Complete Tosh.com

The latest miracle brought to us by the interwebs; SideTaker – the site that “lets the world decide who’s at fault”.

Yes. Take your domestic disputes to the site and have the crowd weigh in with its wisdom, with advice and – ultimately – a vote on who is right. Already in there – the man who complains his girlfriend is getting too tubby, and the women stuck with a husband who thinks you only have to flush one in every three times if it’s only a number one. Oh – and he doesn’t like to change lightbulbs.

Pop in, leave advice, cast your vote. The only thing missing is the option to say: guys, face facts – your relationship is simply dead. Split up, and go find a dating website. I’m slightly surprised SideTaker hasn’t joined forces with one yet. Maybe that’s phase two.

[Warning: this post will mean nothing to you if you don't use Twitter or - at least - are familiar with Facebook's news feed. If you don't fall into this camp, this will be much more interesting than what follows. And even if you do fall into that camp, you might want to think about just following that link anyway.]

Journalism blogger extraordinaire Paul Bradshow quotes me being, I’ll admit, a bit of a Twitter twat on his Online Journalism today. Paul was live-Twittering a conference last week. I, and a few others, unsubscribed from his normally very interesting feed because his updates were overwhelming our streams. We couldn’t see what any of our other friends were up to because of his volley of updates.

Maybe I was having a bad day. Maybe it was all just a bit much. But Paul’s rapid-fire flow of Tweets displaced those from all my other contacts that day, and I found myself needing to get out straight away. I’m glad Paul’s written about the reaction he saw, because what happened there – and the mixed reaction to it – tells us something about how people like to use this emerging form of communication. 

My problem with it was caused by two things – my expectations of the medium, and the medium’s limitations.

My expectations: I like to use Twitter to keep up with friends and acquaintances. They tell me what they’re up to, or what they’ve just seen, or offer up a link. Occasionally – although I’m a little uncomfortable doing it, as I don’t think Twitter is a conversational space – I’ll have brief one-to-one, but public, exchanges with people. But, generally, this is about short, one-off messages to a group.

The medium’s limitations: it is very easy to overwhelm. Twitter doesn’t thread and, although conventional spam is unlikely, it’s easy for people to spam their friends if they go off on one. Sometimes, that’s entertaining – someone will be at an interesting place, or talking to someone cool, or just madly frustrated by something, and you want lots of updates. Sometimes it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons – I follow the Tweets of someone someone I’ve never met, who writes the most infuriating things about the business we’re both in. Somehow, I can’t let go.

But I digress.

All this means for me is this:

First, Twitter’s no good for live (micro)blogging. It’s hard to convey a sense of what’s happening at an event in only 160 characters.

Second, Twitter’s a personal medium, which means I want to know what you think about events – not just have those events described to me, but that 160 limit stops you doing that.

Third, Twitter’s a broadcast channel. Except when you go into conversation with another user – and I’m not convinced Twitter’s good even for that – it’s a way of saying brief things to lots of people. And people, confronted with a broadcast channel that’s blasting out lots of stuff they’re not interested in, will change channel.

Don’t get me wrong. I love liveblogging – my colleagues on Guardian Sport pretty much invented it with their minute-by-minute reports, which meld commentary with analysis, wit and user interaction. We now have similar all over the site, in lots of different subject areas.

I just don’t think Twitter’s a particularly good place to do it.

It’s unfashionable to say it, but I rather like Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. The first thing you notice is the maps themselves are clearer – more map like – than at rival Google Maps, but it’s the bird’s eye view that strikes me as most impressive. You can find a location, then view it at an angle – not from right overhead, as with Google Maps’ satellite view – which gives more perspective. Then you can spin right around a point, through 360 degrees in four stages.

Because the images from each angle are obviously taken at different times as the satellites pass overhead, you get some rather interesting effects. Take the Guardian’s new home at King’s Place, London. In Google Maps, it’s a hole in the ground.

In Live Search Maps, take the overhead view and the image comes from even earlier than Google’s – the site is still home to a working warehouse (making it, perhaps, two or three years’ old). Move into bird’s eye view, and you can spin round a building site and see four different stages of construction. The opening shot shows the core is being built into the large hole in the ground (late 2006, I think). In the final shot the building looks finished, so must be from this spring (the building is, today, externally complete, and being fitted out for occupation later in the year).

Click on the pictures above today (the day of writing) and you should get to the original picture on Live Search Maps. But, in time, those links will come to show a more recent image.

Which begs the question… I’d love to know if Microsoft (and Google) are keeping these images as they replace them with new versions… over time, they’d build up a archive of cities as they once looked. You could view timelapse overhead shots of districts as they change – in the case of King’s Cross, that could be quite a change indeed. It would add a fascinating new layer to the mapping services, even if you’d still really, really want to change the splendidly inelegant name of the Microsoft version…

A footnote on the whole Mayhill Fowler thing: Mindy McAdams, writing about this story, makes the point it’s important we don’t start insisting on accreditation for “offical” journalists. “Naming who is a journalist – and who is not – is a dangerous, dangerous course to follow – and one I hope will never be pursued in my own country,” she writes.

I agree, but she should be aware that the US insists on just that – accreditation – for foreign reporters.

My US reporting visa is expired now, because I don’t report from there any more. It’s a hassle to renew as well – were I to try, it would be paperwork, money and a visit to the US embassy in London before I could work from the US.

I’m not tempted to try a sneaky workaround. Were I to take up reporting again and do my thing from Web 2.0 in San Francisco next week, I too could be locked up and thrown out the country – just like reporters from Zimbabwe whose fate she highlights on her blog. A freelance working for the Guardian suffered this indignity a few years back, and I know journalists fall foul of this reasonably regularly. Long weekends in New York get a whole bunch harder after that, I’ll warrant.

The reasons for the rules differ, I’m sure, between the US and Zimbabwe, but the effect is just the same.

[via Andrew & Ben]

I’m excited to learn of the latest Le Cool guides’ imminent arrival: four of them, including one for my adopted home city, London, as well as Madrid, Amsterdam and Lisbon. There’s been only one Le Cool book so far – Barcelona – but it’s a thing of great beauty, written by friend and peerless cultural truffle hunter Andrew Losowsky.

To describe it as a city guide would be to do it a huge disservice; the name suggests dull lists of ten museums, a restaurant guide that’s out of date and a slightly inadequate set of maps in the back.

Le Cool books miss out the guide book cliches. Instead, there’s gorgeous design, careful writing and, of course, any guide’s principle currency: great recommendations. Indeed, I’m rather looking forward to finding lots of cool little places in London that I never knew existed. This I fully expect; I’m not, alas, cool enough to write one of these, which is one of the reasons they’ll do so well.