Good to know that despite defeat in the election, the losing side is able to maintain a sense of goodwill and magnamity to the victors.

Ooh. Cool Flash app of the week - 10×10 (via New Links) scours various RSS feeds for news, then ranks keywords according to how commonly they appear. Each word has a corresponding picture, providing a graphical mosaic of the news currently dominating the world’s view. Not perfect - some pictures are over-repeated, perhaps if they used more sources that would clear up - but still quite funky to use.

(If it looks familiar in some way, it’s because it’s done by the same folks who made Wordcount)

Just been listening to Andy Kershaw’s tribute show to John Peel (playlist here) - well worth listening to. Not just for the music but for the short clips of the man himself talking - particularly notable is one of a young John Ravenscroft doing an ad for one of the American stations he DJ’ed on before coming back to Britain - the same voice, but weedier: not yet the authority that he would later become.

I missed the BBC2 tribute that was on last night - damn.

I take it back about the Independent’s new website being poor. It is actually shockingly bad.

Take the news home page. Each link to a news story, instead of being a proper hyperlink in the <a href="..."> mould (like, you know, what you learnt in day 1 of webdesign class?), uses JavaScript with an <a href="#" onclick="...">. This is not very good practice when you’re using it to just launching popup windows, but when you’re launching links that are opened in the same window, it’s baffling. People with non-JS browsers can’t use it, you can’t open multiple pages in multiple tabs/windows, and it makes your site unsearchable by search engines (fatal in an era when Googlejuice is everything).

Furthermore, clicking on a link seems to load a redirect page first, then the page you actually loaded comes up. In IE at least, this badly breaks the back button - clicking back just sends you to the redirect page, which then sends you forward.

Both of these mistakes are elementary ones that bad websites made years ago, and since then the standards and usability movements had made good inroads into solving them (and arguing why we shouldn’t make these problems in the first place) - the Independent ought to have hired people with some knowledge of this, rather than someone who’s just flicked through JavaScript for Dummies…

Update: I delved a little deeper to try and understand why they did this - see this comment.

Boing Boing reports with great enthusiasm on a Public Service Publisher (PSP), modelled on the BBC, but for digital content (online and for digital TV).

As it stands, I am not convinced that this is such a good idea. The main question is - how will it be funded? Broadcasting is funded by TV licences - the funding is ring-fenced and directly linked to the medium itself - only those with a TV finance the broadcasting. It would be impossible to levy any sort of similar internet or web browser tax to fund the PSP, so the funding would have to come directly from central funds - this then raises all sorts of hairy questions on long-term prospects (what if a future government needs to save a few million quid?) and on any editorial independence.

A single public service site would also overshadow the plurality and diversity of sites that provide public service (the BBC is not the only one out there). And the idea of being merely a ‘publisher’ may constrict them to simple content delivery, rather than more sophisticated tools and applications (TheyWorkForYou, linked up to a digital TV interface so you could use the red button to check up on the facts while watching the news or BBC Parliament, say, would be cool).

But, ‘public service publishing’ as an idea is nice. It needs to be bashed around a bit, though. A more autonomous organisation, with guarantees and a Royal Charter of its own, and maybe a backseat role - rather than there being a single PSP brand that swallows upall before it, PSP just acts as an enabler for individual publishers to make themselves known to the world.

Still thinking this over, thoughts welcome.

OK, I’m as sick as it as you are, but then I saw this interesting map (via MeFi) of the US election county-by-county, coloured in a continual manner rather than just red or blue. Nicely illustrative of the spectrum of political opinion in America - the clustering of Democrat blue on the West Coast, Las Vegas, the Mississippi river etc. offer a better illustration.

I’d love to see a similar representation using the UK - anything like that out there?

The Independent has redesigned its website. Sadly, despite it being labelled a step forward, it’s still table-based (like all other newspaper sites) with no move to XHTML.

Technicalities aside, I don’t like the look of it either. There’s too much white (even for me) and not enough demarcating the links on the right from the main content on the page. They have JavaScript menus. There is a pointless (and slow) ‘resize fonts’ function. And the dual-column format really, really pisses me off - it’s stupid to have a page several screens tall and having to break reading and head back to the top halfway through. Websites are not meant to be carbon copies of newspapers.

Kerry’s conceded, according to the newsflashes. Just as well, he was starting to look foolish by holding onto the hope that Ohio would be his.

And with that, I’m off to be a bit miserable. Normal service will resume in due course.