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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.)
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Sloshing round the internet for the past few days has been the amusing ‘20 signs’ memette. It was kicked off by Jeffrey Zeldman’s excellent 20 signs you don’t want that web design project. That inspired Chris to put together his hilarious 20 signs you don’t want that social media project, which, in turn, inspired Suw’s 20 signs you don’t want that internal social media project. This got me thinking about it from the other end of things, as a journalist on the recieving end of clueless online marketing approaches.

Most of these are taken from real life, either from my experience or that of others. A few are based on real life, but exaggerated, while one or two are just made up because I thought they’d be funny. There’s a bit of crossover with Chris’s list – in fact, several more of his could have made it on here perfectly happily – but I tried to steer it away from the general territory of “you just have a godawful web strategy”, which would apply to both. I also hasten to point out that this isn’t some big anti-PR rant, just a little bit of mild poking. Some of my best friends work in online marketing, you know.

You’ll notice, as well, that I had to go one better than everyone else, and do 21.

1. You start your pitch with the words “this story is perfect for you”. Unless your story is about robots fighting giant squid in outer space with lasers (and then having sex), I fear you have not yet achieved perfection. Sorry.
2. Not only is your pitch nothing to do with any area I write about, it’s nothing to do with any area that anybody in the entire publication writes about. Yes, I wish we regularly ran coverage of developments in scanning electron microscopy. Regrettably, though, at this stage that remains a pipe dream.
3. Your new video uses exactly the same idea as the one you sent me three months ago, for a completely different product.
4. Pitch includes the phrases “the new Facebook” or “Facebook for X” (where X is some niche group that nobody cares about, not even the people in the group).
5. You tell me that your video has been getting “quite a bit of attention on YouTube”. When I click through, it has 239 views.
6. You refer to your video as “viral” when it hasn’t even been made publicly available yet.
7. You refer to a single RealAudio file as a “podcast”.
8. You seem to be emailing me an enormous video file. Although I am a little unclear on this, it appears that you want me to upload it to YouTube for you.
9. I am required to download a piece of proprietary software nobody has ever heard of just to watch or listen the thing you have done, whatever the fuck it is.
10. Hasselhoff.
11. You have spelled the name of the product you are writing about incorrectly in the email title.
12. Email title is in all caps and takes up four lines in Lotus Fucking Notes.
13. You are directing my attention to a blog/Twitter account that is just a copied-and-pasted regurgitation of your press releases.
14. Pitch includes the words “according to a survey conducted by [name of client]“. I know, I know. It is entirely our fault for having faithfully printed those stories every single time in the past. But please, please, let’s stop it. Now.
15. Your website is a single Flash entity that takes an hour to load, contains no permalinks, and has content that isn’t embeddable or shareable in any way apart from a link pointing to the root URL.
16. Your website is a single Flash entity that invites me to create my own unique content, but once I’ve created that content the only way I can discover the permalink for the results is by using the “Share this with your friends” button and putting in my own email address.
17. And you rather pointedly don’t say what you’ll do with all those email addresses you’re gathering.
18. You have phoned me to tell me about something you’ve put on the web. After about three minutes, we make the astonishing discovery that it’s hard to send links in a voice conversation. “Yes, it’s YouTube dot com slash watch question mark v equals upper-case U lower case p three upper case X…”
19. Pitch initially came from an anonymous Hotmail account, from someone claiming to be a regular member of the public who just happened to make a funny video, which by complete coincidence just happens to raise awareness of your client. Upon closer examination, email’s originating IP address is the same as your office. You hideous, incompetent, ethics-free, spamming cock.*
20. Pitch does not appear to be about anything. Leaves the impression that you are just lonely and wanted a chat.
21. Because I once posted a funny video about an owl, now you think I’m the Owl Correspondent.

*Oh yes, I’ll be writing more about this one. Quite a bit more.

Ben Goldacre writes:

It’s just been publicly announced that the vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath has pulled out of his gruelling legal case against me and the Guardian. He bought full page adverts denouncing Aids drugs while promoting his vitamin pills in South Africa, a country where hundreds of thousands die every year from Aids under an HIV denialist president and the population is ripe for miracle cures. I said his actions were highly worrying, in no uncertain terms. I believe I was right to do so.

This libel case has drawn on for over a year, with the writ hanging both in my toilet, and over my head… For the duration of the case I have also been silenced on the serious issues that Rath’s activities raise, the chapter on his work was pulled from my book, and I have been unable to comment on his further movements around the world.

This will now change…

A couple of points need to be raised here. Firstly, Ben officially joins the pantheon of the greats for the line “This libel case has drawn on for over a year, with the writ hanging both in my toilet, and over my head”; secondly, you have to go and read the Guardian’s coverage of the case, because – significantly, and very positively, I think – they’re giving this biiiig coverage, the sort of coverage they’d give to defeating a junior government minister in a libel action, or something of the sort. Not quite “a liar and a cheat” territory, but getting close. They clearly care, in a way that I wasn’t entirely sure the Guardian did care. Good on them.

The third point is more simple, and has been better expressed by other, wiser men before me:

“If you are a pervert, turn to page 34. If you are not a pervert, turn to page 127.”

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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So, Charlie Brooker writes a very funny article in which he proposes a new “text me when celebrities die” service:

It’s called “eVulture”. You sign up for free on a website, and choose the category of celebrity you’re interested in. This being an age of dazzling consumer choice in which the customer is routinely indulged like a spoilt medieval prince, the whole thing is super-configurable. You can decide to ignore everyone but the biggest Hollywood star, for instance, or specialise in minor characters from half-remembered TV shows, the sort of person whose passing probably wouldn’t be mentioned in a mainstream news bulletin. So if you want to be contacted the moment one of Blake’s 7 shuffles off this mortal coil, or the Milk Tray man winds up in a box of his own, this is the service for you.

Naturally, within a few hours of the article being published, somebody’s got eVulture.co.uk up and running, albeit with a slightly different purpose.

Journalist Paul Tolme recounts in Newsweek the unusual experience of discovering that an article he’d written about ferrets had been plagiarised – by a cheap, slightly erotic romance paperback.

Now, normally that would be a bad thing; plagiarism, after all, is a pernicious and dishonourable practice that needs to be stamped upon heartily. But the plagiarism, in this case, has given us some of the most giddily wonderful, utterly un-erotic dialogue ever squeezed between the warm, heaving covers of a soft-core potboiler.

The scene: a Native American called Shadow Bear has just boffed a young pioneer lady, Shiona Bramlett. Then, er, they see some ferrets:

“They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail,” Shiona said. “While alone in my father’s study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father’s books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.” …

“What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females,” Shadow Bear said, watching as the last of the ferrets bounded off and disappeared amid the bushes away from where they had first been spotted. “Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows.” …

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight,” Shiona said, shivering at the thought, for to her one animal was as cute and precious as the next. It was a shame that any had to die to sustain the other.

It’s fantastic stuff. It’s Atlanta Nights meets Bulwer-Lytton meets David Attenborough. You should head over to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, who uncovered the plagiarism and who detail, in gleefully exhaustive fashion, every painful, jarring, sub-Dan Brown passage. Outstanding.

So: moderately successful indie band get dropped by label, but decide that they can still make money by touring if they build up their fanbase online. Thus prompting the Guardian to write:

An acclaimed indie band will next month leap into the unknown by becoming the first established act to give away an entire album for nothing in a move which could spark a music industry revolution.

They’re not the first.

No, seriously, they really aren’t.

That’s less than a minute’s googling (“give away album” and “giving away album” are the search terms you’d be wanting there). It’s pretty cool the band are doing it (I’ll definitely check it out), and neat of the Guardian to cover them doing it – it’s just a shame that they did it by writing something to transparently untrue that the whole thing faintly whiffs of regurgitated press release. Which is exactly what you don’t want.

I appear to be wittering on about the honours system in today’s Independent on Sunday; specifically, about the news that Zara Phillips is to get a gong.

But perhaps there are still some among you harbouring seditious thoughts: that giving an honour to someone who’s only a few tragic helicopter accidents away from being Queen herself maybe makes the whole system look, shall we say, a tad silly. To those people I would simply say: what, have you never been stuck over what to get a relative for Christmas?

There’s one or two decent jokes in it, I think. Go on, have a look for yourself.

Speaking of which, you’ll all have seen the Evening Standard Horror Chaos Aaaargh set on Flickr, right?