Year: 2003

Categories
Radio & Music

The return of the Bangles…

The Bangles are back! And the Thriller-like corpse of my trashy, teenage self has risen from the dead and is doing a little dance inside me. I mean – it’s the Bangles! I had my first major crush while listening to the Bangles! I wrote off a car while listening to the Bangles! I was the person who bought the Susanna Hoffs solo record! They’re core to my adolescent and pre-adolescent self. And it’s not only me! The first song my little brother recognised on television was Eternal Flame (the only Bangles song I hated). He used to call it “One Eye” because there was a big eye at the beginning of the video. I think he still kind of likes it. He certainly wasn’t keen on Atomic Kitten’s version (I think he felt it was sacrilege).

I mean, look at them! They’re iconic! There’s the cool depressive one on the left that you actually believed could write songs. She was responsible for “Following”, the weird stalker anthem that I loved when I was fourteen. Then there’s Susanna Hoffs, who was kind of tiny and pixie-like and all my straight male friends really wanted to shag. And then the lead guitarist who looked a bit too much like the prom queen to be taken seriously. And finally the weird blonde drummer who looked a bit like a man in drag. How much do they rule?!

I once owned the Bangles Greatest Hits video that I bought when I was about sixteen. But we had this party in my second year at university – a party in which we had to call an Ambulance because someone got alcohol poisoning – and then someone stole the stereo and then someone set fire to the television and that spread to the videos that were placed nearby. No more Bangles video. Sigh.

And now the news is that they’ve got a new album coming out and it’s bound to be terrible (even though I swear that their other albums are all really really good) but obviously I’m going to buy it and stick it on my iPod and try to look cool when people ask me what I’m listening to. And I think they’re coming to London to play live. And I really want to see them, but I bet no one will go with me.

Categories
Politics

Let them hate as long as they fear…

Excerpts from John Brady Kiesling’s letter of resignation sent to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell:

Dear Mr. Secretary:
     I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart…
     The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.
     We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners.
     We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?

For those without the benefit of a Classical education, oderint dum metuant means Let them hate as long as they fear. You can read this letter in full at The New York Times.

Categories
Random

I'm voting LIBERTY X…

So Project Stupidly-Long-Post about this iWire post is taking much longer than I’d expected, and work’s suddenly started taking up my mental space for the first time in a month or so, and I’ve been trying to get some stuff finished for Ben Hammersley and my door’s being fixed (long story behind that one connected to an earlier post of mine). And basically this all adds up to a busy little Tom who can’t think of things to write on his site. Except he’s been collecting things he does want to talk about, and rather than discard them, he’s going to do another linklog. But he’s going to do it shamefully and in full recognisance that he’s basically shirking his intellectual responsibilities to the world. And with the shirking of intellectual responsibilities in mind, let’s jump straight into…

  • The Latest Liberty X video
    The were the anti-group-by-committee pop-group that was itself made by committee and managed to come out with considerably more attitude than the demographically-generated Hear’say. Obviously that doesn’t make them any good – but at least they have the class to take the piss out of themselves. This rather high-quality cover features the band mass-producing hundreds of duplicates of themselves in an effort to get high quality mass-culture pop product out to the masses. Highly entertaining and much recommended…

  • Katy’s Coccyx
    So this is totally the grossest thing you’ll see on the web today – my good friend Katy Kitschbitch has had an operation on her lower back – and decided not only to keep what they removed, but also to take meaty pictures of it and put them online. Utterly grotesque. Strangely compelling. Get well soon, Katy!

  • Tom Lenk on Buffy spin-offs
    “Danny and I keep suggesting that the season finale, which is potentially the end of the show, should end with me kneeling down at Jonathan’s grave, putting blood on my face like Willow did [when she resurrected Buffy]. After I resurrect him, we build a robot of Warren, and then we have our own show. Then we’re hired by the government to use our powers for good, and we’re given a watcher, which would be played by Morgan Fairchild!”
Categories
Net Culture

On Google's trademark…

Over on kottke.org at the moment there’s a piece by Jason on Google’s response to verbing. The story goes like this – there’s an entry on Wordspy for a the verb to google. Google decided to respon to this entry by sending a letter telling them that they shouldn’t publish stuff like this because it dilutes their brand. Jason’s comment?

“That letter from Google is a bluff, an example of a corporation using their significant corporate resources (i.e. time and money) to make individuals – who generally have neither time nor money, relatively speaking – do what the corporation wants them to do, regardless of legality.”

Unfortunately in this particular case, I believe that Google are in the right and Jason is incorrect. The problem is not particularly one of Google trying to force the little-guy into acquiescing. In fact Google have to go through processes like these to stop their brands becoming normal parts of language. When you’re trained as a journalist, you’re told that you have to capitalise brand-names. If you don’t, the company concerned is forced to write to you requiring you to make it clear that it’s a brand. If it doesn’t do so – and cannot demonstrate that it’s done so, then the word can be associated with any product at all. Classic examples are things like Hoovers and Frisbees – they’re synonymous with the object themselves, but they have to be routinely defended otherwise Hoover (the company) loses the right to the brand name – and anyone on the planet can market a vacuum cleaner as ‘a hoover’. If Google don’t protect their trademark and it entered general speech, then there would be nothing legally to stop altavista renaming themselves altagoogle, or Google search.

At least that’s the way it works in UK law as it pertains to journalists. I’ll try and find some more information on this subject shortly.

Categories
Random

Monday Morning Linklog…

Depressingly, at some point it looks like I’m going to be compelled to go for the full separate link-log option, but at the moment you’re just going to have to make-do with the annotated lists that I slap up every so often…

  • Safari to get tabbed browsing
    If you’re a fan of tabbed browsing, then this article (which includes scary looking pictures) is interesting, if not entirely reassuring. Positive feature: ‘x’ on each tab allows you to close it. Negative feature: apparently an entirely new form of tab style – hanging downwards from the URL.

  • Daypop Wordbursts & Top Blogs
    Two new toys from the daypop crew today. Wordbursts is the more interesting of the two – following on from the New Scientist article about trend-spotting in webloggery from a few days back. I don’t know that such a shallow analysis will reveal any particularly huge trends at this stage, but there’s no denying that it could in the long-term. The ‘Top Blogs’ thing is more notable for the internal Google-style weighting system – the more heavily linked-to a weblog is, the greater its ‘page-rank’ and in turn the more effect its links have. It’s an interesting approach, but one I have to think in more depth.
Categories
Random

Why Content Publishers shouldn't host weblogs…

This is a post about why mainstream content publishers shouldn’t host weblogs on their sites – and the special circumstances under which they might be able to make it work. Firstly the reasons why they shouldn’t do it:

  • If you have an established and authoritative brand associated with the fact-checked information that you publish, you run the risk of diluting that image by having your logo or URL associated with content published by members of the general public.
  • This is much less of a problem with discussion forums and community sites than it is with weblogs, because weblogs can use any voice they like (from authoritative to playful) and mostly don’t need to allow any means of conversational redress from other users – ie. it’s easier to confuse a weblog with the brand’s main content.
  • There is also an associated problem (familiar to anyone hosting user-generated content) with legal liability – it’s considerably easier to remove a legally dubious post from a discussion board than it is from a weblog, because webloggers view (with reason) the space as essentially theirs, and immune from intervention from on-high.
  • There is no reason to assume that being in the position to encourage the take-up of weblogging will mean that you’ll keep the ones you want to keep using your service. In fact:
    1. The longer someone has been weblogging, and the more invested they are in it, the more likely it is that they’re going to want to get a domain name of their own.
    2. These same people are also likely to want to use extended functionality at some point and will probably try and move to a dedicated application or provider who can more adequately fulfil their weblogging needs.
    3. A dedicated long-term weblogger may not wish to be associated with the brand of your service any more and may choose to leave.
  • The effect of this is that dedicated, popular and authoritative webloggers will leave your service, leaving behind only new webloggers, and abandoned or ‘low-quality’ sites.
  • And the final reason not to host weblogs is that there’s no need to do so. If you publish compelling and blog-worthy content on your site then it’ll get just as much take-up in webloggia as if you were hosting the weblogs themselves.

Now the special cases – the ways to approach something like this if you’re determined to do it:

  1. There’s value and utility in the information you can glean out of a database of people’s weblog posts. These can help inform editorial decisions and make it possible to spot emerging news / public interest stories. This information (and the multiple ways it can be used within your site) is simply valuable. If you have an established brand, you are more likely to be able to get a decent amount of it.
  2. Probably the best way to implement it after this stage, then, is to use an associated brand and publicise it heavily on your main site. That way you’re putting in that element of distance that stops you being quite so heavily associated with what is written, while still reaping the benefits from it…
  3. And to counter natural migration from your service (indeed to capitalise upon it and monetise it) then:
    1. Firstly, make it possible for your webloggers not only to leave, but also to come back. People resent being put into a position where they are ‘trapped’ into using only one personal publishing tool, and may publicise this as a reason not to use the service in the first place.
    2. Secondly, give them a clear upgrade path – give them various levels of functionality which they can move between. You can try and monetise this if you wish. If the functionality is good enough, people will pay.
    3. Thirdly, use the fact that your running a high-profile publishing business as an opportunity to reward the weblogs you host that you think are particularly good. This is a hell of an incentive to be ‘one of the fold’.
    4. Fourthly, not only don’t try and force people to stay within your design and branding, but make it possible for people to migrate from the branded presence completely. Many webloggers will want (at some point) to purchase a domain name of their own and get more powerful server functionality and access, but many won’t know how to approach this kind of stuff. If you can build mechanisms to keep this process as simple and as easy as possible, then you can keep your webloggers happy, keep them using your service, and in the process get a cut on the price of the domain name, charge for the enhanced hosting (or the removal of adverts, if you’ve used them) and you still have access to the content they’re producing.
Categories
Journalism Personal Publishing

The Ostrich of Journalism…

God what a stupid article. What a profoundly stupid article. I mean let’s not even start with the condemnation of Google as the closest thing to an online Superpower, because while there may be some truth to it, at the moment it’s pretty much just unsubstantiated scare-mongering. But reopening the ‘weblogs as journalism’ debate again? Now that really is stupid. Particularly if you’re not going to make any effort to look past the obvious towards a slightly more nuanced and intelligent reaction. For god’s sake, internet expert, push it a little further.

“Blogging is not journalism. Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion. Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else – often the much-maligned mainstream media.

Now I have no interest in getting involved in this “are they” / “aren’t they” debate – except to repeat my scandalous assertion that in fact news journalism is etymologically a subset of “journalism” – ie. journal writing – making news journalism in many ways a ‘special case’ / subset of weblogging. But I have to be honest, the idea that the limit of this whole debate could be ‘are weblogs going to replace journalism’ – well it pisses the crap out of me. Because while some journalists are sitting around complaining about about how you can’t trust anything you read unless it’s had an editor to correct the grammar, the actually interesting and significant debates are being totally ignored.

These are the debates about what effect an empowered and vocally reactive readership might have on journalism, or the debates about the implications of the huge traffic peaks that can happen when all of webloggia turns your way. These are the debates about how incredibly useful and important it would be to gauge statistically which news stories actually do matter to people, and what it means when hundreds of thousands of people decide to take the news they’ve been given and do something with it – push it further, do their own research – on occasion refusing or challenging the initial piece. How would that change the job of a journalist? What effect would that have, will that have, in two / five / twenty years?

In fact while these journalists are busy shoring up their own defences neurotically against the unlikely threat of freelance weirdos like myself putting them out of a job, they’re studiously resisiting every opportunity to actually interact with this huge distributed community.

This kind of facile superficial reaction would be totally acceptable if it came from well-established print journalists unfamiliar with what’s emerging online. But from technology journalists it smacks of disgruntlement, paranoia and a profound refusal to think past the most obvious conclusion they come to. These are individuals who have been told by some idiot at a dinner party once that their industry is under attack and have decided it’s time to put these “upstarts” in their place.

The whole thing is based on a really simple misconception – they keep viewing each individual weblog as if it was competing with the New York Times. But instead of doing that, they should be looking at how hundreds of thousands of (proper media) readers have completely shifted from passive reception of news to repurposing it, commenting upon it and – on occasion – challenging it… If they don’t do that, if they don’t shift from building defences to looking for the opportunities, then they really are going to be put out of a job – not because they’ve been squeezed out by other webloggers, but because some other companies (maybe even that tiny Google start-up everyone’s talking about) will find some way to do it first and do it better…

Categories
Random

Thursday Microcontentage…

There’s a great big thing in my head at the moment – all conceptual and wiggling – that I’ve been trying to write all day. So far, no luck. I’m stuck about two-thirds of the way through. So to pass the time, here’s a few links from around the web that I’ve been meaning to write up for ages.

Categories
Design

BBC News redesigns…

The newly redesigned BBC news launched last night – the redesign being an attempt to keep the basic UI and architecture of the site intact while bringing its design in line with the rest of the BBC. The most substantial change is the shift from a 640px to an 800px wide layout, which has some clearly positive consequences. The available space for the articles themselves is now substantial, but not so wide that your eyes have trouble finding the beginning of the following line. However, the redesign isn’t perfect, and if I was forced to pick holes with the way it has been restructured they would be:

  • I miss the news being in one column. The single column format – much like the weblog format – highlights chronology, promotes the idea that the material is novel, cutting-edge, breaking news. Having three news stories grouped at the top is an interesting shift with one obvious advantage – it allows them to decide what story demands the most emphasis rather than which story is simply the most timely. Unfortunately it now feels more like feature-content than news content.
  • The internal home-pages (cf. Scotland) don’t seem different enough from section to section. It’s quite easy to get disoriented within the structure of the site – as if you were in a huge building where all the rooms looked the same. I think this problem could be very simply resolved by sizing-up the signage (increasing the size of the page-heading alone would probably help considerably).
  • The “good recent features” bar that spreads horizontally across the front page and sectional home-pages (three pictures with taster-copy on a beige background) produces some HTML layout issues. Primarily, it restricts what you can place in the top section of the third content column. The Education section has a prime example of the problems it can cause. There’s too much copy inside it, which is pushing the horizontal bar down the page, leaving a block of white space in the middle of the central content columns. And if you limit the length of the text on that side, you can end up with nasty gaps of white space there as well. It might not sound like much of an issue, but I wonder what it looks like with text-zooming on or unorthodox font-sizes.
  • Fundamentally, my main issue is that there’s clearly more screen real-estate available but there doesn’t appear to be the same amount of actual news on the page. I suppose the only way to do that would be to measure the area of all the illustrative images, the number of stories linked to and the number of characters spent on the page on the stories involved. Has anyone got the time to do this?

What are your thoughts on the BBC News redesign? Leave a comment here and then head over to the discussion taking place over at Metafilter.

Categories
Health

On people who can't smell…

Last night I cooked myself a meal on my gas hob. This morning, on the way into work on the bus I became convinced that I hadn’t turned the gas off. I had to get off the bus halfway through my journey, find another bus and return home to check. Fourteen hours had passed.

For most people this kind of situation would be unthinkable. If the gas was lit – how many times would I have had an opportunity to notice the flames? If the gas was not lit, how strong must the smell get? How obvious must it have been? Except, of course, that (along with all my other freakishnesses) I have no sense of smell. Or if I do, it’s so ludicrously truncated and ineffectual as to be useless. The signals that other people take for granted just aren’t present for me.

For the most part, I’m highly suspicious of gas appliances, although it’s practically impossible to find a rental flat without them. And if you don’t believe that it’s a real issue, then I’ve got an example for you. When I lived with my ex-flatmates Kate and Mella, on at least two separate occasions they returned to the flat to find it stinking of gas. On one occasion the cooking flame had been blown out by a breeze and I simply hadn’t noticed. Not getting any heat from the hob, I’d simply assumed it was off. The flat, slowly but surely, had been filling with gas (with me in it) for getting on for fourteen hours. I’d had a terrible headache all day and had no idea why…

Here are some interesting facts (and links) about (and for) people who can’t smell (which is known as Anosmia):

  • Anosmia Foundation
    A slightly melodramatic association attempting to get Anosmia considered a disability and taken more seriously as a problem. While clearly not being able to smell does cause difficulties in life (from safety issues, food appreciation and anxiety about personal hygiene), I’ve never considered it a particularly serious problem. Maybe I should reconsider…

  • Congenital Anosmia Pages
    Most interesting for its reader feedback, where people talk about their experiences of limited or total lack of smell – the most scary ones being associated with horrific cases of food poisoning and gas leaks. I never eat anything that’s even vaguely past its sell-by date, and often throw things away even if they just look a bit dodgy.

  • Dangers and Safety Precautions Related to the Olfactory Dysfunction Anosmia
    Some interesting points here that I hadn’t fully considered: “Household cleaners can be a risk factor because the odor of the chemicals will not be noticed to warn the person that the chemicals are toxic and should be used in a well- ventilated area. Warning labels should be read as a reminder of the chemicals involved in such things as hair products, bathroom and kitchen cleaners, insecticides, etc. Our sense of smell keeps people aware of automotive troubles.”

  • Diagnostic pathways
    How to diagnose what may have caused anosmia by following a simple flow-chart.

  • The Cranial 1 Quick Sniff
    Diagnose problems with your sense of smell with this astonishingly weird smell flick-book thing. Every home should have “single-use odor presentations for the testing of olfactory function”.

  • Anosmia Yahoogroup
    An Anosmia mailing list for sufferers and their friends discussing treatments, information and providing support for those who have lost their sense of smell later in life.