Spalpeen

In light of the release of this month’s ABCes, two updates on The Guardian’s website.

1) The Guardian’s poor linking practices (which I’ve blogged about previously) continue to hamper the www.guardian.co.uk’s usefulness. At time of writing, the story featured above on the NHS Swine Flu advice website did not feature a link to that website.

This is bad bad bad. People come to the news to be informed, and this is basic information that The Guardian is needlessly omitting. I’d say that it arguably undermines their whole product: it’s great that most of The Guardian’s excellent team of bloggers links out, but this effort is somewhat defeated if the number one story on the whole site doesn’t!

In this specific case it also opens them up to criticism, since that same story featured two links to internal Guardian links. Those are fine, but you can’t omit the core link to the story while linking to yourself!

I hope to God that this is just crappy CMS syndrome. Really, there is absolutely no point talking about the future of newspapers (nor the prospect of The Guardian turning off its presses) if linking remains a secondary thought.

(NB: I recognise the irony of this being a story about a website going down — where a link from The Guardian might not necessarily help things. However, it’s really not The Guardian’s job to help keep Government websites up.)

2) Good news: The Guardian has slightly improved its Brightcove video solution. Videos are now viewable in full screen, although they’re not embeddable yet. They should really be cross posting all of their copyright-owned content to YouTube, but I’ll take this small victory for now!

All in all, frustratingly small steps from my favourite and most trusted news source.