I’ve Said Too Much

# Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist.

# Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

via Stock and flow « Snarkmarket.

SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, an 18th-century jurist who wrote a famous four-volume history of English law, described a man’s right to trial by his peers as “the principal bulwark of our liberties”. Almost 250 years later, this way of dispensing justice has greatly diminished; magistrates routinely hear criminal cases without jurors. However, for the past four centuries serious crimes in England and Wales have always been tried before a jury. On January 12th the trial of four men accused of armed robbery began at the Royal Courts of Justice in London heard by a judge alone, the first such case in modern times

via A trial without a jury: Peerless | The Economist.

GreatBritain.A2010007.1150.1km.jpg.

Courtesy of @matlock. Rather lovely this isn’t it?

Wow, there’s a lot of sneering going on at the moment. The web is atwitter with people putting *sigh* into asterisks and screaming LOL at each other. It’s all reminiscent of the fuss Lily Allen set off when she blogged on music piracy and unleashed a tidal wave of indignant self-righteousness tinged with misogyny.

Two things have set everyone off: Rupert Murdoch’s statements about paywalls and newspapers, and Keith Vaz’s statements on Call of Duty.

So look. Can we agree that there are some nuanced issues worthy of discussion on both sides? And can we also try to believe that Messrs Vaz and Murdoch might have some interesting points while disagreeing with their conclusions.

You see the problem with that sentence. It’s bloody boring isn’t it? Far more fun to let rip on Murdoch and Vaz.

And let rip people have. Jeff Jarvis had a right old pop at Murdoch yesterday on Twitter, and today Cringely has a really stretched metaphor for why Murdoch has got it completely wrong. And they’re just the most famous ones. Everywhere you look there’s somebody pointing out why the most successful content publisher of modern times is a blithering, past-it moron.

Similarly on games. Vaz complained about the violence of the new Call of Duty, and Tom Watson jumped in with a proposal for a group to “provide a voice” for gamers, as if they were some oppressed minority. And again, everywhere you look, people who know about games (and I admit to not being one of them) are sneeringly shouting that Vaz and his ilk are, ipso facto, completely wrong.

So look. I know Vaz is a blowhard. I know that most newspapers print absolute garbage about this. But can’t we all just articulate some reasoned arguments on this stuff? And perhaps be a little more measured?

Jarvis has, of course, consistently made such arguments, and has even written a book about it. And you know what? He’s probably, almost certainly, completely right. But I don’t think he does his own intellect credit by resorting to sneer-mode at the first sign of significant disagreement. And I don’t believe free v. paywall is quite as binary as this type of debate makes out.

And likewise, games people: I know you’re all super-smart and switched on, but you know what? I do kind of worry that my son plays intensely violent video games. It’s an anxiety that doesn’t respond to being told it’s stupid. I think there’s something dehumanising and, well, not very intelligent about these games, and if I’m honest I’d rather he read a book. But that doesn’t make me a dyed-in-the-wool, antediluvian moron. It just means I have a slightly different point of view born of slightly different experiences.

And everyone: if you’re part of a group which has its own codes and its own beliefs, don’t just fall into the habit of creating a vast echo chamber of similar views which countenances no differing opinions. And don’t just assume that anyone who doesn’t seem to be part of your group is just stupid and wrong. They might be mainly wrong. They often will be. But they might also have a point. And, conversely, you can be right but still come across as wrong if you speak in this kind of way.

As my mother says, you catch more flies with sugar than you do with vinegar.

It might be an odd thing to say, but I think we’ve got an ingrained imbalance in how we listen to “the media”. “The media” assumes that everyone is listening to it with the same intensity as we put into making it. So, when somebody says something stupid and a very small number of people complain, it’s easy for “the media” to make this into something hugely significant, just by talking about it.

And, in fact, no-one is listening with anything like this intensity. It’s something they’re aware of, happening over there and quite interesting. But while we all shout at each other about the thing we care about, the rest of the world goes on its merry way, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Merlin, the charity which I have been helping out as a trustee, is sending a specialist team to earthquake-struck Indonesia, and needs your support. You can donate to Merlin here, or to the Disaster Emergency Committee here, find out more about the mission here, and follow the Facebook page here. Here’s a description of the team and what they’re going to be doing:

Merlin has sent out a surgical team to treat some of the thousands of people injured in the recent earthquake in Indonesia.

The team, the first 4 of whom have already arrived in Jakarta and are making their way to Padang tomorrow morning, includes two surgeons, an anaesthetist, two nurses, a health coordinator and a project coordinator. They’ll be taking surgical equipment and medical supplies with them, ready to perform emergency surgery and deal with traumatic injuries as soon as they arrive.

Paula Sansom, Merlin’s Emergency Response Manager says: “Thousands of people have been trapped under buildings and are suffering from broken bones and abdominal trauma. There is an urgent need for surgical staff and equipment.”

The main hospital in Padang, which was the only one equipped to perform surgery, was severely damaged and only two hospitals are functioning.

One of the surgeons, Asad Syed, is an Irish orthopaedic and trauma consultant, currently working at a hospital in North Wales. He has experience of working in the aftermaths of earthquakes, having worked as a surgeon following the earthquakes in China in 2008 and Kashmir in 2005. During his missions, he performed daily operations, involving complex limb injuries and tissue loss, and also helped to train local surgeons.

Flora Henderson, from Buckden in Cambridgeshire, has over 15 years experience in nursing, most recently specialising as a theatre nurse at a hospital in Cambridgeshire.

Sean Keogh, a former A&E consultant, joins the team as a health assessor looking at the more medium/long term health needs. He has worked in Indonesia before, having worked on Merlin’s response following the tsunami in 2004.

The team will be led by Diego Moroso, who previously worked as an operational coordinator for Merlin in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

If you can spare some cash to help the team out, it’ll be put to immediate and essential use. Please do what you can.

Thanks to a gorgeous piece of serendipity which led me from here to here to discover a song called Brockwell Park by Red House Painters, I was reminded that I’ve been meaning to post a quick update on the local aggregation experiment I blogged about here.

Quick recap: using software set up by the clever Dave Cross, I set up three aggregation pages: Planets Herne Hill, SE27 and Dulwich. These are basically pulling in updates from the likes of Flickr, Twitter, Google search and a few other places. They’ve been running for five months now.

The dashboard looks like this:

That’s for the month to October 3 and, as you can see, visits are pretty low, barely two a day for the most popular planet, for Herne Hill. That doesn’t surprise me, actually. Google’s not giving these sites any love, because they’re just aggregators, and the shortage of billboard posters around London will have alerted you to my minimal marketing spend.

So, what am I learning? Well, a few things:

• permanence is even more important than I ever realised. Without permanence, Google ignores you. And if Google ignores you, the world ignores you (are you listening, regulators?)
• the most useful part of these sites is the RSS feed. It’s a joy to consume every day, and ironically it makes the content less ephemeral. The web pages are only constructed to show the n latest things from all the sources; if I wanted to, the RSS feed could keep them forever. I’m wondering if some secondary processing of the feeds might be useful, to generate something with more permanence at a URI.
• there’s a lot of noise in the system. I’m thinking it needs some functionality to screen out certain types of things. Finding out that people I’ve never heard of are going jogging in Brockwell Park isn’t very useful.
• on the other hand, despite the noise and the mess, the Planets score very highly on timeliness. When someone was stabbed on Lordship Lane over the summer, it was on Planet Dulwich hours before it was any media outlet. In fact, I was told about it when someone told me they’d seen it on Planet Dulwich. It’s not citizen journalism; it’s citizen awareness.
• the shock of recognition is as strong as ever. Seeing a street name, or a shop, or a restaurant I know well, or the name of a pub I go to, inside a piece of media draws you into the content like nothing else I’ve seen.

I’d like to share the Analytics data more systematically. Anyone know how to do that?