So, the Digital Economy Bill was passed last night by 189 votes to 47 and here in the UK we’re all the poorer for its ill-conceived stategies.

Adapted from PopKulture’s vintage Hangman’s Whip Flickr image

Now I can’t be arsed with file sharing (the Bill’s main bête noire). There was a window when, as part of my Cnut like attempt to stem the tide of middle age, I dabbled with BitTorrent, but then Spotify came along – and I never got into the whole gaming thing.

With no emotional investment in the benefits of file sharing, I guess it’s easier for me to be clear that copyright theft is a problem, and a big one. But it’s also clear that the Bill (#debill) is at best deeply flawed:

1. It’s crazy that it was rushed through ahead of the election
2. Its injunctions seem draconian and, more importantly, simply ineffectual
3. Surely, in the digital age, a complete overhaul of copyright law is needed, not just jumping to the crack of the BPI’s dominatrix whip?

I don’t know enough to talk sense about overhauling copyright law, but many who work on the web are at least aware of proxy hiding techniques, botnets, and a host of other reasons as to why the Bill is more likely to catch innocent bystanders and bit-part-players than those it deems the real demons. I wonder how many of the MPs who voted for the Bill understand this reality? It was the duty of any that don’t understand this stuff to vote against the Bill, not merely abstain from it.

The fact that Stephen Timms, the Minister for Digital Britain who drove the Bill, allegedly doesn’t even know what an IP address is, doesn’t instil faith that votes were cast in an informed manner…

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For those too chicken (yup, that’s me) to play with Chatroulette, try iGod.

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Flickr Simpsons set image from Doug Mota

I’ve taken issue before with the way Posterous post-processes HTML class attributes for blockquotes. And today, I discover another niggle…

Normally, Posterous applies a class of short_quote or medium_quote based upon the quote’s length, but neither class gets applied at all if the blockquote (bq) has certain markup within it. I’ve not tested the extent of this issue rigorously but here are 3 instances that seem to trip up Posterous’s parsing:

1. If any child tag of the bq has a title attribute applied to it:

   I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman.

2. If any child tag of the bq includes a cite element:

   I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman. Homer Simpson

3. If the bq itself has a cite attribute:

   I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman.

For comparison, here’s the same quote with no attributes or cite element:

I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman.

Oh, and Posterous, if you’re listening, can we improve the default styling of code elements? Thanks.

(I should add that, niggles aside, Posterous is bloody good!)

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I really like Twitter. It was one of those apps that I’d observed from the sidelines for some time but it was only when I started using it frequently that I finally got it. I just checked in with When Did You Join Twitter and was amazed to find I apparently signed up for it nearly 2 years ago – my how time flies when you’re having fun.

Anyway, there’s much I’ve learnt, some of which I really should have figured long before I did, and much still to get better at. One of those things that will never be perfect – and that’s part of the fun of it – is deciding who and how many to follow.

How much is enough?

I’ve known for some time that, unless you’re a Scobleizer (following c. 18k) or the luminous Mr Fry (following c. 54k!), the quality of attention and conversation is inversely proportional to the number you follow, but as John Cleese’s Maitre d’ might have said…

Ze Twitter sauce is very rich with twuffles, anchovies, Grand Marnier, bacon and a-cream

…and when you’ve had your fill it’s tempting to help yourself to…

Just one more waffer-thin, mint-fresh follow.

And sure enough, despite a fair amount of restraint, that’s what I find I’ve done.

The meaning of Twitter

I don’t get the curious game of following to collect followers seemingly as an end in itself. The joy of Twitter for me is as a tool for learning and forging relationships that would be less likely any other way. Now I’m not sure what the ideal number for that is but I know that for me it’s less than the 460 I’m following as I write. There’s just too much good stuff being said by people I definitely intend to keep following that I’m completely missing.

In nearly 2 years I’ve unfollowed remarkably few people but in the last day or so I’ve been doing some trimming. So, rather late to the game, I’m now getting my head round the etiquette of unfollowing. Sean Bonner has written entertainingly about this in why Qwitter is bad for everyone, and CIOonline have quite a nice piece on Twitter Etiquette: The Polite Way to Take a Break, Ignore or Unfollow. Using their guidance and my own intuition, I’m slimming down on my follows some more over the next few weeks – possibly quite drastically but we shall see.

It’s me, not you

If you find out that you’re one of the ones I’ve shed – I’ll try and send you a message but I can’t promise to – then don’t take it personally. Maybe I’ll be back for more another time.

Now if only a leaner me in real life were as easy as a leaner stream on Twitter. That’s another spring project.

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Dear shitty driver,

Mirror, signal, manoeuvre we are taught by driving instructors are we not? Not signal as you manoeuvre. What’s the point in that? I can see your car is changing direction, I can see the wheels are turning, I don't need a flashing amber light to tell me what I can already see. The moment when it would have been useful for you to start signalling was a good few seconds ago. So don’t give me that sour-faced look as I reasonably begin to nose out thinking you were heading past the junction.

I think you'll find that the useful dictionary definition in this instance is:

Signal

An event or statement that provides the impulse or occasion for something specified to happen.

See that little word ‘to’? It’s important. It refers to something that hasn’t yet happened, not that is already happening.

I’d probably rather you didn’t bother signalling at all. At least that way we can be clear that you’re just a shitty driver. Mind you, the fact you drive for a minicab firm should have forewarned me of that.

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This morning, the Today programme interviewed David Laws MP, the Schools and Families spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. He brought real clarity to the muddled Conservatives policy of tax breaks for married couples, saying…

We’re deluding ourselves as a nation if we think that some sort of small tax break [...] is really going to make a fundamental difference to parenting or marriage.

Equally dismissive of Ed Balls’s Guide to Being a Father initiative announced today, he went on to say…

I would put all of this money into the education system. […] Focusing that money on [disadvantaged] children, giving them skills and aspirations, and giving them as much stability as we can and the life skills that they need, will do far, far more to promote responsible citizens and good stable families than all of this tinkering around.

Asked about using tax policy for social engineering, he again hit the nail on the head…

We have as politicians to be realistic about what we can achieve. We have a great enough problem sorting out the problems in the education system which we can perhaps do something about if we get all the right policy levers in the right place. We have precious little chance of persuading people through some trivial change in the tax system to get married […] and we’ve got to be realistic about that.

David Laws summed up the relevance of marriage to good parenting when he said…

The key thing is whether there is stability and whether there is love and that can often be highly associated with marriage but it’s not exclusively associated with marriage.

That this common sense is even a matter of discussion is galling, common sense that is echoed in Charles Leadbeater’s more general New statesman article about re-evaluating our relationship with money…

What we most value – love, dignity, good conduct, pride, trust, friendship, care – does not come from money. If we were to try to use money to buy any of these things most people would think we were mad.

But not, it would seem, the Conservatives!

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I’ve been tickled today by MyDavidCameron.com, and I thought I'd add my own. It’s in the spirit of Clifford Singer's about statement in which he says, amongst other things...

…we apologise to any detractors who may have missed this – this site is not in fact entirely serious

I heard our Dave saying (on Desert Island Discs, I think) that he loved the Jam at school and the irony of liking The Eton Rifles was not lost on him.

Answering a charge of inverse snobbery

I don’t actually have anything against people who have gone to Eton, per se – I’m a fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for example – but I’m not a fan of the idea of private education. In practice, I know that life ain’t that simple, as a forthcoming post will touch on.

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Screen grab from video at videocrux.com

Leaving the Middle Eastern one-upmanship of Abu Ghosh aside, even I couldn”t eat this much houmous/hummus. But I’m placing my order for a portion of the return match from Lebanon.

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An Atlas moth at eol.org

My inner geek was drawn like a moth to the light of the web around 1997 via Wired magazine’s potent mix of tech evangelism and crystal ball gazing. I’ve been involved in designing for the web ever since, making lots of small changes and a few big ones to the way I approach things professionally.

And of course I’ve also been consuming and occasionally contributing to other people’s blogs for some time but I’ve never had my own. A big part of the reason is the perfectionist in me conceiving grand design plans full of good intentions, because professional pride says I must give the UI a look and a scope that is ‘the business’. And then the best laid plans... you know the rest.

I’ve also had a parallel interest in environmental issues and have closely followed the growing clamour of climate change science and politics. As with my professional life, I’ve tried to make lots of small changes in the cause of ‘doing the right thing’, but less successfully.

So why a blog now?

1. Tools like Posterous and Tumblr now make it so easy that if you feel you’ve got something to say online, there’s no reason not to.
2. By (mostly) separating the things I plan to write about here from my professional life, I can let go of the compulsion to stamp my own design on it (though I hope to later) and simply get into the habit of writing.
3. But mostly, in the wake of the Copenhagen cop out, I feel a need to set some things down for posterity. Assuming this blog survives the process of digital decay (maybe I’ll use Blurb or similar to make a hard copy), I’d like to help my descendants understand the context in which I made the shitty, compromised, and sometimes downright lazy choices I’m making now – that though we could see the climate train crash coming, it wasn’t easy to avoid.
4. The fact that this is a blog means it will hopefully become a dialogue rather than a monologue.
5. Finally, maybe by writing about trying to lead a ‘good life’, I can better hold myself to account.

It would be lovely to think that this blog might contribute to some kind of butterfly effect but I have no illusions. Here’s to making a start – a small change in itself.

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