Whatever the article is, how many times have you searched through Flickr to find a nice little shot to illustrate your piece? It’s a phenomenally useful tool, from just adding more colour to an article or some more unusual and creative uses.

But how many people who use it actually contribute back to the commons? Personally, not as much as I probably should or could – there’s a bunch of photos you can use on my left-for-dead Flickr page (if you want some photos of Doctor Who monsters, hey, feel free) and all the work for the Dev8D and DevXS conferences, including the full film, are CC-licensed.

But not much that I’ve done as a journalist. Which made me wonder – are there ways that journalists, particularly ones that make use of CC content, could release more content to the community?

One of the big reasons more don’t do this could be financial: if you can license your photos for profit, why give them away free? Journalism isn’t exactly awash with money right now, so why cut off a revenue stream? If you’re in a business, you’ve paid for it, so why shouldn’t others? And as stories are the bread and butter – is there a point giving away that hard work?

Wired Magazine last year started releasing staff photos for reuse, but with the requirement for credit and asking for a link back. Having the link has some benefits for Wired of advertising of content and SEO, as well as being good for their brand. See, I’m talking about them now. Oh no, I’ve just been suckered in by it. I even linked them too.

Even if it was on a selective content basis, I think it’d be a good thing if there was more sharing of parts of content from journalists. Maybe selected parts of audio or video interviews, certain photography too, and allow it for remixing with contribution. People are remixing all sorts of content online already and it’s fantastic. It’d be better if it were legal and encouraged.

Obviously it’s something where this could vary from national behemoths to hyperlocal sites, student work or individual blogs: depending on a million different factors. It’s not a debate to which I have any answers to, but think it’s one worth having. If journalism is about the sharing of information, maybe there’s more they can share.

Jade’s Empire

“I don’t know when we decided as an industry that in order to sell five million copies of a game you have to make a Michael Bay film. There are other options.”

Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond is known best for her work on Assassin’s Creed, but in this feature interview she talks about how it’s time for the industry to “grow up” and how games can take more creative risks and have more deeper meanings – but also the risks that involves.
Read it at Eurogamer

MACHINE POLITICS: The man who started the hacker wars.
From being the first person to unlock the iPhone to jailbreaking the Playstation 3, this profiles the story of the notorious hacker GeoHotz and the court case that followed. Your mileage may vary with how linked the hacks that followed on the Playstation Network and the work of Lulzsec are, but it’s a very interesting read.
Read it at The New Yorker

Exams, Demand, and a Short Lesson in Controlling Public Discourse
It may be becoming as predictable to hear people make predictions about journalists saying exams are getting easier as it is them actually saying that, but it’s still a common criticism that deserves a second look. Daniel Hemmens looks at the truth behind some recent claims in the news, as well as asking if it even matters if they really are. An interesting new take on this regular complaint.
Read it at Ferretbrain

Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps
The mantra of businesses disrupted by the internet is “adapt or die”. While tablets and apps are sometimes considered the future of journalism, they’re not without their growing pains – as Jason Pontin looks at the difficulties publishers have faced with news apps and the new direction some are taking.
Read it at Technology Review

If you found any of these articles interesting, let me know on Twitter and I’ll put together more picks in the future…

Unfortunately my degree isn’t actually completed yet and I’ve still got a week worth of frantic work to finish final assignments but that’s besides the point. My time as a student at the University of Lincoln is almost done. But that’s not to say I’m done at that place yet…

This all leads to the inevitable question: “What are you up to next?” – it’s not one I’m particularly bothered about, but here’s my attempt to answer it for those who have been asking.

In the short term, I’ll be staying in Lincoln. Some of the time will be spent working on a project with others for the university’s LNCD group in to the use of WordPress for e-portfolios for nursing and social care students. It’s both exciting and daunting that at the end of that I’ll hopefully have helped make some future meaningful, positive effect on how future students do some of their work on their courses.

Part of the interesting thing about doing journalism is that you can have an effect on things: pushing for things to be better, informing readers, having a worthwhile impact. There’s some similarities in that with this and a few other things I’ve done. I’ve often joked that I hate people as I’m not particularly social with those I don’t know, but the combination of people who care and helping them to do those things better, often with technology, is wonderful. Sorry, I’ll stop the wanky philosophy stuff now.

As well as that, I’m considering ideas for some things for Siren FM and may be doing more work reporting on DevCSI events. And heading to MediaCity for an event thanks to an innovation award nomination from the BBC. And practising the “Oh well I didn’t expect to win anyway so I’m not disappointed” face.

With plenty of time to make the silly things I love like Ceefax meets Twitter and the ridiculously popular BBC Three Generator. And if in the next year, if on the off chance any production company actually picked up an idea from it, I’d love to know. It’s a one in a million (particularly as the ideas would be so ridiculously awful) but I’m aware that it’s been going round those certain circles. If Stacey Dooley does end up investigating being a dwarf and incontinent, I’ll know where it came from…

And come the end of summer?

Who knows.

I’ve got some interesting ideas about new ideas for journalism, silly projects and an itching to get back in to the games world in some capacity. Maybe do more things with audio. Or tech. Or education. They’re all options. Hopefully though I’ll be earning money, as a great man once said, man can not live off Google Adsense alone. I think that’s the saying, anyway. I’m open to whatever opportunities I get offered, find or make myself, wherever those are.

And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll just have more time on Twitter.

Drive essentially, evolved from Docs. And herein lies the problem. I never treated Google Docs as I would a folder.

My file organisation is poor anyway, but on Docs, well, it was never an issue. A good dumping ground for todo lists. Collaboration. Moving stuff between PCs. And as any GDoc you opened on the internet ever got added to your list, I didn’t feel like it was something to really keep clean like you do a folder. You’d have recent stuff up top and search for everything else, because that’s Google.

So shifting from one to the other just doesn’t sit well with me. They were treated differently. And I think there was a good chance for Google to rethink cloud storage a bit, but they went kind of simple.

And I understand that they may want me to deal with photos through G+, and music through Google Music, but in their integration goal – why isn’t their an automatic folder where I can access the jpgs and MP3s? My phone automatically syncs my photos to Dropbox – and I like having access to the jpgs. It also syncs them to my G+ account, but I have to download them OUT of that if I want the actual file.

I’ve got 26gb on Dropbox so moving off that for 5gb is unlikely, but making it easier to back things up and move ‘em between devices is good. So Gdrive has some work to do. But I hope over time they kick in to gear. If G+ is part of their efforts to bring things together, let’s see that happen with my files.

Essentially – HTC need to know when to stop. The Sense UI, their modification of Android, has certainly been made slicker and toned down since previous versions as it came bloated. It’s great in parts, they add nice little features and elements but it doesn’t feel like it was designed with Ice Cream Sandwich in mind. They’re not ugly – I just know they’re wrong. And wrong for little good reason.

Google’s put together a fantastic set of guidelines which HTC’s designers could really do with looking at. In their own apps, they have decided to do a few weird bits with the action bar – and insist on using a look for tabs from Android a few years ago rather than ones that look nice and are consistent.

Then there’s bits of the OS they ignore. Tweaking the popup alerts for Yes/No. Using green as the accent colour on things when for the rest of the OS is blue. And replacing the quite nice new icons for system apps with ones they’ve used for several versions. Things like that make it quite awkward when you come across bits of the OS that they can’t change, namely anything involving Google.

It’s when you get to that level of tweaking – someone going “make sure we replace those icons” without good reason, “change the alert window”, you know they’re fiddling. And not in a good way. Put your effort in to making good, value-adding extras. I know hardware manufacturers need to stand out and having all ICS as standard phones might not be that but put your efforts to things that matter and actually improve it. And stop designing for Gingerbread, ffs.

But we had 10 hours of footage. So…

This is The Story of DevXS. A 30 minute film spanning a three day event. There’s students with ideas of how to improve uni life with new ideas and technology. The importance of people who code. Life as a nomadic web developer.

And a proper cool inspirational bit.

It’s not going to appeal to everyone, but it’s my first longform thing like this in ages and I hope you enjoy it.

This wanky introduction leads me to this point. With the opportunity to make such great things, why is so much of the internet shite?

On Thursday, I read a lovely feature in the i about the Commodore 64 and its impact on a generation and discussing the link between creativity and coding. In the newspaper, it’s a nicely presented piece with a colourful background that really draws you in.

So I went to find the online version of the article to share it on Twitter. I have to say, I was impressed. Impressed at how carelessly it seemed dumped online. Squished in to a 380px column between related posts, adverts, boxes for Facebook and anything to distract you away from the interesting content. It scrolls for decades, with the sidebar of the timeline just dumped at the end as text.

If you were designing the pages to put a feature in the magazine or newspaper, and you submitted such a careless text dump with a tiny image, you’d be rubbish at your job. But online, it seems acceptable. Why?

The benefits of online journalism include being able to use so many more tools. Hyperlinks, interactive elements, galleries, videos, audio… but the design side seems forgotten.

Obviously it’s also about using things when appropriate: the 200 word story about the cat in the tree in the local news doesn’t need much in the way of enhancement (it’s as fascinating as it could be already) but when it comes to those special stories and features which have had so much work poured in to them: do something special with the look of them!

Doing it right

I’m constantly finding myself use The Verge as an example of a fantastic news website and how they display long articles is one of the reasons why. The news posts look as you would expect them to look (but without distracting you boxes saying “HEY! People read these 5 year old stories on Facebook! WHY DON’T YOU?!?!”) but with reviews and features they really come in to their own.

Despite claims that long-form writing is dead online (because something always has to be dying) it has such a great chance of life. This feature about Kickstarter, as well as being a brilliantly interesting piece of writing, is presented in a way that makes you want to read it.

The use of subheadings, images, columns, pullquotes,videos: it all comes together to make the article not seem overwhelming and it looks great. Even down to little details. Normally having text flow in columns next to each other as you would in print doesn’t work online due to the need to scroll: but on that story the few instances they do it – it never goes on for longer than the height of the average laptop screen so it causes no problems.

Give people the right tools

The biggest thing holding more people back from doing this is probably the tools they have. Content management systems can be dire at best and don’t play well with creativity. Stick the text in, add the meta-data, publish. Even on WordPress, an incredibly versatile system, doesn’t have that much to play with by default. There’s buttons to make text bold, do a list and a blockquote if you’re pushing it.

If you know the HTML you can do much more of course, but even buttons for headers aren’t part of the post editor. I’d hope that more people would look at this and go “hey, we could do more” – it can’t be that much work for your publisher’s developer to add a button and shortcode for some pretty pullquotes, sideboxes… even small things just to make more of what we’ve got. Equip people with the tools to do more.

It doesn’t have to be huge amounts of require sinking hours in to design and planning to make a better reading experience. The BBC News website is a good example – they’ve not got the level of design detail you’ve got on The Verge, but the use of sideboxes for related links and analysis, pullquotes, subheadings, video and audio embedded at relevant points within the post. They’re not huge things to design with but there’s enough there to make a difference and show that there is one.

And then maybe as the people higher up see the benefits of what happens when people have these tools for the simpler things, then more will be made or made available for use. With the way some sites look you’d think they believe presentation doesn’t matter on the internet, but how much time and resources have they spent building up a look for their publication in print, designing templates for pages, creating a style toolkit of resources to make pages look good?

Although all news organisations will lament the quality of the technology they work with, newspapers aren’t now put together with typewriters and prit-sticking an image on top. So why should things be online?

The annoyance got deeper this week with the BBC cancelling my favourite show on BBC Three (and I think my thoughts on the rest of that channel are pretty well known), Mongrels. They’ve probably got decent reasons, particularly with their attempts to Deliver Quality* First (*terms and conditions may apply), but each week there seems to be another show facing the axe. Shooting Stars, Something for the Weekend… soon there’ll be nothing on the BBC left and although that’d mean they wouldn’t spend any money the usual suspects would find a way of moaning about it.

At times the BBC seems to be like one of the all-time great artists who just happens also be a self-harming alcoholic psychotic. They’ll create something glorious like Stargazing Live but then proceed to cut their own leg off, pick up a newspaper, scream “WHY DOES NOBODY LOVE ME”, down a bottle of whisky and orders another series of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents.

So with them limping along until Hustle gets put down in a few weeks time, I’m left to look elsewhere for TV shows – and a recent commission has caught my eye. Enter The Exclusives, for ITV 2, where six hopefuls will compete for a 12 month job on a Bauer magazine.

There are about one million different potential flaws with this show that it’s hard to know where to start. But maybe it’s best to go in with an open mind. Maybe it won’t be like The Apprentice and just do ridiculous tasks for television entertainment so no-one notices that making sausages is essential to knowing how to run a business, it won’t ridicule the industry of journalism and so portraying it in an interesting light and maybe it won’t act like famous people and red carpet events are the be all and end all of the universe.

But on the other hand it is on ITV 2.

The thing that bugs me is that it’s another example of working being seen as a prize. And the winner is… YOU! Wow! Well done! You’ve earned the right to earn a wage! At least they’re offering a 12-month contract (which is pretty good going these days). Up For Hire attempted to solve record-high youth unemployment by getting national companies to offer a handful of 3-month Christmas temp positions each.

This weekend Iain Duncan Smith told the Sunday Times he thought the graduate who had to work at Poundland without pay to stay on jobseekers’ allowance was a “snooty so-and-so”, saying “…it’s a human right for the taxpayer to know you’re doing something productive instead of wafting around looking for the job you want while someone else pays for it.”

Apparently, wanting money in exchange for work seems to be an unacceptable, snooty high standard these days. It’s not about that stacking shelves is ‘below’ someone, rather that large companies shouldn’t be using unpaid labour in this way.

Every time someone asks me what I’m going to do after university I just say “find a job that pays money”. Unfortunately, that’s already a hard task. And now I’m supposed to think that wanting a wage is an unacceptably high standard.

Maybe I’ll just sit down and watch some telly. Hopefully there’ll be something better on.

So I took the news that Netflix, a service popular in the US, was launching in the UK I decided to tone down my excitement. I waited at least half the day before signing up for the free trial.

Not for the ‘flix’ part of it. Oh no, I’m not particularly a fan of films. Sure, I enjoy them and watch them, but ask if you want to stick on a DVD and I’ll already be half way through a binge of Boston Legal.

It’s for series binges like that which is why I want a service like Netflix to succeed. Say you want to watch a random TV show from a couple of years back. Maybe Moving Wallpaper, a funny series on ITV a few years back. My options now are… DVD? What if I don’t want to own it? In many cases, things are available on iTunes, although as a Windows user I consider that software as being the devil’s work.

There have got to be hundreds of TV series which people aren’t buying on DVDs. Maybe the repeat fees on Sky channel 742 are still coming in, but they’re not great. I’m sure the companies have all sorts of internal reasoning for not just licensing out archives more, but as a consumer, it makes no sense. There’s a chance for those shows to still make some money.

Think of it like the music industry. Sure, there was radio and physical media. And then MP3s. But subscription services, videos on YouTube, Spotify… make it easy, less people will pirate, more money can be made.

Channel 4 have caught this idea well with a long list of series available on 4OD. Sell some ad spots round them, it’s not cannibalising the Father Ted repeats on More4 but making content people want to watch more available. Oh, and they’ve put their content on SeeSaw (RIP), YouTube…

Which leads me to Netflix. It’s got a great starting selection of shows, some American and British and the streaming is working pretty good. I’ve already enjoyed watching The Thick of It, but it pales in size to the (more established) US service. For a service to really take off, it will need more on there to watch – but will companies be willing to license more of their shows until they know there’s enough customers to be making much money from it?

Hopefully after the success of Netflix and the instant streaming in the US the precedent can be proven, and we’ll see regular updates – and my thirst to watch random programmes can be properly served.