Page three of today’s Sheffield Star. Bottom of the nibs column.

So yeah, “cat doesn’t need rescuing” is probably the weakest story you’d want to print in a regional newspaper on any given day.

You certainly wouldn’t want to print it twice.

Page seven of today’s Sheffield Star.

Printing a crappy story once may be regarded as a misfortune. Printing it twice looks like carelessness.

Using the word “stranded” twice in the first par (hat tip: Sarah Whittle) is…well…

Johnston Press chief Ashley Highfield recently gave an interview in which he boasted that all their papers ran at a “healthy” profit margin of over 20%. Good to know maintaining that level of profit in a contracting industry hasn’t had a noticeable effect on quality.

Every little helps

Diane Abbott’s unfortunate twitter exchange on the caucasian penchant for the devious has been the subject of every radio phone in and TV news talking heads segment today, with many decrying the comments as racism.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’ve been quick to accuse people of that and worse in my time - often when they’ve committed no greater crime than lack of tact and slowness of thought. Occasionally, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve been quicker to accuse because of political leaning or a past display of prejudice.

But what’s more important, from a moral standpoint - the content of Abbott’s tweet, or the way one responds to it?

The league of white, male, privileged, relatively rich people queuing up to feign hurt or distress at such comments on the telly is frankly, unseemly. It’s impolite. It’s ungentlemanly and crass. As a relatively rich, straight white man who lives in a good neighbourhood, I’d like to respectfully ask them to button it.

Some of my ancestors did some pretty horrible things to the rest of the world. Things that bring shame on my heritage. And now, arguably in part as a result of those horrible things, I enjoy a comfortable existence.

If I have to take a minuscule amount of time away from enjoying the fruits of those horrible things to be (perhaps unfairly) vilified for it, so be it. Call it a free punch and take it like a grown up.

Our leaders sure know how to put a dampener on things.

Labour to float “Tax before benefits” policy?

The Labour leader wants to shrug off his party’s ‘soft on spongers’ image with a major  U-turn on his stance on the benefits system.

He will admit Labour blundered by not doing enough to combat the work-shy. 

And he will say that people should get state handouts only if they have paid their taxes first.

I’m hopeful that this is just the mail making things up again, but not that hopeful. The erosion of universal benefits does nothing but drive wedges between parts of society - the deserving and undeserving, the needy and the greedy. The Coalition may have established this as an easy way to keep hold of the headlines in the post Murdoch media, but it’s the last thing Labour should be using to chase poll numbers. 

Happy New Year, though. Chin up.

So when Twitter allows its users to decide for themselves how they want to use the service, and plans their development around those ideas, it works really well:

With Twitter having made its way to the mainstream, one early tweeting convention has brought a nerdy flavor along for the ride. It can be a bit jarring to come across Heidi Montag tweeting about her “#superficial_album,” using the pound sign to make her tweets more likely to appear in searches and become trending topics. Though we might forget where that # originated, the record shows where credit is due — and it’s to an individual Twitter user.

Se also retweets.

On the other hand, when Twitter decides it knows best, and tries to force its users to use the service in a particular way, it tends to go less well.

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “dickbar” and often abandoning the Twitter app entirely because of it. Its initial implementation as a floating overlay over anything you were doing in the app was far worse. Now, it’s just at the top of the main timeline, and it scrolls with the list. But it’s still offensive to most people who hated its debut, because making it scroll with the list didn’t solve the problem of it being there and being mandatory.

All I’m saying is that had Twitter learned anything from its own history, it probably wouldn’t have foisted a watered down dickbar -a dickbutton, if you will - on the top icon level of the official iPhone app. I’m guessing it also would have thought twice before deciding it didn’t want users to be able to see their retweets in a single place. That’s all I’m saying.

Is it time for Apple to make good on its promise of deep Twitter integration, and provide an iOS level Twitter reader?

The Long Winters - The Commander Thinks Aloud

Yesterday’s Wikileaks debate at Docfest was truly fascinating, and featured an absolutely stellar panel - data journalist James Ball, Judith Ehrlich, director of The Most Dangerous Man in America, a documentary about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith and “wikivisionist” @exiledsurfer.

The whole discussion can be heard in the link in my previous post, and my take on WL seemed to be shared by some members of the panel. I’ve always been of the opinion that Wikileaks, as is the case with any political actor, was much more interesting before it became the story. Further, though, yesterday’s discussion leads me to think that it’s not just the quality of the story that has been damaged by the iconization of Julian Assange, but the good that it can do for the world.

The suggestion by @exiledsurfer (iirc) that the channels for whistleblowers to leak to WL have closed, and that no new information has been leaked to WL in 12 months is disappointing. In a way, the whole idea of Wikileaks is unavoidably self defeating. It has to be based upon a cultish dedication to the open information philosophy in order to change how the world thinks about secrecy, but perhaps the practical implementation of a service for whistleblowers requires one too many compromises for Assange.

The conclusion must therefore be that Wikileaks has, in a way, served its purpose. It has shown what is possible, and changed public perception of data, information, privacy and secrecy forever. As James Ball says, “Google wasn’t the first search engine, Windows wasn’t the first operating system.” It now falls to others, perhaps even the mainstream media to appropriate the techniques and ideas of Wikileaks and build on them.

Communities minister Eric Pickles is said to be furious that almost all council bosses, including Sheffield council’s Chief Executive, have ignored his order to take a pay cut.

Finally got around to playing with the photos I took when Sarah and I visited the States this summer. There are some good ones from DC too, but they’re for another day.

Having recently acquired them on BluRay for a very reasonable price, the better half and I have embarked on the now annual review of the Harry Potter movies.

I’m very much a casual consumer of the works of Rowling, but I always enjoy the early installments’ deliciously lighthearted depiction of suburban child abuse. And being reminded that the Ginger was quite funny before he buffed up.

We caught Deathly Hallows pt1, or Harry on Camping as the Kermode has dubbed it, last night. It’s about as far from a Chris Columbus movie as it’s possible for a film about teenage wizards to be.

There’s no Quidditch, no moving staircases and no patronising exposition from Grainger. In fact, there’s very little exposition at all. Rarely have I seen a motion picture so comfortable requiring such prior knowledge. The reliance on showing rather than telling is pleasing too. Chamber of Secrets particularly felt like a book being read to you for three hours, and there’s none of that here.

And on top of that, the pacing is fucking odd. Sure there are some nice setpieces to keep it moving, but the alluded to outdoor pursuits make for a second act which plays like an indie flick. There’s an hour long British mood poem at the heart of this blockbuster, and it’s weird.

But it’s good weird. It’s Dagobah cave in Empire Strikes Back weird. It continues last year’s pleasing trend of mainstream flicks crediting their audience with more than middle school smarts, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Today will most likely see the worldwide number of bloggers swell dramatically. A whole mess of folk, enthused by the bold, daunting challenge of #oneaday will be adding their distinctiveness to the Borg-like collective that is the blogosphere.

And I can tell you what most of them will be posting about today. They’ll be giving their musings on the numerological significance (or lack thereof) of today’s date. They’ll be listing their favourite songs, bands, TV shows, movies, books, plays, games, takeaways and media events involving serial murder of the previous year, and their hopes for the year to come.

There’ll be moans and cheers over the quality of Christmas telly, lists of New Year’s resolutions, and of course a bunch fretting that they don’t know what to put in their very first #oneaday post, and wondering if they’ll make it past the first week.

There might even be a few who write about David Cameron closing 60% of Sure Start centres, despite promising to maintain Sure Start funding during the election campaign.

Anyway, I feel pretty sure I’ll be the only one today posting about Ninja Warrior.

You see, when I decided to do this one a day thing, I figured I’d do it between here, my politics blog and my music blog. If I had nothing specific to talk about, I’d surely be able to find something in the media or entertainment I’d consumed in the day to fill a couple of paragraphs.

So it turns out the only media I’ve consumed today is about five episodes of Ninja Warrior, which is a Japanese sports entertainment programme. It’s kind of along the lines of Total Wipeout, but fucking hardcore. It’s compelling viewing. Most of the contestants, particularly the successful ones, are proper athletes. Fuck, there was this one guy, a firefighter, who I swear to god looked just like Bruce Lee on the Enter the Dragon poster. Channel One (formerly Virgin One) are showing it at the minute, and I fully advise you to tune in.

Thing is, the First of January, while it has a certain basic resonance with ideas of renewal and rebirth, is a fucking stupid time to try and start things as you mean to go on. Most people are tired, even hung over from the night before. The last thing you want to do is read more books or start eating healthy. The only resolutions which don’t seem more than a little foolhardy are abstention from alcohol, and eating more leftover pizza.

So how about next year we start the resolutions on the second. What difference does a day make anyway? You’ll still have your new personal hygiene routine in place long before anyone’s financial circumstances have improved to the point that there’ll be public gatherings again, and it’ll give you a chance to get to the bookshop to pick up the works of Wilde after the bank holiday.

Let’s just have a day, just one day, where it’s OK to watch Ninja Warrior without feeling like you’ve fucked up the rest of the year already.

In the past, companies only had to take public opinion into account in their decision making in as much as letter writing or boycotts would affect their bottom lines. McDonalds, Nestle and Coca Cola prove that while such protests might be an annoyance, they could pretty much ignore them with little adverse impact.

However, in recent times, a new kind of protest action has become more prevalent, and much much more effective. “Distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks, such as the one currently being waged against credit card companies that have withdrawn services from WikiLeaks, present a much greater threat to corporations. 

Since yesterday, a worldwide distributed organisation of activists, collectively known as Anonymous and networked via web communities, has been bombarding the Mastercard’s website with traffic, overloading their servers and putting the site out of action.

At the time of writing, Mastercard’s website is down, and it’s emerging that “SecureCode” transactions aren’t working either. While the former is merely a symbolic victory, the latter will affect millions of online transactions the world over. 

Mastercard, along with Paypal and Visa, cited brand protection among their reasons for withdrawing services. Ignoring the apparent pressure placed on at least one of the above companies by the US State Department, one has to wonder if we are approaching a time when the threat of direct action which entirely takes place online will take over from real world flak as the biggest concern to corporations. 

Previous Anonymous campaigns, most notably against the Church of Scientology have certainly made headlines, and the massive spikes in traffic to their website costs money in both bandwidth costs and improved infrastructure to prevent it happening again.

But not until today’s attack have we seen an attack which managed to place functions of a financial institution out of commission, doubtless costing them a good deal in lost business and damaging their brand further as customers are turned away from the service. 

At a time when petitions and letter writing campaigns have less and less impact, we may be seeing the emergence of a new way for activists to put pressure on corporations. It’s underground, it’s grimy, but it seems like an effective method of democratic discourse in a cynical world.

Plans…

Yoda and Daisy on a sunny day in Fineshade.