Categories
Personal Publishing

On "plogging"…

There seems to be a current obsession with the language of weblogging coursing through print. First things first we got Technobabble in The Times being all random, and now we have “ploggers” (from the Guardian’s Backbencher e-mail):

Readers who have yet to succumb to the blogging craze sweeping Westminster (© all leftwing thinktanks) should pay heed to the experience of Richard Allan (Lib Dem, Sheffield Hallam), a blogger – or “plogger”, as the political variety now seem to be known. Richard, who has announced his intention to stand down at the next election, was asked how it felt to be a “blogging elected representative”.

“My answer, based on my experience to date, is that a blog is like a dog,” Richard mused. “It needs a certain amount of care every day. This is time consuming and can feel like a bit of a drag when you are busy. But you know that without the regular walks and feeding then the dog/blog will become unhealthy. And for all that you occasionally moan about the demands of your faithful friend, you become so attached that you would not enjoy life without half so much without it.”

I can’t quite figure the whole thing out. I mean firstly, no one seems to like the word ‘blog’ anyway except the press. Everyone else seems to find it really ugly or vaguely stupid. Movable Type no longer use it at all, and various long-term luminaries have publically regretted ever hearing or using the word in the first place. And as to all these other neologisms… I just don’t get why the press gets all excited about all those little bits of shorthand – they’re (at best) only tongue-in-cheek. Very few people take them in any way seriously. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to tell whether these journalists are in on the joke or whether they’re just looking for something easy to take pot-shots at…

Categories
Net Culture Politics

Tories would close BBC website…

I’m going to just report this without much in the way of comment while I try and work out what my professional relationship with the BBC means about my ability to give my personal opinion about things like this: Tories would close BBC website.

The Conservative party would switch off a swath of the BBC’s digital services, including its website and the youth channel BBC3, if it won the next general election.

The party’s culture spokesman, John Whittingdale, told Guardian Unlimited Politics he was “not persuaded” of the case for a public service website and that he was “not convinced the BBC needs to do all the things it is doing at the present”, including providing “more and more channels”.

“As a free-market Conservative, I will only support a nationalised industry if I’m persuaded that that is the only way to do it and if it were not nationalised it would not happen.”

Mr Whittingdale’s comments will be seen within the BBC as a glimpse of what it can expect from the Tories’ review of the corporation. The party launched the review, chaired by the outspoken former chief executive of Channel Five, David Elstein, earlier this year.

[He continued] “…I am not persuaded that there is necessarily a case for a public service website. I’m not persuaded that anything on the BBC site could not be provided elsewhere, [for instance] the newspapers are mostly providing sites, which provide news and comment.

“They [the newspaper sites] are essentially trying to provide for the same market and therefore you can argue why does the licence fee payers need to be financing the BBC to do it when there are other commercial organisations who are doing the same thing.”

I’m just going to leave this one open to general opinion, I think. If you’ve got any thoughts or comments, then leave them below…

Categories
Random

The OED's draft definition of a weblog…

The Oxford English Dictionary’s draft definition of ‘weblog’ from March 2003: “A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary.”

Categories
Random

Hal Hartley on Quality…

Here are a couple of good (brief) quotes from Hal Hartley – who is one of my favourite directors. These quotes were found on Way Down Here:

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general.

Depending on what’s happening in my life at a given time, I aspire towards solitude. Your stupidity quotient is obviously lower when you’re by yourself.

Categories
Design Social Software

The Ugly Wiki (Part Two)

A few months ago a conversation emerged across the net about whether or not wikis were ugly (see also Many to Many) (and moreover whether the fact that they was ugly affected how useful they were). Obviously, the whole issue was rife with debate about whether the simple design of wikis was simply nasty or whether it was actually just more useful and appropriate to have something stripped down to the bone.

Anyway, over the last few weeks the team that Matt and I work with has been trying to put together a wiki for our intranet. I think they’ve demonstrated that maybe there are ways of keeping both camps content – simple, adaptable Wiki designs can be made that are also elegant and attractive. First things first – here’s a quick thumbnail of Kate Rogers’ design for the page (apologies for the blue border – it’s a standard plasticbag.org thing).

I’m not sure that having the image reduced to that size necessarily does the design justice, so here are two screen-shots of the site at different screen-widths. The whole thing’s been recoded in (mostl) compliant HTML and CSS, so it’s also quite flexible:

Matt and I haven’t had that much to do with the getting the Wiki together – it was a project that existed before we got here – but we’ve had a couple of minor opportunities to help out and the whole process has been really interesting. I think most of all we’ve learned a lot about how Wikis should be rolled out to groups of people who aren’t really familiar with them – in particular the importance of transmitting the culture and the ethos. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but it’s looking increasingly like it’s actually going to work…

But before I say any more about rolling out Wikis, major kudos to Paul Clifford and Joss Burnett – when we arrived in the department they were experimenting with Zope as a substrate for the intranet, and had put Zwiki in place for the wiki. But when we actually came to working through Zwiki’s rules for text-formatting, we were all a bit startled – they were extraordinarily arcane and complex. So we researched the problem a bit and looked at various kinds of wiki mark-up and discovered that there was not only a massive variety of them, but also that many of them operated on completely different principles from one another.

After considerable examination, we decided that MoinMoin‘s parsing was probably the most effective and useful for our purposes, because – even though I don’t think they’re as simple as Usemod – it’s powerful and has a relatively shallow learning curve. At which point Paul and Joss spent considerable time and effort building a highly effective MoinMoin parser for Zwiki – giving us all the benefits of Zope with a Wiki that is actually simple enough for non-technical members of the department to use. General consensus here is – that if we are able – we’re going to throw all this stuff (design and code) straight back out into the public sphere for people to work with and play with… More news on that as we have it…

Coming soon… The Ugly Wiki (Part Three)

Categories
Random

A new definition of social software…

Can I just recommend The Devil’s Dictionary 2.0? There’s a particularly insightful definition of social software:

social software, noun
Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. “Iím having trouble deciding which node in my social software network Iím going to ask to the e-prom.”

Categories
Radio & Music

On album sales and piracy…

I’m not particularly in the mood to get too involved in this discussion at the moment, but I just thought it interesting that the music businesses hysteria about piracy destroying the music business doesn’t seem to be being borne out by the fact that album sales are at an all-time high. Here’s a quote from the Guardian article:

“Music album sales in the United Kingdom have defied the industry’s alarm calls about piracy, shrugging off the world of CD burning and internet file sharing to reach a record high. After a dip in the first quarter of the year, sales hit a new peak of 228.3m at the end of June, almost 3% up on last year. The figure published yesterday by the British Phonographic Industry marks the fifth consecutive year that album sales have topped 200m.”

Now there’s a slump in the sale of singles (but then that’s been happening for years anyway) and – admittedly – the increased sales are mainly in discounted CDs, which has meant a small drop in the industry’s profits, but really – album sales at all time high does not seem to me to correspond that well with “piracy is destroying the music business”… What am I missing here?

Categories
Personal Publishing

Guardian launches new weblog…

If you go to the front page of the Guardian today, the third story down isn’t a story at all. In fact it’s nothing less than a link through to a new weblog that the Guardian are supporting – KickAAS – designed as a resource and platform for activists campaigning against agricultual subsidies. Now from what I remember, the OnlineBlog was set up as a bit of a sideline and didn’t initially go through normal brand-control channels (I could be completely wrong on that), but this one must have been approved. I’ll be interested to see how it develops – will it be brand-enhancing, will it be brand-destroying, or is it going to pod itself off from the main site and take on a complete life of its own – the first of many weblog projects? [Thanks to Jones for the link]

Categories
Random

What I do in my spare time…

Everybody has a space alien twin – who watches over us day and night: “For every human being on Earth, there appears to be an alien counterpart who takes care of them when times get tough, who shares the same thoughts and who bears a remarkable resemblance to them physically,” says respected cosmologist Dr. Thomas Coates. “This relationship appears to be the true cause of thousands of so-called abduction experiences — and perhaps every story we’ve ever heard about guardian angels.”

Categories
Family

Here be monsters?

A selection of weird “it’s been in the back of my head for a while now” posts about trying to find my biological father: Looking for Tom Coates (Jan 2002), On searching for ‘father’ (Nov 2001), Ring random people with my father’s name (Sept 2001), Pictures of my father (Jan 2001). This might be the time to acknowledge publically that – in fact – I have been using Google adwords to try and get information about my father, which I know is a bit weird, but hey – it makes my brain hurt a bit when I think about it, so what do you expect? Rational behaviour? If you want to see the Google Ad, then it’s here. Please don’t click on it, as it costs me money and it just goes to one of the pages above.

My position on finding my father has always been a bit vague. I really really didn’t want to talk about it with my mother. I didn’t want to ask her any information or anything. And – of course – this would have made the whole process of finding him nigh-on impossible, assuming that I actually started looking for him seriously, which I never really have. And why? I think the reason I haven’t is because I’m scared – scared of whether he’d like me, scared of whether he’d be appalled of me being gay, scared of whether when I find him he’ll be already in the ground and that then I’ll have only the certainty that I’ll never know either way if he’d be proud or ashamed of me.

This all sounds a bit cheap-airport-novel to me, but no doubt in some way it’s true enough.

So what have I done? In possibly the most half-hearted campaign ever, I’ve looked his name up on a few online directories (his name is the same as mine – go figure), and I’ve sent several dozen e-mails to complete strangers around the world with the same name. I’ve stuck up a Google Ad.

But that’s all the trivial stuff. More importantly I’ve made myself very visible. My father worked in computers for crap’s sake, back when you debugged machine code with ball-point-pens on big stacks of paper with perforated strips down the side punched with holes. If he was still alive today he must have been on the internet at least once, right? He must – sometime in the last ten years or so – have typed his own name into a bloody search engine? Right? And I’ve been here – the most internet-visible “Tom Coates” in the world – owning something like seven of the top-ten “Tom Coates” spots on Google. I’m like a bloody massive flashing beacon of findableness. I’m the fucking atom bomb on a dark night. And has he seen me? Has he arse.

I feel a bit like the SETI Project to be honest. Lighting up the darkness with a seeming infinity of radio waves and broadcasts. Radio, TV, Web, Print… I’m here! Anyone who wanted to could find me a moment! So why don’t they come?

Anyway – now I know more than I ever have before because – dear god – I’ve finally had that conversation with my mother. I now know that the invisible parent was born in August 1940. I know that he went to the same school as Dudley Moore (which I think was Dagenham County High School). This was a surprise – in the back of my head I’d always assumed he was from Norfolk like my mum. This makes me more city-folk industrial by history than I’d expected. Apparently he worked for Honeywell computers and then ‘Digital Computers’ in America for a while. My mother said they chose him because he had a funny brain. And he evidently had a fair share of personal issues with his family. Apparently his mother died and his father remarried. He didn’t like the new woman much it seems…

So what now? I know that you’re supposed to take information like that to St Catherine’s House and that they’re supposed to tell you all about whether he’s alive or dead or not or where he’s living now – or if he’s even in the country (or alive, which I’m beginning to doubt). But while I know what you do with the information cerebrally, emotionally I don’t think I have a clue what to make of the whole thing. Just learning all this stuff was a strange and disconcerting experience – I could feel my brain squirrelling the information out of my conscious mind as quickly as possible, out of sight, out of the way. But I can feel it lurking, like an irritating piece of meat stuck in your back teeth that you keep tonguing but can’t get out. And if you did get it out there would be no certainty that it wouldn’t explode to massive inconceivable size, sprout tooth and scale and claw and take my bloody head off. “You’ve gone way off the map, Sonny,” my mind seems to say in full Geoffrey Rush Pirates of the Caribbean style. “Here be monsters”.