In other words: nothing to see here. Move along!

Catch it while it still looks good – i.e. before he gets carried away with plug-ins and widgets like what I did.

It has evolved into a sphere of memes and ideas constantly shaped by the millions of Web users who write, read, and comment on blogs, many of whom followed links there, which were themselves spread virally.  In a sense, the blogosphere operates in a similar manner too open-source code, where a loose confederation of programmers timkers with software, adding to it and sharing contributions with anyone who is interested.

Blimey.  I must be using the wrong internet or something. Doesn’t sound much like skuds.co.uk!  Hang on though, it continues…

Of course, there are often stark intellectual inefficiencies, as well as a lot of hot-gas rhetoric, vitriol, inane discussions, score settling, and outright buffoonery.  Actually the blogosphere can be downright Hobbesian, with posts that are nasty, brutish and (often mercifully) short.

Ah.  That’s more like it.

Interesting book BTW.  Review to follow when I finish it.

It concerns one of our local councillors and his belief that he is being targetted by the Chinese government. The story starts by saying:

Eager blogger Duncan Crow was shocked when an article posted on his website appeared to infect his whole system.  And he even hinted that it could have been the work of the Chinese government.

Sounds like somebody has been a big fish in a small pond for a bit too long and has started to forget how small that pond is in the grand scheme of things.

On reading this I reached into Skuds’ toolbox and pulled out Occam’s Razor which suggested that the chances of the Chinese government finding one critical article about their relationship with Tibet out of the thousands that must exist, and then acting against it instead of the many that will be more influential, are a lot slimmer than the chances of one person, who would never claim to be any sort of expert, making a bit of a cock-up and screwing up his own site.

It is even less likely when you consider that, despite the story talking about “his system” and the Chinese “hacking into his computer”, Duncan’s blog is hosted by Blogspot and so is entirely based on Google’s servers.  To hack it you would need to hack Google and not a PC in Crawley.  Having said that, I suppose you could avoid hacking Google by getting into the PC to look for a stored password.

More hilarity ensues when Crow is quoted as saying ” this was too sophisticated to be the work of local political extremists who would be my usual suspects.”

But the punchline is at the end:

Fellow blogger Richard Symonds, who stood in the county council elections this year for Gossops Green and Ifield East, called Cllr Crow ‘paranoid’.

I think that when Richard Symonds starts calling you paranoid you should start worrying.

There are other possibilities.  I know a bit about Blogger, having been working on a Blogger-based site for a few months on behalf of Horsham Labour and I have seen posts on there that have screwed up the whole site until I fixed them.

The most common cause is pasting something from Word or some other source.  It may look like you are just pasting text but in fact you can pick up all sorts of junk from Word, including all sorts of spurious <div> and <span> tags.  In fact a well-placed, accidental </div> could make it look like the rest of the site has gone.

One way to fix this is to go into HTML mode and remove all the junk.  The sledgehammer approach is to delete the whole post.  To avoid this sort of thing,  if you paste anything do it in HTML mode.

I’m not saying that is what happened, but I’m guessing it was something like that.  If I’m going to rubbish one hypothesis it is only fiar to offer an alternative one that is more plausible.  The irony is that in all probability it was a local political extremist that caused all the problems after all – he just didn’t realise it.

The Observer, wisely, made no comment of their own about whether they believed any of this, but just stuck to reporting what was claimed.  The Crawley News, even more wisely, chose to refrain from printing anything at all.

In reality such comments are few and far between, with most of the site contents being devoted to rather more substantial matters like conflicts of interests and suggestions of poor financial management, which if they are true would be rather more of a reason to resign than being called a few names.

Now I think it is taken as read that I am not a fan of our local Tories and, with one or two exceptions, have a very low opinion of them, but I can’t see them standing down in a huff because somebody said bad things about them.  Unfortunately. They have more backbone than that – or stubborness or bloody-mindedness or arrogance or sheer front, depending on your point of view.  I don’t think they would even consider resigning if somebody published 100% true details of proveable malpractise, so why are the Somerton councillors so comparitively easy to topple?

There must be more to it than is in the news so far.  Might be worth adding Muck & Brass to the old RSS reader to find out.

I look forward to adding his feed to Google Reader if and when it happens.

Me & Tony Benn, Worthing, June 30th 2009

Today I went down to Worthing for ‘an evening with Tony Benn’.   This was a fundraiser for his grandaughter, Emily, who is the parliamentary candidate down there, and a very pleasant evening it was too.Tony Benn has always been a bit of a hero and inspiration to me.  The only time I ever saw him before was when he was speaking at a rally in Trafalgar Square in the 80s.   I can’t remember if it was a CND rally, or an anti-apaartheid rally, or something else, but I do remember that it was his birthday and the whole crowd (estimated to be in excess of 7 by the police at the time) sang happy birthday.

Back then Benn was held in great esteem by the sort of person who went on these marches but was public enemy number one in the tabloid papers.  In the years since then he seems to have acheived national treasure status.  Not sure when that happened, but surely he deserves it.  He spoke to us for a short time, leaving most of the evening free for questions from the floor.

It was a welcome change to have somebody from the Labour party speaking and to be able to sit there agreeing with everything they said!   There were some very thought-provoking comments on all sorts of topics, particularly on war and how much we should interfere with other nations’ affairs.

Emily Benn was also there.  I thought she was very impressive and so absolutely bloody young.  I am still finding it hard to adjust to parliamentary candidates who are literally young enough to be my children, but I can see why she was selected because she spoke well and sounded like a real politician. (But I won’t hold that against her)

I know that when she was selected there were suggestions that it was just because of the family name and Tony’s influence in the party.  Personally I think that if Tony Benn’s influence had anything to do with it then it was only the influence he will have had over Emily and her development rather than anything else and when she gets into parliament, as I am sure she will, it will be under her own steam.

East Worthing & Shoreham Labour Party put on a really good evening.  Tea, coffee and soft drinks laid on, and a plate of strawberries, raspberries, grapes and cherries on every table. Lots of party members and supporters from all over the county were there and made to feel extremely welcome.

1. Left a whole week between posts
   Most serious bloggers can’t leave it seven hours, let alone seven days
2. Offered no explanation for the week of silence
   And I am still making no excuses or giving reasons
3. Didn’t apologise
   And why shoud I?   Without documented evidence that some bewildered soul actually cares and was seriously put out by the absence of Skuds-penned drivel it would be the height of arrogance wouldn’t it?

I’m only active again now because we had fajitas for dinner the other day and I thought I would write a few final words before succumbing to so-called swine flu.  I’m sure I read in the Daily Mail that it can be caught from foreign food.

So far the reception has been quite good.  Already I have had one other department ask if we can help them re-do theirs, and somebody outside our division has asked if he can steal the design for his site with a view to encouraging it to be used for some more corporate-level sites.

Obviously I am chuffed that all this positive attention is coming along mere weeks after my annual performance appraisal…  management now have a whole eleven months to forget about this before the next annual appraisal.

I have also done a template for a Horsham Labour website and put some placeholder text in it.  Just have to train up some of the party officers so they can put some real content in there and then we can launch it.

The third new venture is one that I didn’t have a hand in designing at all, which is probably why it looks so much better than the other two.  I am a mere contributor, not that I have really started contributing yet, but then the site is not fully launched yet.  Its still in a sort of beta phase.

It is a group blog called Common Endeavour and as the name suggests it is a Labour-leaning group effort.  The other contributors at the moment include Paul from Never Trust A Hippy, Sadie from Sadie’s Tavern,  Andreas Paterson,  Olly Onions, and others – with support from Andrew of Bloggers4Labour and Damian (AKA Pootergeek).  With all those and other illustrious figures from the left-wing blogging scene (like Tom Freeman of Freemania and the mighty Hopi Sen of A Blog From The Back Room) all chipping in two thoughts occur to me:

1. What a great team.  This should be a good site to keep an eye on.
2. What the hell do they want me for?

I hope the answer to the second point is that they spotted some potential in my writing that I have not suspected, although its possibly the result of meeting up with Damian, Paul, Andrew and some others over some beers in the past.

I’ll certainly have to raise my game a bit to keep up.  I suspect my more overtly political posts will end up on Common Endeavour, leaving this personal site free for more rambling about prog rock, the trials and tribulations of West Ham, and things of more limited, local interest.

So far the strangest thing is using Wordpress where I am not an administrator but just an author.  I just can’t get used to seeing that menu with so few options on it.

At the moment it all looks a bit naff as so few of my regular visitors who contribute to discussions have a gravatar.  Why not get one now?  It is quick, easy and just a bit of fun.Gravatars are ‘globally recognised avatars’, which is just a geeky way of saying it is a picture that can be associated with you in various places.

Getting one is a piece of cake: just go to gravatar.com and supply an e-mail address.  You will get an e-mail to make sure it is really you and then you can upload any image and have it appear next to your name in comments you make on any gravater-enabled blog or other site.

The verification is to stop you picking somebody you don’t like and getting a picture of a cock, or some other unwelcome image, associated with their e-mail address, obviously.