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Turns out my mother has a trojan on her PC. Like any good webhead I switched her over to Firefox a few months back and since she’s on dial-up and doesn’t spend a whole lot of time online didn’t think she’d be especially vulnerable. She’s also pretty cautious and had been deleting the many emails from Onetel advising her she might be infected for fear of them carrying a virus themselves. And infected she is, but then she’s using a Windows PC, which is where I as a Mac user get all smug but with a tinge of frustration as I sit here watching the Spybot removal program download at 1.5kb/s while the trojan merrily uploads its poison onto the web. And while I’m sitting here I have a poke around this Windows machine to see if there’s anything I can find out, maybe discover the program itself or whatnot, and it becomes rapidly apparent that the reason Windows is a liability is that it is so incredibly unfriendly. Something as simple as checking to see if the firewall is switched on takes me a good 10 minutes to figure out, and I know what a firewall is. Looking at the various control panels and system profiles generates the kind of gobbledygook I’d expect to go to college to learn how to understand…

And writing this is pointless and it’s been said before and there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it other than continue to bury my head in Mac-sand and pretend the problem doesn’t exist because, on the whole, it doesn’t affect me. But I’m sitting here waiting for this download, unable to surf around because the trojan is tying up the bandwidth, and I’m thinking of all those people who are less tech-savvy than my mum (and with all respect, that’s saying something) with their lovely Windows PCs with their friendly UIs and shiny shininess who have not a clue as to what’s going on and no abilities whatsoever to sort it out unless they have a friend or relative with a few hours spare to sit down and sort it for them. And then a little tear emerges from the corner of my eye, the shoulders droop and I start writing bollocks like this while waiting for the cavalry to download at 1.5kb/s…

Here’s a question. Is it worth moving her away from Outlook to some other email client? Is there anything else (that isn’t going to take forever to sort out) we should be doing? (and yes, I’d buy her a fecking Mac in a minute if I could…)

So I’m looking at this chartered surveyors site for no real or relevant reason and casting my cynical wannabe-web-designer eye over it. Rollover graphics on the menu, could be done with CSS… unnecessary flash in the (non-text) logo… nice overall look though - I like the boxes and the grid background … really confusing graphic thing in the middle… Hang on, it’s a fecking tile game! And so I spent a good five minutes on a chartered surveyors site and should I be in the market for a chartered surveyor that logo is firmly imprinted on my brain. This is such a smart idea on so many levels I’m actually quite stunned.

I feel like I’m in a strange place at the moment even though I’m not. I’m at my mums for a fortnight fitting a new bathroom with my uncle which is nice, working but not for an employer, but it’s been really hard work so far and I’m utterly knackered, pretty much working, eating and sleeping. So while an absence of blog posts might not be unusual I actually have an excuse this time.

I’m also coming to grips with the slowternet again - one does take broadband so much for granted these days.

And just now I was reading Chris Reynolds’ The Dial in preparation for reviewing it, fell asleep and dreamed a whole new Mauretania comic. Which was cool.

Mr J Lewis, in sequence.

Okay. Five quid in, three hours, four bands, all great. One day I’ll go to a gig and come away disappointed but right now I’m on a streak. I knew cartoonist of distinction and anti-folk superstar Jeffrey Lewis was going to be good but knew nothing about the support, which is kinda how I like to play it. Same went for Dan and Sooz who I’d turned onto Lewis a few weeks back. Tom has decided to come at the last minute, knew nothing, and walked in just as the first support started, approaching us with a big grin.
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I’m messing around with Instiki, a wiki program that was astoundingly easy to set up on the Mac and which might serve as a good scratch-pad for me to mess around with words-wise, and I noticed something the phrase Camel Case mentioned in the sidebar. After a while I realised what it meant - capitalised words squashed together to make new ones or, in the case of wikis, make links of them. So BugPowder, which is how I’ve always written it since coming up with the name circa 1996, is camel cased, in that it looks like a camel. And that really pleases me with big grins and everything.

So Jez is still hacking away at the Gmail Radio experiment and today presented me with an m3u playlist file that streams tracks grabbed offa Gmail and stored on his server, which was cool in itself except any ogg or m4a files were converted to mp3 and the text of the emails that accompanied them was turned into robot-speech. The end result was a radio show generated on the fly by a range of different people. Once you understand what’s going on here the potential becomes clear and mildly exciting.

Take this slightly different model. There are lots of mp3 blogs out there hosting songs. Automatically grabbing the mp3 files and creating an audio stream would be easy but it misses an important aspect - what the blogger has written about the song in question. With this system you’d get all the tunes from a range of blogs automatically but also the comments that go with them. An audio version of a blog aggregator if you like. Of course you’ve still got the raw information about the song, who posted it, etc, so as you’re listening to the stream you could check the site, see what’s being played and follow the link back to the original post. Wouldn’t that be cool?

All you’d need would be a server with half a gig or so of space and unlimited bandwidth (which, if I’m not very much mistaken, and I suspect I must be, you can get here for $15 a month) to run the program on. Get it to check a selection of mp3 blogs on a 6 hourly basis (say via their full feeds), grab the mp3 files and commentary, convert it into a stream and you’ve got an eclectic radio station with presenters talking about each song, all automatically generated.

A similar but quite different thing is going on at Radio Paradise, which I’d recommend you check out as it’s what mainstream rock radio should be like if there was any justice in the world. (I’ve been listening to it for three hours straight if that’s any recommendation.) Essentially just one couple, Rebecca and Bill Goldsmith, in the small town of Paradise, California choosing the tunes and programming the stream, but what takes it to the next level is the listener interaction. As the stream plays the current track is displayed on the main page. Follow this link and you’re in a forum where members can comment and vote on the track. More interestingly is a second stream, the Listener Review Channel, featuring songs they’re considering for the main playlist, usually suggested or uploaded by listeners, with a simple voting system in place. While the station is ultimately controlled by Bill and Rebecca and has their stamp all over it, this filtered listener interaction adds subtle layers to the experience not just for those involved in the fora but for the non-interacting listener as well.

The model I’m thinking of is again similar but different. The core would be the members only music sharing site mentioned yesterday which is a no-brainer but think about all the data it’s generating. A lot of this can be thrown back into the mix as you’d expect but what’s exciting me is the idea of using this selection of music generated by a large-ish pool of folk to create some kind of external service. A public radio station that’s above board and legal generating cash by whatever means are applicable which gets fed back into the community. And it’s all run by robots.

Cool, huh?

Late notice I know but I’ve suddenly got a spare ticket for the Jeffrey Lewis gig in Moseley, Birmingham on Saturday night. £5.50. If you’re interested let me know ASAP.

Taken

On the left, from my personal collection, the Daily Mail from May 2nd 2000, the day after the May Day anti-capitalist thingy in Parliament Square. On the right, today’s Daily Mail after the pro-hunt thingy in Parliament Square.

[My photos from 2000 | Mail cover from MailWatch]

So I set up the Gmail account for sharing mp3s as mentioned last week, gave the login to a few friends and it’s all be going swimmingly. (If I haven’t told you about it, no offense. I’ve just been randomly going through my chums, all of whom are compartmentalised differently in my mind, picking out those whose music tastes I know and probably missing key folk. Sorry if I’ve slighted you.) Basically we’re abusing the Gmail service in a most blatant way and if the account doesn’t get shut down at some point in the near future I’ll be amazed. What with 20+ people all logging on to the same account from different addresses, sometimes at the same time they’re bound to notice. That’s if they care, of course, and plenty of other people are abusing the Gmail service in varying degrees. At least we’re seeing the ads unlike those who are using it as a virtual drive. Although Jez isn’t - he’s hacked a way of downloading the mp3s and automatically streaming them, and to top it all his system converts the emails into speech and streams them too, which is rather boggling when you experience it. Like some kind of community radio take to it’s logical extreme where every listener is a presenter.

Why do this? Well, other than that it’s cool and fun I have in the space of a couple of days magically created an online community that works. That we’re infringing copyright is a mere unfortunate byproduct (and since it’s a closed network not really a huge problem) - the point is it’s the music that binds it all together. It’s been said many times but it bears repeating that music has some kind of fundamental importance to the human condition, be it singing along to the radio on the factory floor, going to clubs, concerts and gigs, sitting around a fire with a guitar or sharing tapes and now mp3s with your mates. If I was going to create a community I’d build it around music, even if I wanted to get other stuff out of it. Music is the foundation - talk about other things will come from that foundation on its own.

This Gmail experiment (and seeing as it’s probably not going to be sustainable long term once a few hundred people get on board it’s definitely an experiment) along with the seeming ease with which Jez has hacked cool things out of it has made me think more about developing this kind of community into something that isn’t wedged somewhat uncomfortably onto an email service. In essence it’d be a closed members only site (membership gained by invite only) laid out in a similar way to MetaFilter. Songs are listed in a pile system where once the limit is reached the bottom one is deleted to make space (which might sound familiar to some people…) That much is straightforward and nothing new really, but it’s the essential basics on which to build. Some of the developments will be planned out (such as a streaming radio service) but most of them will just evolve and the most interesting ones will probably come about independently of the site itself as people meet new people and stuff, be is music or more likely something else, happens.

The main stumbling block will be paying for the storage and bandwidth but that’s surmountable given the community aspect and by keeping it small (500 members should do it and a fiver a year to cover costs isn’t too steep). The other problem will be security. Sites like this that I’ve seen tend to be web-only and introducing audio streams and the like that can be played in apps like iTunes is going to be tricky to keeps members only. The trick will be keeping it secret, so if it does come to pass (and if it does it won’t be for quite a while) you won’t hear about it here. First and second rules…

24 hours later and MT-Blacklist has blocked 185 comment spams, meaning they got nowhere near my database, and moderated 63, meaning they were accepted but not published pending my approval. Only one of the moderated ones was valid, sent to a post from last May. Of course in this time I’ve had no legitimate comments so here’s a request - please comment on recent posts on the main page (not in the archives - anything over 21 days old is automatically moderated). Don’t try and trick the system - just be yourselves.

I’ve upgraded Movable Type (the system that runs this blog) to 3.11 and it shouldn’t show as I haven’t played with any of the new features yet, principally because they’re the sort of things that involve overhauling great chunks of the site and that sort of shit can wait. What I have done is install MTBlacklist which should hopefully block comment spam which has been getting to be more and more of a pain sometimes reaching over 300 spams a day. With any luck the “Post with new comments” box on the sidebar will become useful again and I’ll finally be able to include comments in the feed. Of course there’s a fine balance to be struck here and if you find your comment is blocked let me know. Of course I’m now sitting here actually wanting the spambots to come so I can blast them away with my metaphorical new gun. Unfortunately MT-Blacklist doesn’t follow through to the source and kick the spammer in the bollocks for me, but one can only expect so much.

(If you’ve never noticed comment spam here that’s because I clear it at least twice daily, once over breakfast and again after work.)

Just watched OutFoxed, a searing indictment of the Fox News channel in the US laying into its inherent right wing bias and fraudulent use of the term “fair and balanced”. It’’s quite an eye-opener, especially as we don’t get Fox over here (it makes Sky News look like the Today program), and even though the documentary is obviously made with an agenda and does have some moments of factual sleight of hand (comparing Fox viewers with those of PBS is like comparing Killroy viewers with Radio 4 listeners. It’d be more interesting to compare them with MSNBC or CBS viewers but the graphics wouldn’t be so dramatic) it’s generally so out in the open that there’s very little to fault it for. If you can watch it, and I got a copy via BitTorrent, do so, especially if you live in the States.

As an outsider I find these sort of documentaries interesting in that, as with Fahrenheit 911, it’s easy to get all smug. I mean, this is Rupert Murdoch we’re talking about! We’ve been suffering his machinations for over three decades! Has it taken you people until now to realise what he’s up to? OutFoxed is clearly aimed at the educated middle class American who suspects something is wrong but can’t quite pin it down (unlike Moore’s work which with it’s Oprah-style emotive content is strictly prime-time) and again I found myself wanting to shout “isn’t this all blatantly obvious to you?”

But then I thought about it. We’ve been suffering Murdoch for over three decades. The Sun has been the bestselling daily paper for 26 years of its 40-year existence and where it leads others follow. Whether for financial or political reasons (or more likely both) Murdoch has made a concerted effort to influence and control our media and political landscape, creating a lowest common denominator in print and broadcast that allows the rest to fall while frightening our politicians into more and more draconian legislation. All this is blatantly obvious and yet we do nothing about it. Fox as a political force is a relatively new beast on the US media scene. News International has been fucking with us since the early 80s. I don’t think we’ve got anything to be smug about here…