Category: Random

I’ve been asked to participate in a survey about weblogs and journalism and, since it’s quite a detailed survey inviting lengthy responses, I’ve decided to put my replies online as a series of micro-articles. The first one goes up today, and is mostly concerned with my personal relationship to weblogs and my reasons for maintaining one…

On Weblogs and Journalism (Part One)
People feel pretty disenfranchised from the world around them – mostly their voices – their opinions – don’t really matter in the slightest. Weblogs – for good or ill – make people feel that they’re being listened to – that their opinions matter. If that was all they did, then I’d say that was enough…

On Friday morning, plasticbag.org reached the age of three years old. It seems like a fairly major milestone to me – maybe three years is the time when you begin to think to yourself, “Is this actually something I’m going to be doing for the foreseeable future – maybe for the rest of my life?” A scary thought…

If you’re interested enough – and god knows why you would be – you can still read the first weblog post I ever made over a thousand days ago… A thousand days… It would be good to be able to say that I’d posted almost every day of that time, but since I’ve just bunked off for almost a week, I think that might seem a bit cheeky…

So what’s happened over the last three years? What have I accomplished? I’ve met loads of new friends. I’ve gone from starting work at Time Out to being Production Editor of their website, through to unemployment, helping out on TCN, working on an education site for Europeans and Ethiopians and building a community for the BBC. Now I’m at UpMyStreet.com. I’ve had a couple of different relationships – mostly disasterous. I’ve sapped around quite a bit – as if there was a storm-cloud perpetually around me, and bounced around like a puppy for much briefer, but much more memorable, amounts of time.

I’ve written an awful lot of crap on my site, but I’ve also written odds and ends that I’ll always be able to keep and look at and be proud of. I’ve also pissed any number of people off. Which probably suggests I’m doing something right…

So where to go from here? God knows. I’d be lying if I said I never got bored of thinking of something to offer up to the world each day. I do. Show me another three-year vintage weblogger that doesn’t feel that occasionally. I don’t think the future will contain as much about my personal life, because I think after a while the more you write about something, the thinner it gets… It’s like you wear it out. After a while you want something that’s just for you – that’s yours alone and that you share with no one. I’ve already been writing less and less about what I do away from the computer… So I think the future probably lies more in the ideas that I have, or the opinions that I need to express. Maybe that’s the direction that weblogging itself will be taking as the huge Blogger Boom generation of the last two years settles down and tries to find a sense of purpose for their sites – a reason to keep writing every day. I can only hope that’ll be interesting enough to keep you guys sticking around…

In the meantime, thanks for coming and I’ll see you all in three years time… xx Tom

A weekend away from London is one thing – a weekend with the family is quite another. You never know whether it’ll be pleasant or nightmarish. Will it end with smiles or scowls? It was nearly a disaster before I even arrived. The trip across London was a nightmare in rain and public transport, and I missed my train by thirty seconds. The next train was double the price, and some bloody woman who had claimed two seats glared at me when I asked if I could sit down for the two hour journey… Halfway through the journey – an hour away from Norwich, I took a picture of Colchester station…

The following day we decided to go to the beach. My memories of the North Norfolk coast basically revolve around my step-father trying to get me to swim in the North Sea and it being cold and rainy. So I was a little grudging about the plan, but we all piled into the car nonetheless and drove north…

My suspicion had evaporated by the time we reached Brancaster. The day was beautiful, and the sky – the thing I miss most of all in London – was, well, everywhere. My mother and brother wandered off in one direction…

… while my father took the dog off for a bit of a paddle …

The beach was almost empty – there was a couple playing with a kite, and some people walking a couple of dogs on the horizon. But for the most part, there was nothing for miles around us in every direction… Even looking away from the beach…

My brother has an incredible throwing arm. He can launch a tennis ball into orbit, throwing at least twice as far as any of the rest of us can manage. Our dog – Tango – loves this, and will run backwards and forwards for hours and hours, fetching ball after ball…

At the high-water mark, the beach was crunchy with shells…

After a while we stumbled upon some mud-flats… It’s easy to walk on mud-flats for about twenty seconds, and then all the grippy parts of your shoes fill with clay and crap, which makes the soles of your shoes feel like huge slippy pats of butter, only black…

Some of the mud-flats rise up into creases by some kind of weird natural process. If you get close to them and photograph them close-up, they start to resemble hills, mountains and canyons…

Anyway – no walk can last forever, so we turned to head back to the restaurant, only to be confronted by one of the most beautiful skies I’d ever seen…

I can’t even count the amount of times recently that I’ve written about the movie Donnie Darko. I’m obsessed by it, it’s clear. But now you have the chance to get obsessed with it too, and I’m going to help you do it. No, I’m not going to pay for it. No, I’m not going to rub your ears and hold the popcorn while you watch it. Instead I’m inviting you all to come and see it with me, and with all the other loony friends that I’ve got that happened to be available on the same night. And the night? Tomorrow. Halloween.

Well that’s actually slightly innaccurate. In fact what’s actually happening is that Barbelith is inviting you to experience Donnie Darko Movie Madness tomorrow night. We’re going to claim the whole cinema for cool people, nice people, fun people – you know… my people. I’m totally serious about this.. It’s a great film and you’re all more than welcome – you’re expected to attend. And after the movie? Some kind of drinking, I should think… Yes definitely… A drink. Maybe several…

With regard to the people who are slamming my comments on ‘the power of the incoming link’ [1 & 2] – could I just clarify that I was not talking about Stephen Den Beste… The theory – that the non-specific warblogger that I’ve referred to recently was Mr Den Beste – was first taken up I think by Flit and has now spread to a number of other sites, including Instapundit and Bitchpundit. Each of these sites has its own particularly charming stance on what I’ve said. But it’s all based on a false assumption, I’m afraid, because I wasn’t talking about him at all… As such I’m going to take Flit’s statement at face value and accept that the misunderstanding was not intentional and accept his pre-emptive apology…

There are a few things that I clearly still have to clarify… I’m talking about individuals having a different way to campaign for what they believe in – whatever ‘what they believe in’ might be. The fact that I’m left-of-centre clearly informs the things that I feel strongly about – the things that I’m prepared to campaign for. But essentially all I’m looking for is a way for a community of individuals to have more influence – more, but equal influence – on each other because I think that there have to be campaigning techniques that operate in addition to argument or debate… If you’re not convinced by the techniques I suggested, then that’s ok… I’m not trying to present a fait accompli…

One of the things that people have talked about is how I’m trying to restrict people’s freedom of expression so that only people who agree with my particular brand of politics can be heard. This is simply, bluntly, once and for all, just wrong. I believe that everyone should be able to stand up for what they believe in – I’m just suggesting a way in which people can do that. The approach I’ve suggested might be hideously flawed, but it doesn’t stop the individual concerned writing what they want on their site, nor does it stop anyone else linking to them. So i can’t see how it interferes with their freedom of speech at all, or how it isolates them. All it does it give some people a public way to register their protest without writing about it (and thus in a way promoting it) on their own sites.

I’ve had a lot of feedback on some of this stuff, and it’s been fairly mixed – the more sober stuff has been the most interesting – some people view it as a useful and poweful kind of protest, others think of it as against the idea of the web as a discursive space, and others think that such a view gives legal credibility to people who want to control incoming links to their commercial sites. Some of these I agree with – some of them I don’t… I’ve been less thrilled with the responses from people whose level of argument has been to criticise my teeth though or who describe anything they don’t agree with as “Saudi-Arabian-style”. My favourite one of these comments though has been the one that describes me as having, “a serious inferiority complex when it comes to learning from [my] moral and intellectual superiors.” I quite liked that one…

I’ve had issues with the levels of surveillance that are appearing in the UK for quite a while now. When I lived in Hampstead I remember remarking that there was no point between my front door and my desk at work where I was not on at least one camera. Every so often someone decides to celebrate the terrifying amount of cameras around us all and hey normally do that with a poster telling us all how safe we are now that we’re continually examined. Just recently a new poster started appearing around London, and frankly it’s terrifying beyond measure. It looks like the cover of a 1950s alien-invasion novel, and drips with the sentiments of 1984’s Big Brother posters. But it’s difficult to know what to complain about – the poster itself is more than a little distasteful, but at least it’s triggering a little alarm from liberal parts of the country. Without it we’d probably accept this stuff without a second thought…

An excerpt from an e-mail I sent yesterday – partially adapted for publishing on plasticbag.org– explaining why I think we need a campaigning or protest tool in excess of the simple publishing of opinions – perhaps along the lines of my proposed inbound link strategy…

Basically, I’m trying to work out if there is some kind of direct action or demonstration that one can do within the blogosphere other than simply express one’s opinions. I’m looking for another approach because of this double-bind: if you link to a person with extreme views in order to debunk them, then to an extent you’re actually promoting them – you’re sending traffic to them, you’re giving their views a certain legitimacy. But if you don’t link to them, and you don’t publically talk about them, then aren’t you like the man who lets evil flourish through his inaction? What’s the right thing to do?

I’m certainly not trying to set up rules of governance of the internet or regulate it – I’m just suggesting that if free speech is the only political tool at our disposal, then we’ll inevitably end up with people having to shout more and more loudly in order to be heard at all. The ambient volume therefore just escalates and drowns out more nuanced, less absolutist or dogmatic attitudes. It should be possible to express ones dissent (or horror) with some kind of silence, sit-in or direct action – something maybe a bit like the Beatles returning their MBE’s to Buckingham Palace…

Obviously this is not to say that the specific tactics I suggested are necessarily appropriate or the right way to go, but I think the motivation behind the idea is a good one, and I’d be interested in anyone else’s suggestions…

First things first – here’s a quick (rough) timeline of what happened from my perspective:

• 3.30pm Phil Gyford notices that something has gone wrong with the listing of plasticbag.org posts on Haddock blogs. My assumption? Something has gone wrong with haddock blogs…
• 3.40pm A quick glance at my RSS feed revealed that each and every link attribute on my RSS feed now read as ‘hacx0red’. My assumption? Someone has hacked into my server…
• 3.45pm In still logged into my Blogger account so I go and check the settings. There’s something very wrong going on – my password, my e-mail address and the URL for my site have been replaced with the word ‘hacx0red’. My assumption? Someone has hacked into my Blogger account…
  • Screenshot One
  • Screenshot Two
  • Screenshot Three

• 3.50pm Beacuse I’m nervous about logging out, I try logging in with a different user name in a different browser. This does not work. My assumption? The world’s gone freakin’ craaaazy…
• 3.53pm I start telling people that I think Blogger’s been hacked. People freak out.
• 4.00pm The UK’s weblogger mailing list becomes full of nervous people, and the information starts going out. Various people try to work out how to get in contact with Ev. We finally manage to get the word to Anil Dash who sends the word on further…
• 4.10pm Danny O’Brien and Phil Gyford are getting the word out to Scripting.com.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us nervous, I think. It leaves us with less faith than before that it’s safe to leave the collective writings of years in the hands of a centralised service like Blogger. What would be lost if 700,000 people lost days, weeks, months or years of writing at the same time? Significantly I think if there was an import / export facility to Blogger that would allow people to keep their own back-ups, then this would be less of an issue. In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to confess that while I’m very impressed by the speed of Blogger’s reaction, I’m not overly impressed by the stuff that they’ve written about the experience. I think it’s important that someone explains to us why we should not be worried by this hack on an archive of content that – after all – was created and belongs to each of us…

Further reading: Slashdot.org, Anil Dash, Quicktopic thread, Blogger Status.

October 26 I’ve had it with Linux! Regime Change has failed! Let’s think inside the box, people! It’s time to put the pedal to the paradigm! Join a sleeper cell, then quit and turn everyone in! Got war? Is our children learning? Mark my words, so you can find them later!” That’s right… I am Jenny McTagarthy, Girl Pirate! (You may have missed how big is my fan-base and a crush on Jenny…)

I’m looking for people to try out a new community project that I’ve been developing at work. It’s a completely new way of organising message-boards and I think potentially it’s quite exciting. If you wish to participate or are interested, then e-mail me at tom%40plasticbag.org – it’s going to be of most interest to people who live in the UK…