- When blogs die
Damn. A favourite blog - London Connections - has suddenly decided to give up the ghost.
It was a site that fed a minor obsession of mine - and, I’m sure, thousands of other Londoners . It told us what, on earth, was going on with all the changes to London’s public transport. Although I didn’t always understand some of the technical diagrams of track layouts, and sometimes it wasn’t even relevant to my routes, I loved the detail and the greater understanding of the complexities of transport planning it gave me. (I know, I know. I am a geek).
The links to public documents about railways works were, in themselves, a valuable civic service that no news organisation provided. It was a site that, far away from all the balls spoken about citizen journalism, proved the huge value of narrow, niche publishing on the web. Just look at the number of comments on the final post to see what value it brought. It was all produced by a blogger who was, I think, anonymous.
But now it’s dead - a risk, I guess, with something powered by passion, not profit. I hope that perhaps the author will take a break, and choose to return, but there’s an air of finality about the final post.
Damn, again.
- Ben Hammersley joins Wired UK
I’m delighted to see Ben Hammersley’s joining Wired UK as deputy editor. It’s a great move, both for him and for David Rowan, ex of the Guardian and currently Jewish Chronicle editor, who’s going to edit the title. My times working with Ben, both in print and on the web, have been among the most entertaining and fruitful of my career. I’m sure he’ll do a stellar job at Wired.
- Office temperature watch
M’colleague Meg, who is unfortunate enough to share an office with me, hit on the splendid idea of bringing in a thermometer to give us some facts and figures on just how sizzling our cubbyhole is. And now we’ve produced (that’s my dreadful scrawl) a list of all the hot places that are, in fact, cooler than here.
So: we’ve established, thanks to the temperature charts on the back of the paper, that our office is hotter than many world-famous hotspots. Mexico City, Athens, Bermuda, LA, Harare, Istanbul, Rio and Singapore? We call you all for what you are: cold spots. You ain’t got nothing on our little corner (top floor, left hand window, since you ask) of the building.
But maybe our suffering is as nothing compared to you. Think you can do better? Meg’s posted about it here, and there’s some discussion on her Flickr pic as well, and we’re offering “something suitably cool” - maybe a nice Vindaloo - as a prize for the best submission. Let’s be hearing about your Hottest Day In The Office.
- On board the Qantas jet that popped a hole at 30,000 feet
On the site today; dramatic video footage taken on a mobile phone from inside the Qantas jet that, at 30,000 feet, popped a hole. It’s occasions like this which, for me, really ram home why video on the site tells a completely different story to text.The text story tells the story of a lucky escape, yes, but essentially it can only be a variation on: “Plane damaged. Everyone’s OK, lukily.” And you could say there’s nothing dramatic about the footage at all. Yes, the oxygen masks are all down. But the engines sound normal, there’s a little more chatter than normal but no screaming, and some people even still have their lunch in front of them. A stewardess, showing how really well trained and professional she is, appears to be smiling to a passenger.
But then you remember they’ve had the explosive decompression already, and the controlled plunge of 20,000 feet (this is a standard thing, as those earnest guys in the forums at the Professional Pilot’s Rumour Network will tell you). They’re not really sure what’s wrong with their plane, and most must have strong suspicions these are their last moments in this world. Maybe real, true horror isn’t like the movies at all - it can be quiet and orderly and just as horrific.
You only really see the tension as they come in to land - ground hurtling past through the window, some passengers have heads bowed and arms out-stretched to the seats in front, waiting for an impact that never comes. The plane just lands as normal, and after a while the cheery Aussie voice of the captain comes on to tell everyone all’s well, but they might have to wait a while while the fire crews take a look at the plane and decide if it’s fit to taxi to the terminal.
All so normal, and yet such a complete and utter nightmare. Little wonder some of them threw up after they got off the plane, while the captain who did such a good job was pictured looking quizzically at a four meter by two hole in the side of his aircraft.
It’s an amazing piece of footage, and it’s a marvel - ironically, as much of flying and engineering as anything - that the thing landed safely. I only hope they find out what went wrong, and quickly.
- “While Obama was wowing them in Berlin, McCain was knocking over apple sauce jars in supermarkets. Hello, Tipping Point…”
Hugh MacLeod’s pithy political commentary on Twitter, this morning.
[Update, 1600:] Since I’m getting a lot - a lot - of Google traffic on the search term “McCain Applesauce“, I feel honour-bound to refer you to a story which explains what Hugh’s comment was about. Here’s the Newsweek take. In brief:
“When John McCain descended on a Bethlehem, Penn. grocery store late yesterday afternoon, the unscheduled campaign stop, meant to highlight McCain’s concern over skyrocketing food prices, instead quickly became a theater for the absurd. First, a cameraman knocked over several glass jars of Mott’s applesauce, which rolled near McCain’s feet as he posed for a bevy of cameras while strolling the grocery aisles.”
In fairness, the Newsweek piece really should be doing better in Google than this post. Bad SEO package, bad SEO.
- Music from the “See how it feels” BMW ad
My regular reader will recall that, a while back*, I was obsessing about the music in the “See how it feels” BMW campaign. It was a stirring orchestra-and-synth creation based - I discovered in this blog’s comments - on Beethoven’s 9th.
Extensive Googling revealed it was produced by London musical group/collective/gathering/trip-hoppers UNKLE, whose stuff I’ve liked in the past, not least the atmospheric Be There featuring Ian Brown (the video, shot on the London Underground, is smashing, in a slightly postgraduate-film-school-project way).
Anyway, the BMW music now has a proper name - Trouble In Paradise (Variation On a Theme) (iTunes link) so you can all go off and play it very loudly while not driving a BMW.
* I’m staggered I posted that back in February of last year. If I didn’t have complete trust in WordPress’s ability to get the date right, in the cold, mechanical, unsentimental manner so typical of blog software, I’d be convinced it was earlier this year. How time flies, etc.
- Anyone fancy a game of fantasy football?
In a fine example of mixing business with pleasure, I’ve been helping devise Guardian.co.uk’s new Fantasy Football game, which launched last night. In the hope this blog’s reader will join in the fun, I’ve set up a Completetosh.com league - The League of Scoundrels. Joining details are below. Go on! Do it now! So much more fun than work!First, the sales pitch… we looked around the market and saw quite a few rather dull games which people were charging for. So we’ve worked with one of the leading fantasy game makers - Clever.tv - to build a free game that is… well, hopefully a little smarter than your average fantasy football game.
Obviously, the central idea is still to assemble a team with your £100m budget, and win points based on the players’ real performances in the Premier League. But, instead of just getting points for an assist, or a goal, or a clean sheet, there are a bunch of other ways to score points - tackles, shots on target, interceptions, and more - which should make this a much more interesting and nuanced play than you might get elsewhere. We think it’ll mean that managers who take a punt on some of the Premiership’s less lauded names may well be rewarded.
Then we added choices of formations, a squad system, stuck on a gorgeous interface, and club supporter and national leagues that your team can all be part of. Best of all, the game’s free. And there’s a £50k prize fund.
We think it’s going to be a scream.
I’m thrilled with how it’s turned out, yet - despite my involvement - it’s still guaranteed that I’ll be rubbish at actually playing it. So now’s your chance to humiliate me (in some cases, again). Better still, your one team can be part of many leagues, meaning you don’t need to have multiple teams, which would be a fiddle.
To sign up: first go to Fantasy Football, pick your team and save it. Then click on Friends’ Leagues. You’ll need to enter the league name: League of Scoundrels. And the password: Completetosh.
You’ll see my team - Cristal Palace - is already there, and ready for its heroic plummet to the foot of the table. Your glory is assured.
- SEO: we’re all at it
Over at the Telegraph, Shane Richmond is lamenting Private Eye’s confusion about the search engine optimisation (SEO) work they’ve been doing. He even speculates that, at Guardian towers, we’ve been doing some SEO of our own.
Well, I can’t confirm or deny that, but the conspiracy theorists will be taking a close look at two exhibits: Charlie Brooker today, and - from earlier in the month - sportswriter Tom Lutz, providing probably the best SEO’d article you’ll find this side of a Viagra blog.
The tragic thing is, it really worked.
- A TV news report that could make you sick to the stomach
My attention was grabbed by an ITV London Today story this lunchtime, firmly stating that not only is water in the Thames clean, but that it is easily drinkable - the best in the country, no less. London Today claimed: “99.98% of tests taken on samples from the river met national and European standards of safety, appearance and taste.”
Surely not, I thought.
Y’see, the River Thames doesn’t look like a clean river, and it’s not. Anyone living here knows. Its distinctive swirling brown murk is caused by silt stirred up by the fast-flowing tides - that’s not the real problem. The biggie is that sewers often overflow directly into the river after heavy rainfall, meaning it’s still quite possible that the river is - in a sense only too literal for those keen on watersports, or surfboarding to work - full of shit.
We even know 2012 London Olympic organisers are fretting that the sight and smell of London’s backed-up sewage might mar their events. It’s a great scandal.
Yet here was ITV’s local news suggesting otherwise. And not just that there was not a problem; that this was the best draw of water in the land.
A quick (web) surf turns up the truth, in a press release from Thursday: Thames Water, the water company which serves the south east of England, is indeed serving up commendably clean water. But Thames Water does not draw its water from the Thames river, thank God, and this report does not mean the Thames River is clean.
So, ITV News’s claim that “samples from the river” have done so well is, alas, as full of shit as the river itself after a heavy downpour. They mean Thames Water, not the Thames river. But that’s not what they said, while showing library shots of the murky old river itself - just to add to the confusion.
The offending 30 second item is below, recorded off my TV - sorry I can’t stand still. And a warning: paying attention to this news bulletin could be a mistake you come to regret, quickly and repeatedly, all because someone somewhere can’t take a days-old press release and rewrite it properly for a bulletin.
- From the archives… Google’s first mention
For no other reason than it’s a lazy Sunday morning, I was browsing back through the Guardian.co.uk archive to see when the first mention of Google was in the Guardian and Observer. I should have guessed; it was the ever-perceptive John Naughton who got to the punch first, writing in the Observer on Sunday March 14 1999.
His column that morning was a complaint about “bloated and vulgar” portals, and he made a very perceptive comment that many in our business still forget today, more than nine years on:
“The Net is all about something quite, quite different - namely individuals choosing what they want, and only what they want.”
Amen to that, again.
He also thought Yahoo was going to the dogs, and that Google would eat its lunch - until it went public too.
“Before it became a business going nowhere, Yahoo! was called ‘Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. Dave (Filo) and Jerry (Yang) were graduate students at Stanford who had the idea of making a directory of the burgeoning Web. Now they’re the billionaire owners of a plonking great virtual billboard with en-suite directory services.
Still, maybe Dave and Jerry will appreciate the irony of being wiped out by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two more Stanford graduates armed with a great idea and a wacky name. Google (www.google.com) indexes Web pages using an ingenious algorithm which ranks a site on the basis of who links to it. It’s a kind of automated peer-review of the kind that created the software on which the Net runs. Google is still in Beta form but works a treat, so it’ll probably be okay until Sergey and Larry float the company and get wiped out by the next pair of kids in the queue. On balance, it’s safer to invest in railways.”
Only on that last point can we see Naughton’s not entirely right. Yet.
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