“I am part of the web development team for XXXX where we are constantly trying to improve the www.XXXXX.com site’s user experience. Part of this improvement involves meeting our users’ expectations when they are referred to XXXXX.com from other websites. To achieve this we are trying to ensure that all inbound links to our site point to a page that is relevant and useful to the visitor and that the link has anchor text that accurately describes the page it is linking to.

On this page of your site http://perfectpath.co.uk/XXXX you have a link to XXXXX.com. To help us improve the usability of our site it would be greatly appreciated if you could change the link so that it has the following anchor text and links to the following page.”

No.

This is my blog. If you don’t understand that as an answer, then you’re not qualified to be in any web development team imho.

There are two parts to it:

1. My – I write it and keep it tidy. I write whenever and whatever I like. I update things if I think there’s some value in doing so. I don’t work for you just because I linked to your site. Content on my site doesn’t get updated just because you decide to reorganise your site. If you break your own links or are engaging in some SEO shenanigans, it’s really not my problem.

2. Blog – the web is not an extension of your content management system, it’s a place where I write on the internet, for myself and for people I know. I didn’t link to you for your benefit, I linked to you because I thought it might be useful to my readers at that time. I’m highly dubious that anyone will look at that post very much, the value to people who read this blog has deteriorated over time anyway. Yes there are interesting things in my archives, but my post linking to you isn’t one of them, it was just a “Here’s what I did today” post.

I can’t say much more without going into details that would reveal who the e-mail came from. Gah!

Facebook has a kind of retweeting function so if you see something that someone else has linked to and you want to share it, the person whose feed you saw it in gets some automatic credit. Good.

I’ve only seen it so far in other people’s streams as Monkey McNutz via Chicken Crazoffsky: OMG this video makes me pee in my pants!

When both parties are a friend of mine then it can be confusing (if you don’t know the form). Who saw it first? Who’s refacebooking whom?

Then I saw it a few times where Monkey McNutz was clearly retweeting people who aren’t in my friends list people I’ve never heard of like Duckface Dibble.

So here’s the problem: I read “Monkey McNutz via Chicken Crazoffsky: OMG! ” as “Monkey says, by way of Chicken … OMG etc.” which doesn’t really make sense. It’s like Monkey is using Chicken as a ventriloquists dummy – whereas actually it’s the other way round. This message is coming to you from Chicken via Monkey (cos you might not know Chicken at all)

I think it’s something about the placement of the via clause – if it were at the end of the link (or whatever is being shared) then it would make sense, because it’s more obviously an attribution – but having it in the Name field drives me McNutz.

See? You don’t see, do you, it’s just me, isn’t it…? sorry.

This snip from Dave Briggs has grabbed a few folks’ attention:

“Lloyd has the bravery to make himself and his life an integral part of his work. He literally lives and breathes this stuff. If I had lots of money, I would give a pile of it to Lloyd to just carry on being him. You should, too.”

So if you’ve avoided micropatronage so far because it’s just not big enough, listen to Dave

You can see my linked-in profile here

“Let’s do something to fix the world!” requires 3 or more players. Otherwise it risks descending into “Two boring gits mouthing off in the pub.” 20-30 folk make for a really good game.

The players are gathered out of business hours in a conference suite of a leading company or a government department. In the foyer, they are given mineral water, orange juice (occasionally cranberry), tea and coffee. Sometimes there are peanuts and kettle crisps. Gamesmasters who introduce alcohol at this stage are asking for trouble. The players are left to mingle. Most huddle in corners with their old pals. One or two, not knowing the etiquette, pursue other players around the room trying to press business cards into their hands while describing their highly valuable services.

After this warm-up period, the players are led into a meeting room which may contain tables and chairs arranged cabaret style or just chairs randomly scattered or, in the Owen variation, there may be little or no furniture at all.

The gamesmaster/mistress announces the theme for the evening, the “Big Question of the Night” or BQN (once hilariously, but mistakenly referred to as “the bacon” – ie “If we can please just get back to the bacon”). If any mild excitement has already emerged s/he will dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd by reading the contents of a long and detailed Powerpoint presentation. The theme is usually a confusingly worded question. Those devising the BQN should ensure that it covers a very wide subject area – it needs to be BIG, man, really BIIIIG. Squash out any specificity and introduce as much ambiguity in the question as possible. To add spice you may wish to declare that supposedly well-defined and well-understood terms are up for re-definition in this context.

Players are now grouped by a method of the gamesmasters choice, though “Boys v Girls” and distinctions based on social class or ethnic background are generally frowned upon in today’s politically correct dystopia. Don’t worry, the socially capable can get on with anyone and those who look a bit lost can be shepherded up into a “Nerds” group.

Now the “conversation” starts. There are a number of recognised opening gambits: “There’s nothing new under the sun”, “We must firmly lay the blame at the feet of the last government”, “I’m alright, Jack” etc. are played as a dummy to make sure that any new players don’t have a clue about what’s really going on. Then the real play starts. Players take it in turns to offer their solution to the BQN.

You may find the following observations on play to be useful:

1. If you are there to sell a commercial service that might at a stretch be a solution to the BQN, you must not refer to that service by name, nor may you reveal (except in a whispered aside to a trusted co-player) to the group this happy coincidence.

2. If you know or suspect that a co-player is trying to sell such a service, it’s considered bad form to declare this outright. However, you might make some knowing remark which makes your co-player blanch while the rest of the team remain unaware.

3. Wherever possible your contributions should refer to solutions that stress certainty, incentivisation, efficiency, driving out redundancy and duplication and the well-known fact that all human-based systems tend toward equillibrium. Phrases such as “it’s human nature”, “survival of the fittest”, “no pain, no gain” are all splendid signs that the game is going well.

4. Points are available for telling a story you once read in a book. With a bonus if you manage to get the title of the book and the name of the author completely wrong. Extra bonus if you actually heard the author speak but still get her name wrong.

5. Points are sometimes awarded for inventive use of diversionary tactics such as arguing definitions, restating the important differences between the public and private sectors, drawing pyramid-shaped diagrams on the back of a napkin. However, most conoisseurs will recognise these as the hallmark of the newcomer or amateur.

6. At the discretion of the gamesmaster, a “plenary” session may follow where those players with inflated egos get to repeat everything they said and ignore what the rest of their group offered. If these people are particularly self-important, you may wish to provide “scribes” to make a glowing record of their wise words on flipchart paper. Then it’s off down the pub.

Disciplinary notes:
1. People who try to point out that this is just a stupid game that we play and it never gets us anywhere except salving our consciences, and it’s always the same old faces and god, what are we doing here? may be pronounced “A Bore” and sent to the corner to think about their wicked ways (mostly though they are simply ignored).

2. Anyone trying to start a real human conversation based on individual, personal experience, that isn’t about selling anything, or making people look wrong, or making ourselves look good is given one chance to try again and a withering look of pity. If they start up again they will be escorted from the premises immediately.

The winner is anyone with a vested interest in their little bit of the world staying exactly the same as it is, thank you very much.

At 8.20 tonight the NATS site said ” restrictions will remain in place in UK controlled airspace until 1300 (UK time) tomorrow, Friday 16 April, at the earliest.” and “at 0230 (UK time) tomorrow we will advise the arrangements that will be in place through to 1800 (UK time) tomorrow. However be aware that the situation cannot be said to be improving with any certainty as the forecast affected area appears to be closing in from east to west.”

As I walked through London I overheard conversations between worried tourists and businesspeople, but also jovial banter about people stuck on holiday in the south of France.

First question then is for the vulcanologists and meteorologists:

“How long will the cloud of ash stay over the UK?”

Answer is of course “We don’t know, no really, we don’t” – it depends both on the length of the eruption (it’s still going on) and on the weather conditions.

So it could be over in a few more hours. Or it could go on for months (!) Thor Thordarsson is quoted on BBC news as saying: “If the eruption has a face change and starts to produce lava… then we might be in for a much longer haul, an eruption that might last for months or even years, with a quiet period in between intermittent explosions.”

Prof Bill McGuire, professor at the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre is quoted in the same article: “it is worth noting that the last eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull lasted more than 12 months.”

That was 1821-1823 though – no jet engines to damage.

So more questions, this time for economists. In the case where the eruption continues for months:

1. What is the daily economic effect of a total ban on airtravel in the UK? (I normally hate these big numbers bandied around, but if we can do it for snow hitting London, we can make an estimate for this) What are the costs? Missed meetings, people just not being in the right place at the right time, delayed delivery of cargo etc.

2. How about that for those countries that are currently affected by the cloud?

3. How long can airlines stay in business in the face of no air travel? Are we talking days, weeks or months? When might we expect the first call for a government bail-out?

4. Which are more vulnerable to a prolonged ban, airlines or the airports?

5. Which other businesses in the air travel value chain will be seriously affected – who is highly dependent and already economically weak?

6. Who’s going to make a killing, other than Eurostar? or (gulp) the ferries?

Note: these questions are not all mine, they have came up in conversation with fine Tuttle people in the course of this evening.

Two things I notice about this group of posters at Epsom station:

1. The common use of Black, Red & White both between the dark fiction titles but also with an exhibition about Victoria & Albert – does this tell us anything about our attitude to Victorian times?

2. Why are these books so popular with suburban rail passengers? Or at least why are suburban rail passengers routinely targeted by the publishers of these books? What does it mean that large numbers of people pouring into London every morning have just spent half an hour immersed in blood, slashing, and psychopathic torture?

But my first reaction was “Blimey, this is going on for a long time.” (the current weather pattern of cold and snow)

And then I thought “Hang on, isn’t this what winter’s *supposed* to be like?” We’ve become so accustomed to having only a few individual days of snow that having a prolonged cold snap with associated precipitation feels out of the ordinary. It’s the corollary of “Oh, we had a sunny day, that’ll be our summer then!”.

But didn’t it used to be like this all the time? Why shouldn’t winter have a fortnight or so of snow and ice? Has anything actually changed here? Why is this so important? And so, yet again, I’m left wondering whether it’s the world that changed or that my dislocation is a result of warped perception. Is it them or is it me? Usually the answer to that question is… errrr… yes it’s me so forget it, ignore what I just said and let’s get on.

Epsom, Surrey. KT19

North End Rd, London. SW6

So it’s time for this again.

Sorry, I can’t help myself.

Seems Rupert, Mike, James and Dan are all having a go too.

I saw this earlier (the copy reads: “Buy a special pack and we’ll grow a hedge in the British countryside) and muttered to myself:

“If you really want to grow a hedge in the countryside, why don’t you just go and do that, rather than making people pay for your poisonous and habit-forming liquor and then spending money trying to make them feel good about you by doing something entirely unconnected so that they’ll buy more.”

I get quite nauseously self-righteous around the middle of Sunday – it’s best to keep clear.

In the time it took to mutter (perhaps it was more of a grumble), I found myself in front of this little scene where someone had released their stomach contents, possibly as a consequence of ingesting too much of the above-mentioned liquor:

which made me think:

“No, Stella, actually, just forget the hedge shit, what I’d really like you to do is to go round personally on Saturday and Sunday mornings and clean up the puke that your product contributes to and then think a bit harder about whether printing the URL to DrinkAware on your posters is quite enough.”

I mean, really.

I then saw someone on twitter point to Guerilla Gardening, a site that facilitates small groups going out and making urban spaces more green, leafy, flowery or otherwise lovely.

And then this morning when I got some cash out, I noticed how bloody filthy this cash machine in Cockspur Street is. And I wondered if anyone would want to do some off-the-cuff street cleaning – the nightmare is that you’d probably be arrested immediately with tampering with a cash machine, no matter how much you protested that you were performing a secret civic service. But might it have legs (particularly for urban dwellers) are there things you could clean without getting into trouble, especially if there were a group of you and are there lessons buried in the Guerilla Gardening site that might help it happen?

Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do it, mainly because devising instructions for how to take your photographs and constructing a metadata scheme that could accurately but simply describe any street corner in London proved way too complex. Plus the web was a very different kind of place – this was an information retrieval system, not a social one. Oh yeah and forget GPS, who was strong enough or rich enough to carry a GPS receiver around with them? Nonetheless, it would have been cool, right? I think the early podwalks had a similar inspiration.

Now the smart people at Google have caught up with my brilliant vision

And (nearly) everybody hates it.

In my opinion, Google Maps Streetview is just a rich enhancement to a map. I have used it to identify places I was going (in Paris, France and Austin, Texas) to get a feel for what sort of neighbourhood they were in and to understand better how I might walk there.

I don’t understand the privacy concerns that people have. Assuming you’ve been (un)lucky enough to be photographed by a car, what are the chances of anyone who knows you seeing it? And in the event that you (or some top-secret piece of your property) are snapped and you find out about it, then you can ask for it to be removed. This seems to me to be way beyond the power we have with CCTV in that 1. We can see it. and 2. We can get it removed. It’s ironic really that when a private company does it, we get to have a say, but when our democratically elected councils or government agencies do it, we don’t even have access.

What do you lose by having your home or car photographed? (mine isn’t there incidentally, they haven’t got beyond the A24 in Epsom) I’m not saying it’s nothing, just honestly trying to understand what it is.

Yes, I can imagine it leading to an imagined worse outcome of the BNP list leak last year, with the list “enhanced” with links to pictures of the outside of each member’s house. But the mashups there were pretty well regulated, once the first few had been done, people realised what a silly thing it was to do and what a dangerous precedent it was.

Before it came to the UK (and by the way, it’s only in selected cities), I’d used the Parisian and Texan versions to look at places I was just about to go to – working out how to walk there without having to cross 10 lanes of traffic etc.

I’ve also used it to look at places that I may never get to see, like parts of the Northern Territories in Australia (can’t remember how we ended up there…)

And it also works well for showing people places I’ve been and explaining something visual.

And as Russell points out, it’s good for the nostalgic – Places I used to live that are just the same and places I used to live that are very different.

I’m also interested in what’s not covered – No great views of Buckingham Palace for example and great chunks of the West End are missing including Oxford Street and Cavendish Sq.

I don’t know what this says about our respective cultures, if anything at all, or what point you could use it to make, but I thought it might live in the analogy library until someone could work out how to use it for good or for evil.

And don’t get me started on the lack of soundproofing in the sit down loos or the ones that flush as soon as you stand up.

How does this get sorted out, please?

UPDATE: So I tweeted about this and almost immediately got something back from Al Green saying to let the Network Rail helpline know. I misread this as the National Rail one, as I’m somehow unable to let go of the idea that it was their responsibility. I got something back from them quite quickly, saying, thanks, but it’s not our patch guv, talk to *Network* Rail. I left a message through their online form too and got a call from someone on Tuesday afternoon to say that they were sending someone along to have a look. Sure enough by Wednesday, all the traps had been removed. So now I’m looking forward to our little brown friends recolonizing, getting their yummy treats from Jimmy Spices bins and taking them back into the undergrowth to tuck in. So it seems to work, though it would have been quicker if I could learn to read properly.

A favourite has always been Passport to Pimlico (1949) for the location shots of immediate post-war London as well as the plucky defiance of the residents of Miramont Gardens. What’s disappointing of course is that it’s actually filmed in Lambeth on the other side of the river rather than in Pimlico itself. Nonetheless it formed an important picture in my young mind of “that London”.

If you haven’t seen it, get it and take a look. Spoilers may well follow…

Watching again, this weekend, I noticed many motifs that echo what I’m thinking about a lot with respect to self-organisation and emergent behaviour, but in particular two examples of herd activity – firstly, the way in which the idea spreads through the community that they are Burgundians and therefore need no longer comply with the post-war austerity measures or indeed any English law they dislike and then later how the crowd gathered to witness the defeat and evacuation copy the kids who have come to throw provisions to their parents (the kids who got the idea from seeing the penguins fed at the zoo).

And I laughed out loud a lot too.

I love it – I’m a news junkie – I can’t get enough of this stuff and these guys supply it very well. It also fits very well with some work that I’ve been doing within Government that I *still* can’t talk about properly, but hopefully will very soon.

So what next?

In following the pattern of traditional news media with live coverage they show two things: firstly that there’s so much more that mainstream media could do, if they could be bothered to learn and let go of their ideas of how things have to work. I think this is the main reason Reuters are doing it, but (yes there’s a but) what it also reminds me is that there’s a whole lot more to news than instant live coverage and, even more importantly that there’s a whole lot more to social media than getting a few seconds scoop on the big boys.

There’s a limit on how live you can get. So in certain circumstances we can get a scoop pretty easily just by happening to be in the right place at the right time or to be witness to something that otherwise would not get any coverage because the benefit from the story doesn’t outweigh the cost of sending a 5-person camera crew. However, when it comes to set pieces like yesterday, the marginal speed gain from live-streaming from qik is wiped out by the drop in quality – the added value is in the contextual stuff that together the guys were creating while running around and pulling together stuff from twitter, flickr and qik.

What the social stuff is best for is the slower, longer-term story-telling, the relating. The repeated application of this kind of reporting is what really wows people, one-offs are fun, but ultimately unsatisfying, because we don’t, we can’t get under the skin of a story in one morning. Yesterday we got a very very broad look at a very shallow event – I’m interested now in how we get depth as well as breadth.

Once Cameron had finished speaking, BBC News fell back to the studio and analysis from a specialist political correspondent. I think we need now to be looking at how we provide that sort of added value, of contextualising stories, breaking them down and looking at them from a range of perspectives. And we get our context by writing and creating other content tangentially to the story that the subjects want to tell. The social reporter interviews the bit-players, junior officials and also-rans because what they think and say tells us as much about the main story as what the official speech-writer managed to squeeze into a time and space designed specifically for conveying a precise message to a relatively small group of hacks. Then by making all the content available, not just the annointed bits that push “the message”, we, the reader/viewers get to filter and re-mix to help make sense of it all.

Things are getting really cool.

Photo: Sizemore

Naturally, I can’t use an image here or everyone would do the same and then photographers wouldn’t get paid and then there’d never be any motivation for photographers to ever go out and capture the world.

/* breathe /*

Try
1970′s Parents
1950′s contact sheets
African American Soldiers
Dancing Girls

@kangus got me started

I can’t believe that no-one at First Great Western thought about whether these power outlets were usable with the charger from one of the most popular mobile phone handsets, or any other one that isn’t a simple 3 point plug.

I hope they do the simple thing which is to turn them upside-down. BTW, this was in first class, I didn’t check, but the last time I was in standard class on a FGW train, they had the same problem on table seats, but the other seats had an outlet between non-table seats.

However the press release is available on the Huddle site too. Though the actual study and important details of methodology are not, we are told that it’s the result of talking to 202 local authority officials a few weeks ago.

My gripes are:

• The use of “public sector workers” to describe the study sample as in “more than half of public sector workers (52%) are disappointed with lack of innovation in IT services”. No. More than half of the officials asked maybe, but 202 people in local government are not necessarily representative of the public sector as a whole.
• Government with a capital G usually means central government and the executive in particular “One third (32.5%) believe the Government’s IT problems could be solved by buying from local, UK-based companies” So were these local government people asked about the Government’s IT purchasing policy or their own?
• The confusion of unwillingness to adopt social software in local government with Central Government IT overspends.
• No details of what sorts of local government officials these were – either in terms of service area or in terms of seniority or responsibility for decision making.
• An assumption that IT departments are the problem – is there evidence that those authorities that have banned Facebook have done so entirely on the say so of IT? Surely it’s more complex than that?

I want to make it clear that I’m sure I probably agree with most of the findings of this report and other people would find some clear facts about staff opinions in this area valuable , it’s the sloppy reporting that I find annoying – can someone who actually knows something about the subject give us a decent summary?

Naturally, rumours, speculation and gossip have been circulating today. As far as I can make out though from the statement on the booking site and the buskers-only mailing list, the main points are that:

No new sponsor has been found to replace Capital/The London Paper – the sponsorship package of £1m+ has funded the administration of the scheme by Automatic Management who ran the audition/vetting process, employed Busking Site Managers (BSMs) to visit the various pitches regularly and ensure all is well, and managed the telephone and internet booking process.

The contract with Automatic seems to have been terminated with very short notice – while we all like to have a moan about how things have been run, they’re a good bunch of people and I hate to see the BSMs especially out of a job.

The internet booking system is to be discontinued and all bookings will now happen over the phone and rosters will effectively be fixed by 2pm the previous day as that’s when they’ll be faxed (yes faxed) to Station Supervisors. This is a killer for me. Because I fit my busking in around consulting, writing and facilitation gigs I rarely book more than 48 hours in advance. I pick up most of my pitches as cancellations or from the unpopular pitches/timeslots, either on the day, or the night before. It’s not clear to me how the booking system is going to work and it looks like a recipe for double-booking disputes on the one hand and pitches needlessly going empty on the other. I do hope that internet booking can be reintroduced (preferably a re-written system coded by someone who understands the web – and basic online security – don’t ask!) but I reckon I’m probably in a minority.

It made me think about being a father, having a father, being a let down as a father, being let down by your father, being let down by your friends, being a let down to your friends, the stuff everyone knows about you except you, finding hope in the smallest things, having hopes dashed repeatedly, motorbike taxis wtf?, not knowing what’s going on, losing everything, carrying on, the difficulty of attacking an enemy with an elevated position, what it must be like to shoot a gun, being in a gang, being on the outside of a gang, unconsciousness, what it must be like to be shot, to see a flash and have your flesh ripped by a bullet, how hot it can get, how good it is to shout in the sea.

So yeah, quite a lot really.

Photo from adman_as on flickr by-nc-sa

The not-so-obvious sign that twitter’s about to go mainstream is that the really smart people are so bored with it they are messing with the concept. This week has seen Hugh making the ultimate sacrifice and fairly swift resurrection. It’s also seen Andrew Baron trying to sell his account & followers on e-Bay (although he’s now deleted the auction) These are the kinds of one-offs that can’t be replicated, but hopefully will inspire some more interesting activity – Mark, how do you describe this sort of copying behaviour?

At the same time, it is becoming more and more like the playground with bullies and victims finding each other very easily. It’s a good job there are some grown-ups keeping things sensible. pfffft!

We’re trying to get the next couple of months of the Tuttle prototype settled with sponsorship – £300-£500 gets you fame and geek gratitude for a week, but on the basis that it’s often easier to raise a lot of money than just a little – you could book say the first (or second, or third…) Friday of the next three months for £1500. Helen’s done some work on polishing the value proposition for sponsors – go take a look and if you or your clients would like to play, you know where I am.

The Tuttle Breakfast next Wednesday sold out in a matter of days and now has a waiting list of 13 people. We’ll do more. Post your ideas for sessions on the wiki – we’ve already loads – I particularly like Mike & Mecca’s suggestions that we need to break out of the echo chamber – I’m hoping that Wednesday will fulfill some of that.

I went to MeasurementCamp last week – I’m still feeling uneasy about it. I just know that with hindsight if I was back where I was 12 years ago, with hindsight I wouldn’t have put so much effort into measuring public services. Or maybe I would, but would try to find ways of balancing the hard and the soft better. Social Media metrics enable and encourage gaming in place of authenticity but when you say it like that it sounds awful pompous and spoilsporty.

I still need more work and somewhere to live from 18th May. Shortest paragraph – greatest headspace. HALP pls kthxbye.

“BLAHBLAH has released enhancements to BLAHBLAHBLAH , its professional-networking website for support
of more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing across BLAH.

This is the first major refresh of the design since the platform was launched over 12 months ago and is the result of the feedback we have received from our growing number of registered users and the recommendations received from a detailed usability study commissioned by BLAHBLAH.

We are confident that users will find the new design more intuitive to use and will benefit from the enhanced help and guidelines that are available on the site. We anticipate making a number of other functional enhancements to the site over the coming weeks and will advise you about these soon.”

Clearly the excitement was too much for “users” of this “community” and they all tried to click at once…

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