Roedd dewis ‘Wales’ am newyddion yn Saesneg a ‘Cymru’ am newyddion yn Gymraeg.

Mae’r BBC newydd cael gwared â’r dolen ‘Cymru’ rhywbryd wythnos yma. Does dim cyfeiriad i Gymru ar y tudalen bellach.

Mae’r prif dudalen yn ddarn o real estate pwysig iawn ac mae’r blaenoriaethau yna yn adlewyrchu blaenoriaethau’r sefydliad. Cer i’r prif dudalen http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/. Neu hyd yn oed http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wales/!

Mae’r adran newyddion yn Gymraeg yn cuddio rhywle. Ydyn nhw eisiau hyrwyddo’r adran felly? Faint o ymwelwyr fydd yn dod ar draws yr adran nawr? Cofia mae BBC wedi gwneud arferiad o gynnig gwasanaethau Cymraeg (fel Chwaraeon) dan y cownter cyn iddyn nhw eu lladd.

Dw i wedi trio ychwanegu Cymru fel lleoliad ar fy fersiwn personol o’r tudalen ond mae’r system yn dehongli’r gair fel ‘Chinnor, Oxfordshire’. Ydy e’n gweithio i ti? Efallai os rydyn ni i gyd yn trio bob dydd byddan nhw yn derbyn y neges?

Gyda llaw dyma rhai o’r blaenoriaethau ar y brif dudalen heno:

• Latin America
• BBC World Service – News and analysis in 27 languages (ieithoedd eraill)
• Uniforms quiz – Do you know your Grange Hill badges?
• High drama – Painted ladies and bamboo music – a guide to Chinese opera
• Bottled bronze – When did fake tan become the new norm?

Gweler rhan 1 os ti ddim yn ddigon blin eisoes.

Mae darpariaeth Cymraeg ar-lein gan BBC wedi cael toriadau eraill yn ddiweddar (gweler marwoliaeth BBC Chwaraeon hefyd). Mae’r straeon ‘Carchar am annog terfysg’ a ‘Carcharu aelod Cymdeithas yr Iaith’ yn bwysig a pherthnasol i ddarllenwyr Cymraeg ond ble mae’r newyddion y byd? Mae’r model Golwg360 yn dda – blaenoriaeth i straeon y byd a straeon i ddiddordeb i ddarllenwyr Cymraeg.

Hoffwn i ofyn cwestiynau eraill am y gwasanaeth Cymraeg newyddion newynog.

Ble mae’r dyluniad newydd achos mae’n edrych fel y dyluniad o 2008 neu rhywbeth (gweler hefyd: Gaeleg)? Ydy siaradwyr Cymraeg yn disgwyl llai o safon yn y dyluniad?

Ble mae’r sain a fideo newydd achos bore ‘ma maen nhw yn dangos rhai o’r un fideos o straeon Dydd Llun, dau diwrnod yn ôl?

Faint o bobol sy’n siarad rhai o’r ieithoedd eraill fydd yn gweld eisiau eu gwasanaethau os fydd angen toriadau rhywle? Gwnaf i dewis enghraifft: Sbaeneg. Sori am ddewis Sbaeneg ond faint o siaradwyr Sbaeneg fydd yn sylwi toriadau yn y gwasanaeth BBC os mae iaith o Brydain angen tipyn bach mwy o bluraliaeth?

Wrth gwrs mae pobol wedi gofyn yr un cwestiynau yma am wasanaethau eraill fel radio dros y blynyddoedd. Does dim problem gyda gweithwyr BBC sydd yn wneud job dda gydag adnoddau sydd ar gael. Dw i eisiau gwybod beth mae pobol sy’n wneud y penderfyniadau cyllidebol yn meddwl.

In the old days it was merely a taunt related to your chosen programming language or maybe some highly opinionated abject nonsense with a needless bit of Hitler comparison thrown in.

Today, if the troll has something to gain beyond just the thrill of getting a rise out of people then they will graduate to their own website or blog and perfect the fine arts of linkbait and flamebait. They will learn how to create feedback loops of notoriety.

My main point in publishing this blog post is to suggest to you that newspaper columnists themselves can be highly effective trolls. Not only do newspapers allow trolls to visit and leave comments, they actively recruit them and pay them to write columns.

For some of the newer gossip sites in the USA instead of a flat fee they actually pay writers according to the page views they can rack up through deliberately being controversial. This could be a way some mainstream news outlets are heading. The structure of incentives leads to particular forms of coverage and opinion. And these are very often ugly forms.

We assume repeatedly, colleagues and friends, that a newspaper is a fountain of public good and decency – and then every time we become distressed and angry and shocked when the fountain shoots out cascades of poop.

Yesterday I began to see a particular columnist not as a writer but as a mega-troll when I saw his Twitter bio which read, of all the things it could have said about his work, ‘I’m right about everything’.

Don’t bother searching for who that is.

This particular columnist (please, resist the urge to search) has reached a new level of expertise in trolling which deserves some kind of industry guild with its own crest of excellence. These professional mega-trolls, instead of operating at a forum level as before or even an individual website level, have mastered the art of controversy at a web level, provoking a swelling of rage in the form of comments, complaints, tweets, trending topics, well meaning righteous blog posts – and inbound traffic.

I’m resisting the urge to name any particular newspapers here for reasons that are hopefully becoming obvious.

Today I received an invitation to a Facebook campaign urging me not to buy newspapers which publish bigoted views about a particular ethnolinguistic group. I am sure that every person who joined will refrain from buying such papers at the stands. So we’ve got the paper-based boycott thing worked out just fine. We’ve long known that paper newspapers provoke controversy in order to sell copies. Knowing that and resisting them is not the challenge.

Now what if the offending newspaper is digital? Newspapers in digital form have effectively unlimited copies and they don’t even charge for access a lot of the time. Many of the hurdles, the protective barriers if you like, have gone. What’s more the paper in its online form is unbundled – you might never consider going near the paper version but I bet you’ve seen occasional articles online.

If you visit a newspaper website which is free-to-access then you are playing your part in boosting the fortunes of the company behind it. All it takes is a click. You get extra points for clicking on other articles. Or rather, they get the points. Everything is tracked and analysed and ultimately used to determine ad prices and sell ads. Usually it’s the high traffic newspapers that are making the biggest success of online. Notice I said ‘high traffic’ and not ‘popular’ newspapers, because how they are esteemed is of almost no importance in this – even to them.

Once you’ve read it and been offended why not send it to a few friends? You could email it but then if you share the link on your favourite social network service or your blog, you could also help them to increase their search ranking. Well done, you helped the poop and pollution to rise to the top.

You may, like me, have done these things. The desire to vent disagreement and frustration is… just… too… strong not to post. But it’s exactly what they want you to do.

If you post things online you’ll know that another thing everybody likes to receive is a good comment. It’s one of the nicest things you can give online. Now if you find a quality blog post or article and you leave a good comment then you bring insight to the conversation and increase the value of the page, which also gives the author a little bit of encouragement. This even applies if you disagree with them, as long as its amicable. These are the kinds of things that make commenting worth doing.

The outcome for an offending newspaper column is no different: leave a comment there and you increase its value in a similar fashion, whether you’re intending to help them or not. But if it’s a flamebait piece there’s no guarantee the author will even read your comment, no matter how witty or insightful you’ve been. Either way, in this situation, you are working for free to create content for them and even to bring repeat visits from people who’ve already been suckered into participating. Maybe we should all save our best for websites and other things that are more worthwhile.

So how do we (the nice people) get to resist and take back control of our bits of the web?

Do you remember the end bit in the original 1960 film of Village of the Damned when the hero has to free the village from the curse of the freaky evil schoolchildren who can read minds? I need you to stay with me here, especially if you post links online for others to see. The eventual hero Gordon needs to keep his mind blank somehow and manages to focus his entire thought process on a mental image of a brick wall. If his brain even flinches and lets out a smidgen of the plan then the ghastly children can outwit him, control him and thereby bring about a nasty accident.

We need to be like Gordon and mentally brick-wall those ghastly columnists. Every tweet and link and reference is a flinch of weakness.

A lot of people say to me, ‘Carl’ they say, for that is my name. They say how about going to the Press Complaints Commission, they’ll sort it out somehow. If you’re unfamiliar with them the PCC are an entirely voluntary member organisation made up of – and funded by – newspapers and magazines. This is the same organisation that did zilch about phone hacking but will somehow restore us to the fountain of purity and goodness supposedly.

Dear friends, no. There can be huge value in complaining in the right place particularly if laws are being broken. But the main point I’m making is a different one and is about the freedom and power we have. We’re the ones who give our attention to these websites. And we’re the ones who can withdraw that attention. We create the environment in which they flourish by allowing ourselves to be baited by the provocation and to be pimped to the advertisers.

I don’t know who said it first but if you’re not paying for it then you are the product. We’re the ones who renew the legitimacy of these sites by handing over the precious currency of attention which they can convert into advertising money every day.

Today the owners of a caching service called istyosty had to take the service offline. Because of a legal threat it is no longer able to rehost copies of articles from two well known tabloid newspapers for the purposes of criticism. Nobody is preventing the actual criticism from taking place but large numbers of people, for reasons I’ve already described, wanted to avoid directly linking to them and bestowing link juice and kudos on them.

Despite thinking of a name and idea for a caching service myself (which was built by somebody else and at the time of writing is still servicing links), I don’t see caching as the long-term solution to our problem.

The problem is that any form of attention – talking about these articles and acknowledging their presence – is beneficial to the offending newspaper companies in some way. I think they may even have been foolish to threaten istyosty over the copyright. The tiny damage from lost traffic here is just a form of progressive taxation which might expand slightly as the overall traffic shoots up, but not enough to sting. It could even contribute to the overall success of each article for all we know.

One solution I am trying is to use software add-ons to remove the risk of ever visiting these sites by accident. For me it’s a question of balancing the good articles with the bad, I’m very open to all kinds of opinion and debate but I draw the line at trolling.

Please note that I am not talking about every writer I disagree with or even about legitimite articles which may even be factually wrong. I am talking specifically about the mega-trolls, the ones I don’t ever need to see or discuss.

So I’ve installed a Firefox browser add-on called BlockSite. There are equivalents for other browsers. It can be massively tempting to think that I could turn it off and follow some of these scandalous links. But then it’s a good feeling to be able to brick-wall them. I’ve reduced my support of these particular sites to zero and I don’t feel I’m missing anything. I’m now enjoying and learning from the many other websites and media outlets which deserve my valuable attention.

Mae tair enghraifft o wefannau am newyddion lleol yn y brifddinas yn dechrau.

1. Bydd y blog The Guardian gan ‘beatblogger’ lleol yn dechrau cyn hir. Roedd Guardian yn esbonio’r meddyliau a staff tu ôl y fenter. Twitter: GdnCardiff
2. Mae yourCardiff newydd wedi cael eu lansiad gan Media Wales. Mae 16 person gwahanol yn cyfrannu ond mae un person yn unig yn gweithio fel gweithiwr i Media Wales. Mae’r cyfranwyr eraill yn sgwennu i ddweud straeon, hybu digwyddiadau a rhannu profiadau. Twitter: yourcardiff
3. Capture Cardiff yw rhywbeth hollol annibynnol o gwmniau cyfryngau traddodiadol. Mae llawer o bobol yn cyfrannu. Twitter: capturecardiff

Mae enghreifftiau eraill yn bodoli yn barod siŵr o fod. Ond ro’n i eisiau sôn am Capture Cardiff. Mae’r wefan yn dangos sut ti’n gallu dechrau blog lleol ar dy ben dy hun. Gyda chyfeillion.

Mae yourCardiff a Capture Cardiff yn defnyddio WordPress – meddalwedd rydd ac am ddim. Prynodd rhywun yr enw parth capturecardiff.com ar y diwedd mis Ionawr a dechreuodd yn syth.

Pobol Caerdydd, ydyn ni eisiau rhywbeth fel hwn yn Gymraeg? Neu… rhywbeth gwahanol? Ble mae’r ‘cymuned Cymraeg yng Nghaerdydd’ yn bodoli? Wyt ti’n gallu siarad am y ‘gymuned Cymraeg’ yng Nghaerdydd? Mae’r papur bro’r Dinesydd gyda ni bob mis wrth gwrs. Ond mae llawer mwy o bethau eraill yn digwydd!

Dyn ni’n gallu darllen The Guardian. Bydd e’n dda, dw i’n siŵr. (Bydd e’n edrych fel y blog Leeds.) Ond ble mae’r lleisiau Cymraeg am newyddion ym mhrifddinas Cymru? (Newidiais i’r teitl i ddweud Cardiff wrth ddechrau trafodaeth.)

Ti’n gallu newid dy ardal pan ti’n tynnu pobol at ei gilydd. Mae llawer o gyfleoedd i gael lleisiau sy wedi bod yn anweledig. Mae rhywun arall yn gallu trafod ieithoedd eraill yng Nghaerdydd.

Beth am y fro Gymraeg a phapurau bro yn y cyd-destun hwn? Dyn ni’n casglu enghraifftiau eraill ledled Cymru ar y dudalen Hedyn.

Mae sgwrs newyddion lleol yn digwydd ar y wefan Hacio’r Iaith hefyd.

Gyda llaw, mae Caerdydd yn rhy fawr i ddefnyddio’r gair hyperlocal am yr enghraifftiau yma. Mae golygiad y gair yn benodol iawn. Basai hyperlocal yw rhywbeth yn ardal yn unig, neu weithiau stryd yn unig. (‘Splottify’ unrhyw un?).

Llun gan iwouldstay

The idea is simple but amazing – huge, high quality still photographs illustrating recent news events.

It’s based at The Boston Globe so right now I’m waiting for pictures from Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony to appear. In the meantime here are the inauguration preparations.