The Wardman Wire

Matt is an internet consultant, commentator, freelance writer and Project Manager based in the UK. He is available for hire. Matt edits the Wardman Wire, and writes at Poligeeks, Total Politics, and occasionally in several other places.

For months and years we have seen a long and meaningless debate about which national newspaper website had the biggest “unique users pen1s” when in fact the competing organs have been the same size to within a tiny fraction, and it would have been more practical to argue about who had the smallest brain and the most desperate need to generate copy.

We now have - in the ABCe traffic figures for October - a difference which is worth noting among the national newspaper websites.

The Guardian is ahead by slightly over 10%.

This is the first of two articles about web audiences for national newspaper websites - I’ll comment on the quality of audiences later today.

The BBC Trust has rejected a proposal to spend £68m launching a local web-video service in 60 Cities across the country.

Good. This was a step too far, especially as Local News media is better placed to closely engage with with local people and has started using online video creatively in some places.

Click through on the title for all the papers.

Front Page Images here and on the Front Page are Courtesy of Sky News.

“Unfortunately the 2 groups with most airtime at the moment are Christian Voice (enough said) and the National Secular Society (who want everyone to think that all Christians are like Christian Voice).”

David Keen

Since I started writing the Wardman Wire, I’ve used series of articles to give extended coverage and analysis.

In the summer I installed a new Wordpress Plugin called “Organise Series“. More recently I had to take it down due to a new version of Wordpress. I’ve been able to reinstall it now, so series of posts are back. The plugin displays a list of related posts that cut across categories and tags in the body of a single post (example ).

It also allows the display of the whole series as an archive.

I’ve got some debris to clear out (articles that appear in series where they shouldn’t), and there are a few design issues (e.g., what happens to images that get moved), but it means that many hundreds of crosslinks between related articles are back.

I have covered the rundown of the bookshop chain that used to be known as SPCK over several months.

The SSG News Blog is carrying a story of some leaked correspondence from the time when the management of the bookshop at Durham Cathedral was transferred from the Society of Saint Stephen the Great to the newly created company “Durham Cathedral Shop Management Limited”. I reproduce the relevant part of the article.