Does anyone care what I think about the great Flickr / Yahoo login controversy? Not to mention to utterly asinine Wii thumbnail complaint? I dunno but what the hell. Some points.
Yahoo is an evil corporation. Has been for years. This is not news. That said, I think it's slighty less evil in places than it was, say, five years ago. That's still evil, of course, but these things are relative, and subjective. Whatever, it's a big company that only really cares about money.
Flickr was bought by Yahoo nearly two years ago. At that point, regardless of any firewalls or promises about leaving it alone, it became "A Yahoo Company". This is beyond dispute. Putting it bluntly, if you had a problem with Yahoo in 2005 why are you still using Flickr today?
One of the ways Yahoo makes money is though "data mining", building up profiles of users to, amongst other things, direct adverts at them. Oddly, this is what most massive internet companies do. Google stores your search queries. Christ alone knows what News International would do if it had a clue about the internet. Again, this is not news.
Things like Yahoo's Web Beacons (which track you around certain sites on the web) have been around since 2002. They're kidna icky but they're not news. And I'm sure they're not unique to Yahoo. Also, they have nothing to do with having a Yahoo account. If you've been to any site in the program you'll have gotten one regardless of your login. I wouldn't be surprised if Flickr is included in this.
If Yahoo hadn't bought Flickr somebody else would have and they'd have to be as large as Yahoo in order to provide the sort of storage, database and bandwidth support necessary to run a photo site. People seem to have short memories about just how flakey and slow Flickr was prior to the buyout. It couldn't have survived as a nice independent site for much longer. If they hadn't gone to bed with the corporates there would be no Flickr today.
That said, Flickr is just a website. For me it's a very useful website that has led to good things. In fact it led to my current blogging job in a roundabout way. I owe Flickr a lot, not just for making me a better photographer and introducing me to new people. Given that, I'm prepared to sacrifice some moral qualms (which I wrote about last summer) for something that works for me. I have a number of books published by HarperCollins but that doesn't affect my stance on Rupert Murdoch.
What bugs me most of all is the righteous indignation of "old skool" Flickr users who are using this, quite reasonable, requirement to move over to a centralised login system, after 18 months notice, to kick up an almighty stink. If they're such passionate Flickr users from the old days then they'll have known about this for over a year, certainly before they renewed their Pro accounts. Crying foul now is just plain rude, and claiming it's because Yahoo is an evil company shows an astounding ignorance about the last two years. Either deal with it like you deal with every other ethical compromise you have to make in your life or leave like you should have done in 2005.
Maybe I'm old and jaded but there's no such thing as perfect, especially when you bring services into play. If you want to be free of all that shit then host your photos on your own site just like we did in the days before Flickr. Because that was so much better than using Flickr, wasn't it?
God, I've gone on a bit more than I was intending. I hope you've been skimming.
In short, if you're not happy with Yahoo owning Flickr, stop using Flickr. It's only a fucking website.
I remember when the Old Skool was something to be proud now. Now it's just embarrassing.
That's my last word on the matter, you'll be glad to hear.
I've been letting Last.FM track my music habits since October 2004 which is a hell of a long time in internet years. (Actually, thinking about it, you don't see people making that net-time-compression comment much these days. Maybe things have stabilized. Or maybe the real world just caught up.)
I never really used the service but I figured it might come in useful one day and the wonderfully names Scrobbler wasn't intrusive as it sat there feeding the stats. Now Last.FM is getting more useful and might have reached some kind of tipping point thanks, no doubt, to having this incredibly rich data set to play with. Their new Events recommendation service, based on your listening habits and those of your friends, is really impressive. This is the sort of thing web services should be doing once they've gathered a bunch of user data - Amazon do it well but where's the recommendation stuff on Flickr or MySpace? It should be a no-brainer.
However, there is a quirk in my Last.fm stuff. I listen to music on random (or as we now call it "shuffle") most of the time. This is drawn from a relatively small playlist containing a little under 4,000 tracks that I built for the 20 Gig iPod I've been borrowing this year. (If you're interested my audio library has 16,533 items that will play for 54 days weighing 84.25 GB. And I thinned it down recently...) So when I play an album by a single artist a few times it really spikes on Last.fm.
Here are my "Top Artists" at the time of writing with the number of times I've listened to them in brackets:
1: The Magnetic Fields (926)
2: The Flaming Lips (666)
3: The Mountain Goats (642)
4: Pixies (603)
5: Misty's Big Adventure (552)
6: The Kleptones (501)
7: Bright Eyes (489)
8: The Beatles (347)
9: Jeffrey Lewis (316)
10: The Decemberists (269)
That's pretty representative of my music tastes, although I kinda got over my Magnetic Fields obsession a while back now and haven't listened to 69 Love Songs on its own for ages.
However, Last.fm says I've played 27,821 tracks in the last two years which means those Magnetic Fields songs constitute a mere 3.3% of my listening. Number 20 (Freezepop) is 0.7%, Number 100 (ew, Snow Patrol) is 0.2% and then it plateaus into statistical irrelevance. Suddenly that top ten doesn't seem so representative.
What can we conclude from this?
I'm so Long Tail it hurts.
(Can I get a t-shirt with that on?)
[2 Days Later: It all seems to have settled down remarkably quickly. All email activities are back to normal again. Thanks for all the advice and suggested swearing!]
The important bit: If you're sending me an email please don't use pete@ this domain. Use my gmail.com account which, like most of my online accounts, is peteashton.
It had to happen eventually. This domain, my domain, the domain that carries my own personal given name, has been randomly picked by an email spam cunt as their "from:" address. (I think there's a specific term for this but it escapes me right now.) This means a couple of things.
Firstly a load of spam is out there that looks like it came from me. This is obviously not very good. A real world example would be someone who looks a bit like me (balding, skinny, white, glasses - it's not hard really) wandering around Birmingham telling random strangers their name is Pete Ashton, slapping them around the face and running off, which wouldn't do much for my reputation around Birmingham. I'm hoping that email filters are savvy enough to know that spammers routinely forge the headers on their emails with innocent domains but there's a chance, how large a chance I don't know, that some email from me may be blocked. I'd be very interested to know whether this is the case.
Secondly, and more pertinently, I'm getting flooded with returned spam (thanks to spammers not being that attentive to the accuracy of their email lists). In between checking my email at 9am and 5pm about 1400 of the things appeared in my Inbox with another 600 or so being filtered as spam and going in my Junk folder. This has actually happened to another domain I own but in that case they were all address to info@, an address I wasn't using, so I was able to set up a simple rule to delete them on sight. This time they're using all manner of nonsense names all @peteashton.com so filtering is not so simple. In the short term I managed to weed them out by searching for "failure notice", "delivery status notification", "Postmaster", "Mail Delivery" and so on but in the long term this won't be effective, not just because there are so many different systems for returning email but because of the danger of deleting false positives.
Another solution might be to filter out anything not sent to pete@, but that would include emails where I'm in the BCC field such as mailing lists from bands and the like. So that's probably not a go-er. I'm going to try some filtering techniques but would really welcome advice on this. Is there something in the headers I can use?
In the meanwhile I won't be checking my peteashton.com mail regularly until I figure out a solution. Probably once a day when I've got a bit of time to filter out the good apples. So please use the gmail.com email which has peteashton at the front of it for the time being.
(Ironically I don't really get that much email these days - maybe two or three useful or relevant mails a day - but I still need it...)
(Oh, and if you can't help with the tech stuff, suggestions of curse words and phrases that might be strong enough will also be very welcome.)
At the top of your Flickr account, should you have one, is a count of the number of "views" you've had. This, I believe, counts the number of times your photos have been loaded up on their own pages on Flickr and doesn't count remote hosting (such as when I post to this blog) or viewing in RSS feeds. Last Monday my views passed 100,000. To put this in some perspective, most of the other Flickr users I've asked (which, to be honest, is about four) have between 1,000 and 6,000 views. I was rather chuffed.
A week later I had 102,000 views. That's two thousand in a week. That's actually quite a lot. I got a bit suspicious.
There are a number of explanations for this.
1) I'm a shockingly popular and everyone loves my photos. Actually I've got a fairly average rep for someone who's been on Flickr for two years. 186 people have me as a contact and my photos get between 5 and 20 views in their first day or so of being uploaded. I've also been concentrating on the Birmingham photo scene a lot this year and don't post to themed or popular groups that much. I might have a tangible rep within my niche but I'm no Laura Kicey. So that's not the answer.
2) I'm a Pool Tart. Check this guy's photo out. It's a pretty good photo and its owner is somewhat proud that it's been viewed 9,250 times. But look down the sidebar at how many groups he's submitted it to. I don't do this, partly because Flickr make it quite longwinded to spam the groups and partly because it really fucking annoys me when people spam groups I administer. So that's not the answer.
3) I'm a Tag Whore. Generally I like to tag my photos properly. Some people don't. Like this cock who has tagged his stupid Flickr Badge with seemingly every word in the dictionary and then some. I found this because he'd used one of our deliberately obscure Birmingham Flickrmeet tags, jqfm2006. The prick. By polluting the tag system he's gathered 1,970 views for this "photo". Needless to say I don't do this, so that's not the answer.
4) The hits are coming from somewhere else and have nothing to do with my activities on Flickr. I think this is the answer.
Here's a mirror of my Most Viewed Photos page (you can't see it on Flickr itself unless you're me). You'll hopefully notice this doesn't have many of my "better" photos and bears no relation to my personal Top 100, something that has often bugged me. Number one is the Working Gloves montage with 2050 views which gave me an enormous clue. The related Working Gloves blog post on this site is one of my main Google honeypots, gathering (until I closed comments on old posts) 67 messages from Pakistani glove exporters who thought I was a shop which in turn got it indexed as the prime directory for Pakistani glove exporters, so the Flickr views are probably coming from here. Down at number nine is Polysics - Fumi, taken at their Barfly gig last November (and, I should add, one I'm quite proud of). Out of curiosity I Googled polysics photo and there it is at number three. Same goes for (sigh...) Monkey Penis.
Nuff said.
So having made stats watching utterly pointless for my blog Google has fucked up my Flickr stats as well, which isn't that surprising given how much I link to my Flickr stream from here. It's kinda ironic that while half the world is scrambling by means fair or foul to get up the Google tree here I am with PageRank of 6 (which in turn has given my Flickr stream a PR of 5) and it's a mild irritant.
In some ways it's nice to be this visible but in others it's a bit of a pain. I'm sure a significant number of valued long-term readers came here via a random Google search but they only add up to a few dozen. The hundreds of thousands of others mostly come here by mistake and take the blog completely out of context and I could do without them. The reason I closed comments on all my older posts wasn't because of spam (touch wood that's reasonably under control right now) but because idiots who couldn't read were leaving comments that showed off their inability to use a keyboard and it was getting boring. That said, I'm not ready to enter the gated community environment of LiveJournal or Vox or to strip down my RSS feed and stop search engines indexing me. I'm kinda stuck in the middle ground.
Moan over.
So I've been running these Flickrmeets in Birmingham for a few months now and it's been very good on so many levels, as you'll probably have picked up from the hyperbolic posts on this blog that follow each one. You'll note that they're called "Flickrmeets" being, as the are, meeting of people who use the photo sharing site Flickr. This is entirely accurate since none of these people would probably have met without their using Flickr, discovering the Birmingham group and finding like-minded souls on there.
Flickr was set up by a bunch of groovy folk in Canada a couple of years back. It quickly became popular because it was innovative and seemed to attract nice people who took good photos. Popularity in website terms is a double edged sword and scaling the service to deal with this new growth, especially as it was still in development (or beta, as it's known), proved to be a problem. Flickr was often slow and frequently offline as databases were stretched and more storage added. It looked like the service might buckle and die until Yahoo came along and bought it. Yahoo is pretty much a multinational corporation. While they left Flickr alone the service had become, essentially, a corporate entity. The founders of Flickr found themselves on the Yahoo board and everyone moved to California.
This is, of course, a good thing because it meant Flickr didn't die. A significant number of original users were up in arms, predicting a mass rape of the service just as Yahoo did to GeoCities back in the old days. I was pretty sure they were wrong as it was clear to anyone keeping a clear head that Yahoo didn't want Flickr - they wanted the people who created Flickr to make the rest of Yahoo more like Flickr and the only way they could do this was to adopt their baby and keep it safe. And it would seem I was right.
As Flickrmeets started to pop up all over the world the bods at Flickr noticed this as being an important part of the whole thang, so they set up a sidebar on the company blog and asked people to let them know when such things were occurring. In return they would send out some badges and stickers to persons organising events to distribute. Figuring free badges were free badges I duly gave them my address and a month or so later a large envelope arrived.
Flickr call this stuff "schwag" which, if you're somehow not familar with it, is a slightly sarcastic term for promotion items given to prospective clients at trade fairs. Those branded pens you've got that you have no idea where they came from - they're schwag. The t-shirt with a logo and vaguely witty phrase that you wear on Sunday mornings - that's schwag. By calling their offer of free badges and stickers schwag Flickr, probably unintentionally, played a postmodern gen-x slight of hand. We know you know these are promotional items and that our sending them out for free means we consider this to be a worthwhile investment in the promotion of our brand and we're not going to hide that because we're not a faceless corporate behemoth of a company. We're Flickr! We just found ourselves in the position to send you stuff so why they hell not?
But a spade is a spade and schwag is schwag and Yahoo is a multinational corporation with a net income of $1.896 Billion that does deals with the Chinese government.
On top of this I have something of a history as an anti-capitalist. Okay, typing that makes me cringe a little bit but I do have the first printing of No Logo, have been on a number of Reclaim The Streets and Mayday protests and had a subscription to SchNews. While I was never really a hardcore activist that was where I was coming from and in a number of ways still do.
And so here I am part of the street team for Yahoo.
You can understand my unease.
On the one hand I'm very happy to promote Flickr to those who might find it useful. I've gotten a hell of a lot from the service. In fact I'd say it's Flickr more than anything that's helped me improve my photography over the 18 months simply by giving me the motivation to take and post up my photographs and by exposing me to a wide array of quality images. The Flickrmeets too have been useful, allowing me to see how others see the same things I've seen. I would recommend anyone who is vaguely serious about the photos they take to get involved in a community that is friendly and supportive and doesn't have all the technobabble that usually comes with photographic sites.
And yet by organising these meets along with loosely co-managing the Birmingham Flickr groups to make them more useful and attractive to people, I am promoting a revenue earning division of Yahoo inc.
I've had this discussion with a couple of people and the general conclusion is it's not really a problem. The benefits do outweigh the moral dilemmas. As a user of the internet corporations like Yahoo and Google (who, I should add, I earn about $30 a month through hosting their adverts on my site) are unavoidable. But still, when I look at the photos from the last Flickrmeet and see everyone, including myself, branded with the Flickr logo pinned to their chests...
In conclusion the disconnect seems to come from how we use Flickr vs what it actually is. The system allows you to filter so that once you're set up you don't have to experience the millions of shit photos taken by idiots out there. You have your own small organic community of 100 or so people and the ability to follow leads to new interestingness. It certainly doesn't feel like part of an international corporate brand. It's more like a club or a gang, only new people come along via tags and the Explore pages. So a Flickrmeet just seems like a physical manifestation of this thing that we created online - Flickr just sold us the tools just as Jessops (or whoever) sold us our cameras. And, of course, online the Flickr logo is at the top of every page. Why shouldn't it be there in meatspace too? When I take photos the Fuji and Nikon logos are there loud and proud above my lens and on my strap. Flickr is just as if not more important to my photography so surely it has its place there? Right? Not right?
Y'know what? I wish I'd never sent off for that schwag...
It used to be that the Guardian's Technology section (previously known as Online) understood the internet while the Media section, by framing it within the bounds of existing paradigms, patently didn't. A recent article in the former, Making a song and dance, shows the emergence of a new mutant strain of article in that it kinda gets it but ultimately fails miserably.
The basic premise is that when you look in detail at all the bands and artists that have "made it big" on the back of "the MySpace revolution" it's really all about old fashioned major record label activity and thus is nothing new. Therefore the online revolution in music discovery and promotion is the same old system in new clothes.
Which is correct. If you only look at the artists that have signed deals with the major labels. The rise of the Arctic Monkeys, regardless of their musical abilities, is not at all interesting as it all boils down to word of mouth which has fueled the discovery of new non-manufactured acts since pop music began. Their management seized on this buzz and got them signed and the record company exploited it, which is great for them and those that like their music, but it's got nothing to do with "the MySpace revolution".
So, at the risk of banging my head against a brick wall, this is my final say on what MySpace and other online music-related social networking services are all about.
- It's not about MySpace specifically
- One day MySpace will be replaced by something better, probably when the next generation of teens emerge onto the online realm. To understand its success you have to understand the appalling state of band websites. Invariably built in Flash they were impossible to navigate, obfuscated all the important information, were never updated and often made you register before you could hear any music. By contrast a MySpace music page has everything you need on one page - band members, influences, biography, tour dates and, most importantly, the actual music. You could cover it in shit and it would still be an improvement, but that doesn't mean it's the ultimate way of doing this sort of thing, just the first time the information has been vaguely standardised in a manageable format.
- It's all about the Long Tail
- So Madonna has a MySpace page. This isn't interesting. What's important is every band you see at every venue in the country also has one and they all exists on a level playing field.
- Success is relative
- Not every band or artist wants to be famous. At this stage in the game most people are aware of The Problem With Music and while some don't know or don't care there are many who are quite happy with a small but significant number of fans who will buy their albums and fill out their gigs. Previously this middle ground was hard to get established in but MySpace has provided a backbone making it all a lot easier to DIY.
- It's how the bands use it
- Social networks like MySpace are, by their nature, about social networking. I'm kinda surprised I need to say that but within the old paradigm of broadcast it seems to get forgotten. What's interesting about MySpace is not what you see when you visit someone's page but what's going on behind the scenes. People are talking to each other, sharing information and getting connected. Bands are finding gigs, managers, labels and other like-minded artists through MySpace in a manner that dwarfs he previous methods of doing such things.
- There's a halo effect
- Tying in to this are all the other actors on the music scene - the promoters, small labels, badge makers, photographers, bloggers / zinesters, etc. The barriers to setting up your own operation have been lowered significantly by hooking into the relevant MySpace communities as all the contacts and information you need is there - it's just a matter of doing something with it. The end result is an ecosystem which, while it may not replace the major labels, provides a viable alternative.
- The death of bullshit
- There are a lot of wankers in the music scene and their currency is cool. When everything you could possibly know came from the NME and Melody Maker it was easy to get away with pretending you knew the cool. Now, with an infinite number of MySpace music pages out there, it's impossible. You've never heard of the bands I like, but I've never heard of the bands you like either - shall we share links while we laugh at the hipsters?
- Nobody cares what you think
- So what happens when you've got a large number of overlapping communities of artists forming a vibrant and self-sufficient means to produce and disseminate their works? The traditional means of getting music to fans becomes less and less important. In the past a band might have said "fuck the labels, fuck the journalists" and been left with nothing. Now bands and their fans don't even notice them. Music journos and A&R men used to hold the keys to the Rock Castle but no-one wants to get in anymore. I don't care what you think of my favourite band. Who are you anyway?
Most importantly a band on MySpace is not a "MySpace band". This should be obvious, but then so should this whole post.
Yes, MySpace sucks big hairy balls. Yes, it's full of the rather annoying variety of teenager. But when it comes to music it's possibly the only place to go, not because it's a great service (it patently isn't in so many ways) but because of what it allows musicians and those who like music to do. Understand this and you understand why "the MySpace revolution" is important, and remember, this is only the first faltering steps. Just wait to something decent comes along.
Yesterday I set up a new Flickr group, Birmingham Graffiti and Street Art, because, y'know, vandalism is cool as long as it's pretty, and in the process put the standard "this is not Alabama" warning on the description. I think Birmingham is fairly unique in that it gets confused with its post-colonial namesake a fair bit, probably because the American Brum is not that large compared to New York or LA while the UK Brum is our nation's second city (no matter what the Mancs say) so given the geo-political weighting of the mother countries they're probably fairly equivalent. Only ours in more important. So there.
Prior to the glorious interconnected digital age in which we live residents of the two Brums rarely gave each other a second thought, but with advent of regionally-defined online social environments a spate of clumsy confusion arose with people offering their junk on Freecycle to folk on the other side of the Atlantic and getting all mixed up on Flickr. Hence the warning, which won't do any good because no-one reads warnings, but at least it's there.
Only... seeing it there a day later it occurred to me that I haven't seen a Birmingham Category Error for a while now. It could be I'm just not hanging in the places where Alabamians hang (though I am fairly active on the Brum Flickr groups - a Spring meet is being planned if you're interested) or maybe the fact that not only are they not the only Brum but that we're the more important one has seeped into their collective consciousness? On the whole the Birmingham bits of the net haven't been appended with "UK" so maybe this nightmare of rather insignificant proportions is over? Could this be an early indicator of the collapse of the cultural hegemony of the USA? We shall see...
Apparently some guy has successfully sued some woman for libeling him on an internet message board. After disagreeing about Iraq she called him a "nonce", said he was racist and declared his wife to be a prostitute. He was awarded £10,000 in damages.
Obviously the details of this are not to hand. It may well be that Mr Smith was genuinely harassed and that these accusations seriously affected his ability to function in society. But I doubt it. I mean, if everyone who's ever been defamed online were to sue for libel we'd need a new planet just for the courts, and yet society seems to function fairly well.
There's something I don't understand about libel law. Surely the importance of the accuser is relevant? Obviously, if a national newspaper prints that your wife is a prostitute when in actuality she isn't then you have good grounds to claim libel. Should the same apply to someone cloaked by the anonymity of a message board?
If someone in authority, who is regarded as telling the truth on matters of importance, tells fibs about you then it's reasonable to assume that anyone hearing said fibs will take them to be true. If, however, said slander is a result of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory then surely it should be seen as such.
(Let me, as I'm apt to do, hark back to the old comics fanzine days in search of an analogy. According to legend someone who ran a zine got successfully sued by some paranoid jerk because he printed a letter from some other jerk who said nasty things about him. This led to a whole bunch of other paranoid jerks (there were a lot of them in 70s/80s comics fandom...) screaming "I'll sue" whenever someone had the temerity to point out in print they were a paranoid jerk and everyone just wished the jerks would fuck off, except they tended to run all the zines, comic shops and other things somewhat central to the scene. Once again, fanzines laid the groundwork for the modern internet as we know it.)
It all comes down to reputation, I think, which means the libel laws are a little out of date. Back in the day, in order to effectively libel someone you needed a platform from which to do it. A newspaper or a book. Everyone else was just someone in the street. Now everyone has the potential to have some kind of reputation and a potential audience who will listen to them and take them seriously, except these reputations exist in degrees. I have a higher reputation than some moron who posts "U R gay" in my comments (this happens a lot - I delete it because it's idiotic, not because I'm concerned anyone will think I'm gay or something) but I have a lower reputation than, say, Kottke who in turn is lower than a journalist for the New York Times. Maybe, when dealing with paranoid jerks who want to sue other jerks for calling their wives dirty whores, Judges should look at the reputation of the libeler. Maybe they do already, although I suspect such a thing would be really hard to quantify.
In the meantime, if someone tells lies about you online, please remember that you're on the internet. This stuff is normal and no-one takes any notice of it, especially on message boards and forums. Get a grip, dude!
Just had an idea for a useful thing. It might exist but I'm in a hurry.
I often open up a bunch of browser tabs with links from my feeds. Some of them I might blog and when I do I want to give attribution, but sometimes, especially with the long articles, I forget which feed I got the link from so I have to backtrack and search for it. This is not efficient.
A really simple solution would be to stick a post-it note on the tab with the URL of the originating post. This doesn't have to be saved anywhere and can be deleted when the tab is closed. I'm sure a plugin for FireFox wouldn't be difficult to produce. Does it exist?
As you may know, I surf the web on a Mac with Firefox AdBlocked up the eyeballs. No popups ever pop (and if they do they go into a new tab) and banner-ad-choked pages are a delicious sea of white. It's always quite a shock when I use someone else's browser to discover that the web is full of ads and popups, not to mention the threat of viruses and trojans.
That said, occasionally one gets through, and today I had a doozy. I loaded up a MySpace profile and clicked on the View Pics link. Suddenly my browser was shrunk to a teeny box in the corner and a Javascript box emerged from the top bar (which on a PC would look more like an alert box) informing me that I needed to run a critical thingy or something. Having other tabs open I didn't fancy losing everything in that window so I clicked Cancel, the window came back and a large animated GIF pretended to do a system analysis reporting 53 critical errors in my registry, or some shit. I closed the tab and another one opened recommending I download some application called Win-thingy as a matter of urgency. I closed the window and it all seemed to be over, though I wonder if I'll find some pointless Windows files scattered around my hard drive next time I do a clean-up.
For a few seconds I was in the Hinterweb and it was rather telling. This is how most people live their online lives, walking down Crack Alley with a "mug me" sign stuck on their backs. But most worrying of all was that this piece of paranoia came from clicking on a link in MySpace, currently owned by Murdoch's News International who are on record as wanting to maximise their advertising dollar from the operation (as well they should given what they paid for it). This wasn't a pop-up or a banner ad. This was a big fat lie that at best you could call social engineering.
I don't hold the Murdoch empire in much regard, it must be said, but if this sort of thing, especially if it's authorized, is beyond all that. It's the behaviour of scumbags and hucksters not one of the largest media companies in the world. Sort it out, MySpace.
This is probably more revolutionary that you care about but Ben Hammersley has stopped using Movable Type for his blog. He's moved to iWeb, the Apple app for making web pages with the minimal of effort. What's interesting is that Ben is no slouch when it comes to blogging - he's responsible for the current implemetation of blogs on the Guardian site (powered by MT) and has written a book on RSS. He's one of the people I've looked to regarding what's going on it blogging over the years, and he's moved to Apple's version of FrontPage for his personal site. Web standards and semantic markup be damned. What's that all about?
As he explains in these two posts, he's having fun. iWeb allows him to play about with typesetting and layouts that a template-driven site with strict validation won't allow. The text in that second post is just a big PNG image for heaven's sake! But the thing is, it looks really good. Each post is crafted as a unique object where photography, type and content work together. (And yes, there's still an RSS feed.)
Last year I designed a site for my mate Dave to host the trailers for his short movie. Being a professional Photoshop user with a good design sense he sent me the designs as fully realised screenshots which I tortuously adapted into reasonably compliant markup. It was a pain in the arse for both him and me but we got there in the end. A month ago he got hold of a copy of iWeb, threw together a new site in a couple of days and uploaded it. And he enjoyed the experience. He now has a site that looks exactly how he wants it to without having to involve a 3rd party "expert" who repeatedly tells him that sort of thing can't be done "properly".
Have you noticed how weblogs all look the same these days? Not the Blogger ones with the standard templates - the so-called A-list blogs. They're all very simple column layouts with minimal clutter and a lot of white. Now, simple is good and very hard to get right, but I suspect there's another reason. If you want to do anything other than the basic text-document layout with CSS it's a monumental pain in the arse and when you get it right nobody notices. So why bother?
As it happens I still like playing about with raw HTML and CSS occasionally. I'm slowly working on a new blog at the moment based on some designs by a friend of mine and it's going to be pretty much standards based. And this blog is going to stay with MT for the forseable future because I like it. But I'm a pseudo-expert, a dilettante who likes getting under the hood and understands the limits. Normal people don't get that. They want it to look the way they want it to look and bollocks to the "right way".
And, if I'm honest, that saying bollocks is a damn good thing. All the great leaps in design (and granted a whole heap of messy shit) came from someone saying bollocks to the right way. There wasn't a standards council for the wild world of zines back in the day and for good reason - every zine was a unique object from the words inside to the way it was stapled it represented the person who made it. "You can't do this, you can't do that." If web standards suit what you want to achieve with your internet presence then use them, but if they don't then fuck 'em.
Which is one of the reasons I'm no longer doing web design for hire. The way I see it, if your content is good enough it does't matter what the layout looks like so get over to Blogger or LiveJournal. And if the design is that important to you then Do It Yourself. Either learn the hard stuff or get iWeb or some other point-and-click design package and get on with it.
Since Songbird appears (I haven't played with it yet) to do pretty much what I requested on this blog a year ago it would appear prudent to put in another request.
I like going to gigs. There are a large number of musicians and bands whose gigs I'd be interested in attending, too many for me to track individually so I'm very likely to miss them unless I religiously scan the gig listings every week, which I don't because there are far too many of them.
What I need is a way of filtering the listings according to my preferences. I could do this by manually entering my favourite artists into a list and cross referencing that with upcoming gigs, but that's far too much effort.
However, it occurred to me today that I already have a list of my favourite artists - my iTunes library. It's safe to assume if I have an album's worth of tracks by someone that I'd be interested in seeing them play live and this information is stored in a handy XML file.
What I want is to be able to upload that file to a service that will produce a list of my "favourites", cross reference it with gig listings for my area and alert me, via email or RSS, when a gig is scheduled.
Can't be that hard, surely?
Update: Tom points me to Upcomingscrobbler which pretty much does this except it uses Last FM data for which bands you listen to and compares it with the Upcoming.org listings. It's pretty keen and I'll be subscribing to my listing but a couple of problems spring to mind. Firstly it misses out on the bands that I like but don't listen to that often, the "long tail" of my music library if you like (an example would be Asobi Seksu who I recently "rediscovered" having not listened to them for a year or so) and secondly Upcoming isn't that comprehensive, at least for the UK. But it's a tremendous leap down the right track. Go check it out.
Here's something I haven't seen talked about much, possibly because it's not really all that interesting, but what the hell.
Now we, or at least those of use that have been online for a while now, have a reasonable history of our activities nicely recorded and organised on the web an unexpected phenomena sometimes occurs. All those blog posts and photos and mailing list emails and the like are simultaneously history and current. Take a blog post I wrote in, say, May 2001. For me that entry exists pretty much purely within that time frame and is relevant to me now mainly, if not only, as a historical artifact. But for someone finding it for the first time via Google it's new and, assuming they don't see the date stamp, current. This can very occasionally lead to my getting a strange email or comment about something that was concerning me four years ago as if it were yesterday, which is a little odd. But in the case of this blog it's still directly related to me and so I can make sense of it.
A slightly more abstracted version of this is the "Photos you've commented on" feed from Flickr, a very useful service which tracks the comment threads for, well, what it says really, meaning I can keep track of conversations about photos I've expressed an interest in. Usually these are photos I've looked at in the last week or so but very occasionally one pops up from the dim and distant past, especially now I've been on Flickr for over a year, as someone stumbles upon an eight month old photo while surfing tags or something, and I'm all like "where did that suddenly come from?"
It became apparent pretty quickly that the personal and the private were merging to form something rather vague and socially disruptive (in a good sense) and I suspect, over the next decade or so, we're going to see the same happen with the past and the present. Just the other day I was searching for something on Yahoo and wishing I could just eradicate everything that wasn't new. There was just far too much history in the results. I mean, who wants to know about stuff from 2001 anyway?
In which Pete writes a long rant about web design, leaves it for a day or two, comes back, realises he's wrong on a number of points, considers re-writing the whole thing, decides not to and posts it as is with the hope that, by having it out in the open, a more reasoned analysis might come to the fore. You have been warned.
I could, and probably should, write this in more depth but it's been bugging me for a while now and I really should get it out of my system, however incoherently. I appear to be having "issues" with web design.
As you might know, pre-web I did zines. My first zine was kinda shite and my later zines were kinda okay, some might say good. The beauty of zines was I could print out text in columns, stick them onto pieces of paper and photocopy them thus creating a magazine without any need to learn the arcane arts of typesetting or printing. Bingo, I'm a publisher. Regardless of my relative merits in this endeavour these principles of DIY publishing were essential in letting anybody publish whatever they wanted. Without eulogizing too much, I consider this a very important thing.
In the early days of the web anyone who was prepared to learn basic HTML (which was pretty much the same as learning how to use early word processors) could put together a website and stick it on Geocities or Angelfire and bingo, they were an online publisher. It was great and pretty much amplified the zine revolution a million-fold, leading to this whole blogging thing we have today.
But those early web pages were seen as a problem. The implementation of HTML was not consistent and riddled with errors. Similarly HTML itself was something of a bodge, attempting to both describe the data it was marking up and instruct how it should be displayed. For the general user this trauma was not apparent but for those wanting to aggregate and process the web the whole thing was an incoherent mess. So XHTML and CSS were devised, with XHTML giving structure to documents so they can be parsed by computer programmes and CSS looking after how this is displayed in browsers and other output devices. This is all well and good, and generally I'm a big fan of the demarcation between content and appearance but it's also where my "issues" come into play.
I think this all stems from the web being devised (I want to say "controlled" but that's a bit strong) by programmers. Programmers are great - they make sure everything we use with our computers works - but they're sticklers for accuracy. And rightly so. Not only does a program have to be 100% accurate in order for it to work, coding is often a collaborative effort so everything has to written in such a way that any other programmer coming to the project can understand it immediately. And so we have standards, not just for the programming language but for how it is written. And these standards are pretty strict.
And so we have XHTML and CSS, the building blocks of the new and improved web. To cut a long story short learning these is not like learning an old fashioned word processor. If you want to create a website that is 100% standards compliant you have to learn a shit-load of stuff, and even when you've learned all that you have to learn all manner of tricks to make it work in every browser.
And, to be honest, I'm not sure I can be arsed any more.
I think my moment of can't-be-arsedness came with the launch of Movable Type 3.2, specifically the revealing of the new default templates for the CSS. Compare that, if you will to the 2.6 CSS I'd used to teach myself how this stuff works. I accept that for most of you they're both utter gobbledegook but there's a fundamental difference between them. The earlier one could be edited by a novice while the current one is a professional document.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this. Movable Type is a professional piece of kit and so it's not unrealistic to expect people using it to be professionals in that field. And you can, after all, use the endorsed Style Generator to create your own style sheet with a few clicks.
Which brings me, finally, to my big point. The web has developed to a stage where the entry barrier is too high. Certainly anyone with a Blogger account can be a publisher - their site will look nice and produce RSS feeds and be indexed properly - but they can't get under the hood and make it their own without some serious research. All they can use are clunky WYSIWYG tools that allow some minor tweaking but only within certain parameters.
Maybe this doesn't really matter. At the end of the day there are millions of people out there writing stuff that millions of other people are reading with all of it standards compliant so the search engines can accurately catalogue it, and none of them have a clue what a p or div tag is. And that's fine - they shouldn't need to really. But what of those who get the itch to go further, who want their blog to look unique or to do something with their templates that hadn't been done before? What if they want to start getting creative outside of their content?
A few years back I started learning all about database driven content management systems without knowing what a database driven content management system was because I could look at the Blogger templates and figure it out. If I was starting out now I seriously wonder if I would have taken one look and decided, hell, I can't really be arsed with this.
Or to put it another way, I read something like this article on transitional vs strict markup, the sort of thing I might have studied with great diligence a year or so back, and the first thing that comes to mind is "oh, fuck off already."
Sure, standards are important but in the march towards compliance I think something quite fundamental to the very nature of the open web has been forgotten - that people by their nature like to make things their own, to customize them and make them unique. The barriers for doing this with web pages used to be very low indeed and, like I said, created the social web we know today. Those barriers have been raised to such a level that getting into web design (both visual and structural) is potentially far too much effort. While I have no solutions at all, I think this is a problem.
Blimey, that went on much longer than I intended. That bug up my arse was bigger than I thought.
I linked to The Metasciences yesterday because I like their music - kinda quirky anti-folk which reminds me of Jeffrey Lewis' solo work and the stuff my mate Steve Ball has been recording in our living room (more on this later...) - but how they bubbled up into my consciousness is, I think, interesting.
Warren Ellis runs a podcast called The Apparat Programme comprised of mp3s sent to him by unsigned bands which he edits (with no speech) into a half hour show. Feedback implied that a lot of people though the Metasciences were the standout act so he gave them a plug which I took him up on.
This is interesting because of the combination of randomness and curatorship along with Warren's uncanny feel for how the internet works. On the one side you've got this chaotic mass of music out there with no easy way to navigate through it without some serious commitment and on the other side you've got people who recommend stuff based on their own point of view and singular experience. Neither of these are optimal, the former being too wide and the latter being far to subjective. To put it another way, if you're listening to music chosen by Joe Muso as part of the Joe Muso experience then that's great, but if you don't really care for Joe or 90% of the music he recommends then you need to do some filtering, and if you can't be bothered then you're going to miss out on that 10%.
What we have here is a middle ground. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, Warren isn't wholeheartedly recommending all the music in the Apparat Programme, merely filtering out the dross and leaving in stuff that has a certain spark. A kind of "not shit" criteria if you like, acting as a primary filter which will lead to other things. He then notices chatter about one of the bands (which he might not even have paid too much attention to when putting the show together) and gives them a blog entry with all the weight of his endorsement that implies, allowing those who can't be bothered with the podcast itself (I've got about five of them sitting there unlistened at the moment) to cut right to the good stuff.
Certainly, this kind of swarming recommendation is nothing new - the del.icio.us popular aggregator works along these lines - but it's the human hand involved that interests me. Maybe it's nothing special and goes on all the time, but there's something about Warren throwing a load of music at his readers and getting them to sort through it swarm-style that appeals.
I'm now wondering if something like this for Birmingham unsigned bands would work, but in the meantime go to The Metasciences MySpace page, scroll down a bit, and download their album. It's very good.
Something of the bloggers block is afflicting me. I've spent the last few days blaming my tools which while a cop out does have a grain of truth. I should really write a post about it, but I've got bloggers block.
So, something frivolous to try and dislodge the lexical colon.
Is the opposite of pseudonymous "onymous"? If it isn't then fuckit, it is now, at least for the duration of this post. For I can suspend the rules of the language at will, such is my power.
There are two sorts of internet naming systems that I have identified. The pseudonymous and the onymous.
Jane Doe goes for the pseudonymous. Her Hotmail account is "bunnyflop56", her Flickr account is "piccywikky" and her LiveJournal is "doomclanger". On top of this her Flickr screen name is "Fly Like A Donkey" and while on LJ she displays as "What Now, Mr Fish".
While I theoretically love Jane to pieces and think her work is of top rate, she fucking pisses me off because I am onymous. if I can't use peteashton I try my droid name (it's a long story) peteash10 or other variations that reasonably identify me as me. Screen names are always Pete Ashton.
To be honest, it's not the pseudonym that annoys me so much as the variation, so maybe there should be two categories, the consistent pseudonymous and the rampant pseudonymous. Consistents are cool because their real name becomes irrelevant making them de facto onymous. The rampants are the problem.
Why? Because they're so bloody hard to keep track of, especially if I know them in the real world by their given name. For example, I discover Jane has an LJ, either because she told me or I figured it out (the latter can take months and I'm sure there are loads of my pre-web friends out there whose comments I've read but never connected). So I subscribe to her feed in my feed reader. A few days later a post pops up from "What Now, Mr Fish" and I have no idea who it's from because I don't keep a handy cheat sheet stuck to my monitor. To make matters worse, after a few weeks Jane gets bored with this witticism and changes it to "I Am Lord Of Cheese" or something and I'm completely bamboozled.
So please, if you're going to use a silly name, and I accept there are good reasons for doing so, be consistent about it.
It's not often you can be pretty much certain you're responsible for something neat happening. You might have been involved but the complexity of things in general means it's hard to take the credit. That said, I'm pretty sure this is my doing. It's not a particularly major thing, but it's kinda neat. So please excuse the ego. I don't mean to boast, honest. It's more a celebration really, a pumping fist, if you will.
Last year you may remember I posted up a request for a searchable small gigs database feed site thingy, a listing of gigs happening in my local area that I could filter to my needs and get RSS feeds out of. Something more useful that the kludgy sites already in existence. The general consensus was that, while a keen idea, building, maintaining and updating such a service would be far too much like hard work and nothing really came of it.
Birmingham has a pretty vibrant music scene but it's not particularly well structured. This is probably a good thing as it allows for a lot of variety and spontaneity, but it's a bugger to keep track of unless you're in the middle of it. In the last 18 months I've been keeping tabs and getting to know the lay of the land, but it's still quite bewildering.
At some point I became aware of Upcoming.org, a pretty bare-bones site created by Waxy Baio that lets you list events you're planning to attend. These are then merged with other people's listings creating a snapshot of things happening in your area, or "metro". It's pretty popular in the States, as you'd image, and metros like New York give a good idea of how it's supposed to work. I liked the idea but was disappointed to see the Birmingham metro was completely barren, rather like the page for Bury St. Edmunds, in fact. No listings at all, ever. Then it occured to me. This is the listing service I was thinking about. It's already been built and no-one's using it. It's there for the taking. So I grabbed a couple of forthcoming events listings and stuck them in. Bingo, a searchable small gigs listing that produced RSS feeds.
Next I sent a message to the Misty's Big Adventure mailing list ostensibly asking people if they could recommend any gigs on the list but with the secret agenda of spreading the word without hyping it. A few more hints were dropped here and there and before you knew it the feed was having the gigs added to it here and there, sometimes in bulk by someone with the same altruistic motives as myself, sometimes by people who were actually planning to attend.
And now, within a few months, the Birmingham metro listing looks like this. Neat, huh?
Here's some cool things you can do:
- Forthcoming gigs organised by Zoot - simply done by adding the Zoot tag to each entry.
- Gigs at Bar Academy
- Gigs where Plinth are playing
- Gigs I'm planning to attend
- and much much more
And almost all of those things produce RSS feeds, which means you can get then in your feed readers (eg Bloglines) or syndicate them onto your site, as I have on the main page, right hand column, under the photos. It would be really easy to build a page representing Birmingham based on these feeds and I might well do that at some point.
Currently I spend a few minutes every week or so updating the Zoot and Catapult Club listings but with any luck I won't have to bother even with that as the community takes over.
Just think, a few months ago this was a barren wasteland and now it's a sprouting grass-roots, non-commercial, user-built community thingy. And I kick started it.
See if you can do the same for your "metro", why don't you.
It's been a couple of years since I started the Linklog which squats on the left hand column of the main page being all eclectic and worldly while the blog itself swims around my turgid inner self. I like to think they complement each other. Or something.
Whatever, I now I have over 2000 links stretching back 25 months which gives a pretty good picture of the sort of things I've found noteworthy online. Join me, gentle reader, as we travel back in time and see which links are not only still interesting but actually work...
In August 2003 Andre Torrez had just launched Dropload, Linklogs were starting to take off (feel my cutting-edge-fu!), we were trying to find the man's head, blogjam's Neil Armstrong: The Awful Truth was amusing us and Dave Eggers reacts strongly to the concept of selling out. Bloggers who's 2003 permalinks now go 404 include Ben Hammersley and Matt Jones. And mine, so I can't complain really...
Scooting forward to August 2004 and Andrew Torrez had just launched Dropcash, there was a Stormtrooper Fairyland Robot Wedding, the Something Awful forum remixed Watchmen, all the 9/11 conspiracies were collected together, apparently I quite liked the music of Harry and the Potters, Smoking Women Are Sexy hit my blogroll and stayed there, a gallery of KFC knock-off restaurants emerged, someone superimposed a geographically correct tube map over a satellite image of London and the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness entertained us all.
I dunno, maybe you had to be there.
Well, the great Myspace experiment is over. I really can't be bothered with the thing. To be honest, the main problem is the interface. It doesn't just suck, it really fucking sucks big hairy balls. Maybe I've been spoiled by web services that take their user interface seriously but there's no way I can be arsed to get involved with the Myspace world. My profile as been stripped down and I'm outa there.
So why's it so astoundingly popular? To be honest, I don't really know. There's no doubt an element of critical mass, where once enough of your friends are involved you have to get involved yourself no matter how much hard work it is, but I do wonder if it's just that people don't know any better. That's not to say they're stupid. They just think services like Myspace are the normal way to do things on the web. I'm reminded of the gasps of amazement of people when I show them Google Maps and edit the details of my photos in Flickr directly on the page, or when I demonstrate to them how to open pages in tabs in Firefox or how this RSS feeds thingy actually works. Okay, maybe gasps is pushing it a bit, but remember most people out there are using Internet Explorer to access their Hotmail accounts. For them stuff like Myspace is perfectly fine and dandy because it gets the job done.
But for me, nah. No offence but I have better things to do.
And one of them is to finally get involved with Wikipedia! You'll hopefully have noticed I tend to link to this wonder of our internet age a fair bit, usually when I want to have something explained or defined. In brief, it's a web-based encyclopedia which anyone, and I mean anyone, can edit. If this sounds like a terrible idea that's bound to go wrong, all revisions are stored so that if someone does something stupid it can be rolled back. Amazingly it works really really well with Wikipedians carefully crafting entries and adding to or editing what others have created. The best way to really understand how Wikipedia works is to watch Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie.
I'd been putting off getting involved because it seemed like quite a big deal to write stuff there. I rely on Wikipedia (with caution of course) for a lot of things so the idea that my ill-founded knowledge might be relied on by others seemed a bit of a dangerous thing. Plus once you start writing something you really have to be certain about your facts. That requires research and citation, which seems like a lot of hard work.
However, while surfing around some British comics pages for a BugPowder post on Wikipedia I noticed that my BugPowder posting colleague Steve Block had a profile there and had been active for a few months. Now I didn't think "Hell, if Steve can do this then it can't be that hard", perish the thought - it was more that I'd never knowingly known anyone involved in Wikipedia before, and now here was a buddy.
So with some trepidation, and after reading all the guidelines and help pages, I started putting together my first page. I think it's probably quite typical of people's first forays in that it's just a big list of Comics Journal Interviews. I have a pretty large, but by no means complete, collection of The Comics Journal and its interviews are always essential reading. However, there doesn't really exist a decent index for it anywhere. Now I have one, not just for myself but for anyone else to use and, hopefully, add to. A useful resource, certainly, and the interview subjects are all linked to their respective Wiki pages, but not it's really "encyclopedic" is it.
Looking through the pages Steve had created I noticed he'd started one for Escape Magazine, one of the more important comics anthologies from the 1980s of which I know a fair bit and have most of the issues. Here's what it looked like before I got to it and here's what it looked like when I'd added to it. (It'll no doubt change in the future so here's what it looks like right this second).
I know about this stuff. I've spent the last 15 years involved with it in various degrees and have a wealth of resources to back me up (those Comics Journals for a start). Ever since Caption where I chaired a panel on the history of the UK small press, I've been wanting to get this stuff down. It's not only interesting, it's actually quite important. Or I think it's important and I know a lot of other people think so too. And now here's somewhere to do it.
What's interesting is that having created a page that has some weight to it (and I haven't finished it yet, there's a lot more to come) I've given weight to the subjects that spin off it. For example, there's now a need for pages for all the artists that were connected with Escape to exist because they have a context. Steve started me off by writing "stubs" for articles he thought should be there and in turn I'll start other people off. It's all quite wonderful really.
And, above all, Wikipedia is a standards-compliant site with a superb user interface that encourages you to interact with it. It even has a vibrant community. Myspace? What's that then?
I've been hanging out on the Birmingham (not Alabama) Freecycle group for a couple of weeks now and it's been fascinating watching what get offered. Here's a selection of things people were going to throw away but decided to offer to the world first:
Mini hover mower
Mothercare Baby Bouncer seat
Hiking, walking and Men's Health magazines
Bathroom suites (yes, plural)
Professional punch bag
High quality 35mm camera
Jaz external disk drive with 6x 1GB removeable disks
Psion 5 handheld computer
Various bike parts
Free range rabbit ("dead but fresh")
Electric Juicer
Acoustic guitar
Ring binders
Wharfdale speakers
Pine cot and mattress
Pine bedroom furniture
Joystick
Dozens of size 8 shoes
Dog guard for a Citreon ZX car
30 Quarry tiles
Typewriter
JVC hi-fi stack system with speakers
photo developing equipment
phone
Single bed
TDK Palm-to-Ericsson connection kit
Scanner
Two pairs of jeans that husband is now too skinny for, originally cost £4
A couple of things I've been interested in have gone really quickly. Most things get snapped up within an hour of being posted (except the typewriter for some reason) so while it might not be ideal for getting hold of specific things (if you want it you can guarantee others will too) Freecycle looks to be a keen way of getting rid of stuff fast.
Folk can also post Wants to the list though unreasonable requests are frowned upon. Some of the more interesting ones I've seen with tantalising tastes of backstory:
Really old garish carpet ("size wise i need enough to wrap a body in! please believe me, i'm actually not a psycho, my friend is...making a film...wait... oh this goes from bad to worse...")
Solar-powered / wind-up radio ("I'm going camping to the Lakes in a few weeks time, and it dawned on me that I was going to miss out on my favourite past-time -- listening to the radio!")
Weights ("vinyl or iron")
Wrecking bar ("I need a large crowbar, called, I believe, a wrecking bar. Does anyone have one occupying valuable shed space, which they don't use, please?")
Paving slabs any amount and hardcore ("Having had great success in finding greenhouses/glass and a trailer I could now use some slabs and hardcore to make a base for my large greenhouse on my "goodlife" allotment. Any quantity considered")
Show window dummy ("485 squadron Air cadets (Harborne) are looking for a dummy to use for training new cadets the "art" of keeping their uniform in good condition.")
Toilet (white) ("A friend is after a white porcelain toilet to replace her old one which she broke recently by dropping something on it.")
Composted Manure ("Our garden soil is the pits, the builders have ruined what was once fertile farmland. We live in CV7 and can collect.")
Terracotta pot feet ("kicking around...")
Bird cage for Cockatiel ("Its just a male on its own called Billy however we are moving and he's currently in a home made box after being moved back into the house from an avery in the garden.")
Engineering bricks ("It is a little known fact that every house has a small pile of bricks in the garden. There is no reason to presume that any two piles of bricks are going to be identical this means that someone, somewhere will have a pile of approximately 150 clean engineering bricks. If this is you, and you live within about a 20-30 mile radius of Redditch then I'd like to hear from you")
Blankets, towels, dog bed ("Just rescued a Border Collie from Birmingham Dogs home. Could do with more old towels for wet days, and also blankets for back of car/kennel/bed")
I hope I've demonstrated why Freecycle is such an international success story. Yes you're helping others and reducing reliance on landfills by redistributing unwanted things around the community and that gives the requisite warm glow, but just watching the Offers and Wants stream through is endlessly entertaining. I fear I may get hooked and subscribe to Freecycle lists in areas I don't even live in...
As you'll no doubt be aware, the Firefox browser is very good indeed. One of the main reasons it's so essential is the huge number of extensions you can add to customise it to your specific needs. Safari, the default Mac browser, is also a great browser but this is what tips the balance for me. Obviously the choice of extensions is a personal thing but this is what I've currently got running...
Adblock - Self explanatory really. Blocks adverts so you can read news articles and browse Yahoo in peace. Always a shock when you use someone else's computer without it installed. If you've surfed the web for a few years and never ever clicked on a banner ad you can use this with moral impunity.
Foxytunes - Controls your mp3 player from the browser status bar. Very useful if you listen to music and never really leave your browser.
Linky - An old fave. Gives you options for opening multiple links at once. Select a bunch of links and open them all in tabs, wait a minute or two and read them. Very useful for photo galleries and online comics. Does more stuff also.
LiveLines - I use this in conjuction with Bloglines. Redirects the RSS subscription button to the reader of your choice, be it web or desktop-based.
Resizable Textarea - Allows you to drag and expand text input boxes (such as for comments). Very useful. Sometimes invaluable (for example, when editing Movable Type templates).
Scrapbook - Save the entire page and, if you like, all the pages it links to, or just save the selection. Ideal for archiving but also for vacuuming content, such as a page that has loads of mp3 or image links. Tell scrapbook to grab them and go make a cup of tea. Works a little like Wget or Curl but with just one click.
Link Toolbar - I raved about this here. Very useful for navigating around a site.
Forecastfox - Weather Forecast in your status bar. Tends to disagree with the BBC forecast but then they're both often wrong.
Google Toolbar - Actually, this isn't really very useful unless you're a power Google user. I have it so I can check pagerank but even then not very often.
Super DragAndGo - Latest addition. Drag links up a bit and they open in a new tab. Drag them down and the tab is opened in the background. Could be really useful, time will tell.
Finally, three web design specific extensions:
Aardvark - Surprisingly useful extension for analysing the markup of a page. Useful for figuring out exactly how the CSS is working. Also can be used to blank out sections of a page prior to printing or whatnot.
Web Developer Toolbar - If you develop for the web, this is your toolbar. Not essential 24/7 but occasionally very useful indeed.
EditCSS - Essential for web design. Opens the CSS in the sidebar and any edits are updated immediately. When you're happy, cut'n'paste it to the real CSS file and Dobbs' your uncle.
I do a podcast.
My podcast gets reviewed
They also review a podcast by the Bluegrass Preservation Society which I download and enjoy.
While listening, the presenter, Ewell Ferguson, says he'd like to hear from people outside of Central West Virginia who enjoy the show.
I email Ewell saying how much I'm enjoying the show here in Birmingham, England.
Ewell emails right back. We have a brief email based conversation.
Ewell asks if he can send me a photo of Buster the Bluegrass Kitty Cat.
I send Ewell my address.
A little later I decide that since Ewell is sending me a photo I might as well order one of his custom CDs and since I don't know much about Bluegrass I ask him to select the tracks himself.
Having done this I get distracted by something shiny and forget to paypal the cash.
A stunningly short time later a priority envelope is sitting on my kitchen table containing a photo of Buster and a CD of kick-ass Bluegrass music.
I love the internet!
Armando Iannucci has a new TV program coming out soon so he's doing the rounds of the broadsheets being interviewed and writing those sorts of articles that people who have new TV shows or books or whatnot write, usually taking some aspect of modern life and taking a contrary position regarding it to make a biting comment on society.
Iannucci's effort in this circus, That's Enough Entertainment, Thanks, written for the Daily Telegraph, is not, as it happens, a bad piece. I was expecting some thin-brained expansion of a stand-up routine that I could easily demolish, but annoyingly, and to his credit, there is some good thinking hidden under the laffs here.
That said, he brings up something of a bugbear of mine - the horror of the overflowing iPod to illustrate the problem of choice fatigue.
"Having all music in their pocket, they find it more difficult to be entirely satisfied with the track they've chosen to listen to. The urge to flick is greater across multi-channel TV, not necessarily because the programmes are bad, but because logic dictates there has to be something even better somewhere else."
Now, I understand this. The problem with modern living in an affluent country like our own is that we have too much choice and we don't know how to process it. But I think there's something of Plato's cave going on here.
I'm a little rusty on the specifics but as I remember it Plato (or maybe it was Socrates via Plato) had this metaphor about how people deal with knowledge. Imagine a cave where someone is chained up so he can't move. All the can see is a blank wall onto which are projected shadow puppets animated by a flickering fire. As far as the chained victim in concerned this is reality because he can see nothing else. Everything about the world can be explained by him in terms of the shadows. Now, say the man is unchained and allowed to walk around the cave. He sees the static models and discovers how the fire animates them. And then he discovers the entrance to the cave and sees the outside world in all it's infinite glory. As I remember it (and it has been a good decade...) the man gets scared and chains himself back up.
But what bugs me about this is that we've been dealing with absurd quantities of choice for quite a while now. It's only since we've been able to accurately quantify it that people lose the ability to cope. My mum recently asked me that common question about the 11,000 mp3s on my computer that would run for 40 days non stop. "When do you find the time to listen to it all?" she exclaimed. I pointed out that thanks to her previous career as a singer and her partner's previous career as a conductor the mass of vinyl classical records they own was probably equivalent, not to mention the many shelves of sheet music and orchestral scores that line the spare bedroom. Does she look at this and wonder when they'll find the time to listen to it all? Does she realise that she'll probably never listen to a decent chunk of it ever again and dispose of it? Of course not. The fact that it's there and available should she want to is what's important.
Or to put it another way, you don't walk into a public library to which you have complete and unfettered access, and exclaim "how will I ever find the time to read all these books!"
I remember way back, circa 1992 or so, when the notion of "information as power" first came to me. I would keep newspaper articles and photocopy bits of information from the reference library about whatever it was I was fascinated by at the time. In retrospect I never actually did anything useful with all this information but I was convinced that in order to survive in this modern age the accumulation of information was vital. As the internet started to come into our imaginations this notion became more widespread. Imagine being able to access all the information in the world in seconds! People will become empowered! It'll be the dawn of a new age!
The problem is that people aren't trained to deal with all this stuff. They've suddenly been unchained from the cave where everything was black and white and have been thrust into this arena where you have to make critical judgments about everything you experience, and it is everything. It's no small wonder that many people just stick to a few forums or blogs and effectively ignore this wealth of wonder out there - it's just too much hard work to apply their critical faculties to all this new stuff. And that's not to say they're spoon-fed drones or anything, just that this is a quite different arena.
That said, I don't think the incessant quantification helps matters. The emphasis on choice implies that the user has to actively chose all the time from a range of options that no-body can deal with. Five thousand songs, 200 online newspapers, fifty millions online radio stations. Given this enormity you're more likely to stick to your FM radio and newsagent with the occasional trip to a small branch of HMV so you can get on with the more important aspects of being alive.
Seasoned web users figured out long ago that the only way to deal with the enormity of the web is to set it up so you don't have to be bothered. Either stick to your own niche or let others do the aggregating. Check your feeds and when you've read them all then that's it. Once the internet that you can be bothered with has run out, the other fifty-thousand billion pages might as well not exist. Keep everything in manageable packages the parameters of which you have specified otherwise your brain will explode and you'll never read anything.
So Iannucci is sort of right. Given the infinite amount of stuff out there it's pointless to pretend that you can experience it all, but I think it's wrong to not be bothered and just ignore it all. You just need to figure out the best way to filter it, and that way will be pretty unique to you.
But what really narks me about Iannucci's piece, the part where he's gone all glib-stand-up-routine, is that he can be bothered. The reason he never watched the Sorpranos and all the other "must-see" programs he lists is because he's busy making his own TV and radio shows. Since, by his argument, he's just adding to to the infinite pile of entertainment, what's the point? The point is that it's worth creating this stuff for the same reason it's worth seeking it out. Communication of ideas, be it entertainment or hardcore academia, is what makes us human.
There's quite a lot to all this. Probably a book's worth. Maybe if there's enough interest I'll try and expand on bits of it in future posts. Or maybe I won't bother.
When I was younger, growing up in Croydon during the late 80s, I didn't feel particularly patriotic. As ever the reasons are complicated by the naive idiocy of youth along with a hefty dose of nihilism but one of the main reasons, or at least the reason that still stands up to scrutiny, was that people I didn't like tended to be patriotic, ergo I wasn't patriotic. Thatcher covered herself in the Union Jack for a start, and then there were footballs fans. There wasn't some complicated socio-political thing going on - I didn't like the Tories and I didn't like football. Since the teenage way of expressing your distaste with something is to reject everything everything associated with it, I rejected patriotism.
Then when I was 16 I went to the States to visit my dad for the first time in years (messy divorce, ask me another time) and I remember being very aware of my Britishness, which isn't hard as Americans, and particularly Texans in my experience, are endlessly fascinated by us. As, I should add, are we of them. But anyway, I started noticing things about me, things I liked and things I believed in, that could only be explained by the country in which I grew up. Did this make me patriotic? Is there any real difference between identifying with things this country had infused me with and loving this country?
Skip forwards a fair number of years and bring the internet into play. Since it's inherently untrustworthy and full of errors, one has to develop a system of filtering in order to get the most out of it. Who has written this? Who linked to it? Who links to the person who linked to it? What else do they write about? What communities to they belong to? Why should I listen to them?
Another way of sorting it all is to make snap judgments based on appearances, just like in the real world. I'm guessing the what we're looking for when we do this is someone who is kinda like us. So since I'll be holding myself in very high regard when judging others I'll be looking to see if they write well in a slightly self-depreciating, witty and insightful manner, read what I consider good books and comics and listen to what I consider decent music, have their own domain rather than a LiveJournal or BlogSpot blog, have designed their site themselves rather than using a default template and, this is probably the most crucial point, provide a well constructed full RSS feed for their blog. And then they turn out to be a twat, but I digress.
Possibly the most important thing in this woefully inaccurate judgment game is where they're from. The areas of the web I tend to surf around tend to be dominated by Americans, usually from the States with a decent smattering of Canadians. When a British voice pops up on, say, MetaFilter, I notice it and pay attention. Conversely when I discover that some blogger I had assumed to be British due to their dry wit and effective use of sarcasm turns out to be a Yank I feel a palpable sense of disappointment. Similarly, when British bloggers win US-centric awards or get published by US based publishers I feel proud of them.
I even go so far as to consider some Americans honorary Brits which I'm sure would weird them out if they knew or cared about it. Maybe, if I'm not the only one who does this, we should start a directory or poll of honorary Brits from the western colonies? I wonder if they'd consider it a compliment or not...
It goes hopefully without saying that this is all very stupid of me. At the end of the day it doesn't make any difference where someone is from as long as what they're doing is good in some way. The beauty of the net is that I can have a communication with someone on the other side of the planet as easily as I can with someone down the road. So why, even though I know it's idiotic, do I do this? Could it be the net has made me more patriotic than I would have been otherwise? Does exposure to a wider range of "others" make you more protective towards those who are more like you? All I'm doing is whittling it all down to something manageable, but why on this criteria?
It's an interesting one, I think. Xenophobia and racism usually comes about in communities that don't have any contact with or understanding of people outside their self-contained and self-sufficient little world. This is different to becoming more aware of people outside your physical community, but how different? I don't think other cultures and countries are worthless but I do give people, ideas and notions from my country more weight and importance. How does this differ from the flag-waving BNP moron down the street?
What I think I'm driving at is can I be patriotic and not be a wanker?
I just saw this over on Jez's blog where he's quoted someone. They start off with "Thank G-d I'm not dependent..." and it got me thinking about people who self censor. Usually it's religious stuff or swearing, and I always find it odd. If you object to swearing that's fine, but J*s*s, if you're going to f***ing swear, then do it properly, you c**t. That's what I say. But then people are odd and that's the point of them really.
I have a nice long post planned for the weekend. Some wacky stuff happened at work this week and it's a good one, but it needs to digest a bit first and Friday should put it all into context.
One of the mailing lists I'm on got trolled this week, which was interesting as it rarely happens to places I hang out on. I was surprised that I was one of the first to cry "troll" while other were still giving the benefit of the doubt, not because the others were naive or stupid or anything - for a while I thought I might have been mistaken - but because despite having never been in a flame war or whatnot I was able to spot it for what it was. I guess my net-fu is stronger than I thought.
During a long oops-I-forgot-mothers-day-oh-you-weren't-in-anyway phone call with my mum I realised I'd forgotten how old I was. Turns out I'm 32, not 33.
Thanks to the MyBlogLog service which records how many times links on the main page of my site are actually clicked on (kind of a reverse stats thing), I've actually discovered some accurate information about my users. Of those who have broadband and download 50mb files of music, exactly half use the web site while the others use the RSS feed or LiveJournal. Which was nice to know.
Doctor Who is really good. I know it's a bad thing to download it before it's even been shown on telly, but I was never going to watch it that way anyway and will be torrenting the rest, so my conscience is clear.
Having introduced housemate Sam to Flickr she asked me how she could get notifications of comments posted to her pics and the like. Since this is done using RSS feeds I set her up with a Bloglines account using their handy system of mailing an invite from my account with a few of my feeds included. She was suitably impressed and maybe even converted to the system and I went back to my own Bloglines account since it's pretty much the centre of my webernet life.
The next evening I'm on my machine and Sam's on the sofa with her laptop. I ask how the Bloglines thing is working out and she moans that she's suddenly got loads of new feeds that she didn't subscribe to, presumably put there as "recommends" by the Bloglines people, and was currently deleting the things. That's odd, I think. They don't usually do that kind of "helpful" thing. So I popped over and had a look, only to be greeted by my bloody account, or rather my account less 10 or 15 feeds. After a major panic where I scribble down all the feeds still showing on my screen that aren't on hers before the browser refreshes, I figure it out.
A year or so back when I moved in here I didn't have my Mac so I borrowed her PC for a bit. The cookie Bloglines placed there was evidently still alive after all this time. But why wasn't there a new cookie for Sam's account? Evidently when she set up the account with the invite she didn't go through the usual logging in process hence no cookie, so when she booted up she got my account.
Two things. Firstly, I'm so used to logins expiring after a few hours that, other than for banking and other sensitive things, I tend not to bother to click the "log out" button. Bloglines obviously don't operate like this, which is great if you're always on the same machine but I've signed in on quite a few over the last couple of years... Secondly, the fact that a seasoned if non-techy user like Sam will automatically assume that a new service will spam her account with a hundred or so spurious "recommends" says something or other about web services.
It's not a big deal but I did have something of a near death experience regarding my online life. If that account vanishes for whatever reason I'll be completely lost. I've put considerable investment in a web-based startup that's just been bought by Ask Jeeves of all people. Time to investigate backup strategies methinks...
Google are, by all accounts, making shedloads of money from their AdSense program, which is, of course, interesting since they've recently opened it up to a much wider base of websites. When it started I would never have been able to host AdSense ads but for the last few months I have been. And in January I passed the minimum revenue whereby I can get paid. (I decided not to get paid just yet though as they're "looking into" other ways of making payments other than the current US cheque (sorry, check) of which my bank would take a hearty chunk out of so I'm waiting for them to introduce PayPal or something, but I digress.)
What's not been so widely reported, though, is how Google are essentially profiting from bad search results, "bad" here being quite a lose term and not meant to apportion blame to Google exactly or to the users who don't fully understand how to search, but meaning where the page indicated as giving the information requested plainly doesn't.
I get a lot of traffic from Google, so much that it renders my stats pretty much useless. This happens partly because I have good PageRank (for my sins) but also because there are many many words on this site and the chances of those five words you searched for appearing somewhere scattered in one of my monthly archive pages is often quite high.
So, Google sends someone here and they're disappointed. Maybe they're intrigued by my sparkling wit and acrobatic verbiage, but they probably haven't solved whatever problem it was they were searching for. (Of course, sometimes they do, and that's great, but often they don't, and that's my point).
So, I have two classes of readers. The first is my regulars, you lot who actually read what I write most of the time and understand it within the context of the blog. If any of you have ever clicked on an AdSense ad in the archives I'd be surprised since they tend to be as detached from the spirit of this blog as can be. Then you have the rest, those thousands upon thousands who've come here by mistake, who didn't want to come here in the first place and are now wondering where to go next. They're the ones who, occasionally, click on the ads, and they're the ones who are generating a small amount of cash for me and a large amount of cash for Google.
I'd imagine the same process happens on the Google search pages themselves - if the results are useful then you're going to use them but if they're bobbins then you'll check out the sponsored links on the sidebar. Is it not interesting that when Google gets the job done properly it makes no money but when it fails it generates an income?
This isn't a criticism by any means. The ads are probably useful as a last resort, since they're generated using the same algorithm that sent that searcher to my site to begin with, and they're probably the only way of generating income for Google so I don't begrudge them at all. And I don't mi