Tag: Social software

Forums are places, I suppose. IRC channels, MUDs and chat rooms too. But blog entries? Not really. Here’s an exception. Ages ago I blogged a special ‘flowchart issue’ of Mizz, the teen mag and, since then, my top search term has been ‘mizz magazine’. Every day, dozens (sometimes hundreds) of teens find themselves – thanks to Google – looking at this entry. God knows what they make of it (many of them wonder aloud: ‘what is this place?’). Anyway, the entry has become a kind of teen hangout. I don’t do anything (just delete the odd Viagra comment-spam) but it’s now more-or-less self-sustaining. I guess it might go on forever…

The esteemed Phil Gyford took about five minutes to figure out why my weblog wasn’t working properly in Explorer after about six months of pointless fiddling and winging on my part… Thanks Phil!

Esther Dyson must be the most demanding networker on the planet. It turns out she favours LinkedIn for her day-to-day people wrangling. She has some pretty specific requirements for her networking software. You probably wouldn’t go too far wrong copying and pasting them into your own requirements statement if you’re building yourself a networking app right now.

I’m sort of interested in social software and I’ve signed up for every networking site since MIT’s Firefly and Sixdegrees but I’ve always thought that it’s all a bit academic until we start to see some second-order networking applications – sites whose primary function isn’t just… well… networking… but something else, something more specific – like losing weight, for instance, or unloading the contents of your attic on eBay.

David Galbraith alerts me to a really quite nifty new chat application that he’s been helping out with called Chatango and David MaCaney, CEO of Dublin-based Cafeslim, is connecting his customers – the slimmers – to help them get more from his weight loss programme. Chatango does IM-style presence detection without a download and that means your chat identity can be an ordinary http URL which – this is the neat bit – means you can paste it into your eBay or Craigslist listings and invite people to ‘click to chat’. I’ve signed up for Chatango (but not for Cafeslim – which is probably the wrong way round) so you can now chat with me (provided I’m online) by clicking here: http://bowbrick.chatango.com.

Geeks are purists. Or at least, most of them are. Pragmatism is tolerated but deprecated. (of course, some people think geeks are autistic but that’s another story). Purists (and autistics) find much of the business of being human far too messy and random. This manifests itself in a generalised impatience with the inefficiencies and inequities of human societies, systems and institutions. Democracy is one of the geeks’ big irritants. It’s obviously a mess. No one would design a system like this – all friction and compromise. Nothing elegant about it. The geeks, consequently, would like to reengineer democracy to better reflect their worldview. To flush out the inefficiencies and replace them with shiny, end-to-end, ‘open’ methods for translating public opinion directly into legislation and for monitoring the process (keeping the legislators honest).

The latest in a string of very worthy geek interventions is called They Work For You, from the people who brought you FaxYourMP, Public Whip and Downing Street Says. TWFY does a simple thing beautifully. It turns Hansard – parliament’s venerable contemporaneous record – into an accessible, searchable record of your representative’s appearances in the Commons. Of course, it does a lot more than that, including allowing you to correct your MP’s more egregious errors right there in the text, counting votes and marking interesting and important debates so they stand out from the rest.

So far so admirable. Surely no one would argue with making the work of legislators more accessible? I don’t know. I find myself wondering whether the democratic institutions we rely on are robust enough to withstand the fire hose of transparency and accountability the democracy hackers are getting ready to turn on it. What the hackers are planning here (and with earlier initiatives) is a ‘revolution from within’ that could, whether they like it or not, rip up the democratic cobblestones to reveal an unknown and unknowable hyperdemocratic future below. I’m pretty sure that I’m just being neurotic here – more democracy must always be a good thing, right? But what if the system currently has just enough accountability in it to keep it moving. What if more accountability actually slowed it down, gummed it up. Turned it into a machine for producing accountability and not laws? What if the apparently entirely benign hacker plot to tidy up democracy for the common good turned out to be less Socratic dream and more nasty sci-fi fantasy (cue replicants).

According to my web site stats, at least 60% of you are viewing this site in one or other version of IE on a PC (85% if you add all those ‘unknowns’). Take a look at the picture above (click for a bigger one). If Bowblog doesn’t look like the screenshot (i.e. three columns, nicely centred on the page), please let me know and (here’s your big test) if you know why it doesn’t look right, please tell me. I can’t figure it out but assume it’s something to do with my stylesheet… There will be a lavish reward.

Paul complains that I don’t provide a link to a timetable in my entry on The North London Line – so I’ve added one (although the Silverlink web site is a framed nightmare and Paul would certainly be better off using Matthew Somerville’s excellent accessible version of the stupid National Rail timetable). Of course, since I wrote it, nearly two years ago, someone’s added a long and interesting entry about The North London Line to Wikipedia, surely the most marvelous publication of any kind available anywhere?

Russell Davies used to be something important in online advertising – but that was before anyone had heard of online advertising. These days he’s something important in advertising. He’s keeping three (count them) weblogs and each is a jewel. I particularly like his two nicely differentiated homages to the greasy spoon, A Good Place for a Cup of Tea and a Think and Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans. The latter is practically a work of art and should probably be lottery funded. While you’re at, check out his ‘ordinary’ weblog, which is nicely written, clever and interesting. I think Russell is the kind of articulate, engaging bloke weblogs were invented for.

A small selection (just the prescription medicines, I think) of products advertised in the comment spam I’ve been deleting from my weblog every day for a couple of months now (just one of the many services I quietly perform on your behalf with no reward and little thanks). I do hope Robin can get that blacklist thingie installed soon!

I should have know that Oliver “Mapping Mars” Morton would have the edge on the mainstream media for the current blizzard of Mars news – and particularly for the breaking Methane story. Azeem directs me to Morton’s incredibly well-informed weblog which is currently running between 48 hours and a week ahead of the broadsheets (add 24 hours for broadcast outlets because they get their stories from the broadsheets). This is a really good example of the power of the best weblog media. Morton is a Mars maniac and knows his planet (although his excellent book is weirdly out of print, according to Amazon, which doesn’t seem right given the year we’ve had). More to the point, his insight is accessible, authoritative and accountable. A mainstream media outlet might be able to provide two from that set but certainly not all three.