I’ve been poking around the list, and found some interesting figures about the members. At a brief count, there are the following numbers of people in “important professions” on the list.

-1 currently employed Police Officer.

-1 currently employed NHS Doctor.

-17 former or retired Policemen, including one detective, one inspector, and one who claims to be a “human rights lecturer” which I don’t quite understand.

-15 people currently employed as full or part-time teachers, or with teacher qualifications, including secondary school teachers in subjects like Maths, English, and Physics.

-12 former or retired teachers.

-114 ex-servicemen. Army, Navy, RAF, Intelligence, MoD Police. 

-18 current servicemen. Army, RAF.

Check the Google Maps mash-up of the BNP membership.

International Alert works with a variety of Non-Governmental Organisations and corporations across the world’s hotspots, including, quite controversially, Shell. Shell apparently want to go back to Iraq, which is an extremely dangerous area to get involved in. Inevitably a corporate presence there would result in deaths, due to the grave security risk out there.

Instead of telling Shell that it’s wrong to engage there because your presence will result in killings because of the security they’d have to employ, they tell them that it would cost them a lot of money if their presence did result in killings. They often cite cases where corporations have been successfully sued in similar scenarios, which has far more impact on the corporations than mere threats that human beings might die.

Business ethics? Pah!

However, there are some technical issues with the way the video is being published.

-Why is there no link to the NYTimes columnist’s story in Tomasky’s latest video? If not in the video, then it should be linked to in the notes.
-Why is there no way to respond with a video comment? Plenty of online services out there solve this problem (Seismic being one - although I personally don’t like their solution).
-Why is the flash player lacking other basic features (full screen mode? download link? RSS/subscribe?)
-Where are the links to previous videos? A link to Tomasky’s blog on a sidebar isn’t enough.
-Why aren’t these videos being distributed on every other video platform out there? (Go to TubeMogul and send this video to 10+ top video sites, for nothing).
-Why is the title/tagging/description of this video not SEO friendly? The Guardian produces some great video content, and this should be up there on the most popular search topics. It’s not going to be if the meta data is as vague as it currently is.

-Also, pre-roll ads? Ugh, but whatever.

I friggin’ love The Guardian’s content, but this is yet another example of a newspaper company getting A for effort, but C for achievement when it comes to publishing on the web.

It’s also why Tina Brown is a complete idiot when she says “I’m not completely sure how a printing press works, but that never stopped me” as a way of justifying her naive entrance into the world of internet publishing. Sorry guys, if you don’t know SEO, you ain’t gonna win the internet.

Raytheon Visit log
IAEA Visit log
MoD Visit log

It’s interesting to me how easy it was for me to track these visitors, and how simple it was to draw them to the site.

It’s also an interesting metaphor for how the internet enables us to watch the watchers, to a limited extent of course. No other generation has had the ability to see which authorities were reading their flyers or newsletters. At least with a blog, you might be able to predict when the FBI/CIA/MI6 would be knocking down your door!