I have long had a soft spot for mashups, with a special fondness for Mark Vidler’s work at Go Home Productions, and Girl Talk is a similar project but is a whole album-length track made by splicing together bits from nearly 400 individual tracks from artists as diverse as 50 Cent, ELO, Madness and Katy Perry.  I was hooked right from the beginning (Black Sabbath mixed with Jay-Z and 2Pac).

The All Day experience goes a bit further though.  Illegal Art released a list of all the samples used and then people started updating the Wikipedia page with exactly where specific tracks are used. Next, somebody created a web page that would play the album and display the names of samples as they were used – as far as they could be identified.

That was cool enough, but now somebody else has expanded that idea on another site that visualises the same information.  Not only that, but you can play the album and choose from three different datasets for the visualisation – the Alldaysamples listing, the current live Wikipedia data, or the Wikipedia data as at Nov 21st. It really is a thing of beauty.

Awesome is an overused word, but I am a little bit awed by all this. Now I have to stop playing with these for a while so I don’t ruin the tracks for myself.  I’ve downloaded the whole thing and will put it on the mp3 player so that one day on random play it can surprise me.

I think the world has a duty to make him famous (or notorious) at some point in the future so he will have to write an autobiography.  It will not be boring.

A short sample:

I’ve obviously seen births on tv. And I remember a no-holds-barred video in GCSE science. But these didn’t involve my fucking sister.

The whole story gave me goose-bumps.  What he doesn’t mention is how he was tweeting all the way thorugh the episode…

The Observer, 3rd May 2009

Just recently I have been busy setting up a new web site for Horsham Labour Party, with a final push to make it go live on May 1st. As anybody can see it is a blogspot site.  It is not really a blog though – it just uses that framework: comments are disabled for a start.  The advantage of using Blogger is that you can have people post articles without having to teach them HTML or anything.  Having got very used to WordPress now I found it very strange going back to Blogger.

We thought about registering a domain like Crawley Labour Party have for their new site, but I think the Horsham membership wanted to wait and see how it went before actually spending any money.  In fact you can do an awful lot online for free these days.  I am still tempted to just go and register a domain, fork out for a cheap hosting package and install WordPress – or even experiment with Drupal or Joomla.  Maybe even a wiki or bulletin board to go with it…

The real difficulty now is letting go.  The idea was that I would re-learn how to play with Blogger templates, create a template, tweak all the layout, tweak the style sheet etc. and then hand it over for the members to create articles.  Now its done I feel all parental towards it.

I’m sure that when more people start posting I will keep going in to sub-edit their posts for style and layout.  It will be a real effort to resist fiddling with it.

The launch date was very fortuitous though.  Apart from being a notable day in the socialist calendar, it was just in time for us to publish our list of county council candidates (and Horsham are very proud of puttnig a candidate in every division and getting all the nomination papers in early!), and the day it went live the local paper had 5 letters published that were hostile to the Horsham MP, Francis Maude and his parliamentary expenses habit.

Two days later and Maude was all over the Observer with a story about his business interests, so there has been plenty to write about!

I find myself wishing that Maude would just stop being greedy and hypocritical for a week or two, or at least stop getting caught out, so I didn’t feel obligated to keep responding.

In the meantime if anybody fancies putting gratuitous links to http://horsham-labour.blogspot.com on their own blogs or websites so that it appears on Google search instead of the old, moribund site do feel free.

Simon Darby, the BNP’s spokesman, said he found out this morning that the injunction had been broken, describing the posting as “malevolent and spiteful”.

Simon Darby is on the list (I checked). He continued…

“We are worried because kids’ names are on the list. It is not information that should be in the public domain,” he added. “We are always receiving death threats.”

I do not disagree with him.  Possibly the only time I would find common ground with him.  I wish them luck in getting the site closed down because every single justification they give also applies to the Redwatch site.  Whenever attempts have been made to close down Redwatch we are told that it is too hard because the site is hosted in the USA. So is this new BNP membership list.  If their injunctions and actions succeed in getting this list taken down it will set an interesting precedent.

Let’s remember that the Redwatch site contains photos and videos of people from the Crawley/Horsham/Redhill area, taken when there was a UAF meeting in Crawley last year.  These pictures were posted on a site where there is some history of those appearing on it getting stabbed.  Some of these pictures were of people attending a model car club that was meeting in the same building.

While I am forced to agree with what the BNP are saying here I do not think they really give a toss about the principle involved.  They have been more than happy to see names, addresses and photos of ‘lefties’ published for years (by their own supporters and fellow-travellers) but only object when the tables are turned.

In defence of the new site, all it does is present a list of names.  It does not make any sort of comment at all, unlike Redwatch which has phrases like “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they’ll all pay for their crimes.” on it and takes every opportunity to refer to people included as “scum”, “cretins”, “degenerates” or “targets”.

On this page they include details of several popular Crawley councillors, described thus:

Chris Mullins at the Crawley Campaign Against Racism’s 30th anniversary International Party in Maidenbower community centre. Mullens is an extreme left Marxist scumbag who is a disgrace to his race, and given the choice he would rather be asian.

and

Featured below is a Tory scumbag called Bob Lanzer. Lanzer is the Conservative leader of Crawley Council. During the last local elections in May, Lanzer was seen going door-to-door with U.A.F smear leaflets.

Both followed by full home addresses and phone numbers.

If any site deserves to be called “malevolent and spiteful” (Simon Darby’s own words) then surely it is this one.  If the publication of a mere list of names canbe seen as incitement to violence then what to make of one that refers to its subjects as ‘targets’?

For a start I am not in Brighton, but in Crawley.  Also the blurb might have given the impression that this is the place to come to for ridiculous headlines from the Evening Argus – something I have only done a couple of times. (Damian is the best person for them).   Having said that – hello anyway.

You won’t find many Argus headlines here,  just various left-leaning comments on a variety of things with an unfortunate fixation on shopping trolleys, prog rock, and weak jokes.

I never realised how much the song could be improved by a Yorkshire accent.

It has made my day.

I be ever so upset.

It should be made a public holiday so its more easily remembered.

it looks like it has only been going for a couple of weeks and therefore has virtually bugger all on it so far, but it could grow and its worth keeping an eye on it just in case.

I’m not sure if whoever is in charge will actually make any money from companies paying a one-off fee for links but good luck to them anyway – there’s nothing to lose. I’m just kicking myself for not thinking of it first myself…