I hadn’t touched Wordle for about a year. Today I stumbled across Wordle again and decided to paste in the text from this home page in, and what did we get?

As with so many things in this accelerated world, getting into foursquare was one of those moments that I don’t recall exactly where/when/how/why I got into it. It was probably the twitter updates from a friend along the lines of

“Joe D. has just become the Mayor of Bur Gerking (Maida Vale)”

which piqued my curiosity. I installed the app on my iPhone and left it for a few weeks before getting into the swing of things. Whatever the details, I’m glad I did get into foursquare.

For those of you who haven’t heard of foursquare yet, it’s a location-based social networking application that encourages people to explore their town or city or other towns or cities for that matter. Initially launched on the iPhone (plus Android and soon Blackberry) the app allows you to geo-locate places nearby to your current location and then “check in” when you get there. You can locate a nearby pub, bar or restaurant and broadcast your presence there to your friends, on twitter or foursquare.

Furthermore, every time you check in to a venue you score points. By checking into and “discovering” new venues you get further points. Just visited 4 venues in a row? That’s another bonus. Checking-in after 3am on a school night? That’s more points and you unlock & earn “badges” too. It’s all good fun and by frequenting places you can become “Mayor” of a venue if you’re the most frequent visitor/loyal patron.

For nights out in big population centres, people with a big, active social network and for people who use twitter this combination of factors must be a big deal. But in Hampshire commuter towns like Farnborough (population approx 60,000) it’s been a bit quiet so far…

Back in early December there were just a handful of local venues in foursquare. These included the Princesmead shopping centre, the newly-built Sainsburys store and Alexandra Road. Now Princesmead I can understand being on there, it is a meeting place for Farnborough people at lunchtime with its food court, coffee and sandwich bars, but Sainsburys isn’t exactly a happening social venue and Alexandra Road is just, well, a road.

This lack of “venues” had put some people off, judging by their comments in the iTunes App Store. However, giving foursquare a 1-star rating and bemoaning the lack of places in their database is completely short-sighted. The whole point of foursquare is that you the user are welcome to add new places. As a member of CAMRA (the CAMpaign for Real Ale) and a lover of good pubs I’ve added my own favourite Farnborough public houses; The Crown & Cushion, The Old Courthouse and The Prince of Wales. But no other Farnborough pubs were listed so I added all the others too (despite some of them being pretty lousy and our favourite Tumbledown Dick being closed for nearly two whole years) and a few more in other nearby towns that I’ve visited over the last few weeks.

The whole point about this application is that people have the power to add new places for other users to discover and “early adopters” can set the bar. Being a web professional, I love fully-featured systems, so by adding as many venues as I know is bound to be beneficial to any new people who hop onto foursquare, particularly in my own area of expertise, my own neighbourhood of the last 28 years. It’s always good to give accurate information on new venues in foursquare so by researching and checking data in maps.google.co.uk for instance whilst sat at home prep’ing a night out, all the correct data can be added to venues (including accurate addresses, postcodes and telephone numbers). Otherwise you can simply add new venues from your iPhone.

So, what if you’re not a socialite, a big drinker or a party person? Well, that doesn’t matter because, as mentioned earlier, big shops were in the database. But, more importantly than that, you can add local shops, independent retailers and small businesses – my local Polish supermarket, selling kabanos and the like, is listed so that you can go grab some Polish groceries if you fancy a change. Our local Global Emporium, selling tie-dyed t-shirts, CDs and incense, is also in the foursquare database, as is the 2020 Photographic lab I use. So it’s all about making people aware of the smaller businesses, the places they might not otherwise know about. It’s up to the locals to populate the database with good, wholesome places to visit that might not be on the radar of casual visitors to your sleepy little town.

What’s more you can even add tips, such as letting people know that Kamko’s Polish mart sells Jamaican Dragon Stout! Or there’s the Aviators bar at The Hub in Farnborough – I must pop in there one day to ask about the ex-South African manager, apparently the story’s a good laugh. Foursquare is about letting people know what to find and what a place’s speciality is and you can even add Museums and places of cultural & historic interest.

So yes, I think foursquare has a lot of potential, not only for connecting people but for connecting people and places too and for putting places on the map that you might not otherwise be aware of or what they do. It’s still early days for the application yet but I’ve seen it grow organically without having given them any feedback myself, but it has been developing in the direction I would have expected it to.

Further to that I actually thought that foursquare could be “the next big thing” and, whilst doing a little research on foursquare hacks for Wordpress I stumbled across a piece on CNN by Pete Cashmore of Mashable entitled Next year’s Twitter? It’s Foursquare. Cashmore notes the common investment in twitter and foursquare and, despite being a little behind the curve against the likes of Loopt and Brightkite, its addictive “play” is a potential match winner.

Foursquare now really feels like twitter did before it got big. I think I hit twitter at the bottom of the curve just as it was taking off. That’s a shame really as, being an old school computer geek, talking ZX-81 and BBC Model B is such a nostalgic and wonderful hark-back in the history of computers. Saying you were there, an early adopter, when foursquare took off, will also be something I hope we can all one look back on with fond memories and tell our children how wonderful it was to be there at the time because location-based social networking services will be as ubiquitous as the mobile phone and what it has become in your pocket today.

Ever since Jan Moir wrote her piece in last week’s Daily Mail column questioning and commenting on everything surrounding Steven Gately’s untimely death her name has seemed to be a permanent fixture in the trending topics on twitter.

Sure, it was a pretty rude article, but it was in the Daily Mail so what do you expect?

What was not expected was the intensity of the furrore that was whipped up and the 22,000 plus people who contacted the Press Complaints Commission. Wow, that’s a lot of complaining!

Whilst I’ve avoided the treadmill chatter of “Jan Moir blah blah nasty woman blah blah” clogging up my twitter feed I do find it puzzling that one of the main protagonists against her was the much-loved Mr Stephen Fry. I must admit that I missed his tweets at the time but understand that it was Mr fry who urged people to complain and whom provided the links to the appropriate authorities for people to do so.

Why is this puzzling? Because it was Mr Fry who said, just a few months ago, about the MPs’ expenses scandal, that it was just a:

Tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important, it really isn’t, it isn’t what we’re fighting for, it isn’t what voting is about and this idea “oh we’ve lost our faith in politics” it’s nonsense. It’s a journalistic, made-up frenzy.

Tedious? Journalistic? Frenzy? So what are we fighting for, Stephen? Are we saying it’s OK to be elected to a position of trust and then to dip your fingers in the public purse, grabbing handfuls of people’s hard-earned cash to splash on flashy consumer goods, mortgages and padding-out expensive second homes but you cannot speak out even if you’re going to get shot down flames for being so narrow-minded?

What Jan Moir said was pretty odious but the amount of flak she received for her views is more than enough to compensate, let alone the public publishing of her home address and calls for her dismissal from her job.

This whole affair simply shows that Jan Moir has marginalised herself by expressing views that are not widely approved, which leads on nicely to Nick Griffin of the British National Party.

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Prior to Nick Griffin being on BBC’s Question Time there was an uproar about the BBC even allowing him to be on the show. People protested that Griffin shouldn’t be allowed to express his or his party’s odious views and the crowd outside BBC Television Centre at the time of filming was quite some indication of the depth of feeling against the man.

Personally I couldn’t think of a better platform for Nick Griffin and the BNP to make complete and utter fools of themselves and, judging by Griffin’s performance, who in their right mind could subscribe to any of his wafer-thin arguments?  He was outnumbered, nervous and put up a very poor show. It was pretty pathetic.

By simply focusing on “destroying” the BNP many people are missing the point that the BNP are actually appealing to, like it or not, some very real concerns that people in this country have about the unchecked level of immigration. And before you castigate me for saying that, bear in mind that the sons and daughters of “recent” immigrants to the UK were the ones who also mentioned that fact on the show itself.

The Labour government that “run” this country have a track record of running rough-shod over democratic public opinion –  whether it’s going to a costly war in Iraq/Afghanistan or allowing waves of people into the UK so that local and central taxes can be spent on translating the texts of the benefit system into their myriad languages, they have failed the British people. That is the point, not the BNP; the BNP are irrelevant, or soon will be.

So what about twitter and the mob?

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As a technologist, designer and communicator I love twitter. Twitter is a perfect tool for keeping up to date and sharing views and information; that’s exactly what twitter was used for in the mobilisation of public opinion against Jan Moir. Twitter was also used to express feeling against Nick Griffin and the BNP and failed to have an effect on removing him from the show, a good thing in my opinion.

What I did find funny today was the tweet that went along the lines

Let’s get Nick Griffin out of trending topics and instead #smashtheBNP

Brilliant. Everyone who RT’d that would have given as much weight to Nick Griffin in the TTs as #smashtheBNP.

So whilst Twitter can be a tool for good it can also be misused too and I feel that whilst the mob have used it in the character assassination of people who don’t like gays and people who don’t like non-whites, the same mob, bless them, are getting caught up in that “tedious obsession” that Mr Fry mentions.

A few months ago an advertising campaign ran across the country for “Team Green Britain” promoting green energy for the country and support for the Great Britain Olympic team in 2012. What slipped by most of the British public are a number of facts:

1. The green union jack in the ads was “designed” by Wayne Hemingway, for a pretty penny, I suspect, despite the green union jack already being the emblem of Ecotricity since 2007.
2. The Team Green Britain campaign was run by power company EDF or Energie de France.
3. EDF, aswell as being French and not British, are a mainly nuclear power company.
4. EDF’s “Green Britain” campaign cost an apparent £50 million.
5. Gordon Brown’s brother, Andrew Brown, is the Director of Corporate Communications at EDF; that means advertising.
6. EDF, after the USA and Canada, are the world’s biggest producer of nuclear waste.
7. As a private company EDF are the world’s number one producer of nuclear waste.
8. Britain’s future energy policy does not seem to rest in the realms of green technology and clean wind farms out to see but rather in the hands of nuclear energy; what are we to do with the nuclear waste of such a policy?

Did greenwash or EDF vs Ecotricity make Twitter’s trending topics at the time? No. What did? Michael Jackson.

And what about last weekend when, for 24 hours, concerned people decided to Tweet4Gary? Gary McKinnon, the British hacker, is to be extradited to the USA for hacking into NASA and Defence Department computers in his search for evidence on the existence of UFOs. He has waited 7 years to find out whether he will stand trial in the USA. When you consider that “top secret” US Government data was accessible by a member of the British public using usernames and passwords as basic as admin/admin or even blank/blank, you have to wonder why this David v Goliath farce is being allowed to continue. One British man, who has aspergers syndrome, against the Pentagon.

Did Tweet4Gary make Twitters trending topics last weekend? No. What did? The X-factor.

So whilst the flashmob swarms on already-blighted crops with ease, there are other more important things in life that seem to go by the wayside. We’re all guilty of idle chit-chat and banal banter but for some that’s all there is.

Next time you’re transfixed by the fireworks display someone will be picking your pockets or dumping in your garden. So when you snap back to reality and you wonder why everything’s gone up in smoke, you’re skint and you’re surrounded by shit, don’t say you weren’t warned!

NB: There’s another important issue I forgot to mention: Jan Moir might have gotten most of the attention in the Stephen Gately furrore but a day before her story Stephen Green of Christian Voice penned a piece that some people on twitter suggested she may have lifted her piece from: Stephen Gately “A Warning” to Boyzone Fans.

Stephen Green is as out of touch if not more so than Jan Moir in his opinion of the world and its people so what Moir & Green have to say is irrelevant. More importantly is Green’s assertion that:

Whether Secularism’s demise will be as a result of the resurgence of Christianity or a takeover by Islam is the only point of conjecture, but fall it will.

That’s pretty confident. Or more to the point, that’s pretty deluded. Apart from his utter devotion to the sad image a bloke nailed to a cross he seems to believe in the “resurgence of christianity” in this country. I don’t think so. And “takeover by Islam”… that won’t happen either. Just as Rome declined and the cult of guilt rose so it will fall from the grace that it forced itself into.

And don’t forget that Green was the man who led the protests against “Jerry Springer the Opera”. If you recall, that was an episode in our social history where it was NOT OK to have a coloured chap in a nappy depicting Jesus but it WAS OK to issue death threats against TV Executives for airing the show.

Some people are just genuine nutters!

28th day of August, 2009: For more than a year I’d been involved in a hefty Joomla! project, migrating a large 1.0.x website to the 1.5 version of the CMS. Having been far more involved in the SEO and editorial arts of the web in recent years, I’d lost touch with my artistic side, the webdesign side of things, and was more than distracted in the technical department – the hands-on application of Joomla! CMS.

So I called in Andrew Eddie and Arno Zijlstra to help out in the development and design aspects of the project respectively. Tom & Will Critchlow of Distilled vindicated & refined our SEO strategy, with Toby Thain of OpenQuery optimising & tuning our MySQL, Russell Smith of UKD1 sorting out the Varnish reverse proxy and the fanatical rackers at Rackspace all pitching in their invaluable expertise. Credit is due also to Drew Jones for covering for me whilst I was on holiday.

So, as you can see, a simple migration involved quite a few web professionals, probably tenfold in all more than when is4profit.com’s business advice website migrated from flat HTML to Joomla! 1.0 back in 2005/2006 (a one-man job it was, back then). The flip side of gaining more power from Joomla! 1.5 was that it had ultimately become more complex. The website had at least quadrupled in size in the number of articles alone, let alone the number of features available, meaning more work, more bodies, juggling the editorial & SEO day job with handling a designer in Holland and a developer in Australia not to mention a few nights talking with people in Toronto, Canada and San Antonio, TX, USA too.

In the middle of this project I took a well-earned rest as, back then, I’d accumulated a year’s holiday and took it all in one hit over Christmas 2008 but, unfortunately, was hit by that nasty flu virus that was going around and spent 3 of my 4 weeks holiday feeling extremely unwell.

But in August 2009, after doing a late-run of the occasional 20-hour day here and 7-day week there, running a self-imposed graveyard shift (try doing brain surgery on a live webserver when there’s a huge volume of traffic flooding in during the 9-5) I finally rolled out the website without once blowing the proverbial trumpet. With a few days of babysitting, mopping up 404s & performing 301s and the general fine-tuning and fingernail biting that come with the relaunch of a major website it was time to take another well-earned break, this time sans maladie.

Flying back to the USA to see my other half my in-flight literary entertainment consisted of  a copy of Charles Stross’  Accelerando as recommended to me by Brian Teeman in a conversation on twitter one day. It turns out that Brian went to school with Charlie Stross many years ago in Leeds. So, with a second-hand copy of the sci-fi tome, I flew west.

Despite the title of this post being Accelerando this is not a book review, however I’ll say I found myself instantly drawn into this story and its fantastic hypotheses from the start – the main character open-sourcing concepts and freely distributing them to good causes in order that they enrich mankind’s technical (r)evolution, taking no direct payment for his services only kickbacks in kind. Excellent stuff, this Accelerando, and it was no wonder Brian, the open source aficionado, recommended it.

But then Accelerando took off, quite lierally, accelerating away at breakneck speed, with me struggling to keep up. I was left, at the end of the book, in a future so wild and yet so strangely logical & utterly plausible.

That was it – back to the UK. A day off to celebrate jetlag and another to recover from my birthday, one day back at the office and then to Germany for a few days (driving, this time, not flying). When I returned to England and was back at work once again everything felt different, refreshed, renewed, rejuvenated. This newness… was it because of my first proper holiday in 2 years, or the travel or because I’d just had all my neurons fired-up, full throttle, by reading Accelerando?

Well, it may be a combination of all three but Charles Stross’ book was definitely a hugely contributory factor in my reinvigoration. Not since Brian Bates’ The Way of Wyrd (Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer) or Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics had I experienced such genuine neural pleasures.

I described the feeling to my Mrs, saying that reading Accelerando was like being at the edge of the ever-expanding universe and you realise the boundaries have been (and are constantly being) pushed out. You look back , take stock of the new perspective and realise just how far you’ve come. Everything has changed, everything is different or, at least, your perception of it has changed. Accelerando really was “far out” and coming back to reality was comforting but also slightly unfulfilling.

Maybe it was the deep involvement in the, at times, almost forensic precision of dealing with the Joomla! project and the relief of putting it down. Maybe it was stopping to look back at 11 years of web design, 9 years of being in the web industry and the notion, portrayed in a chapter of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, of the 10,000 hour “rule”, that you become an expert after 10,000 hours of practice!

So, as I said, coming home to the web world after Accelerando everything looked different. It was a bit like Frodo going home to the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings. People with little or no SEO skills were touting SEO services to their clients! People with no design skills were wanting to be web designers! Design, graphics & content were regularly and blatantly ripped from other websites (I saw the content of someone’s webdesign portfolio the other day not only contain another company’s words but the other company’s telephone number too!)

Having put my design business on the backburner due to my previous workloads I was, for a few years, happy to come home and collapse at the end of a long day. But now, in this industry that never stands still, it’s definitely time to catch up, push out, forge ahead and test the boundaries. Wordpress template hacks and new Photoshop skills are the new staple diet. A dozen websites are on my books to be revamped.

I’d like to thank everybody and I mean everybody I’ve mentioned. Particular gratitude goes out to Charles Stross for writing the excellent Accelerando and to Brian Teeman for pointing out the book. And if you look up the dictionary definition of accelerando it says, and I quote:

ac-cel-er-an-do [ak-sel-uh-ran-doh]
–adverb, adjective Music.

gradually increasing in speed.

So, folks… Accelerando… keep up the tempo!

Post Script: I discovered this morning, after I’d finish writing this post, that Robin Storey (formerly of Zoviet France, Storey, Ayres & Grief and now Rapoon) said something that again totally resonated with aspects of this post:

…the edges interest me more than the cosy centre.

I have to say that I am quite appalled at the amount of venom that’s been pouring out of  the United States recently over the proposals of Barack Obama to reform the healthcare system. There are a number of points that I find pretty unsavoury:

1. That there is any objection to improving America’s healthcare system is beyond comprehension. Why would anybody not want improvements to anything? To wish to deny  positive change is obviously very negative but is also a completely alien concept to me or any of my friends and compatriots. So for anybody to seriously object to improvements they must been in dire need of improvement to themselves, especially in terms of their attitude, flawed logic and how they regard & treat their fellow human beings.
2. The sheer amount of spite, nastiness and brutality that accompanies the objections to improving healthcare is particularly objectionable in itself. Depicting Barack Obama as Adolf Hitler and accusing him of “Nazi policies” is both bizarre and downright vulgar. I thought the big fear in some quarters of America was of so-called “socialism” but to flip to “Nazism” demonstrates both a lack of understanding and a determination to attack and condemn at any cost.
3. The scaremongering against so-called “socialism” is a particularly antiquated concept. McCarthyism is unfortunately still being reheated and served in the 21st century and it seems that one preserve of “conservatives” is to conserve the fears of post-second world war America.
4. Attempting to use Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) as a scapegoat for how America’s healthcare would look under a “socialist” system has been highly flawed. Britain’s NHS does have and has had problems, but show me a perfect system anywhere, either privately or state run. Britain’s NHS is beneficial to the nation’s health and using misinformation and lies to portray a system that has worked for over 60 years is very underhanded. To brand the NHS as Evil and Orwellian is patently wrong. To say the NHS is some sort of breeding ground for terrorism is alarmist, racist and paranoid to say the least.
5. The way in which all this negativity sees the light of day and is disseminated is interesting:  Yesterday’s trending twitter topic “under obamacare” took off very quickly, I was watching the whole episode unfurl as it happened. Whilst I believe in natural phenomena the buzz on twitter had all the speed of a coordinated attack (although there were some nice counterfoils too). Secondly the fact that so many people jumped on the negativity bandwagon can show either of two things: that there really is such a depth of feeling against healthcare reform in America or that there are so many people stupid enough to side against improvements.

The whole lack of discourse in America is troubling. Rather than sitting down and discussing the facts like reasonable adults there seems to be this feeling of utter hysteria being whipped-up and shouted from the rooftops.

Amidst all this venom I’ve seen cries of “but the liberals did it to us”, probably referring to the 8 years of pain that many Americans suffered under the “leadership” of George W Bush. The difference here is that whilst Barack Obama clearly won the presidency, George W Bush “won” to a backdrop of claims that the election result was “rigged”. Bush employed people of very questionable background in his administration including Carl Rove, Dick Cheney and  Donald Rumsfeld. 9/11, the “New Pearl Harbour” (see page 63), happened on Bush’s watch and Iraq was invaded as a result.

The justifiable dislike of George W Bush was mirrored in how the world saw him. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been seen as an intelligent and articulate relief from the “cowboy” swagger. Yet despite only having been in the job for little over 6 months the current US President seems to be constantly under attack by people that do not want to sit down, discuss and debate.

The psyche of the American right wing has become ever more intolerant and hostile as the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the abominably biased Fox News do nothing to help matters.

Whilst America boils in hysteria over the improvement and availability of its healthcare system to all, I watch aspects of its own mental health collapse as hateful propaganda is spewed, consumed and repeated at an alarming rate.

Before berating our “socialist” healthcare systems the objectors in America should study the national healthcare systems of all countries and  some of them are much better than they are here in Britain. Sweden and Finland, for instance, have enviably brilliant health & welfare systems although their taxes are pretty high. They do not, however, have the freeloaders that America and Britain so often object to within their systems so there must be some flaw in the mindset of overtly capitalistic countries. I’d put it down to the vast gulf between rich & poor – how can you not expect any sort of resentment in a system that allows staggeringly-wealthy tax-dodgers to flourish when there is so much poverty at the same time.

So if right-wingers and “libertarians” want absolute freedom and no Federal government then they should go live their “free from all tax” lives. They should watch their roads crumble, their civic societies turn ever more selfish and their communities collapse. I doubt there will be any form of equilibrium only wild variations in circumstance & injustice. That sounds just like it is right now, only worse!

This is about the health of fellow human beings and if people would rather give a kick down than a hand up to disadvantaged people then the human race is going backwards in some parts of the world. That’s not how a model democracy should function, that’s not what a caring society should be about.

As somebody over here said the other day, when we see our doctors we like it when they first say “What’s seems to be the trouble?” and not “Do you have health insurance?” Healthcare is a basic human right not something that should be profited from and the sooner that is understood and acted upon the better.

UPDATE: Deciphering the “inexplicable, intractable ignorance on display in the fight over healthcare this summer” is an independent poll that asks do you think “Healthcare reform is a secret plot to kill people?” 26% of Republicans, 8% of Independents and 5% of Democrats said YES. And 59% of the Republicans polled said they watched and got their “information” from Fox News. Read more about the difference between the facts and the propaganda on the post Rachel Maddow on the GOP Miniverse. You couldn’t make this stuff up (Yet we now know the Republicans actually do!)