flashboy dot org

As discovered by the author of the channel4news Twitter stream this afternoon:

On the plus side, they actually got recommendations.

Major advice to take home from this: if you ever plan on sending sexually explicit texts to anyone, make sure they aren’t in your phonebook as “Twinkletoes” or “Twister” or anything else likely to be next to “Twitter”.

(Also, the channel4news Twitter is interesting and entertaining, as is their FactCheck sister service, and such lols as the above in no way detract from that.)

Causing a significant level of confusion in my mind over the past few days has been this bafflingly over-photoshopped poster for the London Red Bull Air Race:

(Bigger version on Flickr)

Now: what the holy hell were they thinking when they signed off on that? This is an event they’re selling to Londoners, right? Londoners who presumably know that Canary Wharf really, really isn’t in between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge. And who also know that The Dome doesn’t sit on that side of Canary Wharf even if St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge aren’t anywhere in the vicinity (as you can see in this picture, which is suspiciously similar to their source image for Canary Wharf, given that it’s the first image on a Google search for “canary wharf dome“.)

And this isn’t even taking into account the weird thing that the plane appears to be doing, where its tail and even its wings are clearly behind and to the right of the inflatable marker thingy, but its smoke trail has mysteriously passed around the marker to the left side…

I don’t get why they decided that they needed the sheer visual impact of setting their race in a twisted other-universe London with its crazed Escher-nightmare geography and baffling aerodynamic physics. Unless they’re planning something really special for the event, involving twelve-dimensional hyperspace and a carefully placed black hole, I don’t think that poster really sells it to me.

Update: Hello, StumbleUponers! Thanks for stumbling by.

It was fun watching the various Twitter search tools burst into life tonight as people tuned into Bonekickers, the BBC’s new archaeologists-solve-mysteries drama. It’s worth saying that, because this was the only thing that can possibly connect the words “fun watching” and “Bonekickers” – which couldn’t have been worse if it had been translated from the markings on original Templar Knight bog roll. By Dan fucking Brown.

Here is a timeline of my brain bursting while watching it:
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As Chris has already written about, Saturday saw the return of Open Tech, the British geek conference, after an absence of three years. I went along, hungover like a bastard, and a good time was had by all.

Some quick highlights:

Danny O’Brien (excellent as always) somehow turning the Open Rights Group talk into a revivalist meeting, as Bill Thompson led a movement of those not yet saved to come forward and be baptised (and hand over a tenner). Also, the first half of the talk was conducted entirely in Foundation references, the second half entirely in Doctor Who references. It was all very enjoyable, and a delight to see how well the completely spontaneous idea (ahem) that Open Tech 2005 came up with has progressed. If you care about any of the issues ORG fights on – privacy, e-Voting, freedom of information, copyright reform, and host of others – you should probably go and join them now.

The MySociety guys giving the lowdown on WhatDoTheyKnow?, another great, simple political application that makes submitting FoI requests easy, and automatically publishes any response. It’s a great site, and along with all the other MySociety stuff (the video on TheyWorkForYou, the travel time maps) gives you hope that maybe this world isn’t entirely doomed after all.

The same goes for the guys behind the Power Of Information project, who are actually doing cool things within government to free up data and give it to people to use – it’ll be fascinating to see how ShowUsABetterWay works out, because it’s a potentially brilliant scheme.

The guys from guardian.co.uk, who explained the thinking behind the architecture for the Guardian’s web refit. I’ll not go into detail right now (it’s too late to try channeling Martin Belam) but I was pleased in an entirely egotistical way that a lot of their thoughts were similar to thoughts I’d had. Hurrah. They, of course, have the advantage of actually having done them, rather than just vaguely thinking about them.

Overall, there wasn’t quite the same sense of excitement as there was at previous iterations of the event – no “wow” factor stuff like TheyWorkForYou being unveiled, or Audioscrobbler being explained and me totally failing to get it, and a lot less of the useless-but-fun tech hacking that it had in its NotCon days – but instead there was a sense that things were maturing and actually getting stuff done. Which is good, I think,

People I saw but didn’t have anything sufficiently interesting to say to that would have justified me talking to them: Ben Goldacre, Danny O’Brien, Toms Steinberg and Loosemore, Simon Willison, Rufus Pollack and an awful lot of familiar faces whose names I couldn’t quite place. People I was going to talk to but then couldn’t find: Becky Hogge, who now runs ORG and I went to university with. People who I realise I never actually introduced myself to although I was technically in a conversation with even though I wasn’t saying much: Tom Reynolds. Puzzling conversations about Charlie Stross books with someone who clearly thought I was someone else: 1.

So there’s been this internet brouhaha for the past few days, which isn’t of any real direct interest to you unless you have a reluctant but obsessive fondness for Blog Drama!!! (to which I plead guilty). But I think it does illuminate – or at least confuse in an interesting way – a lot of the problems that people are having adjusting to the still-newish world of mass online publishing, so I’m going to try teasing my thoughts out, as much to legitimise the many hours I wasted reading all the threads on this over the past couple of days as anything else. It’s a hugely overlong brain-dump, more about organising my own thoughts – obviously, I’d appreciate any comments you may have.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.
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