My oh my, it’s certainly been getting heated in the Scottish political blogosphere of late. The Glasgow East by-election has captivated us all — and it’s captivated some people a bit too much.

Councillor Andrew Burns can’t remember it being like this during the Dunfermline West by-election. If I was in a cheeky mood I might say that is because Lib Dems are just big soft hippies. (Lib Dem Stephen Glenn disapproves of the current blogospheric Labour–SNP tensions.)

But I think the Glasgow East brouhaha is more to do with the fact that, uniquely, both of the main parties in the running are severely on the back foot. Labour are in big trouble because there is the possibility that this safer-than-safe seat will be lost. This in itself represents a major blow for Labour and they are scrabbling defensively to save something from this election.

Meanwhile, the SNP are in big trouble because they started the campaign by confidently predicting a win. When that possibility is by no means certain, they are going on the attack to try and make sure the victory happens and that a narrow loss (which otherwise would have been a massive coup for the SNP) is avoided.

Jeff has heard it rumoured that the blogosphere will be a prominent feature of the Sunday newspapers this weekend as the fuss over this post by Kezia Dugdale continues to rumble on. In the comments over at Stephen Glenn’s blog, Jeff pointed out that by-elections bring out the worst in all of us (by which he means them). “Delightfully so.”

I’m sorry to say that I’m not so delighted (maybe that is my fluffy Lib Dem tendency taking over). In fact, the rough and tumble of party political debate is one of the things that has made me more apathetic about party politics in recent years.

Two or three years ago I used to get involved in all that verbal jousting with party political types. I’m ashamed to say that I was quite rude once or twice in a manner which was uncalled for. But I did get quite annoyed at the way some people seemed to want to inflame the situation and it was inevitable that tensions would boil over at some point or another. I didn’t really enjoy it. In fact it angered me.

Then I realised what was going on. These people actually enjoy the rough and tumble. They live and breathe it. That is why they became politicians. They love to tear metaphorical lumps out of their opponents rather than debating in a calm manner. If they say something below the belt, they don’t necessarily mean real harm. It is a kind of pantomime. A verbal boxing match.

Then I looked at the nasty election campaigns that political parties so often take part in. The relentless negativity and attacking made me wonder if this is what politicians are really in it for. Just as a boxer chooses to box because he likes to fight, a politician chooses his profession because he likes to fight. Except that a politician doesn’t have the physical prowess.

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with mental battles. This is what debating really is: a verbal chess game. But it’s okay to do it in a debating society. Is it so cool to do it under the pretence that you’re doing it for the good of the people?

Now onto the right storm in a teacup that is Kezia Dugdale’s blog post. Now I don’t know if the rumour is true or not. I err towards the notion that it’s true. Jeff now seems to think it’s true, and I’m sure he has ways of finding out (relative to me anyway — I have no contacts and no-one ever tips me off about anything *sniff*). Plus I doubt that Kezia Dugdale would post something like that unless it was true.

Clearly, though, her post was ambiguously worded in order to have maximum impact. She made it sound as though the SNP cabinet minister in question (who, it transpires, is Nicola Sturgeon) was completely at fault when it seems as though BBC Scotland were probably equally at fault. Now, according to Tom Harris, Nicola Sturgeon’s big crime is trying to wave the security man away. How awful of her!!

Regardless of the merits of the story (”tittle-tattle” was mentioned in the first comment on Kezia Dugdale’s post, and I wouldn’t disagree with that), I have personally had great mileage out of it as I have been gleefully repeating the story to my non-blogging friends. Incidentally, I have equally gleefully been telling the stories of Labour’s various mishaps as well, before any nats start jumping up and down.

Nonetheless, the story is just a bit of fun really and it doesn’t demonstrate that Nicola Sturgeon has made any serious error of judgement (although, as I said, the original post was ambiguously-enough worded to make you think it might have). In short, it is just a light-hearted sort of “and finally”-style election story if you ask me. A Prescott punch-level story, as Two Doctors points out.

The fact that the next day Nicola Sturgeon apparently asked Kezia Dugdale to retract the post says much more about Nicola Sturgeon than the original post said about Kezia Dugdale if you ask me. What was a minor post on a blog that didn’t say very much about the SNP is now apparently on the verge of being big news (or bigger than it was anyway).

The story has certainly snowballed since then and the Scottish blogosphere has been in about as much of a frenzy as I have ever seen it in. It all reminds me of the Schillings scenario. Wouldn’t it have been better for Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP to take the moral high ground and ignore it?

I have to point out that I quite admire Kezia Dugdale. I am no apologist for Labour, as regular readers will know. But you have got to take your hat off to her. Even though, because of all that rough and tumble that I dislike, no-one enters politics unless they have a thick skin, Kezia Dugdale has to take a lot of flak.

She is practically the only major Labour voice in a Scottish blogosphere that is increasingly dominated by SNP macho-men (dare I call them ‘cybernats’?) who are poised, waiting to throw stones at Labour. I and many others would give up in that situation. You’ve got to give Kezia Dugdale credit for perseverance if nothing else.

Even though her blog is ridiculously partisan and never very critical of the Labour party, you can easily level this criticism at two or three SNP blogs as well (Tartan Hero and Calum Cashley spring to mind). Ideas of Civilisation had a really interesting post about this. Why do people blog about politics, particularly when they are often so polemical?

Related to that, Views from North Britain reminds us that blogging is still a minority activity. So any amount of posting on a blog is unlikely to have much of an effect.

Incidentally, how come Nicola Sturgeon always seems to be at the centre of these internet rumours come election time? I seem to remember during last year’s Scottish Parliament elections the story of her very rude nickname was flying relatively freely…

Update: I have just seen this post from Holyrood Watcher which pretty much sums up the situation.

Hello.

I’ve been wondering a bit about the way technology news is still ghettoised. I don’t mean news about the latest rubbish web 2.0 start-up with a ridiculous name. I mean quite important stuff. Security problems and the like.

Take what happened last week. A patch to fix a major flaw in the DNS was released. It is pretty important stuff. But the only mentions of it have been ghettoised in the darkest recesses of the technology sections, cordoned off in yellow and black tape with “warning: geeks only” written on it.

I don’t watch the television much these days, so I might be wrong. But I saw no mention of it on the news. I heard no mention of it on the radio. You certainly don’t hear people talking about it on the streets or in pubs.

You might think, “So what? Security update for X, Y and Z are released every day. You can’t have the news reporting it every day.” But something extra happened with that security update that was released last week: it crippled many users’ computers. Including my parents’ computer.

It is just as well I was still able to use my computer to try and find out what the problem was and how to workaround it. It turned out that ZoneAlarm threw a hissy-fit after Windows XP had updated and prevented users from accessing the internet.

In fairness, the BBC reported this on their website — but that’s not very useful if you’ve got no internet. Perhaps there are still people scratching their head about why they’ve not been able to access the internet for the past week.

The problem is twofold. One, the mainstream media seems quite averse to any technology story unless it’s to do with [say this like a caveman] “GOOGLE” or “APPLE”. Or “GOOGLE”. Simply, if you want to find out anything meaningful about technology you have to really know where to look for it.

And this brings me on to the second part of the problem. The people who don’t know where to look for information are also the most vulnerable users. There are people who, for whatever reason, can’t be motivated to take proactive measures to prevent themselves from the various security issues that inevitably arise when you use the internet.

I have a friend who bought a new computer a few weeks ago. The other day he complained to me that his new computer has already got spyware on it. The thing is that it’s not difficult to protect yourself really.

I’m not really a computer expert in the slightest, but I know the basics of how to protect myself — essentially keep all your software updated with the latest patches and don’t click any dodgy links. I don’t think it’s really a difficult concept. And — touch wood — these basics have worked for me. Since I got my own computer early last year I’ve never had anything worse than a tracking cookie on my computer (as far as I know — I just know that this is an invitation for my computer to explode under the weight of pop-ups tomorrow…).

But even simple measures like these that anyone can take are difficult to get through to some people. So many people still treat computers with awe. It is sometimes easy to forget how foreign computers are to many people.

I remember a couple of years ago when there was a really bad signalling failure on the train line into Edinburgh. Basically every train was cancelled. An old lady pointed to the automated departure monitor and asked why it said a list of trains towards the bottom of the screen were still listed as being on time.

This is what she said in protest (as though it would make her more likely to get on a train to Edinburgh): “I thought computers were wonderful things that never ever went wrong.” But even my basic knowledge of how computers work told me exactly why the trains were still listed as being ‘on time’ — because they hadn’t even departed from their start station, so hadn’t passed any sensors and weren’t technically late at all. The computer was none the wiser for obvious reasons.

This can be put down to the old issue that people in their thirties and younger have been using computers for almost all of their lives and understand what a computer is good for and what it isn’t. Youngsters who have lived with computers all their lives understand how a computer works, but for many people older than that computers just work by magic.

The thing is, that divide between young and old is not so clear cut as I used to think. I was listening to iPM yesterday and there was an interview with Clive Sinclair. He pointed out that back in the 1980s computer users really understood computers because they had to in order to get them to work. Today’s youngsters growing up with computers generally don’t understand computers at all.

So we come back to my friend who is the same age as me and has a problem with spyware. I have had a few conversations with him where I have tried to persuade him to use Firefox. For him, the internet is the internet and he doesn’t understand how one browser can be better than another. Even though I have told him about all the superior features and better security that a browser like Firefox or Opera can provide, he persists on using Internet Exploder version bum point poo.

Many people, through ignorance, don’t take the simple measures to keep themselves safe on the internet. I’ve had a look at the stats for this website to see what bad browsers visitors to this site are using.

In the past month, an amazing 20% of visitors used Internet Explorer 6. This is a web browser that was originally released seven years ago and last updated four years ago. It is notorious for its security problems. The more up-to-date Internet Explorer 7 was released almost two years ago.

You would expect Firefox users to be smarter, right? Not always. In the past month, 243 Firefox users that visited this website were using a version of the browser that is considered unsafe (which I defined as 2.0.0.14 and below). This included 19 people using 1.5.0.12, 11 using 1.0.7 and 8 using 1.5.0.3. Most amazingly, 4 visitors were using Firefox 0.9.1, a browser that has been out of date for four years. I dread to think what kind of security problems these users have been getting themselves in.

It got me wondering. If this many people are using dodgy browsers, how many people are still trying in vain to unsubscribe from spam emails? How many don’t know that even viewing an image in an email alerts a spammer that your email address is active? You could go on.

I don’t mean all this in a preachy kind of way. I completely understand why it is difficult for people to keep up to date with all the security issues that arise. I just find it really frustrating that simple awareness issues are not, well, made aware to people.

Things don’t get much more ubiquitous than the internet. It is impossible to imagine that someone growing up today will not be a regular internet user in some form or another. And there are real dangers on the internet that aren’t to do with [say this like a caveman] “PEDOPHILS” and “CYBER BULLIES”. But the media reports on made-up dangers like “KNIVES” and “YOOFS” and “KNIVES” as though we are on the verge of bladeageddon.

Yesterday I was listening to Digital Planet. They had a chap called Stefan Frei on reporting that around 60% of all internet users are using an out-of-date browser. He had a really smart way of thinking about software security. You should think of software as being perishable, just in the same way as foodstuffs. You wouldn’t eat a mouldy slice of bread, so why would you use a browser with a huge security hole in it?

It’s a really smart analogy that should be spread far and wide. It’s just frustrating that the place I heard it was on Digital Planet, which is probably listened to mainly by people who already know that they should be updating their browsers.

Yesterday WordPress 2.6 came out which is pretty unbelievable because it feels like WP 2.5 just came out last month. Anyway, a new version of WordPress comes with the necessity to upgrade and the hair-pulling that comes with it.

My upgrades went fairly smoothly, but I did notice an issue with .swf files not being installed. I saw that a couple of other people had the same problem.

It got me thinking about what might be causing the problem. The obvious candidate was that the Flashblock Firefox extension wasn’t playing nice with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Flashblock, incidentally, is a must-have Firefox extension for me as it allows you to have complete control over Flash files. No more stupid adverts or autoplay or any of that other nonsense that comes with Flash. Meanwhile, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is slightly flaky, but at the end of the day it makes upgrading WordPress much less painful and much faster than it would be otherwise.

Anyway, I have three blogs. I had the problem with the .swf files on the first two blogs. So that gave me a perfect opportunity to see if my theory about Flashblock was right on my third blog. So I disabled Flashblock and ran WPAU. The upgrade went well, with all the files uploading.

If you already ran WPAU while using Flashblock, your WordPress upgrade may be incomplete. Check to see if the following files are missing and upload them manually.

• wp-includes/js/swfupload/swfupload_f9.swf
• wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/media/img/flv_player.swf

I’ve emailed the author of WPAU to let him know. He says he’ll work on a fix, but I thought I’d post it here to give people a heads-up.

This post began as a response to Jeff in the comments to a post below. But it was getting long and waaay off topic. So I have decided to post it as a separate post.

To save you from trawling all the way through the discussion, we were basically wondering whether the SNP can afford to throw away student votes. I think we agreed that they probably can, because student votes don’t exist to a great extent anyway.

And you raise a good point about the students too. I do wonder how many of them really vote despite their protests and the like. Am I right in thinking that you were even considering not voting? If that’s the case then not much more proof is needed that student participation rates are low.

Jeff is right that I am considering not voting in the next election. It all depends on how annoyed I am at all the parties. Last time round I voted for everyone but Labour (even giving Solidarity my fourth choice!) in the local elections. Possibly in the general election I will throw my weight behind an anti-Gordon Brown tactical voting campaign since I live in his constituency. How funny would it be if he lost his seat? I can’t miss out on that opportunity!

But in general I am pretty disappointed in all of the parties. And given that I have almost zero chance of affecting the outcome anyway, I see little point in casting my vote. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m apathetic about politics, as you are surely aware.

I can’t speak for other students of course, but I think they are much like all young people, and to an extent people in general. Some are really interested in politics and will vote in any election no matter how inconsequential. But many, many others are entirely disenchanted with politics.

There is a stereotype that students are generally heavily interested in politics. Of course there is that element of loud-mouthed self-styled radicals. But they are in a pretty small minority. Most students, I bet, could not give two hoots about party politics. Even some politics students I’ve come across can be surprisingly poorly informed.

This has something to do with blogging as well. It used to perplex me — perhaps it still does — that you do not get more students blogging about politics. After all, students are supposed to be opinionated and earnest. And they often have plenty of spare time to dedicate to this sort of thing. Plus, all of this blogging and new technology — you might expect it to be a young person’s game.

But you don’t get many student political bloggers. From the top of my head, I can count them on one hand. Maybe I can count them on two fingers — including me. I remember once a survey revealed that the average age of readers of political blogs is 40.

Even among my mostly politically aware circle of friends, I probably know almost as many non-voters as voters. I am somewhere in the middle. For the time being I vote, but I don’t blame anyone for not voting.

Funnily enough, despite the general trend that people get more interested in politics (or at least are more likely to vote) as they get older, I have moved in the opposite direction. When I was as young as possibly 12 or 13 I was more earnest and couldn’t see why anyone wouldn’t vote. Now at 22 I am jaded and cynical and am more and more likely to abstain every day.

What does it say about me that I’m jaded and cynical at the age of 22? Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m actually an old codger…

Anyone disagree with me on students and politics? I know a few students (or graduands!) will be reading this, so what do you think?

Last week I was in the pub talking to a friend and we were talking about blogging. This person doesn’t know much about it, but he knows that I’m heavily interested in it. (NB. This person is a Labour Party supporter, which explains a lot.)

He asked me a really strange question. “So, who is it that’s in charge of blogging then?”

“What do you mean, ‘in charge’?”

“Well, there must be someone who’s behind it all.”

“What do you mean? No! It’s something that you do yourself! Anyone can set up a blog.”

I actually had to explain to him that there is no overlord that looks after the blogosphere. There is no official process. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to set up a blog.

And that’s the way it should be, right? Blogging — and, indeed, the internet as a whole — is fundamentally a medium of freedom. Blogging is about many of the things we value the most about freedom — of speech, protest, association. And for many oppressed people in this world who would otherwise not be allowed to express themselves, blogging offers the chance to speak out to a wide audience.

The day you have to ask permission to blog is the day you have to ask permission to express an opinion. (Of course, thanks to our friends in the Labour Government, you already do have to ask permission to express your opinion in this country — but that is a whole new blog post.) What amazes me is not just that some people think that’s the way it should be. It that they think it’s the way it already is and are so unconcerned about it.

Still, at least we know it’s not going to happen, right? Right?

Actually, no. Some poisonous person called Marianne Mikko wants to put a stop to all of that “expressing your opinion” nonsense. Marianno Mikko is an Estonian centre-left MEP. It would be someone on the left, wouldn’t it? If anyone asks me why I don’t see myself as being on the left, it is because the left contains people like this.

Here is what she has to say: “the blogosphere has so far been a haven of good intentions and relatively honest dealing. However, with blogs becoming commonplace, less principled people will want to use them”.

Clairwil’s sarcastic response is the only sensible one: “Oh God! I hate ‘less principled’ bloggers!”

And the solution for stopping less principled people from having a blog? Why, red tape of course!

I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why.

It’s interesting that Ms Mikko thinks that the public trusts blogs, because it doesn’t seem that way to me. Take the aversion that many people have to Wikipedia. “You can’t trust that, you know — anyone can edit it,” they say. That is despite the fact that it contains few more errors than Encyclopædia Britannica does. You hear much the same things about bloggers. They’re not to be trusted. (Of course, the mainstream media is responsible and measured in all of its output!)

That’s just the beginning though. Here is what German ‘Liberal’ Jorgo Chatzimarkakis — a member of Germany’s “Free Democratic Party” — has to say:

bloggers cannot automatically be considered a threat, but imagine pressure groups, professional interests or any other groups using blogs to pass on their message.

Just imagine it! Imagine all those pressure groups. Imagine any other groups! All using tools to communicate with people! Isn’t it just shocking?

Mr Chatzimarkakis continues that blogs “can be seen as a threat”. A threat to what? His job? Then good! Honestly. If this is the sort of thing that comes out of Germany’s “Free Democratic” Party, I dread to think of the illiberal nonsense the other parties come out with.

The thing about it is that you are perfectly welcome to choose which blogs you trust and which you don’t. For me, there are of course some blogs that I trust more than others. I am happy with the decisions I make in this regard. And if it turns out I was wrong about a blog then I just change my mind. Easy.

So what on earth is this ‘quality mark’ nonsense all about? Do these people really think that we are unable to decide for ourselves what we can read on the internet? If these people get their way, soon enough the government will be telling us what to read. If the government tells me to read something though, that is a sure fire sign that I ought to steer clear of it.

Quality mark? Sounds more like skid mark to me.

This might be laughed off by some. But the fact that there are politicians even talking about this is enough to make my blood boil. How can these people have such scant regard for a fundamental right such as freedom of speech?

And, via the comments at The Devil’s Kitchen, it appears as though in Italy they are at an advanced stage of legislation requiring people to register their blogs. Not only that, they would have to pay a tax as well!

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money… the Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.
99% would close down.

Jesus Shite! Are we really headed down this road?

Ideas of Civilisation has written a really interesting post about the state of the Scottish blogosphere compared with the dodgy comments that get posted on The Herald’s website, Scotsman.com and the like.

The Scottish blogosphere is indeed, by and large, a pretty good place for a debate. Nowadays it is probably dominated a bit too much by SNP supporters, but I think the debate is usually pretty respectful. IoC asks, why does this respectful atmosphere not cross over into the mainstream media comment sites?

The answer is that they are mainstream media comment sites. As I have pointed out before, trolls, flamers and knuckle-draggers are attracted to MSM comment sites like flies on a shit. The blog spEak You’re bRanes, a blog I mention many times, does a good job of compiling the most ridiculous comments posted to MSM outlets.

The thing is that IoC is right when he says that the debate in the Scottish blogosphere is good. But this isn’t peculiar to Scotland. The debate in the blogosphere world-wide is also good. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of extreme comments in MSM websites does not just exist on Scottish websites (although Scotland does have a distinct phenomenon with its ‘cybernats’). It is known to media outlets the world over, and even some big websites such as Digg and YouTube.

So why is there such a difference? After all, the point of blogging is meant to be that it’s really easy to get involved in. So why don’t people with poisonous views pollute the blogosphere so easily?

The answer is that it’s so simple to avoid poisonous people in the blogosphere. Does someone have a terrible blog? That’s okay, because no-one will read it. Knuckle-dragging extremists find that they will reach a far wider audience if they post on a website like Scotsman.com or the BBC.

There is another answer. Even though in theory it is easy to set up a blog, the reality is slightly different. You still have to put in quite a lot of effort. It can be time-consuming and you have to come up with the goods to make sure people read it. If you are not interested in having a genuine discussion, you will soon find that blogging is quite costly. But for those who are willing to put the effort in for there to be a good debate, the pay-off can be good. For this reason, bloggers tend to be more articulate, reasoned and intelligent than your average Have Your Sayer.

Does this mean that we should give up on the idea of having comments on the BBC’s blogs or The Herald’s political stories? Far from it. All you have to do to improve the nature of the debate is create the right mechanism to ensure that the cream will rise up.

Websites such as Digg and YouTube have implemented a voting mechanism in an attempt to get rid of trolls. You can choose to give a comment a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. The BBC’s Have Your Say has a similar voting mechanism. However, this doesn’t work in my view. In fact, if anything, it exacerbates the problem. It just makes the comments section even more of a hotbed of demagoguery — the loudest attention seekers, not the most reasoned and articulate, will grab the most votes.

Some websites are just lucky enough to have a good audience that respects debate. The Economist’s website is said to be relatively free of HYS-style trolls. That is probably due to the target audience of the publication. I suspect many HYSers aren’t even aware of the existence of The Economist and if they are, they aren’t interested in posting there because it’s not a publication for them.

However, for the more mass-market audiences of the likes of the BBC, The Herald and The Scotsman, it’s too late to do anything about this. They made a decision long ago to appeal to the masses, so its audience will have that demagogic element that will be reflected in the comments.

Another alternative might be to force users to post under their real names. It is generally believed that once people’s cloak of anonymity has been removed, their online debating style becomes more respectful and considered.

On the other hand, many bloggers and commenters have genuine reason to wish to remain anonymous. And, barring the universal adoption of an OpenID-style system, it would be nigh on impossible to police. A decent ‘middle ground’ option might be to place OpenID comments at the top of the thread and hide the anonymous comments towards the bottom of the page.

Another possible solution is simply to make it costly for the ill-informed jokers to take part. For some, it may be an anathema to make people pay to post comments — almost against the culture of the web. But it needn’t be.

There is one big website that is known for having decent comments sections that avoid the numbskullery of sites such as YouTube — MetaFilter. There it costs $5 to post comments. That is a one-time life-long fee. Pay $5 and you can post to your heart’s content. There is also a one-week time lag between signing up and being able to post.

This ensures that only the people who are interested in contributing properly get involved. $5 is quite a small fee for those who really value MetaFilter, but it is enough to deter time-wasting trolls. A one-week time lag also prevents people from just posting a crazy extreme rant in the heat of the moment. Just like blogging, MetaFilter is costly for the time-wasters, but beneficial for those who want to make a genuine contribution.

The solution for the MSM websites if they want to clean out their comment sections is therefore to somehow create a mechanism that makes it costly for extremist ranters to post, but makes it beneficial for those who want to take part in a reasoned debate.

Perhaps a MeFi-style one-off fee or a time lag might do the trick. If you had to pay, say, £5 to open a lifetime account on Scotsman.com to allow you to post, you might just go for it if that £5 was enough to deter the ranting trolls. It could also be a handy (though potentially small) additional source of income for the media outlets.

IoC’s issue isn’t just with the media websites though. It’s also with the Scottish Government’s website. If a government website becomes an outlet for extreme views, that is undoubtedly a problem. The Scottish Government’s “National Conversation” has been accused of being “a chatroom for cybernats“. That was probably always inevitable. After all, a “conversation” about independence initiated by the SNP is bound not to last long or be very meaningful.

Nonetheless, I have to applaud the Scottish Government for going ahead with the project. To have user-generated content on a government website is pretty big stuff if you ask me and it’s probably the right thing to do — engaging the citizens in the policy-making process and all that.

But the contributions have to be meaningful. I’ve not been following the National Conversation very closely. Skimming through it just now, it doesn’t look too bad, but obviously it’s caused concern among some.

Perhaps for user-generated content on government websites there should be an expectation that you do not contribute anonymously. I think that is probably a reasonable expectation for someone who wants to take part in civic society. People who write a letter to their MP or MSP or another figure in public office can’t expect a reply without supplying a name and address. The Government’s e-petition website also requires you to enter a name and address. The authenticity of some of these names is questionable though.

Perhaps future projects like the National Conversation might require people to supply real names and addresses (not publicly viewable of course) in order to participate. This would remove the cloak of anonymity and improve the likelihood of there being a sensible debate. Looking at the National Conversation website, it looks like most (but not all) participants are contributing under their real names anyway. Still, it’s a thought.

I see that the Terry Watch blog was the subject of a piece in last week’s Sunday Herald (via Jeff).

I didn’t read Terry Watch. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was still going. I expressed my discomfort about the blog not too long after it started, actually.

I’m not particularly a fan of these negative campaign blogs as a whole. I think inevitably the heat / light ratio increases in such blogs. For that reason I didn’t ever check the blog while I was compiling the Roundups. For the same reasons I also ignore blogs such as Ridiculous Politics and Fib Dems — both blogs which now appear to be defunct. It’s possibly fair to say that Terry Watch too is now defunct.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly a fan of the Terry Watch blog, I can’t agree with Jeff’s assessment that Terry Kelly was the victim of “bullying” here. I haven’t seen the controversial images that were posted by Shotgun (not a blogger I’ve ever been a fan of). From what I have heard though they certainly crossed the line.

But a lot of what I saw on Terry Watch could be bracketed under ‘fair comment’. Some excellent bloggers were involved in the site, some of whom have found their names being dragged through the mud in the comments over at the Sunday Herald website quite unfairly.

Indeed, the whole piece, written by Jasper Hamill, looks like pretty bad journalism to me. Through a sleight-of-hand Hamill attempts to associate the Terry Watch blog with racist hate-mail sent to Terry Kelly. To link the blog to this mail without any evidence is pretty disingenuous, particularly since the anti-Terry Kelly backlash began several months before the Terry Watch blog was set up. I, for instance, wrote about Terry Kelly as early as 2006, and again here. I followed up a couple of months later describing him as The greatest argument against representative democracy — a view I stick to.

If you read the article carefully it is clear that the controversy surrounding the Terry Watch blog was caused by Shotgun. But the story is “sexed up” with liberally-sprinkled references to Right for Scotland, revealing his identity in the process. The reason the story mentions RfS? Because he once stood for the Conservative party. In other words, this story is yet more of the “Booo! Tories!” nonsense that I wrote about last month.

The headline is, “Failed Tory candidate contributed to hate website attacking political rival — ‘TerryWatch’ blog contains uploaded photographs of Labour councillor’s daughter doctored to create obscene images”. A more faithful headline would have read, “Random shock-blogger Shotgun posts offensive images” — but that would have taken the wind right out of the sails of the story.

Plobotsky continued the ‘guilt by association’ theme set by Jasper Hamill, accusing several top Scottish bloggers of being culpable for Shotgun’s images. Obviously, though, they are not culpable for Shotgun’s images. Clairwil has explained why.

I guess the difference between Clairwil et al. and Right for Scotland is that RfS apparently continued to post after Shotgun’s images were published while the others decided to stop contributing. That perhaps demonstrates that RfS has slightly poor judgement, but it hardly shows any malicious intent. I feel sorry for him that his name has been dragged through the mud as a result of gutter journalism. Thankfully a few of the comments provide testimonials outlining RfS’s good character, which I see no reason to doubt.

As for Terry Kelly, I can feel no sympathy for him. As I recall, the original reason why Terry Watch was set up was as a response to Terry Kelly’s thoroughly abusive responses to commenters on his blog. As I said in that post I wrote last year, the Kellys (Terry and Rayleen) have a pretty solid track record of baselessly accusing other bloggers of being mentally ill, racist, homophobic and whatever slurs he can manage to shove into the debate.

Once, instead of engaging in a proper conversation with me, he decided to slur me by saying that I must either be a nationalist or right-wing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think if you have been reading my blog for any length of time you will come to the opposite conclusion. Terry Kelly obviously couldn’t be bothered actually reading my blog and engaging in a sensible debate, so decided to resort to ill-targeted personal attacks.

That wasn’t my final encounter with him though. He went back to Scottish Roundup, calling me “janus faced C - - -”. One can only guess what his four-letter C-word was supposed to be, but at least he had the decency to censor himself on that occasion. Given his track record, one can only assume that he is crying crocodile tears when he complains about the robust nature of Terry Watch in the Sunday Herald piece.

However, despite being at the receiving end of his terrible debating skills, I did not feel the need to take part in the Terry Watch malarkey. I felt that Terry Kelly’s own blog did the job for Terry Watch. You don’t have to spend long reading it to realise that Terry Kelly is an utter buffoon, with badly-thought out opinions and a debating style that borders on the abusive who routinely fails to publish legitimate comments. In short, it sums up everything that is wrong with the anything-as-long-as-it’s-Labour mentality that exists in the west of Scotland.

Did Jasper Hamill’s piece mention just how bad a representative Terry Kelly is? Just this weaselly-worded phrase: “ill-thought out proclamations which, among other things, claimed women were “thick”". Calling women thick is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem with Terry Kelly. Delving into the bizarre views of Terry Kelly and just what accounts for the fact that this man gets elected time after time would have made for a much more worthy story than trying to attach the blame to RfS for something he didn’t do.

As for the suggestion that the Terry Watch blog represented bullying, I would think that this is an overstatement. Bullies are people who pick on the weak and powerless. As a Labour councillor, Terry Kelly is certainly neither weak nor powerless compared to the bloggers he crosses swords with in his own borderline-abusive manner. To call Terry Watch a bullying campaign is surely an injustice to the many people who are the real victims of bullying.

As long as the content is non-abusive, there is a place for a blog like Terry Watch, no matter how negative it is. Terry Kelly is an elected representative and therefore ought to be held to account. And as Clairwil said, I doubt Terry Kelly entered politics without being thick-skinned enough to take robust debate. He certainly knows how to dole it out.

There is a lesson from all of this though. As bloggers, we have a responsibility to ensure that high standards of debate are adhered to. Both Terry Kelly himself and the Terry Watch blog probably failed on this account. Indeed, online debates are well known for descending into flame wars, tirades of abuse and disrespect. How to keep the standards of debate high will be the subject of a future post here.

I’ve you’ve been trying to visit any of my websites for the past 36 hours or so, you will have been out of luck. It was all the fault of an exploding transformer (that’s the last time I call Optimus Prime ugly, boom boom). In that sense, I suppose I can be lucky that no data has been lost.

Apparently the outage has affected thousands of websites. A couple of high-profile casualties include Statcounter and B3ta so I was in good company. We should have organised a little meet up so that we could hug each other and tell us it was okay. If only we had a way of communicating with the outside world…

Incidentally, B3ta is still not back up while I am. That’s obviously a reflection of the importance of my website. The downage of B3ta means means that, on this Monday, in offices across the land, there is the threat that some work might actually get done.

Anyway, it’s a good test along the lines of those thought experiments: “could you survive a day without blogging? Har har har.” “Could you survive a day without email? Ho ho!” The answer is yes and yes. This is probably helped a lot by the fact that I can’t actually be bothered to blog every day any more anyway.

However, it did mean that this week’s Scottish Roundup had to be delayed by over a day. I was writing the post when the explosion happened. I knew something was awry because WordPress’s autosaves weren’t happening. I was hoping that it would be a temporary outrage. Stayed up a bit. Gave up to try again in the morning. I was most peeved when it still wasn’t there in the morning. But I lived, and it’s better late than never.

As for email, I don’t know whether that was working or not. I assume not. I sent myself a test email last night from a different account and it came through this morning. But I don’t know if there is other mail floating around waiting for me to receive. My ego will not allow myself to believe that the only email sent to me yesterday was by myself. So anyway, if you have sent me an email since around 10 or 11pm on Saturday night, I haven’t received it. Just so you know.

Several weeks ago Shane Richmond of the Telegraph included this among ten excellent blogs.

This is a meme which means I have been tagged. I didn’t do it at the time because I was busy dealing with the best laxative nature has to offer, exams. It’s quite convenient though because I’ve been meaning to point out some of my favourite blogs for years now but I have never got round to it. This is the perfect opportunity.

So here, belatedly, are ten blogs which I think are excellent, presented in no particular order except for the alphabetical one. These aren’t necessarily my ten favourite blogs, but they are the ones I felt like writing about.

• currybetdotnet

  It’s always interesting to read Martin Belam’s take on elements of web design. Everyone responsible for designing news websites should take heed of his analysis.

• F1Fanatic

  The best F1 blog going. I am always amazed by the amount Keith Collantine manages to post, even in the slowest of F1 news weeks. The quality is top notch as well, and I’ve noticed recently that some big hitting F1 news sites have been behind F1Fanatic once or twice as well. The comments are also often a good read. A must for all F1 fans.

• Freedom and Whisky

  This blog about politics and life in Scotland is well worth a read. David Farrer genuinely knows his libertarianism and is not just riding on the bandwagon since it became more fashionable. So it’s always interesting to read his perspective.

• James O’Malley… Living Legend

  James O’Malley: blogger, winner of an episode of The Weakest Link, columnist for the Northamptonshire Herald & Post and all-round Living Legend. He has his own Facebook fan page for crying out loud. He does deserve the plaudits. This is a man who exposed the Coke habit that so many MPs have. I also couldn’t stop laughing at his review of The God Delusion.

• Pigeon Blog

  A blog written by the slightly bad-tempered Brian Pigeon as he makes his way through life in bustling London. Very amusing.

• Sleevage

  A beautifully designed blog about beautiful (and sometimes not-so-beautiful) album artwork. A must read for fans of music and album artwork.

• Sniff Petrol

  A hilarious Formula 1 / motoring humour site. I can’t get enough of Crazy Dave Coulthard, and laughed like a drain when I read about Michael Schumacher’s latest blocking tactics.

• SNP Tactical Voting

  I would say this has become one of the best Scottish political blogs going — despite the fact that Jeff is an SNP supporter! He’s always there with some thoughtful opinions on the political stories of the day. Gone a bit quiet over the past week though. I hope this is temporary!

• spEak You’re bRanes

  A blog dedicated to ridiculing the more knuckle-dragging comments found on websites like the BBC’s Have Your Say.

• Stumbling and Mumbling

  A fascinating blog by Chris Dillow. An economist’s take on current events that often makes you look at issues from an angle you perhaps did not expect.

For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.

Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!

I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.

And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.

For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.

Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:

hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.

Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.

Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.

And make my own I did. Here is my Muxtape.

I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.

Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.

On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.

It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.

Ever since Facebook Applications exploded onto the scene, there has been a problem. Well, I say it’s a problem, but in reality it is actually an amazing thing. It is only perceived to be a problem by old fashioned companies that just Don’t Get It.

For several months now the old Scrabulous saga has been playing out. Some smart guys thought it would be a great idea to be able to play Scrabble with your friends on Facebook. They were right. It became Facebook’s most popular application, and could even count Mark Zuckerberg among its users.

Unfortunately, the creators of Scrabulous didn’t own the intellectual property to the game. The people who do own the IP, Hasbro and Mattel, have gone on the assault. They are suing Scrabulous’s creators Rajat Agarwall and Jayant Agarwall. This is despite the fact that the brothers have undoubtedly done more than anyone else in recent years to raise the profile of Scrabble.

Do you think if Hasbro and / or Mattel had created a Facebook Application for Scrabble it would have been as successful as Scrabulous? I, for one, highly doubt it. Their reaction alone has demonstrated that they simply don’t “get” the internet. Just like the recorded music industry before them, board game companies, it seems, have woken up to find that the internet has eaten away at their old fashioned business model. They don’t know how to capitalise on the internet. It needn’t necessarily be a threat. But their head-in-the-sand behaviour ensures that it will be.

My personal pet theory is that old companies got far too cosy in the 20th century ways. With the intellectual property rights wrapped up, they have seen no need to innovate. They have rested on their laurels. As such, their products have stagnated. Remember, the optimal length of copyright is around 15 years. A similar length will apply to intellectual property. Scrabble can trace its history back to four times that length.

As was pointed out on the Freakonomics blog earlier this year, Mattel’s and Hasbro’s plans for the future of Scrabble are pretty lame to say the least.

The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

In the meantime, the best thing to happen to Scrabble in generations is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel simply because they were not smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. They should have applauded and endorsed Scrabulous. That way, they would have ended up with a hell of a lot more respect and almost certainly more sales than under the current strategy of the companies.

In the latest stage of their assault, Mattel have finally launched their own ‘official’ Scrabble Facebook Application. But The Guardian reports that all is not well. And yet again, the problem can be laid at the door of intellectual property rights.

Seemingly, the new ‘official’ application is only endorsed by Mattel — not Hasbro. This means that you can not play Scrabble in the USA or Canada, where Hasbro own the rights. For this reason alone, the trust of Facebook’s users has been lost. If you can’t even play against your friends just because they happen to live in North America, why would you bother defecting from Scrabulous which currently has approximately 700,000 “daily active users”?

Today another Facebook Application has been hit by a similar corporate strangling. This time it is from a company that you would think would be able to cope with new technologies better.

Tetris Tournament was an early Facebook hit, and one of my favourite Facebook apps. It didn’t take long for its name to change to BlockStar, but it was still clearly derived from Tetris. The game itself was a bit clunky, but it did the job and was good fun.

Today it has become “Tetris Friends (formerly Block Star)“. Yes, it is now an official Tetris app. So, is this simply BlockStar with a shiny Tetris logo over the top? Far from it. The new game is utter, utter shit. Amazing when you consider that it is actually the official Tetris game. The original is a classic. This is a big pile of flaming hairy balls.

For one thing, the game now only lasts a maximum of two minutes. That’s right. No new levels. No game over as you reach the top. Just a high score after two minutes. It is ready to finish just when you get into the groove. Meanwhile, the graphics are cluttered and confusing. This game is intensely unsatisfying.

The reviews agree. The application’s wall has become a stream of obscenities while the reviews section has turned into a mere succession of one-star ratings.

In this respect, the users of Scrabulous have got off very lightly indeed. The best Tetris app on Facebook has been mauled out of all recognition.

I’m taking a brief break from my break because I think I can afford to now.

When I last wrote about the racism issue in F1, it was to bemoan the media’s role in fuelling the fire. If you have been reading for a while you might know of the distaste I have for some of the coverage found in F1 Racing over the past year or so.

I am not the only person to have noticed a decline in the standard of the journalism in F1 Racing. For instance, Clive has spoken about “the abandonment by the magazines of the high ground.” Alvin in the comments here has said he is currently boycotting F1 Racing.

Craig at craigblog has posted