Happy New Year from all of us at Focus New Media!

We hope you've all eaten and drunk a plenty over the Christmas period, and aren't to shocked at the prospect of returning to work after the longest Christmas break (according to the radio) in twenty years!

We would like you all to know that we're back and with a fully functioning team as of the 2nd, so please get in contact if you need us for anything.

What with the recent announcements of Lisa and Neil being appointed to the Focus board, and the opening of our new office near London, we've been doing a fair bit of public relations work recently, and of course good pr needs good photos.

So without a moments thought I turned to my good friend Dean Robson, a wedding photographer based in Hertfordshire and owner of RT Weddings. In a flash (pun intended) he had us posing, smiling and laughing and I think we got some great photos of special days.

So if you need some corporate photography or even better, are getting married and want a photographer, Dean's your man.

Well it felt like ages since I've added anything to the FNM blog, and upon checking it turns out my last words of wisdom (!) were back in February! It's been an incredibly busy year and as a result we have some big, exciting news to announce in the first week of November - but lips are sealed until then I'm afraid (don't even think about bribing Lisa or Amy with chocolate to find out).

Before all that I'm off to the other side of the world for a few weeks travelling, lying around, seeing some incredible sights and raw fish. Prize to the first person to guess where I'm going.

Thought I would leave with - at last - an article mentioning concerns over Google's continued collection of personal data:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7599342.stm

The guys in the office have been well and truly bored with my rantings about this, so I won't repeat them here. But just to say that if Smart cars with Microsoft were being driven round the country taking photographs of everyone's houses, there would be uproar...

Last week, the BBC introduced a trial of a new web page linking technology, which enables links to be placed in the text of the article (like this one), but unlike their regular behaviour of taking you to a new page, or opening a new tab, the new method displays a summary of the article in an attractive pop-up region.

You can see a few examples in this story about NASA's Orion ship - at least until the trial finishes.

The BBC's primary reasoning for this, as far as I can tell, is to give the user relevant links in the text, without the possible distraction of finding yourself flying off to an external site in the middle of reading a sentence (possibly unlike Orion, which has been delayed.)

The technology the BBC are using (called Apture) is somewhat interesting: for example, Wikipedia articles are summarised into pages, and files such as PDFs are converted (to Flash in the case of PDFs) to retain the same look and feel as the regular links.

Whilst the overall appearance is quite "whizzy", some people have been complaining that there's nothing wrong with the traditional way of hyperlinking and that the Apture method causes (or may cause) problems with the site's accessibility, and/or older or more obscure web browsers.

The trial was announced on a blog article by Steve Herrmann last week, many people have commented, and Steve has replied, promising they will take all comments into account at the end of trial.

Whatever you may think of the technology itself, I applaud the BBC for the openness of the trial process, listening to the comments of the public, and for getting stuck into trialing new web technologies.

For the record, the links in this blog article are the good "old-fashioned" method!

Interesting reading..

According to The Central Office of Information, all public sector websites will need to comply with strict web accessibility standards by next December, or risk losing their .gov status.

Minimum standards can be viewed here.