currybetdotnet

links for 2009-11-20

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:05:27 +0000

Consternation online for Times’ use of Edward Woodward blog tribute – Times responds | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

What is sauce for the goose etc etc

(tags: timesonline copyright theft contenttheft piracy journalismcouk)
Children in Need and Doctor Who - a lot can happen in 12 years - currybetdotnet - 18 November, 2005

Tonight we get a clip from the end of Dave Tennant's tenure in the TARDIS. Is it really only November 2005 when Children In Need featured a special scene bridging "The Parting Of The Ways" and "The Christmas Invasion"?

(tags: bbc television currybetdotnet childreninneed doctorwho)
The BBC homepage and Children in Need - a lot can happen in a year - currybetdotnet - November, 2005

One thing that I think the modular personalised BBC homepage lacks is the ability to reflect zeitgeisty events. Children In Need might irritate a lot of people with forced joviality, but I rather liked the fact that the BBC site used to smack you round the face that it was on. Having one tab with a picture of Terry Wogan isn't quite the same somehow.

(tags: bbc childreninneed)
Historical Minifigs - a set on Flickr by Morgan190

Oh. My. Word. Historical people as LEGO Minifigs. Chaucer looks mean. Could there possibly be a finer set of images on Flickr?

(tags: lego flickr)
Changing headlines | BBC - The Editors

The BBC gets the headline keyword stuffing bug - don't suppose they'll be going as far as that 3AM Girls site though.

(tags: bbc bbcnews seo headlines)
Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience Design - Dakota Reese Brown - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

"As mobile UX designers, we have both opportunity and choice in front of us. The opportunity is to establish the foundation principles of a stable, yet still emerging, experiential space. The choice lies between getting caught up in the excitement of the fad du jour or asking ourselves the difficult question of what foundational principles am I following, or establishing, with the work that I am currently doing".

(tags: usability mobile userexperience ux boxesandarrows)
Preview: London Cringe Night - Londonist

"We've all been through adolescence. And, as the London Cringe Night organisers recognise, most of us have the diaries, suicide notes and bad poetry to prove it. Sarah Brown found her old diaries and presumably decided the cringing she did while re-reading them to herself just wasn't strong enough. So she decided to read them out loud. To an audience. The Cringe Night was born".

(tags: londonist cringenight teenagers)
Confirming Passwords Is Annoying: Is There a Better Way? | Viget Advance

"The defining characteristic of a password field is that it abstracts text as dots. While the intention of this behavior is understandable (it makes users feel secure and protects from prying eyes), the unintended effect is that it creates a usability problem. Users can't tell if they've entered a password incorrectly until after the site's validation informs them. It's like typing with your eyes closed".

(tags: usability password ui interface design registration)
Log in or sign up? - Leah Culver's Blog

Thoughts on how to make the "Login with my existing account" and "Sign up for a brand new account" more usable.

(tags: usability forms ui design webdesign interface ux)
Scroll Clock

Infovore describes it thus: "It's a digital clock made out of scrollbars; divs being resized to force overflow and generate a scrollbar make up the seven-segment display. Bonkers."

(tags: pointlessbutgreat)
The Daily Mash - M&S ADVERT OFFENSIVE TO EVERYONE

"Here's an idea for an advert - what do you f***ing sell and what does it f***ing cost?" ROFL

(tags: dailymash marksandspencers advertising humour)

"Thierry Henry and the net" piece on Guardian PDA blog

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:55:05 +0000

Having gone on and on and on about comments on The Guardian site this week, I was a little bit nervous what might happen 'below the line' on a piece I wrote for the PDA Blog yesterday: "Thierry Henry and the net: Fifa report whitewash and anger on Twitter".

In the end I seem to have got away with just a couple of comments along the lines of 'Journalist gets paid to write article that claims people discuss current affairs on Twitter. In other news: Pope still Catholic', which seemed pretty good going.

Rather than focus on Twitter, what actually got me interested in how the play-off story had panned out online was the fact that FIFA's "official" coverage of the game was so bland and inoffensive that from their matchcast and initial reports, you wouldn't have even known there was anything controversial about the goal.

It worries me a little that we may be heading in the direction where internet reporting rights on sporting events are restricted. As I said in a comment reply on the PDA piece:

"There is a school of thought that says direct communication from clubs and players to fans, and closer control of internet broadcast and reporting rights, will do away with the need for a lot of specialised sports journalism. We might end up with something rather more like minute-by-minute PR puffs than the instant outraged reaction you got from Barry Glendenning on Wednesday."

During the course of the article I looked at the coverage on sites including FIFA, the FFF, the FAI, Le Monde and the Wikipedia edit war that erupted. Here are some of the screenshots that I took illustrating the points I made.

Live text from the FFF does not mention Henry

FIFA's matchcast carries no hint there has been controversy

FIFA's play-off review omits any mention of Thierry Henry

Vote on Le Monde site

One 'diff' from the Thierry Henry Wikipedia edit war

The FAI splash page that was still greeting visitors to their site yesterday

links for 2009-11-19

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:05:25 +0000

World Cup: and another one! « The Bristol Blogger

"I’ve come across the privatisation of public space before but this is new. The wholesale privatisation of an entire f***ing city for a month so that international big business can turn it into a giant cash register for themselves."

(tags: bristol worldcup2018 englandworldcupbid)
Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it | Social Media Today

"If you look at the top 100 Twitter accounts, the only person/company that Twitter made influential was @Twitter. Everyone else was already influential in their own right."

(tags: twitter influence socialmedia socialmediatoday)
Comments are free...to inform and to entertain, as well as infuriate - currybetdotnet

"Because I began my writing career as a blogger, responding to comments underneath a post is normal for me: I've spent almost six years doing so in my own comment box. So naturally, when I write something as a journalist - whether it's for a newspaper's print edition or online - if there's a comment box underneath it, I'll always make the point of interacting there. To my mind, blogs and blogging are about conversations, not just opinion". Zoe Margolis responds to my clarification comment about my post about her comments on Comment Is Free. Is that 'meta' enough for you?

(tags: comments zoemargolis commentiffree currybetdotnet)
Will inquiries find PCC a chocolate teapot, or a serious ‘mediator’? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

Oh I don't know. If volunteering to put currybetdotnet under a self-regulatory framework meant I could take months and months to reply to every complaint, dismiss anything from people not directly mentioned in my blogposts, and claim "public interest" every time I broke my own code of ethics, then I for one would welcome my new PCC overlords

(tags: pcc journalismcouk areyousurepostie)
BE LEGAL: Six things a hyperlocal blogger really should know about the law « The Dan Slee Blog

Very good post here making the worrying point that "British libel laws are amongst the most draconian in the world. At some point I’m convinced someone will lose their house in the not too distant future over an internet blog post. It’s potentially that serious". He also elsewhere says "Contempt of court is about as much fun as serious illness", although given recent coverage of the 'night stalker' rapist suspect, the press are maybe not setting bloggers the best of examples [via Sarah Hartley]

(tags: hyperlocal libel media legal blogging law advice)
The Guardian's technology coverage: what happens next | Technology | The Guardian

"What you're holding in your hands – assuming you're reading this in print form, which a substantial number of you are – is a collector's item. Guardian Technology, in its print incarnation, is to cease publication. The last edition will be on 17 December."

(tags: guardian technology charlesarthur)
Form Design And The Fallacy Of The Required Field | Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media

"Standards are wonderful, but if I asked my mom what is the international symbol for a required field, she would look at me like I was on drugs"

(tags: design usability forms)

"Free vs Fee – the Future of News": Notes and take-away quotes - Part 1

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:55:22 +0000

A couple of weeks back I went to an SLA Europe meeting entitled "Free vs Fee – the Future of News" with a panel featuring Jeremy Lawson from Dow Jones, Andrew Hughes of the NLA, Acquire Media's Laurence C. Rafsky and new media legal eagle Laurence Kaye.

The centre-piece of the discussion for me revolved around an entertaining story told by Laurence Rafsky.

He spoke about a fictional young lad who had set up his own little enterprise. Every day he fetched the newspaper from the newsagent, and carefully folded it up so the sports section was at the front to save his tired dad the hassle. In return, his dad gave him 50p, 10p above the cover price of the paper, and the lad got to keep the 10p.

Some time later, the paper in question decided to go free, but his dad kept paying him 10p for the folding and the carrying. Suddenly, the newspaper sent the little boy a royalty bill of 5p for every newspaper he's been picking up for free, because they'd changed their terms and conditions to outlaw secondary distribution and 'folding without a licence'.

Now Laurence is a very entertaining speaker, and there was much nodding around the room - how could those mean newspapers pick on that poor little boy who was just trying to earn some pocket money?

However, on closer inspection his very analogue analogy breaks down, because it is still grounded in the physical world of the newspaper. There is a limit to the number of papers that one boy can fold and redeliver.

Andrew Hughes for the NLA made the point that in the digital realm, the newspaper industry isn't asking for royalties from a wide range of individuals, it is specifically aiming at aggregators who have built entire businesses on scraping the content from multiple sources, with the potential to infinitely reproduce that content.

It is very easy to criticise the news industry for not acting quickly enough to innovate their business models in the face of the Internet onslaught - and any long term readers of this blog will know that I frequently have. However, the electronic syndication of content to aggregators is an area where newspapers have a long established track record. It is nearly a decade since the NewsML exchange protocol was established, and the IPTC has been active in this field since the 1970s.

The web is made from links, and it would be absurd to try and prevent people linking to your content. However, I still remain unconvinced that 'fair use', 'copyright exemptions' or an argument that 'we are just forwarding links' justifies charging users for paid subscriptions to content you are neither producing or paying for, when other established services like Factiva and Lexis-Nexis have to pay for that content, and have been doing so for years.

Where I thought Laurence Rafsky was on surer footing at the SLA Europe event was when he talked about the difficulty newspapers have in making an artificial divide between B2B and B2C consumers directly accessing content. Illustrated with a great image of a web robot or 'proxy', he argued that when people can use Google from their office desktop, newspapers could not justify pricing the same content, delivered in the same way, differently for 'home personal use' and 'business use'.

Next...

~~Tomorrow~~ Next week I'll have some more of my notes from the event covering the future of print, how your own legal terms and conditions can work against you, and the fractured state of the industry's ideas on how to make money (or how to at least lose less, as I sometimes like to look at it).

links for 2009-11-18

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:05:22 +0000

Post a vulgar comment while you’re at work, lose your job | The Editors’ Desk | STLtoday

Bloke posts sweary comments to newspaper website. Newspaper tracks IP address to school, contacts head, and bloke loses job. Newspaper publishes post about how pleased they are with what they've done. Seems surprised when the internet turns round and says "you did what!?!".

(tags: stltoday community moderation)
ditaa

Seemingly pointless, but nevertheless an act of genius - make real graphic diagrams from command line ASCII art

(tags: asciiart pointlessbutgreat)
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger resigns from PCC code committee | Media | guardian.co.uk

"This move comes days after the regulator failed to find in favour of the Guardian in its inquiry into the paper's allegations about phone hacking".

(tags: pcc guardian journalism ethics newspapers)
Twitter users: young, metropolitan and angry about civil liberties | Technology | The Guardian

Study extrapolates habits of 5.5million users from sample of 200. In the words of Simon Day from that Valentine's Day advert: "Are you sure, postie?"

(tags: twitter guardian smallsampleextrapolatedbeyondstatisticalvalidity)
Comments are free...to inform and to entertain, as well as infuriate - currybetdotnet

If you thought I was being obtuse about newspaper comments yesterday, here is something in the way of clarification - the original bullet points of how the post was supposed to pan out before I inexplicably mangled it during writing...

(tags: currybetdotnet)
Slacktivism : : The Original Sims

"Signing up to a Facebook page in protest or support doesn’t take much effort. People have been hoodwinked. As a part of a psychological experiment, Anders Colding-Jørgensen created a Facebook protest group that went from 125 to 27,500 members in two weeks. The cause, “Save the Stork Fountain” was a totally fictitious protest against the demolition of a famous Danish fountain. He wanted to understand if political campaigns like that could work. His conclusion was that they don’t. People sign-up to the headline not the issue."

(tags: davysims facebook twitter)
Free anti-vax conspiracy theory with every tube journey | New Humanist

I liked this in the comments: "I should think it's extremely exciting for that man to think that he's 'in the know' when it comes to such a major global conspiracy. And actually doing something about it must seem to be the most exciting time of his life, entrenched as he no doubt is in an isolated in-group of mutually supportive and equally cuckoo denialists. It's ironic that the memes they're spreading - along with all the crafty protective memetic coatings that all good conspiracy theories have - can spread about as quickly as the biological viruses they mention"

(tags: swinflu antivax conspiracy newhumanist)

"1966 and all that..." - Contrasting England's 1966 and 2018 World Cup bids

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:55:51 +0000

Tonight we'll be finding out the final qualifiers for next year's World Cup Finals in South Africa. Press attention has also been focused on England's bid to host the 2018 or 2022 edition of the tournament. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the reason FIFA abandoned their continental rotation system and introduced this double round of bidding was because they didn't get to go on lots of exotic junkets during the bidding process for 2010 and 2014. Imagine the hand-bagging exploits the unimpeachable Jack Warner missed out on...

But in an example of a sport bidding process gone made, not only is England bidding for the World Cup, but English cities are bidding to be part of the World Cup bid.

16 cities, including the somewhat unlikely choices of Milton Keynes and Plymouth, are attempting to be part of the English FA proposal to FIFA. This is frankly ludicrous. The idea that London or Manchester need to campaign to be included in the bid seems an astonishing waste of effort. Visit England's Northwest, for example has a digital campaign website for Manchester's bid, whilst the list of contributors and stakeholders in Sheffield's bid boggles the mind at how much time and money is being expended by those public bodies.

It was all so much simpler in the old days.

England were awarded the right to host the 1966 World Cup in a process that the country barely seems to have noticed. In the March of 1960, The Guardian carried a report that the Spanish FA would support a World Cup in England. Note the synonymous use of Britain meaning England in the article!

According to our digital archive, neither The Guardian nor The Observer mentioned the bidding process again until the FIFA meeting in Rome made a final decision. Some 6 years before they would meet in the final, England pipped West Germany to hosting the tournament in a close vote, 34 to 27.

At this stage, the FA had not even decided which stadiums would be used. This wasn't announced until November 1962, when Arsenal, Aston Villa, Everton, Manchester United, Newcastle United, Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland were named as provisional hosts alongside Wembley.

That provisional list turned out not to be accurate. For the actual tournament, Middlesbrough's Ayresome Park replaced Newcastle as a venue, and Arsenal's Highbury didn't feature at all. In fact, the second London venue used was White City's Olympic stadium. This hosted just one game, Uruguay vs France on July 15th, because Wembley's owners were unwilling to cancel their regular greyhound meeting that day to accommodate the World Cup.

I bet that wouldn't go down well in a FIFA bid document these days...

'Smug foul-mouthed juvenile overpaid twerp' Russell Brand graces The Sun's front page today

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:55:55 +0000

You remember Russell Brand? In editorials over the last 12 months or so, The Sun has said he was a 'foul-mouthed' 'smug' 'juvenile overpaid twerp', guilty of 'disgusting stupidity', a 'sick tirade' and peddling 'unforgivable smut'.

And then it put him on the cover today picking his favourite Sun front pages. So not that unforgivable then. I honestly don't know which of the pair looks more opportunist.

links for 2009-11-17

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:05:19 +0000

Some advice to designers of news websites | yelvington.com

Thankfully he does use the IA word so I don't have to write a lengthy blog post in reply ;-)

(tags: design webdesign steveyelvington)
WALTHAMSTOW: Slurpy machine goes up in smoke (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

I walked past this incident on Saturday morning. "It is believed no one was injured during the incident and no major damage was caused to the shop". Making it ultra-newsworthy ;-)

(tags: walthamstow localnewspapers walthamforestguardian)
Olympic agency in fresh logo row | FT.com / UK

"The controversy over the jigsaw-style logo of the London Olympics - panned by critics when it was unveiled two years ago - has been reignited after the advertising agency chosen by organisers to market the 2012 games gave it a decidedly lukewarm endorsement".

(tags: design londonolympics financialtimes olympics olympiclogo)
Journalism.co.uk :: #soe09: BBC looking for local press partnerhips; will add RSS newspaper feeds

"Hull Daily Mail editor John Meehan said the BBC only wanted the 'pretence of partnership' - I've attended lots of meeting about partnership and nothing ever happens. All that ever happens are things that are useless to us'"

(tags: bbc localnewspapers hulldailymail journalismcouk)
If news organizations blocked Google this morning | Almighty Link

"The idea of newspapers blocking Google from indexing their sites has become quite a topic of discussion recently, so I used the search engine this morning to look for some popular items. These screenshots help to illustrate how much Google relies on news sources for its best search results". Trouble is, people think what is in Google *is* the Internet.

(tags: google search newspapers almightylink)
Egypt's football party gets out of hand | Mohamed El Dahshan | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

From the comments: "If this trouble involved England this would be a worldwide outrage and FIFA would be considering throwing us out of the tournament."

(tags: fifa egypt algeria 2010worldcup football commentisfree)

Comments are free...to inform and to entertain, as well as infuriate

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:19:49 +0000

"As a blogger I'm not afraid of the comment box, unlike many journalists of whom we shall not speak..." - Zoe Margolis

The 'outing' of Belle de Jour, like that of Night Jack and Girl With a One Track Mind before it, has raised some interesting debates around the issues of anonymity and privacy when blogging. Zoe Margolis, the one-track minded sex blogger, wrote a piece for The Guardian on the issue, and immediately set about playing a very active and aggressive role in the comments thread below it.

I linked to it on Twitter, suggesting she was very much giving as good as she was getting. Not everybody felt the same. Anne Wollenberg said in reponse.

"Totally disagree. Think she needs to stop rising to it. Readers on the Guardian site will always hack people to shreds and responding to every criticism = red rag."

What interested me here was that I think it illustrates something about the respective culture of 'blogger' versus 'journalist who has comments enabled at the bottom of their articles'. There is one view that says adding comments to the foot of every newspaper article online is just an opportunity for 'green ink' letter writers to scribble all over your work in public. "I can't believe you get paid to write this rubbish" never seems to be too far away in any newspaper comment thread.

You seldom see a journalist come out fighting their corner in a comment thread like Zoe does here. And rightly so. For one thing they don't have the time, and for another, it would be a distraction from having an impartial authorial voice when needed. However, on a contributor's guest comment piece it struck me as a really entertaining read - and surely the point of UGC is not just to let people 'have their say', but also to entertain and make the overall web offering more compelling for everybody? ^{[see comments for clarification]}

There is another interaction role in the comments on The Guardian though, and that is to be useful and helpful. We recently changed the back-end implementation of the system, and Meg Pickard, our head of social media development, used a blog post and comment thread to collect bugs.

One of our developers, Roberto Tyley, also blogged about the changes on the site.

He outlined very clearly the reasons that the system had been implemented in this way, and was open and candid about some of the technical issues the team had encountered. Like Zoe, Roberto also got stuck into the comments thread. Not, in this case, to defend a position, but to help people with the questions they had about the system, and to discuss things like 'cache-invalidation message failure' which had been causing some bugs in the first couple of days. I think it is one of the best examples of a tech team engaging with the audience over changes to a site that I've seen.

Implementing comments on newspaper sites has always been viewed as risky. It opens editorial content to instant and public criticism, may alienate advertisers, and moderating user-generated content is time-consuming and expensive for an industry that is concerned about future financial viability. However, I think examples like the two above show how the potential value of the entertainment and audience dialogue they generate make it well worth taking those risks.

links for 2009-11-16

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:05:32 +0000

Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night’ - Times Online

Yet more PC Winterval lunacy from our mad local councils...

(tags: timesonline winterval)
They’ve banned Christmas! Sort of! » Liberal Conspiracy

...erm, unless you visit the Dundee website where you'll find that not only are there plenty of Christmas events with Christmas in the title, The Times didn't even manage to get the name "Winter Light Night" correct.

(tags: liberalconspiracy timesonline winterval factchecking dundee christmas)
Internet peril facing our kids - Technology - News - Manchester Evening News

"ONE in three children in Greater Manchester have given away personal details to strangers they met on the internet, the M.E.N. can reveal. A shocking survey also reveals that more than a quarter of boys and girls aged 11 to 15 have agreed to meet people they have chatted to online."

(tags: children teenagers internet manchestereveningnews childsafety)
The readers' editor on… a new era at the Observer | From the Observer | The Observer

"These are painful times here. Not so long ago, the Observer looked threatened with closure as losses across both titles reached a frightening £100,000 a day. Mercifully, that threat has receded, but the price of survival is a high one."

(tags: observer observerclosure gnm)
Fewer people are dying in South Africa. Why is that not front page news? « Low Opinions

"No matter whose statistics you accept, the conclusion is clear: given that the population is growing, the rate of deaths is declining significantly, even in the face of what is supposed to be the most serious Aids epidemic in the world. That, surely, is a big story. Why is it not front page news? For the same reason, I suspect, that most journalists uncritically accepted the obviously wrong death figure cited by the Ministry of Health last year. A surge in deaths fits neatly with the catastrophist vision of Aids in South Africa. A decline in deaths doesn’t. In short, good news is no news."

(tags: southafrica journalism africa)
Points of View and HD Picture Quality: a response | Danielle Nagler | BBC Internet Blog

She'll get slaughtered for it in the comments, but for me Danielle hits the nail on the head in the long-running BBC HD bitrate saga: "Dutch research published last month highlights the extent to which views on picture quality are driven by expectation and emotion. On an HD TV, without an HD connection or receiver, some people will believe that they are watching HD pictures and believe they look substantially better than SD. I have no doubt that for those who believe the bitrate cut has killed picture quality, none of the changes to the encoders that we will make to address the problems which we know are there will make any difference, unless they go hand in hand with an announcement that we've upped the bitrate".

(tags: bbc hd daniellenagler verylongtechnicaldebatesonwhichneithersidewillbudge)
Carlos Cudicini crash girl revealed | News Of The World

From the comments "lol @ her being an arsenal fan". Am I alone in thinking that until there is any understanding of who was at fault in this accident, the public identification here seems more likely to risk her being on the receiving end of abuse from Tottenham fans than actually serve any real news value?

(tags: carloscudicini newsoftheworld walthamstow)

Olympic Memory Marathon: Part 3 - My Olympic memory

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:19:38 +0000

On November 7th I took part in the Olympic Memory Marathon, a video project by artist Simon Pope capturing 104 Londoners talking about their experience of the Olympics, whilst he walked the length of a marathon through the streets of the boroughs hosting the 2012 games. These are the memories that I related to him.

I've never been lucky enough to go to an Olympics, but I have visited several of the stadiums where the games have been held. I've visited the Olympiastadion in Berlin, after the stadium had been refurbished ready for the 2006 World Cup, and I've been to the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona twice, once to see Espanyol play, and once to visit the botanical gardens on Montjuïc.

However, I lived on Crete for 3 years, which meant quite a few trips through Athens, and so I've visited some of the Greek sites associated with the earliest revival of the Olympic Games. On one of our stays in Athens we got a last minute hotel deal to stay at the Baby Grand, a hotel where many of the rooms have been customised by graffiti artists.

It was well out of usual price league, and so the breakfast on offer was much more than we wanted to pay. Instead, each morning we headed down the street to Platia Kotzia. It is an unremarkable square in Athens, near the main tourist district. Buildings flank it on three sides with an impressive neo-classical facade at the far end, but it is basically an open paved area filled with not much more than pigeons. We used to sit in the morning with our maps and tourist books planning the day ahead, sipping on the hot Nescafé which was a lot cheaper than staying for a coffee in the hotel. There is a περιπτερο on the corner selling cigarettes and newspapers, and a small pet shop, attracting a steady stream of kids looking through the window at the animals inside.

Although there wasn't anything special to mark it out, what makes the square unique is that it was the venue for the 1859 Olympic Games. This was well before the start of the official Olympic Games, but it was the first attempt by Evangelis Zappas to revive the concept. Athletes from Greece and the Ottoman Empire competed there 150 years ago as a prototype of the format the Games would eventually take.

It wasn't the only Olympic venue in Athens we visited. We never actually got inside the stadium built for the 2004 Games, only passing it occasionally when making an interchange on the Athens Metro.

We did, though, walk past a venue used in 1896. We'd been looking for a particularly well recommended bar, where you could sip cocktails whilst watching the Athens sunset. However, we got there a bit early, and not only wasn't it open, but the attitude of the staff getting it ready made it clear that when it did open they were expecting more in the way of Athens socialites than sweaty British tourists, so we made a new plan.

We spent the sunset walking through the park back towards Syntagma Square, and stumbled upon The Zappeion. An imposing building with yellow walls and white classical styled columns, The Zappeion was the very first purpose-built Olympic venue. It was used at the 1st Olympiad in 1896 for the fencing, and as the media centre for the 2004 games. It was named after Evangelis Zappas, who had worked so hard to get the Games restored.

Again, like Platia Kotzia, there was nothing in particular outside the building to mark it out as a site of Olympic historical interest.

This made a big contrast with a historic Olympic venue that I used to visit nearly daily. For around a year I worked in a BBC office in White City which was built on the site of the "The Great Stadium, Shepherd's Bush". This had hosted the first London Olympics in 1908. As you approached the office complex an Olympic flag flew, and on the side of the walls of one of the buildings there was a large plaque commemorating the event.

The plaque features the Olympic rings, which are in fact anachronistic as they were not designed until 1912, and were not adopted until the 1920 Antwerp Games. There is also a medal table for the event up on the wall. It was interesting to note that, as well as the unlikely sight of Great Britain topping the medal table, there were entries from geographical entities like 'Australasia' and 'Bohemia', who no longer compete in the Olympics.

In front of the plaque there is another reminder of the stadium. Set into the paving stones is a thin strip of metal, alongside a small sign stating that this marks the finish line of the original track used in the 1908 Olympics. It was a really interesting way of bringing back to life a stadium that had survived until 1985, hosting rugby league, speedway and even one of the matches of the 1966 World Cup Finals.

Sometimes, if I thought nobody was looking, on my way to work I'd cross the 1908 Olympic finish line, running in a slow-motion 'Chariots Of Fire' style...

Olympic Memory Marathon: Part 2 - "I am one of the 104"

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:55:45 +0000

At the weekend I took part in an art project for the London 2012 Olympics called the "Memory Marathon". Artist Simon Pope walked the distance of a marathon whilst talking to 104 people who lived or worked in the London Boroughs hosting the next games about their memories of the Olympics. Yesterday I blogged about the workshops leading up to the event, and today I wanted to write about my experience on November 7th, the day of the "Memory Marathon"

I got to walk in a section in Leyton, from Grange Road to Farmer Road, but my meet-up point was in Hackney. This was a bit of a mix-up to start with, as we were meant to be meeting in a cafe, but before I arrived one of the group had managed to get into a row with the owner about using the toilets. So by the time I got there, the group was gathered in the road boycotting the cafe in the cold, until eventually one of the production team stepped in to sort it out.

The logistics of putting the walk together must have been very difficult. There were around 35 people working on the production, with a rolling roster of volunteers waiting with people before they started their stint, and helping them get home afterwards. Understandably the project, which had started at 6:30am, began to get a little behind schedule.

In my bunch of participants we also had a classic case where child safety legislation has become a regulatory burden. One leg was being done by two thirteen year old girls, and their section involved walking across a golf course in what was now the very dark early evening. Leaving them on their own in the dark with just a torch and a mobile phone was pretty inadvisable, but leaving an additional person with them who hadn't been CRB checked was, in the eyes of the law, worse. The situation was solved by getting one of their parents, who had been following the progress of the team in their car, to escort them along their section.

My stint followed on directly from British Paralympics athlete Ade Adepitan and I caught the end of his story as he handed over to me. I found that after his tale of featuring in the closing ceremony of the Paralympics in Beijing, and the sight and sound of 110,000 people raising the hairs on the back of his neck, my story of visiting some sites where the early Olympics were held in Greece and London seemed rather tame.

Although the day of filming meant a lot of hanging around and getting rather chilly, I'm really glad I took part in the project. I've inadvertently been following a path that keeps bringing me into contact with the Olympics. We were in China when the Beijing Games started, in Salzburg whilst they were bidding for the 2014 Winter Olympics, and were visiting Northern Italy during the 2006 Winter Games in Torino. I'm delighted that I will be in London when my home borough of Waltham Forest gets to host the Olympics. I feel that in taking part in the film I've become part of that story.

Next...

Next week I'll have a write-up of the Olympic memories of Athens and London that I related to Simon.

links for 2009-11-12

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:05:30 +0000

New Product by The New York Times

Prototype display of the news. I like the layout very much, but not so impressed with the transitions between the views.

(tags: newyorktimes innovation)
FATV attracts record audience | TheFA.com

"The FA Cup First Round tie between Oldham Athletic and Leeds United, streamed exclusively live on TheFA.com, achieved over 176,000 plays on Saturday evening. This is believed to be a UK record for a free-to-view competitive football match on the internet."

(tags: football thefa footballassociation leedsunited)
Cambrian News readers bite back at Monbiot | Jon Slattery

"Readers of the Cambrian News have defended the paper against the claims of George Monbiot in the Guardian yesterday"

(tags: georgemonbiot jonslattery guardian localnewspapers)
'Unacceptable' level of data loss | BBC NEWS | Politics

"In total, 434 organisations reported data security breaches in the past 12 months, up from 277 the year before".

(tags: dataloss bbcnews politics)

Olympic Memory Marathon: Part 1 - The project and workshops

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:55:31 +0000

"This is an unusual project, and I can tell that by being here you are unusual people"

Our facilitator wasn't wrong - within a couple of minutes of arriving at my first workshop for the Olympic Memory Marathon I was being accosted by a wonderful fiftysomething out of work actress assuring me that didn't do porn (but that she did get asked), and by another guy tipsy enough that he gave the impression of not remembering why he was in Stratford, let alone remember anything about the Olympics!

The Olympic Memory Marathon, which I've just taken part in, is a video project for the London 2012 Games. The artist behind it is Simon Pope, and it has been funded by the LDA and Arts Council England.

During the first workshop I got the chance to ask Simon what had appealed to him about doing an Olympic themed project. He explained that it hadn't been an interest in the Olympics per se which had grabbed him, but that he likes combining walking with memories. He likes to explore how you can re-capture fleeting moments that have gone, and this has been a theme throughout his work to date, particularly a project called "Carved From Memory".

His great-grandfather had been a stone carver on the restoration of cathedrals in Devon and the West Country. A family tradition had been to show a small gargoyle feature that was known to be his work to the next generation. His great-grandfather had taken his grandmother to see it. His grandmother had taken his mother to see it. In turn, his mother had taken him to see it. However, when he came to take his own daughter, it had gone.

"Carved From Memory" was a project to get his grandmother to describe how she remembered the gargoyle, whilst a modern day stone carver listened. He worked out what was possible and what wasn't possible to do in stone, and urged her for more details on things like how the fur had been carved on the back. Between them a new gargoyle emerged, based on the memory.

For the Memory Marathon, Simon said wanted to add to the film-making history of London, by capturing stories and memories of the Olympic Games from 104 residents of the boroughs where the 2012 Olympics are to be held. His plan was to walk the length of an Olympic marathon - 24.6 miles - in the host boroughs. This worked out to 400 metre sections with each participant, equalling about 5 minutes on film.

Picking a route

I was pretty agnostic about the section of the route I wanted to walk down, but some people had definite places they wanted to walk past. One of the participants from Waltham Forest had a long history of association with the Eton Manor Sports Club. The Olympic Park is sited where a memorial to the club still exists, and so it was natural for him to want to walk that stretch. Other special considerations I overheard included one person who needed a stretch that wasn't near a bridge or water because of phobias.

Simon had initially hoped that some stages of the journey might take place within the Olympic site itself, and I would certainly have jumped at the chance at that, but in the end it couldn't be arranged. The part of Waltham Forest the Memory Marathon route ran through wasn't particularly my part of the borough, but I chose to pick a section as near as possible to Leyton Orient's ground, which at least had some personal association.

A mix of memories

During a series of three workshops people worked on the story they were going to tell to Simon for the film. Some people's memories focussed on experiencing the games from a distance, for example remembering getting the family's first television in order to watch the Tokyo Olympics in the 1964. That memory ended with her dad selling it after the games were over, because the children in the family spent too long watching TV when they should be doing their homework.

Another woman related how her 'mad scientist' father in Bangladesh, instead of having a proper television aerial, rigged up a Heath Robinson lash up of wires, pots and pans to pick up signals for their black and white television.

Others in the group had actually attended Olympic events. One in my Waltham Forest group had been at the Sydney Olympics, and had brought along a set of photos taken on the night that Jonathan Edwards won gold. Links to more distant events were also maintained, as the guy from Eton Manor Sports Club had meet several British Olympians who had boxed at the games in the 1920s.

Accuracy wasn't important for the project - one guy kept referring to Russian gymnast Nadia Comăneci.

Technology

As ever, I was interested in the digital aspect of the project. For a start the filming equipment is incredibly lightweight. Much of the HD footage was taken with a camera no bigger than a digital SLR. Had London been hosting the previous couple of Olympiads, I think it would have been harder to make the film, and it would have required a bigger crew.

Simon Pope scouted the route by foot and bike, but a lot of the planning was done digitally using Google Earth.

It would have been possible to put the project together in a pre-digital era, but the number of paper maps needed would have been immense. When the project is finished, they intend to release the Google Earth data into the public domain, along with embedded recordings of people's contributions and photos and video clips of the sections walked.

The TARDIS creche

Perhaps the funniest bit of taking part in this project for me was during the workshop phase, with the revelation that Stratford Old Town Hall has a room literally called 'TARDIS'.

Next...

Tomorrow I'll have a post about my experiences of filming my contribution last Saturday, the day of the Olympic Memory Marathon.

"Waltham Forest is calling for back-up" campaign lays down a welcome mat for criminals

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:25:18 +0000

I became a crime statistic last week, when my bike was stolen in Walthamstow.

Again.

It has prompted me to blog about something that has been irritating me in the Borough for some time.

On the day I discovered my bike was missing, I'd been in ~~Selbourne Walk~~ The Mall, where volunteers were out in force trying to get me to sign a council petition.

"Waltham Forest is calling for back-up" is a politically motivated council campaign calling for more police in the area. The Labour-led administration never campaigned publicly against GLA resourcing decisions when the GLA was run by Labour. There are posters all over Waltham Forest claiming that the area is 120 police officers short.

I'm always pleased to see the council fighting for a better deal for residents, and I've got nothing against Labour, or the Liberal Democrats for that matter, taking up policing levels as part of an election campaign. However, I resent the issue being used for a council tax funded publicity campaign that portrays such a negative image of the Borough.

I've no way of knowing whether extra police resources might have prevented my bike being stolen.

But I do know that if I was thinking about committing a crime, giant posters helpfully suggesting I was much less likely to get caught in E17 certainly wouldn't be acting as anything other than encouragement.