TechnoCloud

An old post noting the BBC’s trialing of video embeds remains one of the most popular on this site, even though the story is out of date.

Thankfully I can update the story after a post on the BBC blog announcing that the trial is going to be rolled out using the embedded media player, starting on the News Technology section.

You can see it in action below (or not if it doesn’t work!).

It works fine for me and was easy to add to a post. The first impression was that the player feels too big, certainly compared to the initial trial size. The description panel below the video content is a large part of this, especially when the metadata could be displayed in the player itself, although I suspect the additional links (Terms; What’s This) were an important requirement of this getting released.

However, since my original post YouTube has increased the size of its embedded players with the change to widescreen format (and even allows HD), so it is not out of keeping with the dominant player in general video.

Equally a blog post is just one of the locations that the video could be embedded and it may look a better fit outside of a blog’s column width.

The history of the internet is littered with failed experiments to shoehorn print online. From PDFs simply stuck online, to ‘turn the page’ user interfaces, to a dump of reams of text into HTML, simply trying to replicate print online misses the point of what makes digital different.

Slowly though, momentum is building for digital print. Let’s look at some of the main reasons for this:

1) The relative success of the Kindle. While the reported 250k+ Kindle 1’s sold is not huge, it does demonstrate that there is a market for e-books delivered over a well designed device, even at an early adopter pricing point. The Kindle 2 will only advance this. Now we are even starting to see newspapers and magazines available in the Kindle store.

2) Related to the point above, the advances in e-book technology, seen in the Kindle and the Sony Reader (among others). I was somewhat cynical until I actually got one in my hands a couple of weeks back and yes, it really does look like paper. Flexible e-paper is also on its way.

3) Google and Amazon’s combined weight. Amazon announcing its intention to put all books into e-book format, Google putting 1.5m public domain works online and its settlement with publishers over out of print but in-copyright books.

4) Public domain works. From the complete works of Shakespeare in an iPhone app to the Canterbury Tales in a blog, Chaucer’s Tales, there are numerous ways that innovators are experimenting with delivering out of copyright public works.

5) The environment. Books are beautiful objects and remain my preferred reading format, but it’s a powerful argument to remove the physical print and distribution costs from the equation through an e-book.

6) Mobile. While reading a book on an iPhone is a far from ideal experience, it can be a convenient way to dip in and out of text when it’s difficult to lug around multiple books. Again I was previously a cynic until having the Complete Works of Shakespeare available to me via the iPhone app has helped me get back into old school texts and rediscover some of the Sonnets while stuck on The Tube.

Books are wonderful objects that are here to stay, but they are going to have to co-exist with e-books as the reading experience, search functionality and storage capacity of digital print starts to make an impact.

It was with great sadness that I learned of the tragic death in a plane crash of the ball of energy and ideas that was Martin Schaedel.

I played a small part on his journey to internet celebrity, giving him what I believe was his first ever job. as described in the article in the New York Observer.

I was managing the technology department at web marketing agency, Panlogic, and was on the lookout for a search engine optimiser. Round after round of uninspiring CVs came and went leaving me still no closer to finding that elusive staff member.

I then received a call from a confident and highly promising candidate who clearly knew considerably more about search engine optimisation that I ever would and seemed almost too good to be true, name dropping conferences, high profile contacts and pointing me to his real estate site to show off his skill at getting high rankings.

At the very end of his call he dropped his bombshell. “There is just one thing more I should tell you. I’m 17.” Clearly this was no ordinary candidate.

We flew him over from Sweden and the team and I grilled him on his extensive SEO knowledge, as he answered each question almost dismissively challenging us to test him further. He then stood his ground and haggled like a veteran over his wage demands leaving us not quite sure what to make of his young prodigy.

Age is no barrier to talent, so we asked him to join us and he accepted. He was quickly welcomed into the team attracting the nickname ‘Mini-Sven’ after then England football manager fellow Swede, Sven-Göran Eriksson.

His confidence was staggering for someone his age, quickly challenging the status quo and proposing that we changed our entire business model on his very first day. As it was, he had to knuckle down with the rest of the team and go through his probationary period.

His first review was a reminder of just how young he was, as he asked for an early answer on his probationary period as he had to let his school know whether he was coming back or not!

He was just as unique outside the office insisting that he only drank champagne and telling tales of the women in his life and his ambitions in the finance industry. You were never quite sure what the reality was with him, but he made entertaining company and did his work, so we got on fine. Perhaps a sign of the line between fact and fiction was in the reported claim in the New York Observer article to have made $2,000 a day doing SEO - I wish!

To his great frustration he never quite managed to beat me at the office table football, but proved a willing attacker in doubles matches against the combined forces of the Creative department…

I later left the company and a short time later so did he, but we kept up on Messenger as he began to realise his goals. There’s no doubt he would have gone onto extraordinary things and it is a tremendous tragedy that such a maverick with so much ahead of him was to end his life at just 23.

In a post last year, I explained that I was looking to run an ad trial on the site to test ad optimisation service Pubmatic as a way to test it for some much larger sites.

That test is now over, partly as this site doesn’t really get the traffic to provide precise enough data, but also because it became quickly apparent that Google Adsense was providing the higher quality ads and higher click-through rates of the ad networks tested.

So, to cut out the middle man, I’ve kept Google Adsense in the hopefully unobtrusive position on the right-hand column, as it’s fascinating to see the responses on different categories and pages.

I’m keen to learn more about the impact of ad positioning and ad unit, so if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to trial another style of unit on single posts in between the post and the comments.

Again, as payback for the ads, I’ll share the results in due course.