Year: 2003

Categories
Journalism Location Social Software Technology

Don't write off Conversations as a geek toy…

So there’s an article in the Guardian today about UpMyStreet. The article is called Street Plight and aims to understand why the company is in administration. Now generally, it’s a pretty flattering article – and a fairly accurate one – but there are odds and ends that are a bit annoying. Nonetheless I’ve decided that I’m going to look on the sunny side and concentrate on phrases like “Upmystreet is full of brainy types” and “[UpMyStreet Conversations is] a bit like a pub”. Yes. I think I’d much rather concentrate on those than the the rather less flattering “Technical people become dazzled by their own wizardry” and “Frankly, you could have more scintillating conversation with a curtain”.

Sigh. It’s no good. It’s not working. So here goes. Here’s why Clint Witchell’ss comments on Conversations are unfair:

One – it’s unfair to take the conversations in any one particular area and claim they’re representative of the whole site. Like every other community, Conversations is only as interesting as the people who participate in it, but unlike any other community – every area gets a different degree of participation. Certain parts of the country are beginning to explore the uses of the site and get involved in serious debates. Other areas are using it to chat about local news and to find local tradespeople. Other areas aren’t using it at all. It’s early days. All I can say is that if you don’t like the conversations that are ongoing in your area at the moment but you can see the potential and value in a site that could help your neighbourhood engage with local issues – then don’t just sit there complaining and feeling superior – start a conversation and see what kind of responses you get!

Two – Conversations is a new product for UpMyStreet and it pushes the ways the site can be used into completely new areas. One of our aims was to try and develop the relationship between UpMyStreet and the people who use come to it – to make people more regular visitors and power users at that. I think we’ve had a certain amount of success with this kind of work, success that I think will grow as people get more used to the idea and start to use the site in different ways. It’s a process of development that aims to move people from simple information finding into treating the site as a bridge into their local neighbourhood. But we’re not all the way there yet. These things don’t necessarily happen overnight…

Three – just because you can’t see obvious commercial uses for the forums software doesn’t mean that there aren’t any or that we haven’t thought about it seriously! If we get the opportunity, you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about and all the commercial/charitable/political uses for the technology, but at the moment – unfortunately – we’re all a bit distracted trying to keep body and soul together! Bear with us! Have some faith!

Categories
Personal Publishing

How to do Trackbacks like plasticbag.org

This is for a very narrow niche audience, but if you are one of the two or three people who have expressed an interest in how plasticbag.org embeds Trackback links at the end of each entry then here’s how you do it. Only a limited amount of computer magic is undertaken. Basically on both the main index template for the site and the individual template for each entry (and any other archiving templates you want to use), I insert this code directly after my <$MTEntryBody$> tag:

<MTEntryIfAllowPings>
<ul style=”list-style: none;”>
<MTPings>
<li> &rarr; <$MTPingBlogName$>: <a href=”<$MTPingURL$>” title=”Trackback from <$MTPingBlogName$>”><$MTPingTitle$></a></li>
</MTPings>
</ul>
</MTEntryIfAllowPings>

Don’t forget, in order for autodiscovery to work when someone else does pings your site you have to make sure that you’ve included the <$MTEntryTrackbackData$> tag in your template. I don’t know if there’s a restriction on where it can be placed. I just stick it directly after my <MTEntries> tag.

Remember: Most of the archive templates will not automatically rebuild every time you get a trackback ping, but they will if they get a comment – so either leave the your comments on or run a rebuild every few days just to make sure that everything’s kept up to date.

Categories
Random

One for the Mirror Project…

There’s a road in the middle of London called Oxford Street. It’s the main thoroughfare for shopping in the capital. One night on my way home I spotted an exotic advert – a actual pair of trousers apparently suspended in water. It was dark, so the lights inside the advert seemed to make the bubbles blown in from the bottom glow like tiny jellyfish as they crept and teemed around the pockets and the button-fly. I took a picture to try and capture the atmosphere but in the process got a ghostlike image of myself on the left of the frame. Beneath my face you can see fragments of red lettering – the upcoming-bus-times displayed behind me on the bus stop… I’ve submitted it to The Mirror Project, of course…

mirror_trouser.jpg

Categories
Technology

Register Refutations…

A week or so ago I wrote a little post called Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere. It was about an article at The Register in which Andrew Orlowski managed to mix a few half-facts with some general paranoia to assemble the spectre of a censorious and manipulative cabal of either webloggers or Google managers.

Orlowski’s gone off on another one this week – and this one’s considerably more ludicrous than the one before. This time – in the article Google washes Whiter – he’s protesting that his previous article has been hidden from people who search for the word “Googlewash” on the search engine:

“Google has made its own statement on the ‘Googlewash’: by making The Register story that coined the phrase disappear from its search results. Not all the search results, mark you, but a very specific one. When you search for the word “Googlewash” (as at 9pm Pacific Time last night) around a hundred results are returned by default. Our story, which is where the word was coined, isn’t among them. We found it, eventually, but it was very difficult.”

The stunning problem with his hypothesis (which was – if you remember – that his article has been censored by Google) is that if you click on the very first link offered then you are immediately directed straight to the article in question. All that’s happened is that – for some presumably totally obvious reason – Metafilter’s article about Googlewashing gets higher prominence. Whether that’s because Metafilter has a higher page-rank and gets linked to more often generally or whether it’s because people linked to this particular discussion with more apposite keywords (like ‘Googlewash’ for example)- well I don’t know. What I do know is that if Google were trying to hide Orlowski’s ‘revelations’, then they’ve made a ludicrously bad hash of it. And if he were looking for censorship, perhaps he should be looking comparatively, since anyone with half a brain can find his article more easily through Google than via altavista or overture or alltheweb.

Categories
Random

Meta-kottke…

Because you turn around for a moment and he’s gone and posted another dozen links (and because – if I’m honest – I’m seldom resistant to repurposing his work), I present “Meta-kottke: Reading the remaindered so you don’t have to” (filtered from Jason’s recent remaindered links bin):

  • Apple buying Universal Music
    Good story if it’s true. If it’s true then it’s connected to the other big Apple rumour – that they’re going to be selling MP3 equivalents over the interhighweb as quickly as next month.

  • So webloggers talk into a video camera and it gets on TV?
    What a dumb / brilliant idea. Way better than that thing with the monkey that Pepsi want to do that I was talking about yesterday…

  • Converting PC applications to OSX – Apple’s interface guidelines are totally fascinating. One of the best things I’ve read today. Thanks Jason!
  • Article about Powerpoint. And let’s end with a profoundly annoying post. Argument: You either too much writing on your presentation and everyone reads it instead of looking at you or you don’t write anything and the presentation means nothing when you’re done. Why argument is bunk: Because there’s a bit under the slide where you can explain what the slide means – the equivalent of having someone there to talk you through it. If you write the bloody thing.
Categories
Random

On cheery things…

Let’s end the working day as we began it – with a few lists of cheery links to help us wind down…

Categories
Random

The Wiki Biography project…

Ok. This is a bit of an experiment in how bored people can get on Friday afternoons as well as a bit of collaborative editing fun. It’s also a way of avoiding having to do anything myself. Basically, I want you – the weirdos who are are dumb enough to read a weirdo who is dumb enough to write about stuff on the internet – to help me write my one-page site biography. It may sound self-indulgent, but I don’t care – I can’t write the damn thing myself, I’ve been trying for days.

First things first – here’s the current page on the site. It used to be a hell of a lot longer and self-indulgent and then I got uncomfortable with the level of information that it contained about some parts of my life. This came to a head when a fairly prominent warblogging site decided to do a competition in my name (The “Tom Coates Award for the Most Bloodthirsty Warblogger” or something). I edited the text right down to the simple paragraph we see today:

Anyway – since I decided to put up a link to that page from – essentially – every page of the site (as a way of explaining myself, I suppose), that simple paragraph doesn’t cut it any more. So I’ve co-opted a page on the Barbelith FAQs Wiki for a bit of collaborative writing.

To make this an easier / more entertaining process, I’m going to be available via AIM for the next few hours under the handle stinkbadger – so if you have any questions or want to ask anything, then you can just ask me directly!

I know it’s kind of a dumb idea, but I’ve been pulling my hair out for days over this – I just don’t know how to write the damn thing. Probably, no one will be interested. If it works, I’ll stick up the text (along with the names of anyone who I know worked on the thing in question) up on the site as soon as I get a moment. And if it doesn’t? What’s the worst that could happen? A few people get exposed to a Wiki. Not the worst thing ever…

Categories
Random

It's Friday, it's 10.30am…

Time for another massive explosion of satisfying link-goo to get us through the last wheezing gasp of quite a difficult week:

  1. “War is over, if you want it…” – and we should all now be focused on the creative and productive work of rebuilding the broken governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. In an unrelated move, the BBC announces that Killing Badgers ‘not the solution’;
  2. In the running for the worst game-show idea of all time: Pepsi’s win-a-billion game: “An unusually dexterous monkey” will do the picking, says executive producer Matti Leshem. “It’s the ultimate slap in the face to evolution: the fate of a billion dollars will be in the hands of a monkey.”;
  3. The US might have the fattest people in the world, but the UK has the best snack-food and don’t you forget it. Introducing snackspot.org – the slashdot of the teenage lust for sugar, fat and monosodium glutamate. Sample article: Confirmed Sighting: Bob the Builder’s Cheesy Toolbag
  4. Could this be the most entertaining range of novelty S&M-wear ever made? bitch, dog, slut;
  5. And finally… As OSX update 10.2.5 is finally software updatable, Apple announce a brand new product…
Categories
Random

Perspectives on UpMyStreet…

A few days on, here’s what the media and webloggia thinks about UpMyStreet (where I have worked for the last eight months or so) going into administration:

  • Bowblog
    “While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden. They were supposed to have survived the bust, they were supposed to have a bullet-proof (at least not chewing gum and string) service-based business model with recurring revenues. They had groovy, meaningful technology and excellent people who weren’t running dog dot.com opportunists. What happened, guys?”

  • Blog.org
    “I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future – its directors say it is “only months from turning a profit”.”

  • Guardian New Media Diary
    “Diary was disappointed last week to chronicle the demise of UpMyStreet, the innovative dotcom that allows you to check house prices, crime rates, listings and so on in any given area. The site is to go into administration in the hope of finding new backers. UpMyStreet was one of the few good ideas of the dotcom goldrush.”

  • NewMediaZero
    “There’s no doubt that UpMyStreet provides a unique, quality service online. Its distribution on the Web through third-party commercial sites is second to none. It’s been backed by News International, which has helped its move onto Sky’s interactive areas. And it’s also deeply involved with Government plans to bring public services online.”

  • NTK
    “It’s not often – but, we guess, not rare enough either – that a company gets slashdotted and receivershipped in the same week. But that’s what’s just happened to one of Britain’s pluckiest start-ups, UpMyStreet.”

  • Whitelabel.org:
    “Buy my baby, please.”

In related news – some of my co-workers are prudently updating their CVs just in case the worst does come to past and the company doesn’t find a buyer.

Categories
Religion Science

On America, Science and Fundamentalist Christianity…

Probably the one thing I understand least about America is its relationship with religion. American is a country that (i) is particularly known for not being hide-bound by convention in science or business and (ii) often demonstrates an astonishing (and often laudable) amount of bombast and rule-breaking in both domestic and foreign-affairs. How then can it be that so many elements of American life can be held so firmly under the sway of religious fundamentalism?

You’d think this kind of thing would be more of a problem for countries like the UK – old European powers whose organisation includes no inbuilt distinctions between church and state. I mean – look at the facts – in the UK, the monarch is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The same woman is also the country’s Head of State and has been for over fifty years. The UK also has – by law or convention – several representatives of the Church of England in our Upper House (The House of Lords), although there is considerable discussion ongoing about whether they should be there or whether all religions in the country should be represented.

But in fact the UK’s religious right has radically less power within the country than in the US. Presidents of the United States essentially have to be church-going Christians. Church-going in the UK is simply considered a bit odd. We have anti-abortion campaigners just like in the US, but nowhere near as many and nor are they so overtly religious. And while it would be naive of me to say that there are no schools in the UK in which creationism or intelligent design are taught, I can’t find any evidence that it’s even mentioned in the UK’s National Curriculum or that any religiously-tinted competitors for evolution are presented as of equal plausibility.

It’s the effects of religion on science, I think, that most appals me. I don’t believe – never have believed – that science is a completely value-free space. Decisions are made every day about what to study, who to study (and what not to study as well). Initial hypotheses are almost necessarily built upon assumption, intuition and the influx of current mainstream political consensus. But the idea that challenges to theories like “evolution” can circumvent the entire academic peer-review and testing process by way of the courts – inspired by people who want to find ways to equate the world with their religious beliefs… Well, it’s scandalous! Totally, utterly scandalous!

The Guardian is running an article in its new Life section today on exactly this subject: The Battle for American Science. It’s this article that part-inspired me to write about this subject today. Here’s a quote from it:

Critics speak with similar alarm about other theories that have been getting a new airing recently, on Aids and abstinence and global warming, for example – theories presented as rival scientific ideas asking only for a “fair hearing”. “It’s a very good rhetorical strategy, because it appeals to the very American sense of openness and fair play,” says Miller. “But there’s something called the scientific process, you know – involving open publication, criticism, and rejection of things that aren’t convincing. We don’t teach both sides of the germ theory of disease and faith-healing. Evolution isn’t in the classroom because of political action or court decisions. It’s in the classroom because it made it through, it stood up to scrutiny and became the scientific consensus. It fought the battle and won.”