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:

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 Instead – rather than a mammoth post sitting unpublished in my drafts folder for the next two years – over the next few days, I’ll just be publishing out-of-context snippets from my broader argument.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

The “Start” section (subheaded “News and obsessions”) is probably the strongest area of the magazine, on first browsing. It’s filled with lots of entertaining and intriguing snippets on pleasingly eclectic topics; even when some don’t quite work (the “Inforporn” segment, while a nice idea, tries to cram too much data into one hard-to-read graphic), there’s always another one over the page that will capture your attention, from Jason Freeny artwork and gorgeous pictures of supercomputers to pieces on the papernet and 3D printing. I worry that the magazine’s printing schedule could make its attempts at online culture trendwatching unavoidably dated, but that’s a fairly insurmountable problem. Maybe that could be achieved with a small, photocopied last-minute insert instead.

The feature on the iPlayer in this section has some interesting content, but frustratingly misses the meat of the story – skipping over giving any specific details of several key years in its slow development, and only throwing in right at the end some muddled references to the central debate over what public service means in the digital age.

Less good is the “Play” section, which seems a little confused and perfunctory, unsure if it’s meant to be reviews, cultural commentary or featurettes; few of the pieces are given the space to breathe. It’s also gimmicky, to little effect. Getting actor Jamie Bamber to review the Skate 2 game comes off as awkward, pointless and PR-led; sending Alain de Botton to review JCB theme park Diggerland seems potentially lolworthy, until you read the bland copy, which could have been written by almost anybody.

The columnists are mostly good value. Russell Davies (also a contributing editor) is, naturally, interesting – his amusingly written defence of being distracted is both cute and thought-provoking, and sums up a sort of contrarian enthusiasm that feels both very Wired and very UK. Warren Ellis, of course, is great. He includes the line “…smearing yourself in soy bacon and allowing starving dogs to violate you while sucking an Obama-shaped ‘pleasure toy’…”, talks about the sheer horror of existence and then abruptly stands up for traditional print publishing structures. These are the kind of writers you want to build a magazine’s voice around.

Meanwhile, occasional geneticist and Northern Rock failure Matt Ridley takes an chutzpah-laden, nicely written but somewhat ill-advised foray into the world of economics. It’s an interesting perspective, I suppose, but you can’t help feel he’s not exactly on solid ground. And Baroness Susan Greenfield’s piece on the search for an explanation of consciousness starts well, but loses its way and descends into vague assertions halfway through. She’s a very odd choice for Wired – she’s not an especially good writer, and her long-standing, evidence-free technophobia sits awkwardly with the magazine’s apparent ethos.

The “Fetish” section – focusing on high-end consumer products – is far and away the worst part of the magazine. The photography is lovely; the text seems to have been copied and pasted from PR releases. It doesn’t help that the first issue largely focuses on absurdly expensive audiophile equipment, complete with all its pseudo-scientific technobabble. Sorry, but when someone’s selling £170 audio cables that come with a free CD which “demagnetises the cables, reducing interference”, I don’t expect Wired to just reprint it, prefaced with a limp “according to the company” – I expect them to actually try to find out if it’s true or (as you’d suspect) utter balls. They do this perfectly well with reviews of some expensive headphones in the more no-nonsense “Test” section at the back of the magazine, which has plenty of interesting content; this leaves “Fetish” just looking like the idiot brother.

Of course, I understand that this section is undoubtedly key to attracting advertisers and defining their demographic; I don’t expect them to be featuring Tesco Value crisps in there. But page after page of uncritically puffed-up shinies with price tags in the thousands of pounds strikes a really weird tone, both in the context of the economic climate and the rest of the magazine.

The full-length feature pieces – which, obviously, are the magazine’s meat and potatoes and possibly dessert as well – I haven’t had time to read properly yet, so I’ll leave those for another day. All I’ll say is that the one about the shipwreck looks great, the one about the shift workers who do nightmarishly important jobs looks equally fine, and holy mother of god the 90s-Wired-throwback neon orange on the futurology piece has done terrible, unnatural, violating things to my eyes.

Overall: while I’ve got my gripes, this looks like a solid first effort, and you have to expect that it will take a few issues to find its voice. Right now, it seems a little unsure what it wants to be; it swings between a more technophile GQ, and younger, hipper New Yorker, and a sort of Vice-for-people-who-aren’t-cocks. That will settle down, I’m sure. As it is, the good probably outweighs the ungood, I’ll be reading it in more depth over the next few days, and I’m already looking forward to the next issue. And did I mention that the texture of the cover is lovely?

(Disclaimer: I know and like Ben Hammersley, the Associate Editor of the magazine. But then, probably 87% of the people in the UK blogosphere who’ll write about the magazine’s launch know and like Ben Hammersley, so that’s not really here nor there nor anywhere.)

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.