John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

TaxiTell.com: 19 November 2008: Taxi drivers always seem to have a lot to say, but there's an online forum for taxi drivers that's just full of nastiness and flaming. Yet when I take a taxi ride it's often an uplifting experience.; So I've created a place for taxi drivers to share positive stories about their day.; It's so basic it's untrue, but partly that's because I wanted it to be usable from a mobile phone while sat in a taxi rank (I haven't tested that yet). But it's so completely unsecured I can't tell you, so it's bound to be spammed shortly. I just wonder how long it will take. And I look forward to dealing with it when it happens.; Anyway, I just love the idea of taxi drivers around the world sharing good or funny experiences and news.
Obama to pick Holder as Attorney General: 19 November 2008: I saw that headline and thought "Obama's picking Noddy Holder to be his Attorney General, wow, I'd vote for that". Sadly not. Gotta be a pick for The DTs tho. Oh God yes, I want that, when's the next vote!
French blog: 18 November 2008: On the GPS tracking in security, business web page, what you see will depend on how your computer is set up. When your computer and/or your browser was set up you chose one or more languages. When you request a website, those language preferences are sent to the web server, and what should happen is the server should return a site in the correct language.; If you have French language set as a higher priority over English, you'll see a French language version of the executive kidnapping blog I wrote a few days ago. Click it for the full story.; If you see the English version, try messing with your browser settings. Find 'preferences' and 'languages' and add French as your preferred language, then reload the page. The main text is English, but the blog should come up in French and when you click it, you end up on the French blog, not the English one.; Cool non?
I'm working on some internationalisation projects: 18 November 2008: I'm working on the internationalisation of some websites. I think it's really important, OK? First of all, it's a clear usability issue. It's clear that not everyone in Britain speaks English, so even if your sales are UK-only, there's a strong argument for providing different languages as a usability issue. Welsh, too.; It should be done sensitively. You're only going to look good providing a Welsh translation if the rest of your brand is suitably aligned. It shouldn't look like you're trying to creep to that population for your own ends, it's part of your whole message.; But here are two of the biggest benefits to translating your website. You get extra links, and you get listed in the other Googles.; Firstly, each page of your site has a points value to Google (they call it PageRank), and when one of your pages links to another, it passes some of those points. The more points, the higher the page ranks in search results. So it stands to reason that the more pages you have, the more points you can pass around your site in links and the higher you will be in the search engines. So if you translate into ten languages, you have ten times the links. Fabulous.; Secondly, there isn't just google.co.uk. Scroll down this page to the maps. Bet you're not ranked in any of those Googles.; Also, there's less competition, so it's easier to rank in most of those non-English Googles.; So, when you set up your computer and/or your browser, you chose the language you prefer. You can change this in your browser preferences. When you request a website, your browser sends those preferences to the web server and the idea is that the server sends back the website in the language you preferred. Try setting your language in your browser to a common other language and have a noodle around.; The problem I was wrestling with is this. When Google visits your website to read it and index it, does it send a language preference like a normal browser would do? The googlebot (as it's called) tends to be pretty stripped down. If it doesn't, it would never see the language versions served that way. How to find out?; If you run this search (ie, search for IP http request), what I'm seeing is a page, about three down, from personalmicrocosms.com called "Your IP Address and HTTP Request Information" which, when you click on it, shows you information about your own browser and Internet connection. Information like your IP address (a number that uniquely identifies your connection to the Internet), and your language preferences set in your browser.; If you go back to the Google listing, of course what that page shows to Google is what the Googlebot sent. So if you click the cache link, you see that the Google bot didn't send a language preference.; So, without a plain navigation to other language pages, Google will only ever see your default language.; So the best way to do the language thing seems to be to serve according to the browser language preference in the first instance, but also to provide a set of clicky flags that allow the user to choose another language. Just in case they are in a library or not using their own computer. Then store that preference in a cookie (that's a big round chocolate biscuit, essential for Internet workers, the information is stored in the chocolate chips) and, if set, override the browser language preference.; That way Google can see the flag language links, follow those, and find the language pages. And of course, that language page isn't a static page, it's the same page with a GET variable set, so Google sees it as a different page, but actually it's the same page that just gets the right text each time.; Right. I'm on to it.
Bozeyed crazy maths professor: 16 November 2008: Looks like we are likely to officially go into recession. Our economy shrank between July and September, so I suppose our second quarter will be October to December and we'll find out if we are in recession in January. Someone, I can't find it now, in the last few days was saying we faced five quarters of recession and I was thinking we were coming up to halfway through that, but we aren't. We're not even in recession yet. But, we are past the first quarter, so if they finally do say we're in recession in January, by then we'll have passed two quarters and be into our third, so .. almost halfway through. Anyway, someone on the telly said online sales are fine, if not growing, and I've read that too but now I can't find it.; Isn't it interesting how, now that Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson are back around number 10, the Tories are on the back foot again? The press attribute that to Mandy. My money's on Alastair Campbell, I've always been a fan. George Osborne's woes with yachtgate and now the hassle over him talking the pound down are both PR battles being won by Campbell. Fabulous to watch the difference someone who knows their business can do.; And Charlie Brooker is back doing Screen Burn, it just makes me laugh out loud every Saturday morning, and that's well worth having.; I didn't realise gay people are forbidden to give blood, try this and admit to mano-o-mano contact and see where it gets you. What do they think's going to happen .. people getting up off the intensive care bed to chase male members around the ward, Benny Hill style, for a quick bit of uphill gardening? Is it not a tad .. well, actually I don't know the reason for it because the link that says "NO, ARE YOU CRAZY! YOU CAN'T, YOU'RE GAY FOR CHRISSAKES! Click here to see why" doesn't work. So I have to assume it's because enough lovely normal people would be perturbed to get gay blood, which is a tad homophobic to my mind. I mean, if you can catch gayness from blood, are we saying we can catch genes from other's blood? Then we need to extend that further. I mean, I don't want blood from people who go to McDonalds or wear hats in cars. Best be on the safe side.; There's a Scottish thing going on. I'm setting up the Internet marketing strategy for a taxi company in Musselburgh, and I spoke to a lovely lady in Dundee who wanted a flip top phone, and then I wandered around town here trying to work out how to say flip top phone in a Dundee accent. Can't quite get it. It's in my head, clear as day, but I can't get it.; I got all excited because for the alopecia clinic I'm working for, well the main hair loss treatment drug is called Propecia and for a second there a search on Propecia in Google showed Belgravia in the number 1 position. And then it went, back to 7 or so. And then again, it was number 1. So I don't know what's going on, but it was nice for the five minutes it lasted.; And finally, in a That's Life kinda way (and why hate Esther so much, I think she's great), what kind of bozeyed, crazy maths professor invented this fractal-based cauliflower?; Except, it's a romanesco cauliflower from The Organic Farm Shop, Pickering.; So that is pretty much what's whizzing around my head at the moment besides trying to stop people with Alzheimers wandering off and trying to buy motorbikes.
Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhhh: 15 November 2008: Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrggghhhhhh! It's a recession everybody. RUN!; Quick! Panic! It's a recession! Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhhh!; The Eurozone, last quarter, recessed by 0.2%. Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhhh!; 0.2%. So 99.8% of business is still the same. Party on!; So let's see now. If this were a household budget, what are we saying? If we take home, say, £2,000 a month, that's a drop of £4. I think, you know, if we tighten our belts we can manage that can't we? One less beer over a month. It's really not even worth thinking about. Shrug, OK.; But perhaps the issue is risk. For people who keep their jobs, it's fine. Prices will probably drop so they may even be better off. But for a few, perhaps even quite a few, they may lose their job and not be able to find a new one for a while. That's tough, for sure.; Having said that, I am secretly pleased that Yell is having to cut back. These are the people who charge over £200 for a link from their directory (that's in addition to about £400 for the directory listing), and it doesn't even pass the PageRank. Well, sorry, but Yell had it coming. I encourage everyone to boycott Yellow Pages and give that marketing money to me. I think more and more people are turning to Google first. Remember for £750 I transformed a local B&B's marketing, giving them their best season this year.
Georgina Downs: 14 November 2008: Wow, gotta love Georgina Downs for her campaign about pesticide spraying. Watch the discussion, she's so spirited, passionate, and capable it's a beautiful thing to watch, it's almost punk. Here's her campaign. You can make a difference.
Men's style: 14 November 2008: Those who know me will know that me and style occupy opposite ends of some imaginary me versus style vector spectrum wotsit. I bought a copy of The Face once, and loved the photography and magazine style and resolved to buy another by which time they'd closed down.; I'm awkward about the whole thing. I'm not 'urban', I live in Scarborough for chrissakes. I'm not country either. Actually I don't like being boxed in like that .. so, that's pretty much that since magazines have to box you in to define their readership. I don't want the "urban dandy watercooler" look. I want my own style.; At the same time, I'll run a mile from anything that assumes because I'm a bloke I like lots of photographs of scanty women, photographs of watches and cars, inane must-buy gadgets and anything that implies I want to get one over everyone else or demonstrate my power or stand out or get any feeling of self satisfaction from my material achievements. I don't. And I don't want more 'stuff'.; So I tend to come out of W H Smiths with a copy of People's Friend. Nah, just kidding, but that might be closer to what I want.; Another thing I don't want is more celebrity.; As part of the whole hair loss blog thing I'm trying to work out how to blend hair loss and style, so for instance we could talk about hats or facial hair or thinning-hair styles or whatever.; So I went in search of style blogs and have to say I got engaged with them. Kempt is lovely and I love that it's regional, but it's US regional so, y'know, Americans and style and all that :-) . This feels like it should be good but the writing style is boring. My favourite, and the closest to what I want is Men's Flair .. see this, about Paul Smith leaves you with something you can use forever, but I couldn't believe the massive Ask Men .. if it's that big (I'm sure I saw it's in the top 1,000 websites as assessed by Alexa), how come I've not heard of it? But, y'know, maybe it's overkill. I just want to know, say, something interesting once a day that I can implement or think about, some principles.; See what's possible with the hair loss thing? I love that.; Gotta love this lady, too.; So, I might just start one up. I have to do a bit of defining first. But it's all to do with this post-consumer age. My g/f said she saw something wonderful about a French attitude to clothes .. don't buy loads of cheap throwaway Top Shop nonsense like us Brits do, just buy a great piece (a scarf or a jacket) and spend the rest of your life working out different ways to use it. That's much more in tune with our times, and traditional magazines are beholden to their advertisers.; It's also about technique. What can we do with what we already have. The sexiest thing? A sense of humour. So what's going on with all the watches and cars? There's definitely something new here.
Creating a responsive business with good website management: 12 November 2008: I've probably mentioned that I've been working with The Belgravia Centre for hair loss .. actually that blog isn't one of mine, this Alopecia Areata is mine, this on hair growth is, and even this on Wayne Rooney is mine (and what do I know about footie), but anyway I'm sure you can imagine how competitive the hair loss industry is, and I worked out the other day that I appear to have presided over a rise in visitors to the blog (one of the things I've been asked to promote) of almost 13% this month over last and 30% this quarter versus the previous.; Here's another one, I've just published the beginnings of a business website for Blue Tree Services' GPS tracking devices for applications in healthcare, security, transport and engineering service and that's interesting because .. well first of all I'm not 100% I'm happy with it but that's the point I want to make. It's better to just publish and then improve than to spend ages trying to get it perfect before you publish, because the users will guide you how to improve the site.; So now I've published the Blue Tree business website, I'll be watching the behaviour of visitors to the site. I can see, for instance, the bounce rate for each page (that's the percentage of people who arrive on a page and leave almost immediately). I might decide to improve the pages with the worst bounce rate.; I can track which pages lead to an enquiry, and make those more prominent in the navigation.; I will be monitoring the questions people ask in their enquiries, and building their questions into the site.; I'll spot which pages are the most popular and adjust the menus and navigation and online marketing accordingly.; Notice, too, the blogs. There are actually four blogs on here, one for business users, one for consumers and two that actually haven't appeared as yet, but there's one for healthcare and another for security. These allow the sales people to write up new ideas as they happen. For instance my latest blog on GPS tracking and anxiety came about as a direct result of a customer enquiry. It can happen within minutes of receiving a call (it's generalised, of course).; By listening like this and reacting, by managing a website well, I can build a reactive company, an organic marketing system that listens to the market needs and reacts quickly. That blog on anxiety, for instance, may be the first time I've mentioned GPS, location and anxiety anywhere on our website. Now, when someone searches for some combination like that, we stand a chance of appearing in the search results, and that builds business. So when the market highlights a new niche, we can react quickly and deliver a solution within hours.; Some say the consumer Blue Tree Services GPS tracking website is too wordy and convoluted. But it's aimed at people who want things to be explained in full. I helped someone who was born in 1922 buy a tracker over the phone the other day. It was a great experience, but it told me I need to say even more.; More to the point, that website was found, over the last 6 months, for over 7,500 different search phrases. Now if one more person tells me they know what their keyphrases should be, I have 7,500 reasons why they don't. And if anyone doesn't believe in the power of content (yes, over visual design) after that, there's no hope for them.; So sure, the Blue Tree Services site isn't the prettiest I've ever seen. But it doesn't matter. Well, OK it does, a bit. But there are more important things to take into account. In fact, I think there are ten things more important than good looks for a website, click to find out what they are.
Fairly unique irritating phrases, basically: 10 November 2008: I'm getting a lot of praise for my writing nowadays, there are even people out there who think it's my main strength. Like I say, I got, I think, 12% in an English language exam one time because I used to write cartoon stories about Little Boo (a stick character). My English teacher encouraged my creativity, but the examiners found little merit in it. It wasn't my worst score, that goes to 4% for history, although we didn't really have a teacher for that period (we had a series of temps). So anyway, praise for my writing does surprise me.; BTW, I shall be disliking Christianity later in this blog so if you don't want to read that, move on.; Also, when I did a set of three aptitude tests in my third year at uni, one was maths, another was shapes, and the final one was words and comprehension, I was very much worse at the latter. The test comprised a set of convoluted sentences with subtle differences from which I was supposed to extract the meaning of those differences. I discovered on that day one reason why I'm not a lawyer. Basically, I didn't really 'get' those complex sentences.; The obvious thing to do, then, would be to say I should take a career involving numbers and shapes. But my 'disability' is playing well in my career. So that's one reason careers advice is often wrong. "Do you like animals?" "Yes" "Why not be a vet?" "Do you enjoy the outdoors" "Yes" "Be a farmer".; All I'm interested in when writing is delivering my message powerfully and clearly. Who the hell wants to write, and who the hell wants to read, convoluted sentences? Bad enough in the courtroom. Deadly online.; So I've always been a fan of the Plain English Campaign and several times considered becoming a registered practitioner only to bounce back off the price.; And I do try to avoid using lazy, stock phrases and I try to put things into my own words. In fact, I've started to see the use of such phrases as either a sign of laziness, or a switched off mind, or a lack of intelligence. Basically here's the Daily Telegraph literally talking about that, I mean, it's not rocket science.; Did you feel it? When you read such phrases you switch off. A writer friend has a favourite example of the misuse of language from when a client said they'd be going "literally, balls out" to finish a project. Lovely.; With luck, because I write in my own words it's occasionally fartypants surprising, I keep you engaged. It appears to be working, anyway. See if you can tell what's mine and what's not in the hair loss / hair growth blog where I appear to have engineered a 12% traffic growth in the last few months in what is quite a hair raising area (alright, competitive).; Speaking of language, in the latest Excess Baggage on Radio 4 (listen again, it's worth it, especially to hear the Piraha sing) John McCarthy talks to Daniel Everett who "has spent much of the past three decades living in the remote and little understood Amazonian tribe of the Pirahas". They, apparently have no concept of numbers. No words for numbers. He tried to teach them numbers and after much perseverence not one managed to count to ten or add 1+1. They get quantities right on average, but aren't accurate each time. Part of that is down to the idea that they don't really have history. They think they, the village and the river have been there forever and will be there forever.; Their language is simple, and it can be whistled, which is what they do while out hunting.; So, besides 'wow, isn't language interesting' (more on the Piraha language here), something else came up.; The Piraha have no control structures, no-one telling them what to do. Even the kids have free reign. Daniel Everett is a linguistics professor at Illinois State University.; When Daniel Everett first went to meet the Piraha it was as a missionary to spread the word of God. He wanted to pass on the sense of peace and love that knowing God can bring. It turned out the Piraha had more sense of peace and love than he had.; And when they asked him what colour Jesus was, white like him, or brown like them, he said he didn't know some people think white, others brown, etc. And that's when the Piraha realised, Everett hadn't actually met God. "So .. err .. why are you telling us all this stuff about someone you've never met?" That's when, Everett said, he wondered about his own faith.; Now just hang on a minute. He devotes his life to Christ, gives up everything, takes his family off to God knows where in the Amazon, bearing enough insolence to try to persuade perfectly good people they should take up with Christ, and he hasn't quite got the hang of the basic questions? I don't know about you, but I found that deeply, profoundly upsetting. Because here was an engaging, intelligent man who had worked hard to understand the Piraha language just like a normal person might. And then he had his faith which seemed to be in a separate, seemingly disfunctional, part of his brain. Maybe that's faith for you, maybe that's why it's called faith .. it's "switch off your critical faculties and just accept all this control/guilt bullshit I'm going to inject". I think we should be learning from the Piraha, not polluting them with our crappy ideas.; Which is why I loved the Atheist bus campaign so much. Fantastic.
Internet marketing sales: 8 November 2008: I've had a few run-ins with Internet marketing sales people recently. One approached me with the promise of getting me on the first page of Google within 14 days for my key phrases. It turned out that a) my key phrase had to be regional (eg. Internet marketer Scarborough), and b) it wasn't SEO at all, it was pay per click ads.; Here's another, an approach to one of my clients from a rather plush sounding, central London Internet marketing company.; He says that our "Google PageRank is low because many of the links to our sites are from 'bad neighbourhoods'. Google puts sites that are in such places on their 'supplemental' index".; PageRank, incidentally, is Google's score for your website. It's partly how they determine which websites to put near the top of the search engine results. So it's important. You can see the PageRank for any website by installing the Google toolbar.; Well, query number one is .. how does he know about our inbound links? If you put link:www.mysite.com into Google you get a list of sites that link to yours, but only those with PR3 or above (so there are many, many others and it doesn't show the PR0 ones). Ctrl+F that results page and search for 'supplemental' and none of them are shown as such (Google labels them). So, no examples, and no evidence.; I get asked all sorts of stuff all the time, there's such a lot of rubbish in this field to talk about. In my early days I'd go "ooh, I've not heard of that" (cue a bit of self doubt) "I'll look into it and get back to you" and every single time it was bullshit nonsense. So I'm afraid I've developed a rather arrogant defense mechanism now, which is basically if I don't know much about it, it's not important. I've read about bad neighbourhoods, and I've read about the supplemental index and I can't remember anything about either. That means I read it, decided it would never trouble me, and didn't bother to remember anything about it.; So, OK, I'll just check. So .. it's about outbound links, not inbound ones. So, if you link out to bad places, Google will think you're trash and treat you so. Fair enough. So don't.; There's a principle here. If there was ANYTHING you could do to harm another website's PageRank there would be a whole industry of people doing it to people's competitors for money. So there isn't. Full stop.; So, our friend goes on "the pagerank of a web page is determined by the average pagerank of all the pages pointing to it". Nope. He goes on to say that because many of our inbound links are PR0, that drags down our average. No no no no. No. If that were true, again, people would automatically create a zillion PR 0 pages and link them to everyone they don't like.; Just to complete the comedy "I would suggest the simplest method to fix this would be to contact the owners of these sites and request the link is removed". Yeah, right. It's bad enough getting well behaved sites to respond to you, never mind those in 'bad neighbourhoods'. So, yeah, that'll work a treat.; PageRank is additive only. A link from a PageRank 0 page gives a little PageRank (it's not actually zero, just close to it), a link from a PageRank 4 page gives a fair bit.; Each step up in PageRank score requires another 8 times the effort. Well, actually no-one knows and it changed recently, but that's the best guess I've seen. So let's say all your inbound links are always going to be PageRank 0. Eight inbound links from PR0 sites gets you to be a PR1. 64 gets you a PR2. 512 gets you a PR3. 4,096 gets you a PR4. 32,768 gets you a PR5. 262,144 gets you a PR6. Think of all the effort you've gone to to get your website to the current PageRank. You need to do eight times that effort to get to the next level.; This chap says once you've asked those people to remove your links, wait 6-12 months, and the PR for our site will be PR6. That's completely unreasonable, no site on the results page for our key phrase is a PR6, Wikipedia is 5, then there's an equal split of 4s and 3s.; So what this chap's done is planted a major seed of doubt in my client's head (bad neighbourhoods), fed in a load of misinformation disgused as knowledge, and then promised something that no-one else in the field has managed to achieve. Big carrot and big stick. Sales based on fear. Good one. I don't mind competition, and I'll bow to anyone better than me. But bullshit's bullshit and needs to be cleared up.; So, y'know. Take care out there.
The Obama Twitter: 6 November 2008: Barack just Twittered: "We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks". That's cool. Thank-you right back.
Prix Pictet: 6 November 2008: Some proper photography for your eyes.
Meyer: 5 November 2008: From Eric Meyer's Twitter: "On approach to Japan, a flight attendant announced Obama's victory. There was a burst of applause from economy; in business class, silence."
Race: 5 November 2008: "Will they call the White House the Black House now?" said my newsagent this morning. Today all the talk is of race, which is really curious because beforehand, it wasn't. Everyone colluded in fear that talk of race would jinx the outcome.; I felt it myself some months ago when YouTube, they've changed their home page now, but it used to show the most viewed videos and it was all fantastic footage of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and so on and I kinda thought "I hope the Republicans don't see this" .. that if they spotted all this bubbling-up interest in the history of the civil rights movement they'd turn it into a race thing.; So, it transcended race beforehand, but now we're all talking about it. I guess it's just the news media doing their thing, the best story is the one that so many share .. older black Americans, old enough to remember being denied the vote and segregated, and now witnessing their first black president. It's within my lifetime. The most touching story in the paper today, for me, was a black woman talking about going into the Woolworths restaurant the day after segregation was made illegal. It was whites only the day before, and she and her friends went in and didn't know what to order, ordered apple pie, "I don't even like apple pie", and "the waitress was so nice to us". For her and so many others .. this must be an incredible moment.; For me the story is the popular vote. Just 52.3% Obama, 46.2% McCain, so despite everything .. despite Bush being so unpopular (it's surely not hyperbole to say he's wrecked the country and so much beyond America's borders) and despite the obvious greatness of Obama, the margin is still so small. I'd be happier if, say 130 million people voted for Obama and then maybe 23 voted for McCain, him, maybe and his immediate family and some people Palin knows. Then I'd feel Americans were really sorry about Bush and weren't complicit, that no-one got into the polling booth and decided they just couldn't vote for a black president, and I'd feel more able to accept their abject apology and be friends again.; I'd like to feel really great about this, but it's not quite reaching me. 46.2% of Americans still voted for McCain. I'm not saying McCain's a bad guy, but, y'know, jeez. You know what I mean if you saw the McCain crowd and the Obama crowd. I know which group I'd want to hang around with.; Apparently, if you are a convicted felon you lose the right to vote. Permanently?; Anyway, I like ideals, so Obama's "democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope" works for me, and I liked McCain's losing speech too.; I was quite weirded-out by the idea that, at Obama rallies (as, I'm sure, at all rallies, even, I think, at the big Stop the War protests here in the UK), you're not allowed to take your own placard. Clearly Obama didn't want "black power" type placards at his rallies. McCain couldn't stop his supporters at one of his rallies chanting they wanted to kill Obama .. imagine their placards. Imagine hearing that of Russia or Zimbabwe or North Korea or China, we'd think "what an oppressive regime". And, fighting for liberty, but you can't bring your own placard? But, we work within the realities and of course without that rule he'd never have gotten in, the campaign would have been seen as a shambles.; I haven't managed to read it yet, but a friend sent this link about how the Obama campaign was run, I look forward to reading that.; I suppose I just wanted Obama's victory to be nearer to 100%, maybe better :-) I guess that's the new battle, damping down our expections and trying to keep things realistic.; And for some reason I keep imagining Obama in a rare quiet moment when it finally hits .. his grandmother missing the moment by a day or so, and all that he's achieved .. being overcome with emotion. And then coming out anew to work to make things better. My God he's fantastic. We know how the Animal Farm works, but let's put our shoulder to this thing and move it together while we can. It's not all about him, we all need to make this thing better, to behave the way we want others to behave. Do unto others and all that. So let's start today.
Obama: 4 November 2008: Interesting, check out the difference between the Flickr images that come up on a search for Obama (295,261 results) versus the 50,372 that come up for McCain.; What's most impressed me is that Obama's campaign is from the ground up. His finance comes in large part from ordinary people's contributions. His support, his staff, are volunteers working together. That's the magic, for me. I'll look forward to reading about how that was organised when the opportunity arises.
Tonight: 4 November 2008: I predict America's biggest landslide tonight. If not, then I don't know what it would take. I'm still petrified though. Will probably stay up to watch the show. So, fingers crossed. Stop breathing. Concentrate. Wish. Here goes.
Some media highlights: 3 November 2008: Wasn't Recount great? Wow. I never understood how the machine counts could vary, I didn't know what a hanging chad was nor how you could get a dimpled chad nor how that disadvantaged poor neighborhoods. Amazing.; Don't miss Shami Chakrabarti on Desert Island Discs. Just awesome, beautiful, soulful .. fantastic. And in contrast to Ani DiFranco on childbirth below, Shami felt, when she gave birth, if she'd managed that she could do anything. It empowered her. Just fantastic.; Scarborough Art Gallery is showing Scarborough Realists and we went along expecting it to be paintings like photographs and yeah yeah and where's the nearest coffee shop. And it wasn't. They, particularly Nathan Walsh (pity about the website) are messing with perspective among many other things.; It got me and my partner differently. For both of us the paintings, often of city scenes, seemed 3D, as if you could walk right into them, in a way that a photograph wouldn't.; For her it was about perception, the artists were somehow representing reality in a way that slotted into our heads better than a photograph would. I think. You'd have to ask her :-); For me, it was about the wierdness of photography. If you were to take a photograph of an equivalent scene you'd use a very wide angle lens and that would distort the straight lines, turn it all a bit fisheye. Also, cameras only record a limited range of values, in a high contrast scene they white out the whites and turn shadows into black blocks. Your eye doesn't do that.; Somehow Walsh in particular seems to be re-writing rules of perspective to provide us with a scene that appears completely realistic, but which isn't quite how the world actually looks, yet it somehow is processed more easily into our minds.; But there was a cartoon element to their work, too. So although hyper detailed in some respects, in others they were like good cartoons.; So my takeaways from that were that I should make more of an effort to do the HDR imaging thing. It might be useful to explore ways to remove lens distortion. That one technique might be to try to remove detail in unimportant areas in order to take the eye to what is important. And keep working on composition, of course.
Ghouls: 2 November 2008: I appear to have made it into the paper
Folksality: 1 November 2008: I read somewhere suitably vague that it's much better to have morality set by laws because the alternative is much harder .. behaviour managed by the people around you .. and that, the article said, leads to a poor deal for women. In extreme cases this leads to things like honour killings but I guess we've reached the point in feminist history where we can acknowledge that men have a tendency to focus, while women have a tendency to multitask. Whether that's genetic or cultural or I'm wrong, who knows.; But the zeitgeist I'm sensing is that men tend to rise to the top of whatever they choose to do because that's where they dedicate their time. Women are rather more pleasant and rounded than that.; It's interesting, because sometimes tight focus is a good thing and sometimes a wider view is better and most of the time both would be great and I guess the task ahead of us is to try to work out how to build an awareness of the value of the female approach, if it really exists.; As an aside, another issue was highlighted by Ani DiFranco on the fabulous Woman's Hour a couple of days ago where she said, having had a daughter recently, she now realises fully how motherhood slows you down, in terms of your career. She said, more or less, no wonder women don't feature so highly as men in society, they are bringing up children and that's no small thing.; Anyway, I've digressed. My point is that if you manage morality village by village, men would tend to take the top positions and that puts women on the back foot, taking care of the kids and here we go again. So, perhaps a society run by learned people who make reasonably good decisions most of the time is better than that.; Now, I promised myself I wouldn't get involved in this story, turned the TV sound off when it came up, and didn't use Facebook for a couple of days while a discussion about it was top of the news feed, but the whole Russell Brand / Jonathan Ross thing is a sort of medieval stoning. It appears the programme itself only raised a couple of complaints, the mass coming after the popular conservative rags got hold of it.; Here's the thing. Programmes are aimed at audiences. If you take, I don't know, a rap programme that's playing violent lyrics or a heavy metal programme, none of the content is going to appeal to those who, say, tune in to The Archers. The point is whether the programme's content is offensive to those who listen to the programme. I mean, I find Chris Moyles and The Archers offensive, always have. I'm not joking, offensive.; I watched Russell Brand's Ponderland the other night in which he graphically ran through various high minded issues around bestiality, specifically, how you might react if you found your wife was shagging your dog. Incredibly funny to me, but I don't imagine my mum would enjoy it. I bet she didn't watch the programme, but I made a point of seeking it out because I knew it would appeal to me.; So .. here's my point. What happens in an increasingly networked world, when the morality of people who weren't going to watch or listen to a programme in the first place, is brought to bear on those programmes? That seems to clearly take us to a place where no-one can say anything that might be remotely offensive on any programme, regardless who the audience is. It seems to take us back to programmes about rock music and young people presented by someone speaking received English and wearing a tie.; Please God let Obama get in on Tuesday. Please please please, I'll do anything. It'll be like Blair getting in. But I don't think Obama is going to turn the world into one big party. His speech where he said he would use, emphatically, "all means necessary" to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons shows America will still wield force. Blair was a great guy, but we still went into Iraq with Bush. The point is, Obama said that for consumption by that particular audience. But I saw it. We all saw it. It's an interconnected world, these things are starting to leak all over the place.; So isn't that interesting? The Internet, which was supposed to lead to greater access to information and the ability for anyone to publish, is also leading to a sort of moral mob, where the risk of sort of burst pipe effect, where information meant for a particular audience suddenly leaks out all over the place, causes people who read the Daily Mail to get upset. And people don't go "yeah, well, that's the Daily Mail doing their thing, what does it matter", there are real consequences. Village morality, courtesy the global village.; I feel a new word coming on. You know how you often get to tag online things with keywords, to say perhaps, this article is about Obama while this other one is about architecture and so on? Well, in case you don't know, that's called a folksonomy, it's a mass of people attaching words to something so we get a sense of what it's about by popular vote (as opposed to having some librarian intellectual person choose a category). Well, I'm going to call this budding popular online morality thing a folksality. See if I can make my mark on history. It's a new word, there are no Google results for it (at 15:30 GMT, see how it fares).