A bit late, this – thought I published this before I went on holiday to Scotland – I get back and find I scheduled it a month later than I should have (doh). Anyway – a different post from the usual as I talk about another one of things I like doing, a lot, which is food.

Last week I took part in one of the most fun and interesting blogger events I’ve ever been invited to. Nom Nom Nom, or “The Bloggers’ Masterchef’, is a cook-off organised in aid of Action Against Hunger by the ever-enthusiastic and energetic Annie Mole (of Going Underground fame), held at the fantastic Cookery School on Little Portland Street in central London.

I felt a bit daunted before the event kicked off. I’m not a food blogger – I write about tech and politics and take the piss out of the Daily Mail; I’m someone who very much enjoys their cooking, but to be in the kitchen with “proper” food bloggers? I was intimidated. Luckily, my cooking partner (and flatmate) Tom (aka @flashboy) has done one of these before, and my nerves were (just about) calmed when he said it wasn’t as competitive as I feared.

Like all good geeks, I made sure I read up and practiced beforehand, eventually settling on three dishes that were summery. Tagliata, seared Italian beef with rocket & tarragon to start; sea bass baked on vine tomatoes with spinach, pine nuts and raisins for the main, and an English summer berry trifle as our dessert (and also our compulsory cold dish). We can’t claim originality – the starter & main came from Tom Norrington-Davies’ Eagle Cookbook, the trifle from Nigel Slater’s Appetite.

The blessing with nearly all of what we cooked is that we could get UK-based ingredients in season – the beef English, the sea bass from Anglesey, the fruit & vegetables from local farmers’ market – it was only the small things like the olive oil and raisins that would have to come from further afield. Furthermore, all the dishes were relatively easy to make and not too daunting, especially in a high-pressure environment.

The tagliata went like a dream – a really nice cut of Hereford sirloin, seared on grillpan and then thinly sliced. Tarragon is an odd choice of herb to go with beef, but there was something about the aniseediness which works well with the rocket. The recipe we had also called for new potatoes – in retrospect though they were probably a distraction from the dish and didn’t add much.

The fish was perhaps the simplest of the three dishes to cook, just season well, slash the flesh open to help it cook a bit quicker, and lay down on a bed of juicy sweet tomatoes & sliced garlic. I might have overdone it with sloshing the white wine on, which ended up making the toms being a bit soggy, but it still tasted fantastic. You might worry sea bass is a bit delicate to be overburdened by tomatoes, but it actually works out fine.

Tom took charge of the dessert – alas in order to conform with the no cooking rule we had to use ready-made custard. A chance encounter in the newsagents led us to find some sherbert flying saucers, so he adorned each of the sundae glasses of trifle with them, which ended up as a really nice quirky little touch.

The upside of all of our dishes was that they didn’t require that much preparation. The downside is that they didn’t take much time to cook either, so after a lull in the middle after all the prep, the final few minutes were a real stress. We didn’t have a big enough pan for the spinach, so we had to do it in batches, without ruining by burning the pine nuts (something I was very careful not to do). By the time it came to plating up I was in a rush, so it wasn’t as neat as it could have been.

We weren’t expecting to win, yet… well it turned out we were right, ‘cos we didn’t. But I was happy with what we cooked – especially when it was clear there were some genuinely talented cooks in the competition. Nevertheless we did get some lovely plaudits about our sea bass, and the trifle, including from the winners, which I’m going to to take as a top-grade compliment. Best of all, it was a real pleasure working in a proper kitchen, and with proper staff – the Cookery School’s staff were absolute angels from start to finish, tirelessly helping us with our every whim, and not minding when pressure meant there was no time for “please” and “thank you”.

It was also really good getting to know other bloggers, and indeed getting to know my own flatmate better – Tom tends to downplay his own culinary skills but at the cookup, but after that I now know he is a perfectly good kitchen lackey assistant chef in his own right as well.

Many thanks go to the Cookery School (whose kitchen really is excellent), and the many people who made it happen, including Rosalind, Annie and Chris Osburn (who took all the pictures above, and I’m very grateful for him doing so, as I had no time to take proper pics). The event’s not quite over yet – the sponsors have donated prizes to a charity raffle in aid of Action Against Hunger – go buy a ticket now to help make a difference.

Update: The Viewer’s Choice award is now up and running over at the Nom Nom Nom website – if you liked the look of what Tom & I cooked, or you just like us anyway, then place a vote for our team, Nom Nom Nom De Plume. Vote early, and vote often – you can vote once a day ;)

Today the Government launched a new website called “Your Freedom” – designed for members of the public to suggest repeals or modifications of laws they find restrictive or bureaucratic. The name’s a little misguided from the start – after all, laws can be used to guarantee and enforce freedoms as well as restrict them, so merely repealing a law does not necessarily entail “freedom”. But let’s let that pass.

This could have been a nice idea; crowdsourcing opinions from ordinary citizens and the wider public away from the professional lobbyists or niche activists and giving them a more coherent and representative voice. It could be used to take a hard look at some of the laws that people have found restrictive over the years, whether they be anti-terror laws, anti-smoking or anti-foxhunting (for the sake of this analysis, I’m deliberately being neutral on what I think of these respective matters). Instead, it’s so vague and generalised that it’s become “a massive dickhead magnet” (© Justin) within hours of opening.

The submission form (login required) doesn’t ask for specifics on which laws or regulations should be looked at, but rather “ideas”, which renders it near-pointless. The questions for the form fields are so vague – “What is your idea?” and “Why is your idea important?” that you could literally put anything there. The moderation policy implies they operate post-moderation – i.e. no moderation – with little or no prescreening at all.

The result is that any old shit can get in, and it does. Even if those ideas are proposing adding more new laws, rather than taking them away – such as Restrict Immigration which turns into a rambling stream of barely-consciousness:

… Schools cannot cope with the amount of children who speak different languages and it is holding back our children’s education. The same with gypsies. If this is a life style they choose, fine. Contribute to the tax pot or do not expect use of public services. Why should taxpayers provide taxis for their children to attend schools etc. Ridiculous.

The ideas look like something that’s fallen off the back of Have Your Say. In fact actually if you look at the relevant HYS page you’ll see exactly that – people spelling out just how they want the government to enforce their own petty prejudices rather than reform what we have. Let’s look at the comments beneath:

Prison meant to be for punishment, but the so called Human Rightists…

Ok enough. Next…

My proposal would be for a new law…

Oh, fuck off.

So, what can we learn from this? First off, design your site better. If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000″. Anyone who just writes “laws about immigrunts“, or doesn’t put a proper name for the law, or the year, filter it out.

(This has a beneficial side-effect – with a bit of fuzzy parsing, we could include a link to the relevant law on OPSI in the proposal so we can look up the more relevant section, and it also makes finding related proposals on the same law easy, a sort of auto-tagging).

Secondly, pre-moderate. If a proposed change is totally incompatible with our international obligations, say if some idiot wants to get rid of all human rights legislation or leave the EU or scrap the NHS, the moderation team should have the sanity and bravery to filter it out. Anything badly spelt, in all caps, copy & pasted from The Chap or proposing repealing murder, bin it. This is not an issue of denying freedom of speech – the green ink brigade are free to write wherever they like – but of keeping the site a proper and sensible civic space. If you want to get the most out of an online community, you have to keep it in good order.

Thirdly, delete duplicates and employ an algorithm to suggest duplicates to a user before they post – look at the number of duplicates for repealing the Digital Economy Act (though you’d think geeks especially would check for dupes before posting). Having five posts all call for the same thing dilutes the popularity of all of them, and leads to incoherent arguments for their repeal, weakening it further.

The shame is that here and there on the site there are constructively-argued ideas to help fix parts of our legislation that are inefficient or restrictive – for example CRB checks, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act or financial risk for small entrepreneurs (not that I agree with any of these, just that these were examples that look properly thought-out and considered at the very least).

As it stands, the site will end up as a total mess – in fact it’s well on the way there already. When it comes to closing the site down, I bet the politicians will take one look at all the “ban human rights act it give free school meals for wearing a burka” posts, shrug their shoulders and say that “the citizens have spoken, but it’s utter rubbish – they had their chance and they blew it”. No, the government who have blown it – they had their chance to make a valuable public resource, but we’ve instead got another poorly-designed, poorly-maintained failure.

The 2010 World Cup is almost upon us – so here’s a quick housekeeping message. Like when I watch Arsenal matches, I’m moving most of the footy Tweeting over to @gnnr to save annoying everybody else. And after mulling the idea for years, I’ve finally set up a football blog – called @qwghlm #wc2010 for the moment, it’ll be a Tumblelog of photos, videos, links, quotes and other things (Tumblr seemed a better fit than WordPress for the job). Check it out, and I hope you enjoy it!

Six months ago, during the Tiger Woods sex scandal non-story that gripped America, a curiosity cropped up from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily News. There had been no footage of the incident that sparked it all off – Woods crashing his car – and traditionally this might have been covered by either a still graphic or just describing the incident verbally. Thanks to computer technology, the Apple Daily had a much more inspired solution: if there isn’t any footage of the incident, no problem! Just make up your own instead:

The videos went viral in a sort of curious “let’s laugh at the cultural differences” way, similar to how Engrish gets covered in patronising Western media. And to be fair, the animation’s a bit wonky, and the Tiger Woods avatar doesn’t look very much like him at all to be honest. But nevertheless, it showed how far we have come. It’s now possible to turn around, within the time demands of 24 hour rolling news, a simulation of an incident if we’re unable to get actual coverage of it. The company behing it’s called Next Media Animation and they showcase their news simulation extensively on their website.

The Woods video was comical, but more worrying is when the events depicted within the simulation don’t necessarily have to be true. When allegations of Gordon Brown’s temper in the workplace broke a couple of months later, Apple Daily were quick to the mark, with an animated Gordon Brown causing trouble with his animated underlings:

Note the simulation of him physically striking an aide in the face at about 0:45. Though Brown’s temper and verbal transgressions are well known, he vigorously denied ever physically striking any of his subordinates, and no substantial claim of physical violence has been placed against him. It’s now possible to create simulations of events that don’t happen, and pass them off as being real. Apple Daily’s presence in Hong Kong and Taiwan rather than the UK (thus making legal redress more difficult), plus the inevitable language barrier, probably gives them more licence with the story; indeed, the English version of the video omits the simulated striking.

Perhaps as a defence, you can say it doesn’t look much like Gordon Brown (to me he’s more like a greying Ed Balls) and the animation still has a slightly unrealistic, wonky look to it. But some of the videos are more realistic than others. Two examples: firstly, coverage of the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in March:

Secondly, and I’m not going to embed this one as it really is far too graphic, is a simulation, gunshots and all, of Derrick Bird’s massacre of 12 people in Cumbria last week. The link is here, but be warned it’s full-on.

In both cases the animation is more realistic for several reasons. One, the protagonists were not publicly recognisable people before the news story broke, so the constraints of facial simulation are not such a problem and more artistic licence can be taken. Secondly – and particularly in the Cumbria shootings – the elements of the story are very much like the animated action in some video games (as betrayed by the numerous tasteless GTA jokes in the comments beneath the video), something which 3D animators are more likely to be adept with.

Inevitably though, the technology will get better – particularly once TV news outlets in the West pick up on the idea and realise it’s a cheaper and quicker alternative to real journalism. The quality may never match reality, but it doesn’t need to – our visual recollection of news events is fuzzy and not an exact copy of what we see. For example, recently Slate performed a survey of people’s reactions and recollections of images from faked news events, such as Barack Obama purportedly shaking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hand (the two men have never even met). Even though these images were Photoshopped and did not happen, many survey respondents still “remembered” the events as having happened and recalled their “feelings” at the time.

The old adage was that newspapers are the first draft of history. This technology looks like being the zeroth draft of history – a way of representing something before we get actual coverage of it, and we run the risk of it becoming our default interpretation of events. Somewhere in poststructuralist limbo, Baudrillard is laughing at us, saying “I told you so”.

Thanks & a hat tip to @rhodri on Twitter for Tweeting about the Derrick Bird video, which is what sparked this post.

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to The Times’ preview of their new website – which as virtually everyone knows, they plan to put behind a paywall at the end of this month. Rupert Murdoch’s edict is clear: he’s going to make people do what they’ve not done for a long time before, and that is pay for online news, and deny the search engines their share of what he sees as his pie.

With the new paywall comes a new look and a new structure. The URLs are much better for starters – thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk rather than the tautological timesonline.co.uk. And the designs are quite gorgeous, for a newspaper website; as one of the the Times editorial staff mentioned – the design of most other UK broadsheets tend to blur into each other. This layout employs larger photos and a more flexible page layout, mimicing paper news as well:

The paywall has afforded the Times and Sunday Times a few additional luxuries that free news misses out on; there’s no clutch of Twitter and Digg icons that clutter other news sites are no longer there, but of course the really big change is the reduction in advertisements. Without them, the site is so much cleaner, although it is not totally bereft of them – but to be honest, it wouldn’t look like a newspaper if it didn’t have any ads at all, would it? And the increased premium on those ads should mean an end to garish Flash animations, rollover, popunders, lightboxes and the rest.

Sadly for the Times’ designers, in order to pull off such a beautiful website that looks so much like a real newspaper, the controls have had to take a back seat. The menubars at the top rely on rollovers, and navigation buttons are small and fiddly; as an example, the pagination controls on the Sunday Times’ carousels are absolutely tiny:

All are fine for those of us on large monitors and point & click devices. But it comes at the same time as the iPad’s launch in the UK, and everyone’s talking about tablets as the future. A new iPhone is expected in the summer and the design paradigm of touchscreen smartphones is here to stay. Controls built for point and click, tiny icons and buttons and all, simply don’t work with stubby fingers on smeared screens.

The Times’ developers aren’t of course that stupid, and the same week the new site launched, an iPad app came out as well; Times and Sunday Times iPhone apps have also been released, although oddly the UI consists of zooming & navigating a PDF of the newspaper which then clicks through to fairly rudimentary mobile-friendly renderings of articles. A sign, perhaps, that things are a little rushed. Thinking isn’t also joined up across the pricing; accessing the Times & Sunday Times website and iPhone apps, the same subscription applies, but the iPad app is a separate subscripion of £10 a month instead. As a consequence, I fear a lot of time and effort is being duplicated over satistfying so many different platforms and pricing models.

Ah yes, pricing models. £2 a week for subscription is about £9 a month, but for £10 a month I can get all the music in the world on Spotify, or £12 a month I can get four TV channels, a shedload of radio, and a news website from the BBC.¹ The price of just one newspaper² a week doesn’t quite match up. £1 for a single day’s newspaper is even odder, in a digital market where a music track or iPhone game costs less, and last a lot longer – there is nothing tangible to keep or line the cat litter tray with at the end.

But then maybe Rupert need not worry. If News International starts bundling Times subscriptions with Sky packages, or other marketing tie-ins with partners, then all of a sudden that £9 a month looks a little less expensive, standalone, and more of a complete whole. So the Times will make money. With a little clever marketing they’ll probably make enough to justify the initial expense and loss of revenue from adverts.

Interestingly, it also raises some interesting possibilities. I’ve discussed here before about the tragedy of comments on news and how it devalues news websites so. But by fencing off the Times all of a sudden now becomes an interesting social experiment; as a further step they will be insisting on real names. It could be the start of a morecivil, closely-knit, vibrant community without the trolls and drive-by snarking (I hope). Conversely, now that commenters have paid up their subscriptions, their expectations about the website’s content will rise accordingly, and now the community management team there have a sizeable task on their hands.

So exciting Times. But at what other cost? Search, for one. The typical user journey for a non-subscriber is via the front page. Click on a link and an overlay will come up asking you to log in or sign up. Straightforward for a human, but that applies to the search engines just as well. When I pressed with a question about it, it was confirmed that unless a Times story was on the front page of the site, then not even the headline will appear in Google’s index for that URL. Sure, Rupert hates Google, but even they have found how to balance comprehensive search indexing with respecting paywalls – just look at how Google Scholar works.

It’s not just search engine robots that will be bemused by the paywall. Any bookmarking service that spiders the site you’re bookmarking – Digg, Reddit or perhaps most crucially, Facebook – checks ahead for the title and an excerpt (and photo thumbnail). The Times however, by refusing any sort of robot-friendly preview URL, ends up looking quite lost – for example, this it what happened when I bookmarked an article in Facebook:

To some extent, search and sharing don’t matter so much now you don’t depend on eyeballs. But nevertheless, the user experience still needs to be great to retain paying customers. For example, I for one rarely use my browser history to find a page I want to revisit that I last read a few days ago; with a rough recollection of its source and topic, I can probably find that page quicker in Google. If I were a Times paid subscriber, I’d be unable to do this with any Times pages I visited, and this might prove to be an annoying quirk at the very least.

But the bookmarking bug would irk me more. If there’s a great article that is worth parting with a quid for (overpriced though I think that is), then any sharing on Facebook, Twitter or Delicious, helps me let my friends and others readers know. Publishing socially-important metadata such as the headline and a one-line precis, while keeping the rest of the content behind the paywall, does nothing to devalue the content but is a quick win in extending its possible reach. With word of mouth so important for news consumption in the modern era, optimising for sharing should be as important as optimising for search – and it’s not about ramming endless Web 2.0 buttons down the user’s throat either.³

The Times’ paywall won’t be a dismal failure, as it comes at a time whe we’re finally getting mature about paying for digital content – whether it’s games and tracks off iTunes or subscription to Spotify. But the vast majority of its reportage is going to pretty similar to its free rivals elsewhere, so they face a battle for every single pound that comes their way. And to win that battle, they need to get everything else absolutely bang-on – search, social bookmarking, accessibility – to make it really work. Unfortunately for them, right now they’re not quite there – not yet anyway.

¹ Actually I pay less than that, as I share a flat, something else which isn’t factored into the paywall – shouldn’t it be per-household like newspapers are typically consumed, rather than per-person?
² Well, yes, two newspapers, but they don’t publish on the same days so perhaps they shouldn’t be counted. That said the Sunday Times is of distinctly different format and they intend to publish during the week, so maybe they should just do away with the temporal slicing.
³ Yeah, I know this blog post has a big icon top right to Tweet, but I’m not a national newspaper… ;)

[Note: Substantial spoilers, for both LOST and The Wire, lie within - if you haven't seen either series in its entirety, then be warned: there are dragons here]

After 121 episodes of polar bears, monsters, the sky turning purple, teleportation through time and space, parallel universes, the disaster-sci-fi-slash-rumination-on-philosophy series LOST came to a thundering and resolute conclusion this week.

Resolute by its standards, that is. LOST isn’t just one of those TV shows just delights or infuriates, both the frustration and delight camps themselves can be broken further down into differing factions. The show’s most ardent fans, and its severest critics end up agreeing on one thing – they hate the show for leaving so many questions unanswered.

What was the deal with the numbers? What were the DHARMA initiative up to? Why was Walt so special? Why did they go to the effort to rescue Mr Eko only for him to die two episodes later? Why can’t women survive pregnancy on the island? Who dropped the DHARMA supplies? Why does Mr Friendly throw like a girl?

The show’s detractors say this is what makes LOST a flawed television series, by being so patently ridiculous. Conversely, the show’s adoring fanbase grew increasingly demanding of a neat solution to it all to justify all the faith they’ve put in it. More laidback afficionados of the show will hopefully appreciate the irony at how this is a great example of faith versus reason, one of the show’s major themes.

Prior, to the finale, some fans seriously expected it to explain everything hidden about the island, and to provide a “satisfactory” conclusion. Instead, the writers chose to play one of the best jokes in modern television writing: for years fans had semi-jokingly explained it by saying the Island was actually Purgatory and this would be revealed in a “it was all a dream”-style disappointment. The writers decided to actually make that come true by telling the audience the cast was in Purgatory. Only it wasn’t the Island, but a parallel universe where the crash never happened, which we were all led to believe was an alternate timeline until the final twist. Everybody fell for it – not a single fan explanation for the “sideways timeline” comes close to predicting this.

The finale managed the difficult task of bringing closure to the series, but also, like in the underrated parody episode “Exposé“, it delivered with a delicious joke on the show’s fans’ endless theorising from the writers – if they want purgatory, we’ll give them purgatory. Smarting from this, fans and detractors alike have been quick to register their disappointment at a “cop-out” ending that steadfastly refused to answer all their questions. The mysteries of the show end up being dismissed as nothing more than the writers making it up as they go along, or even just utter toss from start to finish.

So, the following needs to be spelt out:

It doesn’t fucking matter that none of LOST’s mysteries got answered. That’s the point.

Let’s compare and contrast LOST with another fanatically followed and critically-acclaimed television series of recent times – The Wire. The Wire is everything LOST is not. By and large, the camera is a highly reliable narrator. Characters will lie, cheat and obscure, and you are quickly drawn into a series of deals, double-crosses and treble-crosses but it is still unrelentingly committed to being realistic. Storylines are complex but vastly dramatic plot twists are few and far between; events do happen off-camera, but when they do occur they are deftly explained and exposited.

This realism is perhaps unsurprising; Ed Burns and David Simon drew from their experiences as a policeman & teacher, and journalist, respectively. The realism even goes down to the names of the characters (many derived from or amalgams of Baltimore cops and criminals), and so much is their commitmen to reality that they even cast real-life police officers and former gang members in bit-part roles.

Barely a line of dialogue or a scene is superfluous – they all contribute to greater whole, an intricate mesh of threads where no piece of gossamer goes unwasted. The series is entirely linear with no flashbacks or other devices; the attention to detail is terrifying, and the resulting work is the sum of its parts, a meticulous depiction of people, institutions, and the city, woven together from the street corners, schools and precincts, upwards to the politicians, journalists and kingpins at the top, shows it in every detail. When put so deftly together, it makes utterly brilliant television.

LOST on the other hand is played out in a vastly different universe. Here the details are scattered among a world of myths, red herrings and outright lies. The characters in the show form only a tiny part of a much greater, unseen whole, connected loosely by seemingly random coincidences. The camera as narrator is incredibly unreliable (viz the flash-sideways, or Locke 2.0 turning out to be the smoke monster) and refuses to give up secrets easily.¹ Nevertheless, this makes LOST too a brilliant piece of television, despite the vastly different narrative setup.

As an aside – this does not mean that The Wire never gets weirder than LOST. Just look at some of the characters a supposedly realistic show brings out. The brooding Adam Smith-reading drug kingpin Stringer Bell, the profane yet nakedly corrupt state senator Clay Davis, and perhaps notably of all, the outwardly homosexual drug dealer-robbing stickup man with a heart of gold, Omar. And just when Omar couldn’t get weird enough, he teams up with Brother Mouzone, a pious softly-spoken hitman from the Nation of Islam, to wreak revenge on the druglord who wronged them. I mean, come on. You might as well have had armed polar bears.

The Wire is a forensic work of art – the situation and universe it depicts is built up entirely from what the viewer sees over the series, piece by piece. LOST is a holistic work of art – one where the entire universe is never apparent, and you can only pick at some of its pieces before revealing a complexity within. You were never meant to find out all the answers because the answers are way bigger than what you can see. Even the moment that defines and sets up the series: the plane crash – normally the focal point of disaster television – turns out to be an insignificant event played against the backdrop of a millennia-old struggle between good and evil (wonderfully foreshadowed by Locke and Walt’s game of backgammon in the second episode of season one).

So what’s the point of LOST then? As I see it, you’re meant to be paying attention to is how the characters wrestle with the situation that is beyond their grasp. It would be easy and boring to have all our questions answered and to become an omniscient observer with a reliable narrator. Far better to suffer along unknowingly with the protagonists as they try to work out philosophical struggles such as what being “good” means, faith versus reason, individualism versus communality, fate versus free will. That’s what science fiction is meant to do – take human nature and push it in extreme situations.

This is not to knock The Wire either for trying to be too realistic – indeed it confronts many of the same issues of morality as LOST does, in a very a different context and with a very different narrative structure. Ironically, the setups for both shows are the converse of what happens in real life – usually it is police investigations that are full of unknowns and ambiguities, whereas air crashes can more often than not be rigorously modelled and reconstructed second-by-second.

The solution is realising that there is no one “right” way to explore the ins and outs of human nature, the very best and worst of the human soul. Both approaches, of The Wire and LOST, do so in contrasting universes,² but neither is inherently wrong. To demand that LOST destroy its mysteries is as unfair on it as demanding The Wire to lose its gritty authenticity. In short: it’s not meant to make complete sense. It will be baffling in parts. The characters and the stories they live out, are all set against this backdrop, and you’re meant to experience it as the characters did. So can we please stop moaning about not knowing everything? Good. Thank you. And Namaste.

¹ About the only other work I know of that does this so well is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – an enormously long book which also has an unsatisfactory ending – well worth reading for any LOST fan suffering withdrawal symptoms.
² That is of course except for Matthew Abaddon and Cedric Daniels being the one and same, naturally…

The story of the Conficker worm is a fascinating one. On the face of it, it was just another worm infecting susceptible computers, but it turns out to be well-thought out, highly-designed and incredibly hard to remove. It’s a story worth telling. However, this article in The Atlantic is not that story. These are the opening two paragraphs to the article:

The first surprising thing about the worm that landed in Philip Porras’s digital petri dish 18 months ago was how fast it grew.

He first spotted it on Thursday, November 20, 2008. Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did. Porras is part of a loose community of high-level geeks who guard computer systems and monitor the health of the Internet by maintaining “honeypots,” unprotected computers irresistible to “malware,” or malicious software. A honeypot is either a real computer or a virtual one within a larger computer designed to snare malware. There are also “honeynets,” which are networks of honeypots. A worm is a cunningly efficient little packet of data in computer code, designed to slip inside a computer and set up shop without attracting attention, and to do what this one was so good at: replicate itself.

There’s plenty wrong with the second paragraph, the first meaningfully sized one. The unnecessary attention to detail when specifying the date. The arse-backwards explanation of what a honeypot is, before explaining what a worm or malware is. But most of all, it’s that third sentence. I mean, just look at it:

Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did.

One of the first sentences to hook the reader in, and it’s a paragon of inanity and tautology. Either people noticed it on the first day, or another day soon after? Really? Knock me down with a feather.

Nevertheless, the jumbled nature of the sentences and useless cruft are not what make this an especially awful tech article. It’s the endless conflicting analogies used to make the article more accessible for the lay reader that are the real problem. Take this analogy of computers as starships:

Imagine your computer to be a big spaceship, like the starship Enterprise on Star Trek. The ship is so complex and sophisticated that even an experienced commander like Captain James T. Kirk has only a general sense of how every facet of it works.

Taking something not in the layman’s terms of reference and turning it into something else which is also not in the layman’s terms of reference. Bravo. But no, wait, computer aren’t just starships. Later on in the article, they’re also castles. With maps!

When there is only one fort, and it is well policed, the lock is fixed and the vulnerability disappears. But when you are defending millions of forts, and a goodly number of the people responsible for their security snooze right through Patch Tuesday, the security bulletin doesn’t just invite attack, it provides a map!

As for the battle between security white hats and the bot’s authors, it’s a chess game:

The struggle against this remarkable worm is a sort of chess match unfolding in the esoteric world of computer security.

Except when it’s not:

In chess, when your opponent checkmates you, you have no recourse. You concede and shake the victor’s hand. In the real-world chess match over Conficker, the good guys have another recourse.

(Aside – I also dislike the typically American tendency to use the phrases “bad guys” and “good guys” in articles like this, but let’s save that for another blog post)

But by far the best awful analogy in the piece is provided in an interview with a security expert, who is trying to explain whoever wrote Conficker had to be an expert at very the top of their game:

“Not only are we not dealing with amateurs, we are possibly dealing with people who are superior to all of our skills in crypto,” he said. “If there’s a surgeon out there who’s the world’s foremost expert on treating retinitis pigmentosa, he doesn’t do bunions. The guy who is the world expert on bunions—and, let’s say, bunions on the third digit of Anglo-American males between the ages of 35 and 40, that are different than anything else—he doesn’t do surgery for retinitis pigmentosa.”

I have to admit I was in the process of Googling what the hell retinitis pigmentosa is, before realising this is the worst analogy I have ever read. It manages to turned the simple statement: “there are only a handful of people in the world who can do this” – which does not need an analogy to put it into layman’s terms – into some sort of arcane and utterly irrelevant reference to bunions.

To be fair to the author of the article, the last analogy is from someone he interviews, not himself. But to include it verbatim in the article, rather than judiciously excise and summarise it is a grave error.

Now you might at this point argue that the author is a professional journalist, and I am a nobody blogger who writes long and sometimes very boring blog posts with the odd spelling mistake, so I have no business criticising his writing. And you would be absolutely correct. I have very few stones to aim at his particular glass house.

But please bear me out, for there is a general point which this article exemplifies, and it is by no means the only one. In technological writing for the lay reader, there is an overarching tendency to patronise the reader by breaking everything down into analogy. Computers become starships, or castles, or cars, or anything you like in your attempt to explain one single aspect of their working. Google for the phrase “Imagine your computer is…” to see what people have come up with.

To be fair, there are good reasons to analogise, from time to time. A lay audience isn’t necessarily going to be familiar with the intricacies of computer security, or even computer anything. The growth in the computer and information industry has far outstripped the natural evolution of the English language. Analogies themselves are not inherently bad; they can be a way of illuminating a difficult or novel subject.

But analogies have their shortcomings. Typically, they can only explain one aspect of how something works, hence why authors are forced to use more than one analogy, and the inevitable contradictions, in an article. Even by themselves, these analogies can only be stretched so far before they reach a breaking point, and become not just useless but dangerously inaccurate.

Despite these shortcomings, all too often an author is too lazy or incapable to devote the effort or skill to explain something for what it is, in plain language. This is to the detriment of our discourse; by opting in to analogise everything by default, the writer creates a consistently patronising attitude to the reader. How are people expected to learn anything about a subject if it is continually abstracted away from them, to the point of infantilism?

Furthermore, the long-term consequence of bad analogies is even worse; they become part of the vernacular themselves. Coming back example above, once to look at the language involved, it’s only fair to ask why something us called a “honeypot” to attract worms; real life worms aren’t known for either producing or being attracted to honey. Rather than make the topic more accessible to the layperson, we risk making it even more illogical and confusing.

This doesn’t just contaminate our thinking in writing, but also in everyday speech. Over at the excellent Clients From Hell blog, two recent stories (here and here) show this taking place in the wild. In both conversations, the designer or developer is struggling to justify why their client should pay the price they promised to pay (apart from it being a breach of the law and all). Yet despite having right on their side, they end up using baffling analogies, involving lobsters and plumbers, that antagonise the person they’re trying to negotiate with.

This isn’t just a problem in technology (you see it also in finance and science) but it is one of the fields of writing where it’s most prevalent. While trying to dictate how to use language has always been futile, it’s especially futile in an Internet age where neologisms and jargon can be adopted by miliions near-instantly. So as much as I’d like to see more intelligent and readable tech writing, I’m not holding my breath. But hopefully this blog post will go a little way to raising awareness and provoke a little self-questioning.

So a message to all tech writers writing for a lay audience: in an age where column space no longer usually dictates the length of articles, the reasons against writing things out in a more rounded way have diminished. Spend a little more time thinking about how to write clearly rather than reaching for the first vaguely similar concept in your mind. Don’t just use jargon mindlessly, but question it and use it only if it makes sense (both logically and semantically) to the reader. And it’s not just writers’ responsibility. Meanwhile, readers, of all ability, need to start adopting better filters against shoddy analogies and other figures of speech in tech writing, and we need prepared to call bullshit on them when we see them.

For the first time in 13 years a Conservative government is in power. The last Conservative government went on the way out just as I was leaving childhood; this new one neatly bookends the end of my twenties and my youth.

That said, I’m not as devastated as I thought I might be. Perhaps because this is not the Tories’ 1997. They went from a 20 point lead in February 2009 to a hung parliament against a Brown government seemingly going down with all hands on deck. What threatened to wipe out Labour and the left for a generation eventually turned out to be the second-least worst scenario – the Conservatives forced to enter coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

The preferred option for the progressive liberal left, a Lab-Lib coalition, was not on the cards once the results came in on Thursday night. The numbers didn’t add up; without the aid of the Scottish and Welsh nationalists there was no way to hold a solid majority; such a wide coalition would not have held together well, and been widely resented in England. It was politically unviable. While I’d rather we didn’t have Tories in, with these numbers it was reasonably inevitable, so I’m not that upset about the (tough) choice the Liberal Democrats have eventually made. Better be in the tent pissing in, and all that.

It’s easy to say this is all #nickcleggsfault, and the Lib Dems to some degree look to have been a victim of a last-minute Tory squeeze. 12 of the 14 Lib Dem seats lost at the elections were to Conservatives. The fact the Lib Dems lost so many constituencies is a surprise – their strategy has tended to be to win seats (especially at by-elections) and then hold onto them. Indeed, after combing through the election data, the sitting MP factor seems to have been really important for the Lib Dems:

• Six seats were lost by candidates who had not stood as MPs before, either replacing retiring MPs or standing in wholly new constituencies – South East Cornwall, Harrogate & Knaresborough, Hereford & South Herefordshire, Truro & Falmouth, Winchester and York Outer.
• Three were sitting MPs defeated by quite narrow margins – Camborne & Redruth (66), Oxford West & Abingdon (176) and Montgomeryshire (182).
• A fourth, Newton Abbot, was lost by 523 votes, just over 1% of the vote.
• Only two were lost by existing MPs by sizeable margins – Richmond Park (4,091) and Romsey & Southampton North (4,156).

So not an overwhelming rejection of Cleggmania – instead perhaps an indication of how important a known face can be in a marginal constituency, coupled with some incidents of sheer bad luck as the big two squeezed on the Lib Dems; even Lembit Opik’s much-publicised rejection was actually in the end quite tight. Had the Lib Dems kept 9 seats (the six with newbies plus the three tight losses), with 66 in total they could have formed a working majority coalition with Labour (327 MPs including Alliance & SDLP) without relying on the nationalists, and it could have all been very different.

Of course, all this “if my aunt had balls” dwelling on marginals and the odd handful of votes here and there show just exactly silly this electoral system is, with its concentrating on a few whimsical middle-England towns while swathes of the country (blue, red and yellow) get ignored. The arguments for proportional representation are clear. Imagine if first past the post had not existed at all and someone proposed a solution where one party can win all of government on 35% of the vote, and where the influence of an individual’s vote varies in accordance to where one should happen to live. It would be rightly rejected. Most modern European democracies employ some form of proportional, preferential voting, as have the former Communist states that have come out of one-party rule.

Furthermore, the new parliaments and assemblies introduced to the United Kingdom in the past 15 years have all adopted a proportional system (AMS for Wales, Scotland & London, STV for Northern Ireland), while the European elections have been proportional (d’Hondt for Great Britain, STV in Northern Ireland) since 1999; direct mayoral elections (which cannot be proportional), are all preferential systems using the Supplementary Vote. Not one system has reverted back to FPTP, nor is their any real political momentum in that direction. The trend is clear. Meanwhile, first past the post’s only real strength, the promise to prove ‘decisive’ results, has been clearly undermined by the results of this election.

Moving Westminster to PR is the next logical step. The deal the Lib Dems have got – a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote – in itself will not produce an inherently proportional system (although AV could produce more proportional results nationwide as a side-effect). But it breaks the stranglehold that FPTP has over our political mindset. Once we’ve done that, a move to a much better system such as STV is a (much simpler) case of adopting multi-member constituencies and redrawing boundaries appropriately – neither of which needs a referendum or endless commissions and reports. AV is not perfect – in fact it’s crap – but it’s a very good start.

These negotiations have been the perfect example of how much better it is when politicians are forced to co-operate to resolve their differences rather than harangue each other on television for the national good. Just look at the difference between the coverage before the election and after; the endless soundbites and partisan sniping and playing to the cameras of 24-hour-news, as a substitute for genuine differences on policy. Our news culture was so void of actual news or reasoned debate, that despite the momentousness of the occasion, it was truth told a very boring election. The biggest story of the campaign (outside of the debates) was when Gordon Brown made his “bigot” gaffe, which clung to the frontpages for days (until the next debate arrived). As for the debates themselves, Nick Clegg’s rise to the fore was not characterised by his putting clear water between himself and the others, but a polished and confident performance on TV which encouraged his opponents to outdo each other on saying how much they agreed with him.

Given how much the main parties all seemed to want to agree with each other, the clamour opposing a (God forbid) coalition government (from both ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings) looks a little odd, doesn’t it? To be fair, to go from a confrontational culture to a co-operational one overnight is a demanding change of mentality; perhaps with a system of PR we would all know beforehand that some form of coalition would be inevitable, and so the parties would be able to give a more reasoned breakdown of their intentions for minority government – who they would partner with, what they would negotiate on. It would be more honest to the electorate and go some way to stymie the complaints that PR leads to “backroom deals”. We get cross-party stitch-ups like the Iraq War, in a FPTP system as well, and acknowledging that parties do deals all the time would help shine light on them rather than let them scurry away from public view.

This gulf between pre- and post-election behaviour shows who the biggest losers in these coalition government talks were. Not the Labour Party (who were fucked anyway), but the news media. In contrast to the banal antagonism of the election campaign, when the serious negotiations of producing a government got under way, everybody in power got to work and stopped talking to the media. MPs disappeared from our screens with their usual pontificating, and so the news had to resort to bringing out a series of old warhorses (Heseltine, Prescott, Blunkett). When that didn’t work, they had to resort creating the news themselves – witness the Boulton-Campbell handbags at ten paces, or Kay Burley having a go at protesters.

The newspapers faired little better. The right-wing press tried smears on Clegg and a ludicrous anointing of Cameron as the new Obama, but they failed to push him onto a clear majority, while the Guardian and Independent’s advocacy of the Lib Dems probably had the reverse effect of getting the big two to squeeze them out in marginal constituencies. It’s hard to see who in the media really “won” out of this election.

I mentioned how fucked the Labour Party was – so time for a quick aside on Labour and Gordon Brown. Brown is a no doubt an intelligent and (broadly) principled man; he handled the economic crisis well enough to stop us from descending into the madness of Iceland or Greece. But he was clearly not cut out to be Prime Minister – disliked by his staff and Cabinet comrades, unable to find a common touch, and simply unable to relax like Blair did. He brings to an end the New Labour project he helped found, and Labour now need to look at themselves, and apply to themselves the kind of root and branch reform they so happily piled onto public services. If they are to be an effective opposition and stand any chance of winning the next election off the Lib Dems and Tories, they need to rediscover themselves and bring back voters and supporters turned off by the Blair years (myself included). Cut out the bullying and spin, the obsession with endless ‘reform’, central control and surveillance, and rediscover what a party for the people should be; not a move to the hard left, but a more honest, consensual and diverse politics internally. As for Brown, I have a hunch he could go on to do something like what Jimmy Carter did – redeem himself internationally somewhere, after such a disastrous period in charge. It may well be the only option left open to him, in fact.

As for Cameron, he faces a very difficult situation. This was a good election to lose in some ways. He’s going to have to keep up the cuddly Dave act while he keeps his promises to his supporters and slashes spending; internally, he has to keep a leash on the batty right wing and fundamentalists in his party while making sure his Lib Dem coalition partners don’t get ideas above their station. If his ham-fisted oaf of a Chancellor cocks up the recovery, his entire project could die at the outset, and though they might get kicked out the next election that’s not something to celebrate: we’ll all be made to suffer first.

So here’s what we have to do: keep vigilant, hold the new Government to account on everything and don’t think they won’t get away with it just because there’s a few Lib Dems to keep an eye on things. The best thing we can hope for is that we muddle through OK. But hey, that’s not a bad aspiration to have, in fact it’s what we usually do. So chin up, everyone. It’s not the end of the world.

I was going to write a post about today’s election, but then Tom went ahead and wrote a much better one than I could. Specifically, on the dilemma between voting with your head and voting with your heart:

…my constituency of Poplar & Limehouse is a Labour-held Tory target, and a combination of boundary changes and demographic shifts over the past five years – plus a dash of the inevitable George Galloway sideshow – have put the seat firmly in play. I look at my MP’s voting record, and it reads like a greatest hits setlist of New Labour’s biggest fuckups. I desperately don’t want yet another five years where Labour can abandon principle after principle, safe in the knowledge that no matter what, the prospect of something worse will always send me scurrying back. And yet, as the polls swing rightwards in the last few days, every other consideration starts to become dwarfed by that tiny, nagging possibility that it’ll be my one crucial vote that gives the Tories that one crucial seat, and…

The curse of the first past the post system rears its ugly head here – how some votes are very much less equal than others. My suggestion is that only if a two-horse race is really, really tight in your seat and you feel very, very strongly about not having one of the likely candidates as your MP, then hold your nose and vote tactically. But only if the situation is really, really tight. Else vote with your heart. It might not win, but every vote for a party you truly believe in is another reason in the argument for a more proportional system. Voting for one of the mainstream parties will only make their representation in Parliament look proportional than it should be.

Vote early, vote often is the adage, but also make sure your vote’s informed. If you’re not sure about the candidates then check out their election leaflets over at The Straight Choice, and find out more about their background at either Your Next MP and They Work or You. Have fun and see you the other side – or if you’re staying up then chat with me on Twitter as I’ll be up all night watching the results come in.

This has not been the most inspiring of elections. Three broadly similar parties are fighting for the right to manage the inevitable post-crunch spending cuts and this leaves precious little wiggle room for anything philosophical, creative or inspiring.

That said, the Conservatives have at least pretended to try something new with their “Big Society” shibboleth. The name is stupid and vague, and the negative connotations of the word “big” (cf. “big government”, “too big to fail”) are poor. So far it’s gone down like a lead balloon. Even Cameron’s own people aren’t keen on the idea.

Nevertheless, I’m intrigued. While the Tories’ views aren’t going to chime in with my left-wing sympathies, doesn’t the Big Society at least have a chance of appealing to my anarchist/governments-should-fear-their-people politics, right? So I read the full proposal (PDF). And this is what I think are the three main tranches of it:

• More money for grassroots and community organisations – in part funded by a new “Big Society Bank” funded from unclaimed bank assets.
• Create and train an ‘neighbourhood army’ of ‘community organisers’ – to form neighbourhood groups where there are none.
• Allow these neighbourhood groups & communities to form social enterprises and take control of public services – local people can run their own schools, libraries or prisons (alright, maybe not that last one).

What’s not to love about that? Well, plenty. Quite apart from the fact most people aren’t interested in doing the government’s work for them, it looks a pretty convenient way of palming off responsibility. It will be our worst schools and public services that get dumped on the doorstep of these social enterprises, and despite all the talk of funding, the sums involved are paltry. How much money the Big Society Bank will get is not specified – the ‘hundreds of millions’ figure seems rather hopefully plucked from the air without any real commitment.

Then there’s the question of who will run these groups. The Conservatives used to say that there’s no such thing as society. Now they appear to be saying there’s no such thing as community. Reading this proposal, you could be fooled into thinking that there are no community organisations in the country and so they’re going to train everyone up to rediscover this long-lost art. This is of course bollocks – there are plenty of existing community organisations and societies out there. Shamefully, there is not a single mention of the words “union” or “co-operative” in the entire document, and the word “mutual” is only used in the conceptual adjective “mutuality”.

The Big Society seems to ignore these already existing bodies and institutions and is instead hell-bent on creating a ‘neighbourhood army’ to usurp them. 5,000 people will be trained up – quite who they are, and who will train them, and what on, isn’t covered in great detail. And do we even need to train people on how to organise communities? The Conservative Party cites Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama as inspirations, but Alinsky’s model of community organisation was created in the 50s and Obama’s work in the 80s and early 90s, before the Internet and the power to organise without organisations.

But finally, the biggest reason why the Big Society is such a big con, is the lie that it is devolving power. Ironically, the Big Society is going to be hardest to implement in Wales and Scotland, as the devolved governments there have the relevant powers, not Westminster. Instead, the Conservatives make it quite clear that these ‘empowered’ services are going to have to subscribe to their worldview from the start. On page 1 of the Big Society proposal:

We have developed a detailed framework for opening up public services to new suppliers, and improving accountability and value for money through techniques like payment-by-results, competitive tendering, publishing performance information, and giving people the opportunity to choose between competing providers.

So the rules of the game for anyone wanting to join the Big Society are made clear – conform to our New Labour Conservative brand of politics, or don’t bother trying. No wonder they need to train up 5,000 community organisers – someone needs to ‘educate’ people into doing things their way.

Big Society has taken a bit of a back seat in the campaign recently – with opinion poll results showing a reasonably even split between the parties. And last night in a Party Election Broadcast, the Tory fear machine went into overdrive – horrified that 33% of the vote will not give them 100% control of government, they launched an execrable spoof ad for the “Hung Parliament Party” Conveniently ignoring the fact that we already have a hung parliament operating in the UK for the past three years, north of the border, it’s also curiously anti-politics, slating politicians for doing deals behind closed doors, ignoring the fact they are politicians themselves and are currently begging us to give them the right to make backroom deals for another five years.

In this PEB lies the plain and ugly truth about the philosophy behind the “Big Society”. The Conservatives try to give the impression they want to share power with ordinary people, but it’s clear that under absolutely no circumstances do they want to share power with anyone but themselves. “Big Society” is nothing more than an attempt to shirk responsibility for the work of government onto the poorly-funded and inexperienced, while keeping all the power themselves. This is not devolution, or empowerment. It’s a con.

The Digital Economy Act is now law, after being rushed through in the washup in the last days of a now-dissolved Parliament. Even though the final result was by and large a crushing disappointment – the level of debate and interaction with the bill online has been remarkable. For me, it was the first time I watched a House of Commons debate live with close interest since (I think) the 2006 Terrorism Act (something which helped dwindle my interest in politics somewhat. By now we’ve all gone over a million times the various nasty aspects of a law that will prove counter to free expression and the economy, but indulge me with a few final thoughts.

Parliament’s processes are broken
The wash-up is a truly ludicrous process; while I can just about see the point of making sure finance bills and the like are approved so that the Treasury still has money to spend while Parliament is dissolved, rushing through any sort of complicated or controversial legislation is madness. But of course, the wash-up is only the symptom, not the problem itself. The state opening of Parliament was on November 18, and this session of Parliament could only have lasted five months at best. Yet 16 bills were proposed by the government, only two fewer than the previous year’s full session. Allowing the government to produce such unwieldy programmes, and to make Parliament sit for less than half a year is ridiculous; as is having letting the government determine the timing of an election. A fixed-term Parliament, with elections and state openings timed sensibly to allow full programmes of debate, would have prevented this débacle.

Much hoo-har has been made about the low attendance at the Bill’s second and third readings. By the end of the third reading I estimated there were about 75 MPs in the House chamber. Yet 240 voted; Phil Gyford has attempted to come to their defence saying they may have had other work to do; sadly, as Bill Cash pointed out during the debate, the vast majority of those voting were waiting outside, some in the bar, having been told by the whips to turn up as and when. It’s ridiculous to expect MPs who did not attend a debate to be have the right to vote in it; you could have some form of swipe card system – they can clock in and out of debates and committees, and unless they spent, say, at least half of their time in a particular reading or committee stage for a bill, then they can’t vote in the division. Intrusive surveillance at its finest, but then they should get a taste of what the rest of us go through.

And don’t even let me get started on the lack of proper representation in the Commons, the undue influence of the whips, or the special interest groups. A few dodgy expenses seems pretty mundane in comparison.

Some Parliamentarians are actually alright
From the above, you might expect me to have a loathing resentment of MPs and this is where I have a go at them for being ignorant corrupt bastards etc. Actually, I was quite pleased with the quality and level of the debate of the third reading; it’s easy to dismiss the Commons as a bunch of old white men who are out of touch, but many of the debaters in the third reading showed either a decent understanding and experience of the complexities surrounding the bill, or if they didn’t have the technical know-how, they at least had the humility to argue it should be given greater scrutiny in committee by those that did. Digital rights mensch Tom Watson quite rightly gets the majority of the plaudits, but Nick Palmer, John Hemming and (I never though I’d say this…) Bill Cash were among those MPs who argued cogently and constructively.

Support for the third reading, apart from the government, by the way, was pretty thin – Stephen Pound trying his best to show off his groovy dad credentials by talking about finding the next Stiff Little Fingers, and Denis MacShane stumbling in after a long dinner and rambling about how all socialists should combined together to save journalism or some other such nonsense. My idea above for forcing MPs to sit in the debates they vote on could have the disadvantage in stuffing the benches with a lot more stooges spouting equally irrelevant rubbish, I suppose, so I won’t claim for one minute that it is the only solution to fixing things.

Nick Clegg blew it
The Liberal Democrats had a real chance to secure the support of a huge clutch of educated, savvy and vociferous voters tired of the usual politics and angry with the parliamentary process, possibly for a generation. Instead, he blew it. There was no strong and principled line against the bill from the Lib Dems and it was a clear sign of lack of leadership from Clegg (about whom I already had doubts); he let his spokesman for culture, media and sport jointly propose with the Tories an utterly illiberal amendment into the Lords. After a backlash from their own party members, Don Foster tried to rally a rearguard action in the Commons, but the fact only 18 Lib Dem MPs out of 63 bothered to turn up for the final vote showed how little the party leadership really cared.

You might argue that the other 45 Lib Dem MPs were busy doing something else with an election coming up, but then again, this was midway in wash-up week – they should be in the Commons to work. And this was a division where Ian Paisley turned up to vote. Yes, that Ian Paisley – 84 years old, about to retire from Parliament and politics for good to spend more time with his collection of Dana records. It was the last vote of his Commons career and he had nothing to gain from it, but even he found the principles to oppose it and made the effort to mark a vote against.

While I discreetly encourage you to reward the Lib Dem MPs who did bother to turn up in the forthcoming election (but probably not the DUP in North Antrim, it has to be said), the 45 who didn’t, and the party in general, do not get my endorsement, nor will I be voting Lib Dem this coming election. It was the final straw, and an especially poor show in the same week the Lib Dems smugly paraded their Labservative campaign, the leadership showed they lack the stomach to fully oppose something illiberal.

Ed Vaizey – what a tit, eh?
I shouldn’t just have a go at the Lib Dems. After all the Conservatives are the official Opposition and made their objections to the bill’s many flaws but agreed not to oppose the bill in an almighty stitch-up. A promise to re-review the law after they get into power at the election will probably dissolve away if they win, I’ll wager. But nothing summed the Tories up more than the dreadful Ed Vaizey and his waste of the House’s time using the debate as an excuse for a partisan and highly personal attack on those moving the amendments, rather than details of the bill. It was pathetic. Exactly what I meant when I said “rotten from the top down“. Yet Vaizey and his ilk (on both sides of the House) will be happily returned to Parliament after the election to bray for another five years.

#debill does matter
Coming back to Phil Gyford’s post on the outrage (which is one of the best post-#debill posts I’ve read) – he’s right to point out some of the shriller and more ridiculous anti-bill coverage on Twitter, like the “I choose not to recognise #debill” wankery going on – you can’t choose not to ignore a law you don’t like. But why are people angry about #debill? Is it just because we don’t want our toys taken away from us. Or is it because many of us, our livelihoods as well as our hobbies and pleasures, have come about because of the digital revolution? The music and film industries (which let’s remember are more distribution than creative) may contribute heavily to our economies (about US$5/6bn each), but that’s tiny compared to what can be affected – the telecomms industry alone in the UK is worth about US$65bn.

Start factoring in the value added to many other industries that an open, free and vibrant internet provides, and you can start seeing how frustrating it is to see the debate framed as merely being a fight to “save” our creativity from piracy with no side effects. This does not mean sacrificing all of the content distribution industries on the altar of an unrestricted internet, but it does require a realistic realisation that copyright infringement is inevitable but it is possible to survive and even thrive in a post-digital world. The digital music market is starting to turn the corner – online music sales are now outstripping the loss from physical purchases, but going back to old model of treating ordinary people like thieves and scum is not going to make them any more popular.

What about the “big” stuff?
No lawmaking procedure has gone under more scrutiny by citizens in the UK online than the progress of this bill. You can quite rightly wonder what would happen if every bill was given the same level of scrutiny. More cynically, you could point out how bad all the other bills must be, and accuse the UK digital & media community of being only concerned with their own lot and not the issues that “really” matter like schools or hospitals or wars. There is some truth in that, perhaps, but it’s not true to say the UK digital community don’t care about other aspects of how the country is governed – the #welovethenhs campaign being one example.

It’s also not true that the digital-haves are in a world of their own. I know people who are teachers, doctors, civil servants and military personnel who use services such as Twitter, delicious and Facebook to share and say things. However thanks to the responsibilities of their job, and the rules and ethics they are bound to, it makes publicly criticising or bringing politics into their workplace less easy than those of us in the digital industries (not to mention that often these sites are blocked at workplaces). From my recollection, by and large all the early bloggers working in public services were pseudonymous – and though some have voluntarily ‘come out’ and been welcomed in their organisations, others (like Night Jack) ended up being disciplined for merely telling the truth about their jobs. Stepping out of line can have its costs.

In contrast, those that had better knowledge of the digital economy and its workings occupy this space much more comfortably and a lot more of the time. And as this is a newer and more loosely-grouped alliance of interests, the people scrutinising the bill have not been able to yet create powerful trade associations or unions (not for one moment discounting the excellent work ORG have done). It’s no surprise they turned to the channels they were more familiar with to carry out their protestations. On the other hand, doctors and teachers have more established organisations such as the BMA and NUT through which they can make their own representations to government collectively without compromising professionals individually.

So just because a non-digital bill receives less scrutiny from the digerati does not necessarily mean every bill we pass receives less attention than the Digital Economy Act, especially when scrutiny may be applied through channels other than the Internet. But in principle, it would probably be a good thing if all legislation was given the same level of public dissection by experts as the Digital Economy Act. Doing so would hopefully help raise awareness among the wider public largely turned off by politics in exposing the flaws of the political process, yet be constructive at the same time – pointing out not what only was wrong but ways of improving it. This applies particularly in a Parliament which was not being hurried through the wash-up and bad legislation stood a chance of getting a more timely look by MPs.

So to produce this better scrutiny, how do we organise ourselves so that in future the experts on whatever bill is being debated, whether it be about schools, hospitals, law and order, get better access to the same tools the anti-#debill protesters had, without compromising their ability to do their jobs or their position of trust? Much of the data are there, like TheyWorkForYou and Public Whip, but no-one has quite yet built the tools or organisations to bridge these vastly useful repositories and APIs with how other, less digital, professions work and campaign. Even with the information available, the complex legal language bills are written in, and Parliament’s own quirks of procedure, are further obstacles to understanding the process and educating a wider public. Experts of all kinds – technical, legal as well as those in whatever fields the legislation affects, need to be brought together to make the information out there work to its full potential, and to make our politicians more accountable.

If BBC Have Your Say didn’t disappeared tomorrow, would its users have invented it? As in, would they have set up their own site, community blog or forum, come together and created a site like it. Alternatively, if tomorrow the BBC HYS site fell off the earth, would its community of users come together to replace it?

Probably not. We may bang on about how the blogosphere has transformed UK media and that 13 out of 10 Britons have a blog (or whatever), but BBC Have Your Say fills a rather large gap that ordinary blogging & commenting does not. Why is this? Here’s a few reasons:

• Lack of resources – it takes work to set up a blog and to maintain it. Not to mention the costs of hosting and the costs of moderation. Easier to leave it to the BBC & the licence payer to cover it.
• Lack of time to write – to write regularly, to contribute regularly on a blog or community and help keep it alive, is a whole level of contribution from the much easier short comment the BBC offers.
• Lack of tech-savvy – even the simplest of blogging systems such as Blogspot or WordPress have relatively complex backend UIs, not to mention the hassle of knowing HTML, choosing a nice template, etc. The BBC’s relatively plain and simple design takes that all away
• Too general – the best communities have a unifying theme or topic, from supporting Raith Rovers to spotting electricity pylons. The latest news can be pretty much anything, so there’s no simple, unifying hook to bring that community together.
• Too atomised – some communities don’t have specific unifying themes, but they do have unifying personalities – Mat Howie of Metafilter or Kevin Rose of Digg. But HYS is more anonymous and less personality-led.

For these reasons, a HYS-style site independent of the BBC is unlikely to come about, and it’s for these reasons Have Your Say is so insanely popular. And for Have Your Say, read any newspaper’s comments section – but there’s particular focus on the BBC here. Only the BBC has a public duty – to “inform, educate and entertain” – and this public duty gives them extra responsibility. But is Have Your Say a good thing? What are the consequences of giving everyone “their say”, and does it create a better or worse civic space?

The easy answer is ‘no’. HYS is quite famous for being regarded as low-quality. After all, there are no blogs devoted to the best of BBC Have Your Say (I even checked), but there’s at least one blog devoted to very worst of it, as well as a regular mocking in Private Eye‘s “From The Messageboards”. I sense the same attitude is held in much of the industry; at the recent(ish) Amnesty Technology and Human Rights seminar Kevin Anderson remarked that he considered the most animosity on the web came from the comments section of news websites, and from private conversations with colleagues and others, I get the feeling the view is shared by many.

But is this just snobbery? Are the ‘digerati’ like me and those who I mix with, who are technically capable and able to produce nice shiny blogs, just looking down on the plebs who comment on news websites with disdain? Is it all too easy to sneer?

Well, without trying to sneer or patronize too much, let’s look at what consequences the characteristics of Have Your Say outlined above have on the subsequent conversation:

• Lack of resources and time – with time being brief, it’s easier to lapse into snap judgements. Shorter time also means less time to read up, research or otherwise gain a fuller perspective of what you’re talking about.
• Lack of tech-savvy – on your own site, you control what it looks like and contains. But when the design and context that your contributions are placed is controlled by someone else, there is significantly less incentive to consider the place something you own.
• Lack of specificity – without a topic or focus for the community, nothing is off-topic. And if nothing is off-topic then you can easily spin away into whatever bee there is in your bonnet, no matter how irrelevant it is.**
• Lack of community – while news sites do force you to have a login and profile, most go no further. For those that do offer profiles (such as HYS or CiF) there is no incentive to build a profile; even if you do, profiles are usually little more than usernames, avatars and a history of comments; hardly something to be building a digital identity around, unlike a Twitter profile or account on a vBulletin-powered forum.
• Lack of accountability – even sites like Metafilter or Digg and Reddit, those in charge have to respond to their users’ wishes given sufficient protests (and indeed pride themselves on it). For the large part, news sites like HYS leave their moderators anonymous (not even pseudonymous) and their internal workings opaque, which only created further resentment from users when they make an unpopular decision.

With these factors combined, you’re left with an awful lot of incentives for commenters (metaphorically) shit on their doorstep; there is no incentive to keep the site on-topic or relevant, nor is their any disincentive to maintain a coherent or courteous digital identity, coupled with an atmosphere of mutual hostility.

Incidentally, this is not even taking into account the users’ prejudices, or any agenda they may have for or against the politics of the news site in question (cf. the rabid resentment of the licence fee on BBC HYS). And then there’s the design of the site as well – a flat unthreaded commenting system combined with filtering by fellow commenters’ recommendation encourages herd thinking, polemic rather than conversation, the more controversial the better.

While those who design and run news sites may not have quite have analysed the news site comment as much as I have, they will know the TLDR version: controversy and bile brings about more hits! The Jan Moir Stephen Gately article was probably just intended to be the views of its author rather than deliberate linkbait, but it (and the limp PCC judgement that followed) had the undesired side-effect of showing what a bit of controversy can do for your hits. As long as you don’t break the law, there is no real short-term sanction for a media owner to stir up any controversy, no matter how inane.

But it also had a side-effect in undermining further our trust in the mainstream media in general. For all the mockery about Tweeting Twits or bloggers in their mothers’ basements, on the whole I find the social media world a more civil place than comments on news sites; this is partly by choice – there are some awful, awful gobshites out there in the blogosphere, but I can follow and subscribe to people I like to read (whether their views are congruent with mine or not) rather than have reactionary circle-jerking foisted upon use, glued to the bottom of nearly every news article I read.** It might spell more hits, but the law of diminishing returns hits in pretty quick.

Finally, back to the BBC. It is particularly relevant here, because while the degrading of a news platform’s reputation is bad news in the long run for Murdoch’s media empire and Lord Rothermere’s bank balance, in the case of the BBC it’s the degrading of a national institution, something we all have an interest in. Have Your Say, as it stands, is quite lacking when it comes to informing and educating, and only entertains in the sense of providing fodder for worst-of blogs. And it’s not as if the BBC needs the hits or ad revenue (in the UK, at least).

So why not stop pretending that anonymous bile about anything and everything counts as genuine ‘interactivity’ and take a lead in providing better managed communities around coherent topics, more well-focused user-generated content that rewards intelligent and civil debate, and provide interactivity with a purpose to inform, educate and entertain, rather than endlessly milking controversy for hits? Kill off Have Your Say, let the users flock elsewhere for their squabbling, and instead work on a platform that does something more constructive. The other news media might not follow, but after all, it’s the BBC’s job to be bolder than the rest.

* The best/worst example I can think of recently was this excellent Times article about German geeks trying to reassemble Stasi-shredded files with computer technology, prompting some utter knobhead to respond: We had better order half a dozen machines for us here in the UK Sooner or later (alas, probably later) we shall discover the full extent of NuLabours passion for “misinformation” and “misleading briefings” And it’s the top-rated comment, for fuck’s sake.

** The Readability bookmarklet is a wonderful boon to get rid of all the crap around articles, include the inane commenting, by the way.

Were you affected by this article in any way? Maybe you have an opinion of your own you would like to share. If so, then piss off and write it on your own blog. Just kidding – comments below welcome as always (as long as they’re on-topic)