Over at Economist.com, we’re using Movable Type to power our blogs, the first of which is Free exchange. We did a comparison of the features of the two foremost blogging products (the other being WordPress) and plumped for MT. I started out with MT here, but changed to WordPress (Yahoo! Small Business has both available and it’s pretty easy to trash one and start again). The main reason has been lost in the mists of time, but as I type this into the WordPress GUI editor, I realise just how clunky these editors are.

I had to edit some HTML yesterday and boy oh boy does it mess up when you try and do a mixture of  HTML and GUI editor. Tags get put in all over the place, non-standard HTML gets created and you just end up with a mess. I started to clean it up but in the end I just parked it for now.

The lesson: don’t edit the same post with the GUI editor and in plain HTML.

I’m looking for somewhere for the team to be based that’s not in one of our offices.

I’m obviously holding myself up to be reminded of this, but I really don’t want to be based on a serviced office (nice as they may be). I think that we’d benefit from being in a creative environment that has a buzz about it. Being able to tap into (and maybe even pay for) outside knowledge and experience to help with the development of our idea will be especially useful if we can make it a colalboratiove experience.
I had toyed with the idea of making the finding and selection of our space as a task for the team, but though that I’d sus some options out first.

That said, any offers or ideas will be gratefully received.

After a slow start I received 18 applications to join the team. I said that I’d have been pleased with 10, so 18 is great.

The other great thing about them is that they’re from just about every business in the Group and every region. Oh and they cover most disciplines too.

The quality has been good, too, with most people submitting stuff that’s web-based. It;s taking some time to read all the material that some people have sent in, but I’m nearly there.

I had to hack up some PHP so that this blog at https://projectredstripe.com/blog could be browsed to via the domain name (i.e. without the directory). Not too hard in the end, but (as you may know) I’m no PHP guru, so how did I do it?

Well, Tim O’Reilly, who spoke at the AOP conference last week, could tell you (if you had the chance to ask him). He talked about the way that his company did not have the competitors one might have expected if you’d have looked into the future a few years back.

So who’s his competition?

Google.

And that’s how I learned enough PHP to put in a redirect to a directory. You can view Tim’s keynote (courtesy of Savvis) in full here.

The annual AOP event had keynotes from Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly and Web 2.0 fame.

if you’re scared of screwing up you’ll get nowhere

McCall outlined five challenges:

• brands and people (it’s key that you know what’s being said about your brand online)
• community (although she insisted on calling her readers users, she highlighted the need for a two way dioalogue)
• innovate (”if you’re scared of screwing up you’ll get nowhere” and “you can’t suffocate it by judging it on normal rates of return”)
• excel at software development (”having the best developers is as important as having the best journalists”)
• drive digital revenue growth

She prefaced these by saying that she’d thought of a sixth - vision. She cited GMG’s attempts to make a go of a UK version of Wired magazine as the point (in 1994) when some of the (now) senior people at GMG were first exposed to new media. This experience had stood them in good stead.

Now I call that luck rather than vision, but I take her point.

I’ve discussed her point about software developers (I’m sure that she’s include all technologists) with some people in the past and although she was backed up by other speakers, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. You need the vision to use a framework for people to work in. If it’s there, then talented developers can certainly make a difference, but they need to be given that freedom and like the relationship between a website and its readers there needs to be a two way dialogue.

Tim O’Reilly took this point one step further by talking about “computer programming as journalism”. His theme was all around community and he outlined ways to foster this:

• get volunteers (as in a wiki)
• use self-interest (as CraigsList does)
• architect for participation (design for network effects like flickr does by defaulting to public access)

His computer programming as journalism thought relates to Chris Anderson’s long tail theory - the point he was making was that with all your content in a database somewhere it’s the ability to get at it in a super-easy way that will make the difference. I’d say it’s more like computer programming as sub-editing, but I guess that wouldn’t get as much attention.

Of the other speakers Tim Weller of Incisive made a great point when asked about sites that he likes. Speaking about the Telegraph’s navigation he seemed to be thinking out loud when he said “creativity is good, but plaigarism is quicker”.

Not suprisingly, he also said that vertical search would be big for media organisations like his.

PaidContent.org has more coverage.