SimonWaldman.net

Phone Director
I read about this ages and ages ago at Giga Om, and have now been using it for a while. Anyone with a mac and a (non-symbian) mobile should use this - a great way of connecting the two.

OperaMini
Yes, I’m way behind on this. But (thanks to PhoneDirector) I’ve managed to install it onto my Nokia 6233…and I’m frankly wondering how anyone puts up with their crappy mobile browsers. For those who are interested - OperaMini and some very handy free java apps can be found here (all legit, I believe)

EditGrid
An online spreadsheet that is, apparently, superior to Google Spreadsheets (comparison here). I don’t buy the whole web office thing (well not till everyone sorts out offline working) but this might come in handy for some non-confidential work stuff. And - it just works rather well.

PBWiki’s Wysiwyg editing
I dont’ think they’ve opened this up to everyone yet (I have two accounts on their an I’ve only had an invite for the older one). We used PBWiki for a group conference, and it really worked. Wysiwyg editing, and the ability to bring in plug-ins makes it just that little bit neater.

Levenger 3 x 5 card bleecher
An indulgence? Hell yes. But who can resist having a lovely array of 3 x 5 cards on your desk in a swanky slab of wood. Just looking at it makes me feel organised.

Actiontastic
GTD task management in its purest form on the Mac. I lost a lot of data on an earlier beta, so went off it for a while, but [next sentence not relevant for non-mac, non-gtd ers] the sync with Quicksilver and iCal and the inbox processing system are very neat [But if I could just have a print view of all actions either sorted by project or context, I would be in heaven]

Game House: Scrabble
The perfect end of day treat on the train. And available for instant download and purchase for a Mac. I don’t completely agree with the dictionary…and I think it’s US rather than International, but the functionality is brilliant. I’m doing a pretty good job of beating it on ‘Smart’ level under competition conditions - but Elite whips me every time..and I dread to think how I’d do against ‘Master or ‘Genius’.

And have you, or anyone you know, ever taken part in one?

I just read John Williams piece on Comment is Free having a not-so-gentle pop at the whole e-petitions thing, and he ends with this.

We do need a national debate on how we maintain the contradictory things we like to have in a crowded island - the freedom of the road, nice countryside, a thriving economy, low taxes, and everybody else off the road except ourselves.

Aaargh - the number of times I hear people saying ‘we need to have a national debate’ on this; or a ‘national debate’ on that, and yet I have honestly never

It is normally a spectacular delaying tactic from someone who wants to oppose something, but can’t find a suitable alternative.

Interviewer: ‘So what do you propose…’

Interviewee: ‘I think we should have a national debate about….x x x’

And for some reason, they are nearly always allowed to get away with that as a justified response. When if they’d said what they really mean -

Obviously you can welcome opinions - as the Arts Council has done here in their national debate but please, with less than 100 comments on each debate it’s hardly national or representative.

The point of all this - is that we might not like the way the e-petitions thing has worked out. We might not like the fact that people who don’t want to pay road tax, or inheritance tax, or who want to have the hunting act scrapped get so much of a say. But I suspect this ‘push-button democracy’ (I forget whose quote that was) is as effective a form of national debate as we’re likely to see anytime soon.

So, I’m starting it now - the campaign against calling for national debates. Oh hell, let’s have a national debate about national debates.

Headlines on the front page of this week’s Surrey Advertiser (Guildford Edition, prop. Guardian Media Group)

> Dad found guilty of brutal murder
> Woman’s body discovered
> Road rage driver attacks car with baseball bat
> Inquiry to get bigger picture on pole dancing video

Oh my god! It’s carnage out here…

I’m sure someone with a more sophisticated approach to online reputation management would have actually planned this, but I’m pleased to see that a Google search for Britain’s number one quality newspaper (and a number of variations on that theme) now gives my post on the topic.
Exactly who would make such a search and why, I have no idea…but there you go.

So how is number 10 going to respond to its e-petitions? And did a minister really say: “Whoever came up with this idea might be a prat”. Read more…

I’ve never met him. If people I know hadn’t told me he was real, I’d think his blog was a parody and the man a myth.

I’m loving the diet , the car, the scooter, the treadmill (”We’re gonna attach one our old 24″ Dell 2405 monitors to this thing and put a keyboard and trackball on it so I can watch Law & Order, do email, and surf the web while getting not-fat.”), and the home phone system (”We need around eight phones.. I’m a fan of just using my cell phone an skype, but we need to be able to have folks buzz from the front gate”).

Late night ITV2 if ever I saw it..

OK, so there are essays a-plenty re: Google and Belgium, and all the coverage you could ever need over at Search Engine Land. The world hasn’t changed. There are still appeals to go. Let’s not get over excited. But, I think the final bit of John Battelle’s FAQ puts it in context.

Q. So this is all about renegotiating the relationship between traditional media companies, their distribution networks, and the role of search in the new media landscape?

A. Yup.

And obviously I realised the whole case was a travesty after reading Rachel Whetstone’s explanation on the Google Blog. But I think things are getting a little more complex than this oft repeated Google mantra

We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content.

OK well, We believe that publishers are of real benefit to search engines because they provide valuable content for them to sell ads against. We also believe that when it comes to a news product - the timely use of even a headline and first par is actually a significant part of a story….but that is another matter.
It would be interesting if there was a spare academic/ economist out there to do some real number crunching and actually start to evaluate the mutual dependencies between content providers and searchengines/ aggregators and quantify the benefits each brings to the other, rather then rely on an endless stream of assertions on both sides. But until that day, it’s boom time for lawyers, methinks..

I can, and probably will write an essay on this another time, but it’s Rich’s little outburst is well worth a read

The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed….like nearly every News 2.0 venture so far, Dan’s Bayosphere was a failure.

He has a lot of company. The dog’s breakfast of new media startups includes Gather, Backfence, Newstrust, Daylife, Bayosphere, TailRank, Associated Content, Pegasus News, Tinfinger, Findory, Inform, Newsvine, Memeorandum, NowPublic. The highest distinction on this list is to be one of the few still spoken of in the present tense (or present perfect — “They haven’t yet succeeded…”)

Well, possibly a bit down on Daylife (only just out of the blocks) and NowPublic after this news but who can argue with

Yes, there is a media revolution in the works. But it’s messy, it’s nasty videos on Youtube, not the neat & tidy civic Welcome Wagon of citizen journalism. You can’t quit your job as a journalist and replace your salary with adsense on your blog.

See, the future is always going to be more Bladerunner than The Jetsons - something I’ll return to later. [Thanks, Martin for the link]

Today’s background music is Damien Jurado’s ‘And Now That I’m In Your Shadow’ [Amazon]. Makes Damien Rice sound like a right little raver.

At the time of typing, around 1.1m people have signed the petition on the number 10 site to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy. Now is this

a) A huge embarrassment for the government
or
b) A fantastic example of digital democracy in action?

Most media coverage so far is voting heavily for a) - or as the Indy says: ‘what began as a worthy exercise in openness has become something with the ability to cause embarrassment’.

Hardly a surprise. The whole structure of a petition system is going to result in ‘embarrassment’ - given that every petition is likely to be a protest about something the government has done or is about to do. Petitions saying: ‘we think everything you’re doing is top notch so just go right on ahead’ tend to be quite thin on the ground. Digitally or otherwise.

What this system does give, though - or at least appears to give - is give a pretty strong sense of the proportionality of issues; as you can see if you take the top five issues today and see the number of signatures (in brackets)

> Road tax (1.1m)
> Scrap inheritance tax (46,000)
> Repeal the hunting act (24,000)
> Scrap the introduction of ID cards (20,780)
> Reduce the classified period for census data to 70 years (19,000)

As you might imagine, it pretty quickly starts to fall away after that. By the time you’re down to the petition to : Instruct the Civil Aviation Authority to permit Single Pilot Public Transport Operation up to age 65 subject to a valid medical as lobbied for by no lesser authority than Rotorhub - the hub of the helicopter industry. there are only 80 names.

But here’s some questions and observations..

* Now that the road tax issue has made it to 1.1m does it mean that nothing with less than, say 750K is really going to register as a major issue. In fact on a broader note - does this all just boil political debate down to numbers…perhaps with weighting depending on the amount of the country that is affected and the previous history of co-ordinated lobbying on a subject.

* Any major public revolt against ID cards seems pretty unlikely. If this audience can’t get excited about it…then who will?

* Ditto hunters - come on chaps..you’ve been completely outflanked - not only by the urban drivers, by the anti-inheritance gang.

* Given the furore up and down the country about hospital closures, it’s remarkable/regrettable that there has been no co-ordinated campaign, similar to the roads one. The most prominent is about the closure of the Royal Surrey Hospital (a complete outrage, by the way - latest signatory: S. Waldman).

The BBC asks today, ‘Will e-petitions change anything?’. The honest answer is we just can’t tell yet (fine, but that doesn’t fill 800 words). I hope that an academic somewhere is going to track all of these petitions over a period of 12 - 18 months and then assess the impact they have. Both in terms of affecting media coverage (the roads story lead the Today programme today) and ultimately in terms of policy.

In the meantime, I think this is working out quite nicely. As experiments in digital democracy go (and I’m still not quite sure what that means - but it’s all moved on from MPs having websites) it’s pretty remarkable. It also allows for a much more open flow of criticism on the government’s own site, than, say, many media owners allow about themselves on their own sites.

I think the next step is for them to have an online template for ‘a national debate’, so the next time some waffling commentator or politician says ‘we need to have a national debate’ about this…someone can just press a button, and off we go.

Anyway, (thank God) it’s not all entirely serious. My favourite one is to replace the national anthem with Gold by Spandau Ballet. Vote now, people. If we all pull together, it could be in place by the 2012 Olympics.