Outing's back: postscript

"I think of myself as phenomenally open," she says. "My children would say that, the people who know me would say that, the people who see me in the park would say that. Because when you have kids, you have to be open. Otherwise, what kind of message would that send? You can make a choice that brings them dignity or you can make a choice that's some hiding, shameful thing. I always choose dignity."
What about the other, lesbian kids with no role models, Jodie?

Michael Musto, my favourite gossip columnist, follows up on Out Magazine's Outing cover story (the one with with 'Jodie Foster' and 'Anderson Cooper').

By the way, I've been getting some light spanking myself for Out magazine's "glass closet" cover story about stars like ANDERSON COOPER and JODIE FOSTER who perform the delicate trick of living semi-out lives while not committing to being gay on the record.

In addition to praise, the story has incited the usual storms of outrage, and I honestly don't have the energy to fight the same old creatures who feel that saying a famous person is gay—even when he/she is hiding in plain sight—is a hateful, maligning abomination.

So I'll just link you to my Voice piece from two years ago countering the whinings about my last Out article on Cooper.

It's at www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/....

Then we can all go back to pretending we aren't interested in who anyone's fucking.

More Tesco

Had this response from Tesco to my final email:

I would like to assure you that I have recorded your views and will pass them on, together with any others we may receive, for the consideration of our Corporate department.

Thank you for bringing your further comments to our attention.

Does "together with any others we may receive" sound like an invitation?

Every little helps!

Here's your chance to do something — contact Tesco and tell them to start accepting Electron (they could do this TODAY).

• How this all started

Hearing the web

Excellent YouTube video very clearly demonstrates Screen Reader use.

This video shows the difference between a novice user who can only make use of basic functionality that screen readers offer and an advanced user who uses advanced functionality.

Public service bloggers

The Guardian carries a special edition of their Society section with interviews with public service bloggers.

• The consideration missing behind closed doors
  As an ambulance worker, 'Tom Reynolds' regularly attends calls at care homes for older people. He finds abuse and neglect is more common than he expected.
  

  I recently put in a report about a doctor who prescribed a "teaspoon of salt in a cup of lemon juice, to be taken three times a day" to a 93-year-old woman. An ambulance officer will be visiting the GP and investigating this dangerous advice.

• The doctor - knotty problem
  When the NHS can't cope with demand for even the most common treatments, having no private insurance can ruin livelihoods and lives, says 'Dr John Crippen'.
  

  The last time a patient of mine with back pain was seen by a nurse-specialist he was told to "take appropriate analgesia on a time-contingent basis". This is a fine example of "nurse speak". I refer to it often. I am not good at foreign languages, I do not speak "nurse". I think she meant for him to take two paracetamol every four hours.

• Reality bytes - extracts from the blogosphere
  A mental nurse, the father of a son diagnosed with schizophrenia, an employee of a Scottish council and a doctor at an NHS hospital recount their experiences.
  

  I realised very quickly that working in a government office had nothing whatsoever to do with helping to achieve mission statements or teamwork, and, as far as the voting taxpayers were concerned, well, they could vote and they could pay their taxes. After that, we could forget all about them and get on with raking in some reasonable salaries and employee benefits.

• The policeman - on the run
  Life for a bobby on the beat means pursuing the same criminals, chasing endless paperwork and trying to keep up with the government's latest targets and laws. Mary O'Hara meets the man behind the Policeman's Blog.
  

  Senior officers ... emailed me to say 'this is the kind of thing that happens'. I'm saying things that they think as well. They can't say it publicly, so I'm saying it.

• Power of the secret policeman's blog
  It would be foolish of the establishment to think that the questions by the blogger about modern policing can be ignored, says Patrick Butler.
  

  The ease and cheapness with which online blogs can be created and maintained is rewriting these rules. With the freedom of anonymity, public servants and service-users now have a largely unmoderated platform on which to tell it "how it is", connecting easily to the public and each other outside authorised channels.
  

• I had a dream of getting a book published
  'Wandering Scribe' blogs about being a homeless woman living in a car. But some people suspect her story is a publicity stunt. Alison Benjamin reports.
  
  
• Do you want to talk about it?
  The web creates a new citizen - state dialogue, says Paul Hodgkin.
  

  A new language is struggling into existence - a way for citizen and state to communicate that moves beyond the adversarial and towards a more nuanced public discussion of the thousands of micro issues that arise in a complex and networked information society where voice has been democratised.

  
  

Deputy candidates count friends online

Sanjaya Malakar

Hazel Blears

The BBC covers the appearance of UK politicians on social networking sites.

And produces a chart:

FACEBOOK BACKERS

· Hilary Benn: 230

· Alan Johnson: 216

· Hazel Blears: 160

· John Cruddas: 126

· Harriet Harman: 65

· Peter Hain: 56

... which is entirely meaningless ...

The idiocy of what's going on being illustrated by one of Hazel Blears web managers:

"If you don't yet know why Hazel is going to win - here's a clue. We have just overtaken the Harriet Harman for Deputy Facebook group after just one day of the campaign... and that was a Sunday."

Sweetheart, I and a host of others could Game that on any day of the week.

In the US at the moment people are gaming American Idol to the extent that a complete no-hoper — Sanjaya Malakar — looks increasingly likely to win.

The article also sez that Peter Hain, Hazel Blears and Hilary Benn have set up pages on MySpace and Facebook (Bebo?). Whereas Alan Johnson and Harriet Harman "have had pages set up for them".

So Blears does her own pages does she?

Incidentally, only Hain gets either their Facebook or MySpace pages in the first 100 results for a Google search on their names! And for Hain: 'You must log in to see this page'.

The only Labour deputy leadership candidate to appear on neither Facebook or MySpace is John Cruddas. He has his own website [where he's offering red-eye pictures, like the one right, to journalists], but appears to have shunned the social networking route.

He has said he is suspicious of the internet as a political tool and has expressed concern Labour will use the net to create a "virtual party," rather than holding meetings and face-to-face debates.

Cruddas, whoever he is, is very right to be sceptical. But not of the use the web can be put to with politics.

A similar debate is happening with politicians 'engagement' in the United States where the Web has forced politicians — through satire, largely — to review their efforts.

That's what we haven't got here yet. If Guido Fawkes and that lame The Onion copy is the best we can do ...

Says Bill Thompson

"My fear at the moment is that UK politicians don't have an instinctive understanding of what to do on the internet.

"It has to be done. I doubt it's going to be done very effectively this time around."

Some embarrassment might help that process along.

Bytes · Google brain drain - little green hikers - 1 in 3 say resist ID

• Revenue and Customs has set up a podcast service. One of the first is aimed at helping employers to file their end of year returns. It leads them through the process step by step, telling them what options are available and providing advice on other sources of information.
  
  
• Google is suffering a brain-drain. Hundreds of the 2,300 Googlers hired before the Internet juggernaut's initial public offering in August 2004 are hitting their fourth anniversary. When they do, they'll be free to cash in the final portions of their pre-IPO options, collectively worth an estimated $2.6 billion before taxes.
  
  Stacy Savides Sullivan, Google's chief culture officer and a 43-year-old pre-IPO millionaire herself. "We anticipated more because we think it would only be natural. We worry every day about this and hope we can stay ahead of it."

• On A List Apart, Martin Kliehm looks at the potential of Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA.
  

• Directgov is now producing a 3G version with
  

  ' live travel information; quick guides to learning, money, homes and property; and the latest public announcements including terror alerts and severe weather warnings'.

  Doesn't this sound just like the BBC?
  
  
• Trimble Outdoors has partnered with Google to provide Google Earth viewers with GPS-based interactive hiking information.
  
  The Trimble Outdoors Trips layer is found in the Featured Content selection in Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/). The layer has premium GPS-enabled multimedia content (routes, waypoints, text/audio/video notes) from trips contributed by editors of the BACKPACKER, BICYCLING and Mountain Bike magazines, as well as trips shared by Trimble Outdoors users.
  
  To view the layer:
  
  * Start Google Earth
  * Go to "Layers" in the Sidebar on the left
  * Expand the "Featured Content" folder under "Primary Database"
  * Click the "Trimble Outdoors Trips" checkbox
  * In the main window, pan and zoom into the area of interest to you until you see red lines and dots indicating Trimble Outdoors trips
  * Continue to zoom in until you see little "Green Hikers":
  
  Depending on the zoom level and context, clicking a Green Hiker will open a popup window with detailed information about a trip or its element, for example a photo.
  
  
• Google has launched Checkout in the UK. Merchants get free credit and debit card processing.
  
  
• A programme to kick-start the use of internet communications in space has been announced by the US government. — The Department of Defense's Iris project will put an internet router in space by the start of 2009.
  
  

• OutLaw reports that one in three people say they will resist identity checks using the new ID Card.
  
  In 2004 Mark Oaten, the then Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs, asked for figures to be published on the assumptions being made by Government about ID cards' use.
  
  The Government refused.
  
  Oaten's request was backed by the Information Commissioner and an Information Tribunal and the figures have now been released.
  
  · NO2ID:stop ID cards and the database state
  
  

Bytes · Youth write blogs - Sexcameron - London goes wifi

• New research, My Digital Life, from AOP has 73 per cent of 18-24 year olds writing blogs or posting comments online on a weekly basis.
  
  
• E-government@Large covers Phishing and comes to some scary conclusions about anti-virus software. "Even Domestos has had to abandon its 50 year old slogan 'kills all known germs dead' to say that it kills only '99 per cent of known germs'".
  
  
• Swiftcover.com has become one of the first brands to let users get instant insurance quotes by entering details within the ad copy.
  
  
• Firefox is battling IE7 through adding social features such as the Coop which lets users share favourite Web site links with friends.
  
  
  
  More at Mozilla Labs
  
  · The Coop, sorted by friends
  · The Coop, sorted by friends (alternate)
  · The Coop, showing a preview of a friend's shared content
  · The Coop, sorted by content type
  
  
  
• Sexcameron takes choice clips of Dave on the stump and on his website and re-edits them to make it look as he's dancing to Justin Timberlake's SexyBack. Still waiting for someone to sex-up Ming ...
  
  
  
  
• Guardian intervews Mark Anders, senior principal scientist at Adobe Systems.
  
  Why is Flash taking off again? "It's a combination of broadband and in the number of people being comfortable with it."
  
  How has it changed? "Flash didn't really have a developer focus. It always had a creative focus. But I joined to help develop the messaging and tools."
  
  
• Blogging is now ten years old and there are now 70m of them around the globe.
  
  
• Heather Hopkins has looked at site visits against likelihood to vote and found:
  
  · MySpace visitors least likely and
  · Facebook visitors most likely.
  
  In what must be a first, Guido Fawkes picked up on her comments on MySpace (but he saw it as somewhere for pollies to avoid - they don't vote).
  
  
• The City of London has become Europe's biggest wireless internet hotspot.
  
  The network will span the entire Square Mile, and uses a new "mesh" technology to transfer users automatically from base station to base station as they walk by, allowing uninterrupted web use. Users will be charged about £11 a month.
  
  
  
• Unlike the UK, anyone is now free to download maps and satellite photos of Canada from its Geogratis portal and create a business around them.
  
  
• Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! are now supporting 'autodiscovery' of Sitemaps.
  
  The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. More at sitemaps.org.
  
  
• Google Blogoscoped looks at coverage of criticism of the Beijing Olympics on Google.cn and asks
  

  "Is it good SEO in China to not speak critical of my government – are there any Google webmaster guidelines as to what may get you removed?"
  
  
  

Bishop to c8

New York Times:15 minutes ago

Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion — Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.

Crazy idea? Try selling it to Google

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. looks for ideas that are ``really crazy'' when sizing up potential purchases, the Internet company's top dealmaker said.

``We look at everything very carefully,'' Salman Ullah, Google's director of corporate development, said yesterday in a speech at a meeting of the Los Angeles Venture Association. ``The really crazy ones do really well.''

Mountain View responds to every e-mail pitching a company, while phone calls have a 10 percent response rate, he said.

.. ``The crazy ones mean they ignore the usual restraints of investment levels required or design parameters or `Gee I need more servers than anyone ever thought was possible','' Ullah said. ``When you free yourselves from these constraints, you create crazy, cool things.''

But

.. We believe the following issues have weighed on the stock: litigation with Viacom over YouTube; partnerships (such as with Fox) not being quite as robust as expected; expense creep related to Checkout; and a perceived lack of focus in trying to service traditional media.We believe Google's core search business remains strong, however.
... We rate the stock Overweight.
Christa Quarles of Weisel [SF-Based merchant bank]