Rhodri Marsden

Directing amateurish movies has never been so much fun

The mission of Xtranormal, according to their website, is to bring movie-making to the people. Indeed, they say that it's going to be the most important communications process of the 21st century.

Cameraphones with MPG capabilities probably do more for the medium than Xtranormal, to be honest; its USP is to let you to turn text into a movie. You type, point and click, and the stilted action reveals itself onscreen via some three-dimensional but curiously one-dimensional character. There are many online innovations that you can imagine looking dated in a couple of years time, but Xtranormal achieves the remarkable feat of being incredibly cutting edge and looking dated almost simultaneously.

But apply creative genius to the medium, and you can get something rather special. Behold the effort of Mr Quickly, whose Amazon reviews are also quite something. Yummy. Yummy yummy.

Suffering from website envy?

Two friends of mine had a major spat a couple of years ago over their respective website designs. The fact that they didn't much care for each other in the first place didn't help the situation, but one of them claimed – with some justification, it has to be said – that the other had swiped the overall look of her website and indiscreetly applied it to his. His attitude was very much "No I haven't"; hers was "Yes you have", and eventually he was reluctantly forced to change his to "well yes, I have, but so what?"

Anyone who publishes stuff on the web gets website envy. Most website designers, when briefed by their clients, will be given a load of URLs and be told to incorporate that kind of background, that kind of navigation, that kind of font, that kind of colour scheme and so on. Website designers themselves generally learn their skills not through weighty tomes bought at great expense from the computing section of Waterstones, but by getting their hands dirty, viewing the source code of other people's websites, seeing how it works, nicking the good bits and then applying them to their own designs. This magpie approach is so widespread that those doing it scarcely give it a second thought. And you can't blame them – after all, the whole ethos of the web is about freedom, sharing, adapting, reworking and re-presenting. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Some companies aren't quite so sanguine, it seems. The web hosting provider Fasthosts recently revealed that it is having to deal with an escalated number of content disputes involving websites – almost doubling over the past 12 months. There have been accusations of swiping designs, images, whole chunks of text; Fasthosts are putting it down to tight economic conditions forcing businesses to avoid the expense of employing designers and copywriters, and just cobbling together their own versions of other websites on the cheap. But a far bigger factor is surely our slowly changing attitude towards copyright in general. These days, if you see someone slap a copyright symbol at the foot of their website, it almost looks laughable; you can understand why they've put it there – they've spent time, effort and cash creating their online presence and don't see why anyone else should use bits of it for free – but you'd have to be on another planet to think that letter c in a circle strikes fear into anyone's heart in this day and age.

In an ideal world, of course, people who work in creative industries (Note: the author of this blog works in creative industries) would have their considerable talents deeply respected, we'd be carried shoulder high by cheering crowds at the end of our day's work to a waiting chariot, and the average person would no more steal our work than they'd steal a Rolls Royce. But it's not an ideal world. Don't swipe other people's website designs wholesale, but if you do, well, you'll probably get away with it. Just as my friend did.

Cover story for The Indy pondering the economic model behind YouTube. http://is.gd/1HhSF

Sorry? You want 500 words on Michael Jackson?

I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, to be honest. I mean, I'm not used to grandly pontificating about the cultural significance of the passing of a pop star. I'm not sure that I can draw sufficient parallels with the unusual lives of other famous people who have unexpectedly died, skirt around the paedophilia accusations without saying something inappropriate, or indeed remember the name of his last album. And I usually write things about technology, I mean, I like music and everything, but my last attempt at rock journalism ended up with me submitting an incredibly lacklustre review of a Morrissey album because I couldn't believe that anyone would care what I thought of it (which wasn't much.)

But maybe it's my duty to dredge up some vague memories about what Michael Jackson means to me, but only if you think it would be useful. Uh... I can remember sitting in the kitchen at my grandmother's house in Cumbria in 1980 and hearing "Rock With You" on the radio and thinking it was quite good, but maybe that's not sufficiently overwrought to chime much with weeping readers, so I'll have to make something up instead. OK... My first wife announced that she was leaving me while a re-run of Lenny Henry's spoof "Thriller" dance routine was playing on the television. I was run over by a car whose megabass stereo was blaring "The Earth Song" at deafening volume. I was brought around from the subsequent coma by repeated playings of "I Want You Back." This is what I'd like you to think that Michael Jackson means to me.

I could quickly sum up the story of Michael Jackson's life in order to use up another hundred words, but you're probably better off heading over to Wikipedia, because that's only what I'd have to do in order to make perfectly sure I got 100% of the facts absolutely straight. Look, here's the link, I couldn't have made it any easier for you. That gives me more time to put this next thought to you – and brace yourself, because you might not have considered this: although the world has lost a great entertainer, the medium of recorded sound will, without a shadow of a doubt, ensure that we'll be able to enjoy his music today, tomorrow, perhaps even the next day. In that sense, Michael Jackson will live on, although in the more usual sense he certainly won't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to trivialize the death of a man who was really, really good at singing and dancing. I adore the "Off The Wall" album. I'm listening to it now. It's breathtaking, although it sags a bit on side two. I just wonder whether I could have made a more fitting personal tribute to the man by sitting quietly and listening to it, without simultaneously typing some five hundred words of unutterable horseshit.

The quest for real-time search

A couple of years ago, someone predicted that Twitter would become "the pulse of society", and I remember thinking something along the lines of "nah, that's not particularly likely, because it's just full of people dispensing pithy one-liners or, more often, moribund observations about the weather." But as keying in status updates across services like Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite and others becomes a habit for millions, there's little doubt that this wealth of data slung online is starting to reflect behaviour, mood, opinion... and, yes, the weather. Against the odds, it's beginning to have some inherent value. You might even find yourself wanting to plough through it all to try and find something.

"Bog off," more uncouth readers might be thinking, "why on earth would I want to get any information from random members of the public keying in tedious stuff from their smartphones on a whim?" But real-time search isn't so much about turning up specific information – although events in Mumbai, Tehran and elsewhere have undoubtedly provided that – it's more about taking temperature; scanning down a list of results and using it to gauge people's feelings about news stories, websites or even Iceland's dubious new Chicken Tikka Lasagne. Of course, it's hard to know the exact demographic of those who post status updates and whether it reflects public opinion generally, but it seems likely to be a more accurate barometer than, say, reading lengthy and vituperative comments on blogs and news sites which are, in the main, bashed out in fury by the same small group of people, week in week out.

Google is the undoubted king of search, but it's yet to gear itself up for real-time results; for example, you need to click through to their advanced search page if you want to specifically look for something that's been added in the last 24 hours. Co-founder Larry Page recently admitted that this was a weakness that they were addressing, but in the meantime there are services launching regularly that aim to compete with Twitter's own slightly temperamental search engine (which itself used to be an independent service called Summize, bought by Twitter about a year ago.)

Tweetmeme and DailyRT combine Twitter search engines with lists of the most popular web links to have been recently tweeted and retweeted, while OneRiot opens that out to other social media sites such as Digg. Topsy and Scoopler provide a simpler, Google-style interface, while Collecta should, in theory, give you what appears to be a real-time update for your search – although it doesn't appear to be working at the moment.

To my shame, my main use for these search engines in the past week has been to gauge what people are thinking about the person I know in the Big Brother house. Pity me. The recent Twitter comedy gig (described as "a chaotic failure" but quite fun in parts) worked nicely on Tweetgrid with the comedians scrolling up the left-hand panel and the crowd reaction in the right (although, predictably, people didn't obey the rules. Because people never do.) Like me, you might be ambivalent about the opinions of random individuals. But a service that distills those opinions into something easily scannable, well, that can verge on interesting. Believe me.

The folding plug

I was just in the middle of writing a more lengthy post about real-time search, when someone sent me a link to this video. For those of us whose love affair with the British mains plug never really got off the ground – and let's face it, that's pretty much all of us – this is a brilliant idea that a) I can't believe anyone hasn't thought of already, and b) I hope makes the inventor a much-deserved pile of cash. Behold:

What’s the point in online petitions?

I'm aware that in even posing this question I'm setting myself up to be lynched as the kind of cynic who believes – in a non-committal, couldn't-really-care-less kind of way – that there's barely any point in doing anything, that expending any effort over and above the bare minimum is a terrible waste of precious energy that could be better allocated to lounging around and complaining bitterly about stuff. But actually, I've got nothing at all against petitions. It's often the only way that we're able to make our feelings heard about certain issues; I certainly remember signing some, and thinking yeah, I hope that a few kilos of A4 with my name buried somewhere in the middle will actually make someone take notice of this problem. What I'm not entirely sure of the value of petitions whose signatures are accumulated on the internet.

The one that made me scratch my head this week was this anti-BNP petition that has been widely linked to since Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament. The plan is to hand in the signatures to the European Parliament on the day that they take their seats, to give the resounding message that several thousand of us do not, in fact, support the BNP's policies. Now, there's obviously nothing wrong with taking a stand against racism, and I find Griffin, Brons and the BNP as loathsome as the next man (and my next door neighbour is from the United Arab Emirates) but the 75,000 signatures currently on the petition is somewhat dwarfed by the 14.5 million British people who have already expressed their distaste for the BNP by placing an X next to alternative candidates in the European elections, not to mention the 30 million who were sufficiently unmoved by the BNP's manifesto – or, indeed, anyone else's – to bother turning up to the polling station in the first place. That's 44.5 million who could conceivably say "not in my name" about the BNP, but the way democracy works is that you have to turn up and vote, and most people didn't bother. The petition isn't going to change the result, and the European Parliament aren't going to care less about a petition signed by a few thousand Brits about two confused racist MEPs when they've had over fifty MEPs in their ranks for the past five years whose politics are markedly to the right of mainstream conservatism.

"But why didn't these people use online media to mobilise their friends to get out and vote?" you might ask. Well, some did try. But the kind of people who monitor social media and have friends who are interested in politics weren't the ones who needed motivating. As one wag said the morning after the election results: "I don't understand how the BNP got two MEPs elected, after people on Twitter told people who weren't going to vote BNP not to vote BNP." And that's the point. Social media has connected us very firmly with people who think similarly to us. With the help of friends, we can persuade hundreds if not thousands of people to express their agreement with all manner of stuff (including the statement that the BNP do not represent Britain) which is why constructing an online petition is so tempting. It looks superficially impressive, as if you've mobilised a huge army of passionate recruits. But you haven't. Creating and signing online petitions requires so little effort that it barely requires anyone to think about the issues. Petitions such as this one, railing against Government plans to introduce limits to sound levels in live music venues, collected over 80,000 signatures. But there were no such plans; the whole petition was borne out of confusion and Chinese whispers. Perhaps the most famous petition on the Downing Street website concerned road pricing; we'll never know what percentage of the 1.8m signatories immediately put their names down as a reaction to being told "you will have to pay for something that was previously free", but you can bet it's pretty high, and few will have bothered reading the cases for and against.

The vast majority of online petitions are as insubstantial, fleeting and ephemeral as most other web content, and you get the feeling that those who receive petitions – not least those in Downing Street – are well aware of this. You can't blame those who feel strongly about issues for collecting signatures online, but if they really wanted to impress the lawmakers, they might be better off doing it the old fashioned way, and accosting people on street corners with a pen and a ream of A4 paper.

A blog post about me being an online chat grammar fascist of the worst kind. http://is.gd/X528

rhodri: A blog post about me being an online chat grammar fascist of the worst kind. http://is.gd/X528 #rm

The net’s impact on the Queen’s English

There's a post over at Everything2 which addresses the slow erosion of the proper order of fullstops, commas and quotation marks in online discussion. Apparently, keen to avoid mistakes being reproduced when placing code in quotation marks, geeks have taken to always putting fullstops and commas outside the quotation marks regardless of context. Serious stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. It's the kind of thing that might get Lynne Truss worked up into a frenzy, but it's something of a surprise to see the story gaining over 1300 thumbs-up over at digg.com – particularly when far worse breaches of the English language occur on every corner of the internet on a daily basis.

I've been doing something of a study on this topic in the past few weeks – well, I say study, it's more like spending idle moments messing about on the internet. Omegle is a website that puts you in touch, anonymously, with another random visitor, and allows you to pass the time of day chatting to them about whatever topics take your fancy. For some reason I find it slightly compelling – despite the fact that the likelihood of me having a wide-ranging, mind-expanding conversation is incredibly slim; by my rough estimates around 25% don't speak English at all, and another 50% don't speak it as a first language. But that 50% seem to eclipse the remaining 25% of us in their standards of written conversation.

I know it's only a ridiculous chat room and analysis of its contents doesn't really stand up to any great scrutiny, but in the weeks I've been wandering over and trying it, I've developed a foolproof way of ensuring that you're going to end up talking to someone with a brain, and sadly it involves standards of English grammar. My opening gambit is generally: "Hello." Note the capital letter and the fullstop. If the reply comes back with either a capital letter, or a punctuation mark of some kind, I reckon I'm about 75% likely to have a conversation that doesn't subside into urgent enquiries about whether I might be feeling horny. The vast majority of respondents type "hi" – which generally prompts me to disconnect, which I know is slightly brutal, but you can be around 90% certain that "hi" is unlikely to be followed up by anything of substance.

People who ask "Where are you from?" are the kind I don't mind passing the time of day with, but you're far more likely to get someone saying "from?" or "where?" (or, worse, "from" or "where".) Then there's the dreaded "ASL?", or "asl?" or "asl" – an abbreviation for "age? sex? location?" – which is the most bludgeoning opening gambit imaginable, and one that I'd dearly like to see its users try and deploy in a bar or a nightclub. There's only one group of people who ask "asl", and that's men who need to establish with some urgency that the person they are talking to is female, so they can begin to construct elaborate sexual fantasies while stabbing at their keyboard with sweaty fingers.

My conclusions, shot through with exceptions, caveats and general fallibility, are that nice, intelligent, interesting people can spell, and they use capital letters and punctuation. Everyone else is a dribbling cyber-sexual predator. Probably.

A feature about the burgeoning world of online counterfeiting: http://bit.ly/iBfRy