Merlin specialises in health, saving lives in times of crisis and helping to rebuild shattered health services.

I’ve never had any operational dealings with a charity before, and the people I’ve met so far have amazed me with their dedication to the cause and their appetite for helping people who are desperately in need. I hope I can help out a bit, particularly with their digital channel. If you’ve got any suggestions and ideas, or just want to donate to an organisation that’s treating literally thousands of sick people every single day, do drop me a line at lloyd [at] lllj.net.

So, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, as it probably is for most people reading this. Tin hats on!

View Saxon Coast Zombie Roadtrip in a larger map

Sound track to the day on Spotify (or http link if that doesn’t work)

Not this time, mind. This time it was me asking the questions.

Now The Blue Dahlia is a classic film noir. It has a certain expositionary style. The dialogue is stylised and literary. And my Mum can follow this and I seem to have forgotten how to.

When did this happen? When was The Big Shift in film language? I blame Polanski myself.

A week ago, my daughter (who’s 12) found herself getting into a fairly sticky social situation because of the way she’s been talking on MSN Messenger. Someone got the wrong end of a stick, and it ended up with a phone call from her school. One verbal conversation and the problem went away.

What connects these things? Digital communication, that’s what. My anti-United friend was simply indulging in a time-honoured tradition of baiting. And the one thing you learn when you’re being baited is to take it. Any sign of a negative reaction will be accompanied by hails of hilarity because, as anyone educated in England knows full well, taking the piss is a cherished cultural activity. The key parental advice you receive in England is not that one day, you can be President. It’s that if you ignore them, they’ll go away.

But Twitter, and pretty much all online interaction, radically changes that. Because on Twitter, I can turn you off. With a simple button-press, your riffing on my pain is eradicated, and karmic peace descends.

But, as my daughter discovered, this brings other pain. The thing I hear from her and her friends more than anything else when I call them on their online comms styles is this: “I was only joking.” And the minute you’ve said that, you know something’s gone wrong. Because communicating inside little text boxes is a pale imitation of real speech. It’s easier to offend, either deliberately or accidentally. It’s impossible to accompany any statement with a visual warning that “this is a joke.” It’s an irony-free zone out there. I know, because I’ve insisted on Ofsted-style inspections of my daughter’s online discussions, and some of the stuff kids say to each other is eye-catchingly awful. The charming little friend with a nice line in dry wit can come across as an obnoxious cow online. But it’s OK, because she’s “only joking.”

And of course adults are falling into the old (well, maybe a decade-old) trap: the kids understand this stuff much better than us, we’re just not equipped to advise them on it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. We have to teach our kids how to communicate online. We have to help them understand that words can hurt. We have to teach them the difference between unfollowing on Twitter and physically turning your back. A friend of mine is a deputy at a massive London comprehensive. And do you know how many sessions they’ve had for the teachers on social media? How many lessons the teachers have had in online communication to allow them to pass stuff on to the kids in their care? None. Zero. Zip. The kids really do know more about Facebook than their teachers. And this is a Very Bad Thing.

There’s no Kwik Fix for this, but I would suggest this: we should all be looking at our kids’ online communications. Screw the squeamishness. If they’re under, say, 16, we should be able to view what they’ve been saying to each other at a moment’s notice, without warning. We should be able to tell them what’s appropriate and what’s out of line. We should be able to question obvious deletions. It should be a condition of access to the Internet that this happens. Transparency might not suit tweenagers and teenagers, but it’s essential for parents.

All this thoughtfulness hasn’t added up to anything at all worthwhile, but has yielded the following thoughts:

• Wonderful as they are, there’s something rather unnourishing about outside.in and Everyblock. And I think that’s because they’re just not very good at tracking emerging narratives, which is something local newspapers do rather well. Narratives are where aggregation fails, I reckon.
• There just aren’t enough UK bloggers with local viewpoints to create a rich aggregated experience. Don’t know why that should be, but there just aren’t. There’s maybe two dozen really good local blogs in South East London. There’s probably that many in four blocks in Brooklyn. Americans talk more, work harder and are just more intense.
• There’s something a bit sleazy about “direct aggregation” - by which I mean pulling in a blogger’s full-text feed into your site, and then slapping some ads on it. I think we need to be honest about that. So any aggregation which isn’t sleazy involves some kind of quid pro quo. And that’s hard for an aggregation start-up to provide. What I’m saying is that this stuff done ethically and well does….not…..scale.

But set against that is my continuing conviction that this stuff is important and will, at some point down the road, become very, very big indeed. Someone somehow is going to find a way of combining the power of dozens and hundreds of passionate local bloggers and publishing their narratives in ways which are compelling and sustainable.

Until that day, I’m going to continue experimenting. And in that spirit, I’ve hooked up with ex-colleague Dave Cross who’s written some nice feed aggregation code in Perl and packaged it up into the concept of “planets” (read up on this here). After a high-level strategy summit (ie, a pint in Clapham on Monday night), he’s let me use his system to launch planets for Herne Hill, Dulwich and Tulse Hill/West Norwood. These simple little sites are simply reflecting local conversations at the moment, which is fine as far as it goes. So now to see how far it goes.

Next steps: hook up with local bloggers and see if we can get their content in there, play around with ways of distributing this concept, and continue to mess with Twitter. It’s not a grandstanding strategy or anything. Fred Wilson need not apply. But it’s a bit of fun nonetheless.

Some time ago, the inestimable David Hepworth came along and spoke to a bunch of Guardianistas (as I was then) about the business of magazine journalism and other stuff. In the course of this excellent hour, he said something (in reference to an old magazine cover from the 1970s, I think) which has always stuck with me: “Cool won. Just look at Gap.”

His point being, of course, that there was a time when it was possible to say cool hadn’t won: that it was still battling with other things, like perhaps enthusiasm, or learning, or success, or something.

And then something Alastair Campbell said a day or two ago:

I didn’t manage to the end of the opening Newsnight report on MPs’ expenses before deciding that bed was a better place to be (via this quick blog), but I couldn’t help but be struck by a formidable contrast tonight … between the basic pro-football stance of Sky Sports coverage of football - admittedly easier when you have a match like tonight’s 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal - and Newsnight’s basic anti-politics coverage of politics.

And now this morning we see the predictable acres of newsprint about the new 50% tax band, which was effectively skewered on Twitter by @toppage: “Only 10% of UK population earn over £40k, and only 1.5% over £100k, yet acres of newsprint on the 50% tax band.”

But this was always going to happen, because Nick Robinson on the BBC yesterday said it would happen. Effortlessly, he set the narrative for the new tax band by saying this:

UPDATE, 13:06: The new 50% top tax rate for those earning over £150,000 is designed to put the Tories on the spot - do they back it or pledge to reverse it? Since it will be introduced before the next election, they will have to say.

If they attempt to swerve this political trap they will face criticism from some in their own party and in the Tory press who will demand that they protect “our people”.

Note how this is not about the policy itself. It’s about the policy behind the policy. It’s meta-analysis. It’s post-modernism. It’s very, very cool.

This has always disturbed me about British political coverage when compared with what happens in America. When I read Matt Yglesias or Joe Klein or the Atlantic or the New Yorker, I see coverage and analysis which is unashamedly geeky, obsessive, stats-hungry and engaged. It relentlessly pores over the output of the political machine, munching up every statement from even minor politicians into its vociferous maw, however banal. It starts from the presumption that this stuff is interesting, and that we’re reading about it because, like the people doing the analysing, we’re (perhaps overly) obsessed with it. In other words, it’s like British football coverage.

British political coverage, with some exceptions, isn’t like that. For one thing, it assumes that the lying bastards are just lying to us. As Campbell says:

What has for years been developing as a culture of media negativity is now getting closer to nihilism. I think that most journalists have stopped even thinking whether they have any responsibility for what they now routinely describe as a breakdown in trust between politicians and public, or any reason to care.

Given that assumption, it goes straight for the meta-analysis: for the big story behind the headlines, the connective thread which, the writer assumes, is being hidden from us. The coverage is sceptical and, by definition, defiantly un-engaged with the material.

If this was a British school, the American political journalist would be the geeky fellow at the front with a voracious appetite and a competitive streak. The British political journalist would be the hugely sophisticated gentleman at the back who scores well without any distinctive effort, has a wide circle of friends and always has something to do on a Friday night, despite his apparent lack of interest in anything. In other words, the cool one. The worldly one. Steerforth, not David Copperfield.

So here’s a geeky thought. What if the 50% tax rate isn’t just about politics? What if it’s about fairness? What if it’s about being seen to ensure that the rich contribute fairly to the coming debt apocalypse? What if, like Obama, Brown and Darling are seeking to recalibrate a few things in the light of a fiscal reset? Isn’t that at least worth analysing?

On the other hand, people who think like that never get invited to parties. So, OK, it’s all about plotting and deceit and exciting chatter in panelled rooms. And this is excellent wine, isn’t it?

Photo by IAR (EseLoKo), via Flickr. Some rights reserved.

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”

Couple of thoughts on that. In South London, our local paper is the South London Press, and to be honest the ratio of stories about local government to stories about crime, depravity, awfulness and local entertainment listings is not one which lends hope that they’re going to ape the Baltimore Sun. Maybe there’s something about different traditions of local journalism here - it’s perhaps instructive that London, a city many times bigger than Baltimore, has no publication with the same news values as the Baltimore Sun, and is rather served by a right-wing rag aimed at the suburbs and three freesheets with the emphasis on gossip and entertainment. Local professional journalism could die in London and, you know what? No-one would notice. Literally no-one.

And the flipside to that is that local bloggers and writers are increasingly holding people to account. Check out Brockley Central for a test case in how a group of committed local people can start to catalyse change and deal with corruption at street-level, not on a “us versus them” level which sanctifies professional journalists at the expense of narratives that actually matter to people. Or look at what Dave Hill’s been doing, initially on his own but now within the auspices of the Guardian (and am I the only one who thinks his stuff was rather crunchier when it was on his own Typepad site?).

And, irony of ironies, look at the most successful holding-to-account of recent weeks: the blog campaign, exemplified by Graham Linehan and Tim Ireland, against the poisonous, depraved and vicious actions of “professional news organisation” the Express. Yes, sometimes you do need hard-skinned newshounds to sniff out stories of local corruption. But when there’s so few of them actually doing it, what exactly are we trying to protect?

(Yes, I know it’s different in some cities. Yes, I know there are fine traditions of local journalism in Manchester, Yorkshire and Birmingham. Yes, I know all of these are under threat. But London hasn’t had serious local journalism in, what, over a decade? Or even longer?)