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I know there’s other, bigger, more topical things going on right now, but I couldn’t let this little gem of self-aggrandising historical revisionism from Clare Short slip past. Speaking to the Guardian about how Gordon Brown will be remembered, she says:

On Iraq he was marginalised by Blair for most of the time, but if he had moved with Robin [Cook] and me, we could have stopped it. But he didn’t move. I just think the young Brown wouldn’t have believed what he ended up doing.

That’s funny, I was sure I recalled Clare Short also not moving with Robin Cook, supporting the war at a crucial time when her resignation could have helped prevent it, and only quitting two months later when it was too late and the invasion was done, because people weren’t treating her as a Big Important Person like they did when they wanted her vote.

So here we are. Bloody again.

I’ve voted in every single election I’ve been able to in my adult life; every local, mayoral, national and European election for over a decade. Of those many, many elections, I think I’ve been able to cast a willing and meaningful vote – voting for someone I truly wanted to win, in an election where my vote stood a chance of making a difference – three times. The rest of the time, either the fear of a Tory victory has sent me reluctantly trudging back to a Labour party I’ve spent a decade trying, and mostly failing, to believe in; or, being in a seat with no chance of changing hands, I’ve switched to the Lib Dems or Greens in an attempt to “send a message” to Labour. A message that’s had all the effectiveness of tattooing a manifesto on the inside of your own eyelids.

Given that I was utterly dreading the grim death march this election promised to be – to the extent that for the sake of my sanity I considered simply deciding that any time anyone talked about the election, I would assume they were talking about the upcoming presidential elections in the Philippines, and ignore it – I was caught unexpectedly on the hop by the fact that I actually found myself being tentatively drawn into the whirling vortex of Cleggmania that ensued (and also, perhaps even more so, to the accompanying Dr Evan Harris Love-In that broke out across large sections of the geekosphere.)

I’m by no means blind to the Lib Dems’ flaws. I worked in Parliament for a Lib Dem MP for the best part of a year (while never being a member of the party, and indeed having a thoroughly good time trying to scare the locals by playing the bolshy socialist). So I have both a natural residual affection for the party, but also an awareness that the party can be an ideologically unstable mixture of cuddly, progressive centre-left types mixed in with a fair number of people who can best be described as “Tories who weren’t big enough bastards”. (See the Lord Clement-Jones led cock-up over the web blocking amendment to the Digital Economy Bill in the Lords for a real-life example of this tension at play.)

I also don’t deny that the Liberal Democrats suffer from a lack of what football pundits tediously refer to as “strength in depth”. They’ve got a decent first team, but when you look at the subs’ bench you start noticing that it’s packed with teenagers and players you thought were actually dead. They undeniably have their fair share of (to use Caitlin Moran’s excellent phrase) “the Curly Wurly thinkers”. But when you consider that Labour found a steady stream of senior positions for Geoff Hoon – a man with the character traits and skill set of a vindictive marshmallow – while the Conservative shadow cabinet boasts such reliable tits as Chris Grayling and Jeremy Hunt, it’s not like any party really wants to go round swinging their “look at what a deep pool of talent we’ve got” dick.

So yes. I worry about the Orange Book tendency of the Lib Dems, and Nick Clegg’s part in it. I worry that they’ll not have the strategic nous to navigate a hung parliament without giving the Tories everything on a plate. I worry that a lot of previously ignored Lib Dem MPs will suddenly find themselves being taken out to some very nice restaurants by some very nice lobbyists who have very plausible-sounding cases to put forward, and – being human – will get suckered in. And yes, I worry that Chris Huhne and David Laws might actually be aliens.

But I like the idea of there being a genuine third force in British politics. I like the idea of a parliament where politicians actually have to talk to each other, rather than just jeer across the aisles. I like the idea that regardless of the situation in my constituency, my vote will have meaning on a national scale as a clear signal that we need a fairer voting system. I like the idea of a party that opposes renewing Trident, that wants fairer taxes, that adopts a realistic and compassionate approach to immigration, that is full-throated in its defence of science and evidence-based policy, that doesn’t support illegal wars, that backs repealing the Digital Economy Act, that is in favour of European integration, that opposes ID cards and supports civil liberties, and that – yes – demands urgent electoral reform, and I’m frankly baffled that it’s not the Labour party I’m talking about there. I think a Prime Minister who speaks fluent Dutch would be pretty neat.

In terms of a Venn diagram charting the extent to which I agree with Nick, this:

And yet, here I am, writing this post at stupid o’clock on the morning of the election, and I still don’t know who I’m going to vote for. That’s because my constituency of Poplar & Limehouse is a Labour-held Tory target, and a combination of boundary changes and demographic shifts over the past five years – plus a dash of the inevitable George Galloway sideshow – have put the seat firmly in play. I look at my MP’s voting record, and it reads like a greatest hits setlist of New Labour’s biggest fuckups. I desperately don’t want yet another five years where Labour can abandon principle after principle, safe in the knowledge that no matter what, the prospect of something worse will always send me scurrying back. And yet, as the polls swing rightwards in the last few days, every other consideration starts to become dwarfed by that tiny, nagging possibility that it’ll be my one crucial vote that gives the Tories that one crucial seat, and…

It’s become a tired, arrogant tactic, Labour using the Tory bogeyman to scare us into excusing their failures. But I’m still checking under my bed to see if George Osborne’s hiding there.

So, I still don’t know how I’m going to vote today. But I strongly suspect that regardless, once the counting’s done, and the tears, beer and ink stains have all been wiped clean, my first action will be to send some money the way of the Electoral Reform Society. Because, quite frankly, I don’t ever want to have to go through this bullshit again.

My post for Ada Lovelace Day 2010. I’m late with this, so it’s quick and rough and not terribly nicely written. But hey ho:

It’s a shame that it’s the manner of her death that Mary Ward is best remembered for, because she led a pretty remarkable life at a time when women, for all practical purposes, were excluded from the scientific establishment. Born into an aristocratic family in Ireland in 1827, she was interested in nature from a young age. Then one day, keen to encourage her interest, her parents bought her a microscope – not just any microscope, but the best microscope in the country at the time. This turned out to be a rather smart move on their part, because Mary proved to have a rare talent for illustrating what she observed with it. She became an expert in microscopy, making her own slides of everything from feathers to insect eyes. Her drafting skills didn’t stop there – surrounded by scientists from a young age, her drawings recorded the construction of the Leviathan of Parsonstown – a 72 inch reflecting telescope that was the largest in the world, and would hold that title for half a century. She corresponded with many scientists, and illustrated several books for the physicist Sir David Brewster.

Then, in 1857, disappointed with the quality of microscopy books on offer, she decided to publish a book of her own drawings. Afraid, with good reason, that no publisher would touch it because of her gender, she self-published 250 copies of ‘Sketches with the Microscope’. But it came to the attention of a publisher nonetheless – and they saw that the quality of her illustrations and the clarity of her writing were good enough that the issue of her sex could be overlooked. Renamed ‘The World of Wonders as revealed by the Microscope’, it would go on to such success that it was reprinted eight times over the coming decades.

That wasn’t the last of her popular science publishing career – she wrote two further books, including a telescope companion to the microscope book. Her books were displayed at the 1862 Crystal Palace exhibition; she would illustrate numerous other scientific works for eminent scientists; she published articles in several journals, including a well-received study of Natterjack toads; she became one of only three women permitted to be on the Royal Astronomical Society’s mailing list (and one of the others was Queen Victoria.) She never gained a degree, however – women weren’t allowed to.

And the manner of her death? In1869, aged 42, she and her husband were riding in a steam-powered automobile, home-made by the sons of her cousin, former Royal Society president William Parsons (she was always surrounded by scientists). As it rounded a bend, she was thrown from the car and under the wheels; they snapped her neck, and she died almost instantly. And so she became the first person in the history of the world to die in a car accident.

I suppose you could take from her life story and her far more famous death story a sort of wryly shoulder-shrugging moral fable: that pioneers don’t always get to choose what they’ll be seen as pioneers of. But personally, I think you should probably just take away the thought that, if you have a daughter, a microscope would make a fairly awesome birthday present.

Another bloody “turn your avatar into a cartoon” thing went round Twitter today; I ignored it, because, you know, I’m above all that. Except obviously I’m not, because it was actually a rather jolly promo for the third series of Mad Men – the addictive, oh-so-stylised drama of quiet desperation in capitalism. It let you create a replica of yourself as you might look if you were in the offices of Sterling Cooper in the early sixties, swathed in wreaths of Lucky Strike smoke and misogyny. The designs are by artist Dyna Moe, who created this lovely set of fan illustrations for the series that were all over the internet a while back, and eventually got tapped up to do official work for the show.

So, yes, I’m not going to bother changing my avatar, but I will stick the results here for your amusement. No, it doesn’t look anything like me (and I wasn’t the worst off), but still, fun. Clicky for bigness:

I’ve been trying to write a coherent post about various interconnected subjects involving journalism, especially print journalism – most notably, the thorny tangle of connected issues surrounding whether professional journalism has a future, what exactly that future might look like, and jesus just how fucking grumpy is David Simon?

Unfortunately, I’m a slow, long-winded writer, so I haven’t found time to write a coherent post. Instead – rather than a mammoth post sitting unpublished in my drafts folder for the next two years – over the next few days, I’ll just be publishing out-of-context snippets from my broader argument. These will, by their nature, be odd and a bit shit and acontextual.

The two things that prompted this were Alan Rudbridger’s talk on “Why Journalism Matters” for the Media Standards Trust on Wednesday night – part of an ongoing series – and the much discussed Columbia Journalism Review article by creator of The Wire and former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, in which he grumpily calls on the New York Times and the Washington Post to collude with each other, withhold their journalism from the non-paying public, introduce paywalls, and blackmail every other American newspaper and news agency to join them.

Part 1: On the most bollocksy thing David Simon said –

(Assuming that I’ve already pointed you to Shane Richmond’s post detailing how many others have said that Simon is totally up the wall on this.)

- The most weirdly inconsistent part of Simon’s argument is his simultaneous assertion that there are virtually no new media outlets offering quality local reporting, and that the local papers are being killed by the internet. He actually explicitly says that the newspaper industry has not lost out to a “new, better product”, but “to the vague suggestion of one”. A nice, pithy phrase… and one that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever if you consider the actual behaviour of real-life consumers. People didn’t stop buying newspapers because they woke up one day dreaming of a future where blogs were magically better, any more than men will stop buying four-bladed razors because they can imagine what a hypothetical, mythical seventeen-bladed one might look like.

The widespread collapse of local newspaper readership and advertising revenue in both the UK and the US certainly needs explaining, and the internet may well play a part in that (less interest in local affairs when the internet offers wider horizons? The rise of online shopping squeezing the local retailers who used to be advertising mainstays, and Craigslist et al destroying the classified ads market?) but blaming non-existent competitors isn’t an explanation, and won’t help anybody find a solution.

Right, so – Spotify (the wonderful “universal jukebox” music streaming service, in case you didn’t know) recently pointed out on their blog that you could manually link to a specific moment in a song. Naturally, because I’m awkward like that, I decided the best use of this was to link to the pauses in songs where nothing’s happening. One quick call for suggestions over Twitter later, and here we are: a brief and incomplete sort-of playlist of The Best Pauses in Music History (version 1.0):

2:32 into Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys

0:12 into Monkey Wrench by the Foo Fighters
(suggested by @marshallstaxx)

1:21 into Novocaine For The Soul by Eels
(suggested by @qwghlm)

0:28 into Show Girl by The Auteurs
(suggested by @shanerichmond)

1:29 into Can’t Hardly Wait by The Replacements
(suggested by @shanerichmond)

4:42 into Invalid Litter Dept. by At The Drive In
(suggested by @outsidecontext)

2:09 into Summer In The City by The Lovin’ Spoonful
(can’t remember who suggested this, might have been someone in the office)

2:30 into All The Madmen by David Bowie
(suggested by @Dan_Griffiths)

0:57 into Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel

There must of course be hundreds, thousands more (a few suggestions couldn’t be used because they weren’t on Spotify; a personal favourite, the pause at around 2:57 in Animal Lover by Suede, couldn’t be used because it’s actually too short to pin down to a specific second.) So – what are your suggestions? Drop them, with Spotify links if possible, in the comments…

Admittedly, not my own podcast – but this week, I was chuffed to be asked to do the twofootedtackle football podcast, as hosted by Chris Nee and Gary Andrews (very fine chaps both). Granted, I felt somewhat out of my depth as Chris and Gary discussed the finer points of the Dutch Eredivisie (to be honest, as a Nottingham Forest fan, I was also quite out of my depth talking about the upper reaches of the Championship) but I think I almost managed to hide my relative lack of knowledge. Mostly by being sarcastic about Alan Shearer.

I’ve listened back to it, and I think it sounds really good. Most importantly, it contains a great many rather wonderful (i.e. dreadful) puns – we took inspiration from the erstwhile Scaryduck’s post of songs for footballers, and ran with the theme. One of the puns is represented in pictorial form at the top of this post for your amusement.

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes (search for ‘twofootedpodcast‘), or you can get the mp3 direct from twofootedtackle’s post here. Do have a listen.

One thing I should note: at one point, it sounds very much like I’m implying that the USA have never beaten England at football. This is, of course, not true (1950 and 1993), and wasn’t what I meant. I merely meant to say that the USA have traditionally been a bit rubbish at football. Which they have.

I also regret forgetting to mention my pet theory that Southampton’s slump of the past few years, ending in their recent relegation to League One and the very real threat that they will cease to exist as a football club, all stemmed from the moment they unveiled that statue of Ted Bates:

But I’m not sure I’ll be able to convince anyone of that.

A fair amount of amusement online today, as the Telegraph decided to embed a Twitterfall in the sidebar of their dedicated page for Wednesday’s budget, showing tweets with budget-related keywords. Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone tested out what they could get onto the page… in this case, it seems to have been my internet pal Joe, who asked the pertinent question:

Very quickly, people caught on, and soon enough the Telegraph’s budget page had a sidebar filled with people making jokes, insulting the Telegraph, doing swears and dropping in various bits of absurdist nonsense (my personal favourite being this.)

Within an hour or so, the Telegraph twigged, and took the Twitterfall down. The general consensus seemed to be that it was an embarrassing cock-up on the Telegraph’s part, a failed attempt to be down with the kids. That side of things was summed up quite well by Josh Millard (aka cortex) in a now-deleted MetaFilter thread:

Totally unmoderated and unfiltered streams of publicly-authored/-editable info is not something you endorse if you’re in the business of presenting filtered and moderated info. It’s not rocket science; this is basic stuff.

Put someone on a queue and approve the interesting/appropriate tweets only. Drop an authentication barrier on your wiki. Give yourself the tools to actually identify and highlight the good and mitigate the crap, from day one, if you want to harness a reactive, self-aware firehose like this.

But, while Josh knows a metric crapload more about moderating web content than me – he’s one of MetaFilter’s superb mods – I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Certainly, the Telegraph didn’t fully think it through, but I don’t believe their core problem was one of lack of moderation, but one of inaccurate expectations. Joe put it very well in a series of follow-up tweets (here stripped out of the Twitter format and tarted up a little):

The system/concept works as it should. We are the boneheads. No one at the Telegraph should be in trouble for this. (And by boneheads, I mean glorious, wonderful boneheads.) With every important event in man’s history, there is always someone standing at the back throwing peanuts. Today we are the peanut gallery. Tomorrow we may be the ones on stage. Or, to put it another way: You can’t stop the LULZ.

Sorry Daily Telegraph. I think if you’d ridden that out for another hour, it would actually have been useful. Lessons for co-opters of Social Media: 1) You don’t own the message anymore 2) If people are using it for LULZ then ITS WORKING.

For me, the Telegraph’s major error in this case was that they put the thing up two days before the budget is actually going to be announced. The amount of natural real-time discussion of the budget was therefore minimal; in the absence of anybody saying anything else, it was possible to hijack what was displayed on the Telegraph site almost by accident – this wasn’t a co-ordinated attack in any sense, just a few people idly goofing around. I suspect that the Telegraph had considered and accepted the possibility that someone would say “big shitty balls” on their page; what they didn’t realise was that, absent anything else to discuss, the balls would dominate entirely.

It’s as if Newsnight, in the middle of a piece on Bolivian land reform, suddenly announced “and now we’re going over live to the saloon bar of The Dog & Duck to see what their opinion is” – except the patrons of The Dog & Duck hadn’t been discussing Bolivian land reform, and weren’t told anything about Newsnight’s plans until the moment that they blinkingly realised they were on national television. What would you expect? You might get lucky, and someone who’d read the papers might mutter something about Evo Morales’ significance as the country’s first indigenous leader. But most likely there’d be a bemused pause, followed by nervous laughter, followed by someone shouting “wankers!” and Terry getting his knob out.

That doesn’t mean that nobody in a pub ever has anything insightful to say. It doesn’t mean that broadcasting from a pub is always a terrible idea. It just means that you need to better understand the nuances and uses of real-time conversations, and the locations they take place in. Without a pre-existing conversation, all you have is a silence begging to be filled. You’re practically asking Terry to start waving his bits around.

UPDATE: Yay, it’s back! They seem to be filtering things more carefully this time, although it’s not clear exactly how stringent they’re being, or what method they’re using (and they’re not telling…) Kudos to the Telegraph for sticking with it.

So, all over the news today were reports like this:

An Italian scientist who predicted a serious earthquake in central Italy but was dismissed as a scaremonger said: “The authorities have these deaths on their conscience.”

Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani had warned “a big one” was on the way and even toured the region in a van with loudspeakers warning people, as late as last week.

But he was reported to the police by authorities for “needlessly spreading panic” and also dismissed by L’Aquila’s mayor and other civic officials.

All very Roy Scheider facing off against complacent local bureaucrats in Jaws. It was being tweeted all over the place and burning up the social news sites for most of today. A great, rabble-rousing story about an underdog hero whose warnings were ignored. Every story referred to Giuliani as a seismologist and a scientist.

Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica released the following press release this morning (this is a Google Translated version of the cached press release; their website, with the original, is currently down for some reason.)

Referring to press reports about the earthquake that struck last night, the Abruzzo region, the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica states:

1. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica’s mission and purpose of the study of phenomena that occur in space and in the universe and not from earthquakes or other phenomena related to geophysics;

2nd Mr. Gioacchino Giampaolo Giuliani is a non-graduate technical assistant at the Institute of Space Physics Interplanetario of Turin, which is one of the twenty INAF structures;

3rd Mr. Giuliani is working as technical assistant at the National Laboratory of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) for the Gran Sasso of IFSI-INAF, within the framework of cooperation in your multipartner LVD (Large Volume Detector) for the detection of neutrinos produced by gravitational stellar collapse;

4th the activities of Mr. Giuliani compared the alleged possibility of forecasting earthquakes are not a search INAF, but are conducted by Giuliani himself for personal purposes outside of the service for the institute.

It would appear Gioacchino Giuliani is not a seismologist; he does not even, it seems, have any academic science qualifications at all. He is a lab assistant at an astrophysics institute, and he does earthquake prediction as a hobby, using the notoriously vague and unproven radon method – his prediction was actually that an earthquake would hit a town fifty miles away a week earlier (the sort of details you need to actually be right about if you’re going to start evacuating places).

This story came, as far as I can tell, not from some tabloid, but from Reuters, who were the ones who inaccurately spread the description of him as a “seismologist”; even now, in their newly updated, toned-down story, published many hours after the INAF released their statement, they still call Giuliani a “scientist”, and inaccurately say that he works at the National Insitute of Physics (not Astrophysics, which would give you more of a clue that he’s maybe not a specialist). Reuters are a trusted voice; when they write a story, it spreads around the world. This is, quite frankly, shoddy work on their part.

I got my sleek, pleasingly-textured and slightly oddly-smelling copy of the new Wired UK through the post yesterday. This made me happy, because… well, we’ve got our own Wired again. It’s a national pride thing, right? Now we can all collectively exorcise Danny O’Brien’s traumatic memories of the previous one. And, for the first time since Select magazine died along with Britpop and New Scientist went shit, there’s a magazine that feels like it’s actually sort-of targeted at me. Well, a more highly-paid version of me, at least.

Anyway, here are some quickly jotted down first impressions. I will probably change my mind about most of this over the next few days.

The design is certainly very pretty; the photography bold and colourful. Perhaps it’s a little over-designed – sometimes, the pretty-making interferes with the flow of information on the page; the text gets a little lost, your eyes aren’t quite sure where to look. But that could just be an early lack of familiarity with the magazine’s rhythm.

But certainly, I’d like to see it be more text-heavy. Currently, too often the copy gets relegated to a stray paragraph which is overwhelmed by the images – which doesn’t give me much confidence in reading something that seems like an afterthought. More text! A paragraph is not enough! But I think that might be me trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of contemporary magazine design, brandishing nothing more than an unread copy of the New York Review of Books. (Unread, of course, because it’s intimidatingly text-heavy.)
(more…)

Today is Ada Lovelace Day: a fine idea, instigated by Suw Charman-Anderson and quickly picked up across the web, to honour the all-too-often overlooked women who’ve contributed to science, technology, and our interaction with them. The reasons for this are all too obvious: Suw lays out what triggered the idea here (casual, oblivious sexism in the technology sector); you could look at Kottke’s old post on gender diversity at web conferences; or, frankly, you could just imagine what kind of person you immediately picture in your mind if someone says to you “computer scientist” or “engineer” or “web developer”. I’ll bet that, if they have breasts, chances are they’re of the regrettable man-type.

The idea is that, today, over 1,500 bloggers will write about a woman they respect who works or worked, in some capacity, in the field of technology. I pondered for even longer than the standard prevarication time over who to write about: delve back into history to talk about a pioneering lady of tech (I’m always entranced by the double life of film star and communications technology innovator Hedy Lamarr)? Write about someone I know from the London social media community? Sort-of-cheat, and write about how I respect Suw for starting the pledge in the first place? (I’m sure I won’t be the only one to think of that last one…) In the end, I opted for someone I’ve never met, but whose work I see and value every day.

Jessamyn West is a librarian, a community moderator at MetaFilter, and awesome. I’m not a librarian, so I can’t speak to the exact importance of librarian.net, the website she’s run since 1999 – but I’m given to believe that it’s been an important voice as libraries embrace (or occasionally fail to embrace) the ways of accessing information that go beyond books on shelves. (Wikipedia notes that it’s a “widely read and cited” resource, and that’s good enough for me, because research is hard and that’s why we have librarians.) Jessamyn spends quite a lot of time travelling around teaching people about technology, be it “teaching email to old people” or making cute little videos showing you how to breathe new life into old library computers with Ubuntu. These are all good things.

But it’s Jessamyn’s other day job, helping to run the community over at MetaFilter, that’s the reason I know and admire her. MeFi is a superb example of how to run an online community – run with a gentle but firm touch, open communication and discussion between the moderators and the members, and a clear sense of what makes the site good. Jessamyn has been key to that – the first person Matt Haughey brought on board to help with moderation as the site grew. She was especially influential in establishing, maintaining and implementing the “only helpful answers allowed” rule at AskMetaFilter – a far stricter standard than on the other subsites – which has made it the wonderfully useful resource it is today (“Not Yahoo Answers”, in other words). It always amazes me how Jessamyn (and the other MeFi mods, to be fair) manage to cope with the constant flow of spammers, flameouts, dumb questions, gripes and general nonsense without descending into the shouty rage madness at regular intervals – but manage it they do. It’s a key lesson in how no amount of algorithmic, vote-me-up-vote-me-down community management can substitute for a steady human touch in helping not just individuals, but loosely bonded groups, navigate the complicated mesh of stuff that is the online community experience.

So, yes: Jessamyn, we salute you. In an entirely non-creepy way, though, because you probably get enough of that on MetaTalk.