Apathy Sketchpad

Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for the last month. First, one that made the front page:

• Government Agrees Rescue Package For Snowmen (original submission)

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most senior figures in the Catholic Church in England and Wales has defended his decision to allow a known paedophile to continue working as a priest… The archbishop said he had been acting on advice from professionals at a time when the behaviour of child abusers was not as well understood as at present. … Documents seen by the BBC suggest the archbishop ignored the advice of doctors and therapists who warned that Hill was likely to re-offend. … He later became chaplain at Gatwick Airport where he abused a boy with learning difficulties.

Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor has now agreed that boys abused by the priest should receive compensation, but as part of the settlement they were required not to speak publicly about what happened.

I’ve linked to this story before, but I think it bears repeating, because according to the Times,

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is on course to become the first Roman Catholic bishop to sit in the House of Lords since the Reformation… The Archbishop of Westminster looks almost certain to be offered a peerage after his retirement, which is expected within weeks.

Gordon Brown’s brilliant plan, then, is to let this man have a direct say in public policy without ever facing an election. This man whose poor judgement allowed children to be abused. This liar and hypocrite. This ardent anti-secularist. This man should be allowed a vote in the houses of Parliament. I’m sorry, no. This man should be sidelined, marginalised and ignored like the unrepresentatively right-wing liar in the increasingly unpopular and irrelevant cult that he so clearly is.

We’ve already had one secretly-Catholic Prime Minister this century, who’s now promoting religion as the answer to everything. The government have opened 84 faith schools in the last 11 years despite polls showing they’re unpopular. Why are they so keen to push faith down our throats? Religion is a great tool for controlling the masses, but it only works if the masses genuinely believe it, and we clearly don’t. Even people who profess faith are generally secularist in politics. This is just going to make Labour even more unpopular than they already are. It’s like they’re throwing this election on purpose.

I can’t see any way of looking at this other than as just one more bizarre gift of power from this government to religion. The alternative is that Brown genuinely believes that Cormac Murphy-O’Connor would be a good member of Parliament.

Frankly, I’m not sure which is scarier.

How many people do you know who don’t understand the difference between IE and the actual Internet? Who refer to Explorer’s ‘filmstrip’ view as ‘Powerpoint’? Who send emails with Word attachments that are just plain text with red underlines under all the British spellings? Who call you over every time they get sent a gzip, or transfer data between applications via a pencil and paper? I’ve known at least one person do all of those things, mostly people I worked with.

And that’s not their fault, generally. Please don’t think I’m mocking the ignorant here. My point is that people in charge should fix it. It’s a massive drain on resources. If you can spend a week training someone to use their computer efficiently, you’ll get that week back with interest within a year or two. I don’t understand why companies spend so much money on computers and software, then give them out to all employees without even explaining how to operate them, and then spend even more time and money trying to build a network so secure that their random clicking can’t do any damage. Why not just teach them how to correctly use the software and then let them get on with it? If you’re ignorant, you get training to fix it before you do any damage. You don’t get wrapped in cotton wool. That does nobody any good.

Today at work the IT department sent round information on how to encrypt sensitive data. They recommend TrueCrypt and Axcrypt, both of which are free. When something might affect the University’s reputation like a leak of personal data the IT department (who mostly actually do know what they’re doing) insist on doing things properly, and that means open-source.

Also today, the Pentagon shut down their website because someone at Wikileaks noticed a series of secret reports left in an unprotected directory on one of their public servers in the form of doc files encrypted with Word’s built in password feature and cracked them. The password was ‘progress’. That’s moronic. That’s the only way to describe it. The files should have been encrypted properly, with different, longer passwords with numbers and capitals and punctuation in. They should have been on a secure server where Joe Cracker couldn’t get them. Had they done that then the job of cracking them would have been intractable. As it is, it was inevitable.

I know a bit about this stuff, so to me, this is shocking. There is literally no excuse for doing something like that. Nobody that computer-illiterate should be ever have been allowed near the server. If you don’t know about online security then you might not realise how bad this is, so let’s be clear: this is much, much dumber than leaving an unencrypted USB stick on a train. I can see how that happens. I can see how you might leave encrypted files on a public server. They’re encrypted; it shouldn’t matter if people get hold of them. I cannot see how you accidentally choose a rubbish password and Word’s in-built encryption for official documents about a war. Ironically the document is about what information is public and what information is secret. This story — that the Pentagon is crap at security on a monumental scale — should be huge. Demonstrably it is not. I discovered it via a blog.

Watch this video. It features the most amazing argument you will ever see:

You may know already that I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but it’s not him. I found his style of agument quite conservative and traditional: people have been trying to win arguments by pointing out the gaping holes in their opponents’ ideas for centuries. Ancient people used evidence to draw conclusions. There’s nothing new there.

No, his opponent, Dr Sigman, is the genius here. I have, in retrospect, seen his argument elsewhere, too, but he has formalised it further than most. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. We disagree and are talking.
2. Therefore, There Is A Debate.
3. Therefore, the cautionary principle applies.
4. Therefore, whatever I dislike should be banned.

prayforyou RT @Forestpelt Please pray that @Forestpelt’s 2 atheist friends will find Christ. Pray that God would shine through @Forestpelt to them. about 1 hour ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @prayforyou This ought to be the single most elegant demonstration that prayer doesn’t work we will ever see. about 1 hour ago from twhirl in reply to prayforyou

prayforyou We have a challenger saying we will only prove that prayer doesn’t work. Everyone pray so we’ll prove to @Andrew_Taylor the power of prayer. 22 minutes ago from web

Come on then, God. This should be an easy one. Convince two people you exist. I mean, I don’t want to pour scorn on Your infinite power at all, but I can manage this task pretty easily. I’m almost sure that everyone at work is totally convinced I exist. So come on, God. Pull Your finger out.

Call me cocky if you like, but I’m pretty sure I can win this bet. Convincing atheists of his own existence is one of God’s weakest suits. He’s much better at tasks that only involve committed theists.

Maybe it’s all the praying they do.

I’d like to share some lyrics from a song, which I think really evoke some pretty deep feelings:

Should we act on a blame?
Or should we chase the moments away?
Should we live? Should we give?
Remember forever the guns and the feathers in time.

Because the line between wrong and right,
Is the width of a thread from a spider’s web.
The piano keys are black and white,
But they sound like a million colours in your mind.

Specifically, they evoke the feeling of not knowing what the hell Katie Melua is banging on about. It all sounds like nice, sentimental metaphor until you actually listen to the words and realise that it’s just bullshit carefully sculpted into the shape of emotion, like it was written by a very talented poet who didn’t have anything he particularly wanted to say. And it’s every single one of her songs. And it’s frustrating, because I basically quite like her music, but every time I hear it… look, here, from the same abum:

If this was a quiz on a TV show
And the prize was a guy who would love me so
Whatever they ask, the answer I know:
Hey, my reply, boy,
Is gimme a shy boy.

Is it wrong that it bothers me that that is not how quiz shows work? You can’t win the prize simply by asking for it every time someone asks you a question (with the exception of Deal or No Deal). To be honest, though, the bigger problem with Shy Boy is that it’s a whole song about how she likes shy boys but, being shy, they never ask her out. What year is this? Make the first move! That’s okay now. But don’t select someone on the basis of their shyness and then whine that they’re shy. That’s not reasonable. Well, unless… I’m kind of assuming that Katie Melua is not herself incredibly shy. I realise this is a generalisation purely on the basis that her job is singing to large groups of people.

My favourite ever Katie Melua lyric is at the end of Nine Million Bicycles:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing.
That’s a fact.
It’s a thing we can’t deny,
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.
And there are nine million bicycles in Beijing.
And you know that I will love you till I die.

I love the random piece of trivia dropped into the middle of what ought to be a fairly emotional sentence. I can’t dislike the song, purely because at some point someone must have turned on the radio and heard that song for the first time but only caught the last four or five lines, and they’d just have got love and bicycles with no context. I think that could blow someone’s brain.

Also, I feel like Nine Million Bicycles would be a great song to do at a karaoke night, but with entirely spurious verses that you make up to fit the structure. You just need a ten- or eleven-syllable piece of trivia. It’s easy.

The tomato is technically a fruit. 
That’s a fact.
It’s a truth we can’t deny 
Like the fact that I will love you till I die. 

We’re fourteen billion light years from the edge, 
In real life.
I know the metre’s not as nice,
But don’t change facts to suit your rhythmic device.

I have seventy-seven Facebook friends
Including family,
and it makes me feel quite small 
That you’re the one I love the most of all

Alright, one of those was just pedantry. But that just shows how little thought was put into the original lyrics.

Bonus Katie Melua Jokes That Don’t Work Because She Is The Punchline And Not The Setup:

1. Destiny’s Child’s Survivor is a song about how Beyonce showed her ex that she could be successful without him by forging a glittering career as a bicycle saleswoman in Beijing.
2. I wish people would stop criticising the British Olympic team for mostly getting medals in cycling events at the 2008 games. Do you have any idea how many bicycles there are in Beijing?

Scientific journals have genuinely got the best business model in the history of anything ever. Here is how it works, in a nutshell:

• Other people, scientists, write their content for no fee.
• The journal then gets other scientists to review it. These scientists generally don’t get paid either.
• The authors edit the paper and send it back. Eventually, all the scientists reach a version of the paper they can all agree on (or the paper gets withdrawn). Then the authors pay the journal to publish the paper.
• The journal then charges anyone who ever wants to read the paper extortionate fees. $50 for a PDF file is not uncommon.
• The journal retains the copyright on the words they didn’t write describing experiments they didn’t do, and claim fees for reading it at least until the copyright expires and usually long after that.
• None of the scientists or their employers ever get paid.

This, to me, seems like an insane system. It survives because universities don’t care if they pay extortionate fees for such things and because it’s established. And probably when it was established it made sense — after all, who else but journals could publish things? But now it’s just academia needlessly funnelling money into a mostly pointless publishing racket. I really don’t see what it achieves.

I’ve said before that a better system would just be for universities to publish papers and let anyone who wants to comment on them comment on them. I hadn’t worked out the details, obviously, so it was one lunchtime rant in the pub opposite the lab and I didn’t think much more about it until the next time I hit a paywall demanding I give some publishers $75 to read a paper written by my own supervisor. But someone else has worked them out. It’s not perhaps an ideal system, but it looks pretty good to me and it’s compatible with the existing system.

Dubbed GPeerReview (I don’t know what the ‘G’ stands for but the author’s name is Gashler so that’s likely), the idea is that you post your paper on your academic website, email people you think would be interested, and those and any other readers can review it. They sign their review, along with a hash of the paper, with public key cryptography so you know who wrote it and what about. That way, you get an idea of how much support a paper has and, crucially, what kinds of people support it. The author of the paper puts up the most credible supportive reviews they can find. In theory, if it becomes accepted then there’ll no longer be any need for conventional publication. It’s a very clever system. (See also, the more established ResearchBlogging.org – which Gashler says could be complementary to GPeerReview but covers rather different ground. I think I agree with him on that — it’d be great to see things like that running it tandem.)

I’d love to see something like this made to work across academia. I suspect, though, that what kills it will be that real people don’t understand nerd stuff like public key cryptography. Everyone else in my research unit gets all annoyed if I try to use LaTeX or Bibtex at them. (Well, the dentists do — the other physicists love it. I witnessed a long argument about a week ago over the relative merits of Microsoft Project versus the open source alternative, which boiled down in the end to ‘well the free software probably is better but if we collaborate with anyone else they’ll demand we use Project’ which to me seems like a really crappy way of doing things — I’d rather piss people off by doing the right thing than pander to idiots and help keep Microsoft’s monopoly on proprietary, buggy software healthy.) They act as if Word and EndNote are somehow better. In my experience, Word doesn’t work properly and EndNote formats citations basically at random. LaTeX is a pig to get set up but at least once you’ve done it it stays set up. To be honest, I think that’s another thing that needs sorting: we need a specialist scientific markup language. Maybe a form of HTML (or other XML), with a standard equation format and a few extra specialised tags, perhaps including COinS for citations, which the reader software could be configured to render as a conventional reference, or as a hyperlink, or as whatever they like. A CSS-like ‘default’ style for a particular paper would be fair enough, but the current system that forcibly changes the format depending on which journal happens to have published the paper is rather silly. I don’t want a stack of PDF files all formatted differently. I want a folder full of pictures and ASCII-encoded markup that I can process and output how I like. Get into the twenty-first century. That’s how we do things here, because it’s a better way of doing it.

And there’s no reason that all of the above couldn’t be implemented really very easily, and I’d love to see peer review evolve into something more open and transparent than the existing system, which still relies on the trustworthiness of journal editors and the word of a few unidentified reviewers per paper. But we need nice, simple user interfaces on every part of it or else Joe Scientist isn’t going to actually bother to do it. We need a nice WYSIWYG program to edit the papers, then a nice Wordpress-style package to maintain your site, and a nice package to let you write reviews without much effort. Make it simple, and people might adopt it. Which is frustrating, because by rights you’d think a good scientist would be exactly the kind of person who would leap at the chance to adopt an open, collaborative, technological and free solution to a problem. Those are the qualities that science runs on. And I can’t see what we’d lose by switching to such a system, other than a load of jobs at journal publishers — and I’m sure the big journals would find a way to adapt. Perhaps they’d act as aggregators or run interesting comment pieces more often or something. (I should link to this very interesting discussion, where Gashler explains what journals do that is useful and that GPeerReview doesn’t do. I’m not convinced it’s all really a job for journals per se, but someone will have to keep doing all that. Personally, I think universities should do most of it.)

Bah. I just get frustrated when people cling to what they know instead of adopting obviously better alternatives, like Linux or metric or atheism or not torturing people. I guess that’s just a failing I have. But I’d love to know how any of the above could be shoehorned into the modern scientific community.

• 0.01s: I’ve knocked that pint glass.
• 0.1s: Oh, shit, it’s falling. Maybe I can catch it if I thrust my arm in this direction…
• 1s: No, that’s just caused it to shatter all over the pots and pans instead of the floor. That’s much worse.
• 10s: Actually, if it had landed on the comparatively soft lino floor, it might not have broken. Shit. Right. Anyway. That’s enough standing around staring at broken glass. Time to clean up.
• 1m 40s: Although usually untidy, I appear to be a neat freak when shards of glass are involved.
• 16m 40s: Oh, God, it’s everywhere. I’m going to be eating bits of glass for ages. I wonder how I am supposed to get bits of broken glass off a non-stick pan. I hope this isn’t the kind of glass that has the same refractive index as water.
• 2h 46m 40s: Tell room-mate we’ve lost another pint glass. Why can’t they make pint glasses out of the same stuff as car windscreens? They break at the slightest provocation; why can’t they be shatterproof?
• 1d 3h 46m 40s: Hasn’t happened yet. If still alive at this point, I will assume all is well forever.
• 1w 4d 13h 46m 40s: I will have forgotten the whole thing.

My last post got me thinking about what the hell Twitter is actually for. It’s strange that it did so well when nobody really knew, but it’s equally strange how long I spent rather enjoying it and not having a good answer when people asked me why. I think partly that’s because I’ve not really embraced it until recently. So here’s what I think is unique about it:

It’s different to instant messengers (IM) firstly because it isn’t instant, but mostly because it’s public: your tweets can (by default) be seen by anyone in the world. That means it’s less of a one-on-one conversation and more of a group chat.

It’s different to blogging because of the attitude: it asks ‘what are you doing’ and it won’t let you prattle on about even that for more than 140 characters. That means that most tweets you see are pretty trivial stuff you wouldn’t care if you missed but are, in the moment, of interest. It works best if you follow more people than you could reasonably keep track of, and dip in and out of the stream as if it were an IRC channel, so again it’s more like group chat, but…

It’s different to IRC because of the ‘networking’ side of it: in a chat room (IRC is ‘internet relay chat’ and is a form of online group-chat favoured mostly by awful nerds) you see everything in the ‘room’ you’re in, but on Twitter you see what your friends are saying, even if they’re friends with other people you don’t know. If you have a good client such as Twhirl then you can also see what anyone says on a particular topic and anything anyone says that is directed at or that mentions you.

At any given point there are thousands of discussions taking place, and you should generally see whichever are relevant to you by topic or by friendship. You can chime in at any time, even with people you don’t know. To some extent people find themselves ‘grouped’ by a handful of well-known users that loads of people follow — mostly difficult-to-spell celebrities. The tag ‘#badmovieclub‘ was invented a few days ago because at 9PM yesterday Graham Linehan watched ‘The Happening’ with his Twitter friends, who generated something like 30,000 tweets in 86 minutes. They’re going to do it again in a month, probably with the 2006 version of The Wicker Man. I honestly don’t think Linehan could stop them if he wanted to. Phill Jupitus was working that evening, so he organised a second screening at midnight. I’m sure it could have happened without a celebrity endorsement, but it would have taken longer to spread. So Twitter can create events: for further example, this afternoon a friend of mine (I say friend; I’ve never met the guy and know him better by his Twitter username than his real name) went to an event called ‘#flashdate‘ organised on Twitter and met some people. Twitter can also make normal events more social: loads of people watched Barack Obama’s inauguration with a laptop and got live opinion from around the world as they did so. (The BBC have tried this a couple of times, but it worked a lot better on Twitter.) Even small events — I left Twhirl running while I watched QI this evening and got a couple of comments from relative strangers about that as it was on. And it was the repeat. This afternoon I had a look at the Guardian crossword, and because that’s a relatively common Saturday afternoon activity, it was eventually completed by a collaborative effort between hundreds of Peter Serafinowicz‘ followers. When he ran out of crossword he asked his followers to send more cryptic clues for him to solve. Anything you do that other people are doing, you can do together. Anything you are doing at all, if you’re Stephen Fry. Who knew being stuck in a lift was so interesting?

It’s also a great place to vent. You can shout at Twitter and if enough people follow you then you’ll get some sympathy (or told off) and you’ll never feel like you’re whining because you’re supposed to discuss pointless trivia on Twitter. Some companies even watch the feed to see what aspects of their products annoy people. At least once I had someone let me know that the latest version fixed my problem (bizarrely, they replied with a blog comment). I’m sure I get more done at work since I can tweet from Launchy.

It’s a strange thing, Twitter, but it’s a good thing to have around. Oh, and if you don’t already, you can follow me. I assume anyone reading this far down my blog might want to do that.

This is something I imagine is familiar to a lot of you:

There was a time when I didn’t know what was in the charts because I was laughably ignorant of music. But then I started listening to it a bit, and after a while I found I was passably interested in the charts and knew generally what was there. But then I found that I cared less and less: I’d found the kinds of music I was interested in, and it mostly wasn’t anywhere near the charts, whereas the music that was in the charts sounded like the tedious generic pop that it was. I realised I’d lost touch with the charts when the new wave of indie music hit: to this day I can’t remember what the difference is between Razorlight, The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. (I vaguely wonder if, like the B in ‘R&B’ is now short for ‘bass’, ‘indie’ might now be short for ‘indistinguishable’.) But I still find new music that I like. My system works, and it does so without me having to hear whatever drivel has been packaged up and sold to infants and the infantile this week or finding out who won The X Factor at any point (providing they don’t cover a song people have strong feelings towards). My knowledge of music intersected with the mainstream for a while but then came out the other side.

I mention it because that I realised today that I did the same thing with the news: there was a time when I found it boring and ignored it. Then I began to take an interest, and started watching the news on TV, or reading newspapers. After a while I found I knew mostly what was going on. But now I don’t watch the TV news. And I don’t read newspapers. I’ve found my own sources of news. Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice — not very good but nevertheless the best) serves up a variety of blogs, select columns from newspapers, and a handful of bloggers’ and my friends’ picks from del.icio.us, tumblr, Facebook and Google Reader Shared Items, and Twitter lets me know what else is on their minds. I find that this works much, much better than the increasingly irrelevant traditional media.

I started doing this by accident, without noticing. I was getting my news from the Internet and I stopped reading newspapers mostly because there wasn’t one lying around most days. These days I’ll rarely bother to pick it up if there is. Newspapers are huge, and full of stuff that is not interesting to me, or frequently to anybody else: PR stunts dressed as science, tragic but irrelevant tales of people I will never meet which are in no way representative of life in Britain, made up lies masquerading as news, polite reminders that they still haven’t found Madeline McCann (because she’s dead), pages of intractable minutiae about how well rich people I don’t know played games I don’t care about, letters from reactionary right-wing lunatics which Gordon Brown pretends to read in order to placate the dribbling cretins, cartoons that either make no sense at all or make sense but don’t work, and which have such lousy caricatures and opaque references in them that all the people and metaphors have to have the names written on them so we know what’s going on (hint: some politicians have normal-sized ears), conspiracy theories about Diana, horoscopes that would be false even if they were honest, opinion pieces by people I don’t even slightly respect and analyses done by people I have no reason to trust, comics I wouldn’t choose to read, uninteresting gossip about celebrities that I wouldn’t care about even if I thought it were true, news stories I have no reason to believe, propagation of things public figures have said about topics they don’t understand, more wallcharts than I have the wall to accommodate, grainy mobile phone-camera footage and photos of traffic and snow from the public, the uncontested claims of known idiots, and the megalithic monument to sheer, unadulterated pointlessness that is the bridge column. When I do read stories from newspapers, generally online, they come from a variety of sources, mainly the Guardian, the Times, the Independant, and the Telegraph, in roughly that order, and I almost always find them through other people rather than through the newspaper itself.

With my way, I can amass a legion of amateurs (and some professionals) who filter all the news, including some which gets largely ignored by the mass media, and repost the stuff they find interesting. I’m interested in human rights and transparency in government, so I have Amnesty International and mySociety feeding news into my gawping brain. I get interesting stuff from Ben Goldacre’s del.icio.us feed, the National Secular Society’s ‘What The Papers Say’ feed plus blogs like Why Don’t You? and the badsciencebloggers, my more political friends on Facebook and Twitter, and a load of other places. Because they’re mostly unpaid, they’re less likely to copy-paste press releases to fill wordcount, and because there’s a variety of sources, it eliminates all biases except my own (and it cuts down on that by a factor determined by my ineptitude at seeking out sources who share my politics). Large parts of it are still not of interest to me, but the hitrate is far better than TV news, and stories are promoted by interest rather than the whimsy of the media. For example, this story about a twelve year old black girl who is on trial for ‘assault’ after she was beaten up by four police officers who thought she was a prostitute came to my attention via. Graham Linehan (who wrote Father Ted, in case you didn’t know) who saw it on Boing Boing. A quick look at Google News suggests to me that only two newspapers in the world have bothered to report this story. Similarly, the recent furore over MPs’ expenses took place almost entirely outside the mainstream media until after the battle had been won. And Twitter lets me watch celebrities I like having impromptu semi-public discussions of said news: I don’t even need Newsnight any more. Also, I can read clever comics which are neither tired and inane nor thinly veiled adverts for Scott Adams’ side-businesses, and the Guardian even has its crosswords on the website (although as it goes, my brother sets crosswords for his student newspaper so I can even get those through my vast organic Yahoo Pipe if I ask nicely). Keeping my end of the bargain, I share and comment on news stories I find interesting (among many other things) on my Shared Items page, this blog and my Twitter feed, and thus I am part of other people’s vast news-filtering armies (although of course anyone is welcome to leech off the same system if they don’t want to contribute). This is people power working at its best; this is exactly what the Internet is about.

I presume that at some point some of these people must read newspapers. Some of them work for newspapers. If newspapers and TV news went away, I’m less sure where the original, unfiltered news would come from. I presume there are enough people anally reading press releases, Hansard and so forth, and badgering officials with Freedom of Information requests, and enough people inside organisations who are willing to leak things they think the public should know, that the system would still work, especially with WikiLeaks hosting it all on secret servers in places with convenient laws.

Actually, come to think of it, most of the above applies to TV guides as well. This applies to pretty-well every kind of information, including humour, music and interesting trivia. I used to live on my own and feel crushingly bored: I need other people to stop myself going stir-crazy. But now I can fire up the computer and get loads of interesting reading material and discuss it with people I like. I can kill an evening without even trying now. If I go out too much, I get overloaded with stuff when I get back, but a new tiering system I devised solves that. (I have a folder in Google Reader called ‘low priority’. Since you can put a feed in multiple folders, I can mark that as read and instantly delete 75% of my least-likely-to-be-interesting unread items.)

This is the great thing about the internet. It took it a while to find its feet, and I’ve no doubt it will keep getting better, but this is what happens when people can exchange information this easily, and it’s fantastic.