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

Update: Thanks for all the RTs everyone. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole story, the TLDR version is this: Twitpic changed their ToS to restrict users from selling their uploads to agencies, then retreated very hastily after a Twitter backlash. If you want to know more, read on.

Another week goes by, another scrape on Twitter. This time slightly less interesting than my stumbling on the bin Laden liveblogger, but still intriguing, as I have never before seen a tech company edit its Terms of Service live in front of my eyes, like a Wikipedia entry, in response to a Twitter storm.

Twitpic is one of the leading Twitter image hosting services out there – about four million daily users, the site the famous photo of the plane landing in the Hudson River first appeared on, and the default image service for the Twitter iPhone and desktop clients. It has become big business – it brings in $1.5m in ad revenue a year.

If you run an image hosting service, you have to be careful in how you treat users’ copyright. Your users (usually) own the copyright to the photos they upload, but the service will need some form of non-exclusive royalty-free licence to legally host it on its servers. This licence is included deep in the terms of service. So far, so dull. However on May 4th, Twitpic’s terms of service changed, specifically the copyright section. The copy I have for reference is from Google’s cache and is mirrored here and it’s the first four paragraphs of the copyright section that bear most interest:

By uploading content to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your content on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites.

You may not grant permission to photographic agencies, photographic libraries, media organizations, news organizations, entertainment organizations, media libraries, or media agencies to retrieve from Twitpic for distribution, license, or any other use, content you have uploaded to Twitpic.

All content uploaded to Twitpic is copyright the respective owners. If you publish content uploaded to Twitpic on the web for personal and noncommercial purposes you are required to link back to the original content page on Twitpic and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have taken the content. For example a Twitter “retweet” is acceptable provided the original content link on Twitpic is what is retweeted. It is not acceptable to copy or save another user’s content from Twitpic and upload to other sites for redistribution and dissemination.

To publish content for any commercial purpose or for distribution beyond the acceptable Twitter “retweet” which links back to the original content page on Twitpic, whether online, in print publication, television, or any other format, you are required to obtain permission from Twitpic in advance of said usage and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have obtained the content. No user may grant a third party permission to copy or save content that has been uploaded to Twitpic.

The first part highlighted is a clause seemingly denying anyone who uploads a picture to Twitpic the media exploitation rights for that picture; it specifically targets those businesses who might want to pay for it. The second is a more vaguely-worded catch-all clause that, in the most draconian interpretation, could deny a user from uploading their own pictures to other hosting services like Flickr.

For comparison, this was the equivalent section from the terms of service in May 2010, which is the most recent copy held on archive.org – sadly I have no more recent copy to compare with:

By uploading your photos to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your photos on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites

All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners

[Note: I am not a lawyer, and this is just a lay reading of the situation. But it will become clear, I hope, that these passages are at the centre of what went on in this kerfuffle]

Although these changes were made on the 4th, having done a little detective work on Google Realtime, it seems no-one picked up on them for six days. A single Tweet by @JMRooker on the 5th noted they had been updated, but not on what had changed. It wasn’t until this article (in German) appeared in in Der Spiegel‘s tech section that noted the change this afternoon. The first Tweet I have found was by Beate Clever in German at 15:54 UK time; at 16:49 it was Tweeted in English by Oliver Reichenstein.

Although it took six days for the news to get out, once it did it spread very quickly. Oliver’s Tweet was spotted by my We Are Social colleague Hannah, who retweeted it herself at 17:59, and I promptly followed at 18:05. By this point the story had legs – though I was by no means the only person talking about it, my Tweets on the subject got picked up and retweeted by some excellent & influential Twitter people such as Zoe Margolis and Tom Coates.

You could be easily convinced this was just another angry Twitter mob. But those who responded shared some interesting points of view. Was I being unfair on Twitpic? Did the terms only apply to the version they hosted? But if so, what makes that version different from the original copy you took? Did it only proscribe you from sending the Twitpic to a media agency, and if so would emailing a separate copy of the image as an attachment be just fine? Or was it just a protection from unfair infringement by media organisations? With the new terms of service as vaguely worded as they were, it was subject to various interpretations as the buzz spread.

The specific mention of picture agencies coincided with yesterday’s news that Twitpic had signed a deal with the photo agency WENN to represent celebrity pictures posted on the service (what Der Spiegel picked up on). So this was perhaps a foray for Twitpic to become a citizen journalist version of the PA, providing free hosting in exchange for the right to licence the rights to picture agencies. The idea has been mooted before. In theory, the next time a plane lands in the Hudson River, Twitpic’s ToS would allow it to sell the rights to witness photos uploaded to the service, and prevent the photographer from seeking those rights herself, if the company so chose. Whether Twitpic seriously thought of this as a future business model, or was just enabling these terms now in case they would come in handy in the future, we don’t know, and I am not saying one way or the other.

Finally, apart from legalities, is what they’re laying out morally fair? The new ToS brought a fair bit of opprobium (not least from myself). But, do remember, with free image hosting, you aren’t paying, and although they are getting cheaper, bandwidth and scaling up a service do cost. Online display advertising is just one business model and has increasingly tight margins, so Twitpic may be in the early stages of exploring alternatives. As with any service offered online for free – always caveat emptor.

Twitpic managed to backtrack very quickly. At 18:45, the support team hurriedly tweeted back to me (and then others in the story, such as Oliver) the same message, stating:

They were true to their word; suddenly whole chunks of the text started to disappear from the Terms of Service page as it was being edited; I managed to take notice and livetweeted the progress. Round about 19:05 UK time, out went the second paragraph about photographic agencies entirely. At the start appeared an entirely new paragraph affirming copyright holders’ rights to their work. The paragraph on non-commercial reuse was cut, save for the final sentence (“It is not acceptable…”), which was merged with the new first paragraph. By 19:52 the final edit had been made: from the fourth paragraph, the third party sentence was cut out entirely, and the start was reworded to affirm it applied to reproducing other users’ content, and did not cover your own. In the updated Terms of Service, the equivalent text to the above now reads:

All content uploaded to Twitpic is copyright the respective owners. The owners retain full rights to distribute their own work without prior consent from Twitpic. It is not acceptable to copy or save another user’s content from Twitpic and upload to other sites for redistribution and dissemination.

By uploading content to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your content on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites.

To publish another Twitpic user’s content for any commercial purpose or for distribution beyond the acceptable Twitter “retweet” which links back to the original user’s content page on Twitpic, whether online, in print publication, television, or any other format, you are required to obtain permission from Twitpic in advance of said usage and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have obtained the content.

Those changes might be a bit much to get your head around, so to make it easier to appreciate how big they are, I have created a side-by-side comparison of the two wordings – old is on the left, new on the right – and created a diff of them (the changed bits in blue). Feel free to click through to a full-res version.

You can see for yourself that the changes are quite extensive, and the terms are now vastly stronger in their affirmation of uploaders’ rights. A mere clarification this is not, in particular the second sentence of the first paragraph – “The owners retain full rights to distribute their own work without prior consent from Twitpic” – is in marked contrast to the original wording.

Twitpic have published a blog post called “Your content, your copyrights“, which states their reasoning for changing the Terms of Service:

As we’ve grown, Twitpic has been a tool for the spread of breaking news and events. Since then we’ve seen this content being taken without permission and misused. We’ve partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner. This has been done to protect your content from organizations who have in the past taken content without permission. As recently as last month, a Twitpic user uploaded newsworthy images of an incident on a plane, and many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission.

It’s great that a hosting service is explicitly protecting its users from exploitation and unlicenced copyright infringement. But the original draft of these updated terms of service made it clear that it was about more than just preventing unscrupulous news organisations from misusing photos. The now-removed sections were clearly about preventing users from selling their rights to their own uploads to third parties, not protection from theft. And unlike the apologetic blog post on May 10th, these initial changes to the ToS were not publicised to the wider community when they went up on May 4th; as I have detailed above, it took six days before anybody actually noticed – and by the way, all the credit should go to the tech team at Der Spiegel for spotting it. How Twitpic went about this change is not how a tech company should publicise changes to its users; whatever their motives were for updating their ToS or whatever plans they have for their business model, at the very least this was a major failure in communication.

Twitpic do deserve some plaudits for reacting quickly to the situation, answering those of us who questioned it on Twitter, and updating the Terms of Service to something more acceptable in ludicrously quick time and manner. I say more acceptable. They do still retain a licence to distribute your content as long as it is done in connection with their business, and that business model could well change from being an ad-supported image host in future. There’s nothing stopping you from exploiting the rights to your image, but they have those rights too. You may be fine with that, in which case carry on, or you may not feel entirely comfortable, in which case you may still want to choose somewhere else to host your images. I’ll repeat what I said above, when it comes to free stuff, caveat emptor, especially if you reckon you stand a chance of one day being the next person to snap a plane in the Hudson.

Update (18/05): Tom has received a letter confirming Twitpic’s intentions to “exclusively” resell photos through the WENN picture agency. There is still no announcement of this on Twitpic’s own blog or in the terms of service. So, what gives?

As the biggest news story of the week, the killing of Osama bin Laden, broke, I was on holiday in New York. As the clock ticked passed midnight local time (EDT) on Sunday night, my girlfriend Maha, sitting next to me on the sofa, passed me her Blackberry and showed me a retweet of curious remark related to the events unfolding. A Pakistani journalist, Mosharraf Zaidi, reminded his followers how he had earlier remarked:

The television news we were watching had nothing new to show by now, and was resorting to reruns of President Obama’s address earlier. So, with my curiosity piqued, I started looking up to see if there had been any coverage of helicopters in Abbottabad earlier that day. Googling around normally found the odd news report about a possible training accident, but very little of substance or interest. So I turned to searching Twitter, specifically with Google Realtime, which allows you to exclude Tweets from before or after a certain time of day. This was important, as once President Obama had disclosed the location, Twitter exploded with mentions of it and it became impossible for ordinary Twitter search to cope.

With anything after 11pm Eastern Time excluded, I was able to find Tweets by a guy called Sohaib Athar, or @ReallyVirtual. Once I clicked through to his timeline, I found out he had actually liveblogged the entire raid, unaware that it was America seeking its public enemy number one. At 12.38am, I tweeted, and Maha tweeted too:

And then at 12.41, three minutes later, Sohaib tweeted the defining moment of the story:

(Tip: Twitter annoyingly displays Tweets’ times in a “x minutes/hours/days ago” format, but if ever you want to check the exact timing of a Tweet, hover your mouse over the that bit and a tooltip will give you the exact date & time, in your timezone)

By the next morning, Sohaib was one of the most famous Twitterers around, being interviewed on television and getting mentioned in most mainstream media outlets. His follower count shot up from 750 to just over 100,000 as of today.

Steve Myers of the Poynter Institute got interested in how the story spread and did some investigating (including talking to me and Maha), producing a phenomenal forensic blog post – and from his investigation it appears that mine & Maha’s Tweets were one of the first ones to mention him and may have broken the story.

Caveat: I say may – correlation does not imply causation. I looked on Google Realtime for earlier Tweets from anyone linking to his account pointing and highlighting his liveblogging, and could not find any, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. Nor am I trying to take too much credit for breaking the story – had I not tweeted about him, someone else would have found him sooner or later – the tools were there, and reasonably well known in the trade (and if you work in the media and don’t know them, then for God’s sake learn them).

Steve’s piece is a great bit of detective work and social network theory in one, and I’d like to pick up on a few points he made. Firstly, he states “the number of followers doesn’t matter as much as who those followers are” – this is a really interesting one and worth elaborating. I have about 3,300 followers on Twitter, but most of those are UK-based and would have been fast asleep. Maha has 1,300 followers, but she is a journalist based in the US, specialising in amongst other things, Pakistan. Her following, while smaller, is full of journalists, policy people and those with an interest in Pakistan and the wider region; these would be the exact kind of people to pick up on the significance straight away.

The numbers then don’t always count. But what definitely does count is the story. Steve picks up on the role I played bridging different social networks (in a paragraph that makes me feel odd, being referred to by my surname…):

Applegate was a bridge too, in a slightly different way. He added essential information that resonated with people and spurred them to pass it on.

I didn’t regard myself as a bridge at the time. I just thought, and tweeted: “Wow”. But then as it unfolded more it became clear that the unwitting Tweeting was a central factor in the story. Abbottabad is a relatively quiet town, populated by retired generals and known for its schools and universities (not to mention their military academy). Sohaib himself had moved there to get away from the much more dangerous and turbulent Lahore to find quieter climes – his Twitter bio states he is “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops.”

Given a popular narrative of Bin Laden hiding in caves and the like, to find out he was living in a mansion somewhere so quiet, so genteel and so near to the heart of the establishment came as a surprise. The key thing that made Sohaib’s liveblogging from earlier in the day so compelling was that it was completely unwitting, mirroring our own disbelief that Bin Laden had been quietly residing in the Pakistani equivalent of Tunbridge Wells all these years, without any of us knowing. The story chimed perfectly with our own emotions. And because the story had been unwitting, it was also candid and honest, cutting through the hype and speculation that the 24-hour news stations were resorting to.

Finally, the whole episode shows how transformative Twitter can be. As the story matured and his fame rose, Sohaib took on the role of citizen journalist, becoming a correspondent of sorts (not many other residents of Abbottabad are on Twitter, he remarked, it’s mostly Facebook). He conducted interviews on television, and ventured out into town to take photographs and report back on the mood in the town.

This is a far cry from the cynical caricature of Twitter as an echo chamber – a place where nothing new is said and everything is relentlessly retweeted. As the story progressed, Sohaib came to the wider community’s attention and it in turned shaped his role in the affair. His relationship with Twitter evolved – it went from being a place to remark on the events that had taken place, to realising their significance, to realising his own significance, and then finally embracing it with intrepidness, intelligence and good humour. I might have been one small factor that sparked the process off, but I definitely can’t take any credit for the phenomenon he has become – that’s entirely to his own credit, and something that we should celebrate.

Update (05/05): Maha has also blogged about the events, if you’re interested.

This year’s OpenTech was, as usual, full of interesting and inspiring talks. It’s interesting seeing how it’s come on from its roots in NTK’s Festival of Inappropriate Technology and NotCon. It’s a bit tidier and shinier than its predecessors – no more loyalty card swapping or best carrier bag competitions, and the infamous iPod Shuffle Shuffle was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it’s a sign of how the UK tech scene has grown up, just a little, as this year’s OpenTech was more serious and down to business, but nevertheless as earnest and excited as ever. Unlike other years I’m not going to cover what happened in painstaking detail (not when you can just follow the hashtag on Twitter) but I have scribbled down some random thoughts spilling off my brain…

The political subtext of government data
One of the reasons we can be more serious these days is that the years of relentless campaigning have paid off, and we are now getting more and more open data from the government, and other sources, to mash up, with a variety of results such as traffic injury maps, finding postboxes or visualising spending cuts.

This is, by and large, fab – getting the full potential out of the data that has been gathered by the government at public expense by letting the public explore it. It’s even possible to envision how this data can be used to disrupt or even disprove party political beliefs and theories by exposing them to cold, hard data. But a deluge of data does not mean the end of theory (as Chris Anderson has expounded). Data is not some cut-and-dried artefact free of politics or prejudices.

Hadley Beeman‘s talk on the challenges facing those playing with such data. She explained often there are things such as reference numbers, acronyms – a whole unspoken culture behind the data – which can get stripped out when presented to the wider public. And this got me thinking about subtext behind datasets; what are the unspoken assumptions being made in their collection, or the process behind the design of the system that has collected them?

For example, lets take performance data from schools; usually visualised as a league table, they become the focus of obsession by parents. The league tables have however become the focus of much ire from within the education profession, BERG have attempted to make more of the data with their Schooloscope project – which looks lovely and more user-friendly than columns of figures in newspapers, but misses the point – the league tables aren’t demonised because of their format, but because they may not accurately represent the performance of a school – they may ignore social disadvantages a school’s intake may suffer from, ignore extra-curricular activity or that “soft” subjects are given the same prominence as “hard” subjects. Which of these factors you think really matters will largely be down to your political beliefs, and conversely, the decisions that led to this data being recorded and the way it was assessed, broken down and analysed will also be politically influenced.

There is a feedback loop as well – recording this data in a particular way can end up affecting the very thing we’re trying to assess. After years of being incentivised to perform better in league tables, schools are now accused by some of being little more than coaching centres for children to pass exams than providing them with a full and rich education to prepare them for life. This is not a universally-agreed fact either, but an opinion shaped and refracted by the critic’s political beliefs; even if you agree it’s happening, you may disagree on whether it’s a good or bad thing. In short, the whole process of collecting data – supposedly simple, neutral and objective – opens a can of political worms and can create polarised debate. Simply opening up data and casting many eyes over it is not going to make the controversies about these data go away. And in fact, by doing so without questioning the subtext, we can end up unwittingly complying with the social and political aims of those who collect it.

This might sound a bit paranoid, and wanky, and so I’ll stress that this should not dampen enthusiasm for doing more with out data. The data being opened up (not just by the government, but by the BBC, the Guardian and many other providers) has so many potential uses and ways of enriching us socially. But at the same time we should always be questioning the provenance of data, think about the decisions that had to be made in structuring that data, and asking not just about the data we have got, but what useful data might be missing.

Context, failure and hindsight
Another thing that Hadley mentioned, and worth considering is that occasionally civil servants make mistakes collating data. At the moment this can be difficult to annotate, to explain where a mistake has happened and how it was made – and this is something we need to encourage, for else how will organisations learn? But to demand this we also need to possess a degree of tolerance ourselves. Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to apportion blame quickly (especially in a post-Twitter age of instant reaction), but doing so may end up being counterproductive. Indeed, a culture of fear may already encouraging civil servants and politicians to stop recording controversial meetings or opinions for fear of being found out later with an FoI request (as anecdotes from Ireland have hinted at). Less apoplectic rage and a greater tolerance of sharing stories of failure are needed if we want free thought and debate inside our governments – indeed, that’s a lesson that has lots of applications outside of government data as well.

Futureproofing and archiving
Bill Thompson gave a stirring talk on the need for archiving our analogue past digitally, before we become so detached from analogue that we don’t think any of it is worth saving. Bill took the pessimistic view that our kids might not archive our analogue stuff, which I think is a little unfair on them, but if that warning spurs us on to get it done then the ends justify the means, I guess.

The obsession with archiving now has struck me as somewhat odd – we live in era where storage space is near-infinitely abundant and yet we are more worried about losing our culture than any other age in history. Did the scribes of the Lindisfarne Gospels factor in the possibility their work would still be around 1,300 years in the future? Even once a cultural artefact has become deemed a classic, preservation has often not been on the minds of those in charge of them – Michelangelo’s David was left outside exposed to the elements for centuries. Even attempts to preserve works, such as with Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, or Stonehenge, can involve damaging or radically altering the original so it is no longer the same as what it was, leaving us potentially with a Ship of Theseus rather than a “genuine” cultural artefact. Then again, in an age where people make money selling fake versions of forgeries, maybe that doesn’t matter so much?

As information has become less scarce (we now apparently produce more bits in two days than we did in all human history up to 2003), paradoxically we’ve become increasingly obsessed with preserving it. Maybe it has something to do with the volatility of our storage – all it takes is your hard disk to be corrupted and you could lose years of your work. Or the effect of the internet on giving us information at our fingertips means we’re now capable of knowing what we would lose if these archives disappeared. Or maybe it’s just hindsight and a selective memory – we lament all those thoughtlessly-wiped episodes of Doctor Who, and are now much more sensitive to data loss, but we’re not so fussed about all the editions of The Cliff Richard Show that got deleted too.

Or maybe it’s because digital archiving implies, with the limitless copying it allows, perfection and immortality. Once a cultural artefact is scanned, ripped and uploaded, then we can make as many copies of the digital version as we like, and that digital version will be perfect – so we don’t have to worry about losing or mutilating the original. But then that relies on an awful lot of assumptions. How long will the hard drives or DVDs we store them on stay true, and will we always have device drivers for them? Will the HTTP protocol, or the JPEG compression algorithm exist in 100 years time? Will we even think of computer data as something stored on machines as 1s and 0s by then?

There is a warning from the not-too-distant past. The BBC Domesday Project of 1986 was an attempt to digitally record Britain on laserdisc, like the original Domesday Book of 1086, yet within 15 years the discs were almost unreadable due to a lack of suitable equipment (thankfully, geeks have now made sure the format lives on). A working group I once attended at Cambridge discussed points like this when talking about approaches to digitising the university’s library; the magnitude of time one person was talking about was in the tens of thousands of years. It was exciting stuff – rarely do we ever consider our future as long as that – but also sobering.

Fortunately, the BBC are more forward-thinking than some other organisations, and the lessons of Domesday were learned a long time ago; judging from their posts about archiving, futureproofing digital formats is foremost in their thinking. Digital doesn’t necessarily entail persistent. As an aside, this can act as a reassurance to those worried that youthful digital transgressions could ruin their future lives. Most of the stuff I’ve created online up until 2003 (when I started this blog and properly archived stuff) has now disappeared into the aether, maybe only accessible through dipping into archive.org; whatever youthful transgressions there may have been are now gone. A lot of data can and does get lost over time.

So yes, let’s archive as much of our analogue past while we still can, we will be the richer for it culturally, but let’s not think it necessarily means it will live forever. And while we’re at it, we should become more comfortable with the notion that it’s okay if we lose some stuff from time to time – it’s a fact of life, and if we get too obsessed with preserving everything, we’ll never have time to make anything new.

Excellent stuff to look out for
In short: Ben Goldacre‘s launching a project to keep track of abandoned or never-published medical trials. Keep also an eye out for Rob McKinnon’s Whoslobbying.com as well. The guys at Young Rewired State showed that despite the relatively poor provision of teaching code in schools, there are some great young talented enthusiastic hackers coming up and making things like this. I missed the talk about Frontline SMS but really like the idea – not everyone has a fancy smartphone after all (see also Terence’s excellent talk on designing for all phones). Finally, I will probably be playing a bit with Scraperwiki and the datasets on data.gov.uk, amongst other things…

A bit late, this – thought I published this before I went on holiday to Scotland – I get back and find I scheduled it a month later than I should have (doh). Anyway – a different post from the usual as I talk about another one of things I like doing, a lot, which is food.

Last week I took part in one of the most fun and interesting blogger events I’ve ever been invited to. Nom Nom Nom, or “The Bloggers’ Masterchef’, is a cook-off organised in aid of Action Against Hunger by the ever-enthusiastic and energetic Annie Mole (of Going Underground fame), held at the fantastic Cookery School on Little Portland Street in central London.

I felt a bit daunted before the event kicked off. I’m not a food blogger – I write about tech and politics and take the piss out of the Daily Mail; I’m someone who very much enjoys their cooking, but to be in the kitchen with “proper” food bloggers? I was intimidated. Luckily, my cooking partner (and flatmate) Tom (aka @flashboy) has done one of these before, and my nerves were (just about) calmed when he said it wasn’t as competitive as I feared.

Like all good geeks, I made sure I read up and practiced beforehand, eventually settling on three dishes that were summery. Tagliata, seared Italian beef with rocket & tarragon to start; sea bass baked on vine tomatoes with spinach, pine nuts and raisins for the main, and an English summer berry trifle as our dessert (and also our compulsory cold dish). We can’t claim originality – the starter & main came from Tom Norrington-Davies’ Eagle Cookbook, the trifle from Nigel Slater’s Appetite.

The blessing with nearly all of what we cooked is that we could get UK-based ingredients in season – the beef English, the sea bass from Anglesey, the fruit & vegetables from local farmers’ market – it was only the small things like the olive oil and raisins that would have to come from further afield. Furthermore, all the dishes were relatively easy to make and not too daunting, especially in a high-pressure environment.

The tagliata went like a dream – a really nice cut of Hereford sirloin, seared on grillpan and then thinly sliced. Tarragon is an odd choice of herb to go with beef, but there was something about the aniseediness which works well with the rocket. The recipe we had also called for new potatoes – in retrospect though they were probably a distraction from the dish and didn’t add much.

The fish was perhaps the simplest of the three dishes to cook, just season well, slash the flesh open to help it cook a bit quicker, and lay down on a bed of juicy sweet tomatoes & sliced garlic. I might have overdone it with sloshing the white wine on, which ended up making the toms being a bit soggy, but it still tasted fantastic. You might worry sea bass is a bit delicate to be overburdened by tomatoes, but it actually works out fine.

Tom took charge of the dessert – alas in order to conform with the no cooking rule we had to use ready-made custard. A chance encounter in the newsagents led us to find some sherbert flying saucers, so he adorned each of the sundae glasses of trifle with them, which ended up as a really nice quirky little touch.

The upside of all of our dishes was that they didn’t require that much preparation. The downside is that they didn’t take much time to cook either, so after a lull in the middle after all the prep, the final few minutes were a real stress. We didn’t have a big enough pan for the spinach, so we had to do it in batches, without ruining by burning the pine nuts (something I was very careful not to do). By the time it came to plating up I was in a rush, so it wasn’t as neat as it could have been.

We weren’t expecting to win, yet… well it turned out we were right, ‘cos we didn’t. But I was happy with what we cooked – especially when it was clear there were some genuinely talented cooks in the competition. Nevertheless we did get some lovely plaudits about our sea bass, and the trifle, including from the winners, which I’m going to to take as a top-grade compliment. Best of all, it was a real pleasure working in a proper kitchen, and with proper staff – the Cookery School’s staff were absolute angels from start to finish, tirelessly helping us with our every whim, and not minding when pressure meant there was no time for “please” and “thank you”.

It was also really good getting to know other bloggers, and indeed getting to know my own flatmate better – Tom tends to downplay his own culinary skills but at the cookup, but after that I now know he is a perfectly good kitchen lackey assistant chef in his own right as well.

Many thanks go to the Cookery School (whose kitchen really is excellent), and the many people who made it happen, including Rosalind, Annie and Chris Osburn (who took all the pictures above, and I’m very grateful for him doing so, as I had no time to take proper pics). The event’s not quite over yet – the sponsors have donated prizes to a charity raffle in aid of Action Against Hunger – go buy a ticket now to help make a difference.

Update: The Viewer’s Choice award is now up and running over at the Nom Nom Nom website – if you liked the look of what Tom & I cooked, or you just like us anyway, then place a vote for our team, Nom Nom Nom De Plume. Vote early, and vote often – you can vote once a day ;)

Today the Government launched a new website called “Your Freedom” – designed for members of the public to suggest repeals or modifications of laws they find restrictive or bureaucratic. The name’s a little misguided from the start – after all, laws can be used to guarantee and enforce freedoms as well as restrict them, so merely repealing a law does not necessarily entail “freedom”. But let’s let that pass.

This could have been a nice idea; crowdsourcing opinions from ordinary citizens and the wider public away from the professional lobbyists or niche activists and giving them a more coherent and representative voice. It could be used to take a hard look at some of the laws that people have found restrictive over the years, whether they be anti-terror laws, anti-smoking or anti-foxhunting (for the sake of this analysis, I’m deliberately being neutral on what I think of these respective matters). Instead, it’s so vague and generalised that it’s become “a massive dickhead magnet” (© Justin) within hours of opening.

The submission form (login required) doesn’t ask for specifics on which laws or regulations should be looked at, but rather “ideas”, which renders it near-pointless. The questions for the form fields are so vague – “What is your idea?” and “Why is your idea important?” that you could literally put anything there. The moderation policy implies they operate post-moderation – i.e. no moderation – with little or no prescreening at all.

The result is that any old shit can get in, and it does. Even if those ideas are proposing adding more new laws, rather than taking them away – such as Restrict Immigration which turns into a rambling stream of barely-consciousness:

… Schools cannot cope with the amount of children who speak different languages and it is holding back our children’s education. The same with gypsies. If this is a life style they choose, fine. Contribute to the tax pot or do not expect use of public services. Why should taxpayers provide taxis for their children to attend schools etc. Ridiculous.

The ideas look like something that’s fallen off the back of Have Your Say. In fact actually if you look at the relevant HYS page you’ll see exactly that – people spelling out just how they want the government to enforce their own petty prejudices rather than reform what we have. Let’s look at the comments beneath:

Prison meant to be for punishment, but the so called Human Rightists…

Ok enough. Next…

My proposal would be for a new law…

Oh, fuck off.

So, what can we learn from this? First off, design your site better. If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000”. Anyone who just writes “laws about immigrunts“, or doesn’t put a proper name for the law, or the year, filter it out.

(This has a beneficial side-effect – with a bit of fuzzy parsing, we could include a link to the relevant law on OPSI in the proposal so we can look up the more relevant section, and it also makes finding related proposals on the same law easy, a sort of auto-tagging).

Secondly, pre-moderate. If a proposed change is totally incompatible with our international obligations, say if some idiot wants to get rid of all human rights legislation or leave the EU or scrap the NHS, the moderation team should have the sanity and bravery to filter it out. Anything badly spelt, in all caps, copy & pasted from The Chap or proposing repealing murder, bin it. This is not an issue of denying freedom of speech – the green ink brigade are free to write wherever they like – but of keeping the site a proper and sensible civic space. If you want to get the most out of an online community, you have to keep it in good order.

Thirdly, delete duplicates and employ an algorithm to suggest duplicates to a user before they post – look at the number of duplicates for repealing the Digital Economy Act (though you’d think geeks especially would check for dupes before posting). Having five posts all call for the same thing dilutes the popularity of all of them, and leads to incoherent arguments for their repeal, weakening it further.

The shame is that here and there on the site there are constructively-argued ideas to help fix parts of our legislation that are inefficient or restrictive – for example CRB checks, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act or financial risk for small entrepreneurs (not that I agree with any of these, just that these were examples that look properly thought-out and considered at the very least).

As it stands, the site will end up as a total mess – in fact it’s well on the way there already. When it comes to closing the site down, I bet the politicians will take one look at all the “ban human rights act it give free school meals for wearing a burka” posts, shrug their shoulders and say that “the citizens have spoken, but it’s utter rubbish – they had their chance and they blew it”. No, the government who have blown it – they had their chance to make a valuable public resource, but we’ve instead got another poorly-designed, poorly-maintained failure.

The 2010 World Cup is almost upon us – so here’s a quick housekeeping message. Like when I watch Arsenal matches, I’m moving most of the footy Tweeting over to @gnnr to save annoying everybody else. And after mulling the idea for years, I’ve finally set up a football blog – called @qwghlm #wc2010 for the moment, it’ll be a Tumblelog of photos, videos, links, quotes and other things (Tumblr seemed a better fit than WordPress for the job). Check it out, and I hope you enjoy it!