dropsafe

A few days ago I attended a meeting of the UK Online News Association in the UK; rather than myself explain what it was meant to be about I’ll quote the flyer:

UK MPs expenses was one of the biggest stories of 2009 that has continued to be felt well into 2010. It was at its heart a story of detail, data and piecing information together and is just one example of how developers and journalists are working together.

What does this mean for the future of journalism and news gathering? ONA UK invites you to an evening exploring Hacks & Hacking [...]

…or, in short, it was Rufus Pollock talking about how Governments are (hopefully) going to start publishing all their data in accessible, documented, timely, nearly semantic formats; Chris Thorpe talking about how the Grauniad is reaching out to meet this, and Becky Hogge stitching it together with some perspective.

Inevitably the discussion came around to Wikileaks and related matters, which were being discussed by various grandees and educating-the-next-generation-type journalists. It was at that point I asked a question of the journos and I flubbed it, because although geeks like Rufus were nodding along and apparently following what I was trying to ask, the journos glazed over, their soundbite-sized attention spans having overrun.

What I was trying to ask was:

In a world where both the Guardian (left wing) and the Daily Mail (right wing) would hypothetically be able to download the same complete spreadsheet of MP’s expenses, and analyse it for themselves, and then spin a story upon it… given that, how would either paper be able to differentiate their story in order to pander to the supposed prejudices of their readership, and thereby retain readers, especially when the data underlying it can also be checked by any reader?

I based this question on my experience of once being hauled through the press, leading to a long public debate with the selfsame journalist, and which taught me that the primary goal of journalism was/is not to seek truth but instead sell newspapers; and that this is achieved by not challenging your readership’s expectations.

Anyway I got blown off, and so I was thrilled yesterday to see Jay Rosen note almost exactly the same thing in a form (and forum) that journalists might understand and care about – because he is one.

Jay wrote:

5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com:

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.

The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

For “blind spot”, read also “prejudice”.

Read “anything based on biased interpretation”.

Read “falsehoods”.

Regrettably a single instance of this will not change everything overnight; but there’s certainly a business opportunity in proactive damage control available for those who understand the both the goals of WikiLeaks and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and what it is that really motivates newspaper sales journalistic website revenue generation.

May interest some people I know:

http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/event.php?eid=183

Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar:
Net neutrality in the UK
Date: 28th September 2010
Venue: Central London

As Ofcom consults on whether to end net neutrality, this seminar will examine internet traffic management, whether it’s necessary in the UK, the possible economic benefits, and what the unintended consequences may be for users and the network operators.

Discussions will also look ahead to how traffic management may work in practice and the options to ensure transparency for users, and consider whether consumers need to be protected with a minimum level of service guarantee.

http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/agenda/Net-Neutrality-Agenda.pdf

Registration

Chairman’s opening remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Traffic management and ‘net neutrality’
Alex Blowers, Director of International, Ofcom
Questions and comments from the floor

The effects and consequences of ending net neutrality
Themes: Is net congestion a short?term issue created by current online usage trends? How are different networks and players being affected? Would ending net neutrality lead to ‘unfair’ traffic discrimination? What are the economic benefits of traffic management? What will be the effect on quality of service of traffic management? What effect, if any, would traffic management have on innovation? Would ending net neutrality encourage investment in NGA (next generation access)?

Andrew Heaney, Executive Director, Strategy and Regulation, TalkTalk
Senior representative, network operator
Senior representative, website
Senior representative, high bandwidth website
Analyst
Question and comments from the floor

Chairman’s closing remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Coffee

Chairman’s opening remarks
Senior Parliamentarian

Consumers and traffic management
Themes: To what extent is ending net neutrality in the consumer’s best interests? What can be done to ensure traffic management is transparent to consumers? How can information on traffic management be presented so that it is accessible and meaningful to consumers, both in understanding any restrictions on their existing services, and in choosing between rival offerings? Should a minimum level of service be introduced to ensure broadband access is not determined by economic circumstance?

Senior representative, network operator
Senior representative, high bandwidth website
Consumer representative
Senior representative, ISP
Question and comments from the floor

Final thoughts from Ofcom
Alex Blowers, Director of International, Ofcom

Chairman’s and Westminster eForum closing remarks
Senior Parliamentarian
Thomas Raynsford, Senior Producer, Westminster eForum

It costs money to attend and although I had a decent experience the one time I attended, I am not sure how much this really influences “people of influence”.

I would be interested to know who the “Consumer representative” will be, and what weight might be given to their opinion…

#pragma prerequisite you have read lots of Pratchett books

A few years ago at a rare party, my friend Jim got drunk and espoused to me a theory, viz: that I am Captain Carrot; not in some existential do-gooder sense, but instead he suggested that I might have been the (literal?) inspiration for the character as physically described in the Discworld books.

Personally I suspect that Jim might have been mixing the story up with yet another, older meme from my social circle[1] – however his idea has got legs, and has a plausible backplot: in 1987 I was working for my university magazine and on the back of the release of Mort in hardback, through his publisher I wangled an interview with Pterry and so was sent early one morning to rendezvous with him at Waterloo station, to ride in a limo for the best part of a couple of hours to (IIRC) Bromley in Kent, to a book signing that I could observe – and then trot back to UCL to write-up.

The resulting article got spiked in favour of student union politics, and I haven’t the notes – something I regret to this day – but merely two weeks later I got on a train at Paddington and there Terry was again, in the same carriage. We politely exchanged nods, him sat at a table, me standing, while a pleasant lady asked him what he did for a living, thrilled at him being a writer, and “[had he] had anything published yet”?

Terry was very kind to her.

Anyway: Jim’s point was that I tend to leave an impression on people and that since I loom tall, am roughly triangular, have a voice that can saw through concrete and have/had a shock of orange hair[2], Jim wondered if my shape might have lodged in Terry’s brain and served as a template for the description of Carrot.

Since “Mort!” predates “Guards! Guards!” only slightly in time – if not in volumes – it’s not impossible, though in my heart of hearts I might wish it were true more than I believe it likely. The L-space wiki itself suggests otherwise.

But I do remember a few things from the interview:

• one was Terry’s insistence that he didn’t like tape recorders, he thought they were not good tools for proper journalists who ought to use notepads; this led to a discussion of journalism as training for being a disciplined writer.
• two was that apparently I was the first interviewer ever to be asking him about his work with BNFL as inspiration for “magic” in the early Rincewind books, with overspills of magic causing “walking trees” and “shoals of invisible fish” and so forth, compared to the contemporary woes at Sellafield. I was right, it was an influence, but he wasn’t seeking to make any political point – merely to juxtapose “magic” in one world and “physics” in another.
• thirdly (and this is where I’m racking my brains to draw detail) – he wanted to write a book under a pseudonym; I don’t think it was fantasy exactly, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the plot was, even though he outlined it. It was something “more serious” but not related to Discworld in any way. It was standalone.

That’s about as much as I remember; interviews I’ve seen from the past decade suggest that the idea behind “Nation” is quite recent, else I would think that that was a candidate. People reading this should bear in mind this was 1987, when book #5 of the Discworld series was just out, manuscripts for a few others might have been ready to go, and Terry was not the world famous crusading bazillionaire and national institution that he now is.

So now I’m wondering whether – 23 years later – perhaps somewhere in the Amazon catalogue there might be a Terry Pratchett book written under a pseudonym?

Does the internet have an answer? A suspicion?

I’d love to know.

–
[1] …viz: that someone from the UK net.community whom most of us had met at one point or another – Tanaqui Weaver – both knew Neil Gaiman and was a partial inspiration for Delirium in the Sandman series, although Tori Amos has since been wrongly anointed and the credit given yet elsewhere, with Tanaqui expunged from the public record.

[2] apologies for the mullet, I didn’t know any better, or rather I just never got it cut – I hacked the front off so that I could see, but the back was heading towards Unix-Guru ponytail proportions, but never quite worked. The picture’s from circa 1993 but’s not too far off the mark for my university look. It certainly wasn’t intentional – that would require me to follow fashion and I didn’t even know what a “mullet” was… or rather I thought it was a kind of fish.

Update: better picture, 1989-ish. Shows the height differential.

The debacle that I wrote-up a few days ago is now hotting up:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/beebplayer#incoming-99637
Tom Adams
12 July 2010

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like a copy of the following documents:

1. All correspondence with Dave Johnson in relation to beebPlayer, an Android application for accessing iPlayer content.
2. All correspondence with any other parties in relation to beebPlayer.
3. All internal correspondence relating to beebPlayer.

Yours faithfully,
Tom Adams

[BBC response elided]

Where are the reporters who would take an interest in the BBC trying to close-down open access to its content?