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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.

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.

Following on from the amusing sight of Twitter’s resident celebrities turning into detectives, verifying or debunking other supposed celebrity accounts by going straight to the source, I was mucking around last night and ended up making this t-shirt design. It proudly proclaims that you have been authenticated as the genuine article by the most prolific and successful fake-hunter of them all – Wossy himself.

Unlike previous designs, this time, I’ve actually bothered to make the t-shirt available from CafePress, on the off chance that it’ll please someone who really likes obscure t-shirt slogans that reference minor internet in-jokes whose topicality has a lifespan of about four days.

Geekier alternatives that I considered were “Jonathan Ross is my OpenID provider” and (thanks to Chris) “Jonathan Ross signs my PGP key”.

As is now becoming tragically traditional, here’s my pigeonhole-breaking list of the best Things In General from the past 12 months. As is also traditional, it’s late. If you’re a regular reader, and remember the 2007 and 2005 lists, you’ll know the project by now: every year, the cruel hegemony of categorisation unfairly forces stuff into neat boxes. Iron Man was “a film”. Boing Boing Gadgets was “a blog”. The moment someone did something impressive in a sport was “a sporting moment”. This blog rejects such reductivist notions, and instead celebrates the innate thinginess of things, allowing – say – Will Wright’s Spore to go head-to-head with Billie Piper for the title of Best Budget Italian Restaurant.

So, without further ado, here are the 21 best things of 2008:

21. WALL-E
Made me cry, twice, on both legs of a flight to and from New York. I wasn’t the only one who cried, either: witness this awesome, awesome story from MetaFilter, which could have made this list all by itself. And will also make you cry.

20. Mars Phoenix
“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” was the most moving piece of writing of the year. What I said here pretty much covers it.
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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.

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.)

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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One thing I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t got round to is my lovely new toy, an Asus EeePC. I bought one partly on a shiny-craving whim, partly because I wanted a genuinely portable computer, and partly because I think the anti-feature-bloat approach that they took with it is something that should be generally encouraged. So I encouraged it, with money.

It’s a really neat little machine, and I’m very, very fond of it – I’ve been using it almost to the complete exclusion of my trusty old ThinkPad, largely from the sheer pleasure of having something that starts up in 25 seconds, shuts down in 12, and doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing every half an hour to nag me about some software update or another.

It does take a little getting used to, however – the keyboard is fine, although I’m still not as quick on it as I am on a regular sized one, and I wonder how well someone who doesn’t have my tiny, childlike fingers would cope. The small screen is also a little odd at first, but by and large works with most things that you need it to – you just need to get used to CTRL-plussing and -minusing a bit more than normal to optimize the font size for the screen. The one site I regularly use that was causing me grief, however, was Google Reader.

The problem essentially is that the main menu (the bit in the upper left with the Home, All Items, etc options) takes up a fixed amount of real-estate, which squeezes the list of your subscriptions – the actual meat and potatoes of the reader – into whatever space is left. Which on the Eee, is precious little. In fact, it only manages to fit in two lines, making it all but useless for looking over your feeds to see what’s new:

Even doing the old CTRL-minus to reduce the text size doesn’t help much – by the time you’ve got a usable number of lines, the text is all but illegible:

The solution, after a bit of monkeying about, turns out to be twofold. Most obviously, F11 gets rid of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, giving you a fair bit more to play with. The extra help comes from using Greasemonkey, by way of grabbing Lifehacker’s Better GReader extension. This lets you fiddle about with the look of Google Reader – the option you want to use is the Minimalistic skin, which lets you get rid of the top bar on Google Reader by simply tapping W. The combination of these two gives you plenty of real estate to browse your feeds in, even with the normal chunky text size:

You can, of course, give yourself even more to play with by reducing the text size a bit – it’s still legible with one, or even two, reductions. Not a terribly complex or hard-to-figure out fix, but I couldn’t see it noted down anywhere on a cursory google, so I thought I’d put it here in case anybody else was gnashing their teeth over the issue…

Flickr is a popular photo hosting and sharing site. It is really quite good. Users can either have a free account, which has limitations, or pay $25 a year for an unlimited service. A few days ago, Flickr added video hosting to the site, for paid members. This prompted outpourings of absolute rage from the paid users, at the sheer affrontery of the company in giving them an extra service at no added cost. Also, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, which Microsoft is currently trying to buy, although Yahoo is trying quite hard not to be bought by them. This also added to the users’ anger, as they criticised the Flickr staff for working for a company whose parent company might be bought by another company.

The thread in which this all gets shouted about includes this wonderful comment from somebody called “mikeossur”:

This is the new America,

Health care for the rich – only.

Shite software by MS$

1000 year war.

George Bush thinks he is king.

Flickr is a photo site.

As Speak You’re Branes would say: you are a gibbon’s minge.

A new domain suffix, .asia, just went on sale – which is, of course, a source of great joy to those who enjoy making punning domain names (e.g. del.icio.us, thelittlestho.bo, and so on). Someone’s registered an interest in my personal favourite, fant.asia, already – although because of the “landrush” system they’re operating, anybody else can also jump in for the next few weeks and fight it out in an auction. Still up for grabs at the time of writing, however, according to this:
euthan.asia
austral.asia
eur.asia
aph.asia
gymn.asia
And a huge range of medical terms, from acataphasia (a disorder in which a lesion to the central nervous system leaves you unable to formulate a statement or to express yourself in an organized manner) to xerasia (excessive dryness of hair).

The lowest number still unaccounted for is 101.asia. Also, I should get out more.

Just because Chris asked.