davblog

On Saturday I was at the Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park. It's a pretty good idea to have a three-day festival in London over the same period as the Glastonbury festival as it's easy for the acts to play both festivals over the weekend and those of us whose camping days are long behind us get to enjoy some of the Glastonbury bands and sleep in a comfortable bed.

My main reason for going was to see Neil Young, but there were a number of other acts (across three stages) to see first.

We arrived just as the first act started on the main stage. They were called The Original Sinners and my friend said he was interested to see them. It turns out that there must be more than one band of that name as these really weren't the band he was expected. They were pretty dreadful all in all. They were followed by Rudy Vaughn who had apparently won a competition in the US to come over and play at the festival. They were even worse. And instantly forgettable (I just had to look up their name). The only thing I can remember about them was that they finished with a cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It".

By now I was desperate for some decent music. The next band on were The Pretenders and they didn't disappoint. To be honest I was surprised that they were still going. Haven't most of them died? But Chrissy Hynde still has it and their set was head and shoulders above what had gone before. They were followed by Seasick Steve. I've seen him on TV a few times and I've never really understood what the fuss is all about. But live, it's a completely different story. He was brilliant. It's just him and a drummer, but they had the huge festival audience hanging on every note.

The next act on was Ben Harper with his new band. I'd never heard of him and nothing I'd read about him filled me with any enthusiasm so I took the opportunity to explore the other stages. I didn't get very far as on the first stage I walked past I came across Alessi's Ark. I was completely entranced by their modern folky tunes and I sat and listened to all of their short set. After that I wandered back to the main stage where I was unfortunate enough to catch the end of Ben Harper's set. Which really wasn't very good.

The sun had be shining all afternoon, but as Harper left the stage it was becoming obvious that a storm was on the way. And sure enough, within fifteen minutes we were all rather wet. There was even some thunder and lightning.

The next band on were the Fleet Foxes. It was still raining when they came on, but it stopped soon afterwards. I love their music, but I'm afraid the rain rather dampened my enthusiasm. When they were playing and singing it was fabulous. But they take their music all very seriously and that means that inbetween songs there is interminable retuning of instruments which rather destroys the atmosphere. I'd love to see them again in a more appropriate venue. It sounds like I didn't enjoy them, but I should point out that even after two hours of Neil Young, it was still Fleet Foxes tunes that were stuck in my head on the way home.

Some time later Neil Young took the stage. I've been a Neil Young fan for years (we all had copies of "After The Goldrush" when I was a teenager) and I'm appalled that I've never seen him before. It's not like he rarely tours or anything.

Young opened with "Hey Hey, My My" (or perhaps it was "My My, Hey Hey" - I get those two confused) and the next couple of hours is a joyful blur of music and feedback. He played pretty much everything I wanted to hear (the full setlist is online). Oh, ok, there were a couple of things missing, but with a back catalogue the size of Young's you'd need to play all day to fit everything in. In amongst the grunge and feedback he found time for a more folky section where he played things like "Heart of Gold" and "The Needle and the Damage Done". If I have one tiny criticism, it's that if he learned to finish his songs a bit sooner he could fit in twice as many. For example, he finished with "Rockin' in the Free World" which had at least four false endings.

The encore was the Beatles' "A Day in the Life". I understand he's be playing that a lot on this tour. But when he got to "Woke up, fell out of bed..." Paul McCartney joined him on stage. I can't really see Paul McCartney and Neil Young as a double act so it all seemed a bit strange to me. I suppose I can say that I've now seen McCartney live. And I won't have to go to one of his (increasing rare and, I expect, overpriced) gigs.

This has to be one of the best gigs I've ever seen (and I said that after seeing Magazine earlier this year too - been a good year for gigs so far). I think this was the last night of the tour. But he'll be back. And if you get the chance to see him play, I strongly recommend that you take it.

There's a lot of material out there on the internet. And the nature of the internet means that it's easy to reuse that material without paying any attention to copyright. If my browser can display an image, then I can save that image to my local disk and then, perhaps, use it on my own web site or in some other publication.

But just because it's easy from a practical perspective, that doesn't mean that it's legal to do it. Much of the material on the web is subject to various copyright restrictions. And if you're going to be a responsible internet citizen then you're going to ensure that you are careful not to use any material in ways that are contrary to the copyright.

If you are, say, a national newspaper then you're going to want to be really sure that you're being careful about copyright. I'm sure that someone like (to pick a paper at random) the Daily Mail would get very upset if they found someone using one of their photos without permission or without giving correct attribution. It's therefore reasonable to expect them to offer the same courtesy to others.

Take a look at this story about Philip Schofield and Twitter. Don't bother to read it. It's the usual Mail nonsense. They're complaining that Schofield shares too many details of his life on Twitter. But they do it (ironically, I'm sure) by poring over every detail of a meal in the Fat Duck. No, don't read the words. Take a look at the pictures. Schofield has illustrated his evening by posting photos to TwitPic. TwitPic is a Twitter "add-on" that allows you to share photos as easily as Twitter allows you share text.

Notice that the Mail have put a copyright attribution on each of Schofield's photos. They all say "© Twitpic", implying that that TwitPic own the copyright on the photos. But if you take a few seconds to read TwitPic's terms and conditions, you find that they say:

All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners

TwitPic lay no claim at all to copyright on the pictures, so the Daily Mail are attributing copyright to the wrong people. It's not at all hard to find this out (it's a link labelled "terms" at the bottom of the page - exactly the same, in fact, as it is on the Mail site), but the lazy Daily Mail picture editor couldn't be bothered to do that and just guessed at the copyright situation.

And whilst we're talking about the Mail not understanding copyright, it's worth remidning ourselves of the nonsense in their terms and conditions.

• 3.2. You agree not to:
• 3.2.1. use any part of the materials on this Site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors;
• 3.2.2. copy, reproduce, distribute, republish, download, display, post or transmit in any form or by any means any content of this Site, except as permitted above;
• 3.2.3. provide a link to this Site from any other website without obtaining our prior written consent.

Under clause 3.2.3, I've broken their terms at least twice in this article. But clause 3.2.2 is the really interesting one. You're not allowed to download or display the content of the site. Which makes it rather hard to view it in a browser. Idiots.

Update: They have now changed the copyright on the photos to "© Philip Schofield/Twitter". So that's one less piece of stupidity in the world. The struggle continues.
 

Long-time readers will know that I am not averse to contacting companies to complain about bad service that I receive. This isn't a particularly fulfilling hobby as you very rarely get any kind of satisfaction. But recently it's becoming even less satisfying than before. I've noticed that email conversations with customer service reps are becoming more and more drawn out as many of them seem less and less capable of understanding the issues that I am raising. It can often take a couple of rounds of email before they are clear what I'm talking about. And I'm pretty sure it's not me describing things badly.

Here's an example.

Last week the BBC showed an abbreviated version of Leonard Cohen: Live in London. I missed it as it was first broadcast, so over the weekend I tried to catch up with it on iPlayer. We have Virgin Media, so we can watch iPlayer content through our V+ box. I found the programme and started to watch. I didn't last long though as the aspect ratio of the programme was wrong. The programme had been filmed in 4:3, but the iPlayer has stretched it to 16:9[1]. This meant that everyone everyone appeared fatter than they should be. I know that many people are used to watching television like this, but to me it renders a programme unwatchable.

I wrote to the iPlayer support team explaining the problem. Here's what I wrote:

The version of "Leonard Cohen - Live in London" which is currently available on iPlayer on Virgin Media is in the wrong aspect ratio. It appears to be a 4:3 broadcast which has been stretched to 16:9. Everyone therefore seems to be far too fat and the programme is unwatchable.

I think that's clear.

This morning I got a reply from them. Here's what they said:

I understand you're unhappy with the size of 'Leonard Cohen' on BBC iPlayer.

The bit rate varies per programme and is dependent on the amount of changes per video frame. For example, a programme such as 'Doctor Who' or 'Leonard Cohen' will be at a higher rate than a Current Affairs programme (where a presenter is fairly static in the frame).

Considering the above information:

The average file size for a 30 minute streamed programme is around 110MB. The average file size for a 1 hour streamed programme is around 215MB.

I appreciate you may feel differently on this matter and I'd like to assure you that I have registered your comments on our log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for BBC iPlayer and commissioning executives within the BBC, and their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Nothing in there at all about aspect ratios. They seem to have assumed that I'm talking about the size of downloaded programmes. Which is strange as I specifically mentioned the Virgin Media version of iPlayer which doesn't support programme downloads.

I can see three explanations:

1. The person genuinely misunderstood what I was asking about and answered the question to the best of her ability. In which case she needs better training in the products that she is supposed to be supporting.
   
2. The person didn't read my mail carefully and just sent a reply that looked like it might address the issues I was talking about. In which case she needs to read email more closely. Perhaps the iPlayer support team needs more people so they have time to read messages and write replies carefully.
3. No-one read my email and some automated system sent a canned reply based on some (obviously flawed) keyword matching.
   

I know I shouldn't waste my time, but I've had another go at explaining exactly what the problem is and why this reply didn't address any of my issues. Let's wait and see what happens.

But it shouldn't be like this. Speaking to customer service shouldn't be like banging your head against a brick wall. People should know the products they are supporting and they should want to give the best service they can. It's becoming far too common that customer service replies appear to be dashed off as quickly as possible in the hope that no-one will actually bother to read the reply. Either the support team don't have the training to properly support their products or they are overworked and don't have time to do a proper job.

Either way, it's all very frustrating.

The BBC showed the Leonard Cohen concert again over the weekend. I recorded it on my V+ box. It was broadcast in the correct aspect ratio. I enjoyed watching it very much.

[1] I like to call this "Dixonsvision" in memory of the sadly-missed shop which used to insist on demonstrating all of its widescreen TVs this way.

Last night I was at the O2 Arena to see one of the 30th anniversary performances of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. For some reason it was a year late - the 30th anniversary was actually last year.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was expecting. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been Jeff Wayne with a group of unknowns performing the album, I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find that with a couple of exceptions each part was played by the person who played it on the original album.

One of the exceptions was, of course, Richard Burton who narrated the album. But he was there in a way. A giant animated head was projected onto the side of the stage and recited Burton's lines. The animation was impressive but it was slightly strange that it was based on a version of Burton's face which was far younger than he was in 1978.

There was an added treat even before Burton's opening narration. The show began with an animation of the martians plotting their attack. Some research this morning reveals that it was taken from a computer game based on the album which was released in 1998. This piece is also the source of the sample "the problem is, of course, the humans" which is used in one of the Ulladubulla remixes and which has been bugging me for years.

Following this short film, Burton comes in ("No-one would have believed ...") and "The Eve of the War" starts up. The animation continues telling the story of the invasion and in the middle of the song, Justin Hayward walks onto stage and tells exactly what the odds are against anything coming from Mars.

The performance continues in the same fashion. The band (and orchestra) play almost note-perfect renditions of the music, the video screen plays out the story and occasional guest stars come onto the stage to sing. It's all really rather impressive.

The first missing guest star is David Essex as the artilleryman. I haven't heard why why he isn't involved but, to be honest, he isn't really missed. Alexis James (no, neither have I) takes the part and does it very well.

During "Thunder Child" another surprise is revealed as a large martian fighting machine is lowered to the stage and started shining bright lights over the audience. My companion pointed out that "it all went a bit Pink Floyd" at that point, but in my opinion that's no bad thing. As the Thunder Child was destroyed, Burton told us that "Earth belonged to the martians" and the first half of the show (the first album in the double album set for those of us old enough to remember such things) came to an end. We had a twenty minute break.

The second half starts in a lower key than the first half. "The Red Weed" is possibly the weakest musical link in the whole piece. Not that it's bad by any means, it's just that it doesn't (in my opinion) hold up to the standards of the rest of the album. The animation was very nice at this point though.

I was expecting the pace to pick up again with "The Spirit of Man" which is my favourite part of the album. On the original recording this is a duet between Phil Lynott and Julie Covington. I know, of course, why Lynott wasn't there but Covington was another unexplained absence. And these two were really missed. Lynott's place was taken by another unknown called Shannon Noll and Covington's by Jennifer Ellison. I really really tried to ignore my prejudice against Ellison, but she really isn't the equal of Covington. Maybe her presence drew in some people who wouldn't have come otherwise (I doubt it) but I was distinctly unimpressed by her performance.

The Alexis James returned to give us some more of his David Essex impression whilst singing "Brave New World" and the evening was back on track. Except that there wasn't really very much track left. If you were writing the piece for stage then you'd make sure that there was a big finale. The War of the Worlds doesn't have a big rousing finale. It just kind of fades out when the narrator realises that the martians have all been killed by terrestrial bacteria (sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone).

Most of the audience were people who knew the album well and knew that there wasn't much of interest likely to happen after the end of "Brave New World". Combine that knowledge with the fact that the transport links to North Greenwich were severely curtailed last night (no Jubilee Line) and you end up with a large proportion of the audience starting to leave before the show was over. I have never seen so many people streaming out of an auditorium whilst the band were still playing.

We stayed until the end. It was good, but not as good as the end of the first half. There's nothing they can do about that. The first half is just better.

All in all, it was a great show though. If you're a fan of the original recording then I highly recommend it. If you're not a fan of the original recording, then you really should be.

Now, who's going to buy me a copy of the 7 disk collectors edition?

On the train home I was pondering the difference between guerrilla marketing and gorilla marketing.

Antonio points out that the Cadbury's Phil Collins advert might be an example of gorilla marketing, but I think it's probably deeper than that.

According to Wikpedia:

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing tactics are unexpected and unconventional; consumers are targeted in unexpected places, which can make the idea that's being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally.

In comparison, gorilla marketing is probably all about alpha males beating their chests and flinging faeces.

I know which type of marketing I'd rather use.

I remember a time, not very long ago, when people assumed a link between literacy and professionalism. When producing text for public consumption people would always take the time to ensure that their spelling and grammar were correct. Obvious errors in copy would be seen as a lack of attention to detail and would throw grave doubts on your level of professionalism.

Those days are long over. Here are a couple of good examples from today.

Firstly, I got an email from an agent who was asking if I'd be interested in a requirement that she was trying to fill. Her email began like this:

I hope your well?

That is, of course, a perfectly reasonable sentiment to start an email with. It's just a shame that her grammar let her down so badly. As well as confusing "you're" and "your", she has also tried to turn a sentence into a question. All in all it gives a bad impression of her company. If they can't be bothered to spend the time getting the grammar right in an email, then can they be trusted to check a contract carefully?

Then, this afternoon, on Twitter, Chris Applegate made this observation:

My, there are a *lot* of "gorilla marketing" experts on LinkedIn

Would you consider taking marketing advice from someone who didn't know the difference between "gorilla" and "guerilla"? I suspect that gorillas have a rather different marketing style to guerillas.

LinkedIn acts as a combination of a CV and an advertising hoarding. Seeing how you describe yourself there will often be the first impression that people have of your work. Making fundamental errors in your description can't be a good idea. Are there really so many people out there looking for marketing people that they don't care if you're a gorilla or a guerilla? Or are the gorilla marketing experts aiming their services at clients who don't know the difference either.

I strongly suspect that it's the latter option that is closer to the truth. There are so many people out there who have a no real understanding of how the English language works that it really doesn't matter whether or not you use it correctly. It's only a rapidly shrinking group of curmudgeons like me who will ever notice.

I suppose that before I publish this, I should really go over my LinkedIn profile with a fine-toothed comb. I don't think there are any errors, but I'm sure that my eagle-eyed readers will be able to spot one or two.

The people at uSwitch saw yesterday's blog post and were rather pleased that I was so happy with their service. To show their thanks, they've written to me with an offer for my readers.

If you use this link to visit their site and change energy supplier before the end of June 2009, they will send you an Amazon voucher for £10. You'll also (obviously) need to give them a valid email address so they have somewhere to send the voucher.

I don't yet have a policy for promoting products on this site. Perhaps I should think about that if offers like this become more common. I should, however, point out firstly that I have no connection to uSwitch (I'm just a satisified customer) and secondly that I'm getting no payment for mentioning them again - the offer is just for my readers.

So, once again, here's the link to use. The offer is valid until the end of this month. Which gives you about two weeks to make use of it.

How do you buy your power? Or, more specifically, how do you decide which company to buy your power from?

Here's how I do it. Ever six months or so I go to uSwitch and spend five minutes researching who does the cheapest gas and electricity for our usage. If I find something that is much cheaper than our existing supplier then I'll change. Most of the time I can make the change over the internet by simply following a link from the uSwitch site. Most of the time the differences are so small that it's not worth changing.

One thing that I will never do is to sign on for a new power supplier from people who knock on my door and try to tell me a new supplier without giving me time to investigate their offers. Firstly, I think it's incredibly rude to disturb people whilst they are at home, but mostly it's the hard-sell tactics that I object to.

We had one last week. He was from npower, but they are all as bad. I noticed him as I was walking home, but realised that he was walking away from my house. When I got in, my wife said that he had knocked at the door but she had ignored him. But an hour or so later he came back. I answered the door and he immediately launched into his nonsense. Apparently, most of my neighbours had realised that he could save them money so they had all signed up. He didn't have price data for my current supplier but he knew that he could save me money. I tried to explain to him how uSwitch works, but it seemed to just confuse him.

In the end I told him that I refused to do business with any company who called on me uninvited as I considered it rude. He started to argue that it wasn't rude, but realised that he was wasting his time and retreated.

Ususally I just let these things go, but on this occasion I decided to take it further. Firstly I checked with Uswitch and, as I suspected, my supplier (Scottish Power in case you're interested) we still the cheaper than npower by about a tenner a year. Then I emailed npower customer services to complain about them sending out uninformed and unethical sales people.

Today I got a reply from them. They were sorry to hear that I felt their sales representative was attempting to mislead me. They were also sure that normally "the standard of service offered by our Sales Team is professional and of the highest standard". They also pointed out that if I sent them my address they would pass my details to their "Marketing Supression Team" which would stop me getting further visits.

That last item got me thinking. Of course, it'll be an improvement if I get no more sales visits from npower. But there are many other power companies who delight in trying to mis-sell their services in this way. The absense of the npower team will scarely be noticed. Wouldn't it be good if there was a industry-wide "Marketing Supression" list that all of the power companies signed up to. I can't be the only person who gets annoyed by this.

I have no idea how effective these sales calls are. It must work to some extent as it's a relatively sales method. I know those people won't be paid much (and most of it will be commission), but there are a lot of them. I'm surprised that people listen to their nonsense, and I worry that they are preying on people who don't have the presence of mind to think about what they are being told and therefore take it at face value. I suppose that if you're told that "most of your neighbours are switching" and you're not given a chance to check that out before signing, then some people will just accept it.

Until we can get an industry-wide marketing suppression list (or, better, banning this kind of selling) can any one recommend any good tactics for annoying these people?

And please, make use of uSwitch.

This morning a friend was complaining on Twitter about using Evolution on Linux to talk to his company's Exchange server. Evolution is the default answer to the question "how do I talk to Exchange from Linux", but my past experience has been much like my friend's - it's really not a very good answer.

I suggested Thunderbird to him. In my opinion, Thunderbird is the best email program out there. It's been my email program of choice for several years. It will happily work with Exchange to receive and send email. Googling for "thunderbird exchange" will bring back lots of useful results.

But Exchange isn't just about email. There's a whole calendaring system there too. Evolution supports that, but (by default) Thunderbird doesn't. There is, however, a way to get your Exchange calendar into Thunderbird using a rather circuitous route. Here's how I do it.

Firstly, you need the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. Lightning adds calendar features to Thunderbird. You can create events and get alerts when they are about to happen. You can even subscribe to external calendars as long as they are in a standard format. Unfortunately, Exchange calendars aren't in standard formats. So we need some kind of intermediary.

The intermediary I use is Google Calendar. In fact I use Google Calendar as my definitive calendar. Every other calendar application I use reads from or writes to my Google Calendar. And Thunderbird (or, rather, Lightning) is one of the applications that interacts with it. Google Calendar writes calendars in the correct standard format, so Lightning will read a Google Calendar out of the box. But we can get cleverer than that using another Thunderbird add-on called Provider. Once Provider is installed, communication between Lightning and Google Calendar becomes two-way. I can add events either in Lightning or in Google Calendar and they will turn up in both.

There's one final step. We need to synchronise our Exchange calendar with Google Calendar. And Google have a product that does just that. It's called Google Calendar Sync. With this installed, your Exchange calendar is automatically synchronised with Google Calendar regularly. So now we can edit our calendar anywhere and the new or updated events will show up in all of our calendars. I've even noticed that invitations to events from other Exchange users show up in Lightning - but I haven't tried replying from there yet.

There are two things I don't like about Google Calendar Sync. Firstly, it has to be running on a PC running Windows which is connected to your Exchange Server. So it's not a solution that will work whilst you're (for example) out of the office with your office PC switched off. Secondly, it will only sync with your main Google Calendar. I would have liked to have a separate calendar for work events (and it's only work events that come from my Exchange calendar), but that doesn't seem to be supported yet.

And there are a couple of caveats with Lightning and Provider. If you're using a Beta test version of Thunderbird 3 then the standard Lightning and Provider downloads don't work with it. There are nightly builds of them both available, and the version of Lightning that I tried worked fine but Provider still didn't seem to work. I expect that situation to change quickly over the next few weeks as the Thunderbird 3 launch gets closer.

A year ago I was really disorganised. I never knew what I was supposed to be doing. Settling on Google Calendar as a definitive place to plan my life was a really good idea. At least now, I know which meetings I'm missing.

Last night I dreamt that the BNP had won seats in the European Parliament. This morning I woke up and it was true. Across the country, 6% of the electorate (well, ok, 6% of the 35% who could be bothered to vote) had decided that they were best represented by racists. In two regions the percentage was high enough for them to win a seat.

It's difficult to know who to blame for this. Certainly the Labour government have a lot to answer for. If they hadn't done all they could to alienate the electorate over the last few years then there wouldn't have been the need for people to vote against them. And it's not just the Labour Party, of course, every MP who has been abusing the expenses system and destroying the public's trust in politics has to take a share of the blame. Then there's the right wing press. They don't explicitly support the BNP, of course, but papers like the Sun, the Mail and the Standard ("sorry", my arse) have been slowly but surely creating an environment where the BNP's poisonous attitudes have moved from being completely unacceptable to something that "middle England" discusses over the dinner table. People who didn't vote were also to blame. Low turnouts favour minor and extreme parties. Every vote that isn't cast increases the power of votes that are cast.

And then there are the voters. There's a load of nonsense talked about the BNP vote being a protest vote and that the people who voted for them not being racists. I'm afraid that doesn't really bear any kind of scrutiny. There were plenty of protest parties to choose from. Just because you want to give the Labour Party an electoral kicking, that doesn't lead inexorably to voting to the BNP. There are only two reasons why you would vote for the BNP. Firstly you're the kind of racist dickhead who agrees with their policies. Or, alternatively, you thought you wanted to vote against Labour and didn't bother to research the policies of the party you decided to vote for. In either case, you're a moron.

Just before I went to bed last night, Nick Griffin (the leader of the BNP) was being interviewed by the BBC. What an odious little toad of a man. He was on the defensive throughout the interview. He obviously knows that his opinions are completely offensive to all rational people so he spends all of his time trying to find increasingly bizarre ways to defend them. He claimed that one reason why the BNP only allows white people to join is so that they can use race discrimination legislation against employers who try to sack employees who are found to be members of the party. Every time he opens his mouth, sane people just want to slap him.

I can understand why the BNP want to be a whites-only organisation (it's because they're racists) but I don't understand why UK electoral rules allow it. They want to be seen as a legitimate politcal party. So why can't we pass a law saying that all UK political parties have to reach certain standards of equality. You know, basic stuff like not discriminating on the basis of gender, race or sexuality. Seems obvious to me.

Griffin also likes to harp on about the "indigenous people". He really needs a lesson in history. Perhaps someone should send him a copy of Homo Britannicus. The UK doesn't have any indigenous people. Modern humans arrived in the UK from Europe less than 30,000 years ago. Maybe we should try to send Griffin back to the home of his ancestors. Mind you, it'll be pretty crowded there as we all have our roots in Ethiopia.

Before the election there was a lot of discussion of the BNP on Twitter. The "#theBNPareTwats" meme got a lot of use. And yet it appeared to achieve nothing. But that's not really surprising, is it? Twitter is largely an echo chamber. You follow (and are followed by) your friends and people who like what you write. The BNP discussions were largely people who were never going to vote BNP telling other people who were never going to vote BNP not to vote BNP. The chances of any of that witty repartee reaching and converting people who were going to vote BNP was close to zero. So perhaps we're to blame a bit too. Instead of doing our bit to exchange insults about the BNP on Twitter, we should have been out there knocking on doors and explaining our point of view to people who don't share it. Perhaps shouting about things on Twitter (and, I'll admit with slight embarrassment, on blogs) isn't the best way to change things.

It's too late now though. There's nothing we can do[1]. Four the next five years, two regions in the north of England will be represented by racists. We can hope that people saw these elections as unimportant and that they won't vote the same way in the next General Election. But can we be sure of that? Perhaps we'd better consider doing some real campaigning next time.

Because the thought of BNP supporters in the House of Commons is far too grim to contemplate.

[1] Well, we can (and should) sign Hope Not Hate's "Not in My Name" petition, but it's not going to change anything.