Brexit

I was awake soon after 5:30 yesterday morning. As I got to my computer, the EU referendum results weren’t confirmed, but it was looking certain that the country had voted (narrowly, but decisively) to leave the European Union. My thoughts during the day are nicely summed up by my tweets and retweets. My initial reaction… Continue reading Brexit

Twitter’s Early Adopters

just setting up my twttr — jack (@jack) March 21, 2006 You’ll be seeing that tweet a lot over the next few days. It’s the first ever public tweet that was posted to the service we now know as Twitter. And it was sent ten years ago by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders. Today,… Continue reading Twitter’s Early Adopters

TwittElection at OpenTech

Last Saturday was OpenTech. It was as great as it always is and I’ll write more about what I saw later. But I gave a talk about TwittElection in the afternoon and I thought it might be useful to publish my slides here along with a brief summary of what I said. TwittElection from Dave… Continue reading TwittElection at OpenTech

Quoted By The Daily Mail

This morning Tweetdeck pinged and alerted me to this tweet from a friend of mine. @davorg Did you see that you feature in your favourite online newspaper? http://t.co/pumrCggsZr — Robin Houston (@robinhouston) April 17, 2015 He was right too. The article was about Reddit’s Button and about half-way though it, they quoted my tweet. I… Continue reading Quoted By The Daily Mail

TwittElection

The TwittElection web site

I was convinced that the general election in 2010 was going to be the “Twitter election”. I built a web site (now sadly lost somewhere in cyberspace) that monitored what PPCs were saying on Twitter in my local constituency. But, all in all, it wasn’t very impressive. I gave a talk about how disappointing it… Continue reading TwittElection

Gullible

Did you know that the word “gullible” doesn’t actually appear in the OED? A lot of people I know spend a lot of time poking holes in tabloid stories. It’s fun hobby for all the family. The tabloids are so bad at checking facts that it’s usually easy to find the basic flaws in things… Continue reading Gullible

Nadine Dorries: Just Say No

Today was the day that parliament had a rather long list of private members bills to debate. Originally there were sixty-four on the list. As this informative post from Kerry McCarthy tells us, they’d normally expect to get through about three of them. The MPs sponsoring the rest of the bills were pretty much wasting… Continue reading Nadine Dorries: Just Say No

Did Twitter Censor #GodIsNotGreat?

[Executive summary: Betteridge’s Law (probably) applies] The Twitter furore over the #GodIsNotGreat hash tag has pretty much died down now, but there’s one branch of the debate that is still getting comments and retweets. Here’s an example from johnwilander. #GodIsNotGreat pulled from trends because christians protest. But #ReasonsToBeatYourGirlfriend was allowed. Stay classy, @Twitter. As I… Continue reading Did Twitter Censor #GodIsNotGreat?

Hitchens’ Last Laugh

This morning I woke up to the terrible (although not completely unexpected) news that Christopher Hitchens had died. The rational community has, of course, lost one of its most erudite and interesting members. But it seems that Christopher had one last trick up his sleeve. As with most breaking news these days, I found out… Continue reading Hitchens’ Last Laugh