davblog

Daily Mail on Chrome

2008-09-08T13:28:15Z

It's very unlikely that you haven't heard of Chrome, the browser that Google launched last week. If you're running Windows then you may have even tried it out.

Those of you (and I assume it's most of you) who follow tech news will also know that there was some confusion over Chrome's licence agreement during the week. On Wednesday it was noticed that the agreement (which everyone is bound by when using the software) claimed that Google had full rights to do whatever it wanted with any data that you submitted through the browser. Uproar ensued for a few hours until Google realised its mistake, apologised and removed the offending clause. By Thursday lunchtime everything was fine again.

But not in the world of the Daily Mail. For some reason they decided to run the story about Chrome's licence today. Why they didn't run it on Thursday or Friday when the story was still fresh, I don't know, but it's there on their web site today. Of course as the confusion over the licence has all been resolved, they mention that in the fourth and fifth paragraphs.

Google's 'End User License Agreement' (EULA) attracted so many complaints in a 24-hour period that it was forced to edit the offending clause.
It now states that users 'retain copyright and any other rights' that they hold on material posted or submitted online.

But it seems that isn't clear enough for Mail readers, some of whom have left comments on the story demonstrating that they obviously haven't managed to get that far into the story. Maybe they only read the headline before becoming so insensed that they had to post a comment. Here are some examples:

Sounds like an excellent reason to steer well clear of it - Fred James, Worcester, UK
Thank you Daily Mail.You have just stopped me from downloading this new Browser. - william
I'm uninstalling... - Phillie L Hall, Abu Dhabi

All in all it seems that these particular Mail readers fail at basic comprehension.

Update: I've just noticed that at the top of their story, the Mail describe this problematic clause as a "hidden" clause. In what way was it hidden? It was just part of the licence agreement. It was only hidden in the same way that all clauses of all licences are hidden - because no-one ever reads them.

Their Own Worst Enemy

2008-09-02T09:55:20Z

Sometimes (actually, it's really quite often) Free Software enthusiasts are their own worst enemy. Their insistence on using completely free formats for audio and video instead of the proprietary formats that most people use means that their message is often only seen by a tiny minority of people - generally the people who don't need to see their message anyway as they are already converts.

Here's an excellent case in point. The GNU project is twenty-five years old this month. And to celebrate the anniversary, Stephen Fry has recorded a video for them introducing the concepts of free software[1] and talking about the project. This would be a fabulous marketing tool for them, But the only people who will be able to watch it are already Free Software users.

If you had a video to share with as many people as possible, the way that most people would do it would be to upload it to YouTube, Google Video or some other video sharing site. The GNU project won't do that as all of those sites use Flash video which is a proprietary format and the GNU project are sworn to spurn proprietary formats at all times. This religious adherance to their holy writ also prevents them from using the second best approach which would be to make Quicktime or MPG files available on their web site. Again, these are proprietary formats and therefore verboten.

The approach that the GNU project takes is to make the video available as an Ogg Theora file. Now Ogg Theora is a perfectly good format. Videos in that format are reasonably sized and of pretty good quality. Also, and this is what the GNU project love about it, the format is completely free and open. For that reason, it's the format that the GNU project use for all of their videos.

There's only one problem with the Ogg Theora format - almost no-one can view it. On most standard installations of Windows and Mac OSX, there is no software that can play an Ogg Theora file. Which, to my mind, rather defeats the object of having such a useful marketing tool. The GNU project are using this as a way to encourage people to install and use their new gNewSense software package, but I can't honestly see anyone installing all of that just to watch a Stephen Fry video.

"Ah", I hear you saying, "but that's not really a problem, is it? Some clever geek will convert the Ogg Theora file and upload it to YouTube by the end of the day. We'll all watch it there." And you're probably right. There's a very good chance of that happening. But if it does, the GNU project will probably issue a takedown notice. You see they've released this video under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works licence in order to specifically prevent people from converting the video to a more friendly format. It's like they want to prevent people from seeing the video.

[Update: As pointed out by Matt (the producer of the video) in the comments, I was completely wrong about the licence. The No Derivative Works clause does not exclude conversion to other formats. There are many versions available on YouTube.]

Of course, this isn't a problem, for me. I use Linux on my desktop and that's the only major desktop platform which supports Ogg Theora out of the box. Or so I thought. My first attempt to play the video on my standard installation of Fedora 9 failed. I just saw a grey box and a Java applet error. I fiddled with the options a bit and tried again using the Totem video player. Ironically, that popped up a dialog message warning me that it needed a proprietary plugin to play the video and then telling me that no appropriate plugin was available. Ignoring the error, the video played fine anyway. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the BBC will play the video and lots of people will see that way. But getting Stephen Fry to record a video about your project is an incredibly powerful publicity tool. It is stupid to hang on to your religious beliefs to such an extent that you prevent most people from seeing it.

[1] The Free Software Foundation never ever use the term "Open Source Software" as it dilutes their brand.

Update: On investigating gNewSense further, I see that it's a completely new Linux distribution, because popular distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are happy to include proprietary software. I despair.

Update 2: In the comments, Paul points out that they are using a Java applet to play the video, which will mean that it works fine everywhere where Java is successfully installed (not, it appears, on my machine). But it's 2008. No-one uses Java applets any more. And anyway (as Paul also points out) Java was proprietary (and therefore verboten) until very recently. What did they do before that?

Is Sarah Palin a Wiccan?

2008-09-01T09:53:28Z

This just came up in a discussion in the office. You read it here first.

Sarah Palin claims to be a christian. If that's the case then why are at least two of her children (Willow and Piper - I'm researching the others) named after teenage witches? I reckon she has wiccan sympathies.

Does anyone else have any evidence to add?

Mind you, this makes me somewhat conflicted. I'd far rather have a wiccan as VP than an evangelical christian who supports the teaching of creationism in science classes and denies anthropogenic climate change.

Tesco Improves its English

2008-08-31T11:20:43Z

From the BBC:

Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute.
The supermarket giant is to replace its current "10 items or less" notices with signs saying "Up to 10 items".
Tesco's move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use "fewer" instead of "less"

It's good, of course, that they're finally going to change it to something that is grammatically correct. But what's this "uncertainty" over the current phrase? "10 items or less" is obviously incorrect. There's no uncertainty about that at all.

Livery Companies - Project Complete

2008-08-28T08:28:28Z

(Well, stage one of the project, anyway.)

A couple of years ago whilst I was working in the heart of the City of London, I noticed that my lunchtime wanders were taking me past a few of the City Livery Halls. I'd always been aware of the Livery Companies, but I'd never really investigated them, so I didn't know how many of them there were or how many still had Livery Halls. So I decided to find out a bit more about them.

I also started taking photos of the halls that I passed. Of course, when you have the collector gene that I have, just taking pictures as you wander past buildings randomly isn't enough. I had to find out where all of the remaining halls were and get pictures of them.

And finally, a couple of months ago (as I was walking to a London.pm meeting) I took photos of the last three. I only uploaded them to Flickr last night as I had some trouble with Shozu (which may or may not be related to the general phone weirdness I mentioned last week). But anyway, I fixed the phone last night and was able to upload the final pictures.So now I have a set of photos which (as far as I know) contains all of the Livery Halls. There are forty-one pictures in the set, but one of them is a plaque marking the site of the Cooks' Hall which is no longer there (they kept burning it down). If you know of any I've missed, I'd love to hear about it.

Why do I say that this is just the end of stage one of the project? Well, I was a bit disappointed to see that there was no good site on the web to get information about the Livery Companies. What information there is out there is scatter amongst a number of sites. So I decided to put that right. I'm in the process of building liverycompany.org.uk which will hopefully become the definitive place on the web to find information about these fascinating institutions.

Phone Strangeness

2008-08-22T12:28:51Z

My current phone is a Nokia N91, I've had it for well over two years, which is probably the longest time I've owned any phone, and I've been very happy with it. Of course it's showing its age technologically now, but I haven't had any problems with it.

But last week, whilst I was in Copenhagen, it started acting very strangely. Usually, it runs for two or three days between charges, but it started running out in less than a day. Also soon after turning it on, the user interface slowed to a crawl so that, for example, it took at least two minutes to open a text message. The longer the phone was on, the slower it got. After ten or fifteen minutes the phone became unusable.

My first thought was that the battery needed to be replaced. It's still the battery that came with the phone and I'm not sure what the lifetime of these batteries is supposed to be. I found some selling the correct batteries cheaply on Amazon Marketplace and ordered a replacement.

But that hasn't fixed the problem. Everything is still exactly how it was. My next plan was to upgrade the firmware and reset the phone. But both of these actions will delete all of the user data from the phone. So I needed to back it up first. This involved booting my laptop into Windows for the first time for months (and spending half an hour installing all the security updates that have been released since I last used Windows) so that I could use the Nokia PC Suite and the Nokia Software Updater. Having installed both of those I prepared to backup the phone's data.

But it didn't work. Remember the problem where phone slowly grinds to a halt? Well that also affects the backup process. You can only back stuff up in tiny chunks. And in the hour I spent trying it on Wednesday evening I didn't manage to get everything backed up successfully. I'll try again over the weekend. I suppose I should have been taking regular backups anyway. And I would if Nokia had software that ran on a sensible operating system.

My current theory is that there's some kind of runaway process on the phone and that it is taking all of the processing power and draining the battery. Does that sound possible? And if that's the case, how would I go about fixing that? What are the Nokia N Series equivalents of 'ps' and 'kill'?

The most annoying thing about this is that my current contract with O2 only has another six weeks to run. So I'll be getting another phone soon any way. I just need to resurrect the N91 for a few weeks until I can get an upgrade.

I cheer myself up by considering what I'll upgrade to. The N96 is currently favourite, but I might just go with an N95 if their price drops following the release of the N96. Most of the phones I've had over the years have been Nokias and I'm used to the way they work.

Of course I'm not even going to consider an iPhone. There is some strange reaction between me and Apple hardware. It always ends with me wanting to throw the hardware at the wall.

Why Corporates Hate Perl

2008-08-20T13:50:49Z

Over on O'Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled "Why Corporates Hate Perl". I'm working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year's YAPC::Europe. I didn't think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning I found a link to it on the front page of Slashdot. It's also been discussed on Reddit and on Digg.

Showing Appreciation

2008-08-18T14:12:20Z

I've mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn't had any problems and just wanted to say thank-you for the programs. Here's what he said:

David I wish to personally thank you for the help you provided to my wife in being able to place a search engine on our friends website. We have needed a search engine on my own personal site and have not been able to accomplish it but now that we have done it on our friends site [url removed] our site is next in line [url removed - but it's a gun site].

Please believe me from my heart when I say thank you and I am so glad there are people like you in this world. I help many people in my business and because of their needs and lack of money. Many many times I do not charge one red cent. Well it came back to me 100 fold in enabling us to use your valuable information. We cannot afford 20-30k for what we needed and because of you we can now make it happen. Thank you ad infinitum, [name removed]

If you ever need help in locating a machine gun, silencer, destructive devices, mortar or grenade launcher, or anything else down to a handgun or long gun don't hesitate in contacting me I am completely at your service.

[contact details removed]

HARD-CORE RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE AND PROUD OF IT

I wrote back to him thanking him for his kind words. I tried to explain the concept of open source to him and pointed out that personally I was involved because of the good fit with my socialist principles. I also thanked for the offer of business assistance but pointed out that in the UK those kinds of weapons are not allowed to be owned by private citizens - a law which I wholeheartedly support.

I'll let you know if I get a reply. But it's an interesting illustration of how open source software can help all kinds of people. Not just the ones that you'd like to help.

Breaking Radio Silence

2008-08-18T09:14:09Z

It's been a bit quiet round here for the last week or so. Sorry about that. I was busy in other areas.

I spent the last week in Copenhagen, speaking at YAPC::Europe. Over four days I gave three short talks and a full day training session. It good to catch up with a number of old friends. I'd never been to Copenhagen before, so there will be some photos appearing on Flickr before too long.

As always at these conferences, I get fired up about interesting projects in the Perl world. I think there were three things I really want to get involved in this year. The first is my Proud To Use Perl blog which is already up and running. The other two I'll talk more about as they become more concrete.

Like a number of the conference attendees I was staying in a cheap hotel near the central railway station. There are a number of similar hotels in that area. But it turns out that it's also a slightly dodgy area to stay in. There were a few sex shops on the same street as my hotel and usually as I was returning to the hotel there was someone on the street who was happy to offer me either sex or drugs.

We were also very close to the Tivoli Gardens. So on Friday evening, after the conference was over, After a couple of hours I found myself in the middle of a free rock concert (Fredag Rocks! apparently). There was a huge crowd watching an incredibly dodgy Danish band. They sounded to me a bit like a Danish version of INXS - which is, in my opinion, a really terrible thing to sound like. I left after a few numbers. Later investigation revealed that they were called Gnags and that they are "frequently referred to as one of the best live band in Danish rock history". I couldn't see it myself.

p.s. Oh, and I've upgraded the software running this blog to the latest version of Movable Type. There seem to be a few glitches. Please bear with me as I try to sort them out.

Anniversaries

2008-08-08T09:29:44Z

It's been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first "real" job. I hope you won't be too bored if I spend a few paragraphs reflecting on my career so far.

My degree from South Bank Poly (remember polys?) was in computer studies. This was very much aimed at people who were going to work in large data processing departments. We studied COBOL and CODASYL databases. SQL and C were seen as the cutting edge technologies. Interestingly I spent my sandwich year working on PC product releases for IBM. The documentation for these was in an obscure format called SGML - the weirdest things turn out to be useful in the future.

So I left South Bank with my degree in computer studies and got a job working for a company called Learmonth and Burcheet Management Systems (LBMS). LBMS were big on structured development methodologies. They apparently had a big hand in the design of SSADM. They did consultancy and training, but they also had a CASE tool. That was where I came in. I was part of a team who was reimplementing their CASE tool. It was to be a Windows application (which in 1988 was a rather brave step to take). Over the next four years I became pretty proficient at Windows programming in C (Visual C++ wasn't around in those days). I also, probably more usefully, learnt a lot about data modelling and databases as that was the part of the tool which I worked on. LBMS not longer exists. They went out of business soon after structure methodologies and CASE tools went out of fashion.

I left them before that though. In 1992 I decided to move to pastures new. I got a job working for a company called Comtext. They specialised in communications tools like telex. I was there to give their tools a nice Windows front-end. I was only there for six months. By then I had a CompuServe account and I could tell that email was going to kill off their business. I don't know what happened to them. There's no evidence of them on the internet now.

Early in 1993 I got a job working with Walt Disney. Actually it was with Buena Vista Home Video - their home video group. We were building a system to report on European video sales. I got the job on the basis of my Windows and SQL experience, but whilst I was there I moved to working exclusively on Unix. We implemented our system in a number of European offices and as part of the project I spent a few months working in Madrid.

Unfortunately for Disney, the technologies they were using (Sybase, C, Unix) were exactly the set of skills that were becoming popular in the City of London. And the City was crying out for contractors with that skillset. So in April 1995 I set up Magnum Solutions and went off to start contracting in the City.

For four years I worked for various banks in the City doing Bank-type stuff. I was during this time that I picked up my knowledge of Perl. In fact, by 1999 I was getting work purely on the basis of my Perl expertise. I was getting a little bored by banking though so I decided to try working for dotcoms for a while. Actually, it took a while for the change to take place and I spent eighteen months alternating companies like QXL and Sportal with financial work.

2002 started badly. I spent all of 2001 working for a single client but the contract finished at the start of 2002 and the jobs market had collapsed. I spent five months out of work before taking a permanent job with Bibliotech (now known as Spider Networks). That didn't last long though. In November they went through a bit of a cash crisis and made a lot of staff redundant. Including me. Luckily the market seemed to have picked up a bit and I found a new contract within a week or so.

Following that contract, at the end of 2003 I made one of best connections that I've ever made when I spend a few months working on the Guardian web site. I've been able to return there a couple of times since.

2004 was another bad year. I was unable to find a contract to follow the Guardian so I ended up designing and building a new web site for Karma Download - a site for musicians to sell MP3s of their music. They didn't make any money and closed down a couple of years later. In May of that year I took another permanent job, working for Outcome Technologies. I lasted until the end of the year before the call of freelancing became too strong and I left them.

Since then, things have been going pretty well. I've bounced between three different clients. Two of them are media organisations and the other is a bank. So I'm getting plenty of variety in my work.

It's been an interesting twenty years. It hasn't gone in the way I planned it at all. I was a Windows programmer. And now I'm a reasonably well-known expert in a language that I hadn't even heard of when I started out.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring. Retirement, with any luck.

The Press on Dawkins

2008-08-04T12:54:38Z

Richard Dawkins' new documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, begins on Channel 4 this evening. He has therefore been doing a round of publicity interviews and the results have been appearing in the press over the weekend. It's interesting to see how different papers treat it.

The Times ran a pretty straight article about Dawkins and his work (actually they ran another piece a couple of weeks ago).

The Guardian gave the article to Charlie Brooker. Brooker has no time for religion in any form so his piece is as funny and unapologetic as you would hope.

The Mirror's piece is quite strange. The writer takes the approach that actually, the evidence for evolution isn't quite as strong as Dawkins claims and that an intelligent person wouldn't take a firm position in the discussion. The Mirror writer is, it would appear, a fool.

But the strangest approach comes from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. Both of these papers have found a way to spin the story so that it backs up their xenophobic agenda. They do this by picking up on a remark from Dawkins where he says that many muslims have creationist beliefs and that it is therefore muslim families who are largely responsible for the increase of creationism that we are seeing in the UK. Now, no-one will deny that there are a large number of creationist muslims. Or that their children are being indoctrinated into believing that evolution by natural selection is "just a theory". But I strongly suspect that this is rather missing the point of the documentary which, from what I understand having not seen it yet, is to explain the power of Darwin's theory.

But if we're going to get into the discussion of who is behind the current growth in creationism, it looks to me like the Mail and the Telegraph are ignoring some convenient facts. There are also a growing number of christians who are telling their children that evolution is unproven and Genesis is literally true. Of course that doesn't sit well with the papers' agenda. They want to promote the idea that it's the evil foreigners who are destroying our society. Their argument is as weak as it ever is, but it seems that an argument doesn't need to be particularly logically coherent in order to convince the readers of either paper.

Oh, and I don't recommend reading the comments on either of those stories. Discussions of creationism and evolution always seem to attract the hard of understanding and it seems that the Mail and Telegraph readership has more than its fair share of people like that.

More Password Idiocy

2008-07-31T12:51:15Z

When will web sites start to be careful with people's passwords? Oh, I know that a few sites get it right, but it seems to me that the vast majority still don't have a clue what they are doing. Here is today's example.

I got an email this morning from a company called RAM (that's Research and Analysis of Media). Somehow they knew that I was an (occasional) Observer reader and they were inviting me to join a panel that would (as I understand it) answer occasional surveys about the Observer. It sounded like a good cause, so I signed up. As part of that process I gave them both a username and a password. They immediately confirmed my sign-up by sending them both back to me in an email.

That is, of course, a serious cause for concern, but there's a slim chance that they aren't storing my password in an accessible form in their database. The mail might have been generated from the data in the web form I filled in. However, an hour or so later I got another mail from them telling my how to log into me account and including my username and password. In fact, that one email contained all of the information needed to log into my account (web site address, username and password). So they have established themselves as a company who can't be trusted with your password.

On the off-chance that they wouldn't be sending me any more mails containing those details, I thought I'd try to return at least a small amount of security to my account by changing my password. Except that there is apparently no way to change your password from within your account. By this stage they are breaking records for password stupidity.

I've contacted them about the problems and send them a link to my basic guide to password handling article. I'll let you know if I get any response. I hope their surveys are constructed with a little more thought then their web site.

Update: I heard back from them about not being able to change my password. You can do that in an "update profile" screen. Not sure why I didn't spot that last week. Nothing from them about the password storage issues though.

Drizzle

2008-07-30T08:21:34Z

When I first read about Drizzle last week I assumed it was some kind of joke. It turns out that it isn't, so it just makes me a little depressed.

Drizzle is[1] a cut-down version of MySQL. MySQL is the database server than has been known to make grown database designers cry because of its rather cavalier approach to the relational database model. For much of its existence, MySQL didn't have many of the features that make databases useful - features like triggers, stored procedures and (specially) referential integrity. It was very fast, but it really couldn't be described as a relational database. It was just a data store with a vaguely SQL-like query languge. Over the last few years, MySQL has added more and more of these features and recent versions are very nearly like a real database[2].

Of course, adding these more advanced features is going to effect the performance of the database. If you're checking referential integrity on each insertion, then things are bound to get slower. Or are they? I'm not sure that's the case. If you don't use the referential integrity checking in the database then you have to duplicate that functionality in your application code. But checking referential integrity is a core feature of a database system. That code is (hopefully) going to be well written. In most cases it's likely to be better than your code. So trusting the database to check referential integrity is likely to make your application seem slower until you turn off your own hand-crafted referential integrity code. Trust your database to do the work. It's what it's best at.

But I think the damage has been done. There is a generation of database designers (and I use the term in a very loose sense) who don't know about "advanced" database features like referential integrity, triggers and views. They don't know about them because they learned database design whilst using an older version of MySQL which didn't have those features. Or they learned from someone who learned whilst using an older version of MySQL. We have systems like Activerecord which encourage the developer to ignore the advanced features of the database and to use it as a dumb data store.

So this generation of database designers don't see the need for these features and therefore don't use them. They see them as an unnecessary waste of resources which just slow down their application. In my opinion, if they learned about these features then they wouldn't think like that, but I'm not writing this entry just to plug my Advanced Databases for Beginners course.

I don't deny for a second that many applications (mostly web sites as far as I can see) run really successfully without using these features. But as a database designer it makes me nervous. It's like programming without a safety net. Why take unnecessary risks with your business data?

So this is the perceived need that Drizzle addresses. A need for a dumb data store that doesn't do any of the advanced things that a database should do. It's like we're turning back the clock to MySQL 3.x. And that's why Drizzle depresses me. It looks to me like a dumbed down tool for people who haven't taken the time to learn their craft. I spent far too much time working with MySQL 3.x. It always ended badly?

Am I missing something here? Perhaps I'm a "database dinosaur" who just doesn't understand the new trends. Please point me at at articles that could enlighten me.

But until you do, my databases will all include referential intergrity, triggers, views and stored procedures.

[1] Or, more accurately, will be. It's a work in progress.
[2] Athough you still have to entertain doubts about a database system which documents an option (and one that is off by default) which makes it 'behave like a “traditional” SQL database system'.

Twitter Hierarchy

2008-07-29T12:58:10Z

For most of the last year, I've been working behind a corporate firewall which blocks most social networking sites. It's therefore only in the last month or so that I've been able to use Twitter all day every day.

It seems to me that many of Twitter's users have slightly distorted the sites original purpose. It was originally intended to be used for posting brief "I'm doing this" messages, But many people seem to be using it to hold conversations with their friends. It's become a sort of "non-instant messaging". Interestingly, the site's developers noticed this change and added features (like replies) which made it easier to use the site in this way.

But there are still places where the site's origins are obvious. On anyone's profile page you can see two numbers listing the number of people that person is following and the number of people who follow that person. But actually the Twitterverse doesn't break down into two sets like that. There is a more interesting set of three numbers. For most people their sets of followers and followees aren't disjoint sets. There is another set of people who both follow you and are being followed by you. Let's call them your peers.

So we have three sets of people. The people who you follow but who don't follow you in return (people you think are interesting but who don't think you are interesting enough to follow), your peers and the people who follow you but who you don't follow in return (people who think you are interesting but who you don't think are interesting enough to follow). There's probably a whole cyber-sociology paper in analysing the ratios between the sizes of those three groups for different types of people.

But the important thing is that you can only carry on a conversation with people in your peer group. It remind me of the old Frost Report sketch about class differences. The people higher than you in the food chain don't listen to what you say. A few times I've missed things that people said to me because I'm not following them and simply adding "@davorg" to your message doesn't add it to my home page (think of the spam potential if it did).

I get round this by using Twitter Search (previously Summize) to search for messages to me. Actually I go a step further than that and have a feed from that query in Bloglines. Is that a common solution to the problem? What do other people do? Is it a problem that you've noticed?

Another, related, issue is how do you move up the hierarchy? Is there an etiquette for contacting people who you follow but who don't follow you? Can you just send them a direct message saying "hey I'm interesting, follow me"? And is anyone being inclusive and automatically following anyone who follows them?

Oh and what does Twitter have that Pownce, Jaiku or identi.ca don't have? Is it just the number of users? Will we ever see a big move from Twitter to identi.ca like the MySpace to Facebook move of last year?

Update: hanakomu points out (on twitter of course) that if someone replies to you then the message appears in your 'replies' tag whether or not you're following to them. Also, people get a mail when you follow them - but I think that's probably optional.

Missing MPs' Blogs

2008-07-22T15:38:13Z

A while ago, I set up Planet Westminster - a pretty simple site that simply aggregates all of the MPs' blogs that I could find. It was largely created to scratch a personal itch. I wanted a simple way to subscribe to all MPs' blogs in my feed reader. And that's really how I use it most of the time. I just read it in Bloglines rarely bother to look at the site (which explains why I haven't fixed the character-encoding problems that are obvious to anyone visiting the site).

But I had a look at it today. And I tweaked a couple of presentation problems. As part of the process, I ran the software which aggregates the feeds by hand a couple of times. And that showed me one interesting issue that I had previously missed. The program displays an error when it can't find the feed that it's looking for. It's currently generating eleven "missing feed" errors. That's out of thirty-six feeds that I currently monitor. Perhaps a couple of those could be put down to temporary network glitches, but that's potentially over a quarter of the (small number of) blogging MPs who have either given up on blogging or have moved their feeds without putting redirection in place (that's starting to become quite a regular topic round these parts).

At one point it looked like MPs might start blogging in reasonable numbers. We'd broken the 5% barrier. It would be a shame if they decided if it was a waste of their time and started to abandon it.

The errors I'm getting are as follows (with links to the missing web feeds) . If any of these are your MP, then perhaps you'd investigate what's going on and report back. One of them is my MP, Martin Linton, so I'll start by investigating him.

Update: Having looked into it a bit further, I see that many of the problems are down to people moving their web feeds without putting redirection in place. Obviously I don't blame the MPs for this, but it indicates how little their "tech support" people know about how this stuff works.

A few of the blogs have closed down though. And it's interesting to note that in a couple of places a blog feed has been replaced by a news feed.

I need to put aside some time to do some more research into this in order to ensure that the date I have is up to date. And this is exactly the kind of information that PoliticalWeb is supposed to provide.