Author: Carl Morris (Blog)

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Bilingual blogging in a Google Translate world

OK, just done a blog post on here in Welsh. It’s not my first use of Welsh online. I’ve emailed and used Twitter and commented on other blogs and things in Welsh. But a full blog post. Boof. It took ages to write!

I wanted to jot down some assorted observations and lessons learned.

Google Translate was a fun toy to use at the end. I enjoyed that. There was a surprise application – it actually picked up several typos. Example: I saw the word “penderfyny” in the result and was able to fix the spelling to “penderfynu” (decide) and so on. I suppose I could have got this from a dedicated grammar checker like Cysill.

Some things you think are obvious come out wrongly. “Dyn ni’n gwybod” becomes “Man we know”. And before now I’ve seen it render “Caerdydd” as “Bridgend” which is totally wrong. These are byproducts of its statistical approach. If it had a few cheeky rules in there it would be a killer.

Oddly when it translated “Islwyn Ffowc Elis”, a person’s name, it rendered it as “Elis Islwyn Fawkes”. I had a moment of mild disgust where I assumed it had got this from data originating on Wikipedia. It turns out “Guto Ffowc” is what the Welsh call Guy Fawkes. In theory this data could have been taken from any source in both languages. I don’t think it’s using Wikipedia, let’s hope not…

Some of it came out ultra-cryptic. It could be partly my Welsh as well as the translation algorithm. Occasionally it has a poetic quality.

I’m particularly fond of the intro

This is my first post in the old language. First post is usually quite difficult. She felt as a step in the new domain.

Although I think the ambiguity of the following, in relation to use and abuse of technology, is unfortunate.

They see abuse and will see good things.

For the WordPress freaks – and because it is such a fantastic piece of software, there are only non-users and freaks – I am using a plug-in called Basic Bilingual by Stephanie Booth for the summary bit. This automatically inserts HTML language code and allows you to tweak your design through the CSS. It gives you an extra admin field for the summary bit. Mine was an English summary for a post in Welsh but you can do it with any two languages. It worked for me first time.

[UPDATE: actually I just lost the summary for some reason, after fixing a typo and saving. So I’ve reverted just to pasting it into the post. It might be fixable with the plug-in…]

I had a minor quandry with tags and categories. (The quickest way to explain the difference is an analogy with a book. Tags form your index page and categories are your contents. Kind of.)

I have a back history of tags and categories here. My blog has an English-language interface, with most posts in English but now some posts (OK, one) in Welsh. In the end, I decided to stick with the English language categories. For tags I have used Welsh language and tagged again with English translations.

For proper names like Google I’ll be retaining them, rather than using things like Gwgl, Trydar (Twitter) and Gweplyfr (Facebook). Which I have seen in use! These recall a comic tradition apparently popularised by playwright WS Jones.

Here’s the problem. If you click the “Google Translate” tag you’ll see all posts that relate to it. If you click “blogging” you’ll see all posts that relate to that. But if you click “blogio”, you’ll only see posts in Welsh about blogging. I’ll see how it goes. I can always go back and re-tag (the joy!).

There’s always search, that will work.

(Incidentally don’t you think “blog” itself, the very sound of the word, fits very neatly into Welsh?)

I think I’ve covered everything except comments. The visitor comments here are a mixture of English and Welsh, which is fine by me. (Elsewhere on the web I suppose it could be good etiquette to comment in the language of the post – if in doubt. But that’s a possible guideline not a rule.)

This is a personal blog. I’m a human being and want this to be reasonably spontaneous, like talking to your face.

My blog, my way! If anything, blogging is about freedom.

FREEDOM.

So feel free to comment below. Or set up your own blog and comment there in the language of YOUR choice.

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Bilingual people with monolingual blogs. Give people a Make It Large option.

I’ve tried to avoid talking about blogging itself too much here. As in, I don’t do blogging about blogging. That’s not because there’s no value in that exercise nor because I have any particular aversion to meta (in fact quite the reverse). It’s just that I didn’t think I had anything new to say or contribute to the discussions. There are some great resources and conversations out there relating to blogging which are easy to find. This blog isn’t one.

Blogging has outlasted any forecast of its demise. Not a fad after all then. It’s been absorbed into our minds and society and new technologies. But some of those crazy myths still remain.

So let’s just shoot these down first. Some of the myths have re-emerged again around newer forms of blogging.

The general guideline is, if you find something of ultra-niche interest online – however boring or trivial – then maybe it’s not intended for you.

That includes somebody talking about their breakfast. I defend the right of people to “babble” and talk about their breakfast. It’s what people talk about.

As well as that, because of this kind of online sharing somebody can retroactively compile a pie chart of how many people had porridge this morning and so on, or rather talked about it. If they want to. There’s a cumulative set of data which might become interesting even if you don’t find the individual posts interesting. (Thanks to Mandy Rose for this observation.)

That said a blog doesn’t have to be merely a personal diary, again a common misconception.

My first blog was nothing like a personal diary anyway. It was and is named Sleeveface. It had a specific format, which has remained as I’ve continued to maintain it to the present day. It actually gets better and better because it has a “community” of amazing contributors. It clearly wasn’t really a place for my writings about anything.

One blog is rarely ever enough for one person. So last year I started this blog which has become a handy place for thoughts, sometimes of an experimental nature. If I just want to add a page to the web, I do it here. I have a couple of sekrit projects which will arrive here when I get around to them.

Starting was difficult because I didn’t want to repeat anything that people had done online. On the web there is always somebody else who is more expert than you. That is initially intimidating. What is the point of writing about ANYTHING? (Eventually you chill out with your status as an expert at just being yourself.) In time the activity becomes its own reward and sometimes I hardly think about who might or might not be reading. Then to get a little comment or to have someone mention it when I see them, those are bonuses.

But initially, thinking I could actually risk rehashing what other people might have said elsewhere, except in my own words was quite liberating. Originality is over-rated!

It’s all in the words. Which I why I sometimes love to use indulgent prose, long words and also refuse to kill my darlings.

From the start I knew what it wasn’t. “What not to blog?” is a useful exercise. Let’s just say that Twitter revenue speculation, cats and advice sheets for aspiring “thought leaders” were not on the agenda. Again, those interests are more than adequately served on the web if you look.

The fact it’s called Quixotic Quisling of all things should tell you I wasn’t aiming to be a “pro-blogger”. Likewise it’s not intended as a cross-section of my life. There are big bits of my life that haven’t made it to this blog.

Now that in 2009 the all-conquering domination of the mighty Welsh language continues apace, at least in my world, I’ve been looking online for things in that language. I’ve been banging on about how I’d like to see more Welsh language blogs in existence. Eventually I resorted to offering to set up some WordPress installations and otherwise help a few individuals who I thought would be interesting – out of the epic kindness of my heart. But people were too busy. And all the usual crap.

🙂

The most obvious partial solution was staring me in the face – just start your own. In line with the carefully constructed house brand for this blog (blobby at best), I have decided just to insert the Welsh language posts in arbitrarily.

There is actually a nice number of multilingual bloggers (in various countries), from which I’ve taken inspiration here, when it comes to the practice and conventions and so on.

I won’t be doing anything bilingually like writing something then carefully attempting to translate it. Pfft! The Welsh posts will have unique things. Each will have a quick summary paragraph in English so you can decide if you want to use machine translation to check it out.

Obviously if you understand Welsh, you can just look. And laugh at the mistakes.

If you’re something in between, i.e. a Welsh learner, you can do something in between.

I was chatting to nwdls about all this and also Daniel Cunliffe who does Datblogu. Often Welsh speakers choose 100% English for their blogs and maybe it’s because people buy into the idea of the big worldwide audience and the pro-blogger thing. Obviously there’s a bigger potential worldwide audience for an English language blog. Conceivably, at least. But it all depends which world you think you live in. If we really cared about maximising raw potential numbers, we’d all learn Mandarin right?*

When I went to Barcelona earlier this year I chatted to a German lady who pointed out “Ah, you speak Welsh. Well done. That will really help you in the world.”. This isn’t a general point about German people, it’s quite a common attitude.

One reason I originally decided to learn Welsh was because it’s the second most used language in My World. So it is helping me in the world, thanks very much for the insight lady. As much as it has been useful for work, it’s not just about utility.

It is actually bringing a tremendous amount of joy to my world.

So the actual reasons for blogging in the medium of Welsh are related to this point. It’s the bespoke, personal world within the web which I see. And would like to see. After the chat with nwdls, I realised there was no need to make a big choice. I’ll do both languages in one. And Google Translate could help non-Welsh language** readers to access the extra stuff.

So, thanks Google Translate.

Google Translate is not the first attempt at machine translation for Welsh (see also: Apertium project) and is also a bit wonky. But as with any machine translation, you’ll get the gist and it may not be long before we can truly link cyber-arms and skip to a better tomorrow.

If you’d like to read some proper research on Welsh language use in blogging and other social media then Datblogu is good.

Are you in a similar position? As in, you’re not monolingual but your blog is? Consider reconsidering.

* By the way, I would like to know Mandarin. But for different reasons.

** Incidentally don’t say “English speakers” if you mean “non-Welsh speakers”. The Venn diagram resembles a fried egg and Welsh speakers are the yellow bit. When you say “English speakers” you are ignoring the fact that it’s one of those bulbous fried eggs where the yellow bit actually includes the white directly beneath it. Heh heh. Enjoy white and yellow if you can.

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How Iggy Pop pushed mass advertising over the shark and broke the fourth wall

Look I’m not an expert on advertising or anything. But I am an expert in being ADVERTISED AT. It’s become a truism that there’s a constant stream of shouty advertising messages interrupting your every thought, etc. At this point I could repeat that and lament how advertising bombards us all in the face. But I’m sure you know about this.

Anyway, good news. Mass advertising is over now. I can hear it dying. Kind of.

The thing that made me think about this was the recent advert for car insurance featuring Iggy Pop. I guess I’ve seen it on countless billboards but the version that jolted me was on Spotify.

“Am I selling cheap car insurance or am I selling time?”, Iggy asks.

The curious thing was the phraseology the ad agency chose. (It’s for Swift car insurance if you must know.)

This ad references the fact it’s an ad. Iggy is selling here and he’s not afraid to admit it. Obviously, hardcore fans will answer that Iggy Pop is selling not only the insurance policy but his own legacy and self-respect here. Yeah probably. But I’m not here to assess that. I’m here to assess if advertising is now experiencing its own period of shark-jumping.

There’s something in Iggy’s admission here which breaks a kind of unspoken rule of advertising. Advertising pushes emotions and dreams unquestioningly. It doesn’t usually ask you to assess it or its reason for existing.

But of course we all do.

Besides, all advertising is meta. Here’s something I said earlier in the year – about another ad campaign:

Advertising is by and large, in my opinion, a self-referential medium. You always know you’re reading adverts. They make you think about the way advertising pervades society and also about specific advertising campaigns – whether they’re effective and that sort of thing. With other media you “zone out” and listen to the message. That applies to a conversation, phone call, television programme, radio, a newspaper article or this blog post. You have a chance of thinking about someone’s thoughts and taking your mind off the medium itself. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in saying that – advertising makes you think of advertising. If you’re interested in communications as I am, then you also wonder how much money was spent and what’s being done to measure the effectiveness (if at all).

It’s definitely not fashionable to make blatant sales pitches like Iggy’s anymore. His doing so almost takes it back to an older, more direct time. I don’t remember the old-fashioned sales pitch. Being (merely) one day older than MTV, adverts aimed at me have only ever been clever-clever and knowingly sophisticated.

But we the audience have always been more sophisticated.

In recent years I’ve drastically reduced my television viewing. (Don’t get me wrong, I love television. But I also hate it. Anyway, that’s for another time.) In my mostly television-free life, when I do pass one the ad breaks stand out even more. I notice them and they are even more irritating. I mean, TV adverts, come off it! Who speaks like that? How can anyone be comfortable allowing that into their home?

A case in point was the Orange phone advertising which attempts to portray your phone in the first person, “I am who I am because of everyone.” and so on. Err, right.

Another factor in my heightened sensitivity to this stupidity could be my new experiences of a minority language which – because the economics aren’t thought to stack up – doesn’t have much advertising in any format. There isn’t much Welsh language advertising because interruption advertising is a partially-sighted approach which treats us all as a demographic blob who’ll probably fall into line. That’s why they get celebrities in, it’s the closest thing to a warm human connection they can muster. They should read Cluetrain.

Whether they admit it or not, even the advertising agencies have absorbed the fact that conversational buzz is more effective than interruption advertising. Obviously the most noteworthy thing about the Iggy Pop ads is his decision to appear. Even some tedious argument about the death of “real rock’n’roll” is more bearable than anything in the ads themselves. Ditto John Lydon advertising butter. Oddly they persist with the ads but it now becomes about the ensuing publicity around the ad. And then the word-of-mouth. (Some ad agencies even have their own blogs now. But they never use advertising to get business for their own services.)

Some kind of pinnacle of this was achieved last year when Honda staged a television ad on Channel 4 featuring live skydiving. This got them loads of coverage in a press hungry for wacky stories. Especially gimmicks related to how traditional media might raise cash.

In the interests of research, I just watched the skydiving ad itself, online, for the first time. Actually pretty boring. (I also found out about an unplanned and tragic twist.)

Nowadays, if your ad doesn’t generate press, publicity and blog buzz of its own then it’ll just blur into the rest. The choices have become

  1. think of something outlandish for your advert then try telling people
  2. try telling people

Soon enough maybe they’ll twig that the latter is cheaper. All this depends on the product being worth talking about and the general public getting tired of gimmicks. Stay vigilant!

Like I said, this isn’t just about TV. Other forms of media are going meta in their quest for the ultimate advertising route up their own back passage. We should resist magazines with screens, for one.

I’ll continue to listen to Spotify. The service has all kinds of data about my listening habits and location but none of the ads are targeted. So it’s not an advertising model (credit Andrew Dubber for this observation). It’s a paid subscription model where you pay to have the ads removed. The annoying, repetitive and untargeted ads become the mechanism for getting subscriptions. It could be a rare example where ads might just work. For Spotify if nobody else.

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Maes space

You might be wondering what exactly happened at the National Eisteddfod in Bala earlier this month.

Well, so am I.

And I was there.

There are many eisteddfodau (which is the correct plural, where the last syllable rhymes with ‘pie’) around Wales and the world. But the National Eisteddfod is unique, it’s the biggest and varies its location, alternating between north and south Wales annually.

This was only my second National Eisteddfod. To the people who’ve been attending since a very young age, I described it as being this exotic thing in my mind, like Rio Carnival, which was perhaps overstatement. But what you get in this blog post is an atypical viewpoint of a newcomer, or possibly outsider.

(By the way, if you can write Welsh and you have any comment to make on this you should consider starting your own blog and making it there. Lle mae fy mlogs, gyfeillion?)

For most other attendees, I imagine the Eisteddfod takes on a familiar, reassuring regularity every summer. On one hand it’s a Welsh language idyll for a week, understandably protected in order to retain the essential vibe which makes it unique (because there are plenty of other events catering for various languages and tastes – the Eisteddfod is just plain different mmkay?).

It’s also a chance to do things common to all humanity like listen to music, have a drink, see friends and cousins. And then maybe compare children. You know, with the Joneses.

Cymry Cymraeg take the latter to a whole new level. To my mind, the default state of a young child is shyness and total inability to step in front of a crowd, let alone entertain one. When I was eight years old, say, I was in Berkshire and we had roughly one or two light entertainers per class, which is maybe 5% give or take. I don’t know how the schooling is done but by the time a Welsh language child gets to the stage, he or she will possess total confidence to sing, perform and dramatically contort the face with a very fine degree of eyebrow control.

Obviously at the Eisteddfod you get the top percentile, the very apex of primary school level performance craft, but it is definitely embedded in the culture. I could list all the things about the Eisteddfod that were novel to me but this is a good one because it means there is a constant flow of competition-ready offspring being bred in folk artforms and Eisteddfod traditions before I’ve even built my tent. Or figured out the appropriate Welsh verb for this (codi to raise, not adeiladu to build).

I had a great, great time. Gigs, camping, good weather, good company. The Eisteddfod took over the whole of Bala town, which felt like the heartland and small enough to be conducive to fringe events and spontaneous happenings and encounters. Last year in Cardiff was very dispersed by comparison, where the maes was on the margins of the city centre at a distance from fringe gigs and other goings on. That and it was diluted, by the rest of the city and by actual rain.

In Cardiff the focus ended up on the maes which is not the sum total of the Eisteddfod experience. Please don’t let it be the sum total. In fact, reaching the point around the fifth hour of deciding which of three quango stands to visit – all of which totally irrelevant to your life and work – yields a kind of existential despair as you crumple the day ticket in your pocket. What I’m trying to say is, there are a lot of organisations who mistakenly think it’s important to have a presence and show the face at the maes and it ends up feeling like a row of uniform display stands at a business expo. Unless they can pack a mean display stand and dazzle us then they probably shouldn’t bother at all. Oh and cool freebies. Little tractors I can give to my nephews would be good.

I had to dig to find the cultural stuff at the maes but it was there, stuff like Tu Chwith at the Pabell Len (literature), Pictiwrs showing shoestring films and Twm Morys roaring and banging a stick on the ground. I saw someone singing Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper but in Welsh and on a harp which is something to write home about, I guess. There were a couple of noteworthy tech launches too (Cysill grammar checker and a belated but welcome phone from Samsung that does predictive text in Cymraeg).

Over in town, the inaugural Gorsedd Y GĂ®cs event was good too. It’s fun to be in a gorsedd.

The (proper) Gorsedd and the costume is what many people associate with the Eisteddfod and is again, only a part but admittedly rather peculiar.

Watch the video above. I missed this bit so I’m glad I caught it here. The commentary is in English. As you can see, any remaining poetry hopefuls are lambasted for a lack of vision, organisation and clarity. There is no poet decent enough this year so the chair kinda just yawns at the audience. The audience can’t do much but applaud – I don’t think it’s the TV edit – it looks like they do just break out into applause at such mediocrity regardless.

(For moments like this somebody should invent negative applause where you suck bursts of sound from the air in disapproval.)

In the clipped parlance of Twitter, lolspeak and leetspeak this is known as a .

In life itself I’d like to create this kind of tension at times by announcing to a packed auditorium there is a chair for something but that nobody deserves to sit in it. I’d reserve it for things which make me disappointed and very cross, like public transport and the general state of things.

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Underpass makes tunes

Underpass is a Cardiff-based musician and DJ. Above is a video for a new tune from his new album. It reminds me of home.

He and I have a long history as colleagues and friends, including running a club night called Machine Meadow. It was 2004 and we wanted to DJ and book people we wanted to see, like Werk label, Adverse Camber collective and Kode9 (first dubstep night in Cardiff?). Among other things, I also promoted Multistorey EP and plugged it to radio – with some degree of success!

Ability as an electronic musician is partly about songwriting and partly about the art and science of studio production, both of which Lee has been carefully honing for a long time. So here’s to him and his new tunes! The early mixes I’ve been hearing have been splendid indeed, including a tune with multi-instrumentalist and former Placid Casual artist Rhodri Viney (alias Broken Leaf).

Read the Underpass biography or follow him.

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Thoughts after Telstar (the film)

Telstar is a British film about 1960s record producer Joe Meek.

It’s been in some cinemas here for around a month and despite some decent press, apparently it hasn’t “grossed” much at the box office, which is a pity. Why? Influential though he is, Joe Meek was a producer not a performer and hence not an enduring household name. And arguably, the strand of music – early British rock’n’roll – is not among those currently being revisited or re-appraised. But neither of these is a good reason to avoid seeing a film! (Or distributing one, if that’s the situation.)

I recommend it, even if you think you’re totally unfamiliar with the life and work of Joe Meek. Saying that, you might know Johnny Remember Me (from that curious mini-subgenre of teen death ditties which flared up in the early 60s) or Telstar (otherwise known as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Desert Island Disc).

The weaknesses are the typical ones you get in this sort of film. In particular, they can’t resist some heavy nods to the future significance of certain events, for the audience’s benefit, like when Meek casts a demo tape by a then-unknown Beatles into the bin, that sort of thing. I guess that was deemed more important than showing any of the other performers he actually did work with that were left out. Admittedly, there are bound to be details glossed over in a career as prolific as Meek’s. Despite these minor flaws it’s well worth a look.

This isn’t a proper film review by the way, so here’s a piece of space age skiffle called I Hear A New World, from Meek’s formerly long lost album of the same name.

For me, Joe Meek’s tunes are a more recent part of a musical adventure starting with latter-day electronica and going via 1970s dub reggae. In other words, I suppose my discoveries have gone backwards chronologically. Meek, in my head, belongs in a kind of loose collection of 1960s pioneers of sound experimentation, like Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and Brian Wilson.

(In terms of electronic pioneers, I have some Kraftwerk albums but they’re not my favourite band or anything. I continue to listen to stacks of other stuff especially dub and reggae, which never ages.)

All this reminded me of the book Ocean Of Sound by David Toop (from 1995), especially this bit:

Ask musicians of a certain age a question: Who revolutionised the recording studio? Invariably, the response will include the following names: Phil Spector, Joe Meek, Brian Wilson, Lee Perry. At critical moments of their lives, one common link between all these studio innovators was a state of mind known, for the sake of society’s convenience, as madness.

Whether this is a link of causation or correlation, I don’t know. Could it be unhealthy, in itself, to be so obsessive about creating a perfect sound? Or is this a more general burden those with artistic genius are commonly said to struggle with?

Toop’s book goes further but the film doesn’t deal with these kinds of questions directly. We see Meek suffer from paranoia, depression and mental illness. But he also begins to believe his own hype and reject nearly everyone who’d helped him find success. That and the drug abuse, money worries, obsession with the occult, blackmail attempts and social maladjustment (in relation to Meek’s sexuality) and legal challenges probably form, you might think, some basis of an explanation.

As with Phil Spector now, it’s an odd juxtaposition to celebrate the genius and listen to such fantastic music yet be reminded how dark things ultimately became.

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Smells Like “Free”

Like you, I’m a sucker for those books which identify an emerging area of economics or sociology and boil it down to some zeitgeisty theory.

Most of us would like to say we can pinpoint the exact trends affecting society, business and bookshelves alike for the next three to six years. Somewhere within my own bookmarks, real and virtual, I think I’ve nailed it. It’s definitely about groups of people (Here Comes Everybody, Tribes, We Think) but also influential individuals (Outliers), perhaps with remarkable offerings (Purple Cow). Given the right timing and people (The Tipping Point) and marketed differently (What Would Google Do?, Free Prize Inside), you can at least hope for a minor hit in your niche (The Long Tail). Your instincts will be correct (Blink) or if not, the whole thing will be downright counter-intuitive (Freakonomics).

Together these guys are revolutionising barbecue conversation among a certain aspirational demographic who like the inside track.

And now! Chris Anderson’s Free is the latest new topical thing to dazzle the blogosphere with its rightness/wrongness.

Story so far: Anderson’s The Long Tail sold pretty well, became a successful talked-about blockbuster and thereby failed to remain in the long tail. By contrast, Free is more aptly pioneering a real live marketing experiment (only somewhat brave now, in these post-Radiohead times) where already you can download the entire audiobook for free. While infinite stocks last!

Or read it online for free, USA-only. Or, only in the United Kingdom (land of the free Prince album), you can stream the audiobook for free or get a free but abridged softback version which is printed on bog roll or something.

The whole plan is flawless except “freeconomics” as a buzzword sounds very much like “freakonomics“. That aside, a guy can only launch this perfect combination of title, contents, packaging and distribution once. Although I would like to get my paws on the supposedly upcoming Free – Super Deluxe Version, which could be some kind of expensive “premium” edition for the real fans with – I don’t know – WATERMARKING, GOLD LEAF, HOLOGRAMS, SPOT VARNISH, STROKEABLE EMBOSSING and HEAVY PAGES WITH A SMELL.

Take that, Radiohead.

My prediction is some hapless fool will mistakenly heed the title on the lavish display stand and attempt to carry it out of Borders without paying.

Truly though, every mug who blogs about it (me included), regardless of their verdict, gives it a boost in the positive feedback loop. It’s seen as a significant book and if you didn’t agree, you wouldn’t be mentioning it. If you haven’t absorbed its contents, you can. Download now!

Meanwhile, Anderson will be appearing at a prestigious future-of-content symposium near you so make sure you understand expressions like “freemium” and “feels like free” AND have your own personal view worked out. For the other seers appearing on the panel with him, that had better include custom-prepared awesome anecdotes and a high degree of variance with his take on it. It’s a macho world and you can’t just agree. Besides, you guys were picked for the panel because you’d already branded your own thoughts into an identifiable corner anyway.

Anil Dash adds to the loop by acknowledging the loop:

I haven’t had a chance to finish reading Free yet, but I am sure that both of these authors’ books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it’s okay that these books don’t necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they’re arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting that these trends are ascendent actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the guise of reporting on culture. I like that!

I too admire the moxie of anyone who presumes to serve me up some exciting trend as a nutritious bundle wrapped up in easily-digested futuristic pill form.

The career path of Andersonomics (have observation, name it, bring insights about – say – migrating birds and Brazilian musical movements, add liberal sprinkling of futurology, blog it, refine book, do speaking engagements, repeat) may seem easy. But if you’re considering it, you first need to consolidate your reputation in an established field.

Where else can we turn if not to our qualified experts? In general, nobody gets to be a disruptive writer speculating on “disruptive” things without a whole heap of life experience and hard graft. Actually, stop press – that’s wrong, some 15-year old kid just stepped up and did. So all bets are off.

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Do you care about Wales? Can you code? Fancy helping TheyWorkForYou then?

Below is some full background to this, but in summary TheyWorkForYou are looking for volunteer coders interested in working on Welsh Assembly data. If that’s you, please join the new discussion list and let’s figure out how to do it.

If you don’t know TheyWorkForYou then take some time to familiarise yourself. It’s a well established site taking parliamentary data and presenting it in a queryable form. It’s free, loaded with information and very useful indeed.

The whole thing is maintained by mySociety who are world class at this sort of thing.

Have a play and see what you can glean about your MP or issue of choice. The search function allows you to subscribe by email (or better still, RSS feed) to notify you immediately whenever something you care about is discussed.

This is all very well for the UK parliament but the Wales section of TheyWorkForYou is currently looking very bare, containing only the following text.

We need you!
It’d be fantastic if TheyWorkForYou also covered the Welsh Assembly, as we do with the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, but we don’t currently have the time or resources ourselves — in fact, both those assemblies were mainly done by volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help out, please get in touch!

So yes, Wales is the only constituent part of the UK which doesn’t have its parliamentary data available on TheyWorkForYou.

There is nothing preventing us, it’s purely because nobody’s stepped up and done it.

As a quick explanation of the work that needs to be done: Welsh Assembly proceedings and transcripts are already available on the web from the official site. But they’re effectively raw dumps – of speeches and other data. It’s almost impossible to get useful insights about members’ voting records. It provides no option to subscribe to notifications that a phrase was used. Apart from a very basic and clunky site search function, all the insights are locked in. You could do a human-powered research trawl through the records, but that starts to get a bit unwieldy for normal people. It feels like the preserve of experts and not really like proper democracy.

Most of TheyWorkForYou’s engine is already built. In the words of Matthew Somerville at mySociety, the work now is to “parse the official report of the Assembly into structured machine-readable data to feed into TheyWorkForYou, along with member information for the Assembly. This will need programming skills, I’m afraid.”

So if you know anything about data structures or programming, why not apply that knowledge for the good of everyone? Join the discussion list for now as we’ll be figuring out how to tackle it.

Any given Assembly Member who does his or her job properly would surely encourage the kind of scrutiny that TheyWorkForYou could bring. You might be wondering why nobody at the Welsh Assembly has added the necessary features to allow their data to be queried. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt this time. Maybe they don’t always intend to obfuscate and hide this stuff. It’s just they’re not up to speed with any better ways of doing it. You might be able to help them! And the people of Wales!

I’m not naive enough to think that all problems can immediately be solved by opening up this information. Neither will it be enough to get every voter running to the polls once the information is available. All manner of things can go wrong in the democratic process. But if your thing is data, there is a clear problem there and maybe that’s the part of the scene you can help with.

In Wales we have a good selection of knowledgable, principled and often witty political bloggers. I’m not one. But I can help resource the conversation in the party political domain by opening up the possibility of insights from the data. It will be a step towards better accountability among our representatives. Let’s hope it does clear a pathway to some possible solutions.

If you’re not a coder, you could make a donation to mySociety or spread the word.

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Reaching for a better email tomorrow (my white inbox resolution six months in)

Happy new half-year!

Back in January I made a resolution to leave my inbox empty every night. I have partially succeeded. It’s forcing me to make those little decisions. It’s a lot more manageable. Hooray!

At times I’ve let it slip. But there’s no use feeling any guilt over it. Guilt won’t motivate me, it won’t fix anything and it’s never the right response to ANYTHING. It’s probably better to feel total, utter freedom. FREEDOM. Try it.

The overall point is I CARE about my work and the promises I make. The act of giving out an email address carries responsibilities. If the inbox were to flood to a river of unanswered messages, bacn and spam, it would be time to rethink my involvement. Merlin Mann wrote a good piece about the high cost of pretending. It’s well worth a read. For instance, if you’re going on holiday why make a weak promise about your email backlog if you just can’t keep it?

I also like Donald Knuth’s stance on email (total abstention so he can have the time to write huge books about algorithms).

I am continuing with email but those guys have taught me it should be a deliberate decision, not a default. Most of it is up to me because on a positive note, I am totally at one with my Thunderbird email software. I have customised every square millimetre to my little foibles. (We all have little foibles.) It runs locally so there is a minimum lag between my commands and its obedience. It will always be quicker than Gmail’s web interface, for instance. Thunderbird engenders super slick sensations of being highly-effective which I then transmute into reality.

By contrast, I dislike these pseudo-email systems that are creeping in. By that I mean direct messaging on any social site which is a bit like email but doesn’t let you DO STUFF to it. Facebook messages are pretty awful. The interface is clunky. I need to archive things out of sight and it’s not possible. I’m left with a river of everything. I think it probably reinforces bad habits for people. Don’t even mention auto-filtering, that’s nowhere. As for the volume of messages, if you don’t respond to an event you’ll get every single mass broadcast related to that event.

I can’t turn off Facebook direct messages but I do want people to be able to contact me. So next to my face I’ve written “If you are thinking of sending me a private message, I will respond far more quickly to proper email. Just saying.”. Let’s hope it doesn’t sound too arsey. I just want my every action to be gilded with quality feelings for all involved.

Twitter direct messages are OK I guess. You can’t DO STUFF with them. (Scoble listed the stuff.) But at least they’re 140 characters long or less – you can express anything with that! Well, nearly.

Anything more interactive deserves a wiki or a Google Doc. (Or a Wave but that isn’t available yet.)

Or a good old phone chat.

Maybe even a face-to-face meet-up.

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Open Season – selections on a theme of openness

I’m thinking about our obsession with “open”.

People work in “open plan” offices. If not then maybe their manager has an “open door policy” and offers an “open mind”. Maybe they conduct negotiations with “open palm”.

Then there’s open source software, now pretty familiar and widely used. Of which OpenOffice is an example (as well as Firefox). And there are examples of “open source” hardware and machines too. Check out Arduino.

Online we use web services that offer OpenSocial, as well as OpenID login. And OAuth – where the open is baked right in.

We’re familiar with Open University of course. They were well ahead of the current trend. Elsewhere, “open society” and “open government” are discussed. In the UK we have Open Rights Group, our counterpart to the EFF.

“Open” is becoming a byword for positive and good and progressive. “Open” is a hot word of now. Will it always be this way? Or will it be remembered as a passing enthusiasm – either superseded or perhaps absorbed everywhere to the extent that it becomes transparent?

I’m particularly interested in open source. I’ve benefitted a huge amount from open source software. Some great work has been done and some very successful companies of many kinds exist – all thanks to open source software.

How far can this approach be extended to non-software projects?

Creative Commons and approaches to copyright reform represent a form of openness, outside of software. Some (but not all) Creative Commons licences allow derivative works and adaptation.

Can you run a country using open source principles? (What’s going to happen when Tim Berners-Lee opens up government data in his new role? Will he enable us to spot and fix the bugs in Brown’s Britain?)

What about human relations? What about sharing? (And “over-sharing”?)

What about “proprietary” – the opposite of open, at least in a software context? At times, proprietary can be pretty good if you’re the proprietor. But you also miss opportunities.

I figured the best way to explore these questions would be to start documenting bits and snippets I find along the way. For this purpose I’ve started another blog called Open Season. I’ve just realised the term comes from hunting, that wasn’t deliberate. But it does capture some of the ambiguity of open. If you’re in the firing line, you’d prefer closed season. Open letters are similar – you don’t always want to receive them, especially if you’re a politician with responsibilities being identified.

Initially Open Season will resemble a scrapbook with the odd comment from me. I’ve chosen Tumblr as it’s ultra-quick blogging for anthologists and snippers and plagiarists. With the Firefox plugin, I can drag items to the bottom-right corner of my browser and they’re on. Then in the longterm I can turn them into properly thought-out posts here. Open Season is a pile of bits. Even more of a pile of bits I mean.

My aim is not to explore the benefits of open source in software. Those are pretty well documented and discussed. I’m looking at that, but I’m trying to grasp the wider issues of the open philosophy.

Usually computer software runs as object code – which is compiled from source code.

But any other creative work doesn’t have source code. This blog post doesn’t have source code. A car doesn’t have source code. A government doesn’t have source code. Your brain doesn’t have source code. Your body doesn’t have source code. (Don’t tell me DNA is source code! It isn’t.)

Any reference to “open source” outside of software is an analogy. Remember when we had to re-adapt everyday terms to describe what happened in and around computers? We would boot and store files, then at the advent of the graphical user interface came the window, paint, wallpaper, menu and the like. Now it’s the other way round – open source works for software, now we’re applying the term to other things.

All this has the potential for awesome results. But taking a software engineering methodology – that can clearly work – and thinking it could be applied to ANYTHING is possibly a bit rash. Let’s see.

Comment if you like. I’m “open sourcing” my thought processes on this one. Can’t get away from it.