What’s it like being back on the internet after 6 years

I mentioned to someone that I’d had about 6 years with little or no internet access and was back online with a vengeance. It might have been a throwaway remark with the expectation of a short one line reply but it really got me thinking. Here’s a slightly improved version of my reply:

In one sentence: The internet seems to be gaining great original content and making mainstream media obsolete.

Dave Winer (a geek hero) had a bet with the New York Times that bloggers would become more influential than the NY Times in coverage of top stories (he won). His analysis of
mainstream mass media is spot on in my opinion:

“The pervasive big publishing philosophy of Dumb It Down, forces all stories through too narrow a channel to model the diverse and complex world we live in. When the Times covers my industry it seems they only know three stories — Microsoft is evil, Java is the future (or open source or whatever the topic du jour is) and Apple is dead. All other stories are cast into one of those three. They’re boring the readers into looking for alternatives, and because they are limited in the number of writers they employ, they can’t branch out to cover other angles.”

So instead of mass media we see a vast number of new sources of information with a far smaller audience – for example lots of blogs with only a few dozen readers. We still have some hugely popular things on the web (for example, youtube videos like “Charlie bit my finger” which has had several million viewings) but they cannot pull in all the attention from all of the people online. Unlike TV where a limited number of channels compete and each try to pick the largest “demographic” (I hate that word!) of viewers to appeal to, we have websites with incredibly narrow appeal but which are very popular.

Indeed the quote from Dave Winer’s challenger in the bet seems to sum up the attitudes of the creaky Old Media:

“…the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the OP ED page for 100 years.”

Oooo, I might get a letter on the letters page if they’ll publish it. Personally I like the chance to rant about everything I want to rant about and you’re all welcome to rant back.

Hat Fail

Hat Fail

Fantastic Contraption – Physics engine Flash game

I’ve tried some of the 2D physics engines on the web, such as Phun, but never seen anything like this. It’s a physics engine with some simple but well designed tasks to complete, always invloving moving an object to a target area. Check out other people’s solutions to levels and you’ll find some amazingly inventive creations.

Don’t try this unless you can spare a day to finish all the levels!

It’s the Fantastic Contraption!

After minimum wage… how about a maximum wage?

The public disgust at the vast paycheques and bonuses paid to bankers in the City of London was intense. Why should anyone should earn so much, yet alone those who don’t actually make anything? (don’t give me any crap about how they “make wealth” – they take wealth away from the rest of us, the parasites)

So why don’t we impose a maximum wage? We already have a minimum wage in the UK, surely it’s not that hard to come up with a legal framework for a maximum wage including expenses, bonuses and shares?

It’s pretty certain that you wouldn’t personally be affected by my proposal (unless multi-millionaires spend their time reading obscure bloggers). So how much should we let the rich have? What would be a reasonable figure? 1 million a year? What about 100 times the minimum wage?

According to HM Revenue & Customs minimum wage is £5.80. So an person working a typical 40 hour week, 52 weeks of the year would earn £12,064. So 100 times this would be just over 1.2 million. That seems reasonable. And why should any individual get as much as 100 other people.

A counter argument is that this would send big earners overseas. Good, it frees up well paid jobs for the rest of us. If they are earning that much they drive up the cost of everything for the rest of us with their excessive purchasing power, the [insert you own choice expletive here]s.

Further reading and food for thought:
“Highest paid director gets 900 times more than his average employee“

Stop Press:

Goldman Sachs have capped pay and bonuses in 2009, at £1m each. It can be done.

Learn how to design your own websites

I’ve made myself a web design site and I’ve written an article on getting started on web design using HTML and CSS. I go through in simple stages from a basic web page to this completed website page. If you have any feedback on the article (positive or constructive criticism) I’d love to hear from you.

Stylish outdoor projection

A beautiful and amazing combination of 3D modelling and outdoor projection:

The most beautiful house I’ve ever seen

I’ve seen this crop up a few times on the web. This is Simon Dale’s low-impact house in Wales. His site has lots of information about building the house. The important things to me are the cost and the low environmental impact. The house cost £3000 (and an amazing amount of work). It’s environmental impact is tiny compared to a typical modern house build and it’s rather nicer I think. Unfortunately the UK planning system makes it very hard to get permission to build houses like this. I even had a tiny bit of a hand in the building – I helped putting some of the mud up on the turf roof!

A low-impact home built from natural materials.

The best troll on the internet

I present to you… the best troll on the internet. Absolutely hilarious.

“What sites &+ books can i buy to learn spanish?

i just bought a chihuahua a month ago &+ im trying to lyke teach it tricks but i cant speak spanish sooo its not lyke understanding

soooo where can i buy books to learn spanish”

“How do i use my new radio at night?

i just bought a Sony XDR-S3HD HD Radio

it has am and fm but no pm

so how do i listen to it at night”

Dont you think the police department needs to get there act together?

Yesterday a officer pulled me over speeding and asked to see my license.
But just the other the day they took my license away and now they expect me to show them it
geez how dumb are they.
are all cops this dumb or is it just the one sin my neighborhood

Fivepenny Chairs – traditional hand made chairs from Dorset

Just finished a new website for a friend. David Saltmarsh at Fivepenny Chairs makes wooden windsor chairs – windsors, bowbacks, sackbacks, stools and rockers – using traditional techniques and tools.

There are some beautiful pictures of the chairs on the site.

DIY online democracy

Intro

We’ve seen enormous changes occur because of the web/internet:
. vast amounts of user generated content (blogs, youtube)
. vast online social networks created in a short time (facebook, WoW)
. huge numbers of people interacting
Huge numbers of people show their support in facebook groups hoping for religious, social or political change but facebook is not designed for mass voting or discussion.

What I Think We Need

2 areas I see where we have yet to see the internet impact greatly and where I beleive something needs to happen very much are: the political world and the financial system. I propose an idea to tackle the first of these: an online debating and voting system designed to do the job of the government (of the houses of parliament at least). Although it would have no power what-so-ever in the real world, it gives people a chance to debate and form opinions and to gauge public opinion. If it proved itself sufficiently, could it take the place of our existing political system? Lets face it, our government is never going to do this by itself, but user built systems (slashdot, wikipedia, facebook) can grow rapidly and effectively.

If the population of the UK had wanted a social networking site, the government wouldn’t have given us facebook. If we’d asked for online shopping we wouldn’t have got amazon. Let’s face it, government can’t do these things. And if we want to use the internet to improve our democracy, we’ll have to make it happen ourselves.

How It Would Work

Users create propositions. The have associated tags, eg. “Reduce speed limits on motorways to 60mph” might be tagged “road safety”, “climate change” and “transport policy”.

Comments can be made on each proposition. A facebook style system is used to rate comments (a simple thumbs up or down). The highly rated comments should be much more prominently displayed. Users can filter to see only higly rated comments or all comments (like on slashdot).

Users express if they agree or disagree with the propositions. While reading the on-going debates users may change their opinion at any time. The current level of agreement can be seen
and changes can be graphed over time.

The default front page for visitors not logged in shows hot topics and highly praised comments (in other words the most interesting content to persuade you to join).

To be really effective user accounts should be linked to one individual. That would be difficult but just an email verification would be reasonable (facebook uses a mobile phone account to validate). Faking large amounts of support should be rendered quite hard by the volume of legitimate traffic. Users breaking the rules (eg. creating multiple accounts) can be banned permanently, which would be a harsh punishment in a true democracy.

I think the most important requirements are as follows:
. It has to have transparency – like with wikipedia where analysis of metadata showed organisations editing topics to suit their purposes – downloadable zips of propositions, comments and votes with usernames and IP addresses.
. So it also has to be open-source.
. It has to have a good privacy policy.
. Users can hide behind a username but the history of their posts is easily accessible to others.
. It cannot be owned, or be seen to be owned, by any one “side”. That’s why I think it can only be set up by geeks – seeking debate and consensus rather than forcing their opinion.

There are currently sites trying to promote online democracy but I have yet to find one fitting the above criteria, especially they tend to be “owned” by an individual or group.

Further reading: the article “Rebooting Britain: Open democracy to the online masses” discusses similar ideas.