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The list of bloggers over at ChickYog who are grumpy at dodgy Uzbek Alisher Usmanov is now both a) astonishingly long, and b) astonishingly diverse. And of course, it’s yet another example that attempts to shut down speech on the internet are generally as effective as squeezing toothpaste back into its tube, only twice as messy. Thanks to the efforts of his lawyers Schillings, a much larger audience now knows that Craig Murray’s allegations are out there, and finding them is simply a matter of googling “Murray Usmanov“. Good work, lads.

The main point, for me, is that Murray’s allegations against Usmanov are extremely serious – they go far beyond the generic “businessman with a slightly murky background” that British football authorities and supporters have happily turned a blind eye to whenever the wallet’s fat enough. For such a person to gain control of any British football club – not to mention one of its greatest clubs – would be a disgrace to the entire game. But then, we’ve already allowed an (allegedly) human rights-abusing kleptocrat to buy Manchester City without us kicking up much of a fuss, so perhaps nobody cares that much.

None of which is to say that Murray’s allegations are true. He offers little more than assertion as evidence for many of the claims; and there is such a clear intent on Murray’s part to damage Usmanov’s reputation that, even if the majority of the allegations were substantially accurate, he could still have a very strong libel case against Murray. But Usmanov has refused to pursue this route – despite Murray’s repeated requests that Usmanov let the allegations be tested in court. Instead, he takes the bully’s shortcut.

British law is already heavily weighted on the side of plaintiffs in libel actions; to allow them an even easier route to shutting down speech, that offers minimal opportunity for defence or redress on the part of those being silenced (including innocent bystanders who get caught in the cross-fire), is deeply dangerous. And to extend that to cover not only the making of allegations, but the discussion of the very existence and nature of those allegations, is flat-out ridiculous – especially when something as important as the tattered remnants of our national sport’s integrity are at stake.

MINOR ADDENDA: By the way, as regards the specifics of the situation at Arsenal… the more I read about this, the more convinced I am that a silly little joke theory I came up with last week is actually true. Dein is using Usmanov to push the Arsenal board into the arms of Kroenke, his first choice. He deliberately chose the worst possible person he could find to mount a mock-takeover, so that his original takeover plan would suddenly look far more attractive. I still don’t think Arsenal need it (£200million!) but it would make my opinion of Dein a little better…

This, I think, goes particularly well with this one that I blogged a few months back.

I can’t believe that this lady had the opportunity to give herself the email address dot.dottin@foo.com, and passed it up. Disgraceful, I call it.

(In case you were wondering, this was inspired by Chris and I pondering what Anne Dot Eggers Nielsen’s email address is. Additional point: Ms. Dot Eggers Nielsen is the only player at the FIFA Women’s World Cup whose surname initials spell out the abbreviation of her country’s name.)

In case anybody’s wondering what complex economic reasons are behind the entertainingly third-world sight of Northern Rock customers queuing round the corner to close their accounts, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s somehow related to a worldwide meltdown in the banking sector provoked by years of highly dodgy sub-prime lending. Nope. Actually, it’s all Michael Owen’s fault.

You might be familiar with the Curse of Northern Rock: the bank, big sponsors of sport in the North-East, used its three biggest stars in a series of adverts a while back. Johnny Wilkinson, Steve Harmison and Michael Owen. It didn’t escape people’s notice that, the instant they appeared in adverts for Northern Rock, each one of them was suddenly hit by long-term recurring injury crises from which they utterly failed to recover. Most amusing was the pre-World Cup ad featuring Owen on a luggage carousel, with the tagline “Can we have him back in one piece please?” The answer, underscored by the percussive clanking noise of Owen’s cruciate ligament going to shit, was “er, no.”

But now that Owen’s fit again and back to scoring form for both Newcastle and England, it’s quite clear what’s happened: a lump of curse has been removed from him, and – like a salmon drawn upriver to the place it was born – it has returned home. Curse material is clearly a finite, tangible thing (perhaps much like the gooey black witch-substance of Western African traditions) that exists in fixed amounts, cannot be created or destroyed, and has a strong homing instinct. As such, with Owen fit, Northern Rock now has a large portion of curse lurking in its vaults.

What does this mean for the future of the bank? Well, with Wilkinson crocked again and Harmison unable to recapture any sort of form, they’re probably okay for the short-term future, and the people queuing to get their money out are over-reacting. However, there is a clear potential threat of Wilkinson coming back in time to take part in the Rugby World Cup. If this was to happen, Northern Rock would then be in possession of two-thirds of the original curse-substance it distributed – possibly enough to precipitate a full collapse. And if Harmison ever manages to bowl straight again, the resulting calamity for Northern Rock and its inevitable domino effect could be enough to destabilise the entire economy.

The solution is clear: Northern Rock must immediately launch a new advertising campaign, thus giving the curse a new home. I think some posters featuring Newcastle United manager Sam Allardyce high-fiving thumpy midfielder Joey Barton would be an ideal solution. It has the potential to save the entire British economy from falling into a decade-long recession; more importantly, Allardyce and Barton are tossers and it would be very funny.

Ha. It turns out that nobody’s been able to comment on my blog for several months now because of a misbehaving plugin. I was wondering why it had gone a bit quiet round here, but put that down to the fact that I, er, hadn’t really written anything.

You’ll be immensely relieved to know that I’ve now killed the plugin, so commenting should work just fine. Many thanks to Sokratis from TrustedPlaces for pointing out this huge bug on my site – ironically, in response to my post pointing out some minor bugs on his site. Oy.

UPDATE: Ugh. Just reread this post, and it reads a lot more nitpicky than I intended. Anyway, the TrustedPlaces people have been in touch (an impressively quick response to what is, lets face it, nothing more than a lone git shouting into the void) to say that they’re working on the star ratings bug, so that’s good news. Yay TrustedPlaces.

TrustedPlaces, the social venue review site that’s one of the more hotly tipped British startups of recent times, and one of my favourite new sites, just gave themselves a big makeover.

Beyond the cosmetic stuff (when you first hit their splash page now, the impression is that they’ve moved away from looking rather a lot like Flickr, and instead started looking quite a bit more like Last.fm), there’s some nice changes – notably, personalised recommendations (had to be done) and much neater implementation of Google Maps integration. So, when you search for, say, “Soho”, all the listed places appear on a map to the right, which is very nice and intuitive. Of course, the downside of this is that it also makes it quite apparent that half the places listed are nowhere near Soho (Marble Arch? Green Park?). So they need to sort their search out.

And unfortunately, so far there’s a host of tiny niggles like that which are either old faults carried over, or new tweaks that have actually degraded the user experience (from my point of view).

For example, there’s no indication of whether a review has got any comments, and the only way to get from the venue’s main page to a specific review’s permalinkable page (where the comments are displayed) is to click “add comment” – why not have a more obvious, non-action specific permalink for each one? And if you’re not signed up, you can’t even access this at all, so passing visitors are excluded both from getting potentially useful information in the comments, and from seeing what kind of discussions and community the site has. That seems like a bad move for a site that should be aiming to be a first port of call for people Googling that night’s meetup venue, as well as being a barrier to encouraging community building.

Equally annoying is something that looks like it’s part bad design, and part pure bug – the star rating it appears you’ve given to the venue changes depending on what view you’re looking at it from. For example, look at my review of The Drunken Monkey, an unpleasant Shoxton git-hole that I gave a grudging two stars some time ago. First, if you look at it from the list of my reviews on my profile page, it has a badly-rendered 1½ stars:

That’s not what I gave it. I think that’s the average star rating it’s got from all users – useful to know, but if you’re looking at an individual user’s profile, surely what you’re most interested in is what rating they gave a venue? Whatever – if you then click through from my profile, suddenly, I’ve given it four stars:

Well, once again, no I didn’t. I have no idea where this four stars comes from – but whenever you click through to any review from my profile, that’s always how many stars appear. Is it the average number of stars I give? Or just a straight-up bug that always displays four stars in this location for everybody? I’ve no idea. Anyway, it’s only one you then click on the venue’s name to see all its reviews that my actual rating appears:

This isn’t just a problem with my reviews either – I glanced at a friend’s reviews, and one pub was given 4½ on his profile page, 4 when you clicked through to the single review page, and then 5 when you looked at the venue’s main page. Seeing as he was the only reviewer, so the pub’s true rating was 5 stars, where that 4½ came from is a mystery…

I hope these little glitches get cleared up soon, because TrustedPlaces really has the potential to be an excellent resource – and I do stress that they are only niggles, and that many of the new features and design seem pretty sweet. But a trust-based community site can’t get very far when it’s not reliable, and hides its community features.