This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: email

The man-made climate guilt trip

20 December 2009 16:53

Categories: Current affairs, Politics

For the past couple of weeks, many big-wigs are meeting in Copenhagen for a chit-chat about climate change. This happens against the backdrop of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit email hacking. This is said by some to offer evidence that climate scientists have manipulated data in order to boost the case that climate change is man-made.

The emphasis on whether or not climate change is man-made confuses me. For instance, the Met Office’s response to the hacking seeks to underline the fact that climate change is man-made: “The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it.”

Why is there so much concern over whether or not changes in temperature, and the knock-on effects that result, are man-made? Would climate change really be any less of a problem if it were caused by, say, volcanoes, sunspots, or other natural phenomena? The flood would come anyway.

Surely the correct question is not whether climate change is man-made. The correct questions are:

  • Is climate change happening?
  • What effects will it have?
  • What will be the net cost of these effects?
  • What actions can be taken to guard against these effects?
  • What will be the cost of taking these actions?
  • Is the cost of taking these actions greater than the net cost of the effects of climate change? (i.e. can the resources be better spent elsewhere, for instance on alleviating poverty, etc.)

If I see that it is raining, I don’t just stand there for ages pondering over whether or not the rain is man-made. I just put up an umbrella.

  • Is it raining? Yes.
  • What effects will it have? It will make me wet.
  • What will be the net cost of these effects? I will feel uncomfortable and may become ill.
  • What actions can be taken to guard against these effects? I can put up an umbrella.
  • What will be the cost of taking this action? I will have to carry my umbrella around with me.
  • Is the cost of taking this action greater than the net cost of the effect of rain? No.

Voila — I have successfully guarded myself against the effects of rain in the most efficient manner, without worrying about what caused the rain. So why worry about what causes climate change? As far as I am concerned, if the flood is coming, the flood is coming and that is the only information I need to know.

Granted, the causes of climate change are a pretty important thing to know. If you know the cause, you know what you can do to help prevent it.

But the debate over whether or not climate change is man-made implies that, even if climate change is happening, it doesn’t matter if it’s not man-made. But that is surely not true. The effects will be just as devastating whether it turns out climate change is caused by man-made or natural causes.

It just seems to me that the focus on whether or not climate change is man-made suits both sides of the debate rather too much. Climate change sceptics will apparently view any evidence that climate change is not man-made as a signal that climate change is nothing to worry about (which is surely not true).

Meanwhile, left-wing environmentalists love the focus on the man-made aspect because it gives them an excuse to lecture people on their behaviour. This can be seen in the ever-growing list of human behaviours that are said to cause climate change — everything from taking the car to eating meat and even — can you imagine? — having children.

I would like to hear a bit more emphasis on the effects of climate change in the event that it is not man-made. Otherwise, the anti-environmentalists seem like all they care about is their cheap flights and fast cars. And the moralising environmentalists come across as wanting to take us all on one big guilt trip for having the temerity to exist.

4 comments

Is the blogging era over?

20 November 2009 23:13

Categories: *, Blogging, Internet, Technology

It is commonly said that blogging is dead. The refrain has increased in frequency over the past year or so, as Twitter extends its influence further and further.

I have been blogging since 2002, when I was just 16. Over the years, it has been my favourite means of communicating online — more than Facebook or Twitter. More than IM and perhaps even email.

But increasingly I find myself becoming tired of it. Partly, this is due to that pesky “real life” nonsense taking over. As I make the transition from school pupil to student bum to full time worker, I have less and less spare time to dedicate to blogging.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that I am trying to run three blogs at once (the others being Scottish Roundup and vee8). In addition, I have started to write for other websites and have begun to dabble with podcasting.

Blogging is not what it once was

There have been many changes in the nature of blogging since 2002 as well. The emergence of other tools like social networks, microblogs and tumblelogs has encroached on territory that blogging used to inhabit.

In 2002, blogs were the best (or only) way to interact with friends online. It was pre-MySpace, never mind Facebook. Back then, blogs were a good way to publish snippets of transient, inconsequential thoughts — to get stuff off your chest. Now, Twitter is ideal for that. For those who feel too constrained by the 140 character limit, you can always set up a tumblelog.

But now that these new tools exist, blogging has been forced to become a medium where you publish more in-depth thoughts. Without a doubt, I update this blog much less often than I used to. In 2004, I published 880 posts. This year I might just about get above 100. But five years ago many of my posts were extremely short. Now, to justify even touching my blog, I feel like I have to produce an essay.

There is also the fact that I posted a lot of nonsense when I was younger, whereas now I have to be more responsible with the way I update my blog. I need to come across well, which means I have to quite carefully consider everything I publish.

In short, blogging is now hard work, whereas beforehand it was just good fun. None of this is news. But today, a couple of things have again focused my attention on blogging.

Where are the new readers?

Firstly, Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting wrote a post announcing “the death of blogging“. He senses a general malaise in the blogosphere. According to him, there are few new readers. Moreover, some big Scottish blogging names have hung up their keyboards in the past few months.

In response to Jeff, I would say that I don’t think a year has gone by when a big name hasn’t given up blogging. But blogging life goes on. While I am not happy to have seen the likes of Scottish Unionist and Malc in the Burgh close down their blogs, and others dramatically decrease the frequency of their updates, blogging is not about who the big names are. It is about the conversation between bloggers.

Jeff may well be right that there are fewer new readers though. In terms of statistics, the best days of this blog are certainly long gone. Visitor numbers peaked in 2006 and 2007, and have steadily declined since. This is in stark contrast to the early years, when readership grew seemingly exponentially, as though it were viral. In fairness, you should expect this if you publish much less, as I do. I doubt the same applies to Jeff though.

Twitter increases in authority

Perhaps more ominous in terms of the value of this blog is not the fact that readers appear to be losing interest, but the revelation that Google appears to view my Twitter account as more authoritative.

It hadn’t occurred to me before to check what the PageRank of my Twitter account might be. I assumed it would be low. But having read, via Andrew Hayes, an article about PageRank and Twitter, I decided to check.

I was astonished to find that my Twitter account apparently has a PageRank of 5. In comparison, this blog today has a PageRank of 3 (a shadow of what it used to be).

Of course, it is probably wise not to focus much on the importance of PageRank. Google itself increasingly plays down the role of PageRank. Of course, that hasn’t stopped them from using PageRank as a means of publicly “bitch-slapping” websites that it views as threatening its advertising revenues gaming its search engine.

PageRank is the one small window provided to webmasters who want to see what Google really thinks about their websites. For my Twitter account to be clearly rated higher in this way than my blog has come as a surprise. I am not even the most prolific of Twitter users.

So is the blogging era over? I couldn’t have articulated this in 140 characters or less. But if few people are going to read it anyway, and if even Google doesn’t care so much, it makes me wonder what the point is any more.

An hour or so of my evening has been poured into writing this post. Soon I will have even fewer spare hours to spend on blogging. I persevere with blogging because I think it is, in a way, important. But if Twitter is easier (which it undoubtedly is) and has more impact (which apparently now it does), is there much point in continuing?

15 comments

Hello? Is this thing on?

2 June 2008 11:19

Categories: Admin, Blogging, General, Internet, Technology

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.

Comments closed

Reaching a wider audience or just creating an echo chamber?

20 April 2008 19:52

Categories: Blogging, General, Internet, Personal, Technology

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?”

My Tweet Cloud 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.

13 comments

Older posts »