On reflection…
… I may have bitten off more than I can chew in launching this blog on top of my three other sites. So I’m leaving the Blue Cat in quarantine for now. But do visit my other projects: Bubblewrapped, The Other TaxPayers’ Alliance, or, for a more musical fix (Gil Scott-Heron included), Spacebeats.
Brown’s known unknowns
Gordon Brown interviewed in yesterday’s Observer:
Do you have no regrets, no feeling that there is anything you could have done in the last 10 years that would have better positioned us for this storm?
The truth is that not even the heads of some of the major financial institutions knew what was actually happening and what the risks they were taking were.
Brown needs to choose his advisers more carefully. The “heads of some of the major financial institutions” might not have known, but he did, she did, he did, and he did – not to mention him, him and her.
One person who didn’t know was former US central bank chief Alan Greenspan, signed up by Brown as honorary adviser to the UK Treasury in 2006. But at least Greenspan, unlike Brown, admitted he’d made mistakes.
There’s more at Bubblewrapped.
Vacuum-packed spam
Whenever a client asks me to add a discussion forum to their website, my first questions are: Do you have anyone to moderate it? And will anyone use it? Here’s what can happen if both answers are negative.
The Future of the NHS Forum was launched in 2006, on the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service. It accompanied the book of the same name, which featured views from experts and politicians of all shades. Since then, the forum has gathered a mere 36 entries and 15,858 registered users (and rising).
A browse through the members’ list explains all – they include “slots avenue casino”, “AdultMasterXXX” and (suitably for an NHS forum) ViagraComprarOnline. As air will fill a vacuum, so spam will fill a forum.
Of course, one way to get your new forum going is to do what letters page editors of under-read magazines have done for years (and I’ve worked on quite a few): make them up. And if that sounds a bit desperate, imagine having to resort to making up your own blog comments…
Desktop publishing saves the day
This blog claims to be about DTP – design, technology and politics – but it was another type of DTP – desktop publishing – that got me here in the first place.
Twenty-one years ago this month, I and two friends, Ben and Tim, launched the long-forgotten Manchester Left magazine, pledging to counter the “London-centrism” of the British Left. (The fact that we were all Londoners who had barely set foot outside of the Manchester University campus would be no obstacle.)
Thatcher had just won her third election victory – and so Manchester Left came just in time to lift progressive spirits with its sunny prose and cheery cover image. It did at least succeed in its aim to be “non-sectarian”: articles by trotskyists and anarchists sat next to a defence of Labour modernisers by fellow student Derek Draper. (At the time we thought Derek was terribly right-wing because he went around quoting Roy Hattersley at us; now it’s a sign that he’s left-wing again.)
The magazine was made possible by the arrival of a £2,500 Apple Mac SE in our student union, complete with a tiny 9″ mono screen and an exotic piece of software called Quark XPress. Even with these tools, production was not always easy. One article, imaginatively titled “Socialism and Democracy”, was supplied by our politics lecturer Norman Geras. These days Norman is best known for his well-read Normblog, but what impressed us then was that he was ON THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF NEW LEFT REVIEW.
In 1987 you didn’t just email someone a Word attachment. Norm handed us his lengthy manuscript and we proceeded to key it into the trusty Mac over several days weeks. (When I say “we”, I mean Claire – although we had the latest means of production, our relations of production were less developed.) We dutifully printed out a proof on the beast of a laser printer and handed it to Norm. The problem was that none of us had bothered to read it first. Norm, who was nothing if not meticulous, looked slightly aghast and said gravely: “I think we have a problem.” Then he sat us down for what felt like three days, took out his red pen, and talked us through each mistake. There was at least one in every sentence.
And what of my co-conspirators? Ben, always proud of his kaffiyeh, travelled through various shades of non-zionism, post-zionism and anti-zionism until he settled on, well, zionism. And Tim went on to write the definitive history of disco, Love Saves the Day.
Searching for pussy on the net
Is Apple’s robotic censor getting carried away? A friend recently searched for lullabies for his two-year-old daughter at the iTunes Store. Here’s what he found:
Disappointingly, the offending word wasn’t bleeped out in the song itself.
(PS. Apologies if you found this page via Google because you were actually doing what the title says.)
Never trust a button
I recently made contact with an old colleague, Paul, whose longstanding Never Trust a Hippy blog puts my Johnny-come-lately effort to shame. A few days later he invited me to be his friend on Bebo.
My thoughts were:
- He seems a bit keen – we’ve only just got reacquainted.
- Why is he asking me to join him on Bebo – he’s even older than me.
A few days later, the explanation came:
If you have ever emailed me, or been e-mailed by me, you probably received an invitation to join Bebo a few days ago … I wanted to see how the ‘invitation’ system worked so I let it see my Gmail address book, and – you know how it is – when it offered me the option of mailing everyone or just picking one or two people, I somehow managed to reverse it.
As it happens, Paul isn’t the first. Facebook also makes it a little too easy to email everyone in your address book, and several old chums have got back in touch with me that way (or so they say – I prefer to think that they were just itching to contact me but were too shy to say).
One reason for making such mistakes is summed up by Steve Krug, who eight years ago published “Don’t Make Me Think”, the first (and still the best) book I ever read on web usability: ”The main thing you need to know about instructions [on web pages] is that no one is going to read them – at least not until after repeated attempts at ‘muddling through’ have failed.” And us seasoned web hacks are the least likely to read instructions – and therefore the most likely to screw up.
On the other hand, Paul’s more succinct explanation probably says it all:
Social workers must die
The Facebook group I set up to accompany the (Other) TaxPayers’ Alliance recently gained its 100th member. Only 800 members to go and we’ll have overtaken the original Alliance. I was feeling quite pleased with this until I saw that the group RIP BABY P x gained 131,000 members over a similar period. And that’s not all: RIP BABY P x shouldn’t be mistaken for those splitters and wreckers in R I P Baby P (9,400 members), xx R.I.P Baby P xx (330 members), or Name & shame the bastards!!!! petition. R.I.P Baby p x (1,500 members).
In fact, search for Baby P on Facebook and you’ll find more than 500 groups – never mind members. Some are more upfront in their aims:
- DIE A SLOW PAINFULL DEATH TO THE BASTARDS WHO DONE THIS TO BABY “p”
- get the scum social workers sacked who didnt help baby p
- Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered
- BEAT THE PARENTS TO DEATH WHO KILLED BABY P
After a while it becomes hard to distinguish reality from parody, though I suspect Slaughter those who allowed Baby P to die, in the face is the latter:
this group is 4 every1 who hates the mother and other ppl who were lukin after baby p. fuckin scum. join this group and express your absolute horror at nu labour for allowin this to happen. thanks to gordon brown and useless social workers, this poor child who i really care about, is dead. its because of nu labour’s negligence that this child was allowed to die, i hate them. did i mention that i hate nu labour? hang every1 in nu labour and hang every social worker in the country. then find the sick mother by using social networkin websites like facebook and hang her. then rape her dead body and cut her breasts off, fry them in a wok and send photographs in to the daily express so that they can join in the RIGHTEOUSNESSEz.
Much more terrifying than any self-righteous anger is the mawkishness of discussions such as what song to dedicate to Baby P (which isn’t a parody – as far as I can tell). Suggestions include James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”, Celine Dion’s “Fly” and Chris Rea’s “Tell Me There’s a Heaven”. The Rea track is proving a hit, and has – inevitably – gained its own 8,000-strong group, A song for Baby P. Please join 2 make this happen!!! Shouldn’t there be a law against this sort of thing? Or at least a Facebook group?
Meanwhile, I was wondering whether my own group could benefit from a change of tone – perhaps a poem in praise of capital gains tax OR LOTS OF SWEARY CAPITALS – when I came across the eminently sensible Stop the fake moral outrage over Baby P and give the council a break:
Manifesto:
1. There are hundreds of children a year who die because of neglectful or violent parents. If you care, do some voluntary work; give money to a good cause; or become a social worker.
2. Don’t sign up to mindless groups simply to ease misplaced guilt.
3. Councils do not have enough money to maintain the excellent levels of service they provide or to recruit and train the additional staff they need. If you must blame someone, blame central government for cutting the money they give to councils.
Then again, they’ve only got eight members. FUCKING LOSERS.
Keep Obama out of the White House
“Ladies and gentlemen, Barack Obama is our new president,” announced US talk show host David Letterman. “And I think I speak for most Americans when I say, anybody mind if he starts a little early?”
In fact he probably spoke for most of the world. But shouldn’t we be demanding that Obama starts later, not earlier? Sure, it will give George Bush more time to rush through loopy last-minute laws, but the odd devastated national park is a small price to pay to prolong the deliciously warm and tingly sensation of Obama’s honeymoon period.
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About this site
This is a blog about DTP – design, technology and politics – or it would be if I didn't keep going off at tangents.
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About Clifford Singer
I'm a partner and creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency. I sometimes play guitar in my poor excuse for a band, The Great Apes. You can find me on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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My other sites
Spacebeats (musical madness)
Bubblewrapped (economic madness)
TaxPayers' Alliance (no, not that one)
