I loved her tweets. They were innocent, describing the minutiae of life in a care home. And there was never an expectation of anything other than that. Ivy had the perspective of someone whose glass was full to the brim. Her tweets were a beautiful and welcome injection into a stream from which I was otherwise looking for insight and interesting links. From anyone else, I would probably have considered the tweets too trivial to bother with and unfollowed without a second thought. But @ivybean was not someone who could be unfollowed. That would have been sacrilege.

Below are some of the tweets that made her a joy to follow.

im having ham salad for tea

hello everybody hope you are all ok

sorry its only a short tweet and not done a lot over last few weeks but the wether is so nice its good to sit out

had a visit from our sandra yesterday she brought some parkin which we had with our cuppa it was very nice pat had the biggest piece

hello everybody sorry not been in touch but been having a few problems with laptops and internet. hope everybody is enjoying the sun

its been really busy in Hillside this week, the lounges have been decorated and we have got new curtains, it looks lovely

Edith has just received her telegram from the queen

time for a cup of tea and biscuit i think

i used the prime ministers private toilet in his study too

We’ll miss you, Ivy Bean.

Earlier this month, BBC News launched its new offering.  While the information architecture of the site didn’t undergo a change, the navigation into that information architecture was turned upside down.  Side menus were moved to the top, while the navigational elements within the body of the homepage were unrecognisable.  And the site sucks on an iPhone where the previous site was easily navigable.  My review of the changes can be found here.

As is often the case with such wholesale changes, people reacted badly.  People don’t like change.  And when it’s something as beloved as the BBC website—an offering that has generated affinity and affection in keeping with its offline brand—the reaction to the change is all the more vociferous.  But usually this reaction calms down as people get used to, nay sometimes begin to prefer, the new offering.  (As an aside, I loved the previous redesign in March 2008 from the moment I set my eyes on it.)

With this change, there has been no such calming.  Three weeks in, the people who I know and trust still don’t like it.  It’s still confusing and unintuitive, and the BBC has ruled out reverting to the previous incarnation.

To address my frustration at the user experience of the site on the iPhone, I downloaded the newly launched BBC News iPhone app.  And I have to say, it’s lovely—at least in comparison to the disgrace that is the website.  And it also addresses head-on the Adobe issue, its video footage being accessible through the application.

But I’m still annoyed with the website from my laptop.  And I can’t see this going away.  And so for the time being, the Guardian will be the source of a greater proportion of my online news absorption.

Facebook allows you to connect to people you know. It’s quite a personal thing housing pictures, thoughts and details that you likely wouldn’t want to give random people access to. So you’re quite discerning about those you invite to be your “friend” (for want of a better word) and those from whom you accept similar invites.

Twitter on the other hand is less personal. People’s profiles are generally quite vague and while many write about the minutiae of life, thoughts are generally not sufficiently detailed to tie to an individual. Its primary use, certainly among those people I follow, is to disseminate information that other people might find interesting.

This less personal feel that forms the basis of Twitter rather oddly promotes the creation of new friendships in a way that Facebook doesn’t. Facebook attempts to maintain existing friendships in a virtual world, and with its 500 millionth user recently signing up, it’s arguably rather successful in that mission. But the looseness of Twitter allows you to follow people you don’t know, strike up relationships with people you’ve never met and form alliances with those people based around common interests (and quirks).

With Facebook, what was real becomes virtual. With Twitter, what was virtual becomes real.

And this is what I love about Twitter. It extends your friend-base as opposed to enriching your existing friend-base. It’s almost like a social outlet in its own right. I can find people interested in Excel, in social media, in data mapping, in fatherhood, in iPhones, music, numbers and engage with them meaningfully on those very subjects.

On first impressions, I disliked last week’s re-branding.  So I allowed a week before passing comment, to allow it to grow on me.

It hasn’t.  And here’s my review.  The review focuses entirely on the News homepage.

First impressions were drawn to its overt redness.  It’s way redder than its predecessor, the header that houses the three main navigational tools lacking the subtlety of before.  (For reference, the “before” view can be seen in the link to its review above.)  And when news breaks, a further red strapline at the top only goes to accentuate this.  Maybe over time this will become white noise.  But for the time being, it distracts the eye and takes it away from the site’s content.  Embedding the navigation in the header is, however, successful in widening the real estate available for content though.

Now to the typography.  It comes across as amateurish.  The contrast in size between the clickable title of the headline news article and its summary is way too great.  And the very size of the title makes its on-hover underline plain ugly.  They appear to have moved from a Verdana-esque font to Arial, which may be more web-friendly but only serves to make the content less visible, to me at least.

The main news items are more difficult to absorb.  The pictures that previously accompanied the lead three articles gave context, allowing elements of the article’s subject to be inferred without the need to read the entire summary.  This sounds lazy—and maybe it is—but it is a symptom of how people absorb information nowadays.  I do like the tag showing which articles are “new”, as previously, a new story that was not deemed important enough to make the top three could easily be lost among the lesser stories.

The right-hand column interests me little. Maybe as video becomes yet more prevalent online, I will find myself clicking more over there, but for the time being, that column, above the fold at least, is almost redundant to me.  It’s very orange though.

Besides the Sport link in the top navigation, nothing sport-related makes its way above the fold unless a sports story makes mainstream news (e.g. yesterday’s Open result).  I think this is a crying shame, particularly given the BBC’s deserved reputation in this field.

Below the fold, I get lost in a heap of yet more confusion.  There isn’t sufficient visual distinction between the Also in the News section and Sport.  And the lack of any tags against any of the Sport headlines means you have to know your stuff and may result in confusion.  Surfaced articles such as Wigan sign Melbourne trio, without the Rugby League tag, will cause confusion.

The grey localisation box (after all, it’s location based rather than being based on anything any more specific about my person) is a half-arsed attempt at personalised news.  Down the right, again general confusion is the order of the day until you hit the familiar and loved Most Popular box, which straddles the second fold, on this laptop at least.

The lead stories from the site’s main sections (Business, Politics, Technology etc.) are stacked four abreast, lesser citizens in a homepage stripped of any sense of order.  And the iPlayer gets some airtime in the bottom right corner, almost an afterthought.

Look at the site on an iPhone, and as well as being unable to access any of the video content because of the Apple/Adobe stand-off, you’re confronted with a site that is difficult to navigate, with lots of vertical and horizontal scrolling and general difficulty getting close to any of the content.

Overall, the homepage is a mess.  It lacks structure, order and any meaningful visual differentiation.  And I miss its predecessor dearly.

But over the last few months, my post count has dropped off significantly. This has, to varying degrees, been a result of general busyness, lack of interesting things to share (when has that ever stopped me?), the non-seasonal seasonality that affects bloggers and Twitter. Twitter is easily accessible, requiring little forethought. Ideas that might otherwise over time stew and percolate, taking on a life of their own, are instead shared via sub-140 character snippet and moments later forgotten—in most cases by both the reader and the author.

But more recently, blog posts (for the posts themselves are not blogs, despite the wonts of many of their writers and the ensuing boiling of my blood) have started coming to the fore again. I’m enjoying my blog again and am finding things to write about that inspire me and, hopefully, that inspire the odd reader out there. For I’m guessing you all must be odd.

I’ll be making a conscious effort to resist the temptation that the immediacy of Twitter offers and pushing more d my thoughts, views and tangential ramblings blogwards.

So stay tuned.

In Huddle, if you want to edit a file, you lock it.  And when you’re done, you unlock it.  I find this far more confusing.

I understand the rationale for Huddle’s choice in nomenclature.  In locking a file, you are preventing other people from editing it.  And when you unlock it, those with permissions are again entitled to edit it.

But it would make equal sense to me if the terms were reversed.  I might unlock a file to edit it—just as I would unlock a bike to ride it—and then lock it when I’m done.

The terms they’ve chosen result in a slightly confusing user experience.

As of 2004/5, according to HMRC, the mean income of taxpaying individuals was £22,800, the median being a good deal lower than this—61% of taxpayers earned £20,000 or less.  If every pound of income generated the same amount of tax, then 52.3% of tax would have come from those earning £30,000 or less six years ago.  And less than 25% of tax would have come from those earning £50,000 or more.

Now arguably, the greater one’s disposable income, the more tax those pounds generate—some of the essentials in life are exempt from VAT.  But this effect will be marginal.

So the panelist was pretty much right.  To have a significant bearing on the amount of tax brought into HM Treasury (via the front door of 100 Parliament Street), you have to go after the low-end of the pay scale.

I’ve never been happy with the concept of an SEO.  It’s basically someone who understands enough about how the internet works—or more specifically how search engines work—to advise on how best to write, tag and structure your web pages to get them naturally to the top of search rankings.

The offline equivalent would be some form of location specialist, advising companies where best to position their shops to maximise footfall.  But the online version has adopted somewhat legendary status, seeming to me to have invented an industry where one was not particularly needed.  The very existence of SEOs means that SEOs have to exist, to compete with their counterparts.

Seth Godin today wrote tangentially to this very topic, signing off with:

That’s one reason I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I’d rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead.

I’ve always agreed.  I need to make my service better and more attractive through its attributes and my reputation, as opposed to artificially improving my perceived quality by bumping my results up the rankings through clever tagging.

The very term search engine optimization makes my blood boil.  It isn’t about optimizing search engines.  It’s about frigging search engines such that they think you’re better than you are.  To me, SEOs are the scourge of the internet.

Has the person who decided to start putting adverts over the bottom half of youtube videos been found and shot yet?

I suspect the answer is no. And rightly so. For too long, the general public has been getting internet stuff for free, ignorant of the cost of providing the service and hell-bent not to pay anything towards it.

People are up in arms at The Times’ proposal to start charging for its content. But if that is what they must do to sustain their service, then so be it. Whether it’s the right commercial model—if there is such a concept of right or wrong in this space—remains to be seen. But you have to respect them for trying.

And the same goes for Google, despite my belief, one growing among my peers, that Google’s Do No Evil mantra is poppycock. Providing YouTube content to people is not free, irrespective of whether the content was a rights-free video shot by your mate. There is technology and people to pay for to allow that content to be served to the public.

Now if you asked the average YouTube visitor to pay for content à la Times, then they’d most certainly say no. (Actually, they’d most likely grunt judging by the state of the comments they leave on videos.) But ask them to pay for it indirectly through the medium of advertising and you have yourself an angry Gaz Beirne.

The free, ad-free world is unsustainable. Get over it. And along the way, get over yourselves.

I was worried.  So I did some research.  And I solved the problem thus:

• Downloaded i-FunBox which gives you control of the iPhone’s file system from your computer
• Searched the file system for a file entitled iTunesDB.  It appeared as 0 bytes and resides in a folder ending iTunes_Control\iTunes
• Delete it
• Disconnected the iPhone from the PC
• Reconnected

Bob was indeed my uncle and the job was a goodun.  This was the main source of my research.  Thank you.