An enormous amount of input goes into every major Affino version release, and Affino 7 is no exception. Front and centre to all our considerations are our customers’ ongoing requirements and feature requests - Affino almost wholly evolves along collaborative lines between the Comrz Team and every single one of Affino’s users.

It’s frequently a tough job consolidating all the different diverse requirements into a single streamlined system, but this is what we do every day. Pretty much every tiny nuanced functionality has been specified for a particular business scenario and activity. For every major release we endeavour to simplify the user experience, which is not always as simple as it sounds as no two Affino users deploy the system in exactly the same manner.

Every consideration is made to imbue Affino with simplicity, elegance and ease of use. It thus follows that the key technological inspirations convey those same values of clarity of purpose, elegance and simplicity:

London 2012 Olympics Look and Feel

The degree of detail and finish of the many elements of the London Olympics are a key influence in the look of the new interface. In particular, we took inspiration from the dynamic keyline pictograms - which elegantly convey movement and modernity. Affino’s Key Navigation Icons are largely inspired by those pictograms - harnessing the same values of forward movement and dynamism

Amazon

Still the benchmark for online retail, now with a vastly improved elegant interface - Amazon continues to inspire with its ever increasing depth and breadth and yet singularity of purpose

Apple

Apple still remains the benchmark for elegant product and interface design, and supreme ease of use. It’s focus on learnability remains a significant design influence in how we consider Affino’s daily usability and overall customer experience

BBC

Despite its detractors, the BBC is a significant pioneer online - with its iPlayer representing the first and the best of the Internet TV Players, and the relatively recent BBC.co.uk update being the first significant move towards tablet-style navigation for the main website interface

Facebook

The world’s most popular people-connector maintains its position for a reason. Despite lacklustre performance on the stock exchange,

Gymnastics Venue - North Greenwich Arena (The O2) (adapted by Populous)

Much has been written about the exterior design of the new London 2012 Olympic Venues, Stadium and Olympic Park. There has been far less coverage of the actual interior designs of the various venues - the playing surfaces, perimeter wraps, boundary decorations and signage.

I’m fortunate to live right next door to one of the minor outdoor venues - Hyde Park, home to the Triathlon and 10K Marathon Swim events, as well as the location of the BT London Live venue. I do daily Nordic Walks around the perimeter, and the contrasting 2-tone signage looks wonderful all around the park. Just up the road from me is Paddington Station which has London 2012 welcoming / information booths and bunting, and is peppered with the resplendently uniformed London 2012 Ambassadors,

For some, the colour combinations are a little garish, but watching live via the BBC, they seem to give these spectacles added vibrancy. Where with Wimbledon it’s frequently difficult to see where the ball has landed on or outside the court - the wonderfully contrasted playing surfaces featured in this blog make is super clear this time around. I expect the London 2012 games to have a significant impact on the future indoor / floor / surface design of new sports halls and sporting venues around the world.

No one really likes the Wolff Olins designed ’2012’ logo, which is why the ’London 2012’ typography is the more commonly used brand marker - the typography was designed by Wolff Olins too, as well as the branding guidelines - for the diagonal separating lines, two-tone colour schemes etc. With the various architect firms - Populous, Zaha Hadid, Thomas Heatherwick, Wilkinson Eyre etc.

For the Gymnastics we have 4 island podiums mixing pink, red, pale yellow and grape, quite fitting for the Women’s Gymnastics.

I’m an avid follower of the world’s leading music festivals - specifically how they are broadcast and ’packaged’ for the digital audience. I’ve kept tabs on the BBC’s and YouTube’s coverage of music festivals over the last few years, and reported back on how each has evolved their offering - benchmark events have been Glastonbury in the UK and Coachella in the US. In this Olympic year, there is no Glastonbury, so we will use BBC 1’s Big Weekend extravaganza - the 2012 Hackney Weekend Music Festival as the UK benchmark.

Where the BBC always excels is in the depth and breadth of its broadcast coverage, and in its archiving. For this year’s Coachella there was really just a smattering of play-back videos from the 3 days of live music, and no full sets. The BBC though has video highlights for pretty much every featured artist, including full sets for the festival headliners.

Watching live though was a different story, as YouTube’s Coachella coverage had better broadcast quality and a much superior interface - with full interaction! For Coachella, fans were able to connect via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and do comments and shout-outs during the performances - on a live update feed - obviously comments are enabled for most content on YouTube. YouTube also cleverly includes the hashtag #coachellalive on all the updates posted - for maximum exposure. Moreover YouTube’s Coachella screen had a really clever rolling ’What’s On’ panel with dynamic thumbnails - which allowed you to mouse-over for live previews of each stage!

The BBC interface did not really makes the most of social media, and it was noway near as easy to organise your viewing schedule. I also noted that for last year’s Carlisle Big Weekend, the BBC was much better at posting up setlists on the artist overviews. Currently the write-ups are mostly sans setlists, which is something we kind of expected after last year!

It’s a tale of two very different approaches - as for live and direct coverage, YouTube’s system was most obviously superior, but in terms of being able to really ’catch’ the music - in terms of ’on demand access’ - then the BBC comes up trumps, as you can view after the fact - most of what you missed, which was not the case for

Last year I blogged about catching the year’s first big music festival courtesy of YouTube - who broadcast live form the 5 stages over the 3 days. I raved about the really clever interface - how they included hashtags into their live updates - and how slickly the whole thing worked, including the uninterrupted streaming broadcast itself.

This year the layout of the interface was even better - with the current and upcoming bands listed in the centre, and the updates off to the right. It was interesting to see the addition of the ’Login with Google+’ option - although I never saw a Google+ originated post - they were about 70% Twitter Updates, with 30% Facebook - I even logged on myself to post updates during the Azealia Banks and Miike Snow sets.

I did not really start watching properly until the Saturday - and thus caught a mix of highlights and full live gigs by the following artists:

• AWOLNation
• Azealia Banks
• The Big Pink
• Buzzcocks
• Childish Gambino
• Datsik
• Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg + Eminem, Fiddy, Warren G, Wiz Khalifa et al.
• Florence & The Machine
• Kaiser Chiefs
• Kasabian
• Miike Snow
• Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
• Radiohead
• Santigold
• SBTRKT
• Swedish House Mafia

I would have loved to have seen, but missed these:

• Amon Tobin
• araabMUZIK
• Borgore
• Dada Life
• DJ Shadow
• Feed Me
• Flying Lotus
• Frank Ocean
• Girl Talk
• Justice
• Kaskade
• M83
• Noisia
• SebastiAn
• The Weeknd

I always compare YouTube’s coverage of this with the BBC’s coverage of its main music festivals. I think the actual live streaming and the social experience is better by YouTube, but overall the BBC still leads - as they provide so much better supporting materials - and actually post up much more of the video highlights - only 76 Videos are listed on YouTube’s Coachella Page - and these are individual tracks, whilst for the BBC there is normally an extended highlights (circa 30 mins.) plus a couple of individual great moments from nearly all the featured performers - a number of the videos on Coachella Live are not even the best moments from those sets.

On my somewhat dodgy Talk Talk connection, I was astounded to get a totally seamless experience over the whole event - did not drop out once - and switching between the 3 live feed options was butter smooth!

As I’ve said before, I&

I’ve been waiting a while now for the arrival of Netflix on these shores, so was it worth the wait?

When I received the initial email invitation, it’s poor quality made me unsure as to whether this was some sort of phishing effort. This was not helped by the very basic Netflix holding page presented to UK users.

In any case, I had been waiting a while for this so I dipped my toes into the 30 day free trial. You have to enter you credit card details during registration, which will likely put off some users, but I triangulated the security certificate to be sure. Once registered, you get presented with a very elegant browsing interface, not a million miles from the one for iTunes films, but much the superior in my opininon - especially how it pops up detail information when you hover over the film / programme image.

I caught up with ’Gone Baby Gone’ - a film I had not got around to watching yet, but had always wanted to see. The whole experience from browsing, to selecting and watching is truly slick, simple and elegant. For those worried about signing up via Facebook - for everything you watch, you get the option to not share to Facebook - so that you can continue to watch trashy TV and movies without exposing your viewing choices to friends and family.

Currently, the only thing that really counts against Neflix at the moment is the rather slim selection of video available. Like many other users, I expected there to be a lot more US TV Series. Also - you don’t get the very latest films or TV - it’s mostly a series or two behind. But great if you want to catch up with films and TV you missed when they were initially releases - a couple or so years ago.

The £5.99 all-inclusive monthly fee is the perfect price point as far as I’m concerned - Netflix just needs to work on signing more studio deals and providing a larger selection.

In terms of overall experience, this is currently my favourite way of watching video online - I’m of course interested to see what Apple, Amazon (LoveFilm), YouTube and the BBC do in response to this.

I wrote a blog not so long ago about the poor state of online video, and how poorly it compared to the more traditional model of Blockbuster - which is unfortunately fast waning. There is no online service yet though which is able to deliver as wide a video libary, as quickly as Blockbuster.

It’s that time of year again when pop pundits do their best to predict who’s going to strike it big next year.

There’s no real suprises on the BBC Shortlist, certainly not in the inclusions, but there may be a question as to why Lana Del Rey has been edged out by Lianne La Havas and Ren Harvieu - I for one certainly think Lana is doing more interesting things vocally and melodically than those two.

I was never that bowled over by Nicki Minaj - sure she’s done some mean raps / flows, but for me she’s not nearly as consistent as say her predecessor Missy Elliott, nor quite as interesting as NME’s favourite newcomer Azealia Banks, who is a little potty-mouthed for sure, but is fresh and dynamic, and somehow more genuine and arresting than Ms Nicki.

One of my favourite albums this year has been Frank Ocean’s ’Nostalgia, Ultra’; in particular the ’Novacane’ track - slick, laidback, mature hip hop, superbly produced - he certainly deserves a high place on this listing.

Skrillex (aka Sonny Moore) has been a very busy boy this year, co-producing a number of records, including nu-metallers Korn’s latest album, as well as numerous remixes and own productions. Skrillex’s ’Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ EP came out last year, but has been on fairly regular rotation for me this year on my iPhone jukebox. I love this kind of Dubstep / Electro House hybrid sound, which some naysayers are unfortunately trying to denigrate by calling it brostep - obviously they don’t like to dance!

I really hope Niki & The Dove (Gustaf Karlöf and Malin Dahlström) win the award this time - they’re like an even catchier ’The Knife’ as if fronted by Kate Bush. This is glorious, quirky pop which does not sacrifice melody to artifice as often happens. Pretty much everything they have released so far is excellent - DJ Ease My Mind, The Fox, Gentle Roar, The Drummer, Mother Protect, Last Night - really great, inventive pop music.

The full BBC Sound of 2012 shortlist is as follows:

A$AP Rocky - rough and ready, urban US grimey hip hop (Not UK grimey!), some great tracks (e.g. Palace) but does not quite rise up to the lofty heights of Azealia Banks or Frank Ocean - who are superior in the rap category

*Azealia Banks - smart, witty, innovative flows with clever changes in tempo

I can totally see what the BBC is trying to achieve with their New Home Page Design, and largely I applaud their efforts, but not necessarily the results. All of us Web Professionals know that there is always a trade-off between functionality, usability and aethetics. With the acceletared rate of tablet uptake, particularly ’iPads’, we are seeing more and more tablet-style navigations as part of generic website design. Gone is the old-fashioned paging of the traditional internet screens, to be replaced by horizontally swiped pages and infinite vertical scrolling - I have a feeling eBooks will soon have infinite vertical scrolling too - even an automated setting which allow the text to trickle up the page at your pace of reading.

The fundamentals in any interface design though remain the same - focusing and guiding the user through the key information display areas / panels - in a co-ordinated order of hierarchy and prominence. And in the area of information architecture and relative prominence of content highlights, the balance is far from right.

The new above the line design is kind of like a Magazine template - mostly with single item feature tiles - and there is too little difference between the many blocks / tiles to focus the user’s eye properly on a set order of tasks. We then have the more typical Web Content Listing Highlights below the line as it were - Most Popular > What’s On > Explore >.

In the process, we have lost a significant part of the former’s information overview - there are actually far fewer items of content displayed on the screen at any one time, and in a harder-to-read format.

Several of the panels I really like on the current one are missing too - History Highlights are gone, as is the iPlayer Highlights scroller, the Music Highlights etc. etc. What we have as a replacement is much less flexible in its structure and offers content up largely in a less hierarchical fashion.

My neat pockets of information have disappeared - to be replaced by swiped masthead overviews of amorphous blocks which seem somewhat randomly arranged - you get a tile here and there corresponding with the ’Music’ topic, but rarely in the same place twice.

It’s pretty for sure, and zippy to use, but in terms of information retrieval / transparency / discoverability and reproducability it all leaves you feeling

Once again I enjoyed the festival courtesy of the BBC, in my home lounge - and entirely via the Internet. I still feel like I would want to check it out ’on location’ one of these years - as long as I had guarantees of good weather, and could attend ’Kate Moss’ style - i.e. being flown to and from luxury 5 star hotel at the start and end of every day.

Following my minor critique of the Big Weekend website, BBC are making ever more concessions towards the social Internet, and although those social elements still aren’t quite as slick as YouTube’s Coachella coverage, they’re not too far away now, and the BBC Video archives offer so much more!

With my newly acquired iPad, it was interesting to see that the only coverage available for the iPad was via the BBC’s excellent iPlayer App. The main BBC Glastonbury website is still largely flash, and the Mobile site is not really up to par with the latest advances in technology. The tipping point will be when the main Glastonbury site is done in HTML5.

Anyway, as for the 3 day festival - I quite enjoyed Friday Night headliners U2, although there were no real surprises here, same goes for Saturday’s Coldplay who featured some great new material, but did not surprise really either. Sunday’s headliner Beyoncé was magnificent though and in fine voice and full fitness dance prowess. Her set opened with a bang, and those who thought she might have front-loaded it with ’Crazy In Love’, ’Single Ladies’ and ’Nasty Girl’, were in for a surprise as her set continued to deliver the goods throughout. She included all of the Destiny’s Child hits, as well as excellent cover versions of Prince’s ’The Beautiful Ones’, Alanis Morisette’s ’You Oughta Know’, Kings of Leon’s ’Sex on Fire’ amd Etta James’s ’At Last’ there were also some lovely little mashup touches including a segment of Mark the 45 King and The Eurythmics’ ’Sweet Dreams’. Shame on all the detractors who tried to belittle Beyoncé’s performance. Beyoncé and her all-female all-in-white band performed magnificently throughout.

Another magnificent female performance came courtesty of Janelle Monáe, who had little communication with the crowd, but managed a

As I often do, I caught the odd snippet of live coverage of the first of the big summer festivals - BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, this time from Carlisle. I made sure I ’tuned-in’ online for the main headline act - Gaga, and I was not disappointed as she played most of her hits, plus a smattering of new material, some jazzy numbers, a couple of ballads and a latin track - Lady Gaga entered in heavily pregnant guise inside a gold coffin, nice touches included dedication of ’Orange Colored Sky’ to Will and Kate; highlight was current personal favourite Gaga track ’Judas’ right at the end.

Other highlights included a commanding performance by Tinie Tempah and a masterclass in proper dance music programming and sequencing from those 3 funky Swedes - Axwell, Sebastian and Steve (SHM) whose clever edits and mashups were included in the following tracks:

01. Swedish House Mafia vs. Tinie Tempah - Miami 2 Ibiza (Swedish House Mafia Intro Edit)
02. Ting Tings - Hands (Edit)
03. Style of Eye - We Are Boys
04. Arty - Around The World
05. Swedish House Mafia - One w/ Rune RK - Calabria
06. 2000 And One - Spanish Fly (Butch Remix) w/ Calvin Harris - Flashback w/ Calvin Harris - Awooga
07. Axwell vs. R.E.M - Heart Is My Religeon (Blake Jarell Mash-Up)
08. Pendulum - The Island (AN21, Max Vangeli & Steve Angello Remix)
09. Steve Angello pres. Who’s Who - Yeah
10. Hard Rock Sofa & St. Brothers - Blow Up (Thomas Gold vs. Axwell Remix) w/ Adele - Rolling In The Deep (Acapella)
11. Axwell - Nothing But Love (Remode)
12. Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Eric Prydz Remix)
13. Steve Angello & Alex Metric - Open Your Eyes (Tim Mason Festival Dub) w/ Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Acapella)
14. Alesso - Dynamite w/ Daft Punk - Around The World (Acapella) w/ Sebastian Ingrosso - Kidsos
15. Swedish House Mafia feat. John Martin - Save The World [John Martin Live]

This really was one of the best club sets I have heard in a long time, quite brilliant from start to finish.

As far at the live coverage goes, BBC are still best with providing in-depth content, in and around the live performances with off-stage antics, interviews and accoustic performances all featured - as well as archived videos from most of the artists featured.

YouTube’s coverage of Coachella, had a couple of great innvovations which would have been nice to have seen on the BBC

As is often the case, I checked out the various offerings of live coverage online. Key resources for me on this occasion were the BBC , ITV , YouTube and CNN . At first the BBC coverage seemed the best, yet just when the wedding dress was about to be revealed, the BBC live stream crashed out.

I had been checking on YouTube and CNN also, and these suffered the occasional stutter, in fact YouTube was the most stuttery - even though it was re-streaming the main BBC broadcast. Suprisingly leaving ITV as the only one that managed a continuous quality broadcast.

The sun came out at just the right time, and the pomp and circumstance of the occasion have been magnificent. Even though a sort of republican at heart, I am still charmed by the precision and spectacle of such a ceremony. London and Britain can both be proud.

With so many natural disasters happening already this year, it’s nice to have a joyful celebratory event for the world to share. So far the organisation has been immaculate, and so suprising that the weather has been well behaved, as befits the occasion.

I almost avoided this event this year, but am glad I witnessed it, it’s really quite wonderful for everyone to have something positive to talk about at last.

I always thought the BBC were the masters of live music coverage, and in many ways they still are - in terms of all the behind the scenes footage, biographies, interviews, escapades and impromptu live accoustic sets. For this year though, YouTube has done a sterling job in letting non-attendees witness the live spectacle of Coachella , America’s Glastonbury of sorts, at least a little brother to Glastonbury in most ways.

I’m not going to split hairs on the lineup, I have watched a number of bands now, and I’m really impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the YouTube Coachella Festival interface, and the cleverness of the Twitter and Facebook connects. For Twitter , YouTube are automatically embedding the "#CoachellaLive’ hash tag for superb Twitter trending performance. Via integration with Twitter and Facebook they allow Fans to easily post ’Shout Outs’, at the same time promoting the festival and YouTube itself.

The interface has a simple Programme Guide and What’s on Now / Coming Up listing - everything you really need for live music coverage. BBC goes a little further with Artist Biographies, Videos and backgrounds - linking into the enormous archives that make up the complete BBC experience. I don’t expect YouTube do to this, but it would be nice to have some king of tag-indexed library of officially related videos for each of the featured artists, and a means to access the elements of the live stream individually post gig also.

I can really see YouTube becoming a forerunner in this, and can foresee a two-stream concert ticketing system where a lower priced tariff allows you to experience the concert from the comfort of your home sofa - allowing to to neatly forego the pleasures of stinky chemical toilets, endless queues and the potential of rain and mud.

With the rapid development of Internet Television services - connecting with a variety of home streaming devices - Apple TV , Google TV etc. I see this as a big potential money earner for YouTube . Mainstream cinemas are already on the bandwagon - providing streamed access to live events - operas, pop concerts and sporting events - giving global access, as well as more convenient access in some ways - to a much larger audience. This is certainly an object lesson in how to do things well. The sound and video - were great for the whole of my viewi... More

Watching live on-site reports and continual coverage on the BBC from the heart of the earthquake zone shows how ’close’ the Internet has made the world. Dozens of countries in the Pacific are still under threat of Tsunami - North and South America, Eastern Continental Asia / South-East Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Hawaii especially.

Japan is one of the best-prepared countries for earthquakes, and even though there is significant damage and destruction, most of the big cities affected are largely totally intact; it is the rural areas around Sendai in the North-East that have been devastated.

With no trains running, Tokyo is a mass of pedestrians - with commuters attempting to walk home. Via a live feed on the BBC , I am watching reports coming in from every country which this disaster touches - which is most of the International community. On-site reports from countries that lie in the line of the extended Tsunami show how many countries are in a state of emergency - with several potential impact areas being evacuated.

We know now that this is the 6th most powerful earthquake worldwide since records began - of a magnitude of 8.9, key details as follows: 8.9 magnitude earthquake struck at 14:46 local time (GMT +9) off North-East coast of Japan Epicentre of earthquake lies just off coast from city of Sendai (80 miles) Earthquake triggered Tsunami with a wavefront of magnitude of 10 metres Rural area around Sendai largely devastated Boats, Cars and House tossed around like toys by advancing waters More than 90 people confirmed dead, several hundred still missing Communications and transport significantly hit Many nuclear powerstations on auto-shutdown Outbreaks of fire, including at oil refinery Tsunami warning for most of Pacific Basin

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is in the process of setting up a Japan Earthquake Crisis Centre - will add more info when it arrives.

Resources: Japan Earthquake Person Finder Pacific Tsunami Warning Center Google Japan Earthquake Map ShelterBox Japan Relief Effort Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK World) More

The ’J’s have it in BBC’s Sound of 2011 Shortlist

After a trio of winning female soloists (Adele , Little Boots and Ellie Goulding ), it now looks likeliest that the males will reclaim the ’Sound Of...’ crown for themselves.

The Longlist recently announced is as follows: Anna Calvi Clare Maguire Daley Esben & The Witch Jai Paul * James Blake * Jamie Woon * Jessie J * Mona The Naked & Famous Nero The Vaccines Warpaint Wretch 32 Yuck

(* - My Picks!)

There are some fairly obvious missing artists from the list as far as I’m concerned: Florrie Lana Del Rey Sunday Girl

...All of which I believe will have a significant impact on 2011.

There’s a couple of questionable inclusions here also - on technical terms at least. I actually really like the ’Passion Pit’ meets ’MGMT’ sound of ’The Naked & Famous ’, yet they have been active since 2008, and released their album in September of this year. Morevoer, D&B / Dubstep stalwarts Nero have been active since 2005 and already had a strong influence on 2009 and 2010, I’m not sure they qualify as such as new for 2011.

Anna Calvi is very much in the ’Florence and the Machine’ mold - with a hint of ’Bat for Lashes’ - impassioned delivery, but nothing particularly new. Clare Maguire is somewhere along the lines of ’Alison Moyet’. Daley’s style is a modern extrapolation of ’Stevie Wonder’. Esben & the Witch also have an air of ’Florence’  and ’Bat for Lashes’ about them, but with a more grungy backing. The more traditional indie of Mona , The Vaccines and Warpaint does nothing for me really. Wretch 32 is a little too derivative of the current bassline sound of ’Wiley’, ’Tinchy Stryder’ and ’Tinie Tempah’, and the shoegaze sounds of ’Yuck ’ are also nothing new, nor particularly dynamically interesting.

The most interesting female for me is soulful pop chameleon ’Jessie J ’ (Jessica Cornish) who’s an exceptionally versatile modern popstar singer / songwriter in the ’Lady Gaga’ mold - she has much more in her armoury than the bold / brash ’Do it like a Dude’. For me however, it is the three ’J’ males which are the most interesting. Populist pop-dubste... More

Markus was not happy with how our News pages looked on Comrz, and I was set the task to devise a new presentation template to showcase the very best of news delivery currently available on the web. I spent several days trawling all the major news sites, and was particularly impressed with several of these, largely - BBC , CNN and The Guardian . The idea was to produce the Ultimate Topical News Resource - where you could easily seek out, list and review key news stories by key criteria.

The make-up of the main listing template is as follows: RSS and Content Subscription appear with Section Header, as well as at base Articles can be listed out by time range - Latest | Most Viewed | Most Liked | Most Commented | Most Shared You can click through to the Public Profile of the Author Click on the Date to list out all articles within that Section published on the same date Click to add / view Comments Number of Views - also clicks through to article Most recent Article is highlighted with Larger Image and Teaser Text Article Topics are only revealed on mouse-over Facebook ’Like’ is revealed on mouse-over Share icons / function is revaled on mouse-over The following articles are listed in summary format - mouse-over reveals Topics, Like and Share

We may still have a couple more tweaks to do, but so far it’s working pretty well. The ’Detail’ presentation utilises the ’Info Box’ for ’Article Highlights’, we also list Topics in a left hand column, and we include a new ’Quotation’ field.

All the new icons are enabled via additional fields / settings on the Design Style. Some of these icons / elments may find their way onto other existing templates in the fairly near future ...

Some of you may have noticed that several parts of the BBC website were down for several hours last night. I don’t know if this had anything to to with 10:10:10 - but it any case it brings to light the continuous fragility of the Internet and web hosting in general.

It is inevitable that everything that is UP must at some time come DOWN, it’s not so much about the frequency of how often this happens, but much rather about how well the Internet stays up and how much we depend on the Internet in daily life now - the actual incredible power and resiliance of the Internet as a whole.

We know from personal experience that with ongoing software development and updates and DOS attacks, viruses and worms - every day’s worth of hosting is a sequence of mini battles to hold off the onslaught that might some day momentarily disable your site. For our high performance Affino hosting, we have a vertiable quadruple fortress of hosting defences - using all manner of clever systems and applications to keep those that might do damage at bay.

Almost regardless of the provisions you have in place you will always encounter something new and somewhat unexpeted - when this happens it’s a case of how quickly you can deal with the problem and restore normal service again. All the big sites suffer from the occasional downtime - whether Apple or Twitter , Amazon or Facebook , or Google .

It’s a little bit like an electricity blackout in some ways - regardless of who’s site goes down, I am always enormously relieved to see it back up again - just as I was when the BBC site magically reappeard once more without its 500 Error screen. Weekends always mean that a reduced skeleton staff is on duty, and because of this - if something does go wrong it often takes longer to solve the problem than on a weekday. Beyond all the built-in hardware and software defences, you also have the posibility of load-balacing across several servers, or even clustering several different server farms for rapid switchover when things go badly wrong.

It’s not so long that the Glastonbury site went down under the clamour of music fans trying to get tickets for next year’s show. Website hosting is really very much like building flood defenses - you put in place a provision for what you believe will be the maximum... More

Back in Victorian times you would promenade daily, year-round down Park Lane and along Pall Mall until the summer ’Season ’ hit, when you could take your showboating to a more extended range of venues.

Now in modern times, ’The Season ’ as such is a more extended range of sporting, cultural, and most significantly - musical events. Back in the early days, you would need a tent, sleeping bag and boots, and a digestive system capable of enduring dodgy festival foods and long queues to portaloos. Nowadays, thanks to the BBC , you can catch much of the music festivals online - some acts in full, some in highlights fashion.

Watching music festivals online, also means you don’t have to gamble with choices like choosing between watching Eminem or Prodigy at the recent ’T in the Park ’ festival.

If you have ever been to a festival, you will know that the audience experience of a live act can be very variable and depends on a huge degree on the vantage point you find yourself in. Many a times in my past I have found myself pushed to the fringes or having some obstacle in my path which affects the visual or auditory quality of the experience.

Again - no such problem online - the sound quality is very respectable, and the viewpoint of the performing artist is always going to be better than what you see from row 77 in Glastonbury. There has been a recent trend in cinemas to host live broadcasts from a variety of cultural events, particularly Opera. Considering the prices you pay at the Opera House, and the viewpoint / accoustics etc, the Cinema option is preferable or at least more practical - to many opera fans.

The added benefit of viewing online is all the related content and references, so you can quickly cross-reference the setlist with album tracklisting to pick out a favourite tune.

As with the BBC coverage of the World Cup , I am always impressed with how the BBC covers a live event. For all the festival sites out there, perhaps the BBC is missing the live interactive location map, but for pretty much everything else the festival experience is better on the BBC .

So far this year, I have followed:

Radio 1’s Big Weekend
Glastonbury
T in the Park

And we have several more up-and-coming, including:
BBC Proms
Reading & Leads

Thi... More

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am a huge fan of the BBC family of websites generally, and in the past have often referenced parts of the BBC Site in terms of best practice implementation for certain functionality and interfaces.

However! In my opinion, the new design of the BBC News pages takes them back significantly in terms of best practice usability. The BBC has adopted a ’Blog’ style format, dispensing with the contextual left-hand Main Menu, and instead rendering a more simplified version of this at the top of the page.

Moreover, Related Content used to be located in the right-hand column, but is now placed at the very bottom of the article. The sole purpose of the right hand column now is for general Content Highlights, even this is a little backward, as the numbering of the Most Popular articles comes to the right of the titles.

I would sincerely love to see the Usability Testing Results on this new layout, as any idea of cross-contextual browsing is completely lost in the new format. In our many years of experience, the best format for informatic sites is 3 columns - with pertinent references aligning up alongside the main article - to the right and and left. In removing the contextual basis of the page location with the simplified Menu, it is more difficult to contextually navigate to related content. The Main Menu itself could be improved with the addition of additional drop-downs. As for the loss of the Related Items from the right hand panel, I cannot see why this has been done - humans always reference best in the same plane of view - this is why you have margin notes. Moving everything to the base of the page divorces the primary content from its contextual relativity, and reduces browsing to linear terms, rather than the tangential / parallel means we have grown accustomed to.

The new layout is definitely more elegant, and the BBC have updated the various Article Tools (share etc.) to a nicer format, but for me, the whole usability has gone back enormously.

What do you think?

As a football fan, my main online resource for everything football has always been ESPN’s Soccernet Website , then the BBC , then Sky - in that order. The issue with the makeup of the Premiership is that none of the live games are available any more on ’terrestrial’ television - and Sky isn’t a particularly cost-effective option for following your team (as only some of the games are covered live); so mostly I catch up watching Internet highlights and BBC’s Match of the Day .

With the World Cup, the television coverage is completely different. The majority of the games are televised live on ITV , with the remainder broadcast on the BBC . As I am actively working for most of the time that the games are on, my main points of access are the ITV Live Website and iPhone App, as well as the BBC iPlayer Live webcasts (all playing in background of course).

As the principal broadcaster for this World Cup, ITV has really pushed the boat out when creating their World Cub mini-site. A number of Live Stats panels give you regular, in-context updates - at least they are supposed to! The ITV Live site is obviously superior to the BBC one, although its Live Steaming service is much much worse. Watching ITV Live means frequent loss of broadcast, with numerous glitches on video feed, audio and stats display. The BBC ’s effort is a more minimalist affair, but the quality of broadcast service is much higher; so that even though ITV has the nicer viewing environment, the experience ends up much inferior to the BBC . I also don’t understand why the BBC could not implement a nice contrasting black background for their World Cup Live framework. You may have read in other articles on this site, how video is best supported by a black ’cinema-like’ framework.

So the ITV Live Website is a good effort, but not really good enough overall. Also, Soccernet offers much better statistical updates and presents more information in a much more interactive and appealing manner. US sports coverage has always been about feeding through as many different statistics as possible at any given point in time, and Soccernet really excels at this - I love summarised statistical data.

Of course there is a whole slew of Apple iPhone Apps for the World Cup - an even mix between free and paid-for ones. Nearly every newspaper has its own World Cup App, and most are being c... More

The Future of Music Retail - Introduction

2 Significant music-related things happened for me in 2009. Firstly, I signed up for the Premium version of streaming service - Spotify ; secondly, I finally succumbed to Apple and bought into the iPhone smartphone. I have several discarded MP3 players and iPods which have somewhat fallen into disuse as I found it a burden to carry around so many devices. The fact that the iPhone comes with iTunes / iPod functionality means that I now always have a subset of my music collection with me (circa 300 albums). However! Neither Spotify or iTunes combined come anywhere close to meeting my broad musical tastes - they just don’t quite cover the range. Moreover, I am still quite captivated by solid formats; I like the ownership of something tangible, the smell of freshly printed vinyl sleeves, the artwork and cover notes. So I end up syncing playlists on Spotify for offline use, buying some music from iTunes , but still largely buying CDs for albums and Vinyl 12"s for singles. In the meantime, the Internet has evolved a vast array of Music-related services, as we will see:

Solid Format Online Music Retail

If you are buying traditional music formats online, you are most likely buying from either Amazon or Play.com  or HMV  or even Tower Records . All have excellent retail catalogue functionality, with Amazon setting the standard for enhanced features, related recommendations and notifications. The holy grail for Online Retail really is automated cross-selling - that is to say - encouraging discovery of like artists and music by way of recommendations and notifications. Most sites now feature ’Customers who bought / liked this also bought / liked this ...’. You are encouraged to set and refine your preferences, with which the site builds a profile to send you notifications for related offers. I use a number of dance specialists sites, including Juno , Phonica , Boomkat , HTFR , Decks.de and HHV.de ; niche music sites Rough Trade , Discovery Records , Piccadilly Records , Music Non Stop and Norman Records ; moreover, I also use specialist music marketplaces (think of them as dedicated eBay-like retail platforms) - Discogs and GEMM . These are my key resources for buying music, and because of my broad tastes, I often end up using upwards of 20 different retail... More