I’ve Said Too Much

As well as the new job, I’ve also been appointed a trustee at Medical Emergency Relief International, aka Merlin. It’s the best of good causes:

Merlin specialises in health, saving lives in times of crisis and helping to rebuild shattered health services.

I’ve never had any operational dealings with a charity before, and the people I’ve met so far have amazed me with their dedication to the cause and their appetite for helping people who are desperately in need. I hope I can help out a bit, particularly with their digital channel. If you’ve got any suggestions and ideas, or just want to donate to an organisation that’s treating literally thousands of sick people every single day, do drop me a line at lloyd [at] lllj.net.

lloydshep Work

As anyone witness to my prolix ramblings (nothing that a pair of scissors won’t fix) on Twitter will have suspected, I’ve not been in an office for two months. This has been prior to a new beginning for me: from tomorrow, I’m working for the BBC, in the role of Head of Multiplatform Products, BBC Vision. I’m blisteringly excited and appropriately terrified. Broadly speaking, I’m going to be responsible for the production of multiplatform services which are not directly related to individual television programmes - for a better description of what this means (and to see the crib sheet that helped me through the interview process) I recommend Dan Taylor’s description of the job context over at Fabric of Folly.

So, tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, as it probably is for most people reading this. Tin hats on!

lloydshep Work

Three of us are off on a roadtrip along the “Saxon Coast” today - essentially out along the Thames, cut across the Hoo Peninsula and then across to Sheerness. Partly research for the zombie-historical-detective-thriller I’m sort-of-not-writing, and partly for fun. Here’s the route, with some highlights to visit:

View Saxon Coast Zombie Roadtrip in a larger map

Sound track to the day on Spotify (or http link if that doesn’t work)

lloydshep Delightful exploring

I’ve just finished watching the mighty Blue Dahlia with my Mum. Now normally watching a film with her is a distracting affair. She likes to lean over and ask who that is on the screen and why are they doing that? It’s fair to say she occasionally struggles to follow what’s going on.

Not this time, mind. This time it was me asking the questions.

Now The Blue Dahlia is a classic film noir. It has a certain expositionary style. The dialogue is stylised and literary. And my Mum can follow this and I seem to have forgotten how to.

When did this happen? When was The Big Shift in film language? I blame Polanski myself.

lloydshep General film

Last night, after Manchester United crashed out of Europe in pretty spectacular fashion, I stopped following someone on Twitter. Because he was, not to put too fine words on it, getting on my tits. He’s a forthright gentleman at the best of times, but last night’s exercise in schadenfreude was a bit too much for this United fan. I shut him off.

A week ago, my daughter (who’s 12) found herself getting into a fairly sticky social situation because of the way she’s been talking on MSN Messenger. Someone got the wrong end of a stick, and it ended up with a phone call from her school. One verbal conversation and the problem went away.

What connects these things? Digital communication, that’s what. My anti-United friend was simply indulging in a time-honoured tradition of baiting. And the one thing you learn when you’re being baited is to take it. Any sign of a negative reaction will be accompanied by hails of hilarity because, as anyone educated in England knows full well, taking the piss is a cherished cultural activity. The key parental advice you receive in England is not that one day, you can be President. It’s that if you ignore them, they’ll go away.

But Twitter, and pretty much all online interaction, radically changes that. Because on Twitter, I can turn you off. With a simple button-press, your riffing on my pain is eradicated, and karmic peace descends.

But, as my daughter discovered, this brings other pain. The thing I hear from her and her friends more than anything else when I call them on their online comms styles is this: “I was only joking.” And the minute you’ve said that, you know something’s gone wrong. Because communicating inside little text boxes is a pale imitation of real speech. It’s easier to offend, either deliberately or accidentally. It’s impossible to accompany any statement with a visual warning that “this is a joke.” It’s an irony-free zone out there. I know, because I’ve insisted on Ofsted-style inspections of my daughter’s online discussions, and some of the stuff kids say to each other is eye-catchingly awful. The charming little friend with a nice line in dry wit can come across as an obnoxious cow online. But it’s OK, because she’s “only joking.”

And of course adults are falling into the old (well, maybe a decade-old) trap: the kids understand this stuff much better than us, we’re just not equipped to advise them on it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. We have to teach our kids how to communicate online. We have to help them understand that words can hurt. We have to teach them the difference between unfollowing on Twitter and physically turning your back. A friend of mine is a deputy at a massive London comprehensive. And do you know how many sessions they’ve had for the teachers on social media? How many lessons the teachers have had in online communication to allow them to pass stuff on to the kids in their care? None. Zero. Zip. The kids really do know more about Facebook than their teachers. And this is a Very Bad Thing.

There’s no Kwik Fix for this, but I would suggest this: we should all be looking at our kids’ online communications. Screw the squeamishness. If they’re under, say, 16, we should be able to view what they’ve been saying to each other at a moment’s notice, without warning. We should be able to tell them what’s appropriate and what’s out of line. We should be able to question obvious deletions. It should be a condition of access to the Internet that this happens. Transparency might not suit tweenagers and teenagers, but it’s essential for parents.

lloydshep General

Over the last two years I’ve spent more time in than is healthy mulling over how to bring local information together effectively. I’ve tracked the adventures of outside.in and Everyblock, I’ve agonised over postcode data, I’ve mourned for the dreams that nearly made UpMyStreet the finest website in the world, I’ve installed Wordpress half-a-dozen times with 20 or more different plug-ins to pull in feeds from different places, and I’ve wandered the halls of Yahoo! Pipes like I’ve wandered the streets of Los Angeles - with an overwhelming feeling that a party was going on somewhere to which I wasn’t invited.

All this thoughtfulness hasn’t added up to anything at all worthwhile, but has yielded the following thoughts:

• Wonderful as they are, there’s something rather unnourishing about outside.in and Everyblock. And I think that’s because they’re just not very good at tracking emerging narratives, which is something local newspapers do rather well. Narratives are where aggregation fails, I reckon.
• There just aren’t enough UK bloggers with local viewpoints to create a rich aggregated experience. Don’t know why that should be, but there just aren’t. There’s maybe two dozen really good local blogs in South East London. There’s probably that many in four blocks in Brooklyn. Americans talk more, work harder and are just more intense.
• There’s something a bit sleazy about “direct aggregation” - by which I mean pulling in a blogger’s full-text feed into your site, and then slapping some ads on it. I think we need to be honest about that. So any aggregation which isn’t sleazy involves some kind of quid pro quo. And that’s hard for an aggregation start-up to provide. What I’m saying is that this stuff done ethically and well does….not…..scale.

But set against that is my continuing conviction that this stuff is important and will, at some point down the road, become very, very big indeed. Someone somehow is going to find a way of combining the power of dozens and hundreds of passionate local bloggers and publishing their narratives in ways which are compelling and sustainable.

Until that day, I’m going to continue experimenting. And in that spirit, I’ve hooked up with ex-colleague Dave Cross who’s written some nice feed aggregation code in Perl and packaged it up into the concept of “planets” (read up on this here). After a high-level strategy summit (ie, a pint in Clapham on Monday night), he’s let me use his system to launch planets for Herne Hill, Dulwich and Tulse Hill/West Norwood. These simple little sites are simply reflecting local conversations at the moment, which is fine as far as it goes. So now to see how far it goes.

Next steps: hook up with local bloggers and see if we can get their content in there, play around with ways of distributing this concept, and continue to mess with Twitter. It’s not a grandstanding strategy or anything. Fred Wilson need not apply. But it’s a bit of fun nonetheless.

lloydshep Work local

Some time ago, the inestimable David Hepworth came along and spoke to a bunch of Guardianistas (as I was then) about the business of magazine journalism and other stuff. In the course of this excellent hour, he said something (in reference to an old magazine cover from the 1970s, I think) which has always stuck with me: “Cool won. Just look at Gap.”

His point being, of course, that there was a time when it was possible to say cool hadn’t won: that it was still battling with other things, like perhaps enthusiasm, or learning, or success, or something.

And then something Alastair Campbell said a day or two ago:

I didn’t manage to the end of the opening Newsnight report on MPs’ expenses before deciding that bed was a better place to be (via this quick blog), but I couldn’t help but be struck by a formidable contrast tonight … between the basic pro-football stance of Sky Sports coverage of football - admittedly easier when you have a match like tonight’s 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal - and Newsnight’s basic anti-politics coverage of politics.

And now this morning we see the predictable acres of newsprint about the new 50% tax band, which was effectively skewered on Twitter by @toppage: “Only 10% of UK population earn over £40k, and only 1.5% over £100k, yet acres of newsprint on the 50% tax band.”

But this was always going to happen, because Nick Robinson on the BBC yesterday said it would happen. Effortlessly, he set the narrative for the new tax band by saying this:

UPDATE, 13:06: The new 50% top tax rate for those earning over £150,000 is designed to put the Tories on the spot - do they back it or pledge to reverse it? Since it will be introduced before the next election, they will have to say.

If they attempt to swerve this political trap they will face criticism from some in their own party and in the Tory press who will demand that they protect “our people”.

Note how this is not about the policy itself. It’s about the policy behind the policy. It’s meta-analysis. It’s post-modernism. It’s very, very cool.

This has always disturbed me about British political coverage when compared with what happens in America. When I read Matt Yglesias or Joe Klein or the Atlantic or the New Yorker, I see coverage and analysis which is unashamedly geeky, obsessive, stats-hungry and engaged. It relentlessly pores over the output of the political machine, munching up every statement from even minor politicians into its vociferous maw, however banal. It starts from the presumption that this stuff is interesting, and that we’re reading about it because, like the people doing the analysing, we’re (perhaps overly) obsessed with it. In other words, it’s like British football coverage.

British political coverage, with some exceptions, isn’t like that. For one thing, it assumes that the lying bastards are just lying to us. As Campbell says:

What has for years been developing as a culture of media negativity is now getting closer to nihilism. I think that most journalists have stopped even thinking whether they have any responsibility for what they now routinely describe as a breakdown in trust between politicians and public, or any reason to care.

Given that assumption, it goes straight for the meta-analysis: for the big story behind the headlines, the connective thread which, the writer assumes, is being hidden from us. The coverage is sceptical and, by definition, defiantly un-engaged with the material.

If this was a British school, the American political journalist would be the geeky fellow at the front with a voracious appetite and a competitive streak. The British political journalist would be the hugely sophisticated gentleman at the back who scores well without any distinctive effort, has a wide circle of friends and always has something to do on a Friday night, despite his apparent lack of interest in anything. In other words, the cool one. The worldly one. Steerforth, not David Copperfield.

So here’s a geeky thought. What if the 50% tax rate isn’t just about politics? What if it’s about fairness? What if it’s about being seen to ensure that the rich contribute fairly to the coming debt apocalypse? What if, like Obama, Brown and Darling are seeking to recalibrate a few things in the light of a fiscal reset? Isn’t that at least worth analysing?

On the other hand, people who think like that never get invited to parties. So, OK, it’s all about plotting and deceit and exciting chatter in panelled rooms. And this is excellent wine, isn’t it?

Photo by IAR (EseLoKo), via Flickr. Some rights reserved.

lloydshep Politics alastair campbell, journalism, nick robinson

Scary gattica ad on tube, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

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lloydshep Work channel 4, sexperience

David Simon in the Guardian is arguing that newspapers - and particularly local newspapers - are the last best hope of preventing the cancer of political corruption.

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”

Couple of thoughts on that. In South London, our local paper is the South London Press, and to be honest the ratio of stories about local government to stories about crime, depravity, awfulness and local entertainment listings is not one which lends hope that they’re going to ape the Baltimore Sun. Maybe there’s something about different traditions of local journalism here - it’s perhaps instructive that London, a city many times bigger than Baltimore, has no publication with the same news values as the Baltimore Sun, and is rather served by a right-wing rag aimed at the suburbs and three freesheets with the emphasis on gossip and entertainment. Local professional journalism could die in London and, you know what? No-one would notice. Literally no-one.

And the flipside to that is that local bloggers and writers are increasingly holding people to account. Check out Brockley Central for a test case in how a group of committed local people can start to catalyse change and deal with corruption at street-level, not on a “us versus them” level which sanctifies professional journalists at the expense of narratives that actually matter to people. Or look at what Dave Hill’s been doing, initially on his own but now within the auspices of the Guardian (and am I the only one who thinks his stuff was rather crunchier when it was on his own Typepad site?).

And, irony of ironies, look at the most successful holding-to-account of recent weeks: the blog campaign, exemplified by Graham Linehan and Tim Ireland, against the poisonous, depraved and vicious actions of “professional news organisation” the Express. Yes, sometimes you do need hard-skinned newshounds to sniff out stories of local corruption. But when there’s so few of them actually doing it, what exactly are we trying to protect?

(Yes, I know it’s different in some cities. Yes, I know there are fine traditions of local journalism in Manchester, Yorkshire and Birmingham. Yes, I know all of these are under threat. But London hasn’t had serious local journalism in, what, over a decade? Or even longer?)

lloydshep Work journalism, local

I’ve become increasingly - many would say boringly - obsessed with the growth of the surveillance state: CCTV cameras, ID cards, national databases and the like. I still think these things are in many ways a very bad thing. But I wonder if there isn’t another perspective. Could it be argued that these are just symptoms of a more general cultural move towards a different attitude towards freedom, rights and openness.

There’s a number of items for discussion. The most recent is a story in the FT this morning about the OECD and UK government putting pressure on Liechtenstein to open up their bank vaults and force customers to voluntarily disclose information for tax purposes. One of the catalysts for this change was this:

The proposed purge of undeclared bank accounts by one of the world’s hitherto most secretive tax havens reflects pressure on Liechtenstein. Germany succeeded last year in uncovering tax evaders after buying stolen customer data from a former Liechtenstein bank employee.

In other words, the move from paper to digitised data has exposed Liechtenstein to the same dangers as we suffer as individuals: the larcenous acquisition of our data. But in this case the social outcome was positive (unless you’re a Liechtenstein banker, of course).

More generally, there’s a wider move to making data available: recent examples include the Guardian’s Data Store, and a new API for US economic data from the Federal Bank of St Louis. In both cases, what’s striking is how an individual entity can make data available which other data stakeholders might wish wasn’t opened out. For instance, a state federal bank can release economic data for the whole of the U.S. And once that data’s out, all the stakeholders in that data have their room for manoeuvre restricted, at least when it comes to restricting use. In the information power equation, the data stakeholders lose some power, and we gain some.

It’s important to note that the collapse in individual privacy, and the explosion in access to previously withheld data, are two sides of the same technological coin. Both stem from the ability to digitise data and then make it available on a network. CCTV and ID cards would make even less sense in an analogue world, while the Guardian’s Data Store would be frankly impossible.

So, there is a trade-off. Is the benefit we receive from a new cultural attitude to previously “secret” stuff greater than the potential injury to our individual liberty? For me, the jury is still out (I know, because I saw them leaving the building on CCTV). But as a last note, I’d refer people to what will now be known as the Alastair Campbell Edition of the New Statesman. There’s a thought-provoking piece in there by Conor Gearty, professor of law at the LSE. His thesis is that those complaining of civil liberties being “squeezed” are making several mistakes, including:

• Assuming a “golden age” of individual liberty which doesn’t exist
• Ignoring that laws are at least as much about quantifying what the State can do (instead of leaving it vague) as they are about extending its powers; and this is preferable to leaving the extent of the State’s powers to common law (which is that the “England’s golden Constitution” blowhards would prefer).
• Ignoring the significant legal constructs for guaranteeing freedoms, including devolution, the Freedom of Information Act, the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act
• Focussing on the downside of state interventions and not the upside: CCTV does prevent crime, DNA does solve it, for instance

I certainly don’t agree with everything that Gearty says, but I think it’s something worth saying. In our newly open, networked and interconnected world, we do need our rights codified. An ancient constitution and set of precedents will no longer cut it (ask anyone who’s had to deal with online libel issues). Everything is changing as a result of technology. And as such the end of our privacy is a symptom of cultural change stemming from technological development, and that change has massively positive elements as well as worryingly negative ones.

lloydshep Politics liberty

The madness is spreading, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

Now the BBC’s caught the stupid virus. Off the Guardian. That’s the BBC and the Guardian, people. Not the Express and the Mail. Sob sob sob.

lloydshep General

Guardian education story FAIL, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

I was going to post something over the weekend about how Richard Desmond’s chamberpot of a business was now actively toxic to UK citizens, what with commemorating the death of Jade Goody before it happened and manipulating some of the most tragic teenagers on the planet to sell a few extra issues in Scotland. But there’s something even more insidiously awful about the Guardian’s front page this morning.

The story the Guardian is reporting is this: the education editor, Polly Curtis, has seen draft plans for a shake-up of the primary school curriculum undertaken by Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief. I haven’t seen the plans, obviously, but the drift of Polly’s report seems to be that Rose is proposing to make two rather fundamental changes: trimming down the 13 standalone subject areas into six “learning areas”; and giving teachers and schools some concrete choices about which options to teach in class. In history, for instance, schools could choose to teach either the Victorians or the Second World War.

Now, if you know anyone at all who teaches, they’ll probably tell you that the single thing the government could do to improve things would be to give teachers and schools a bit more leeway to tailor teaching to the circumstances of their schools and their classrooms (David Hepworth has a nice post on this today). So a more fluid platform on which to hang subjects, together with some options to pick and choose, seems like an eminently sensible course.

Oh, and the Rose plans apparently recommend that children should be given some teaching on “digital media” - on self-publishing, on shared knowledge, on the changing shape of how we talk, share and learn in the new digital sphere.

So what pithy concept has the Guardian chosen to illustrate this move towards a more flexible curriculum, which acknowledges that the way children consume knowledge has changed utterly in the last decade? “Kids to be taught Twitter, and Second World War no longer compulsory.”

How does this help human understanding? How does this disingenuous attempt to grab some attention on the newsstand help children, teachers or parents? Why is a supposedly intellectual institution like the Guardian succumbing to sub-Daily Mail posturing? What on earth happened here?

Well, we know what happened, of course. A front-page team and a news editor and a reporter took an interesting story. And they juiced it. They juiced it so much that a story about one thing became a story about something else. And in the process they managed to make Jim Rose - a highly-respected, experienced educationalist - look like a dad at a wedding playing with the cool kids by associating his work with Twitter, which for many is the poster child for feckless technical twiddling and twaddle.

The Express-Dunblane stuff was unconscionable, nasty and even evil. But this is intellectually ridiculous and socially poisonous. When a newspaper changes the weave of a story deliberately to gain attention - and when that newspaper is the poster-child for independent British journalism - all our arguments about the centrality of journalism and its importance are in danger of being seen as flimsy attempts to prop up a discredited profession. This is shoddy, vicious and cynical.

lloydshep General, Politics guardian, newspapers

It’s a rum old thing, is the Joseph Rowntree report into Britain’s database state. It’s clearly written, normally dispassionate, and rivetingly annoyed. It crystallises many of the anxieties many of us are feeling about the development of the country’s new surveillance-and-tracking society. But it occasionally cheapens this effort with a dose of overreach. For instance:

Stephen is fourteen and lives with his mum in Nottingham. He is listed on all the big databases that every youngster is on nowadays: ContactPoint gives links to all the public services he has used; the NHS Care Record Service has his medical records; the National Pupil Database has his school attendance, disciplinary history and test results; he is on the Child Benefits Database, and also on the National Identity Register since he applied for a passport; the Government Gateway has a record of all his online interactions with public services; and the ITSO smartcard he uses for local bus services and discount rail fares has been tracking him ever since his mum refilled it with her bank card. His mother frets about all this – when she was a teenager in the 1980s, things like medical and school records were all kept on paper.

And although the family has always kept its phone number ex-directory and always ticks the ‘no information’ box, they get ever more junk mail. More and more of it is for Stephen.

Like millions of children, he is on a few more databases besides. After an operation to remove a bone tumour, he needed an orthopaedic brace for two years, which brought him into the social care system. As his teachers could see from ContactPoint that he was known to social workers, they expected less of him, and he started doing less well at school. The social care system also led to his being scanned for ONSET, a Home Office system that tries to predict which children will become offenders. The Police National Database told ONSET that Stephen’s father – who left home when he was two and whom he does not remember – had spent six months in prison for fraud, so the computer decided that Stephen was likely to offend.

When he was with some other youths who got in a fight, the police treated him as a suspect rather than a witness, and he got cautioned for affray. Ten years later, after he thought he had put all this behind him and completed an MSc in vehicle testing technology, Stephen finds that the government’s new Extended Background Screening programme picked up his youthful indiscretion and he can not get the job he had hoped for at the Department of Transport. He tries to get jobs in the private sector, but the companies almost all find excuses to demand EBS checks. Two did not, but one of them picked up the fact that he had been treated for cancer; all cancer data is passed to cancer registries whether the patient likes it or not, and made available to all sorts of people and firms for research. Given the decline in the NHS since computerisation, most decent employers offer generous private health insurance – so they are not too keen to hire people who have had serious illnesses.

That’s a powerful story, but it’s somewhat cheapened by the uncited asides like “given the decline in the NHS since computerisation.” This just gives politicians a way to discredit the report in its entirety, as was done (rather shockingly) by the ministerial drone who was sent out to knock the report down on Today this morning.

On the other hand, there’s also some fascinating insight into how gridlocked ministerial and civil service thinking is on this stuff. For instance:

There is a sense in the senior civil service and among politicians that the personal data issue is now career-threatening and toxic. No-one who values their career wants to get involved with it. This is irresponsible and short-sighted. Like Chernobyl, the database state has been a disaster waiting to happen. When it goes wrong, some brave souls need to go in and sort it out while others plan better ways to manage things in the longer term.

That rings rather true, doesn’t it?

lloydshep Politics liberty, privacy

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing styles this week. Specifically: what is “self-publishing” doing to our sense of what a “professional written style” is? A few things have been rolling round in my head. Viz: why do people still enjoy Digital Editions? The Guardian’s relaunching theirs. And in Word Magazine recently, one of the “favourite things in the world” was the New Yorker Digital Edition. Isn’t that a bit odd?

Another viz: why do I find full-text news stories from newspapers rather dull when they appear in my RSS reader? I often find myself just reading the first para or two and then skipping on. But I’ll happily read full-text things from web-initiated publications.

A third viz: as someone who spent a good few years studying English literature, and someone who additionally felt most of the words expended on said discipline were essentially wasted, I found Kottke’s reprint of an email about the style of David Foster Wallace brilliantly correct. An extract:

A Primer for Kicking Ass
Being the Result of One Man’s Fed-upped-ness With ‘How to Write’ Books Not Actually Showing You How to Write
By James Tanner. Reprinted with permission.

0. Begin with an idea, a string of ideas.

Ex: Mario had help with his movie. He did a lot of the work himself.

1. Use them in a compound sentence:

It’s obvious someone helped with the script, But…Mario did the puppet work,And…It was his shoes on the pedal.

Read the whole thing, I implore you. Because, I would argue, it packs more semantic signal into fewer words than just about anything Wallace-related that wasn’t actually written by Wallace.

Random thoughts all, but they add up to a couple of things:

1. Context is vital to a reader’s expectation of style

2. Self-publishing has opened up a new style which is open, discursive - and potentially more information-rich than older print styles.

Context

When you write for print, I don’t think you’re actually writing for readers. You might be writing for an editor, a sub-editor, a fact-checker, a colleague, a collaborator. You might be writing to order. You might be writing to a deadline. But you are, in essence, writing for an institution. That institution has a set of conventions, some of them formal (a style guide, for example), some of them informal (the political leaning of your paper).

This is of course a highly desirable thing in the packaged print world. The reason I sit down and make time for the New Yorker is that I know all the writers within are conforming to a set of formal and informal criteria, not to mention meeting a dizzying quality bar. The authority of the printed word is an experienced reality: if someone’s gone to the bother (and expense) of printing it, it must be worth (at some level) my reading it.

But chop that content up, recombine it and send it out in other ways, and what happens? The context changes. In my RSS context, I’m impatient for information, for the next thrill. I’m recombining everything all the time. And, occasionally, stuff that’s been written for that other context, that “print” context, seems slow and staid and rather dull. It seems pointlessly verbiose, like a literature professor crashing a drinks party held by his students. The medium is out of sync with the message.

Which leads on to the second point:

Towards a new style

If print writers are writing for institutions, then “self-publishers” are writing for other people. Normally quite a small, known or at least half-perceived group of real people. And that means the style is instantly more conversational, more open, more discursive.

And you know what? I think that style packs more meaning per word into it than the printed style does. It’s why people can feasibly talk about “getting their news off Twitter”, because there’s something about receiving 140 characters from someone you know which is a lot more emphatically meaningful than receiving something from a printed page. The writer doesn’t have to position themselves, either within a publication or as an expert, because the people reading it know what they’re getting and why they’re getting it. They can cut right to the chase.

Also, this new style doesn’t need to “sell” anything. You don’t need a sexy headline. You just start talking. I mean, you don’t start conversations off with a summary designed to capture people’s attention (or you might, but it must sound really, really weird). So you don’t need to do it when conversing digitally.

I suppose the interesting thing to look back on will be whether this new style has actually had an impact on the printed style. Have newspaper journalists who’ve experienced blogging changed their print style? Or do they switch between modes, knowingly or unknowingly? Newspaper websites already make a category distinction between the styles - some things are called “articles”, others are called “blog posts” - and I’ve known it to cause semantic meltdown when one tries to justify what’s a blog against what’s an article. But the difference is there, it’s strongly felt, and it’s quite interesting.

And now I’ve just noticed the word count on this “post” has reached worryingly print-like levels, so time to stop.

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I posted this via web and the content originally came from Lloyd’s posterous

lloydshep General

I posted this via web and the content originally came from Lloyd’s posterous

lloydshep General

I’ve decided to stop cluttering up the Interwebs with repeat links to stuff which I’m sharing elsewhere. For some time now, this blog’s been mainly formed of digests of my del.icio.us links every day rather than anything which could be construed as “original content.” So in my own little corner of the WWW I’m cleaning out my closet. If you want to follow what I’m following myself, try my del.icio.us page (and its feed) or my Google Shared Items page (and its feed). If you want to find out what I think about my flies being undone all morning, follow me on Twitter. I’m leaving this blog as somewhere which I use when I’ve got something to say rather than something to repeat. Time to turn off the echo chamber.

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I posted this via web and the content originally came from Lloyd’s posterous

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via telegraph.co.uk

That in the Telegraph today.

I posted this via web and the content originally came from Lloyd’s posterous

lloydshep General