So… a day at OpenTech (I still prefer the old name of NotCon). Aaanyway, I had a thoroughly good time, tempered only by the fact that I had (unwisely) stayed up drinking till 3 the previous morning, then (along with Tom) fallen foul of London’s night bus system, and didn’t get to bed till 5. Still, on three hours sleep and a pernicious hangover were not enough to distract me (or Tom, who managed to make it too) from the delights that lay within. Having been to several of these now, I can say that the organisers have got things pretty much down pat; OpenTech was quite well-organised, compared to its predecessors; the timing of talks generally kept to schedule and the audio/visual setup now runs pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, a lot of talks and seminars I was interested in happened to clash at the same time, which was a real shame.

The practical open content talk was a good starter; Paula Le Dieu of Science Commons was an particularly nice and engaging speaker, talking without notes on the project: a commons of scientific resources (not just papers but data and even materials and specimens); I would have loved to have talked about the more tacit, less explicit forms of knowledge (working practices, subtle nuances, local habits etc.) which some sociologists of science like Harry Collins have talked about. I’m not sure how they can be shared, apart from maybe setting up databases of people who can register particular skills or experiences, whom others can meet in person to learn from them. Meanwhile, Openstreetmap was launched, an open mapping project using GPS and a community of volunteers, which has an impressive-looking Java applet with which one can edit and annotate data directly onto the map, Wikipedia-style.

The social factors seminar (with some of the guys from MySociety - who I must apologise to, as I met them in the depths of my hangover and wasn’t very lively or conversational as a result) was interesting, as an overview of what kinds of things are out there. However (and the same complaint goes for any sort of social software in general), is that there is very much the case of “build the technical, and the social will follow”, as if the social has no input whatsoever. From a sociology of technology POV the issue is: what key decisions did you make, and how were they informed? Was it purely decided by the technology or were there other factors? Martin Belam from the BBC was a little more open about the role of the user and the design decisions made for the recent ’special’ BBC homepages for the return of Doctor Who and Live 8, but the influence of the social on the design of the technical is either not appreciated, or perhaps more specifically, is tricky to explain properly. My hunch is that designers and programmers often take many decisions without realising it (especially OSS programmers, if they are doing it from home), and thus asking them themselves to recount their actions and their reasons later can be quite tricky. Maybe we need to transport some into a lab and do some proper ethnographic studies…

The blogging and social software seminar was also good. East London’s favourite paramedic Tom Reynolds was just as entertaining in the flesh as he is online, in his talk on how not to get sacked for your blogging (I recommend the PowerPoint slides, especially if you like cats). Paul Mutton had an informative piece on mapping social networks, which was good, but at the moment his diagrams are not telling us much more than what we know already. The content needs to become richer - lines between nodes should have different types (love/hate/gossip/jokes etc.), maybe different weights for different directions (does one person dominate the other?). The discussion afterwards was dominated by discussion of another project, What Should I Read Next? (a free/open version of Amazon’s recommendation system that does not rely on a purchase actually being made), which I fear may bomb once the publishers catch on and spam it to death.

Jamie Zawodny of Yahoo! gave a good if not highly illuminating presentation, talking a lot of good stuff about open access to APIs, RSS and combining and aggregating data from many sources, which set up nicely for the final talk, which was on web applications, and things like Greasemonkey, the demonstrations of which were highly impressive (having resisted the urge to start hacking Greasemonkey things together, I now really, really want to play catch-up and start writing one right now). Some of the apps (especially Book Burro) were very small, self-contained examples of high-quality need identification and innovation by the user.

In all, OpenTech was good, although somewhat less exciting than in previous years - while it is a good, no, actually a great thing that the likes of the BBC, Yahoo! and Amazon (who all had presenters there) are now considering the open source/open access/hacking/user-led innovation/whatever you want to call it as a resource, it doesn’t mean every presentation has to be as serious or straightforward. While in past years there was live hardware hacking on stage and construction of clocks from prawn sandwiches, there wasn’t enough of the conference oriented towards useless fun rather than practical fun (apart from the disastrous iPod Shuffle shuffle, where people would donate their own Shuffles to a pool and get a random one back - lovely idea in theory but too impractical to actually do). There was motherboard kerplunk but it wasn’t officially on the timetable and so I missed it.

Still, I had a good time and there were plenty of interesting things said. My one regret was that with little break-time during the day (and my feeling under the weather) I didn’t get to talk much to people, especially as I had to leave pretty soon after it ended for another enagement (so apologies to anyone I met and said I would meet later). I still need to watch the half of the conference I missed (in particular the BBC Backstage launch and Danny O’Brien on the need for a British EFF).

Right, off to enjoy a very rainy Sunday. More reflections on OpenTech to come (hopefully).

Today’s eerily reminiscent, but also pathetic bombings in London provoked two reactions - firstly, “OK, the security services can be forgiven for not knowing anything about the first one, but they’ve really dropped the ball in letting this one slip through, in the midst of the biggest anti-terrorism investigation ever”.

Second reaction is about the bombers - “You fuckers, you’ve closed all the Tubes just in time for my weekend visit. Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.” Yes, I’ll be down there this weekend, and if anyone else is going to Open Tech on Saturday then look out for me; I’ll be more than willing to have a chat and drink during the day.

The other day it was my, er, pleasure to watch Battle Royale, the cult Japanese Lord of the Flies meets The Running Man (whilst on crack) movie. The basic premise is that a government, losing control of the nation’s youth, tries to reassert its authority by instituting a brutal social programme. Every year, a randomly-selected class of school pupils are drugged, taken to a remote island, given weapons and told only that they must kill each other; the last one surviving will be allowed back home as an example of the monstrosity they are clamping down on.

My first thoughts on watching it was My God, I just hope no-one from the Home Office watches this. My more settled thoughts are that it’s not a bad film, it has its flaws for sure, and no doubt some of the best dialogue is lost in translation (such as this - warning, spoiler), but it’s quite a stark telling of what happens when otherwise innocent and happy people are demonised, ghettoised and made to turn on each other. More refreshingly, there’s none of the crap that you’d get if there had been a British version, which would no doubt try and hook it up with the whole reality TV phenomenon merely to please the likes of Mark Lawson and Zoe Williams, happily chin-stroking in the media columns (aargh, my thoughts are polluted by Ben Elton’s Dead Famous). Nor is there the shlocky post-ironic fauxmodern, let’s see how cool you can make yourself look by referencing as many films as you can throughout (and if we can get some boobies in there too, that’d be great) that you’d get if it was turned into an American slash flick. No. No blatant and desperate attempt to be seen ‘commenting’ on ‘current issues’, no egotistical worship of false idols, instead, it’s good, old-fashioned combination of brutal violence, betrayal and emotional bonding, with just the right amount of gallows humour, which nicely makes what satire there is much more subtle. It is uncomfortable to watch, absolutely, but that’s because it’s honest: it’s human beings mercilessly killing other human beings. You should be uncomfortable watching it.

You can never have too much mashed potato.

After finishing dinner today, I’ve realised that every time I have mashed potato (which isn’t that often, I hasten to add, spuds are always more of a chore to prepare than rice or pasta), I am preparing larger and larger portions. And then after the meal, when I am all done, I will head back to the pan I mashed them in and scrape out what’s left. No matter how much I make, I am never sated. It’s quite worrying, really - mashed potato is one of those foods that tastes absolutely delicious (especially with a dab of pesto, or some fried shallots or spring onions, mixed in) and yet doesn’t make me feel that full. I’m getting worried now - especially as I know if I made chips out of so many potatoes and then ate them I’d probably drop dead on the spot.

To top it off, I’ve just remembered have a box of instant mash in the cupboard for emergencies, and now I have a terrifying image of me making a midnight dash and guzzling half the packet, before suddenly feeling terribly, terribly ashamed. Hmm. Might have to go for a brisk walk to clear my head…

I have been using Mediawiki (the same software used to run Wikipedia) for a private online wiki for some time now, for recording notes and research for my MSc dissertation. But, I’d like to do an HTML dump of all the pages from the current version of the database, for reference when I am offline (in this case, my five-hour train journey to London this weekend). Infruiatingly, there doesn’t seem to be that option - you can export to some specific XML format, but not produce a simple static HTML mirror of the site. The only plugin I’ve found no longer works. Anyone know of a (quick) solution?

12 days after the London bombs, and as it’s become clearer that, with the main protagonists dead and their associates scattered around the world, the investigation into the crimes are going to take some time. So, no quick conclusion, nothing to talk about, so everyone gets back to their favourite game - blaming the usual suspects for the same old gripes. Such as…

Blame the BBC! The BBC used the word ‘bomber’ initially instead of ‘terrorist’ - use of this whitewashing euphemism for the people who did this apparently makes the BBC fascist-appeasers. The fact they are the national broadcaster with an ethical commitment to restraint, trying to report on confused, conflicting and partially-complete information on a sensitive issue is handily dismissed with the all-powerful benefit of a few days’ hindsight. Easy. And the solution? Privatise it and let the market sort it out! Remember, consumerism is democracy.

Blame The Guardian! A trainee at the Guardian apparently belongs to Hizb Ut Tahrir, an Islamist extremist organisation. The simpler explanation that this was a fuckup by the HR department is a mere veil; instead it’s further proof of the Grauniad’s descent into madness. Incidentally, the ‘free market will give us the media we deserve’ argument appears not to apply to the Guardian.

Blame Hampstead! Apparently, the bruschetta-munchers in North London (who include amongst their number George Galloway and Ken Livingstone) are to blame for the dual rise of Islamic fundamentalism and white working-class racism in East London and other impoverished parts of the country, by er… reading The Guardian and voting Liberal Democrat. Exactly how our Hampstead overlords are controlling and manipulating the rest of us is never explained, but one thing is for sure, the current political atmosphere has nothing to do with the current government’s foreign policy failures, its caving in to right-wing media hysteria over immigration and its inability or unwillingness to redistribute wealth. Oh no.

Blame the Americans! Apparently the Yanks fucked up and blew the cover of an Al Qaeda mole who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew one of the bombers (Kevin Bacon may have been involved, who knows). In the absence of any actual evidence and with the investigating authorities keeping their cards close to their chest, we’ll just hit the conspiracy trail and say it was all their fault.

Blame everybody you like, including the pinkos at Amnesty! - By far the worst thing I read this week was this shit-unfunny piece of unfunny fucking crap, which is amongst the worst, sub-schoolboy excuses for satire you’ll ever read. It reads much like comic strips in the Daily Mail which ‘mock’ ‘barmy’ Health & Safety regulations (right next to the piece asking whether saying the word “envelope” will give you cancer) - amongst their many targets that are hemmed in together as being comparable with suicide bombers are the commie terrorist-lovers at Amnesty International, probably for having the temerity to point out that Guantanamo Bay may have more than a passable resemblance to the Soviet gulags. Which of course, nothing could be farther from the truth - after all, the detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned without trial and (allegedly) tortured by a democracy. So that’s all right then.

Right. Anyway, there is a point to all this, which is namely this. Political blogging, I am sad to say, is shit. Well, not all of it (the political blogs I link to on the right are the ones I enjoy; I read many more that I don’t really enjoy), but it pretty much is. Generally, the articles are long, turgid, hyperlink-light (and are often the same ones used again and again) and written in the style of newspaper columns. More often than not, they actually are newspaper columns, reproduced in great chunks with little more than a minor pithy sentiment of agreement (linklogs exist for a reason, guys). Genuinely illuminating reporting or research is kept to a minimum (the ’scoop’ about the Guardian trainee reporter doesn’t count, it could have been undug by anyone armed with Google), and there’s precious little use of any medium other than text (images, sound, video etc.). Oh, and they’re rarely funny, and even more rarely witty. But most irritating of all is the grubby and entirely predictable factionalising that occurs; in the end it becomes entirely tiresome with page upon page of the same points rehashed at the same bogeymen (I am this close to creating a Harry’s Place content generator). Otherwise intelligent and interesting people just become parrots, as the aftermath of the London bombings have proven. Compared to some of the other far, far more illuminating blogs on other fields of interest like technologies, design, economics, etc., political blogs are (with a few honourable exceptions) just… boring.

When I first started blogging (2 years ago this month, I think) I talked about all sorts of crap, on a daily basis. More recently, this blog has become more political and more wordy (it’s quite interesting to compare the early posts in the archives with present-day ones); partly because I have less time to write, and also because I like to cover my bases when writing politically, my posts have become fewer and fewer. I fear I might be heading down the same path towards predictability and cantankerousness, so I’ve decided to write about politics less from now on. Not completely stop - if something gets on my tits enough I will deliver a first-class rant, promise. But I’ll try to talk more about the books I read, the websites I encounter, and the things I see around town (and even start integrating my photos a little more) more from now on.

Okay, I’ve realised I haven’t the time to really blog a coherent post about more on the London bombings, but here some thoughts and things…

• People have said that the suicide bombers deliberately targeted Muslim areas in London - but I am doubtful (Russell Square doesn’t strike me as a Muslim area, and Liverpool Street/Aldgate is the wrong side of the boundary between the City and Tower Hamlets). As the bombers were all from Leeds, did they really know the intricacies of the ethnic and religious makeup of London?
• This raises a further point… in the UK we have notions of a north/south divide, but also of a homogenous Muslim community. Is it time we should start looking at the former rather than the latter - gross generalisation coming up here, but in London, ethnic minorities tend to be more integrated than in Yorkshire. Insularity of communities, higher racial tensions, the higher poverty and fewer opportunities were all cited as factors in the Bradford riots (and also why they did not happen in the South)… should we also consider them as things that fuelled the attraction of fundamentalism?
• This is not of course to say that they were terrorists just because of their background; the motives to blow oneself up in a public place are far more complex than that. Many blogs, especially the pro-war ones, have been keen to paint it as Islamic fundementalist terrorism of the Al Qaeda-kind: a nihilist, fascist, anti-democracy, restoration-of-the-Caliphate kind of philosophy; issues such as Iraq or Palestine are discounted as smokescreens or excuses. While this is certainly true when one sees what Osama bin Laden says on a video, the motives of the London bombers may well have been different. The two British suicide bombers who carried out atrocities for Hamas in Israel made clear that the occupation of Palestine was their main bugbear; they saw themselves as soldiers in the cause of liberating Palestine, while the Caliphate etc. itself took a back seat. Those who attribute the Iraq war as a factor in the London bombings are criticised as not understanding the nature of Islamofascist terror, without consideration that the men who blew themselves may have shared the same (mis)understanding.

  (A Harry’s Place post also discusses divisions and factions within the umbrella term of Islamic fundamentalism)

• The BNP - what a bunch of cunts, eh?
• I feel uneasy at the fact that the “Muslim community” are now obliged to apologise and condemn automatically, but Chicken Yoghurt and Blood & Treasure have expounded on this far more effectively than I could.
• Phil Edwards discusses terror in a long but good read.
• Um, that’s it. More to follow later, perhaps

Status - busy. And with little Internet connection goodness. Sorry. Will post later in the week - have lots to talk about including further London aftermath and the G8 summit (remember that?). In the meantime, have a delightful story, courtesy of this week’s Popbitch newsletter:

Many moons ago, when Hugh Laurie and Sir Stephen of Fry were just becoming ‘known’, they were interviewed on a BBC radio show. Mr Fry asked what the foam covers on the end of the mics were called. To which Mr Laurie said, “They’re called ‘Spoffles’ and they prevent what’s known as ‘Popping’”. Mr Fry, the Host and the Engineer were all impressed by Mr Laurie’s knowledge and the interview continued.

Years passed, and once again Fry and Laurie were in a radio studio. The Engineer said something like he’ll just adjust the Spoffle. Mr Laurie says, “The what?” And the Engineer explains that this is what the foam things are called. “Good Lord,” laughs Mr Laurie, “I made that word up on the spot years ago in a studio!”