Who said 'weaker sex'?

BBC monitored by US agencies 24/7?

Why isn't this news?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Russell Tice was back on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC program Thursday evening to expand on his Wednesday revelations that the NSA spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as "tens of thousands" of other Americans.

Surely this also means the BBC's communications within the US?

More from Wired.

What does spam look like?

Image generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.

From a series by Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu.

Another from his series malware.

Scrapbook clips catch up

I've been repeatably hearing a bizarre (to my ears) ad running on the Olbermann netcast - Kraft 'natural, 2% milk' cheese with ... drumroll ... "no added growth hormone". Only in America?

I shouldn't mock. We have crap food here too. But something called Velveeta, which "doesn't need to be refrigerated after opening"???

Google has launched a Elections Video Search gadget which use speech recognition.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

+ Google kills the Google bomb :{

Hah (sorry, shouldn't laugh).

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail.

US 'Department of Homeland Security' is seriously suggesting that airline passengers wear 'security bracelets' which would deliver taser-like shocks if they 'fail to comply' - seriously.

Here's another shock horror story in 'the war against tourism':

And it wasn't enough for another woman to show TSA agents nipple rings that set off a metal detector. The agents forced her to take them out.

Mandi Hamlin said, "I had to get pliers and pull it apart."

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

Tracey Ullman has a great character, Chanel Monticello, taking da piss outta this shit.

Delightful story about how Karl Rove, aka 'Bush's brain', threatened a webbie:

If he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio".

No wonder they're losing online, who'd want to work for them?

Computing magazine had a good-news story about the NHS IT project - the biggest non-military IT project in the world - focusing on Homerton Hospital. All great, practical, working properly, stuff. Pity that a/ it's not easily found on the web and b/ Labour is making nothing of it.

eGov: New figures from NWEGG shows that:

A ‘self-serviced’ web transaction is 24 times less costly than a telephone transaction and 46 times less costly than a face - to - face transaction.

According to the Daily Mail (FCS):

Ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.

AND

Attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.

New York Times piece on the challenges of being a Tekkie in Kenya:

Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.

Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.

Here's good CRM for you. From an email:

We couldn't help but notice that it's been a while since you've visited Current.com, and it's bumming us out.

If you have a moment, we'd love to hear from you about your experience on Current.com, what did or didn’t work for you, and how we could make things more enticing for you in the future.

Lincolnshire is truly pioneering with eGov. Apart from the ads they are:

As part of their “Accessibility tested by humans” strategy, Lincolnshire’s website will be tested every 3 months by a panel of disabled users with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy through to dyslexia. Results will then be published on Lincolnshire’s website for anyone to see.

I completely agree with this more 'social' attitude to accessibility.

Here's Whitehall's approach:

The draft had threatened to switch off non-compliant websites altogether, warning: "websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names". The final guidance issues a similar warning, but using the softer formula 'may be at risk' instead of 'shall be subject to': "Government website owners are reminded to follow the conditions of use for a .gov.uk name (Registering .gov.uk domain names (TG114)). Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn".

Monbiot point:

A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class caprice

How guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:

In the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity. If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant.

Etre (newsletter only) had a great post about 'cognitive illusions', relating this to usability. Citing Bruce Tognazzi from 1989 it notes that:

1) Users consistently report that using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.

2) The stopwatch consistently proves that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard.

This illusion reveals a much more important learning: Users' perception of reality and reality itself are not the same thing - which means that you should always verify their claims through research. You should also take pains to validate your own intuitions, because even when you're certain of something, you can still be very wrong.

Etre's blog had an interesting post about a new ATM interface for Wells Fargo. ATMs are thirty years old - proving that usability is an ongoing and never-ending process.

Dave Briggs is running an event in Peterborough relating the ReadWriteWeb to the needs of local government. Check it out.

Featuring case studies from both local and central government, practical exercises to learn more about how social media could be used within a local authority context and plenty of time for networking and chats over coffee.

eGov AU on why UK lgov sites are better than Australian ones. Unfortunately he cites Redbridge :{

Information ain't free. After a long break with no email, I had a notification about a citation of that suicide and the internet BMJ article (which I went to work on). But of course I couldn't read it because JAMA's medical research is behind a paywall.

That's cleared some clips :}

Just this to add - from the online journo Michael J Totten: The Truth About Russia in Georgia:

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Chinwag looks (back?) at 'Black Hat marketing: the dark side of search':

I can’t definitely claim a connection between a willingness to embrace black hat SEO and a willingness to cut corners in other areas of business but it’s testament to the ease with which black hat rules can be applied.

Millennial Marketing and the Obama campaign:

Design guru Michael Bierut[says] that the stand-alone logo, consistent use of the Gotham typeface ("very American ... conversational and pleasant") and his online look and feel make Mr. Obama the first candidate with a "coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. ... There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients."

Another lesson from the campaign: Integrating Social Networking Tools into Political Campaigns

Profile pages, badges, buttons and even widgets are easy to build (believe me, if e.politics can have a widget, anyone can). In other words, campaigns don't have to dive right into the deep end — sometimes a dipping a toe or two into the pool of Facebook and MySpace fans will be enough.

Mail report on the world's oldest Facebooker, Ivy Bean. Alleged I'd have to say. Post media coverage she now has '4823 friends'. It's all seemingly facilitated and I can't see anything saying she's actually using the web herself. Unlike many another so-called 'silver surfer'.

Blogging’s Glass Ceiling. NYT on just why women bloggers are a distinct minority.

All about the cyber attacks which preceded the war in Georgia. More from Wired.

"Another interesting aspect is seeing how certain countries are what I call 'cyberlocked,'" cybersecurity veteran Richard Bejtlich tells Danger Room. "We know a land-locked country has no access to the sea. Countries like .ge [Georgia] might rely too heavily on one or a handful of connections, potentially through hostile countries (eg, .ru [Russia]), for their physical connectivity. As a result, an adversary can control their network access to the outside world. A diagram from the Packet Clearing House, shows Georgia's network dilemma.

Who exactly is supporting the Great Firewall of China: XSGuard Management System, who are Dutch; Cisco, American; Radware, Israeli.

Also on board are Lucent, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Ericsson, Acsys Biometrics and Nortel Networks.

Cisco are the main offender, it seems.

Somehow missed from the who-ha headlines about the plan for refunds if your council isn't 'performing' (arf! arf!) is that the central 'new idea' from Whitehall is something called a 'Place Survey'. This will drop through your letter box and ask you to fill in a form containing no less than 174 questions!

PSF estimates that this will cost up to £50k per council. None of which is funded by Whitehall.

But neither is the cost of the concessionary bus fares scheme, which is carving huge holes in selscted council's budgets around the country.

Pressures on councils to reduce headcounts to meet efficiency targets and the shared services agenda are exacerbating a looming skills shortage of experienced staff in London local authorities, it has been claimed.

No shit Sherlock. This is according to "a report to Capital Ambition, London's regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership body, disclosed in minutes of a meeting of its Programme Board", and reported by PSF. This comes as a poll from local government IT supplier Civica showed that the majority of council managers surveyed say their local authority lacks the necessary in-house skills for transformation programmes and that 'transformation' is actually leading to a workforce skewed to the over 50s and a 'talent drought'.

If 'transformation' is to a big extent about the web and 'online services', which it is, then some 'talent' injected from the real world and released from the usual strictures is needed.

How to get them? Neither Hazel, Tom or the opposition have the vaguest clue ...

The Electoral Commission can be added to the list of those concerned about the use of electronic counting systems in the London Mayoral count.

Very cool rip on gmaps from XKCD



Coming to a ditzy red-top near you soon? 'Binaural beats' aka 'digital drugs'. Despite being actually 169 years old.

Very bizarre first 'interactive' YouTube video, from Mexico.

Here's another tool to add to those silly wordmaps of your blog and undoubtedly others, this one 'maps' Twitter.

And another expansion on Google Trends, which I likee.

Wired carried a great analysis of Twitter's, um' 'business model' ...

Cuil? I think not.

This made me laugh out laugh when it popped in my inbox.

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP)'s 'Digital Publishing Summit's keynote is to be delivered by (drum roll) ... Trinity Mirror CEO, Sly Bailey:

on the expanding role of digital publishing, and the future of local news. Sly runs a portfolio of more than 350 local and national brands - can you afford to miss this rare appearance from the former IPC Media CEO, who led the sale of the magazine group to AOL Time Warner?

And also the loss of circa £35m @ IPC in one of the biggest f*ups during the f*up heavy dotcom crash and whose failure to improve the amateur-hour Mirror Online has amused us all for many years?

I think not.

Following another business character who I love to lampoon, Michael Grade attempted to blame ITV's failure to make money online to:

"Non-UK companies like Google and Apple [who] are free to build market-dominating positions online in the UK without so much as a regulatory murmur".

Bah, humbug.

dailymail.co.uk has introduced a new section called 'The best of the web - digested' which, when it started at least, was dominated by The Independent and The Guardian.

More when I catch up ;]

Live by the sword ...

One of the Daily Mail's laptops was stolen - with thousands of personal and financial details on it. As noted, only, in The Guardian and ComputerWorld, funny that.

Dear Sir/Madam

Unfortunately one of the company's laptops has been stolen. The contents included personal data, some of which related to you. The laptop was password-protected.

We are writing to you as quickly as possible to alert you to the fact that the theft has happened and to inform you of the data types lost, so that you can take appropriate action.

In your case, your name, address, bank account number and bank sort code were the sensitive information lost. We suggest you should take two steps:

1. contact your bank to ensure that it is alerted to the loss of the data, and so that it can advise you on any possible security issues and on any steps that it would be advisable for you to take in order to minimise the risk of any consequent loss occurring;

2. consult at the government website http://www.identity-theft.org.uk for advice on avoiding or dealing with identity theft.

The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen. We have, of course, notified the police of the theft of the laptop and are talking to the Office of the Information Commissioner about what has happened.

On behalf of the company, I would like to offer my sincere apologies for any annoyance and inconvenience to you that this breach of security may cause. I can assure you that we take security of personal data very seriously and have, since this incident, which was inadvertently caused by a technical issue, already further strengthened procedures.

Yours faithfully
M J Hindley
Group Finance Director
Nothcliffe Media Limited

Wonder if this'll shut them up about the 'incompetence' of others? Ya'think?

Google Reader clips catch up

er, way behind here what with other work to do and all that. So quite a lot, some may become posts, starting a new Firefox Scapbook thread sounds like a good idea ...

• Questions to the Prime Minister!
  Simon D reports that the PM is inviting questions to him via YouTube. And here's the man himself
  

• TechPresident noted that "the Brits are continuing to lap the U.S." and "In the U.S., we’ll have to first get around those archaic rules barring Congress from even using YouTube. Then we can talk about those conversations."
  
  
• Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2
  Via Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design very comprehensive and useful - and often forgotten - stuff
• CRM turned upside down and inside out
  Ruth Kennedy @ IdealGovernment pointing out that bizness has moved onto VRM from CRM and maybe government should pay attention ...
• Google Translate adds 10 new languages...
  As well as translations between languages. Still no Persian ...
  

• Italian's Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face
  From the New York Times. Yet more from what some US commentators are calling 'The War on Tourism'. Quite astonishing warning for those visiting the USA. Whether you're besuited, connected, whatever - beware, the sadists seem to run the border posts. Comes after the news of them stopping firetrucks and ambulances. Plus, if one of the 20% of British adults who smoke, be prepared for harassment.
  
  
• Here come the tube-steppers
  via Delib, their final 'Opinion Tracker' analysis for the Mayoral elections showing "what looks like a final surge of buzz and positive sentiment for Boris".
• What did happen to all those London mayoral votes?
  via The Register. They observed the election count, done using machines, and didn't see fraud. But I was reminded of another recent experience — The Bedford Elections 2007 and the electronic counting fiasco.
• Becta asks EC to probe Microsoft school deals
  via The Register. Another multi-million dollar fine on its way?
• The Day Is Coming
  via John Battelle's Searchblog. He reports on a Bloomberg story via IWantMedia: 'Google is considering running display advertisements alongside the results of Web queries for pictures, moving beyond text-based ads. "There's lot of potential for advertising revenue there," says VP Marissa Mayer. Google is seeking new revenue sources as its growth slows.'
• "Gagging librarians is horrendous." The Internet V. FBI: Net Wins
  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive, an online library, provide the agency with a user's personal information after the Web site challenged the records request in court.
  Danny Sullivan also covers it here.
  
  

• The Food Vision project
  via IDeA Knowledge. Website "promoting good practice and projects that deliver safe, sustainable and nutritious food and improve local community health and wellbeing. The case studies and toolkits within the site are designed to help and inspire those intending to set up similar initiatives." Phew! Hardly 'plain english' and government creating another website? Shurely shome misshtake?
  
  

• Web Accessibility - The Power of Five
  via E-Access Blog Socitm says that five errors account for 76% of all website accessibility failures, and it asked Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services at the charity AbilityNet, to describe their impact. Robin is blind and uses the popular ‘JAWS’ screen reader software to access the web.
• 2 Spanish visions and values of Government 2.0
  via Benchmarking e-gov in web 2.0 'The people at Goldmundus have started an interesting exercise. They propose future narrative scenario of an ideal government 2.0, based on the possible usage of web2.0 tools such as Twitter and GCal in government.I really like the idea. '
• Crime mapping for London, Boris? We’ll start the clock now
  via Free Our Data: the blog - they can foresee 'issues' ...
  
  

• Councils Urged To Mix Technical Web Tests With User Tests
  via E-Access Blog - accessibility is a social issue as well as technical!
  

• Voter File 2.0: Catalist, Democratic Tool
  via techPresident
  Catalist is building on the lessons of 2004 (where Democrats had a database meltdown) and working to build a 50 state national database with the names of 180 million registered voters, plus 75 million unregistered people (for use by voter registration groups), enhanced with commercial data, specialty data (like who owns hunting licenses), integrated it with the Democrat's VAN application, and with a tool for subscribers to mine the data. Catalist's goal is to be a permanent piece of progressive infrastructure.

• Don't cry for her, Democratic Party
  via Citizen Crain "The festering Clinton boil is finally being lanced within the Democratic Party, at least for this election cycle" - Kevin hopes this finally breaks her stranglehold on GLBT.

• BBC's embedded player boosts traffic by 50%
  via PDA by Jemima Kiss
• Change 101
  via BuzzMachine - Jeff Jarvis
  I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.
  Here’s the Keynote we’ve been using as notes for this discussion.
  

| View | Upload your own

Here are the relevant slides about the interactive program

| View | Upload your own

• Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 1
  via currybetdotnet by martin.belam
  'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 2
  
  Conclusions

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