virtualeconomics

Gatwick Hilton pages: what I've been working on

For anyone who's curious what I've been up to since I joined Holiday Extras as Editor about four months ago, see left and click on the link for the new Gatwick Hilton pages.

We've been working to roll out new content on the site - first by going out and actually collecting that content, visiting hotels and car parks and photographing and writing up our experiencs. Second by redesigning the pages that content sits on so it's not just easy for the Google robot to read but engaging for real live humans too.

Four months and one page sounds like a pretty slender return on Holiday Extras' investment, but in fact we've got another 20-30 hotels all visited, photographed and written up ready to go live too.

Photographs by me, words by me (edited by my senior copywriter Sarah), page design by Oak and technical implementation mainly by our SEO team. Plenty more to do and we're going to be redesigning the whole thing again almost immediately but just for the moment...that's what I've been up to. Let me know how you'd make it better.

Please sponsor me

(Off topic, of course). In a couple of weeks my father and I will be walking the 18 miles of the Timble Trail in aid of Wheatfield's Hospice, a palliative care unit in Yorkshire. If you've ever found my blog useful or informative, here's the chance you've been looking for to do something nice for me and punt me a few quid in sponsorship. Also, if you've read this far and don't yet know that Virgin Money now offers a non-profit charitable giving website that you should use for your own fundraising (instead of Justgiving, which is a for-profit and skims some off the top), there's some more free advice about online media. Just so it's not all off-topic. 

A new role at Holidayextras

I'm very pleased to say that in a couple of months I'll be taking up a new position as Editor-in-Chief at Holidayextras.co.uk.

As well as looking after existing PR and SEO teams - something Holidayextras already does brilliantly, so it's a good place for me to learn more about that side of the content business - I'll be recruiting, training and managing new teams of freelance writers to cover the UK's major airports. (If you're interested in talking to me about that opportunity or know someone who would be, therefore, do get in touch - contact details are at the top of the page. I'm particularly keen to hear from writers I've worked with before, since you've already been through a lot of the relevant training. Writers who know their airports also eagerly sought.)

I left localpeople last November planning to take a year or so off to play with my twins. The Holidayextras opportunity was sufficiently interesting to drag me away from that break early. They're already doing a great job of exploiting a lucrative niche in one of the UK's largest online markets. The company consistently wins prizes for being not just a good place to work but one of the top 100 companies in the country. Most of all it's an opportunity to work with some excellent people do something I enjoy - building up new teams of writers and making content a measurably valuable part of the business rather than a cost centre.

I start on Monday July 18th, just six short days after the (very) long awaited latest volume of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire comes out, so I already know how I'll be spending the last few days of my year off - reading very quickly. I've got lots to look forward to in July.

Reading age of Journalism.co.uk's top five journalism blogs

John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk was kind enough to include virtualeconomics.co.uk amongst his picks for top five journalism blogs of 2010 (thanks John!), so I've run another Google reading age filter over all thirteen of the blogs listed (three people got a pick, two of the blogs were picked twice) with the results you see to the left. I'm afraid both Wannabe Hacks and After Deadline return data anomalies. 

Admin: Disqus comments

I'm currently trying to install Disqus comments. "Trying" not because I have any complaint with their commenting system (it works just fine, and their tech support is conspicuously excellent) but because importing all of your old comments has yet to work to my satisfaction. So old comments are currently missing - if you're wondering where yours has gone, I haven't summarily deleted it. In positive news, Disqus includes Backtype's superb "reactions" feature, which pulls in tweets etc that link back to posts, which - since 20% of my traffic comes from Twitter and Facebook now - is at least as important to see as comments on the page.

Follow us on...

There's a couple of new pages regular readers might like to take a look at - a dedicated posts-only Twitterfeed (ideal if you want to just see blog posts on Twitter not every damned thing that pops into my head) and a Facebook page. The FB page is where I'm currently running the poll to see whether The Times is still considered the UK's paper of record now its website sits inaccessibly behind a paywall - if you haven't already, you can read the post here (or Roy Greenslade's take in the Guardian here) and vote here.

How easy is it to build a custom URL shortener?

Almost every link you see in Twitter is necessarilly shortened. When I use a desktop client like Hootsuite I get ow.ly links; when I retweet out of Typepad and it defaults to bit.ly; when writing in Twitter I manually run a link through qurl.com or one of the other shorteners. But increasingly I see tech blogs and mainstream media sites using their own branded shorteners - Techcrunch uses tcrn.ch, Businessinsider uses read.bi,  NYU's Jay Rosen has a branded shortener at jr.ly. So I wondered how difficult and expensive it would be to do the same, without any real programming knowledge.

The answer in both cases is "not very". It's about twenty minutes work spread over a few days, and it costs less than $100. Here, by way of example, is a custom shortened URL for my last post http://virt.ec/ugs.

To build it took two things. One, finding and buying a suitable, short URL (in this case virt.ec, an Ecuadorian TLD)  that I found via 101domains.com. URL costs vary but a free one that fits your brand should still be fairly easy to find for a few dollars.

Two, pointing it at a white-label URL shortener. I used Tinyarro.ws, which cost me $49 for the year and has excellent, rapid support and Just Works. There's instructions on how to turn your URL into a shortener here.

That's it. I'm not a programmer. Anyone can do it.

Am I in favour of markets?

Ross Parker asks whether I am in favour of markets, a question prompted by my call for regulation of the ISPs to stop them imposing a two-speed Internet. My response is in the comments at Ross's blog, or you can read it below. 

Am I in favour of markets? I am in favour of freedom of choice. That freedom is very often best expressed and protected by a free market, so I am very often in favour of free markets. Where market freedoms can only be secured, or market failures only avoided, by regulation I am in favour of regulation. The market is a means not an end.

The Internet is a market – a market for websites, content, ideas. As such it is currently the most important market in the world – so vastly more important than the market for selling connections that if it’s necessary to regulate the latter so as to guarantee the freedom of the former I am in favour of that regulation.

And I think in this instance that regulation is necessary. For the Internet to function effectively as a market for ideas, its users must be free to choose. This isn’t like crossing the street to shop at WalMart because Trader Vic’s only stocks one brand of cola or switching from Fox News to Channel 4 on the remote. A household has one ISP for Internet access and changing it has such significant friction costs no-one can realistically vote with their feet every time their ISP decides the BBC hasn’t paid enough so iPlayer isn’t going to work. More to the point, new ideas that have yet to come up with a cash model simply wouldn’t be able to pay so the next Google would never be able to compete with the current one (this is not a new idea – Cory Doctorow keeps making this point better than I can).

So yes, I am in favour of markets, as a means to an end, and I am in favour of them working properly. Currently this one can only work if it is regulated. Not the first time that’s happened, won’t be the last.

Update: Adam Gurri points me to an excellent treatment of this subject by Eli Dourado, which I recommend to everyone. 

Virtualeconomics.co.uk

I've been trying for an embarrassingly long time to map my blog to its own domain, Virtualeconomics.co.uk. I've learnt a little about CNAMEs in the process, and a lot about the forbearance of  customer support at GoDaddy, and since I keep this blog to learn things I guess I should therefore count it a success. Anyway, this blog now site at Virtualeconomics.co.uk, and all the old URLs will still work, and there we are. 

Moving on from localpeople

Today was effectively my last day as Head of Publishing at localpeople. As I told my team yesterday, having taken redundancy my plan for the foreseeable future is to have a lovely long rest (maybe a year or two, not joking) and spend as much of my time as possible playing with my lovely new twins (four months old this Saturday), barring anyone offering me the opportunity to do something so unexpectedly fascinating or well-paid that I can't resist.

Localpeople's been a great place to work, and I've had a lot of fun being part of the team that took it from a piece of market research and a strategy presentation in the DMGT boardroom to a network of 123 local websites. As I pondered to someone the other day, my best guess is that no-one, with the possible exception of Arianna Huffington, has enjoyed the opportunity to hire so many new journalists in the last eighteen months, and I've loved the job of finding towns in which to launch new websites, hiring and training Community Publishers for those sites and helping drive forward a genuinely exciting new venture at the intersection of journalism and social media. It's been a fantastic couple of years, a privilege to work with a great team and I wish localpeople all the best taking the business to new heights in 2011 and beyond.

Update: here's more on my move from Journalism.co.uk