Its a bit hard to judge how good it is or even whether it is any good at all because it is a social networking tool and any benefits to it will only really become apparent when I have a bit of a network on it – at the moment I only have a few people on there. Having said that, it does make a lot more sense than Google Wave did. It looks like it has promise, but only when some sort of tipping point has been reached in terms of users.

The encouraging thing is that it was the same with Facebook and Twitter. The first week or two was spent wondering what to do with it all.

To start the ball rolling a bit:

If you are already on Google Plus and want to connect with me, follow me, or put me in a circle or whatever, I am on there with my Gmail.com address. If you don’t know it just ask, or find me here.

If you are not on Google Plus and need an invite, just ask me – leave a comment here and I’ll invite you.

For the nerds it is all quite exciting:  Google are accusing Microsoft of using results from Google to inform their own search engine Bing’s results.  Or something like that.  There is more to it than that, and if anybody is interested they can read all about it here.

I read about it last night, how Google had wangled it so that the search for the made-up word Hiybbprqag would generate a single result, about seating arrangements in an LA theatre, on Google.  After running that search a few times, using only Microsoft’s browser, they ran the same search in Microsoft’s Bing and got the same single result.

This morning I tried the same search at work and got 267 results.  Most were stories on tech blogs and news sites about the accusations, but quite a few were for a Surrey-based classified ads site who had the foresight to put Hiybbprqag into their metadata.

Tonight, a mere twelve hours or so later, I ran the search again and got 119,000 results.  Not bad for a word that was invented recently and only unveiled to the world yesterday.  I even noticed that one result was for a site with the address hiybbprqag.com.

At first I was impressed that somebody (in Taiwan) had got the domain registered so quickly, but it turns out the domain re-directs straight to a Google.com recruitment page.  Someone is having fun with this…

I expect the film rights of the whole affair are currently being auctioned in Hollywood somewhere as a sort of companion piece to the Facebook film.

My first instinctive reaction when I read about it yesterday was that Google had got Microsoft bang to rights, but thinking about it I do wonder if Microsoft have done anything wrong.  After all Google publish APIs for just about everything so should they be so upset if somebody uses them?

Or is it not as simple as that?

people who comment online are often motivated by emotions, and negative emotions at that. Furthermore, the longer online discussions last, the more likely they are to turn increasingly negative, and in doing so, these negative discussion dissolve into a back-and-forth sustained by fewer and fewer commenters.

I think this is about as surprising as some of the Wikileaks ‘revelations’ but it is interesting to see that a formal academic study supports what we all experience although it stops short of actually stating Godwin’s Law.  Mind you, Polish academics are probably less flippant about NAzis that we are.

The scary thing is that the study was based on data from BBC message boards which, while not famous for being a nutter-free zone, are not the worst places on the web by a long way.  Imagine if they had included, say, the Daily Mail online comments as well.

Next time you are using a forum or message board bear in mind these comments from the researchers…

The active users are those characterized with negative emotions and they seem to be the key agents that sustain discussion in the thread. Finally, we have shown that negative emotions accelerate user’s local activity in the thread

…and wonder whether having a high post count against a user is really something the more active members should be boasting about.

So.. any good?  A few observations.First of all, I prefer the council’s approach because they didn’t mess with the RSS feed.  The County Times changed their RSS feed twice during the changeover.  I think that re-launches are best done in a big-bang manner anyway.

As for the council’s website itself, it looks OK.   It looks a bit busy, but then all council sites do. It comes with the territory.  They all have information on so many different topics and try to cram links to as many of them as possible onto the front page which they sort of have to.  They don’t know what any particular visitor might want and if they are following some sort of rule of thumb about nothing being more than x number of clicks from the front page they are going to have to flood the page with links.

Given the limitations of the job, the site is quite well laid out,  but it is just as quick to find anything out by using the search function, which is pretty effective.   I was able to get to their terse and unedifying press statement about Mark Hammond with one click.

It is not a stunning design, but I have never seen a local council site that is stunning and easy to use.

The County Times has the same problem as the council: it is a local newspaper and there all local newspaper sites look quite similar, partly down to them all being owned by the same few companies who use the same tempalte for all their titles.   Even without that, all newspapers have certain constraints and readers have certain expectations of what they will look like.

The CT site doesn’t look too bad.  It is clearer than the old site and looks prettier – though that is always a subjective matter.

There is plenty wrong with it still, but there are good reasons for the things I don’t like.   For example, too much of the front page content is ‘below the fold’.   One reason for this is the amount of space used by advertising, which I’m guessing is unavoidable given the economics of local papers.   I’m sure the same reason will account for the biggest drawback, which is the lack of content.

All newspaper websites have the same dilemma: put too much on it and there will be no need to buy the paper, put too little on it and it is not worth using.  I don’ t think the County Times have got the balance right yet.  In the printed version of the paper there are all sorts of stories that don’t seem to get anywhere near the website.  The full page about the Hugls’ vitis to Hiroshima last week, for example, or this week’s article about the affordability of homes in the district.

I can see how they do not want to reproduce them in their entirety online, but I think they are missing a trick.  They could put a very short summary online, with a note saying ‘read the full story in this week’s paper’.   I will admit that when the Argus does that it can be very annoying and frustrating, but that is only because I don’t intend to buy a copy, but it might work to generate sales – perhaps more for a weekly paper like the CT than it would on a daily like the Argus.

If you read through the web site you could easily assume that the paper is just full of stories about cars crashing on the A24, thefts from garages and barns and the odd fire, and be unaware of a lot of the content that is more news feature than news.  The newspaper itself isn’t perfect but it is a lot better than you would know from the website.

So, the main verdict must be that the website is a very poor advert for the newspaper.

Putting in some of the extra content, even just as ‘teaser’ articles would fix that.  As a twist, perhaps the full text of articles could go oline at a later date so that the site was useful as an archive resource.  That would make the site useful for all sorts of people, while also serving as a reminder that there is a lot more to the paper than car crashes and rural burglaries.  For an example, the housing development at Broadbridge Heath by Berkeley Homes has been a hot topic in the area for a couple of years, but search the site for “berkeley” and you do not get a single relevent result.

It is the same with the sections for columnists and opinion.  Go to them and the only content is last week’s column by Francis Maude.  Why not all his previous columns?  Why not the countless columns by Henry Smith, Philip Circus and Morwen Millson?

As it happens they are in there somewhere.  Search for “equitable life” and you will get Maude’s column from August 2008 about that topic.  So you can search for older columns, but not find them by browsing.

If looks were everything, I would give the site a qualified thumbs up, but the content and navigation let it down.  Where it matters the site is just as bad as it was before.  I wold be happier if they had left the website alone and modernised the paper edititon, by moving to a more practical format.

With all the decorating I am doing I will admit that it is useful to have some sheets of paper as big as 58cm x 74cm but for all other purposes it is unwieldyand impossible to read easily.  I can think of no good reason to persist with the old broadsheet format that all the daily papers, bar the Telegraph, have ditched.

In other news: the design and content of skuds.org remains as crappy as ever so I am well aware of the glass house from which I am lobbing my bricks, thank you very much.

If, by ‘internet election’ people mean that voters will all surf the net, visiting all the parties’ web sites, following all their local candidates’ Twitter feeds and reading their blogs and discussions on their Facebook groups, then making their minds up based on that and direct marketing-type e-mails then not only was 2010 not the internet election but neither will any future election be it either.

Back in June the Hansard Society posted something about 10 online campaigning lessons learned from the 2010 election.  None of them seem to be wrong, but they don’t go anywhere near giving a complete picture.  I did like number 2 though:

The more effective the tool, the less sexy it is; Think databases and email.

So true.  We are still a long way from having the whole country online, and even futher from having all the online people using the internet to find out about politics.  It will probably never happen.  A smart website might look good and be well-received by the small percentage of the population that see it, but you will get far more benefit from a decent database that records where your supporters are, where the floating voters are, and manages how you can target yoru message to them – whether it is by new technology, old technology or no technology.

Where the internet, backed up by well-organised information, can have most use for political parties is in co-ordinating and directing their other activities.  Even if elections continue to be won and lost on the doorsteps that does not mean the Luddites are right – internet-based activity can encourage more people to get involved in the old-fashioned grass roots campaigning and get them allocated in the most effective way.

Having said that, there are ways in which future elections could become very different, thanks to the internet, and 2010 showed signs of how that could happen.  There were many single-issue campaigns that used the APIs of the various MySociety projects to good effect – some better than others.   As a candidate I received plenty of emails generated by websites about topics like hunting, Trident, Robin Hood taxes, and many others.

There was some official party advice about responding to such emails, but I expect the advice will be very different next time round.

Each campaign had slightly different tactics and all had some good and bad points.  In the future there may come to be some sort of standard, taking the best points of each campaign, and maybe there will be a lot more aggregation of campaigns.  It will be harder for candidates to justify a position of not answering these questions, and it will be easier to find their answers.

In return, these online campaigns will have to make it easier for candidates to respond.  Some of the emails I got were expecting me to follow a link to a pdf file containing a pledge of some sort or other, print it out, sign it, and post or fax it back somewhere.  Who has time for that if they are receiving dozens of emails a day?   Even incumbent MPs will find it hard, let alone candidates who still have a day job to do and no administrative support.

I think there has to be a certain understandable reluctance on the part of candidates to want to make pledges on everything as well.  They may have an opinion on something but not a huge amount of knowledge and will not want to be committing to anything they might find out to be impractical.  For example, there were campaigns asking candidates to pledge to join a particular all-party group on some topic.  As a non-anorak I don’t even know if I can promise that – I don’t know if these groups have limits, I don’t know how many you can join, how much time they take up, and so on.

The other frustration for a candidate was receiving the same email many, many times after having responded once.   This could have been improved by having the web site record the first response so that subsequent visitors would give their postcode and then be told what their candidates think instead of just generating a new email.  Far more efficient.

The top tip for candidates is to save all your responses and then when duplicastes come along you can copy and paste from earlier emails.   It saves time and keeps you consistent – it feels wrong to not reply personally, but get over that: the questions were computer-generated text after all.

The next stage of all this will be when the collated responses are kept and compared to voting records to hold MPs to account – and perhaps this is where the real reluctance to reply comes from.   It is already easy now to look up MPs’ voting records, in the future it will be as easy to compare their voting records to what they said in elections.

I think this is where the internet will make the most visible difference: not in the political parties’ campaigns but in the campaigns of pressure groups and other single-issue groups.  Most of these had electronic campaigns that looked like they were knocked up when the 2010 election was called.  In the future they will be written beforehand, and be better.

That doesn’t mean the political parties will not see the internet change what they do, but it will not replace the knock on the door, the phone call or the leaflet through the letterbox.  If we all just sat at home and blogged, tweeted and commented on forums we would not achieve anything.  Those things have their place, but their impact is largely second-hand.

There are many excellent political blogs out there, but their postings will be read by a very, very small number of non-aligned voters – probably a statistically insignificant number.  So that brilliant post about the closure of a local hospital ward will not be read by any of the voters affected by it – but it *will* be read by people who are knocking on doors and will give them information to backup what they are saying and it will be read by some people who are then motivated to become one of those volunteers.  In some cases it may get picked up by a local newspaper – that is about the only time it will get to the attention of the floating voters, the few who actually read newspapers anyway.

All very rambling I know.  I may expand on one or two specific points in the future.  This is somethign I have been meaning to write about for a few months and never got round to.  I have finally done it in part as a response to comments from Richard Symonds on earier posts.

He has been complaining about a perceived lack of activity on behalf of the Labour party to the savage axe-swinging of the coalition.  One answer is that the actions that will make the difference are not necessarily the one that will be visible to him.  We could all write blog posts about how bad everything is, and lots of people do, but that is not going to get a message out to voters ready for when they have the opportunity to change the government.  That will be done by getting more individuals signed up to knock on those doors – which is happening.  I don’t know about Crawley, but the membership of Horsham party has increased by 15% since the election already. The next step is to get those new members (and the old ones) motivated to get out there and engage with voters directly.

All of that will be happening behind the scenes.

Owen’s response about what he is doing up in Rugby is interesting.  I’m sure he appreciates how few floating voters will read what he writes – but it is not wasted effort.  Knowing what is going on there may well persuade a few people to join up and I hope that anybody knocking on doors up there is a regular reader.

It is not clear how campaignign will change in the future and even less clear how I will fit into it – except that it will preferably not be as a candidate and will still involve a lot of footwork regardless of what I do online.

By combining 360-degree panoramic zooming with dynamically adaptive multi-perspective panoramas, Street Slide provides both an immersive and an informative experience for exploring street-side imagery and geo-located information.

Skuds translates:

It’s cool

If phrases like “adaptive multi-perspective panoramas” leave you cold then this demo of Microsoft’s answer to Google Street View is best watched with the sound turned off.

Along with the long list of expected domains, like www.bbcbrasil.com, www.bbcspanish.com and www.bbctrust.org there are a few amusing ones like www.desperaterussianhousewives.co.uk and www.brightonbam.co.ukMost of the domain names seem to belong to either Doctor Who/Torchwood, The Wrong Door or Psychoville.  The various Psychoville websites were an integral part of the online experience for that series, with the fake websites providing clues for a competition which was quite diverting at the time.

It occurs to me that TV companies must be holding onto quite a few domain names either for planned programmes or even just in case.  In the old days it was sometimes necessary for somebody in a TV show to give a phone number and they used ranges of numbers that were specifically provided to be dummy numbers – because some people just cannot resist calling a number they hear on TV, either just out of mischief or because of an inability to distinguish between fact and fiction.  American TV and films always give phone numbers as beginning with 555 for the same reason: a fact used in the film The Last Action Hero to prove they were in a film and not in the real world.

Now you see people in TV shows typing in web addresses, or having web addresses on fake adverts and the best way to guaranteee it doesn’t clash with a real company’s web site is to use a domain of your own.  Sometimes the TV show will put sort of easter eggs onto fake web sites that are mentioned in the show.  Heroes did it with a few domains (Nikki’s internet stripping site and 9th Wonder comics), and so did Lost (Oceanic, Hanso and the Dharma Initiative had websites I think) and the BBC did quite a few for Doctor Who – the Bad Wolf site, UNIT, Harold Saxon etc. etc.

I’m assuming the desperate russian housewives site was mentioned in an episode of Eastenders.  Probably a good idea to have your own tame site attached to that URL.  It wouldn’t do to have a character mention a site and then have some chancer snap up that domain name and put all kinds of filth on it.

For what it’s worth, my favourite of all the BBC-owned websites has to be www.leamingtonspalifeboatmuseum.co.uk

As you would expect from Cory Doctorow there are lots of juicy little details about the technology and some great concepts of how the internet may evolve and blur the lines between online and offline.  It is also a glimpse into the different cultures around the world and how they might start to interact, with the younger generation growing up to have the sort of contact with other nationalities that their parents would never have imagined.

I have read a few books during the last month, and built up quite a backlog of reviews to write.  I am probably not doing them justice by doing the reviews now to take my mind off the impending election day, but I did make a conscious decision that I wanted time to let this book sink in before writing about it.  Here is what I wrote about this one:

For The Win is like science fiction set 5 minutes in the future. Parts of it reminded me of the classic cyberpunk novels, although it is a lot more plausible.

Lots of small details in the book tie in with snippets of information I have come across before. That is a bit of a worry: if they are correct and sort-of verified it makes the rest of it more likely to be realistic, and some of the lives described in it are not happy ones.

The background of the story is the globalisation of culture and entertainment, in the form of online games in the mould of World of Warcraft. The games have generated grey market and black market economies where in-game resources are traded in real life for real money. This has led to people in developing countries being employed to generate or harvest those resources to sell to people in richer countries.

The story concentrates on several groups of such workers, almost exclusively children, in different countries and how they use the infrastructure of the internet to organise themselves across national borders and language barriers to try and improve their conditions which are little more than high-tech slave labour.

There are some fascinating little lectures on economic theory and globalisation incorporated into the story in a way that doesn’t intrude too much. In fact one of the characters in the book manages to explain basic economics more concisely and better than an economics book could.

I don’t know how accurate the depictions of life in the slums of Dharavi or under the oppressive Chinese regime are, but they feel right and the idea of workers from those countries joining with workers in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and other places having discovered that they have more in common with each other than with other layers of society in their own countries is heartening for an old lefty like me.

As the story progresses the workers in different countries not only forge alliances with each other, but their trade union of workers in virtual industry makes alliances with traditional unions in ‘real’ industries. It points the way to a potential future where the reaction to globalised industry is the globalisation of labour.

I found the whole book extremely thought-provoking, but felt a little disappointed by the lack of a conclusive ending: I really wanted to know what happened to those characters. Maybe I’m old-fashioned that way.

I have been using it for a project where low costs are crucial and it has been brilliant.  I was quite happy to put up with the Google Ads displayed on the site in return for all the facilities.  I think I will have to start looking at alternatives though.  Should I look at another online service or look for some open source software I can install and run on my won server?

Anybody got any recommendations?   There must be something I can install which can provide discussions, event notices, announcements, polls, links and file archives for a group of (probably) less than 100 people – all password-protected and invitation-only.

Spot the (deliberate?) mistake

My first thought was to doubt the expertise of so-called experts in Google analytics who can’t even spell Google, then I started wondering whether this was actually done on purpose – a way of drawing people to their site so they can point out their error.   I could be over-analysing of course.