A number of news outlets – including the BBC, Guardian and Channel 4 News – mentioned yesterday in their coverage of the closure of the News Of The World that TheSunOnSunday.com had been registered just two days ago. (It was also mentioned by Hugh Grant on last night’s Question Time.)

It’s a convenient piece of information for a conspiracy theory – but a little bit of digging suggests it’s unlikely to have been registered by News International as part of some grand plan.

When I tweeted the claim yesterday two people immediately pointed out key bits of contextual information from the WHOIS records:

Firstly, it is unlikely that News International would use 123-reg to register a domain name. @bigdaddymerk noted, News International “use http://bit.ly/cWSHia for their .coms and have their own IPS tag for .co.uk”

Murray Dick added that it would “be odd for big corporation to withhold info on whois record”

And – not that this is a big issue given recent events – according to @bigdaddymerk “in the case of the .co.uk registering as a UK individual would be whois abuse.” (UPDATE: The specific abuse is detailed here)

You might argue that the above might be explained by News International covering their tracks, but if were covering their tracks it’s unlikely they’d do it like this.

UPDATE: From Malc. in the comments: more digging has been done at Loutish – note the comments as well.

UPDATE 2: It seems there are other web addresses registered by other companies, too. This post points out, however, potential trademark issues (none has been registered) and conflict with Trinity Mirror.

UPDATE 3: Those other addresses are now registered to News International – but not the .com domains.

UPDATE 4: I think News Corp missed an opportunity with FoxNewsUK.com…

The timeline

Anyway, digging further into the timeline of the ‘Sunday Sun’ casts further doubt on any conspiracy connected to News Of The World.

For example, it was reported over a week ago that The Sun was moving to 7-day production (thanks to Roo Reynolds, again on Twitter).

Between that announcement and the registration of TheSunOnSunday.com, anyone with a habit of domain squatting could have grabbed the domain in the hope that it would become valuable in the future.

Either way, even if it has been registered by someone at News International, the timings just don’t add up to a News Of The World-related conspiracy. Certainly it will have been a factor in deciding to close the NOTW, and plans to launch a Sun On Sunday are now likely to be accelerated (I’m amazed that they hadn’t registered the domains before, at least as a defensive move) – but it’s pretty clear that those plans pre-date the closure of NOTW.

So, as I wrote yesterday, a ‘Sunday Sun’ is not a rebranding of News Of The World. They have just closed the country’s biggest selling newspaper – its most profitable tabloid – and made 200 people redundant.

Note: this post was udpated to correct an error: the NOTW is not the highest selling English language newspaper in the world (that is probably The Times of India). Thanks to Paul Carvill in the comments for highlighting.

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It’s often said that Twitter’s big advantage over Google is its ability to allow you to conduct ‘real time search’ – if an event is happening right now, you don’t search Google, you search Twitter.

But today Google has announced a series of features that, while still not offering real time search, take it just that bit closer. For me it is the most significant change to Google’s core service in years. 

Here’s the video:

This week, while talking to my students about the ability to search by date in Google, the computer assisted reporting blogger Murray Dick mentioned how unreliable the feature was, so I wouldn’t get too excited. 

What is new, however, is the ‘recent search’ facility, which brings up results from the past hour or two.

Perhaps most significantly, the intuitive nature of the controls makes it much easier to find relevant information – and has obvious uses if you are a journalist only interested in recent reports. I tried it with an event I attended today and the results were clearly better than a generic search.

The ‘Timeline’ feature is particularly useful – you can now drill down to a specific period, allowing you to do the opposite – rule out recent reports – if, for example, you’re looking for background on someone currently in the news.

Also useful is the horrendously multicoloured ‘Wonder Wheel’ which will generate related terms that you can browse through.

So, a search for ‘Paul Bradshaw’ brings up online journalism, journalism blog, Press Gazette and Birmingham City University – an obvious way to get an overview of the areas and companies a person is connected with, and drill down to information about those. 

‘More text’ will give expanded descriptions of results; you can choose to include images from the pages; and it is easier to switch to searches of video, forums and reviews. 

Also worth noting is that Google appear to now be supporting microformats: this means you can filter reviews by sentiment, and more easily disambiguate people in searches. 

It also means you should be looking at using microformats for your own content, of course… 

If you can see any other applications of Search Options, or find any features I’ve not spotted, let me know.

UPDATE: TechCrunch compare Google’s performance against Twitter Search, FriendFeed, OneRiot, Tweetmeme and Scoopler (which I love) in this real-time search-off.

UPDATE 2: ZDNet spots the addition of public comments on search results. Very interesting.

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The best thing that I took from this week’s 2gether08 event was yesterday’s announcement by blogging MP Tom Watson and Ofcom’s blogging Tom Loosemore of Show Us a Better Way.

The site (also a blog – notice a pattern here?) is releasing a range of public data and inviting people to mash them up, or come up with ideas to do so. In their words:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.

While the US has a strong tradition of making public data available, which has enabled the likes of Adrian Holovaty to create pioneering mashups like ChicagoCrime.org and Everyblock, the UK’s public data has been much less open.

But that is changing. The Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data’ campaign has successfully heaped a lot of pressure on government to “Make taxpayers’ data available to them”, and when I was recently invited to take part in a government white paper workshop around “community empowerment”, I got the impression that I was knocking at a semi-open door when I said that public availability of data would be my number one priority (more on that workshop here).

Anyway, back to that new website. Murray Dick has already come up with some stonking ideas, and I would suggest every journalist in the country with any interest in the future of journalism should at the very least be watching this and thinking about the possibilities in their area. The Power of Information Task Force blog is well worth following for further examples internationally.

If you think FOI requests have transformed journalism in recent years, and the battle to retain those, think about this: if we don’t make the most of this opportunity, we’ll have no excuse when the government decides to withdraw the offer.

• Related links (via Nick Booth):

Bill Thompson

Justin Pickard: “This is what it’s all about”.

Shane McC: “Surely this can’t be government? But it is…Brilliant”

Guardian Tech: ” It would be fantastic if a Guardian Tech reader could win this”

Ideal Government: “we offered an OS map and a Google lava lamp”

Richard’s Kingdom: “what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs”

Ed Parsons: “I’m Impressed”

Skuds Sister: “I have more confidence in motivated geeks than in large companies”

Daveyp “does this mark a sea change”

Ideal Government: “Power of Information work is gathering pace and getting quite exciting”

Bob Piper: “My suggestion was going to be ‘Where’s my bloody post office gone’.”

Open: ” it behoves me to offer a little praise when they get things right”

100 ideas already Tom Watson: “we might have to find some more prizes.”

Personal Democracy: “Kudos to all!”

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