I spent a couple of hours, in two separate journeys, in a car with one of my best mates today. His taste in music is very much in the skinny white boys with guitars mode, so we had lorryloads of Editors, Rakes, Enemy, Twang, Monkeys etc. I like a lot of this stuff too, but what struck me this morning was how very, very awful most of the lyrics to most of this new generation of indie songs are. There are honourable exceptions, chief among them the Arctics, but Jesus the rest of it is overwrought bollocks. It reminded me of my main problem with grunge: if the middle class educated white male is the most fortunate creature on the planet, what the hell is making them all so chuffing miserable?
I had a long conversation this afternoon with someone who’s trying to get something launched on a “public sector” website operated on behalf of a government department by a big gorilla contractor. And this struck me: everything about the website was wrong. The design. The navigation. The content. The content management workflow. No-one anywhere along the chain of designing the damn thing had given a single moment’s thought to users: both internal users (work flow) and external users (navigation). It was, to all intents and purposes, a dead platform.
How did this happen? How can it be that an organisation which needs to talk to hundreds of thousands of people every day can get the simplest, most effective form of communication is has so completely, abjectly wrong? And what was most apparent was that this is never going to change. The people who run the website don’t want to change it. The people who want to change it don’t think they can. The people who should use it aren’t using it (but I bet nobody knows that because I bet nobody’s looking at the stats). It was a pure new media clusterfuck.
I’d love to tell you which public sector website I’m talking about, but I can’t. Suffice to say it’s bloody ironic. And I bet it’s not the only one.
Technorati Tags: design
Brown hails ‘partnership of purpose’ with US | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics:
Mr Brown quoted the former US president Franklin Roosevelt, saying that the “arsenal of democracy” - schools, museums, newspapers and the arts - was just as important as weapons in defeating terrorists.
Nick Cohen gives a pretty devastating riposte to Johann Hari’s review of his book What’s Left, which I must admit I have not read. The reality of my not having read it supercedes any opinion I might have of the wrongs and rights of both reactions to the book, but I liked Cohen’s summary:
As I said, there are many criticisms that can be made of their analysis and mine. But for criticism to have intellectual integrity, the critic must present an honest summary of the ideas he is attacking. If he doesn’t, he produces propaganda. Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m genuinely surprised that the editors of Dissent need to be told this.
And I have to acknowledge that if Hari’s analysis is right, Cohen’s book is misguided, and if Cohen is right, Hari is little better than a liar. Hmmm.
BBC News just reported on the death of Bergman….with a clip from a French and Saunders skit.
I am speechless.
So explain to me why the the BBC News Editors blog feed is excerpts and not full-text? I mean, it’s not like they’re carrying ads on their web pages or anything. Come on, chaps, get with the programme.
Grade ‘F’ all round for British newspaper homepages on YSlow - currybetdotnet - 30 July, 2007:
However, more than a third of the UK is still on only on dial-up access speeds. The Sun’s 725.8k homepage footprint can take up to an astonishing two minutes to download every single element on a 56.6 Kbps connection.
When I used to work on the BBC.co.uk homepage, the aspiration was for the entire homepage footprint including graphics, HTML, CSS and JavaScript not to exceed 100k - a 7th of the size of The Sun’s whopper.
So, according to YSlow anyway, it is pretty much a verdict of “could try harder” all round for British newspaper websites.
In a very curious mini-essay, the LSE’s John Gray argues that Monarchy is the key to our liberty. The constituent parts of the argument seem to be that: Iraq is in a mess (agreed); the reason for the mess is that Iraq is actually just a theoretical idea, dreamed up by colonialists and enforced through dictatorship (agreed); the invaders had little or no understanding of how the invasion would destroy the totalitarian glue that held disparate communities together (agreed); and by coming up with a written constitution that proscribes the power of the monarchy in the UK, we may be making the same mistake.
Er, no.
I’m not being facetious, either. That really is the arc of the argument in Gray’s piece. Towards the end he says this:
Look at those successful countries with borders that enclose different ‘nations’: Spain with its Catalans; the United Kingdom with Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish; Canada with the Quebecois. It is worth pondering the fact that the few genuinely multi-national democracies that exist today are mostly monarchies and relics of empire. Except in these irrational relics, democracy has nowhere managed to flourish at a multi-national level. Multi-national democracy has been most enduringly embodied in pre-modern constitutions.
Happily, we do not face in Britain any of the horrors that have accompanied the building of nation-states in other parts of the world. Still, it would be unwise to take our good fortune too much for granted. The monarchical constitution we have today - a mix of antique survivals and postmodern soap opera - may be absurd, but it enables a diverse society to rub along without too much friction.
But what evidence is there that it is the monarchy that allows this to happen? Or the “monarchical constitution”, as Gray has it? Doesn’t time passing count for something? The fact that we’re all used to each other? The fact that we share a lot of fundamental viewpoints as to how the world should be?
I’ve heard Gray’s argument before, over dinner party tables, when the chatterers say that Iraq “isn’t ready for democracy”, that its institutions are wobbly and its model of social participation non-existent. What these people never voice is the unwritten alternative: that we should leave the Chinese alone to repress their people, that Saddam may have been a bad person but at least he held the thing together. They can’t say that because they don’t believe it, but by not saying it they’re dishonest. The subtext to Gray column is this: “your model of democratic liberalism is naive and it won’t work. In the long run, dictators are needed to maintain order within emerging communities. Without dictators you have chaos and anarchy. And liberal monarchism is just a more sophisticated, but equally necessary, model of controlling dictatorship.”
Or, “let sleeping dogs lie. The might bite you.”
Ah yes. Because Monday morning is always a quiet time for banking business.
Or, Why Michael Arrington Is Not A Reporter - Dear Podtech: I’m Not Your VP Marketing:
First Podtech CEO John Furrier emailed me repeatedly this morning asking for changes, then later Robert Scoble wrote on Twitter that much of my post was incorrect. It may well be incorrect, but it is certainly what I believe to be true after the extensive research I did on the company.
Sometimes I wonder if the libel laws in the UK aren’t actually a good thing. At least they make people a bit, you know, careful.
