Spalpeen

A great comment posted on this story about work uniforms at The Guardian. Linking is really simple. Do it often, and do it to relevant sources.

“Please, please, please can these blogs stop including idiotic hyperlinks? The Transport Salaried Staffs Association is presumably a recognised body and should warrant its own link, which would be considerably more useful than picking out the word ‘transport’ to link to that section of the Guardian’s own website. Might seem like a minor point but these links are too often virtual non-sequiturs that display little understanding of where readers might want to be taken. Please tell me they are generated automatically by some crap software rather than painstakingly added by an actual person.

Ahh, feels better to have got that no-doubt pointless rant off my chest.”

Some discussion on Twitter

• Craig McGinty retweeted the link to this story, and added that “the Guardian can’t even link to Friends Reunited when the article is all about it.”
• C.K. Sample III said this “sounds suspiciously like the linking techniques of a site that starts with eng and ends with adget.” Through my amazing skills of deduction, I’ve determined that he’s talking about Engadget. Only thing I’d say in response, is that at least they always link to the source of the story! That would be a pretty decent (and easy) principle for newspapers to adopt.
• Leon Green over at Pickled Politics.com agrees with the commenter, and says “it’s bloody annoying the way the G doesn’t do inline linking properly.” True dat.

Just got this message on my Facebook. Wonder if it’ll be permanently returned?

Some interesting links on the story: 

Facebook Terms of Service Compared
Facebook terms of service on fire
Facebook TOS update
Also, follow Alisa’s Twitter.

The BBC have made what is, in my opinion, the best site design change for the past decade of BBC News online. The first place I go when I check news.bbc.co.uk is the “Most Read” tab. They’ve now added an extra five spaces. That, to me, is like doubling my supply of crack. I’m going to click twice as much, and read twice as much, and share twice as much.

Why do I love this little link box so much? Well, if you read the site often, you’ll know that occasionally there will be a big piece of upcoming news that you suspect is going to be “front page news”, but which the BBC News editors haven’t, for whatever reason (laziness? because they want to put populist stories up front?) posted as a major story on the homepage. A major example of this was the story of Geert Wilders, which appeared as a minor story for an hour or so until it picked up steam and he tried to get into the UK (incidentally, I first heard of the story from @BreakingNewsOn, which is usually has news 5-10 minutes before every major news site and even Google, and has its own set of annoyances).

So, if I go down to the BBC News Most Read box, I can see what the readers are sharing (it’s based on traffic). People know best what the news is, so it’s actually far more valuable for me as a news finder than the human-edited homepage is ever going to be. I’ve seen endless stories about the 17,000 extra U.S. troops in Afghanistan, so there’s absolutely no reason for me to click the headline story. I know it’ll be the same old BBC News/AP style, with about two facts which I’ve already seen repeated dozens of times before.

This minor, almost insignificant change beats every one of the BBC’s stupid site refreshes that they do every few years. More please! And do please tell me if I’m crazy.

“We ran Barack Obama’s fanclub”

Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner at Blue State Digital which ran Barack Obama’s pioneering web campaign during the 2008 US Presidential Election, came to talk at City University. I made some notes from the last few questions, specifically why he thinks Twitter is a gimmick for political campaigning. City should be posting the video of Thomas Gensemer’s talk pretty soon.

UPDATE: Read The Guardian’s great interview with Thomas Gensemer. He has some great tips for Labour! Listen up Tom Watson and Derek Draper!

How do we shake it up in UK, and get broader adoption by politicians for new online tools?

“You can’t create a Howard Dean moment in the UK.” Instead, you’re got to start a small project, and show quick results. Spread “buy-in” from constituencies to other constituencies. Not helpful to think of a top down perfect solution. Best to say, here’s the budget, here’s the goals, here’s the community we’re mobilising. Best way to grow an idea is to start small and let it spread.

How do you manage expectations and prevent later disillusionment?

No possible way to have 15 million mobilised people at the end of first year to be as gung ho as they were in the days after the election. But, can identify niche issues and mobilise people. Segment out who are health care advocates and build something for them deeper than the campaign rhetoric. Understand that the other 80% will be less responsive (but build niches for them too). If you keep core bases of support alive, there’s no reason why it won’t turn into 15 million come campaign time again.

Why do you think services like Twitter are gimmicks?

Let me say that I think there are interesting consumer applications. Will be interesting to see Facebook’s biz model, and to see if Twitter has a business model [implication being it might not get one].

The problem is that the new tool on the block tends to distract. It’s easy for a lazy and unimaginative campaign flack to sell story of “politician on twitter!”. Case of shiny object moving to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep relationships, new services like twitter are scattershot and dizzying. They burn political capital. Besides, they don’t talk to the people you want to talk to [case of early adopters not being very useful to political campaigns? I'd still consider Twitter to be an early adopter service - won't change until it has 60 million users, not just 6 million].

Today (and for the past 4-5 years) it’s been the case that any major tech news item’s Google page is dominated by blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo.

It’s really hard to understate how important this is. These are multimillion dollar businesses on their own right, and half of their traffic comes from pages like this. Newspapers will probably never figure this out, so in the meantime, their authority is going to be continually taken from underneath them by awesome sites like Engadget and its rivals.

Give people what they want, and they’ll take it.

A conversation with my job-searching buddy living out in Exeter.

Peter: i just applied to be a grave digger
Me: thats awesome
Peter: its not funny, its my life
and i actually hope i get it!!
oh dear
Me: man
did you have to send a cv?
Peter: nah i applied online application
should have not put my degree on

 
Image credit: Flat Earth News by Scleroplex on Flickr

I’ve been listening to the City University’s massively informative series of talks from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, and you should too. I liked Nick Davies’ talk so much, that I decided to paraphrase/transcribe some of it, and added some of my own thoughts.

Don’t bother reading all the newspapers, watching all the TV news shows, listening to all the radio broadcasts.

Why? Because if you’re constantly listening to everyone else to find your news, and all everyone else is doing is constantly listening to everyone else to find their news, then you get a shallow echo chamber where everyone is reporting the same small set of stories and everyone reports on the small small set of stories in the same manner.

Objectivity sucks

Davies cites Martin Bell’s reporting of the war in former Yugoslavia. Some stories have such an inherent emotional content that you are distorting the story if you don’t express it deliberately and overtly. In this war, one side was literally raping the other. If you stand there and coldly report the story while people are being raped and pillaged, you’re distorting what’s happening. It is utterly impossible to objectively report on events. The objective story doesn’t exist. Continue Reading »

For no particular reason, here I repost my essay on the differences between Classical and Structural Realism in International Relations.

Which provides the most convincing account of the current security environment, Classical or Structural Realism?

by Conrad Quilty-Harper

This essay comes at a time of crossroads between classical or “human nature” realist thought on one side, and systemic or structural realists on the other. The rise of structural methods of thought in the 1970s saw a decline in the popularity of classical realist thought, although it has seen a recent resurgence in popularity at the start of the 21st Century. Does the end of the Cold War justify a return to classical realist thought? Did structural realists misunderstand and unfairly dismiss Morgenthau’s work? Or does Mearsheimer’s policy advice stemming from his offensive realism extend structural realism’s relevance to the extent that we do not need classical understandings of realism? This essay will argue that structural realists incorrectly interpreted Morgenthau’s stated importance of human nature, and that a reaffirmation of the importance of classical realist thought is justified. This essay will also show how Mearsheimer’s advice to contain China’s rise is dangerous and unnecessary, and the inevitably fatalist consequences of structural realism are neither desirable nor necessary.

Continue Reading »

Clay, what really tipped you over the edge? Was it the eight trillionth biased, irrelevant, spammed, or purchased link on the homepage of Digg.com that made you lose faith? Or was it the fact that every politician who has successfully utilised the internet, has cynically used it to raise money for their existing political platforms? Perhaps the continuing utter insignificance of Creative Commons in relation to greater society, and the prevalence (and success) of DRM?

Technology is not innately “good.”

People split the atom, they use it to build bombs that can millions, and to provide power for millions.

People make a site that can allow anyone to vote for stories, they use it to help other people discover “10 Famous People Saved By The Heimlich“, as well as the latest obscure political development.

Crowds are not wise. They are mobs.

Clay now thinks of the internet as “just another implementation layer for special interest groups” - this didn’t have to be the case! But that’s what happens when people just invent a piece of technology and give it to millions with no guidance. There will always be a need for editorial control.

Frankly, the kind of wide eyed optimism that many people have about the internet is really unhelpful. Theories aren’t enough. Just putting it out there isn’t enough. It’ll take a lot of hard work to make the internet even a shade of the amazing place that people like Clay like to imagine. People want money and power, and the internet is just another tool to get it.

Fun in the Snow from Conrad on Vimeo. Shot handheld on a Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 from the top floor of the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, UK.

I also put up some photos of snowy tracks and a snowed-in bicycle on Flickr.