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.

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.

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.

19. Hitler’s BNP membership gets leaked
The BNP membership list leaked raised many important questions of privacy, data protection, and how democratic institutions deal with the non-democratic. Most importantly, though, it provided a fitting final flourish for the previously moribund Downfall re-subtitling meme:

Excellent piece of work there by Chris (advisory: two of the jokes in there are mine). See also: LOLGriffin, which was the result of three of us fucking around on Twitter.

18. The Twat-O-Tron, from spEak You’re bRanes
OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE IMMIGRANTS ARE TOO SOFTLY SOFTLY BECAUSE MUSLIMS ARE RUNNING THE SHOW SIX WORDS: LOCK OUR KIDS AWAY TO SAVE THEM THIS IS VERY DISTURBING TO ME

17. Human Bacon

Best Family Car 2008.

16. Celebrities on Twitter
Stephen Fry, John Hodgman, Greg Grunberg, Shaq, Jonathan Ross (who is now acting as a internet detective to debunk fake celebrity twitterers). All good stuff. Andy Murray, less good stuff. Wil Wheaton: love you, man, but for pity’s stop the jokey imagined conversations with iTunes. Yeah, we get it, you have a very slightly eclectic music collection and randomly shuffling through it produces some unexpected juxtapositions. We know. This happens to everyone.

15. Portishead’s Third
2008 was a good year for the unexpected appearance of things we’ve been waiting a comically long time for. While I’m not too fussed about Spore or Chinese Democracy finally being released into the wild, Portishead’s return from their indefinite hiatus was one of my favourite mainstream releases this year. It trod a nicely-judged line between being something they’d clearly spent a lot of time thinking about, and giving the impression that they were just having fun. Most of all, it was just pleasingly weird: more than simply refusing to make a soundalike retread of their earlier material, they tried on different styles on virtually every track. From the Holy Fuckish edges of We Carry On to the bizarre ukulele spiritual misery barrel of Deep Water, to the thrillingly alienating comeback single Machine Gun – a track which shows us what the theme tune to The Terminator would sound like, if The Terminator was a film about an emotionless killer robot. Of course, just experimenting with new sounds isn’t enough; I believe Keane also tried a radical new sound in 2008 as well, and, you know, who cares? But Portishead pulled it off by making sure that their tracks were (to use the technical musicological term) really bloody good. (last.fm link | Spotify link)

14. Bonekickers
Ha. No, only joking. It was actually the worst television show ever made. But it was quite fun saying so.

13. Screenwipe on QVC
Disgruntled chronicler of our culture and television shouty man Charlie Brooker (who is right about everything) is increasingly attaining a status somewhere between spokesman and cult leader for sections of British geekdom (as evidenced by The Charlian, which is great but also a bit weird and stalky). I’m fairly sure that nobody is more horrified by this development than Brooker himself. Anyway, my favourite Brooker thing this year was the unexpected appearance of a much-loved Screenwipe feature on shopping channel QVC. Great. (Oh, and Dead Set was excellent too.)

12. The Times sub-editor who removed Giles Coren’s “a”
As entertaining as Giles Coren’s swearier-than-thou rant and the ensuing fallout was, one important point stood out: his original “wondering where to go for a nosh” joke was shite. As painful as it might be to end on an unstressed syllable – trust me, I know the agony of people pissing about with your prosody – the readers of the Times, the world of restaurant reviewing, and the annals of English literature as a whole didn’t really lose out on much when it was so rudely expunged.

11. Bacon cups
Bacon cups.

10. Wikihistory
One of my favourite bits of fiction of the year. Stop killing Hitler! “Bulletin 1147″ deserves to become a catchphrase.

9. Yelle
So, yes, naughty French electrochanteuse Yelle was far and away one of my most-played musical finds this year – especially Je Veux Te Voir (last.fm link | Spotify link), her awesomely pop diss track that goes into some anatomical detail about the deficiencies of a French rapper. What’s that you say? Je Veux Te Voir was originally released in 2006? Shut up. If it’s good enough for Keiron Gillen, it’s good enough for me. Also, she looks like a sexier version of Cassandra from Only Fools And Horses, so there*.

8. Seth Bingo and the Silent Girl
…and speaking of Keiron Gillen, the second run of his and Jamie McKelvie’s just-about-perfect music as magic comic Phonogram is only one issue old, but I already think that snobbish indie DJs Seth Bingo and the Silent Girl are some of my favourite new characters in just about any medium for a long while.

7. Sigur Ros at the Latitude Festival
Just lovely. Best Modern Asian Cuisine (North East region).

6. The Dark Knight
Forget Heath Ledger’s astonishing performance, or the general greatness of Messrs Bale, Oldman, Eckhart, and Gyllenhaal. My favourite part of Christopher Nolan’s complex, morally twitchy superhero-romp-as-crime-epic was the unexpectedly brutal resolution of Michael Caine’s story about chasing a jewel thief in Burma. It was the finest riff on the theme of the inevitable decay and corruption good intentions suffer, in a movie positively dripping with them. Also, the bit with the lorry flipping over was cool.

5. Dear Science, TV On The Radio
TV On The Radio never really stuck for me before this album. As is often the case with experimental rock, you want them to respect the scientific method, and only publish once the results of the experiment have been collected, analysed and peer-reviewed. But what everyone else says about this album is, basically, spot on – it’s just awesome. Key tracks: opener Halfway Home (last.fm | Spotify), the astonishingly lovely ballad Family Tree (last.fm | Spotify) and the dirty slow build of DLZ (last.fm | Spotify).

4. The McLaughlin Groove by Andrew W.K.
What I said here.

3. The new British coinage
Not only was the new UK coinage produced by a completely unexpected bit of innovative thinking from an institution as venerable as the Royal Mint – created from an open competition, by a young designer who’d never designed a coin before – but the end result was a really lovely bit of design.

2. Nate Silver, Sean Quinn, Sam Wang and the FiveThirtyEight v. Princeton Election Consortium bitch-fight

The US elections became an all-encompassing obsession for me, and much of the world, for months on end. When the dust settled, there were two clear winners: the tall hopey chap with the big ears who now runs the world, and Nate Silver.

Baseball stats geek Silver turned his analytical abilities on the polling data spewed out left, right and center during the long, long election. His website, fivethirtyeight.com, went from being an underground secret among political geeks to the ultimate oracle of polling truth, with a massive following, following his predictions for Super Tuesday. But the most interesting wrinkle of the whole election prognostication madness was his rivalry with Sam Wang,a Princeton neuroscientist who also moonlighted as a polling wonk, with a far simpler set of methods, on the Princeton Election Consortium website.

The argument began as a polite disagreement, and rapidly escalated into a subtle but unmistakable nerd-brawl. Silver dismissively said that the question Wang was trying to answer – “what would be the result if the election was held today?” – was a largely pointless question to ask; Wang countered that Silver’s methods were statistical smoke and mirrors, minor cosmetic corrections that were dwarfed by the potential errors in his assumptions. As Silver’s fame grew, to the point where he as a honoured guest on The Colbert Report, Wang’s tone changed from gentle chiding to outright snark.

Of course, this was a pony race that would have an unambiguous victor: who could most accurately predict the final result? As the world wandered, dazed and blinking, into the shiny dawn of November 5th, the media hailed Silver’s triumph: his predictions had outperformed many major pollsters, and were within hand-waving distance of the final result.

What they all missed, though, was that Wang’s simpler methods had beaten Silver’s by a clear length.

While Silver was close, he missed Obama’s final share of the popular vote by 0.6% and was out by 16.5 votes electoral college votes. Wang nailed Obama’s popular vote to within 0.1%, and only the fact that one district of Nebraska flipped blue (the first time in history a state ended up with a split result) stopped him getting the electoral college spot-on: he predicted 364, it turned out to be 365.

This isn’t to say that Silver was a charlatan, of course; he was genuinely dealing with a large number of what Donald Rumsfeld called known unknowns. Not only did he do well at establishing a clear and useful framework for discussing what kind of effect those unknowns might have, he did a fine job of making sure there were as few unknown unknowns as possible. A little hubris and over-confidence in his models was certainly a tad misleading, but as a corrective to the nonsense that was spread by many in the media and, more scandalously, some major polling organisations (five letters, rhymes with Dogby) it was vital. And on top of that, FiveThirtyEight also had Sean Quinn’s superb ground-level citizen journalism, one of the few attempts to report in-depth on the two campaigns’ Get Out The Vote machines, and the gaping gulf between them.

But yeah, Sam Wang still won.

1. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Thankyou, thankyou, precious TV writer’s strike. Overall Winner, Best Customer Service.

So, that’s it. I missed out loads of things, because I can’t remember them. What were they? Suggestions, reminders, arguments and general talkiness in the comments, please…

*Credit for Yelle description: Joe The Dough.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Eventually – too late, frankly, once the internet had been busy stewing for several days – Boing Boing issued a statement, which sort-of explained things, but sort-of didn’t explain others. Prior to this, they’d been busy deleting any comment that even hinted at the affair, starting a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with their readers. Regardless of how justified one may think their original actions may have been (currently, I don’t think we know enough to say one way or the other, but I incline towards the idea that it was unwise) Boing Boing’s reputation has undoubtedly been harmed by this, and their ability to be a clear voice in favour of openness and broad-brush free-speech has been degraded.

But in all the debate about it, I thought the most interesting issues it raised were often overlooked amidst dumb debates about the precise definitions of “censorship”, “free speech” and so on – most of which were irrelevant. Indeed, it was one specific repeated bit of point-missing that struck me in particular.

Personal problems
There was a lot of very heated discussion about whether Boing Boing was a “personal site”, or whether it should be held to the standards you’d expect of (say) a newspaper. But surely this ignores one of the cornerstones of the new publishing world that BB helped usher in – that such distinctions are now so fuzzy as to be practically meaningless.

Certainly, Boing Boing is a personal site, in that it’s still editorially controlled by its founders, that the writers are the only people who decide what should be published, and so on. But it is also part of a for-profit company, and its contributors make (apparently) healthy incomes from it. Furthermore, it has a readership that many newspapers would be (are) envious of, is a major source of information for many people, and has very deliberately inserted itself into the public discourse on a number of important subjects – information openness being a major one of them. It is simultaneously personal, professional, private and public.

And it was really weird to see so many people (notably in the first thread at Making Light), who I imagine would normally would be quite happily suggesting that such distinctions are now increasingly irrelevant, spending so many words arguing over which category Boing Boing fits in.

Of course there’s a world of difference between one person’s LiveJournal with two subscribers and the New York Times, but anywhere you try to draw a line, you’ll find a myriad of edge cases that defy simple classification. Surely rather than starting with the assumption that there are many discrete categories of content publisher, and trying to retrospectively fit whatever you’re discussing into one of them, it’s better to start with the assumption that publishing is publishing is publishing – and to work out what best practice is across the entire field, and what needs to be assessed on a case by case basis.

At the very least, it should be pretty clear that if you want to spend a fair portion of your time decrying the state of the mainstream media and pointing out how much better blogs do reportage, analysis and comment (which I agree with to an significant extent), to then jump back to the position of “but it’s just a blog!” when people hold you to account over something will require – at the very least – some rather dainty footwork.

Xeni Jardin acknowledges this, and tacitly admits that it’s still an area of some confusion for the Boingers themselves, when she says:

This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now… We realize that we’re now bigger and more complex, and we’d probably handle something like this differently now that we’ve grown… This hasn’t happened before.

It must be weird, realising that the widespread public perception of what you do is significantly different to your own view of it, and that it’s been changing right under your feet. But the BB team should have been able to see that these problems would confront them sooner or later – and it’s strange and disappointing to see them be so tone-deaf to the issue.

You don’t control the context
Which (sort of) leads on to my second, connected point. One of the major issues that confronts publishers or all sorts – personal, professional, whatever – is how to deal with challenges directed to them about what they’ve published. That questioning will often come from people who have little understanding of the context of the published pieces – the internet being a magnificent device for stripping work of its original context – and who were never the target audience for the work. The very fact of being linked to changes who you are and how you’re perceived. Something you wrote for your regular audience of four friends looks very different once it’s linked to from a major site with a degree of authority. A lighthearted pop-science story for a general audience looks shoddy as hell once the Bad Science crew get hold of it. That dark joke at the end of your TV column? People who’ve never read you before might think you’re actually advocating the assassination of a world leader.

In this world of shifting context, there’s a range of approaches you can take towards challenges to your content and editorial decisions: a “my house, my rules, if you don’t like it then start your own blog/zine/major newspaper conglomerate” approach; a formal, behind-closed doors procedure for assessing your own practices; or simply an ad-hoc, case-by-case, depends-what-mood-I’m-in attitude. All of these can be valid and justified in some circumstances. But it seems to me that there’s little doubt that – in a situation where you don’t fully control the context of your own work, and the expectations readers have when coming to your site can change dramatically without you ever realising it – transparency isn’t just an ethically appropriate approach, but (and I’m going to write this in bold) transparency is the option that scales best. From LiveJournal to major newspaper conglomerate, from personal comment to investigative reporting, you can apply the same basic principles, and they work – and it doesn’t matter if your audience and their expectations are suddenly completely different one day to the next.

Ironically, the best summation of this approach comes from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, under a year ago, on Making Light:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
…

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.
…

Teresa (who I have a lot of respect for) is currently the moderator/community manager for Boing Boing. If they’d followed her guidelines more closely, a lot of this could have been avoided.

Post slightly edited for clarity and coherence at 8.27am, July 2.

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…

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.