Archives for May 2007
Twitter Reminder
As a terminally absent minded person I like this a way to use Twitter as a reminder system. Also a reminder that we have a Twitter Group that we use to send out notices about the programme and solicit input to the show.
CBS buys Last.fm for £140m
In 2006 I visited Last.fm in their rather run down offices in Whitechapel, London. It was the kind of near derelict 1960's building, you'd expect to find a sweatshop not one of the UK's most innovative tech firms. I shared a coffee with Last.fm's Martin Stiksel, brewed in a kitchen looking like something out of the Young Ones. Looking at the state of the sink I was rather more worried about catching a virus than I've been during any tech-related interview since. Well they've moved on and with this £140million acquisition by CBS (the largest for a UK Web2.0 company) they've confirmed their success.
Street Views on Googlemaps
O'Reilly Radar report that Google are adding "immersive" views to their maps. Now as well as seeing what a location looks like from above you can stand at street level and get a 360 view of the location. You can play with the tech yourself here . The service is currently only available in a few locations, but it's an exciting development.
It seems to me reading this report about a couple who work for a sat-nav mapping firm, much of the raw material for these kind of maps may also exist. Interesting possibilities open up when you think about how this data could be used and enhanced particularly in a business context.
UPDATE: I suppose this effectively counts as a second-thought. Internet users have been pointing to odd things caught by the new "street level" system. One very popular link is described there and elsewhere as someone leaving a strip club. I won't link because there is in fact no evidence that the man was leaving the club, he was photographed outside the club, that's all, he might just have chosen an unfortunate time/place to park his car. But it highlights some of the risks with how people may use this technology, this man, whether he visited the club or not, has had his imaged plastered around the internet with the description "man leaving a strip club." Now this is a problem with the interpretation of the technology rather than the tech itself - but it highlights the dilemma. On the one hand a really cool, draw dropping in fact, application that's great fun to use, and evidently useful too, but on the other hand as this case illustrates there must be some privacy concerns.
Folksonomy, Venezuela and Esotouric
The archive of the segment is available here. This week we featured:
- Chat about Rachel North's appeal for help finding a "cyberstalker"
- Noted: Joss Whedon's post on Whedonesque about Dua Khalil's stoning to death
- The Hilary campaign appeals for a song from 'Tubers
- An interview with Asterism/Global Voices Salam Adil on reaction from Iraq to the historic bilateral talks between the US and Iran (his blog round-up can be read here)
- Daniel from Venezuela News and Views on protests at the closure of RCTV
- Tim Coyne of The Hollywood Podcast takes an Esotouric tour
- Paul Gillin on the New Influencers (extended audio permalink here)
- David Weinberger talks about his book Everything Is Miscellaneous and how folksonomy is the new taxonomy
That's it, next week is still in the early planning stages so please drop me a note with any ideas for stories/blogs/podcasts you think we should feature
The New Influencers
Paul Gillin's book The New Influencers is a detailed look at the way the social media are changing marketing and the media. While its primary audience is destined to be people involved in communications (whether the media, advertising, or public relations) there's plenty to entertain those of us who want to get under the skin of spin. There's a wealth of information, guidance and some good in-depth case studies of "The New Influencers" (i.e. the movers and shakers in the blogosphere) I'd say it was a top-pick too for aspiring business bloggers
You can hear our interview with Paul in full here
Heinz Meanz Tubez
A clever online marketing wheeze by Heinz has left some red faces, according to the New York Times. Bright sparks in the ketchup marketing division decided to run a competition encouraging people to submit home brewed ads, but it yielded some less than brand-enhancing entries, as the paper reports:
In one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz's product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.
And all these user generated ads didn't come cheap, the paper quotes a Heinz vp as saying it's at least as expensive as traditional commercials. There's some interesting analysis of the strategy over at Marketing Ideas Online, essentially arguing the company started looking for films in the wrong place, while Global Nerdy thinks the ads are actually quite good if not exactly family viewing.
Having reviewed a few of the videos (some of which are very intentionally/unintentionally funny) I'm reminded of a story in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders: an unsuccessful campaign for soup that offered purchasers of a particular brand free socks with their soup. It was a dismal failure because, Packard contends, people don't like to be reminded of smelly socks when buying soup. Like wise ketchup, on its own without a chip or fishfinger to slaver itself over, is nasty sticky stuff and most of the user generated commercials spread it around pretty liberally. The one below, for example, left me feeling vaguely nauseous and wondering about the cleaning bill:
Still people have been bathing in Baked Beans for years and that doesn't seem to have dented sales.
Blogs in the News
The Mail Report of 7/7 victim Rachel North's efforts to combat a cyber-stalker.
ABC: Myspace mis-identifies woman as sex-offender
Guardian: Bloggers should be barred from Libby sentencing in case they make fun?
Jounalism.co.uk Should the National Union of Journalists support political campaigns? Journalists feel they need to be objective, but do political campaigns by journalism unions threaten that? Journalism.co.uk reports that BBC journalists opposed to the NUJ boycott of Israeli have started a blog. While there's an interesting debate and podcast about that and other wider issues on this NUJ linked blog.
ABC: Claims on a Porn Stars Blog lands US policeman in hot water.
Inside the Creationist Museum
Up All Night interviewed Ken Ham of the Creationist Museum . The museum has been dubbed by Eugenie Scott, director of the National Centre for Science Education, as a “creationist Disneyland”. (There are some photos purporting to be of the inside of the museum here. )
But if you find yourself swayed by creationism some in the blogosphere would like you to consider an alternative. Blogger Bobby Henderson has popularised a pasta-based creation story :The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Bobby's tongue-in-cheek argument is that his account of pasta based creation was just as valid as those of the hard-line creationists, and deserved a place in the curriculum of American schools too (creationists have argued in several US states that their account of the origin of species should sit alongside The Origin of Species in schools). No word on whether a Flying Spaghetti Monster theme park is planned yet, but I'm sure it would have a great cafeteria.
24/7 Art and the FBI
Up All Night recently featured an interview with the artist Hasan Elahi. Elahi is helping Big Brother to do their job, photographing, tagging, logging and monitoring his every move. Why? well shortly after 9/11 Elahi became the focus of attention for various agencies, after he was falsely accused of storing explosives in a locker and then fleeing on September 12th (both claims were completely untrue Elahi is a perfectly respectable US citizen) Ethan Zuckerman explains the rest:
For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he'd call his FBI agent and give the routing, so he didn't get detained along the way. He realized, after a point - why just tell the FBI - why not tell everyone?
So he hacked his cellphone into a tracking bracelet which he wears on his ankle, reporting his movements on a map - log onto his site and you can see that he's in Camden. But he's gone further, trying to document his life in a series of photos: the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. The result is a photographic record of his daily life which would be very hard to falsify.
So by constantly monitoring himself he's able to demonstrate his innocence. In effect Hasan is a test case for the transparent society in which every action is monitored and recorded 24/7 not by big brother but by individuals, on phones, camera's and computers. O'Reilly Radar points to another interesting case of DIY surveillance . Their analysis of the potential role of democratised surveillance includes this quote:
As YouTube proves, we are far more adept at watching each other than the government could possibly be. In the future, it's not "Big Brother" that will be watching us, but millions of Little Brothers
It's not a reassuring vision, although there is something to be said for watching them watching us. But the real difficulty with Hasan's approach comes when we wish to take ourselves off-grid perhaps for entirely reasonable reasons, then, of course, the question becomes, what have you got to hide?
Buffy Creator on "Honour Killing"
A post that seems to be by Buffy creator Joss Whedon on the fan weblog Whedonesque, revisits the case of Dua Khalil the 17-yearold girl whose murder by stoning to death was captured on a mobile phone camera and distributed online (reported earlier on Pods and Blogs) Whedon is appalled by that video, but in a heartfelt post he draws parallels between it and the fictional abuse of female characters in modern horror films, in particular, the controversial movie Captivity. For context the billboard ad for the horror film had created a storm of protest. The blogs post states
A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured.....
It's a brave post that touches on many controversial issues. The post challenges us to explain ourselves as consumers of what the post calls "torture porn". As the consumers of fictional graphic content, the post asks, how different are we, from the men who watched the video of Dua being murdered? Whether you agree with it or not the Whedonesque post asks very profound questions about the way in which society and the movie business regards women.
UPDATE: I've fixed a few typos here per comments...if you spot em' please let me know. I'm a radio person, not print, and my mildly dyslexic spelling is part of the reason for that.
Political Searches Revealed
Heather Hopkins has looked at what people write when they search online and include the words "tony blair", "gordon brown" or "david cameron"
The results may not be welcomed by the politicians themselves. There seem to be a lot of people searching for "Why the Public Don't Like Gordon Brown" - it's the fourth most searched for term. David Cameron doesn't fair much better the fourth most searched for term for him is, "David Cameron cloney blair" (oddly Tony Blair's 9th most searched for term is David Blair Tony Cameron).
Of the Tony Blair facts people look for his age and children feature. When the Australian branch of Hitwise took a look at the two Prime Ministerial candidates among the questions people were asking on-line were "How tall is John Howard?", "John Howard Heigh"..and well they might ask even wikipedia doesn't have the answer though this thread helpfully observes that, "John Howard is taller than Ronnie Corbet and shorter than Malcolm Frazier."
Irish Elections 2.0
Irish voters go to the polls Thursday and appropriately enough for a nation that has prospered thanks, in part, to its hi-tech savvy, it's a very web2.0 affair. Mick Fealty points us to the twitter group set up by Irishelection.com which will carry all the latest news from the polls.
Incidentally I spoke to Suzy Byrne of IrishElection.com about social media's affect on the polls. It was a fascinating discussion (I thought). Thanks to Andy Hall of our interactive team you can listen to the interview here
If you are interested in following events online here are a few of Mick Fealty's picks for political analysis Splintered Sunrise, Harry McGee , Kevin Rafter and, of course, we should mention his own blog Slugger O'Toole
UPDATE: In a subsequent chat Suzy also points out the web has flourished as broadcast media labour under a reporting ban until 10:30PM on the 24th May. Here's what Irishelection.com have been up to, while the ether has been silent:
The blackout doesn’t apply to the internet so irishelection.com hopes to help you in your decision on who to vote for by putting interviews up on the site all day. We have lined up polticians from all parties to speak to us for a podcast or written interview and will be posting throughout the day.
Pricey Pods
This post is a little old. It got stuck in limbo as our blog servers ground to a halt.The Times reports that top civil servants have been using iPods to watch instructional videos on leadership. The snag is that, the paper reports, the 20 iPods cost £8,800. The paper does report that this includes a service agreement which doubtless explains the difference between this figure and the cost of a brand new pod £190(ish) online. However, it looks like good value compared to the alternative, as the paper reports:
A Home Office official said that providing iPods to top staff was a much more economical means of providing leadership skills than sending staff on management courses which can cost £1,000 a day.
On an entirely unrelated note (except for the fact that it reminds us to treat what we read with a pinch of salt) Tim Worstall dismantles newpaper outrage at the blog of a senior civil servant. Well worth a read.
FanLib and Fan Fiction
There's controversy in the world of Fan Fiction after FanLib.com, a $3million commercial venture, entered into the space prompting a significant backlash in the community. Fan culture expert Henry Jenkins of MIT has an excellent summary of the issues on his blog. I've an interview with Henry that I'll post here soon:
If you are wondering what Fan Fiction is this wikipedia entry may be helpful: Fan fiction (also commonly spelled as fanfiction and frequently abbreviated to fanfic or occasionally just FF or fic) is a broadly-defined term for fiction about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators.
In other words writers using the characters and settings from existing works of fiction to create works of their own. A quick trawl through the sites and you'll see fanfic versions of Harry Potter, Dr Who, Star Trek, Buffy etc, but plenty that lies outside popular sci-fi and fantasy shows and novels.
Fan Lib's official launch created a significant backlash within sections of the fanfic community.There were many concerns voiced by fanfic writers but a key issue seems to be that a commercial presence in fanfic will draw attention to a space that has operated as a close-knit community below the radar of copyright lawyers and rights holders. Even if companies like Fan Lib were to create spaces protected from cease and desist notices, for some fans it would inevitably be a censored space. Henry puts it like this:
the concern that as companies construct a zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, they will use them to police more aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand. Fans have long asserted their rights to construct and share fantasies that may not be consistent with the ideological norms of media companies.
It's a fascinating issue, that mirrors the concerns raised by other virtual communities faced with a growing commercial exploitation of, and public interest in, what they regard as "their space". We've seen similar issues arise in Second Life, for example, though the overwhelming reaction thereseems to have been indifference, rather than anger .
As with all these cases, adverse reactions in the community are not uniform, and new entrants attract new enthusiasts. As Henry points out there are already many fans choosing to join Fan Lib; clearly many fanfic writers are happy with the new venture. The people behind Fanlib say that they will answer questions posted to Henry Jenkins in his blog, and I've invited them to talk to Pods and Blogs too. It will be interesting to see how things play out.
UPDATE: You can listen to our interview with Henry Jenkins here
Virtual Cash, Congo and Podcasts
You can listen back to the segment here. Thanks to all those in our twitter group who helped us with stories. Tonight we featured:
- Engadget's trouble with Apple
- Boingboing names a jumbo
- Beruit based blogger Jamal Ghosn talks about the situation in Lebanon and the latest bombing in Beruit
- Ian Betteridge tells us why he, and quite a few other bloggers, were unhappy with media coverage of the alleged risks of wifi particularly as it was reported in the recent Panorama - (thanks Suw!)
- Wildlifedirect told us about about a Mai Mai militia attack on park rangers protecting a gorilla sanctuary
- Blogger Fijian Black spoke about the fear stalking the Fijian blogosphere following a recent crack-down by the military government
- The Potential risks of money laundering in Virtual Worlds with Steven Philippsohn, Chairman of the Fraud Advisory Panel's Cyber crime Working Group and David Grundy of Northumbria University's Newcastle Business School
- A round up of British Podcasts from Dean Whitbread. The clips we played wereThe Alternative Kitchen Garden, Little Histories (bats), Janet Parkinson, Bob Cartwright. Mentions too of John Buckley and Citizen Scoop, The Contrast Podcast and I'll plug from our twitter group Sassy Science because you can never have too much science.
That was it. Quick note of thanks to Suzy Byrne of Irishelection.com for taking the time to chat and to Henry Jenkins for his thoughts about fan fiction, more on both soon. Suggestions always welcome & more pods please. Radio and podcasts are friends who don't meet-up often enough
UPDATE: "Dead Whitbread" has now been resurrected. We did spot the typo but MT was being so slow I gave up. Thanks to DEAN for his understanding, apparently he and The Dead Artist had a great time hanging out anyway.
RSS Explained
The Common Craft Show have produced this wonderful video explaining the mysteries of RSS. If you love blogs but don't use/understand RSS this video will revolutionise you blog reading habits. If you think all this is "old-hat" then watch the video it's a fine example of a simple but effective web tutorial.
Cartoon Copyright
The excellent animation blog Cartoon Brew links to this miracle of editing explaining copyright law in the US. As the video points out, fair-use, is merely a "defense" in American law not a right, so thie video's liberal use of clips from classic Disney films might be seen as Stanford's Centre for Internet and Society, who host the clip, throwing down a legal gauntlet to the US media giant.
Link-o-rama
- Podcast listeners: older, richer Want to reach a degree educated 35-54 year-old audience with a household income over $50,000? Try podcasting. But why are they mostly men?
- Very cool neuroscience blog - Retrospectacle
Parrots, rock and neuroscience what could possibly go wrong! The schmidt pain index needs to be adapted to radio - UK Music Podcast Explosion?
Possibly. This feels like an intermediate, but positive, step. Many podcasters seem to do just fine playing music not associated with any publishing group.
Radio 3.0
Most of us here at Pods and Blogs are still struggling with Radio2.0 but the boffins on the Five Live interactive team are already tinkering away with the online tubes and valves from which the next generation of radio will emerge like a crystal set from a posh Christmas cracker.
Not content with skillfully turning radio into video this week, Brett Spencer, the head honcho of Five Live interactive sends, us this report from the future via the recent Radio 3.0 conference:
"The Radio 3.0 event in London, aimed to look at where radio goes next in an increasing competitive marketplace
Jenny Abramsky, BBC Director of Radio opened the event revealing the launch before the end of the year of DAB plugins for MP3 players, a way to keep the next generation in tune with the wireless.
There was a lot of talk during the day about the ongoing growth of digital radio although Phil Riley of Chrysalis Radio was keen to point out the commercial sector is paying for digital development out of their own profits. He also likened multi platform to high stakes gambling having to decide whether to back sky, freeview, mobile or online with development money
He went on to pretty much dismiss online listening pointing out the BBC's 15 million online listening hours per month is a tiny fraction of the 1 billion listening hours per week across the whole sector. Last FM and Pandora were dismissed as 'inconsequential' along with any other online radio station. Commercial radio is alive and well according to Riley with Galaxy in the Midlands reaching 54% of the teenage population, Didn't look so healthy though an hour later when the man in the expensive suit from Ofcom revealed that commercial radio revenues are down 4.5% year on year and 40% are actually losing money. He also predicted many small stations may not survive. Digital listening is now at 14% but predicted to rise to 90% in the next ten years. Although I did begin to think he was making stuff up to see if we were paying attention.
There were questions over whether satellite radio can ever be successful with Sirius and XM in the US swimming in red ink having spent a fortune, and this culminated in a presentation from World Space who are planning to, well take over the world. It was a bit like a Thunderbirds storyline, With their super dooper satellites they plan to launch more stations than you shake a stick at in Italy in 2008, then France, Spain etc. When they get to the UK they will look at 50 channels, 30-35 ad free music stations, 6 news channels and 10-15 speech networks. And then after lunch.........
According to World Space 'country by country approval is necessary, in the absence of harmonized regulatory frameworks to support pan-European complementary terrestrial radio networks'. Hey it sounds like a fun place to work."
More on the conference from James Cridland here more Radio 3.0 related commentary here
PS The image is from an excellent short film ...not that I'm biased or anything.
Pods and Bloglines
As an experiment I've added the RSS Feeds from the last 10 shows to a public Bloglines page. The aim is to eventually put all our links (that have feeds) in one place, so people can browse their posts, or easily subscribe to those blogs themselves. I've done this by hand, and given that there are on average 6-7 interviews per show, I'm pretty sure I've missed a couple of folks out by accident.(Usual disclaimers apply: We didn't write the content of these blogs and we're not responsible for their content..but you'd figured that out already right?)
I've also found doing this a useful way for me to visualise our coverage. Are we getting a sufficiently wide range of blogs on the radio? Is the show taking the right direction. Just from this short sampling I can see that we have a bit of a deficit when it comes to UK Blogs, the podcasting coverage is a bit thin (though we've a couple of interviews on tape that will help redress this), and we could certainly do with more blogs in countries outside the anglophone world. What do you think? Take a look and drop me a note or leave a comment.
And what about the method here? Is Bloglines the right tool for this? Should we be using another tool instead to do this? Is there an automatic way of turning links into feeds to save me from this mechanical turk work.
UPDATE: Al from our twitter group suggests del.icio.us for some good reasons. In the spirit of chuck it at the wall and see what sticks we'll give that a go too! More suggestions welcome.
Graphing the Blogs
The excellent Datamining has a quick look at some tools for representing in graphical format the number of times a term is cited in blog posts. The graph here is for example is the graph of the number of links to Pods and Blogs contributor Robin Hamman's blog Cybersoc.com
You can also create similar graphs (but with more than one term for comparisson purposes) using BlogPulse Tools. Why would you want to do this? Well here's an example: I rather think that this graph is a pretty effective illustration of the power ofYouTube in pushing this story given that its first mention in the press on May 6th didn't really register with the rest of the media. But I may of course be wrong...there are after all, lies, damned lies, and graphs.
Tour of Trek
I should have posted this ages ago. You may have heard about Tony Alleyne the Trekkie who we're told recently sold his starship decorated flat for £425,000. Well about 3 years ago I took a tour of Trek flat 1.0 in the company of Tony. You can hear me beaming down to Nuneaton Station and otherwise making a fool of myself here. The two things about the flat worth mentioning not captured by the audio are a) the strong smell of plastic and b) that the mock 24th century interior lay behind a 1980's mock tudor exterior
The sold for "5 times original price" headlines in most of the news reports fail to reflect the full extent of Tony's expenses as BBC Online reported last year::
Tony Alleyne, 52, spent nine years and £30,000 transforming his flat and used another £100,000 to launch a company which offered similar makeovers.But the schemes were funded by loans and credit cards and he has filed for bankruptcy with debts of £166,000.
Following this set-back Tony did what many a home-seller has done and redecorated. .Tony updated the flat to resemble the Voyager series. It seems to have done the trick, now that he's successfully sold the property. A rather happier ending than that of Star Trek itself, which after Enterprise, could nae take no more captain.
Cancer, Oil and Art
You can listen to the segment here. Thanks to all who suggested stories, this week we featured.
- A brief note about the Lulu-blookers. You can hear Colby Buzzel talk about My War here
- Brian Richmond spoke about blogging and getting the most out of life. Brian has pancreatic cancer and the prognosis isn't good.
- An Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal is offering net users the opportunity to target him with a paintball gun via the net as part of an exhibition the Chicago Tribune describes as, "One of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time"
- A second art themed interview as we speak to the creator of Spam Trap
- Matt Burden spoke about restrictions on YouTube and MySpace for serving soldiers
- Vincent Salafia of Tara Watch joined us to talk about onilne activism (thanks to Al Iguana for the suggestion)
- Sex workers use blogging to get their point of view across
- Jane McGonigal spoke to us about the "alternate reality game" World Without Oil
Next week British podcasts surveyed, other suggestions very welcome
Iraqi Paintball Art
On Pods and Blogs we'll be speaking to Wafaa Bilal the Iraqi artist who has given web users the power to remotely shoot him with a paintball gun. Wafaa's own family have been affected by the violence in the country (Wafaa himself left in the 1990's). It's an interesting commentary on what some have called "the remote control war". The Chicago Tribune said:
Visitors to www.crudeoils.us/ or www.flatfilegalleries.com/ can watch and interact with the artist through a live Web cam and chat room. They also may choose to do something else that gives the piece its lacerating point. They can attempt to gain control of a virtual firearm that translates the exhilaration of a video game into something more real -- the actual shooting of Bilal with a paint gun.
This video posted by Wafaa really gets his point across...
US Army restricts net access
Just had this from the BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington about this story about the US restricting net access for troops:
A spokesman for US Strategic Command / Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations confirms that his agency has blocked access to certain recreational websites through .mil portals. He would not confirm that they include MySpace - however, he confirmed the authenticity of a memo sent by General B.B. Bell which lists them as Youtube, Myspace, Metacafe, MTV and others. Read the memo here
The spokesman said, "As these sites have become more and more popular, they've had an impact on bandwidth resources and network availability, and we're having to restrict use of some of them."
He denied that the military was unhappy with the nature of content being posted. "We're not stopping anybody looking at anything. It's not the nature of the stuff being posted." He said troops could still use these sites through their personal ISPs - just not on military computers. However, he also said, "Wherever you have sites this popular, you have the potential for malicious activity. A secondary benefit of restricting use of these sites is for operational security".
We'll be speaking to a Matt Burden of Blackfive about what he thinks is behind this latest move, on Pods and Blogs
Spam Killing Art
Now this is how to deal with Spam. We'll be talking to the artist Bill Shackelford on the next Pods and Blogs:
"Spamtrap" - watch the video
As the video shows the machine prints and shreds every piece of Spam sent to Bill's old Yahoo account. Worth a Turner Prize I think.
New Look Labour Website
As a sign of how important the net is becoming in politics The Telegraph uses Labour's redesigned website as the spring-board for it's coverage of Tony Blair's announcement of a departure date. I'll leave others to provide cultural and political analysis, but here for your viewing pleasure are the two versions of the site - spot the differences:
UPDATE: Alex Hilton of the also redesigned LabourHome blog was on Five Live Drive, denying that the change had always been planned to occur at the same time as Tony Blair's announcement. Though even he seemed a little surprised by the purpleness of the new site.
Alternate Takes as PM sets a Date
The Prime Minister has given notice saying he will step down on June 27th. Labour's Kerron Cross has been disecting the coverage in a wonderful little essay:
But is it me or are all these flashbacks to ten years ago and these political tributes to Blair all a bit Time Trumpet?
How ironic! I'm just watching Time Trumpets Armando Iannucci interviewed on College Green on News 24
While the media circus spins at high speed, Conservative Iain Dale does his best to to make sure bad news doesn't get burried and trumpets the interest rate rise. In a similar vein Labour supporting blog Recess Monkey notices that more information about the cost of ID cards has emerged out today, "Thank god there aren’t any other big political stories today eh?"
Meanwhile former Tory spin doctor now Times Columnist Danny Finkelstein is running a comment central vote for the best satirical video. "Should I stay or should I go" is a marvel of video editing.
On a more reflective note a Labour councillor, on his blog Blogging4Merton, remembers 1997.
The best bit was of course Portillo getting defeated along with the reaction of surprise by Stephen Twigg, no one had really predicted his demise, and bearing in mind he was then the poster boy of the Tory right it was an exhilarating moment. Also the scene from Putney from supporters of Jimmy Goldsmith was pretty hilarious along with the comments made by David Mellor about Jimmy Goldsmith. Later on the part where Barbara Follet's campaign team in Stevenage could not open the champagne bottle provided some lightened up proceedings.
I suspect there will be many people like me who will read that and feel very old. Today also sees the launch of the new Labourhome website where many positive memories will doubtless be found, but there are supporters and opponents alike who are offering more mixed assesments. Lib Dem sympathising Hot Ginger and Dynamite points out the positive but isultimately disappointed:
His poll ratings once made him the most popular British Prime Minister in history, and despite it all, they have never sunk to depths that Thatcher’s or Major’s did. Perhaps discontent and a sense of betrayal are the inevitable consequences of any lengthy term of office - but it’s hard to escape the sense that somewhere along the way, Blair absolutely lost sight of the horizon.
Mixed feelings too by some bloggers within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Andy Reed MP writes:
I am sure on a wider reflection with the hindsight of history he will be looked upon favourably - but as someone who didn't reach the enormous potential he had in '97. I fear that is the reality of politics in the UK. People expectations grow faster than the reality of the challenges in the world around us.
All these views and more will doubtless be refelected in the rolling coverage. For a behind the scenes look at the gathered media, this piece of YouTube is fun. The voice on the tape sounds strangely familiar, but my memory is no doubt monkeying around.
Painting for Mountain Rescue: a correction
Apologies to Marcus Brown and Paul Colman for getting an important detail wrong last night. Marcus is currently the "Dead Artist" an attempt to boost the value of a painting he's using to raise funds for Mountain Rescue. I'll let The Dead Artist tell the story:
This is Paul Colman the day before he headed up to the snow and height of Scotland. As you can see he’s all kitted up to go climbing with a friend (and not Skiing as mentioned in the BBC interview). Two days later this happened to him; “The Worst Sunday I’ve ever had”. If you haven’t read it yet then do, it’s why we’re doing all of this stuff.
So sorry about that at 2am sometimes the memory goes a bit faulty. Do follow all the links it's an extraordinay story and good cause. It's rather a nice painting too..
Fight fires with goats?
My friend and LA history enthusiast Kim Cooper of the 1947 blog, is backing an innovative solution to the fires that are currently afflicting the city...goats. The idea is that they will eat the undergrowth that fuels the worst fires. It may sound daft, but with fires a regular occurence innovative solutions are certainly needed and as Kim points out goats have been tried elsewhere in California with some success
Terrible prizes for Unlikely Blogs
Inspired by this wonderful blog about peas and another fun blog about baskets I'm opening the unofficial Pods and Blogs UnPrize for the Leastly Likely Undertaking in Business Blogging. Rules are simple, must be a business blog and it must be unlikely. The judges decision is absolutely final, unless we decide to hold a vote, in which case the results may well be rigged anyway. You can call a premium rate phone-line if you wish for you own amusement.
In nominating a blog for the Least Likely Business Blog UnPrize please avoid making value judgements about whether it is a good or bad blog, we are after unlikeliness that is all. As far as we are concerned everyone is welcome at the blogging table we mean only to celebrate diversity.
The prize for the winning suggestion will be a copy of a signed CD from Jim Nader host of NPR's Annoying Music Show. We are not responsible for injuries sustained as a result of listening to the prize.
You may enter the competition by leaving a comment, emailing us a podsandblogs@bbc.co.uk or sending a direct tweet
Digital Soapboxes
You may remember, many weeks ago now, Pods and Blogs had one of the first one the record interviews with Tim O'Reilly calling for a bloggers code (written up on News Online here.)
The implications of the call for a code are bing discussed on Thursday May 10th at the Guardian. Soapboxes in Cyberspace will look at
The recent debate around the call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct highlighted the growing importance of the online ‘political commons’. Historically the political commons has been shaped by political parties, civic organisations, and news and current affairs media. Increasingly people cleave to the latter for engagement, but its ability to facilitate a political commons – from the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’ to the Guardian’s Comment is Free – is not yet proven. Is this a challenge of business models or technical constraints? Lack of understanding of users or failure to design the right kind of spaces? Or the product of broader social phenomena we have yet to understand?
Looks like its £15 on the door, no word on dress code.
Show Notes: Milblogging and Honour Killings
A bit of a struggle on a Bank Holiday this week , but you can hear the segment here. Our interview with El Blogador ran in truncated form ahead of Kevin Connoly's report later in Up All Night. On the show we featured
- Discussion of the Alex Ponosov verdict. Alex's blog (in Russian) is here thanks to Veronica for the rough translation
- The US Army's Milblog rules discussed by Noah Schachtman and Capt. Eric Coulson
- Jay Adelson CEO of Digg on the great DVD hack code debate
- Adarlan Hardi of Kurdish Aspect on the disturbing video's of a young girls stoning to death in an honour killing. Apologies to his sister Choman Hardi who we also interviewed, but the due to technical problems with the recording we were unable to broadcast
- Christopher Grant of Joystiq on games that you control with your mind
- A slightly surreal journey into the world of Marcus Brown aka The Dead Artist aka Sacrum Brown. The dead artist project is all in a good cause raising funds for mountain rescue (his friend was caught in a climbing accident NOT skiing as I incorrectly said in the intro..I'm afraid I misremembered a conversation with Marcus, apologies). Another of Marcus' surreal and strangely hypnotic videos below
Two legs good, four legs bad..
At about 0435 BST UpAllNight will be featuring an interview with the Taiwanese owner of an extraordinary dog who seems to be able to motor around on two legs as well as most manage on four. We haven't yet figured out exactly how to turn video into radio...so for the curious among you the video can be found here
Ordinary people, extraordinary radio
A friend pointed me to a wonderful website Sound Portraits documenting the work of an American independent radio production company. As the blurb says:
Told with care and dignity, the work depicts the lives of Americans living in communities often neglected or misunderstood. Sound Portraits frequently collaborates with people living in these hard-to-access corners of America, giving them tape recorders and microphones and helping them tell their own stories.
Isn't that what podcasting is meant to be all about too? If you listen to audio like this, listen to shows like Outlook on the World Service, and This American Life as a podcast from NPR you'll see that radio can be just about life itself. But why, given the ease and inexpense of podcasting, do we leave it to the professionals to tell these tales? Too many podcasts immitate radio, when, I think, the best radio immitates life itself.
Electronic Voting Under the Microscope
There have been reports of electronic voting problems in the election. It will be interesting to see what the Open Rights Group observers lead by Jason Kitcat have to report on the issue.
UPDATE: Jason was on Five Live Drive, with an excellent round-up of what they had observed. (you can hear the interview by visiting the link to Friday- it was about 1hr 20mins in)
Jason's appearance also prompted some lighthearted texts relating to his last name of which the pick of the crop must be "Was Jason sticking two fingers up at the e-voting system". Interestingly both Jasons name and the chocolate bar share a common debt to the 18th Century political and literary institution the Kit-cat Club
UPDATE II Dr Vee rightly points out that the report I'd linked to isn't quite right about the problems in Scotland so I've removed that link, there's more info here
I'll be periodically checking the blogs to see what people are saying, but feel free to add links and/or your own experiences in the comments.
Higgs Boson Blog Controversy
Pleasantly surprised to discover that Physics World has added Five Live to its press subscription list (perhaps it is an attempt to help us understand reverse swing), I was even more astounded to find that the magazine had entered the great, blogging debate.
Apparently "Blogs [..] threaten the traditional ways of releasing scientific results at seminars and conferences". The magazine reports that early news of the discovery of the holy grail of particle physics, the wonderfully named Higgs Boson particle, was based on blogs written by researchers. Although a number of mainstream news outlets reported the possible discovery the data wasn't all that strong, enough for a scientist to write an excited post to a blog, but far from enough to prove all that was claimed in the articles in the popular press. In fact it's far from clear that anyone has conclusively found the elusive Higgs Boson.
The issue of scientific blogging is a tricky one. Researchers will naturally want to blog the developing naratives of their research, but no matter how many caveats they put in their prose, there's always a risk that journalists will jump the super-colliding gun and prematurely report promising early signs as major breakthroughs. It's another of those issues where we find blogs occupying a no-mans-land between conventional publishing and a means of communication within a community.
UPDATE: Craig in comments thinks its journalists who need to smarten up their act. I agree, I'm certainly not suggesting scientists shouldn't blog about their work.
The Great Digg Rebellion
I've been a bit to busy to post much about The Great Digg Revolt:
Attempts to gag the blogosphere from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt.
The row centred on a 'cease and desist' letter sent by the body that oversees the digital rights management technology on high-definition DVDs. It requested that blogs and websites removed details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs.
The software key is a short series of hexadecimal numbers, (what you use if you count in 16's) the website where the revolt happened was Digg. They were initially removing posts containing the number, but after a user rebellion on the popular social news site, Digg top brass changed their tune and have (sort of) joined the revolution.
But why a revolution? Should people be publishing software cracks? One colleague described posting the number as "like putting up someone's PIN number online". I'm not sure. Generally I support the view that the way to fight DRM (if that's what you want to do) is through the democratic process, through the exercise of consumer power, and through the courts - not by hacking or piracy. But on the other hand the absurdity of to prevent people posting a number to the internet is plain for all the web to see, and has become a story covered in most of the UK broadsheet papers. In seeking to prevent their software being compromised, the people behind the take down notices have effectively ensured that the number is all over the internet.
And bloggers are employing some very inventive techniques to publish the number. In the middle of the afternoon a friend wrote to say she had found "280,000 references" to the number online. Other's I know have printed T-shirts with the number on, another has changed his IM message to include the number. One witty livejournal user who has created an account with the number listing some of the odd "get arounds" including, a rather charming song, and a tin badge with the number is on sale in Ebay. Of course, I suspect many of those doing these things are I'm sure, like me baffled by the remote control, let alone DVD encryption, what's interesting is how an attempt to control what people do on the net has exactly the opposite effect.
US Army's Pyrrhic social media strategy.
A while ago a milblogger I know quite well politely declined an interview request: three of his soldiers had just been killed, he was writing their memorial service.
We communicated via Instant Message, he was in Iraq while I was desk producing a radio programme in London, struggling to fill air-time with a fairly typical mix of "he said, she said" political rows and stories about skateboarding dogs, for example.
Earlier I'd seen the news of the deaths flash on wires. A bland statement of the facts. Like hundreds of agency reports popping up on the newsgathering system, instantly forgetable. But I remember the IM conversation, I remember the sympathy I felt for the blogger, and the way it enlarged my understanding of the terrible responsibilities of his job.
The point of this story? Well the US military has decided to issue new rules on blogs, most are interpreting it as a "clamp down". We shall find out more after the milblogging conference in DC this weekend where I imagine it will be a hot topic.
At the same time the US military has launched it's own YouTube channel. In the eyes of many it giveth with the one hand and taketh away with the other.
This dual response is so typical of organisations as they wrestle with Web2.0: a desire to engage but an inability to let go of the idea of central control.
Yet central control destroys the great PR advantage of blogging, its authenticity. The milblogs by showing the human stories behind the conflict have surely only done good things for the image of the military.
Should we lose the milblogs, we'll have lost an important aspect of our coverage of the conflict. The military will seem less human, and our understanding of war's consequences and complexities will be diminished.
Show Notes: 7/7, The UN and Iraqi Films
You can listen to this week segment here: The stories we covered were:
- Rachel North spoke about why she would like a 7/7 public inquiry
- Matthew Lee who is the only blogger in the UN press-pack spoke to Rhod (thanks Clark!)
- Richard Moross of Moo spoke about the success of the business and getting a net business started in Britain
- Fady and Laurie from Hometown Baghdad spoke with us about the challenges of film-making in Iraq
- Samantha Newport of Wildlife Direct spoke to us about blogging Congolese park rangers
- Brian of Alive in Baghdad defended their decision post a video interview with a member of the Islamic Army of Iraq. (Both the US and Iraqi govts describe the IAI as a terrorist group)
As mentioned before our new Twitter page was very useful in putting the segment together, you can join here. Finally, here is one of the video's mentioned in the interview with Hometown Baghdad
From the archives: BBC iPlayer Interview
With the news that the way you will be able to watch BBC telly is going to change as the iPlayer gets the green-light, just a reminder that you can hear our interview with BBC's Director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield' about the iPlayer here.
Twittering in the Congo..
Pods and Blogs has started twittering. I wasn't quite sure what the point of it would be when I embarked on the project, but Graham at Noodlepie has furnished me with a great example if not of the power of Tweets then the power of social networks.
We had about 15mins left to fill in the programme when I got into work this afternoon, so I sent out a message to our nascent twitter group to see if anyone had any ideas for stories. This was Graham's response:
Here's quite a nice blog story from Congo - http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/03/10/dr-of-congo-park-rangers-with-blogs/
Well it certainly was a good story, wildlife park rangers in the Congo start blogging. Sam from Wildlife Direct the group behind the project spoke to us via Skype (over a satellite internet connection) from the jungle. You can hear the interview on our usual online archive. . In the meantime enjoy the video below and get a flavour of the life of a blogging ranger.
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