qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

A quick intermission to tell you something I’ve been getting up to at work this week. We’re working with WWF Earth Hour which is this weekend at 8.30pm – people from around the world will be turning off their lights for an hour to make their stance known against global warming and to lobby world governments to take more effective measures against climate change. There’s a stack of things you can do to help – including signing up, resources for spreading the word on your blog or website (such as the light switch widget you can see top right) and sharing your experience on YouTube and Flickr. Do check them all out – it’s for a very good (and very important) cause. Thanks.

The origins of this post came from a question I was asking myself: Why is Twitter, a ludicrously low-bandwidth service, popular now and not in 2000 or 2004? And at the same time I read a lot of posts about how Web 2.0 was going to turn our brains to goo. This post attempts to tackle both topics.

It seems you can’t move right now for excitement about Twitter and other forms of microcontent creation. Everything else is following Twitter’s “go small, go often” philosophy as well – just look at Facebook’s new lifestream interface. And with Twitter dominating current web thinking comes fears of digital overload, warnings of destroyed attention spans (as Maggie Jackson argues in Wired), or even ludicrous claims that it will make you ill. On the other hand, this “snack culture” could just be handled by our brains just fine, ultimately making us mentally fitter.

One problem: these are the wrong questions to be asking. The dichotomy of “brief and shallow” media vs. “long and deep” media is a false one. As Steven Berlin Johnson argued last year:

If we’re truly living in a snack culture, how come so many forms of entertainment – TV shows, games, movies – are getting longer? Most of us, I suspect, have had this experience lately: You tell a friend that they simply have to start watching one of the new long-format dramas, like Heroes or The Wire.

Right now, the movie everybody is going on about on the web is Watchmen, which clocks in at an impressive 2 hours 42 minutes, and itself an adaptation (for better or worse) of one of the most complex and layered graphic novels of the 20th century, the only such book to make TIME’s 100 novels of all-time, one held in almost impossible high esteem by the exact same demographic (geeks) that also love to be on Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites.

Watchmen (and the other examples Johnson cites and expounds upon in Everything Bad Is Good For You) show that when consuming media, depth and brevity are not totally irreconcilable; you can concentrate on something difficult and concrete as well as enjoying content 140 characters at a time. And yet Twitter often gets demonised as a posterboy for the inanity of Web 2.0. Perhaps that’s no surprise, with its chief characteristics of brevity and ephemerality, the exact opposite of how we have consumed media in the past. Given that “value” of old media was often measured on its length (writers being paid by the word) or durability (all those books and records on your shelves), what’s produced in new media is often characterised as comparatively worthless, particularly by those who cut their teeth in the old media.

It’s tempting to say this was inevitable, the Internet coming in and destroying business models, rational thought, the very fabric of the universe as we know it. Yet Twitter didn’t just become popular because of all that free bandwidth, server power and cute pictures of whales. In fact, we were technically capable of producing Twitter five years ago, with broadband adoption relatively high among early adopters (geeks), and Twitter’s paltry bandwidth needs being easily handled by WAP or SMS on mobile. But it arose for two reasons: firstly, because people wanted to take part in this communal self-expression – giving us the so-called “adrenaline shot” of information. But we are not rats being stimulated by electrodes at a lab assistant’s will – Twitter is popular not just because we wanted to take part, but because we are now able to as well.

What if the vast rise in information volume and variety was not an inevitable result of the digital landscape, but rather a consequence of how we behaved socially and digitally? That as the “early adopters” – the bloggers and wiki editors and geeks – in the mid-2000s got more used to dealing with information – continually writing, creating, photographing, rating, tagging, chatting, texting, poking, etc. – and improved their brevity & clarity, that they have become more efficient at producing information? And once they became more efficient, they sought (or created) channels and media that better exploited that efficiency.

I’ll lead from my own personal experience here. Looking over this blog now and comparing it with 2004, you’ll see I write a lot less than I used to. What thought would have taken me an entire blog post back then, I can now Tweet once, or post to Delicious with a little extended commentary. How? Because I got better at communicating more briefly, and what used to take a blog post now can take a linklog post or a Tweet.

This can even improve the quality of one’s writing – once you’re confined to 140 characters (often less, if there are hashtags or a username to put in too) – and in a world where a lot of people are Tweeting, you have to make it more interesting, not less, to stand out from the crowd. Extraneous words, useless adjectives and sucking up have to get the boot, if you want to fit what you’re saying in succinctly. This is the exact opposite of growing sentences with David Foster Wallace, and while it may send fans of dense prose into despair, it does on the other hand encourage more simplicity and less pretension.

Of course, not everything on Twitter is gold – let’s face it, a lot of it is shit – but then again, a lot of everything is shit. But those of us who are fans of Twitter are comfortable with the levels of shit and have filtering mechanisms that can deal with them, so that we can find the stuff we really do enjoy. This comes back to what Clay Shirky called “filter failure“: the idea that “information overload” is not the problem – it has been a problem since the invention of the printing press – just that our filters have been radically realigned and are now the responsibility of consumers rather than publishers.

The key is this – that early adopters have not become distracted to death by consuming services such as microblogging, because we only moved onto it once we’d become publishers ourselves, mastering producing information online through other forms of media. By doing so, immersing ourselves in those information flows and working out what works and what doesn’t, we became better consumers of information as well – although that took a little time; hence why Twitter lagged several years behind the rise in blogging.

Discussion here is dominated by Twitter, but for “Twitter”, read anything new, distracting and disturbing in Web 2.0 that is emerging or will emerge in the near future, the same principle should hold – we choose to adopt them because we are able to as well as because we’re willing. This can appear puzzling to the outsider, and the only way to join in (if you want to join in) is to do what the geeks did, to produce and consume more information to help train up one’s filters. As I have discussed before, we will still need some technological help in the filtering process. But no technology can relieve the brain of all of its filtering burden. It’s somewhat ironic that the best way of preventing information overload is to indulge in even more of it – but who said anything in this world was that straightforward?

Over on my Flickr, a long and boring discourse on how taking a photo of an empty ice rink caused me a lot more hassle than I bargained for.

An interesting story broke this morning. The Times journalist Giles Hattersley wrote, in an article about the inaccuracies of Wikipedia:

My entry features at least two errors, one libellous (unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley’s son).

Interesting because, at the time, Giles Hattersley did not have an article about him on Wikipedia. As the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond pointed out:

Yet I can’t find an entry for Giles Hattersley in Wikipedia. And, as Martin Belam points out, it doesn’t look like there has ever been one.

I can confirm this quite easily – I’m a Wikipedia administator and so I can examine the entire article history – available here. I can quite authoritatively say no article on Giles Hattersley existed on Wikipedia before 1507 on February 8th – which was after Hattersley wrote his article and Shane Richmond had picked it up. “So far, so what?”, you might ask – journalists have long been used to making erroneous or exagerrated claims about Wikipedia – such as Petronella Wyatt in 2007. But then it all got a bit weird.

At 2048 tonight, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, unilaterally decided to delete the article, even though it does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion. If you want to judge for yourself, a copy of the last revision before deletion is available here – it is fairly neutral and with citations from reliable sources, I hope you’d agree (disclosure – I edited this article once, but only a minor one, adding the word ‘falsely’ in the first sentence third paragraph)

While Hattersley’s Times piece was undoubtedly a motivation to create the article, his job as a journalist for a national newspaper and former editor of ARENA make him probably notable enough for a Wikipedia article in the first place; Wikipedia’s objective philosophy makes clear that it is the content of an article, not the motivation behind its creation, is what counts towards its inclusion. Any article that does not meet the speedy delete criteria should have its deletion first discussed, according to Wikipedia policy. This was not considered here.

So what happened? The reasons given for deletion are not very clear:

I have temporarily deleted this article, and kindly request that no one restore it until we’ve sorted out all the facts. Giano has been blocked for 24 hours by me for incivility related to this entry. Jay and I are already aware of the situation and I am reaching out to the newspaper for further clarification.

There is certainly no question of libel (or else the Telegraph’s lawyers should be worried about Shane Richmond’s article) – and there were appropriate citations given. Reaching out to the newspaper (presumably the Times) is also a strange thing to mention – as the article deals with Hattersley personally and not his employers. Jimmy Wales’s reasons for deleting the article certainly transcend the usual policies towards controversial articles. The involvement of Giano, an editor who has come into frequent conflicts with other editors before, adds another intriguing dimension to further confuse matters.

Finally, this is not the first editing controversy Jimmy Wales has gotten into. It brings to mind past stories of him editing entries against policy, for seemingly personal reasons – even as petty as editing his own date of birth on his Wikipedia article.

No-one comes off well in this. The Wikipedia community doesn’t, for creating a vindictive article about Hattersley (I must confess I joked about doing so but did not carry it through). Jimmy Wales doesn’t, for not going through established Wikipedia policies, in a community whose philosophy and outlook he is meant to not just adhere to but defend. Giles Hattersley comes off pretty badly as well – the most charitable interpretation of his Wikipedia claim one could give is that it was sloppy journalism (Update: or as later clarified, it could alternatively be blamed on sloppy editing).

There is further, ugly implication from all this. Much of journalists’ research is done from the Internet these days – nothing wrong with that, as long as it considers the veracity of sources in mind. But bad journalists and pressing deadlines can mean sometimes journalists cross the boundary from legitimate research to outright plagiarism or falling for hoaxes. Yet the newspapers these journalists write for are considered by Wikipedia as reliable sources – so there easily lies a vicious circle where misinformation can become ‘fact’ by being picked up by a lazy or incompetent writer.

But the answer to this isn’t by using your website to vindictively attacking the mainstream media and its employees just to settle a grudge. The answer is a tightening not just of editorial standards but of ethics – the philosophy and approach you take to what you write and say.

Journalists need to learn to appreciate Wikipedia’s strengths and weakenesses, as well as realising how much harder it is for mistakes to go unnoticed in this world today. Wikipedians need to learn to stick to the policies they’ve agreed on and not to use the site as means of exacting vendettas upon others. If both sides fail to raise their game, trust in both will crumble in the long term.

Update: More in the comments – basically he has blamed it on an errant subeditor, and that the error existed not in his article but elsewhere on Wikipedia, “one or two years ago”, but he’s not sure where. No-one can find such an error. The lack of basic fact-checking doesn’t exactly do his reputation as a journalist any favours.

Further update: The Times corrected the article (and a less inflammatory headline) on Monday afternoon, although the claim that there was any sort of error on Wikipedia has still not been fully substantiated.

Charles Arthur had a nice post at the weekend entitled: If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code. As any modern journalist is able to Google around for facts, Charles tells any budding journo to set themselves above and beyond the normal set of “IT skills”; being able to get a more powerful grip on data is now becoming part of what a journalist should know:

None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively – and quote them meaningfully – too.

It’s great advice – playing with data and getting a feel for how to get the best out of it not only helps you find new things out, but also helps open your mind up to a more healthy appreciation of data. It allows you to explore the possibilities of data as well as its flaws, when it can be trusted and when it should be taken with a pinch of salt. And it’s things like this that contribute towards a sense of joyful skepticism that any self-respecting geek should possess (and you thought it was just about watching every episode of Battlestar Galactica).

I gave up programming as a full-time career more than three years ago but have still kept my hand in programming since, either for fun or to make work quicker and easier. Working in the digital and social media PR sector isn’t just about going to the pub (truth be told, it’s actually about going to very expensive pubs) but also about dealing with vast quantities of information – so you can see how programming can help. Making tasks faster is part of it, but the programming mindset is equally if not more important: it has taught me skills such as looking to optimise and make things quicker, filtering noise from the signal, reusing what you have to save effort in the future, and not being surprised by the unexpected.

So I’m going to say what Charles Arthur said, but bigger. If you work in any information industry, or are thinking about a career in it, learn to code. And by code I don’t mean learn something hardcore like Java or C++, or even learn a full programming language (as you’ll see below). But it means getting above the usual abstractions you see – your web browser, Word, Excel – and getting involved at a deeper level, get to appreciate what the data it is you’re reading and realise it’s not just something to look at.

So where and what would I recommend getting started with programming? From my own weary geek’s viewpoint, here’s six ways of getting into it – three of which really aren’t strictly programming at all:

Regular expressions. I cannot begin to think how many times these have bailed me out of an otherwise unrecoverable situation. Regular expressions are ways of finding and replacing text that are much more powerful than the bog standard. For example, you might want to get all the telephone numbers or postcodes, out of a document, but they are all different so a simple search wouldn’t be able to do it, so you have to do it by hand (and might miss one out).

A regular expression on the other hand can say “find me any group of eleven digits that begin with a 0, and either match the patern 0xx xxxx xxxx, or 0xxxx xxxxxx” – and bingo, you have all your phone numbers. Get clever and you can even tell it to not worry about whether it’s a space or a hyphen in between the groups of numbers. Be careful – they can get complicated, so build them up slowly and step by step – and they can do unexpected things, so always back stuff up.

CSV. Many people work with Excel spreadsheets and while it is great for tabulating data it isn’t a very portable format. Often you want to copy data in or out of Excel into other applications and it ends up being a horrible mess of numbers separated by spaces and tabs that you have to re-align yourself. CSV (comma-separated values) is the very boring but portable way of getting data in and out of Excel – it just consists of text with no styles, with commas to mark in between each column.

CSV looks like shit but it makes up for it by being able to be extremely portable and lightweight. Combined with regular expressions above and you’re able to take the useful data out of a horrible mess, replace everything between it with commas, and you can now import it straight into a spreadsheet. Or vice-versa – extracting numbers out of the spreadsheet and allowing other apps to play with it (like I did with the general election map)

Yahoo! Pipes. I am still waiting for Yahoo to piss this one up against the wall like they have done with Technorati and Flickr. So much of the web already runs on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – streams of links and articles – that being able to manipulate them like this is a real boon. Yahoo! Pipes takes RSS feeds and allows you to merge them together, filter them, cross-reference them and more. When I was looking for a job last year I used a series of Pipes to pull feeds from various job websites, filter out the kinds of jobs I didn’t like, and then remove the duplicates so I wasn’t wasting my time – all delivered to Google Reader for easy perusal, as and when they came in. The interface is as reasonably usable as you could expect and has led to some really useful apps being created.

JavaScript. JavaScript is indispensible part of the web, although originally it seemed destined for little more than launching popups and stupid messages in your status bar. Now virtually every page is interactive in some way, and JavaScript’s true power is being exploited. One of the most obvious ways of getting it to work for you is Greasemonkey, which allows you to add scripts to change the behaviour of what appears on your screen – such as making Google Reader more readable, getting rid of Xeni Jardin, or (with the help of regular expressions) making postcodes turn into links of maps.

Python. The biggie and the one I use the most. Python‘s strengths lie in its simplicity – it’s quite simple and human-friendly and runs pretty much on anything. It also has a sensible structure and organisation, which teaches you to code well and clearly. Finally, the vast libraries available mean you can play with pretty much any data format, such such as BeautifulSoup, which allows you extract data from webpages easily. Python’s one drawback is that it falls down on its relatively poor documentation & tutorials, with some honourable exceptions such as Mark Pilgrim, so do hunt around and don’t let the technicalese put you off.

Finally, PHP gets an honourable mention – a easy enough language to learn and used widely, but with so many evolutions and a complicated past the language is a mess, and it teaches several bad programming habits.

I wouldn’t recommend doing all six at once, or even ever, nor would I set expectations too high. In some respects, it’s not even about the code or the results you get – it’s as much about the philosophy and understanding it brings with it: that data is not a static thing but ours to play with, making us able to create wonderful new things or change society for the better.

Last year, Jason Kottke charted the rise of the single-serving site – “web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing”, as he puts it. They range from the facetious (IsItChristmas.com), to the possibly useful (IsLostARepeat.com), to the downriight marvellous (ItsNotLup.us). They’re almost the anti-Web 2.0 – uninteractive, dry-looking – devoted to a single psychotic purpose, neatly spelt out in the URL.

Since then, another kind of sites with a single purpose has sprung up – they can feature content – typically photos – and just that. They’re updated, but unlike blogs focused on single subjects, there’s no commentary, no snarking, no linky enthusiasm. It’s just content shovelled up for you straight away – and a lot of them use Tumblr. Brokers With Hands on their Faces, Garfield Minus Garfield and Fuck Yeah Sharks are three of my favourites, whiile Bale Yeah! and White People Trying to Look Serious get honourable mentions. The less commentary the better – let the content do the talking. Dude Totally Punched A Horse slips on this last one – it should just be the videos. Ditto for Arrested Development Stills – just leave them be!

Tumblr is ideal for this kind of streaming – having managed a super-secret Tumblr myself these past few months (I’ll reveal all sooner or later), the interface is a cinch, and as comments are not enabled by default it saves the messiness of moderating or dealing with the content. It’s halfway between single-serving and full-on blogging, leaving you free to obsess about whatever you obsess about. It’s light, fun and often hilarious. Long may it continue.