. I'm not sure what she'd have to rewrite in order to kick the Swiss out, for all I know she's able to do it already.
A fairly recent development in facial scanning technology is 'liveness' detection, which checks for the kinds of movement that will indicate that the camera is looking a real, human face, and not a picture of one.
So yes, that could well work, so long as the border plods aren't watching you.
I did a count on this years ago, before we ran comments. I haven't checked again, but I doubt the numbers are much different. The number of readers effectively halved from page to page, so 50 per cent page two, 25 per cent page three, etc. This isn't really a consequence of splitting articles across multiple pages, as you get a simlar effect with long articles, it's just harder to measure.
Only putting the comment link on the last page certainly has its attractions, but I'm not sure about it. Say you diligently read all the way through, go away and think about it, then return to the article in order to make a comment (I know, in my dreams, but I like to think the best of people). Mightn't it be excessively stalinist for us to insist that you have to go all the way to the last page in order to make that comment?
BTW, I've never personally been keen on multipage articles, but there are arguments for them, and I believe there are even people who like them. I think we ought to make it more obvious in our labelling that Print is effectively also the single page button. So change it to Print/View as single page.
It really isn't my intention that this sound like 'like it or lump it'. We're certainly not going to go back to the old design, but we don't intend to try to restrict everybody to reading The Register in a single way. We're noting what you have to say here, and we're considering what we can and can't do in the way of alternative views. And maybe some kind of view switch button is feasible. Say, we could think of it as an 'all the stories' view that just gave you them wallpapered in order, laid out rather like the old front page but minus the story weighting we used to use for that... Certainly sounds like an option to me, but we need to consider the labour overheads. If an alternative view can be almost entirely automated from our end then it's feasible, but if it generates more admin and support work then it's less so.
I think we at least considered having a mouse over preview of comments. Would that do the trick for you? We killed off the list of first comments as part of the general page de-cluttering exercise. I think we've still got some tidying up to do down at the bottom of story pages, so we can reconsider as we do that.
We prefer not to talk about ad blockers. We are currently in a position to be able to tolerate them, and we'd like to keep it that way, so we try not to do anything that might encourage them, and it'd be a help if you good people out there would do likewise, OK? But what you do in the privacy (hah) of your own browser is your business. EOM.
As for subscription versions, we really don't see that kind of twin track Reg as being feasible. We might or might not be able to sell enough subs to make it worthwhile from a revenue point of view, but we'd have to police it in some way, and that really isn't our style. More importantly, you tend to create problems for yourself when you do this. You'll remove some, maybe lots or even all, of your better off readers from the advertising demographic, so your ad inventory becomes less valuable. Along with this you might find yourself accepting more aggressive advertising in order to encourage more subscriptions, or simply because you need to in order the recoup the ad revenue you lost because of the demographic shift.
I've no problems with subscription only titles, but twin track seems to me a mess I'd be smart not to get into.
We had threaded comment on the roadmap last year, but we pulled it because there was quite a bit of coding involved, and we had other urgent projects that needed attending to. I think we'd still like to have threaded, and to generally make comments more forum-like, but financially that's a difficult one to justify. Revenue from the comment section isn't that big, and as advertisers seem to have some kind of issue about having their products next to people cracking dirty jokes and swearing at each other, it's not an automatic gold mine.
Now play nice. You told me what your problem was, I used the configuration you gave me to see if I got the same effect, and I didn't. So what am I supposed to do next? If I have a dozen people reporting an issue, then I likely have a problem. But I haven't, not that problem.
As I mentioned earlier, if it's good on an iPhone it's a total accident. If we'd tried to get mobile versions right at the same time, we'd never have shipped anything. I just had a quick look on one though (fanboy, you got me...) and reckon it could be worse. Hopeless in anything but landscape, front page text small enough to force me to take my glasses off (the Guardian's the same these days, but the FT still works), navbar busts on story page (bugger) but story page readable, and width seems to fit nicely.
Personally, BTW, I find the way the New York Times and AP apps present on the iPhone neat (NYT load time's a pain though). There might be something in that direction.
I guarantee you that we do not specifically design features in order to combat mental ad block. We got an acceptable response from the ads on the old design, and we hope we'll get the same from the new. Generally we tolerate freeloading bums, although we prefer it if they don't encourage other freeloading bums in our columns.
Your self awareness in any event indicates that if you are a freeloading bum, you are a thoughful one. We like that.
We only want to be able to control some kind of reference design of the site, and we've absolutely no objections to people using extensions to make it display in the way that suits them. Matter of fact, if there are fairly straightforward things we could do that would make it easier for them to do that, then we'll be happy to do them, tech resource permitting.
Seems like a harmless enough request. I'll see if I can find out if there's a reason why we didn't put the count at the top as well. Although OTOH, as we make cracks about encouraging people to comment before they've read the article, maybe having post comment there at all is a bad move.
There is a link back from Reg Hardware, but it's tiny (small vulture), and it's not on the front page. We'll do Tony some kind of trade at the border when we put a Reg Hardware link back into the Reg front page. (-:
We've tried posting direct to section in the past, and have found that generally it's a waste of time, so we'll be continuing to have practically everything appear on the front page. And on average, stories will stay on the front page for about as long as they did previously.
By being able to present and drive the sections better, however, we think stories there will perform a little better, people will find more stuff that interests them once they get into the site, and will therefore tend to hang around for longer.
As for smaller and bigger screens, yes we accept that the approach we've taken creates problems for us there, but we'll be working on dealing with them.
The population of most read on the section pages is currently the most read stories in that section. The front page one has various weirdisms in it, and we're going to have to nail down the parameters properly and work out how we can label/explain what it's supposed to do. Er, just as soon as I know... (-:
Part of the intention with the new layout was to do something pretty much like you suggest. We're not quite achieving this yet, partially because at least one part of the placement process is cumbersome to use, and we need to get a better one coded, and partially because we're not yet entirely used to the new approach that's needed.
I'm glad you mentioned sections though. If you look at the Hardware section, you'll see we're running a lead and section-specific teasers there. We can also set section-specific Special Reports there, although at the moment it's running the site defaults set for the front page.
We can switch this functionality on for other sections in a twizzle, and we'll roll out a couple more over the next couple of weeks. But we don't want to do it for a section unless we've got a specific in-house custodian for it, so the burden of picking stories doesn't get insane.
That's caused by something we do to avoid page loads stalling. We try to load the content first, so the reader gets the page without having to wait until an external ad server gets around to sending a banner. If you do it the other way round, a slow or screwed ad server can bring the whole show to a halt, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm not sure there's a great deal we can do about the shuffle, but we'll take a look.
The logic works better if you read what I said, rather than what you said.
I said it was too crammed, and that one of our goals was to have a greater ability to promote stories that we felt deserved more exposure. At the same time, I said, we wanted to give those who wanted to view stories in the order of publication that opportunity, not messed up the way it previously was.
And second time around I didn't say it was too busy, I said we felt we might have too many stories on the front page. That is, it's maybe too long. And we have Earlier stories to let people read back through the stories that have dropped off the bottom.
There have been some people complaining about 'more' ads, so I think I'll try to clear that up.
We have ad inventory requirements, as do all ad funded publications. Because we have a fairly large readership, our ad inventory substantially exceeds those requirements. We'd only need loads more ad space if we slashed our rates and went gunning for vastly more low rate ads. And how dumb would that be?
Our rates are the same as they were last week, our requirements are the same, and we can fulfil them just as well now as then.
You're getting the ads in different parts of the page, certainly, but there aren't more of them. As a matter of fact some of you are seeing pages where one or more of the ad slots aren't filled, in which case the editorial links are simply sitting next to one another. People may be perceiving more 'ads' because we haven't quite got the format of the editorial images in the right hand column right, and you may be clocking them as ads.
We'll be working on that. But really, there are no more ads than there were before.
We've got somewhere over 50 links to editorial in the new design, and approximately the same number in the old. We think maybe the new front page is a little too lengthy as it is right now, so we might decide to run with a few less, but the numbers still won't be all that different.
What I've been doing so far is presenting an explanation or fix where it's relatively straightforward. We'll do a roundup of where we think we are, and of the responses, probably tomorrow, and we'll cover fixed width there.
Executive summary now though. We understood on the way in that there would be readers who would object strongly and loudly to the switch, but we felt that the gains we would make in ability to control the look and feel of our product would outweigh this. We still think that, but having now establshed the format (subject to some tweaking), we ought then to be able to look at how we can cater for larger screens and handhelds.
I think maybe we got a bit ahead of ourselves in pulling Odds & Sods at this point. The section is essentially what it says on the tin, i.e. a bunch of miscellaneous stuff we don't have other homes for. So it's a labelling fail really - it's BOFH, Bootnotes, Entertainment and About The Register, and most of the traffic we get to it actually seems to be on the way to BOFH. So we thought we'd make it simpler to go directly to BOFH, and reorg the rest as part of our pending sections rethink. But as we haven't done any of that bit, there's an argument for putting Odds & Sods back on the nab bar while we get on it.
We'll check the 9.6 issue. We got rid of the old links to Reg Hardware and Channel Reg because they were relatively little used. Go down the page and you'll see bigger, alternative jumping off points for both, plus BOFH. This is experimental, by the way. We'll be checking stats on what works and what doesn't, and modifying in light of that data.
We'll also likely start running links from the grey strip under the nav bar below the masthead. This is occupied by the subsections on the section pages, but on the front page we're looking at how we could make it more fluid. Reg Hardware, Channel and BOFH would be obvious chandidates for inclusion there. And we'll be running links to specials in both of them in the right hand column, so they ought to be better promoted than they were in the old look. That's the intention, anyway.
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