And the television isn’t on.

Now go back 20 or 30 years. It’s Saturday morning. It’s cold outside. And the television is on, and will stay on probably until bedtime. First there will be some major children’s effort, probably from the BBC (Swap Shop giving way to Saturday Superstore and handing off to Live and Kicking with a few misfires in between).

Then the sport will start. There will be a lull in mid-afternoon when the only live sport is the wrestling on ITV. Then the football results will start coming in, and that will occupy almost the length of a real football match (we only saw one real football match on telly back in those days, and that was the FA Cup Final, which lasted a whole day). Then another lull at teatime with some sub-cabaret nonsense from the coast somewhere. Then Doctor Who. Then a movie, perhaps. Or a detective drama.

Then bed.

A whole day given over to worship of the goggle box.

Right now, my kids are on their computers. One on Facebook, the other on Sims. My daughter’s spent some time watching the Tempest on Youtube because she’s got an audition this afternoon. And I, it should be obvious, am blogging.

It feels to me like my generation was lost in front of the flickering CRT. As Clay Shirky says, maybe this was an interruption in human development. Maybe we’re back on track now. All I know is it’s quiet in my house, and people are thinking and selecting their activities, not just sitting back and letting a default activity anchor them for an entire day. The box in the corner (or rather, the output which ends up on that box) feels like it’s taking a less central, better place in our lives. It does feel like significant progress.

Now, I think I’ll read a book.

I said to my wife “you know, if the Guardian offered that, I’d subscribe like a shot.” And she said “knowing you, you’ll have signed up to the Times by the end of the weekend, just because it’s new.”

She knows me so well. So, from next Sunday, I’ll be getting the Times delivered to my house for the grand total of 8 quid a week. No contract, and I can change my options online at any time. If I want just one paper a week, I can get it. If I want to suspend for several weeks, I can. And, as has been said many, many times before, that’s a week’s worth of newspapers for the price of four tall Starbucks lattes.

Now, before this turns into a commercial for what is still a newspaper owned by Big Bad Murdoch, I should just say that I can’t understand why the Guardian has never offered this. It’s been discussed endlessly internally, and for the life of me I can’t recall anyone giving me a single good reason why they shouldn’t do this in my five years there. It’s not going to save the newspaper industry, but surely there are, say, 20,000 people living within the M25 who’d be willing to sign up to receive the paper? At least at the weekends?

Also, worth adding that the Times make a big deal of their “clubs” when you sign up. You get free membership of their Culture or Travel clubs, and I admit to glazing over when they rolled off the list of benefits. But it took up at least a third of my phone call with them.

We shall see. But (as I’ve said here before) I already spend much more on magazine subscriptions in a year than I do on the BBC licence fee. I like the feel of print-on-paper with my breakfast. Try as I might, clicking on a website while I munch on porridge or toast has just never done it for me. I admit to being quite excited that, from next week, a crisp newspaper will be on my doorstep every morning. It makes me feel like a grownup, to be frank (the delivery bit, mind, not the Times bit. The Guardian is a much more grown-up newspaper).

And, in fact, no-one is listening with anything like this intensity. It’s something they’re aware of, happening over there and quite interesting. But while we all shout at each other about the thing we care about, the rest of the world goes on its merry way, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Merlin has sent out a surgical team to treat some of the thousands of people injured in the recent earthquake in Indonesia.

The team, the first 4 of whom have already arrived in Jakarta and are making their way to Padang tomorrow morning, includes two surgeons, an anaesthetist, two nurses, a health coordinator and a project coordinator. They’ll be taking surgical equipment and medical supplies with them, ready to perform emergency surgery and deal with traumatic injuries as soon as they arrive.

Paula Sansom, Merlin’s Emergency Response Manager says: “Thousands of people have been trapped under buildings and are suffering from broken bones and abdominal trauma. There is an urgent need for surgical staff and equipment.”

The main hospital in Padang, which was the only one equipped to perform surgery, was severely damaged and only two hospitals are functioning.

One of the surgeons, Asad Syed, is an Irish orthopaedic and trauma consultant, currently working at a hospital in North Wales. He has experience of working in the aftermaths of earthquakes, having worked as a surgeon following the earthquakes in China in 2008 and Kashmir in 2005. During his missions, he performed daily operations, involving complex limb injuries and tissue loss, and also helped to train local surgeons.

Flora Henderson, from Buckden in Cambridgeshire, has over 15 years experience in nursing, most recently specialising as a theatre nurse at a hospital in Cambridgeshire.

Sean Keogh, a former A&E consultant, joins the team as a health assessor looking at the more medium/long term health needs. He has worked in Indonesia before, having worked on Merlin’s response following the tsunami in 2004.

The team will be led by Diego Moroso, who previously worked as an operational coordinator for Merlin in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

If you can spare some cash to help the team out, it’ll be put to immediate and essential use. Please do what you can.

Quick recap: using software set up by the clever Dave Cross, I set up three aggregation pages: Planets Herne Hill, SE27 and Dulwich. These are basically pulling in updates from the likes of Flickr, Twitter, Google search and a few other places. They’ve been running for five months now.

The dashboard looks like this:

That’s for the month to October 3 and, as you can see, visits are pretty low, barely two a day for the most popular planet, for Herne Hill. That doesn’t surprise me, actually. Google’s not giving these sites any love, because they’re just aggregators, and the shortage of billboard posters around London will have alerted you to my minimal marketing spend.

So, what am I learning? Well, a few things:

• permanence is even more important than I ever realised. Without permanence, Google ignores you. And if Google ignores you, the world ignores you (are you listening, regulators?)
• the most useful part of these sites is the RSS feed. It’s a joy to consume every day, and ironically it makes the content less ephemeral. The web pages are only constructed to show the n latest things from all the sources; if I wanted to, the RSS feed could keep them forever. I’m wondering if some secondary processing of the feeds might be useful, to generate something with more permanence at a URI.
• there’s a lot of noise in the system. I’m thinking it needs some functionality to screen out certain types of things. Finding out that people I’ve never heard of are going jogging in Brockwell Park isn’t very useful.
• on the other hand, despite the noise and the mess, the Planets score very highly on timeliness. When someone was stabbed on Lordship Lane over the summer, it was on Planet Dulwich hours before it was any media outlet. In fact, I was told about it when someone told me they’d seen it on Planet Dulwich. It’s not citizen journalism; it’s citizen awareness.
• the shock of recognition is as strong as ever. Seeing a street name, or a shop, or a restaurant I know well, or the name of a pub I go to, inside a piece of media draws you into the content like nothing else I’ve seen.

I’d like to share the Analytics data more systematically. Anyone know how to do that?

I’ve pointed out that any concerned parents searching Google for information on the cervical cancer jab (in the tragic wake of a schoolgirl’s death) see a mass of negative and inaccurate information linking the girl’s death to the vaccine.

It turns out she died of an unrelated tumour. But Google’s results will give parents second thoughts about letting their daughters be vaccinated, even though the injection will save 00s of lives a year. You can help however.

YOU can help do something about this.

If you can publish a web page …

The results Google shows are heavily influenced by two things – the number of links to a page, and the text that’s used for a link.

So, please, if you have any way to publish a web page (you have a blog, say, or you work somewhere that publishes online), then link to this URL:

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hpv-vaccination/Pages/Introduction.aspx

Ideally, use some link text like cervical cancer jab or cervical cancer vaccine to link to that page, like this: cervical cancer jab.

The more of us who link to it, the higher in Google’s results that page will appear, counteracting the ill-informed media scaremongering. My aim is to get this NHS page into the top 10, and preferably top 3, of a search for relevant terms.

Nice work, sir. So remember: link to this cervical cancer jab page!

Update from Malcolm Coles in the comments: the NHS have started promoting a new HPV jab page here.

1. Black or White – Michael Jackson
2. Bulletproof – La Roux
3. Diamond Rings – Chipmunk feat. Emeli Sande
4. Supernova – Mr Hudson
5. Boom Boom Pow – Black Eyed Peas
6. Celebration – Madonna
7. Boys and Girls – Pixie Lott
8. Evacuate the Dancefloor – Cascada
9. Knock You Down – Keri Hilson feat. Kanye West
10. Left My Heart in Tokyo – Mini Viva
11. Release Me – Agnes
12. 22 – Lily Allen
13. Let’s Get Excited – Alesha Dixon
14. Sexy Bitch – David Guetta feat. Akon
15. Remedy – Little Boots
16. Valerie – Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
17. Never Forget You – The Noisettes
18. Billie Jean – Michael Jackson
19. Heartbreak (Make Me a Dancer) – Freemasons feat. Sophie Ellis-Bextor
20. Poker Face – Lady GaGa
21. Holiday – Dizzee Rascal
22. Jai Ho! (You Are My Destiny) – A.R. Rahman & The Pussycat Dolls feat. Nicole Scherzinger
23. When Love Takes Over – David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland
24. Ready for the Weekend – Calvin Harris
25. Bonkers – Dizzee Rascal & Armand van Helden
26. Beat Again – JLS
27. Untouched – The Veronicas
28. Never Leave You – Tinchy Stryder & Amelle
30. Blame It On The Boogie – The Jacksons
31. Hot ‘n’ Cold – Katy Perry
32. We Are Golden – Mika
33. I Gotta Feeling – Black Eyed Peas

Well, perhaps not. But the point is this: meetings (like email) get a seriously bad rap inside big companies. The consensus position seems to be that if the meetings (and the email) would just get out of the way, we could all get on with our real work (and I’m reminded of a former boss who told me once that he had always believed that if the day-to-day hassles ended he could get on with his job, until he realised the day-to-day hassles were his job).

Meetings and email can, of course, be annoying. But then so can desktops that take ages to start up, desk phones with stupid interfaces, colleagues with bad music tastes and lossy headphones etc. etc. The thing is, if you’re in a certain frame of mind or doing a certain kind of activity, pretty much any kind of human interaction can be annoying. Coders hate to be interrupted. Writers, too. They’re face-down, high-intensity-and-focus activities. Interruptions are murderous.

But other activities are not like this. Discussing user propositions, for example. Negotiating priorities. Navigating towards consensus on forward planning. Nudging different groups and stakeholders to a common goal. All these things require contact and interaction. And guess what? Nine times out of ten, the best type of interaction is a meeting.

I say this at the end of a day which, this morning, looked like a nightmare. No yellow left in the Outlook, a series of quite edgy-looking meetings and some random-looking stuff in between. And yet I made enormous progress towards worthwhile goals today. I ended the day clearer on budget, clearer on priorities, pleased to have been listened to, and with a big user proposition agreed by major stakeholders. Without meetings, this would have taken weeks.

Similarly email, which I may come back to another day. Suffice to say that without email, most modern corporations would grind to a halt.

Final point. Corporations don’t organise meetings. People organise meetings. If you’ve got a meeting problem, it’s not a meeting problem, it’s a people problem.

Now, off to a meeting, of course.

1. Being Human was originally conceived as a drama about university graduates living together. One was an agoraphobic, one was compulsively anti-social with rage issues, and one was a recovering sex addict. The monsters were added later: ghost trapped in house, werewolf, and guilty vampire. Neat, no?
2. The Cut is written in five minute chunks to create a 25-minute TV broadcast once a week. It’s really good. What I learned from this one is how creative production crews are being when it comes to shooting stuff on low budgets. The Cut is all filmed within five minutes of the offices of BBC Switch, the assistant director is also a writer, and the script supervisor also works on the Switch website. Also, the teenage stars looked embarrassed and blushingly young all the way through the presentation, until the moment the microphone was passed to them and they switched, immediately, until professional mode. It was amazing and rather charming.
3. When Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith started Psychoville, they had no idea when it would end. Also, while they were pushing to get it commissioned, they arranged an open readthrough/performance at Notting Hill which attracted an audience in three figures and which showed that the material was funny (the audience laughed) as well as horrific. And Psychoville is what they call Royston Vasey in Japan. Fact.

I would like to explain the gratuitous picture of Lenora Crichlow, who is beautiful in Being Human but mesmerising in the flesh. Not really a lesson, but interesting nonetheless.