What’s creepier in this TV Licensing advert - the authoritarian insistence of the message that we’re all being watched for our own good, or its soft underbelly - the complete and unremitting faith in “the database”, in yielding awe of its panopticon abilities?

Addendum: And I say this as someone who is quite fond of public service broadcasting, just not how it’s enforced…

You know, this is the first weekend in forever where I’m able to relax. I’ve been spending most of today catching up on some RSS feeds, resetting unread ones and starting afresh, and trying to get through an enormous pile of unread copies of Private Eye. None of this has anything to do with the following post.

Twitter appears to be flavour of the month - it got on the front page of the Guardian and it’s being used by both Downing Street and skin cancer awareness (leading to a somewhat disconcerting email alerts). It even has genuinely useful purposes - i.e. keeping up with the latest Arsenal scores. The tipping point isn’t just being covered in the mainstream press - lately I’ve noticed a huge spike in people following me, some who look like interesting human beings and others who look like spammers (I now have the “x is following you on Twitter” turned off, so if you’re genuinely think you have something interesting for me use the @qwghlm feature instead).

I’ve been on Twitter for aaages (since December 2006, which puts me around the 80,000th user mark - ooh get me), more than long enough to get a feel for the place. The BBC gets it half-right in the secret of its success:

The appeal of Twitter - and the thing that has persuaded me to spend more time there than on other social networks - is that it distills the essence of Facebook and chucks away most of the annoying stuff. I’d long tired of all the poking, vampires, SuperWalls and countless applications which cluttered up what was once a clean interface. What I still value is the status updates which allow me to see at a glance what my friends - and distant acquaintances - are up to, and that is what I get on Twitter.

It’s not just simplicity of reading and navigation though - it’s about simplicity of expression. My sixteen months on Twitter has covered a torrid breakup, various bouts of sadness and happiness that followed it, a Glastonbury festival and two holidays and trips down the pub too numerous to contemplate. It’s so simple I can use it to talk about these and more - every little jokes, puns, moans, observation, venting of steam etc. without the fiddly complicatedness of Facebook’s status system (even after they dropped the “is” last year, it’s still rubbish) and by a variety of means (web, IM, phone, special apps such as Twhirl).

The BBC article has missed out on this crucial element - Twitter would be nothing if people didn’t make stuff on it. It’s the fact it’s useful (and a little bit fun) that’s the key to success. People actually reading your Tweets - that’s an extra bonus as far as I’m concerned. Just like the vast majority of the blogs out there, most Twitter streams are read by handfuls of people (and mine is no exception). This makes it difficult to make money out of the entire operation - as the Beeb also points out:

Apparently Twitter’s managers are indeed wary about antagonising users with advertising, and are talking instead of marketing premium accounts to businesses who would use it to communicate with Twitterers like me. I don’t think that is going to be any more attractive to the community. I shared a communal cold shiver with a fellow technology journalist the other day when a PR firm started “following” both of us on Twitter. It’s the eternal problem for social networking entrepreneurs. The minute they start to try to “monetise” their users, they risk eroding the very thing that this community values - clean, noise-free communication.

I am currently entertaining the view that Twitter’s creators didn’t design to make money - at least, that is, they didn’t do it to make money on an ongoing basis. They would instead build it up & flog it to someone (ad network, mobile services provider, publishing service or Google) and leave the how-to-make-money problem for them to solve.

As for how to make regular money from Twitter - if such a thing is really necessary - the premium model idea isn’t a bad starting point. Some blogs carry ads & a few are entirely funded by them or sponsored placement; why not the same with Twitter streams? Charging Twitter subscribers for the capability to monetise their own streams by including ads, sponsored & branded posts etc. means the balance between keeping things genuine and being entirely commercial becomes a problem for the content provider, not Twitter as a whole. Ad-filled or plain lousy commercial Twitter streams will probably be ignored, the ones that get it right subscribed to & read. A far better solution than mindlessly dispensing ads to all.

This should really be on the firm’s blog rather than my own but fuck it, I thought of this in my own time on a Saturday so here it goes instead. :)

I love del.icio.us. I’ve been using it since, er, February 2005 and in that time I’ve built up (at latest count) 2,256 bookmarks. Only problem is that I tag a lot and have eclectic taste, so I have built up a stonking huge number of tags. So many so that that when I load my bookmarks page, there is a huge lag as it builds the list of tags in the sidebar (especially as it uses some JavaScript which knackers Firefox on my elderly laptop).

You can reduce the minimum number of posts a tag needs to have been on to be displayed, to 2 or 5, but even this isn’t that helpful - with the vast number of tags I have, it still takes too long. But then idly just now, I was looking at the URL that tells del.icio.us to set this number, and realised it’s just:

http://del.icio.us/Qwghlm?setminposts=5

Can I just hack the URL to make whatever threshold I like then? It turns out I can, so:

http://del.icio.us/Qwghlm?setminposts=20

now displays only the tags I (and anyone else) have used, on 20+ posts. Which is much more manageable and quick to load. Hurrah!

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Looks fine so far. Anything broken? Do tell.

I had seen these batshit-insane adverts for a couple of weeks already, but hadn’t got a decent shot of them to provide. Now I’ve found that the Met Police have kindly provided copies on their own website all along. Have a butcher’s below:

If you take a photograph of something you “shouldn’t”, or so something “odd” with more than one mobile phone, you’re a suspect. What counts as “suspicious” or “odd” behaviour, they don’t say. In fact, the message from these adverts appears to be: We haven’t got a fucking clue who the terrorists are - so we’ll leave it to your internal prejudices to decide instead. The message of this campaign is so vague, they’re even saying be vigiliant of anyone who lives in a house in an “unusual” manner:

The endless calls for heightened vigilance and suspicion of your fellow citizens, in the absence of evidence of a specific threat may be in the name of security, but they lead to a form of mass insecurity. The police’s reliance on the wisdom of crowds ends up utterly failing, as there is no correcting mechanism for the level-headed to compensate for the paranoid; even if 99% of us are not taken in by a false alarm all it takes is one panicky idiot to call in what they think is a threat and the police have to act - even if it’s just a tape dispenser, chilli sauce or a nesting box for bats.

Aside - ironically, the police themselves are no strangers to this, with one errant officer having this week circulated a well-known urban legend about drugs being sold to children. You’d think they’d be aware the damage a single loose cannon can cause.

Anyway, back to the terrorist alerts. It’s what Bruce Schneier has referred to as the “war on the unexpected“. Of course, the ones I’ve just listed are just the bonkers false alarms that make the news; there must be many more mundane incidents that never get reported in the news. Just what is the cost of all these false alarms? Not just the drain on police resources (especially while we are constantly reminded of the cost of hoax 999 calls), nor the cost of all the inconvenience every time a street or train station is evacuated, or even the health costs of the additional stress of living in fear. There’s also the cost in lost social cohesion, trust in each other and faith in the authorities to be able to do the job, intangibles it’s impossible to put a price on.

So what next? Apart from taking the piss with remixes of the posters on BoingBoing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And I don’t just mean wearing Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirts, whilst continuing to take photographs, using your multiple mobile phones and, er, living in your house without fear of intimidation (though of course we should). What I mean is something further - is it going to take before there’s a backlash, from more than the usual suspects, and some sanity is restored to anti-terrorist policy?

Step 1: Go ad hominem from the very start and label your opponents as being part of some mythical self-styled intellectual commentariat (while ignoring just how eminently qualified you are yourself to belong to that same cadre):

It has become an intelligentsia default position, or IDP for short, that we in Britain are - as one of my favourite intellectuals put it the other day - “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”

Step 2: Posit a false dichotomy and put your opponent at one extreme end of it:

So would Garton Ash really rather be freer and less safe to the extent of having less chance of catching a rapist or murderer?

Step 3: RePush the boat out even more - emphasise how the bad men will get you if you don’t do what they say. Go for the heart-tugging “as a father” line if need be:

How do we measure my right not to feel discomfited by CCTV or DNA testing, against that of, say, Justine Kelly, who was 18 - one year older than my oldest daughter - when she was raped by Lloyd

Step 4: When all else fails, wring your hands and play the race card. You racists!

A database of existing offenders in particular categories also means that certain ethnic groups are far more likely to be recorded than others, and therefore are far more likely to be successfully prosecuted in future.

Ask a sub-editor to top it off by giving it the headline “Ignore the paranoid fantasists” and voila! Instant column!

Of course, everything Aaronovitch bases his argument, for a universal DNA database of everyone in this country, is disingeuous. Having your personal data in state hands doesn’t make you more secure, and I’m not just talking about your bank records and NI numbers - all it takes is one dodgy copper and you can have an innocent man hounded to death in their home by a mob. Of course, measures such as a DNA database can be enormously useful in solving individual crimes, but only when targeted correctly and with care, and as one component of an investigation. Taking DNA indiscriminately makes suspects of us all and in turn weakens further the trust the citizen holds in the state.

The central tenet of Aaronovitch’s argument - that there is dichotomy between security and privacy - is a false one, both intellectually and empirically. A strong defence of human rights and civil liberties does not make us less safe - where you would rather live, the Netherlands or North Korea? What’s oddest about this dichotomy is how those that use it are so happy to pick & choose where they are. The current government and many of its cheerleaders (such as Aaronovitch) have long insisted on a more intrusive state, whether it be via a national identity register, DNA fingerprinting of all or monitoring of our phone calls and emails, all in the name of preserving our security at no cost, while scoffing at what they regard as out-of-date ideas of “liberty” and “rights”. Yet on the other hand they support the invasion of other countries in the name of liberty, all the while making ominous comparisons to Hitler and other historical events. The result is that the deaths of thousands of civilians in a foreign land can be justified by the emergence of a nascent democracy (no matter how flawed or chaotic) yet a few high-profile criminal cases on our own shores mean suddenly principles are cleanly forgotten. A question of mere distance clouding judgement, or just simple hypocrisy?

Scientologists love to spam my real-world postbox, thanks to a previous resident of my flat being a fan and subscribing to their newsletters (wanker). Hence the above which appeared today in my mail.

It disturbs me, mainly because it displays a worrying lack of knowledge of simple mechanics. The strapline beneath claims “the momentum is accelerating” - physically impossible given that it is mass that accelerates, not momentum (which as any fule know, is mass x velocity). Also since we are already at “FULL SPEED AHEAD!” and hence maximum velocity, the acceleration should be zero in any case.

Golden Age of Knowledge Indeed.

Luckily, today I also received a complimentary copy of WTF magazine, which is surely where karma meant for this nonsense to actually belong, but there must have been a bit of a mix-up:

The whole Max Gogarty juggernaut rolls on, and it’s mostly the Guardian and its stablemates doing the driving. There’s this hand-wringing piece by Rafael Behr which compares it to the Cultural Revolution and fails to even consider the possibility the Guardian might have made a mistake, and a heavily biased article in The Observer, both of which fail to see the bigger picture, namely that a newspaper thought they could get away with something that went against the principles of their readership, and got caught out. Instead, the spin is one of mob rule, “hate mail” and bullying and the like.

Still, this is a recognised problem on the internet and I’m going to clarify the “UGC is better than mainstream media” tone in my last post before someone misinterprets it - not every comment on any of these pieces is a burning white-hot nugget of UGC gold, superior to anything a mainstream media outlet could ever do. A lot of the comments are fairly trite and some downright abusive. There is going to be for any comments section of any site or blog, and as doctorvee summed up in a good post last week:

Look in the comments section on any major website, and you will find loons aplenty. I used to be a big advocate of letting people comment on MSM news articles. I thought the BBC’s terrible Have Your Say was just a one-off accident due to the fact that it was among the first major attempts at allowing comments on MSM websites. Now that comments are commonplace, it is clear that it was a mistake to believe that it would enhance accountability or improve debate.

Loon commenting is such a commonplace phenomenon (obligatory link to Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and XKCD on YouTube comments) that there are whole blogs devoted to it. But there are usually, if not always, lovely tasty grains of wheat amongst the chaff. It’s just that the system’s broken and we often can’t find them. So how to go about fixing it? Duncan says:

But that needn’t mean there should be no discussion about their stories. In its place they could — and should — have a system like pingbacks or a Technorati widget so that readers can see what bloggers have to say about the story. The standard of debate would surely rise.

I disagree. Blogs aren’t the only way to go about commenting on the web, Technorati is a pain in the arse to use anyway, and it’s possible to be an insightful and intelligent commenter without having the technological savvy, time or energy to have a blog. But how do we encourage better interactivity with the mainstream media without every Tom, Dick or Adolf swamping the system with idiocy.

Part of the problem is the limited definition of what “interactivity” means to MSM people. Allowing people to just “Have Your Say” (a phrase which should be not just banned but buried under a mile of concrete in my view, not least as it implicitly disregards the need to think first) is not what Web 2.0 or interactivity is about; for a community site to be interactive in a smart way it has to give users the chance to control content as well as contribute.

So what’s the answer? Sites like Digg or YouTube employ point systems to promote the best comments, and on the face of it, it has appeal. At the same time, filtering or ordering comments by how well-approved they are destroys the ability to view conversations as a thread - a good reply to an idiotic comment suddenly loses all useful context. As a result, most of these systems still keep to a semi-threaded system and set a very low barrier for entry - which is why it fails miserably on both sites.

Casting an eye over the comments sections of national newspapers, and this idea hasn’t been taken on very much. The Guardian’s Comment Is Free has no such system to rate others’ contributions, but does have a “Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us” link in red after every single post. That’s hardly encouraging an environment of considered debate, or promoting positive and constructive thinking, is it?

Here’s an idea: Do we really need to have comments as a thread, or even have them ordered in time? After all, such an architecture encourages a hothouse, an environment of one-upmanship, reactionary thinking, getting personal and taking things to a ridiculous conclusion. Going to a more blog-like format, instead of the forum format we have now, with each comment standalone and not threaded or ordered in time would discourage this. It would mean they focus on the matter at hand, rather than getting personal, making it more like the format of a traditional debate (instead of an episode of Jeremy Kyle). Ordering it by rating or vote means that (we’d hope) the better and more insightful comments get promoted.

Then again - there are flaws and I acknowledge that not for the first time in my life, I may have too much faith in human nature. While I’m hoping hope the better ones get promoted, while the pointless, vague or plain idiotic ones would not (partly because they are less well-written, but also because there usually being more of them, the votes would be split), that may be just wishful thinking on my part. This Facebook group of dickheaded cuntery is 50,000 members strong, for example - all of them clicking an “I like this!” button on an equally moronic post would be awful. All internet voting systems like this can be gamed, and there is the possibility (maybe inevitability?) of cliques being formed. As well as, of course, the risk of people deliberately clicking a terrible post not because they agree with it but because it’s hilariously idiotic.

Still, I’m only speculating, and it’s very much a case that someone needs to actually do it, and do it properly for us to find out how good it would be. It would be a welcome sight to see on MSM websites, removing threads entirely and making it less confrontational. It also has benefits for the site owners - getting the community to partially self-police itself can take the workload off moderators, and the best content can be promoted to site level and adds value there. It’s worth a shot, surely?

What do you think? Why not “have your say” in the comments below? Oh God, I can’t believe I just said that. Right, flame away.

Update Thanks to John in the comments, who points out the BBC employ such a system, although it is not the default view - stupidly, I only surveyed newspaper sites before writing this blog post. It is interesting - as John said, it does get rid of the worst, albeit to varying degrees. On some topics it works quite well on and others it doesn’t (e.g. this). It does run the risk of making some debates look very one-sided. It would also be interesting to see the number of recommendations per user - they are unlimited, something I’m uneasy with - it makes it far too easy for one person with the time to flag up everything they like. A restriction on the number of recommendations allowed a day perhaps would be a good idea.