The spamtide is rising

On the several websites I roughly corral, the spamtide is rising. Comments spattered with Ugg boots and heating systems, spurious resubmissions of forms full of gobbledygook or try-it-on phrases. Even my inbox (behind two spam filters) is starting to receive sharp arrows of sour links.

But last week, a machine generated wordsalad flew in, and I felt a wash of nostalgia.

There were about 30 murders from the general area.

On 8 January 1928, Fradin filed suit for defamation against Dussaud. In Pisa, he probably obtained his doctoral degree in 1546, and returned to his native land two years later.
He died in Harare on 5 November 1990. Fists flew freely for a few seconds but the mix up was stopped without damage to either player.
Death of Charity Gardener. Vera means well but she is a loud, controlling alcoholic who spoils Will and subtly despises Sasha.
I believe belongs to Captain Roberts. World Championship on ---------------- Proper title, proper determinor

Back at the time of the spam high tide, I found the wordsalad generators fascinating, gave them names, imbued them with personalities. At the time I was high volume spamsifting (sometimes this needs to be done) and (particularly after holiday weekends, where compromised servers would spew out thousands of messages) I would see these messages again and again. I made small booklets of them, wrote comics about them, shared their latest oeuvres with bored friends. I wasn't the only one. People were obsessed. They still are. Websites  and Web Toys and Twitters and Pinterests and endless posts on blogs bear testimony to our brief fascination with these things that sound like communication, but are actually just non-intelligent machine generated language. Wikipedia even decides it needed a new name, but I'm not sure Spoetry will really catch on (indeed, it has a non-notable notice on it).

The one above is like an echo of the memory of those early wordsalad bots, which started as an attempt to avoid work-checking filters and ended as a sort of wordmusic, computer generated but nevertheless lovely. I think we love it for the hint of intelligence, the sense that there might in some bot somewhere be something that in time and with care will straighten and self organise, like a child learning to talk. We briefly nurture these imitators before realising that the thing we are holding is a doll, a simulacrum, a generation.

And then think: maybe the next one.

On the invention of Social Networking Sites

According the archive, it was October 2001 that I was introduced by a friend up the curve from me to a site called Livejournal. Now, as then, it is somewhat obscure. A niche site for enthusiasts of open source, creative work, privacy and anti-corporatism. But its combination of creative posting, forum-type commentary, friend-lists, communities of interest and solid, tag-enabled archiving hinted at a thing my oversocialised brain had been waiting for. Long before Dunbar's number entered popsci vernacular I could feel the creaks and cracks emerging in my social group as we found all-consuming projects, demanding jobs, started families. "Join this," I remember saying, "This is how we'll organise our parties now. This is how we'll make holidays and fun stuff happen. Get an account. Here's an invite code. You don't need an invite code now. Do you still not have an account? Join. You don't have to blog. You don't even have to comment. You can just watch. Didn't you know? I put it on LJ. Get an account."

At the same time I was looking at how other people were using it, the strange rag-bag of needs it fulfilled. It wasn't all about socialising and talking. There were private posts, secret messages, communities for two or one or none. Something prickled a memory, a short story I'd read years ago, when I was a lonely teenager, far from friends and fun, caught in the alternating fixed boxes of the determined life of the child; green walls for rural smallfarming, gold for the clever scholarship child. I couldn't remember who wrote it, I couldn't remember what it was called. All I could remember was an angry father, a lonely yellow farm, vistas suddenly opening, not of land but of information; and a red cloak, whirling in the night.

Years later, I described these fragmentary memories to a friend who is something of an expert on fantasy stories,  and she selected a scuffed book from her shelves. "I think it's a series of stories," she said, giving me a copy of Get off the Unicorn by Anne McCaffrey. "The hero is called Nora."

Nora Fenn, born on a farm, catapulted into life in university town, dressed in rags and living on brainpower alone. No wonder the stories (Daughter, 1971, and Dull Drums, 1973) had appealed. And there, on page 98, the revolution described in a single phrase: "Every citizen had the right to Bank-storage:" by which she meant free individual use of computer access. Private storage, locked behind a privacy seal; a searchable, extendible space to keep the attenuated self that the future demanded. In a utopian moment McCaffrey imagines how this unassailable self, this core of protected privacy, this reflective space that has to listen, that can only remember, accurately, perfectly and completely, might lead to happier, saner people, reduce substance misuse and paradoxically increase community activity and promote community feeling. She even puts a date on it; "From 1990," she says. The year I made my first web page.

In the story, Nora and her classmates are in charge of decommissioning obsolete records, sifting the private storage of the dead for sociological gold, advising recommendations about limits of bank storage for citizens. In real life, Facebook followed Livejournal and Twitter followed Facebook and communication has perhaps triumphed over reflection within the social networking environment, but at least our bank storage and programming time has an aspect of functional infinity our predecs could only dream of.

It's not set very far into the future, McCaffrey's oddly gentle fable of programming and social advancement, but it teasingly reveals a very heartful vision of our post-millennial future. In the flutter of ambitions and necessity, in the whirl of a crimson cloak you couldn't really afford in a courtyard you got to via a strange ladder of ambitions and declarations. And you spin, spin, caught in the promise of a future where everyone is held and no-one is left behind.

Women in Engineering Day Talk - 2014

(Delivered to a local technical college for a lunchtime talk on Women in Engineering Day 2014.)

In preparation for giving this talk I did a short piece of research among my friends who were engineers and those working in associated fields like ICT, technical project management, system administration and programming. This research took the form of; one blind survey (delivered online) where participants did not get to see what each other were saying, in order to promote full honesty; one online discussion where people could see and comment on each others' opinion; and several discussions, including a detailed discussion with a male engineer.

Gathering and organising data, capturing the useful and most helpful information, and re-presenting it to decision makers, such as yourselves, is often my mode of working. One of my duties is the specification, construction and testing of new tools which enable online access to services. I get to make things myself sometimes, but far more often I am assembling information and explaining it to different interested groups in language they understand.

Or, as one of my interviewees put it, "I speak Geek, and I translate".

This talk includes five points, five questions, and lots of opportunities for you to join in!

1. Engineering is not ICT is not Technical Management is not Civil Engineering is not Software Engineering 

Among the women I spoke to, about half of those working in ICT had not studied technical subjects at school at school and college. They had instead found conversion opportunities in their workplaces, and done study either funded by or provided by their place of work or self-financed to upskill themselves. The other half had studied maths or computing or Computer Sciences or something along those lines.

> Can I ask you quickly to introduce yourselves and say what you are studying/hope to study? 

> Thanks!

The engineers had all studied sciences, in particular physics and maths, and were qualified to degree level or beyond. There were a few PhDs in the group, too. However this probably reflects bias in my group. The engineers were aware of certain professions within civil and mechanical engineering which had a vocational route, and those in ICT discussed (or had taken) on-the-job routes.

Some had been strongly motivated to enter their area, others had just wandered into it as something useful to do while they were figuring out what to do with their lives. But they all spoke of having a knack or a feel or an aptitude for where they ended up.

They had ended up in lots of different jobs that were very unlike each other.  It's a very diverse field.

2. Know someone who does it already, or get to know them or the subject area

The usefulness of already being known cannot be overstated. Engineers (and employers in general) like reliable measures, known quantities and understood capabilities. They also like experience, and this is reflected in salary. The younger workers (and several of the people I spoke to said being young was a bigger issue than being female) is at a disadvantage.  But there are ways round this:

• Go for established companies, where there is a regular process for getting to know new staff members like graduate or school leaver programmes or apprenticeships
• Go for new/start-up companies where everyone is a stranger
• Get to know a company through holiday working, contracting or similar 

Several of the women spoke of a family background which encouraged their engaging with technical topics. Parents who teach them to program and not to be afraid of computers or mechanical tasks were listed as important. It made them think about their own capability and not underestimate it.

> Can I ask which of you have family members working in technical fields?

> Thank you.

Pretty much all had got jobs, work experience and crucial career breaks from the people around them. This went from getting jobs at places where course mates or college friends were working, to getting a holiday job making a small busines website for a father's friend. Her comment on this? "Outright nepotism - but I did a good job, and that was on my own merit - don't feel guilty about nepotism."

3. Don't let other people's expectations (or your own) limit you 

The women and men I spoke to thought it would be useful if there were more women in the field, but that to be an engineer you have be a certain sort of person. I thought that was a bit vague, so I asked - what sort of person? They said:

• Prepared to get stuck in, get their hands dirty, and fix or make stuff
• Able to stick to their opinions, be persistent, and persuade people to do the thing that will work
• You need to have people skills in situations where there are problems or conflict 

There was also a tendency to describe themselves as "not typical women", but what did they mean by that? Let me hand over to S, an engineer working on farm machinery:

"The difficult bit is breaking through the expectations to let yourself even try to get into the field in the first place. Girls pick up the message from media/family/peers/people-who-don't-do-engineering that it isn't something for them, and it's sometimes hard to keep going against that message even if you're certain you like what you're doing."

And often the easiest response to that is to say, "I'm not a typical woman" and carry on doing the thing that you love. But it can still come back, at the strangest moments:

"It's also hard to keep the message out of your own brain. I was discussing this with a female colleague the other week who knew she wanted to have a go at welding and learnt how to do it but still felt that sense of 'can I do this, as a girl?' at first - knowing at a conscious level that it was a ridiculous thing to think, but still having it pop up from her subconscious anyway."

The female colleague went ahead and did the welding anyway, but for teenagers, the pressure can be much more insidious and hard to resist:

"I saw so many girls drop A level physics as soon as they had difficulties with it, because that undermining 'oh, well, I'm a girl, maybe this isn't for me after all' let them drop out rather than put the work in to get through it."

> Can I ask you all to say something you're good at, or something you are not  good at, if that's easier!

> Thanks.

Welding comes up a lot. Some people are good at it - they have a knack. Others don't! This includes a male engineer I know. But he would never interpret his lousy welding as meaning that men can't weld or that he's in the wrong job. Instead he got himself good enough to do a passable job, and leaves anything skilled to colleagues who are better at that part of the job.

4. Sexism isn't a constant problem, but you will need some strategies

Pretty much everyone I spoke to said their workmates weren't sexist, but that they had all worker in or knew of environments/people/situations that were. So, you are likely to come across problems, and you will need to solve them. But you won't always be fighting.

> Can I ask you what problems you are worried about?

> Thank you. I'll respond to these, in order:

People will think I don't have the strength to do the job. Let me hand over to J for this one: "Take yourself seriously, buy tools that are the right size for your hands, and use tools that are the right ones for the job. Above all, never go into a situation you feel uneasy about. Just walk away."

I won't get given the good work, the opportunities, or the breaks. Concentrate on the work that's yours. Other people's work pretty much always looks better, because you don't see problems from a distance. Also, remember that as a long as the work is necessary, it is good - if you're doing work that seems to serve no purpose, or is boring, you need to challenge or ask; it could be you have misunderstood something, or there could be a problem. Remember; the difficult and nasty jobs are a sign of respect.

Going to college will be difficult because there won't be other girls. The women I spoke to said that was not a problem (bar the occasional off-colour joke from academics). Some had positively enjoyed it.  But blokish environments were discussed by everyone, and there were lots of different strategies. Being thick skinned or not particularly caring what other people thought of them helped to an extent, as did standing up for yourself and making it clear what is and isn't acceptable. Calling people out on nasty banter helped make working environments a nicer place. But so did being friendly, effective and reliable, or as one person put it, "so good no-one can say you shouldn't be there."

Male colleagues will get more respect or pay than me for doing the same things/will claim my work as theirs.  The main comfort I had to offer here is that often these things will happen (and from a senior female worker saying, dryly, "In practice we are strongly discouraged from comparing salaries" to an academic talking about how, the higher you get, the less likely you are to see someone who isn't a straight white male, it clearly did happen) was that these things also happen because you are young and inexperienced, and these will both improve over time.

There was also a question I prepared, but didn't use -- about having children (pick a company with established processes/procedures, continue some work or study during your maternity break(s), make sure that you're in a well-run workplace) but none of the girls were interested in that!

There was also a question I was asked and hadn't prepared for: I am worried people will refuse to work with me because of their religious or cultural background.

Hmmm. Tricky one.

5. Not much queuing for the loos and more money than I could contemplate

My anonymous poll allowed me to ask about salaries. Starting salaries wandered from £15-25K (although with some notable outliers like my less-than-impressive £7.5K) but current salaries were much more exciting, topping out in the £90K+ zone and averaging around the high £40K zone.

Interestingly there was not a clear relationship between salary and level of qualification. My investigation suggested that technical specialisation into a particularly desirable fields may have been the single biggest factor in raising salary after simply being good at what you do - but predicting what will be crucial infrastructure and what will be just useful transferable skills may not be possible!

They also spoke about other benefits of being part of a cherished and valued minority (and mild annoyances, like being asked to pose for photos for company brochures a lot) after all, most of the workplaces knew that they should have more than just a couple of women in the workplace. Those individuals and organisations that didn't (and I had some hairy stories, not just from small tech and games companies, but from a worker at what one would expect to be a very ethical workplace) were often coming from individuals or workplaces with wider problems, the sort you needed to either solve or leave (and the women I spoke to had done a mixture of both). But they were, on the whole, very positive about their work.

> Can I ask you what you are really looking  forward to in your careers?

> Thank you

The women and men I spoke to all enjoyed the culture in their workplace ("being surrounded by people like me is more important than if they are men or women") and the satisfaction of doing the work they loved. Being surrounded by other people who really care about getting things right, making things work and getting all the details done, properly is really satisfying. Let me hand over again to S, for one last word:

"Most of the people I work with are your stereotypical quiet, thoughtful types who care about getting the thing itself right, not about status or approval, so they really don't care about *who* came up with the right answer, they just care about the answer. So I'd like to see more women in engineering (I'm one of about fifteen women in a department of three hundred) but not to fix something about where I work directly. I'd like to see more women in engineering so that non-engineers stop making girls rule themselves out of it before they even get a chance to try."


Women in Engineering Talk 2014 by Jeremy Day is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://cleanskies.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/women-in-engineering-day-talk-2014.html.

DO put your daughter on the internet Ms Worth

Two odd things this week; I've been asked to talk as part of Women in Engineering day, and I ended up with someone on one of my e-safety course feeling so aware of the risks that they felt they should close their social networking presences. I feel bad about both, but not really for different reasons. Both have to do with gender, visibility, and the difficulty of pressing out into the unknown.

Disclaimer; I am a woman, but I'm not an engineer. Lots of my friends are software engineers, or work in data and systems and web. My background is web and communications, not web and development. But there are many ways in which you can't really separate the content from the medium/function and in common with many others who started work as web something-or-other I have over the years drifted techwards, fuelled by a desire to help make things work better. I have also found myself acting as translator and advocate for back-room systems and it was in this spirit I polled my friends and rolled their opinions into a short talk on being a woman in ITC and engineering.

 Not ready yet, but here are three points, by way of a sneak preview:

1. The sort of person you are is more important than whether you are or are not a woman when it comes to entering the ICT/engineering field. However, it will have an effect on your career because of the attitudes of other people you will meet professionally. How this goes will depend on your workplace, but it can go very well (also badly).
2. Having social and professional contacts within the field and having the confidence and entitlement to exploit them fully really mattered. Jobs (not all jobs, but many, and many that were important in the careers described) were gained through parents, partners, friends, social contacts. Everyone does it; don't fear it.
3. Although you may well get paid less than male colleagues, and suffer more hassle and harassment (though you might not) you will still earn more and more regularly and more steadily than most, all for a job you (pretty much) enjoy, working with people you (pretty much) get along with.

Digested down still further, this says; "Don't fear going somewhere new, even when it attracts problems. Use your social contacts, don't fear them. Don't worry about doing worse than other people, as long as you're doing well enough, it doesn't matter."

Which was very, very close to the arguments I was making for keeping your social networking presence.

don't blink during the database stand-off

A lot of us dream of the database. The one great database that will take all of the data from our tiny scrappy datastores, match fields, cross-validate and deduplicate and place our data into the rich promised land of absolute knowledge that drifts in front of our eyes like a mirage, perpetually two and half minutes into the future. That's my vision, I suppose; a single person-orientated record, that follows them from record creation, through time and eventually into the archive like an obedient electronic shadow, plus an information layer over the world, that provides administration points for that record, mapping and pinning and attaching them in the spaghetti junction tangle of their official environment.

Anyone looking at that thinking, that's Facebook and there's Google, that's fine as long as the world you live in is permitted to be partial, optional and mostly centred around relationships and buying things. Not that their data isn't often much better than ours. But I digress.

Across the room, there is a different vision. A series of people who share this vision are explaining it over to an assembled group of people who have suddenly been swept up into this vision. The vision includes a variety of things but one of them is a datastore. Would it not be better if all the datastores were just one? Think of the savings and the improvements to the service!

Across the room from the people with the vision sit the operational managers and asset holders. They have a variety of systems, all of which are in use and fulfilling a non-optional service. They may not be the best systems (all large systems have a tendency to stay jammed into first working configurations) but they work, within tolerance, and they do a variety of things. 

There is a brief moment of silence. Into it, a single sentence falls: I wonder if we're really talking about more than one system here.

on the difficulty of avoiding data devalidation

As is my wont, I was updating my website. In this case the key product I was linking to was the NHS Service Finder database. I smacked through a sample search (like you do) and my eye snagged on a thing halfway down the page. A thing I knew had not existed since 2011.

So I went to the button, you know the button, the one that opens a challenging half-remembered route to the data curators who keep your information in a reasonable state of validation (my memory ran something along these lines; there's some forms, and a phone number and a guy and a thing you have to do, but he knows his stuff so it's OK) but the button was gone, and in its place was a simple line of text: "This information was supplied by Serco Global Services on 12-03-2014"

OK, I thought. New route. "Report an issue with this information" link. Insta-auto-holding-reply received. Take it from there. Then I thought to myself, I wonder if [redacted] service is still there?

It was. Four years gone and repeatedly removed from everyone's databases.

But (and this is really the but) it persists, haunting the local databases, or those that don't (or barely) update, linked to long-gone web content, or copies of that content, or copies of copies of that content. We're guilty of it, to an extent ourselves; one of the sources I found was (or at least appeared) official, or from the right source, though I think it was a random scrap lost on a server somewhere.

 24 hours later, I get the email from the person. "This information has been passed to our third party information supply service. Please be advised it may take as long as 6 weeks for any changes to be reflected in the database."

Spare a thought for the information curators. I think about them a lot. Specifically I try to think about how to encourage them to try the emails and phone numbers they copy from database to database. Because they're dead, every one of them. The email, the phone number, even the web address (which was a surprise to me, I thought it was redirect to current content and oh, another thing for fixing).

We never want to throw away data, us humans. I remember the days I kept a careful list of all my database deletions, a list of the discontinuations, each with a justification that no-one would ever ask for. The services, clubs, groups, activities that make you go ooh! are the worst, persisting and re-entering for the sake of being interesting, that common currency of the internet.

Well, I have work to do. Time to attend to the synaptic pruning of the semantic web. 

A final note on skipping the email and phone call stage of three-point data validation and just relying on the web search; Google is adjusting its search around you constantly. If it looks like you're searching for evidence of long-discontinued services, it will give you evidence of long-discontinued services. And if you find yourself thinking, "ooh, that sounds like an interesting service," beware. Others have gone ooh before you.

Poem for Safer Internet Day 2014

I needed a poem for Safer Internet Day 2014 (don't ask) and for some reason there was not a useful one anywhere I could find. So I wrote this one:

Always ask if you get lost on the internet

The internet is a very big place
Bigger than the world
Bigger that the sky
Bigger than everyone
(Though not actually bigger than space.)

And this is why you must always ask if you get lost on the internet.

If you’re looking for something and you can’t find it
Or if you find something bad
Or strange or confusing or nasty
Or not what you expected
Find an adult you trust and sit down together to find it

And then maybe you will still be lost on the internet

But you will be lost together, which is better
Finding the right links to click
The right sites to visit
The best places to visit
And the right people to talk to, together

Always remembering (even if you don’t feel lost on the internet)

To think before you click, post, press, send
Keep your name, phone number
Address, school, and pet’s names
Safe behind safe passwords
No-one knows not even your best friend

And when you find someone else who looks lost on the internet

Be gentle with them and remember it’s
Their first time here, and
They don’t know what
To say, or how to say it
To make sure other people understand it

And then you can help them not to feel too lost on the internet

And when you find yourself (you will)
Seeing things you don’t like
Reading things that should
Not be said to anyone
Close the page, stay calm, report, and tell

And someday there won’t be anyone lost on the internet

Jeremy Day 2014

This poem may be freely reproduced and used with attribution for educational purposes.

 
Always ask if you get lost on the internet by Jeremy Day is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://cleanskies.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/poem-for-safer-internet-day-2014.html.

in search of a labour red-top

I crave certain things in my political landscape. A commitment to social progress and suitable support for all parts of society, of course. This is actually pretty widespread in all colours (although the shape this support and progress takes can be very different) and particularly at the local levels, where politicians are hard put to avoid their population. However, I also crave political balance and opposition, at all levels, and this is harder to find. 

The popular voice is overwhelmingly conservative, with socialism confined to embattled, closed populations. This popular narrative of conservative values (including its insidious variations, for example that everyone believes socialism, pretends liberalism and actually acts conservative) is open to all.  But when everything belongs to everyone, the most "reality-based" attitude set wins for everyone who cannot afford the luxury of belief or pretence. And thus the socialism of the people is lost in the new honesty of the reality TV generation. 

I wondered if my position was hiding the narrative of popular socialism from me, so I went looking for a Socialist tabloid, but I couldn't really find a successful one. I wonder if the problem is that little about the concerns of socialism lends itself to feel-good, group-bonding, slap-em-out, shout-em-down headlines. We have The Star, The Mirror (and their local variations) but they are struggling. I had this idea about ordering and reading it, but... when the Star reports that over 100 people recently applied for a £13,000-a-year job to be a refuse collection operative in Wrexham, what can I do with this information? Only feel worse about the world.

the robots are at the door

I'm bringing the casual cover up to speed during a gap in the regular web editor's continuity.  Like all web systems, ours has its little quirks, and though I did a couple of intensive sessions on the way in there are always the odd bits that come out in dribs and drabs as the days go by. 

This morning I caught myself typing the words, "the robots are drawn to the more popular pages or those that have comments on them already, especially if those comments include images or links" by way of explanation following a more than usually unfortunate alert message dropping into the approval box. I adjusted the comprehensibility of the message while handing out disapproval to this comment (and another, considerably less offensive, message selling - a first for me - a gas-powered outdoor heater) reflecting on the sad truth of the matter.

Our CAPTCHAs are quite good. They're probably not robots.

will no-one save me from this clip art hell

I am downloading clip-art daily. I have been driven into this dismal corner (bright with the indefinably awful smiles of the determinedly generic) by the strong-arm package bundling of a prominent clip-art sales site. I delegated the purchase decision to a staff member who was briefly passing through. He left me this. The site is extensive, but most of it is very badly tagged. A depressing number of pages toss away their descriptive space on misspellings and waste words like handsome, beautiful, fresh, sexy, pretty, etc. I go back to chasing search terms through a maze of the scrubbed and filtered, trying to find the word for what I'm looking for. It's a perfect tidy-up job for the Mechanical  Turk, but why would they bother? Forced constant overpayment has me doing the work.

Later, I am trying to show the new staff member Google Analytics. But there is a clip art woman who is stopping me getting to Google Analytics. She smiles gently while I wrestle with my log-in. The browser crashes, like a floundering brontosaur. She doesn't even bother making a snide comment about the paucity of my updates or the make and antiquity of my browser. She just stands there, smiling, using most of my screen, while I stab at the log-in button (now hidden in a tiny ribbon at the top of the screen).

Eventually I get in. Everything's been redesigned, again, in that "you can use me on an i-pad!" look, all shiny, rounded, tasteful and empty like a flagship store no-one can afford to visit. I grind my teeth and get to re-navigating the menus.

leave me alone with your frivolous segmentation

Two events recently have focused my annoyance on the phenomenon of market segmentation.The first involved an email from a popular mailing list service provider. They'd sent me an urgent email explaining how updates to their system involved changing how certain aspects of their segmentation worked. It's a service that adopts a chummy, familiar tone, which does actually generally work in reducing the colossal annoyance of composing, analysing and maintaining mailing lists. But in this case, the chirpy apology for using the marketing jargon caused a wearying explosion of annoyance. "If you don't understand, please pass it to the person on your team who does deal with such things," oh ho ho. There's a sort of self obsession here which probably makes perfect sense from their perspective; after all, I'm sure they do have a department which deals in segmentation. But for those using their service, is this always the case? Is it not vastly more likely that their customers are juggling not just segmentation, not just this product, but the entire concept of online marketing with a host of other responsibilities and duties? Tread gently when you mock our ignorance of your specialisms; lest you discover where priorities truly lie.

And speaking of lying, the other vast explosion of annoyance at segmentation occurred as a mailing list I had been previously signed up to split into some fifteen-odd sub-lists, most of which I still needed to read. A sweary run through repeated triple-verified sign-up processes ensued as I tried to follow their reasoning (and the lack of a "just send me everything" tick box. Leave me alone with your frivolous market segmentation; mostly if I have signed up to it, I'm interested in it; and if something does fall a touch flat for me, hey, I really do have a nice handy right-there delete button.

the arrogant assumption of dedicated time

Great news! A popular online service tells me. You can now achieve [a list of a variety of things] with all the brand news features in our product and analysis tools. Learn all about it in our new webinar series! Hmm. Let me consult the vast wasteland of my diary. Let me consider all those afternoons that would stretch out in bleak silence, washed with bored and lonely tears.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a vast fan of progress. I love the fact that every item, service and product, no matter how small or slight, has or would benefit from having the careful focussed attention of intelligent individuals improving it. What I resent is the assumption from some larger services that there will be teams of dedicated and specialist people looking after their product. There is simply too much to do for any one service to command such attention, particularly as the gains in using these services are light, and that they cannot be delivered in isolation by anyone attempting to reach a universal audience.

You will get some attention, but frankly anything that requires a webinar series to learn is unlikely to be adopted by any but the most overstaffed and obsessive. Put it in a to-do list please. We'll get to it when we need it; and not before.

developing backwards

At the moment I'm typing this while flicking back and forth to the tab containing emusic, where I'm previewing a random pile of notes, recommendations and more. I have to keep flicking back and forth because unless you have their overly needy tab at the front, the volume of their preview player reduces to an irritating whisper. So, in order to multitask, I have to keep on flipping back to it, each click-back accompanied by a little stab of complex disappointment, which ranges from irritation at how dark and gloomy the site is since the redesign, to musings on how bugs get sold to site owners as features, to a slight sadness at how this is a literal performance of the myth of multitasking. I'm  very fond of emusic (and frequently recommend it -- their long tail is very long, and they have a great selection of rarities, and most labels remember to put their singles up on it, but if you are signing up be aware that their album releases run a little later than other providers and there's typically no album discounts) but...

Music sites in particular seem to be prone to developing backwards. As legitimacy and commercial interest catch up with the bleeding edge the sites get more strewn with logos and disclaimers, the supply of downloads dries up, and sweet deals (that are perhaps more sweet for the owners than the customers) begin to clutter the original offer.

I'm currently wavering over RCRDLBL, for example, originally a hot daily download that has mutated over a few years, sometimes offering more, sometimes less (the buggy Bing-branded music player a particular nadir) but often the place to find sweet remixes that for some reason were not making commercial release. They've shaken off Bing, but recently it's gone a bit streamy (enabled by Spotify and Soudcloud) and expanded their recommendations. But other people's lists of things they like are not that much more exciting than your own, and the more third-party systems involved and the longer the list, the bigger the administrative task. On the other hand, they have lead me to treasures and precious jewels in the past, and still do with a bit of careful trawling - if I ever find the time.

your brand says spam to me

In common with many other webmasters I got back from my Christmas break to find a Bad Thing. Someone had hacked a server somewhere and for three days over Christmas it had fired off a steady stream of commentspam into my filters before one of my counterparts toiling on the dataface came back from their Christmas break to discover their Bad Thing, and fix it. In the meantime, I set to clearing the gakk from my filters, speculating the while on why people spam. Mostly it ends up in filters, not marketing to anyone other than the person who has the aggravating task of clearing out the comments, for whom it is largely a negative experience. Although, in line with old-school attack, a proportion of the comments also had wordsalad subject lines, some of which were quite beautiful:

• vault owllike whiterump minginess
• indiscriminate negotiation dirtying pumple
• outstandingly semiprofessional flirting ellipse

(As an aside, I am not interested in advice about how to stop this problem (either my problem, or the site whose server got hacked) from happening using technical means. If you are interested in this as a technical problem, user maintained social networking sites like Livejournal and Dreamwidth are great places to try out your ideas and meet other people interested in solving the same problems.)

Although as a - what's the Yougov term? Dissatisfied Customer - of the aforementioned Livejournal, I do delete commentspam on a pretty regular basis, this was the first time in a while it had been a big enough job to include reflection on how the spam environment has changed in recent years. Wind back a year or two, and the Canadian Pharmacy crowd with their exotic lists of drugs were leading the field. In 2012, although there is a smattering of viagra, cialis, tramadol, tylenol, ativan and their ilk, the overwhelming majority is brandspam. Working through the comment pile for anything I needed to reply to or report, I realised I was using brand names to identify comments as spam. In fact, there were some brand names that I already associated with spam. Ugg? Spam. Christian Laboutin? Spam. Louis Vuitton? Spam, beyond a doubt.

Why does this happen? Is it popularity? The intensity with which a brand is ripped off and faked? Or is it just chance, that brand caught up in the roll of the black-marketing dice? Is it damaging for them, or do they feel (as some celebrities do) that all publicity is good publicity? Is there complicity?

Whatever the truth of the matter, I'd been given a snapshot. The state of spam, Christmas 2012. And here are the brands under the spammer's Christmas tree:

• Christmas Top of the Pops: Uggs, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Laboutin, Lasix, Tom's Clogs, Mulberry, Michael Kors, Chanel, Pandora Charms, Dr Dre Beats, GHD hair straighteners
• Christmas classics: Viagra, Canadian Pharmacy, Cialis, Ativan, Zoloft, Flomax, Tylenol, iPod, Ativan, Clomol, Flagyl, Nike
• Contemporary Christmas Gifts:  Chilliwack, Tiffany's, North Face,  Canada Goose, G-Star, Thomas Sabo, Hunter Wellies, Zithromax, Adirondack

Thanks all, for the unexpected Christmas gifts in spam filters and inboxes across the world. Thanks for the thought, and the lack of thought. Thanks for the endlessly sapping process of overengineering and upgrading filtering systems and the sites down and broken and the information pollution and all of the Christmas messages lost in the seasonal spamfall. It's nice to know exactly how much you care.

become a deviant: y/n

It's not a question you ever want to be asked in a work context; not in my area of work anyway! In some, I'm sure it's an asset. But for me, deviant, work, no.

That is, until I asked the manga girls whether they used Facebook. "Well, yeah," they said, "But mostly on Deviantart! Are you on Deviantart? Can we be your friend?"

Errrrrrrrrr. I said. Not yet, but I can be. What's your ID?

I'd picked up an ID on a trawl through online drawing groups years ago, but it had seemed a bit forumy, inexplicable and -- frankly -- grey, and I was sure that any profile, if it still exists, would be a tangle of abandoned fragments. Not to worry though, a shiny new profile is the work of a moment:

http://jeremy-spired.deviantart.com/

... and gives me a convenient place to drop any cartoons, pictures, etc. which I do at the art group which brought all of this up in the first place. I'm still feeling my way, because it's massive, with its own interface querks, dialogue conventions and games -- you can get an idea of the sheer size and breadth from the size of this meme-station:

http://meme-station.deviantart.com/

Here, meme mans a blank drawing game. Fill it in, have fun, invite a friend! I have to say, the focus on creating, on creativity and collaboration is refreshing, healthy and exciting. Interactions seem mostly positive and it's a rich and thrilling environment.

Maybe that moment of "erk!" when you have to tick yes to "become a deviant" does a clever trick. It marks that step into virtual space, that fourth-wall moment where you step into your ID, and embrace the pseudonym, the performance.

It looks like a place where you'd be able easily to shake off your past with a change of ID, and skip through different characters as your interests change. Like somewhere you could successfully play. And that has to be a freedom worth having.

Ten things that are killing the social web

In common with lots of people recently I've been seeing a slow fall-off in numbers of people commenting, participating, chatting and responding on my various social networking channels. Part of the clue's in what I've just said; channels. More channels spreads attention more thinly, and stops people reliably getting your news.

You drift apart.

This annoys me; when I first joined the busy rush onto social networking sites (2001, my archives tell me) I had a bold vision of a world where I could broadcast important information easily to friends; where they could pick it up at their leisure without feeling pressure to respond or react; where I could see day-to-day details of their existence and by this resist the slow erosions of time and distance that lead us, in five years time, to be strangers again. This was my vision; a social group where no one is left behind.

It didn't happen that way. Partly, that's down to human nature. Lots of people don't enjoy the fragmentary communication style of online contact; others see computers as work and socialise away from them. I've made new friends and reconnected with old friends and walked along the social connections to friends of friends pretty much as you're supposed to, but right now I'm organising a party and the situation is far from ideal. In fact, I'm probably going to need to send out an email, and then send out another email, just like I did in the old days, but with even less chance of success thanks to hair-trigger spam catchers.

The messages are up, but the number of relevant people listening is dropping off. Plenty of interaction, but increasingly with partial strangers, as if this were a communication mode no longer sufficiently privileged for actual friends. And there's no point in trying to write IMPORTANT in capital letters or bold or even blink some text or use any other attention! indicator, either: years of deleting spam has taught us that the more urgent something appears, the less likely it is to need reading.

So much for human nature; there are also a bunch of things happening in the evolution of the social web at the moment which are stifling communication (even though some are enabling it). Confused? Let me explain through the medium of a conveniently numbered list:

1. Richer environment
   It's a bit like trying to meet a friend at an Arcade combined with a Science Museum, gallery, Shopping Centre and Funfair. With so many shiny distractions around it's easy to miss something, especially when the first symptoms of offline crisis is online absence. Yes, your games, puzzles, ads, badges and prizes are lovely, but I need to go see my mate now, sorry.
2. Feature creep, usability decay
   Currently Myspace's music player is flaky and Facebook is only intermittently alerting you when you receive an event invitation. At the same time, both are expanding their capabilities like excited slime moulds, colonising thrilling new features, while crucial central systems decay and reorganise, forcing users into multiple work-arounds and unbudgeted and unexpected learning curves to a soundtrack of struggling, swearing and giving up.
3. Social Networking Marketing Experts
   Top of the social pile of the people trying to game the online social system are the people trying to build personal brand, leverage their online identity and create a buzz around [content]. They not only clutter my social space with idiot theories, annoying how-to videos and tedious single-insights posts, they also (and more insidiously) create nervousness among online freshers who are in a state about making a mistake; irritate and annoy regular users; and provoke veterans to throw up their hands and leave it to the Nathans.
4. Earn money from home!
   Somewhere in the middle are gangs of teenagers, marketing students and stay-at-home mums earning small amounts of money for brand blogging, SEO optimisation, buzzes made entirely by a stable of fake IDs, and all the other myriad methods of white-to-greymarket online advertising. It's impossible to resent anything that produces such low wages and some of it is useful information, but the constant murk of UGG boots, random restaurants and price comparison websites gets wearing.
5. Spammers, scammers, hackers, script kiddies and their ilk
   Bottom of the heap are the parasites who've trained us to ignore urgent messages, avoid clicking on links, and fear making friends with strangers. Who have distorted the development of websites so that vast resources are now poured into security and updating, rather than into improving the site for its users. Thanks to them, all websites are now less reliable, more prone to changes of service and more annoying. They are largely responsible for that slug of anxiety, paranoia and fear many people feel when they sign up to a new service or suffer interruptions or changes to a current service. It's driving people off the web, not least because there's no obvious way to punish the perpetrators.
6. Firehose of Me anxiety
   Some people select one channel and stick with it; others skip around doing a bit here, a bit there (often precisely because their friends are scattered across different channels). Almost everyone has an additional channel for rich media, even if it's only a Photobucket or a Youtube. While combining these channels into one, single complete channel is certainly possible nowadays, all but celebrities and massive egotists flinch from full channel combination, the unmediated stream of an individual's online existence. That much of one person at once is overwhelming, and feels intrusive; even if it is, often, things you do want to see.
7. Overwhelementation
   There is too much to follow. Too many cool things, nice people, fun events, neat new music and gorgeous art. Once the watched feeds get over a certain level, once the channels proliferate sufficiently, once you have above a certain number of elements on your page, following everything, reading everything, you either can't do it, or it stops being sociable fun, LOLs and gossip and turns into a joyless job-list, a round of sniffing posts to deal with and shout back at, grinding out your social existence like a grumpy prayer-wheel.
8. Intimacy drift
   On the social net, the professional is personal, strangers are friends and family are filtered; privacy settings came in alongside the crowd of old schoolfriends, colleagues and acquaintances building their instant social groups, and all of us too status-aware and/or open to turn down even a dubious social connection. But as friend-groups swell, trust diminishes; and no matter how heavily we filter, the awareness is always there that as soon as anyone gets annoyed or feels someone should know something, or is simply sufficiently motivated to press ctrl+c, ctrl+v, our privacy is toast. It inhibits, and forces a backwards march into an inner circle, particularly during times of stress when we need new connections and fresh perspective.
9. "Share this" --with your mum
   Sharing is a lovely idea, but enabling tools encourage oversharing, which leads to inhibition. The first step into any new application, social network or utility is nowadays increasingly likely to include a frantic dash through the settings, turning absolutely everything off, for fear that your skimming of small print has produced a cross-identity torrent of "x watched this", "X thinks kittens are cute!" and forced that most disagreeable of thoughts; Le spammeur, c'est moi.
10. Hesitancy of choice
    Most of the central services (Facebook, Myspace) want to take on the functions (photoposting, status updates) of the specialist services (Flickr, Twitter). By the time you've figured out what to use, the urge has often faded. This is why I often find myself using Tumblr, the blogging equivalent of bashing big buttons with little thought. But Tumblr's simplicity means I don't tend to pass on its pretty updates, locking them away from the bulk of my friends. As a result, my friends are --word of the moment-- siloed into channels and unable to mingle.

I'm aware that I'm listing problems without knowing solutions, and that it's only my opinion, and that I'm no trendsetter or important voice; but I know I'm not the only one posting things like "...tumbleweeds here..." right now. And, as it happens, I do have some advice, although it's not new, not rocket science, and not an easy answer to all your online marketing needs.

• Don't neglect your core functionality
• Build new features when you need them, not for their own sake or keeping up with [SNx]
• Engage with your marketing population and encourage them to enforce good behaviour
• Make it easy to share and not to share on a post by post basis
• Play nice; you'll win in the end

flexibility key for making the most of facebook

Of all the various social networking outreach tools we've been using, Facebook is drawing ahead fast. Occasionally Twitter will throw up a surprise sharp enough that I'm careful to regularly check my @ and direct messages, but the bulk of the work is out in the Facebook.

Continuing in my experimental vein, I'm taking every opportunity to compare and contrast different approaches. Conveniently, two main agendas (Positive Activities and Choices/Pathways/Connexions) provide me with a very neat pair of comparators. Whenever I'm uncertain about how to approach a task, I can take one route on one page, and the other on the other, and learn by doing.

So, the two pages get slightly different approaches, on the advertising, the character of the posts, the numbers and character of the links. Spreading out further, the different groups and projects are all pursuing their own contact style and behaviours, according to their needs. At first this caused me some anxiety. As members of an advanced bureaucracy, stepping outside consistent procedure is panic-provoking. As people who work with people who are young, and often vulnerable in other ways, we are naturally concerned that our actions are consistent, kind and safe.

However, as practice developed, I began to feel that this very multiplicity of approach may be crucial to successfully using social networking in a youthwork context. Where workers made up their own approach, in collaboration with the young people they were working with, groups flourished and grew. Where workers asked to be shown how to use it, then followed instructions, their enthusiasm quickly waned and online groups began to fade.

I've come up with a few reasons why this might be:

1. The fluid nature of social networking environment requires flexibility.
   Social Networking is a dynamic, constantly evolving environment. To respond best and most creatively users must be open to exploration, experimentation and change.
   
   
2. Social networking is a naturally subversive act which resists rules and authority.
   From the informal communication register to the multiple oportunities for time-wasting, deception and mischief-making, Social Networking is sub-rosa, sneaky, circumvential and generally an area of experimentation, boundary testing and play. This makes it a rich environment for youth work, but one best engaged with informally, collaboratively, and on the young people's own terms.
   
   
3. Successful usage requires proper submersion in the Social Networking environment.
   Following rules and tapping through checkboxes doesn't communicate the true appeal of the online environment. Not that workers should spend their whole time watching youtube videos, talking rubbish and playing pointless web games! But some exploration and experimentation is crucial. A phrase I use is "be guided by your offline practice", and here I would quote the climbing wall. Go up and down the wall yourself. You'll be a better worker for it.

on the refolding of identity

Scandal this week as huge online multi-player game World of Warcraft decided to introduce their forums to real name culture. The predictable outcry masked a broader anxiety about the brave new world of total connection. Now that the entire world is online, will it have to become less free? Or, put more simply; are most people really idiots?

World of Warcraft backed down, of course; several days of female roleplayers gently sharing with the site organisers their extensive personal experiences of being stalked, threatened and harassed did the trick nicely. But Facebook, the native home of the real name culture, is alive and well and winning the internet.

The internet started out as a pseudonymous culture. Faced with character name limits, people created aliases. Realising they were different people with different groups, they made multiples. Feeling the need to escape in an overpoweringly male-dominated world, women went male, or gender neutral. People put on imaginary bodies and made strange worlds. They met strangers and found out new ideas, explored new territories of identity and expression. They were able to switch and change to meet new challenges and rest from exhausting interactions. It was thrilling, empowering, exciting.

Compared to that, the real name culture of Facebook feels like being a pop-up gopher in the hammer game -- the same friends, the same connections, the same short list of faces/friends/family, chattering back endlessly. It's quite nice, but also quite boring. You respond to someone, you see more of them. You ignore someone, they go away. It simulates the experiences of popular kids everywhere, which is fine, I guess; but if you only stay in your own pretty playpen you're kind of missing the point of going online.

For anyone who read about online freedoms and felt a sinking sense of horror, you're absolutely right. While you can engage with this freeedom creatively, make interesting content, have fun, make new friends and generally have a brilliant time, of course many people take the other route. They grief, flame, stalk, harrass, break and vandalise things. They do appalling things almost unconsciously, without a second thought; and their excuses are very simple and very clear. It is easy to do, anyone could do it, lots of people want to, and nobody's stopping me.

Are they right, though? Are they really now the dominant online group? Or, to put it another way, are most people really idiots?

If what's predominantly happening is that most people are routinely thoughtlessly acting out without worrying about consequences because there are unlikely to be any bad consequences and it's just so easy, yes, some form of unique registration might have an effect. However, if what we're seeing is an aggressive minority indulging in deviant behaviour because that's what they want to do, then it seems likely that people will get round the checks and blocks and continue with what they're doing because that is what they do when they're online.

World of Warcraft's forums, for the moment, are continuing to allow their users fictional creations their voices. But if the moronic and monotonous sock-puppet slaggers outnumber the real and honorable interactions, what conclusions should we draw?

Bye bye Bebo, so long Livejournal

"Everyone talks about Bebo, but nobody uses it," she says. I'm talking to a group who are using Facebook to promote gigs at their Young People's Centre. It's been incredibly successful. They made friends with local bands, promoters and music fans. They made friends with everyone in the Youth Club, on the local Town Youth Council and the local Youth Forum. Once they got enough friends in the age-group, they just started being suggested to the local young people as a suitable friend. And the young people laughed at the building pretending to be a person and notched up another friend-mark on their tally sheet.

At 400 friends, it's impossible to be sure who's on your friends list any more. Is it a risk? I take them through some of the risk points, ignoring the irony of teaching kids to use Facebook. Sometimes they need it, but not this lot. "Oh yeah, I was stalked," she says, with a lopsided smile, and launches into one of the standard stories. She snaps open a chat window as she talks; one of the bands wants info about an upcoming gig. She fires a question across the room, someone fires off a text, the information comes back and she responds. I'm looking at the text as she types. The language is formal, kind, elaborately polite, bracketed by smilies and see-you-latwer commonplaces. Subtext made explicit; I'm busy, but I still care.

Bebo, then, does anyone use it? "I think my little sister... used to," says one of the older young people. "She's got a Facebook now. She's only eleven." We launch into another discussion of online safety, terms of service and protecting yourself. They know the script, though; they're looking out for each other, they can take their concerns on to staff, family, friends.

Does anyone read blogs? "I have a friend who writes one, I think..." They look a bit bored. Someone's sent through a message. "We told them the stage times, didn't we?" she snaps, "They know this!" She types up a quick message. "Who is it?" asks one of the younger young people. She tells them. "He never remembers anything," he laughs, "Too much *phweep*." Her response, typed with machine-gun speed, is as unfailingly polite and concise as her chat.

Do you have any trouble with people being rude on the wall? No, no. Of course they don't.

So, Bye bye Bebo. We didn't get much more than a year's use out of it in the end, before everyone was flooding onto Facebook. And the blog can go, too -- fold it back into the general site news and the timeline. Twitter and Myspace can stay, for now, utilities filed next to Slideshare and Youtube. Glad I elected to use Livejournal for the blog, though! Downloading an archive copy was a piece of cake.

recovering from the personal effectiveness course

It's been a couple of weeks since I went on the Personal Effectiveness Course, and I've just about recovered. No disrespect to the trainer (she was very good) the course content (some interesting insights) or the training arrangements (nothing like being presented with an assertiveness challenge partway through the day), but, let's face it, if a person has problems with assertiveness, effectiveness and so on, there is, by definition, a problem. Problems are seldom sorted out by a few useful insights; this presents the beginning of the work.

I have the usual issues common to operational, hands-on staff with training around "personal improvement". I feel it's sort of waffy and handwavy, dancing around the work without actually getting on with it. In this spirit I've set aside time each week to complete training that will improve my effectiveness and capabilities at work -- those clear goals and that work focus help me feel satisfied that the training is valid use of my time, but at the same time, most courses start or involve a bit of personal improvement.

There was the usual round of reprove/excuse/allow over my doodling during the session, but as you can see from the page below, it didn't really slow me down. So, what struck me?

The notes on trying to form a relationship is related to people (including bosses) feeling annoyed or overly distracted when people socialise at work. While the option of just telling people (or requiring them) to do things is available for a few lucky people, most need regularly renewed social connection to avoid awkwardness when sharing out work. Social glue becomes a lubricant to progress.

My bulleted list refers to the triple preventers of progress.

• Me getting angry and frustrated,
• people going silent,
• agreements not leading to action.

I was looking for answers to these problems, and didn't really get them. I have a lot of tips and tricks for calming myself already, and I know about lists and faulty thinking and triggers and so on and so forth. This section of the course depressed me, and the "we instruct people how to treat us" doodle hits the crux of the problem. There was the usual discussion of family roles and how these direct your interactions as an adult. For some people, this is a revealing insight, but for those who grew up in difficult emotional situations, this statement can arrive like a life sentence; the abused destined always to perform their negative, reactive, limited roles, the abusers able to merrily carry on in intentional absolution.

I would rather believe that you can put away your childhood habits, those bad communication glitches learned from difficult family interactions, and learn to operate with other people -- colleagues especially -- as a rational, respectful and kind adult. That way, as you move along social connections, as you increase them, you can set aside childish things and ways of behaving.


P.S. I've included the picture of my cat because the internet requires kittens; the face of increased financial anxiety is something we all wear from time to time.