Phil Bradley's weblog

*How* much do they know about me??

I got to thinking the other day, which is always a very bad idea, but there you go, sometimes I just start and then can't stop. So, I picked a company that I have dealings with, and decided to work out how much they know about me.

My address - no big deal there of course, but they could then find out how much my house is worth, and probably how much I paid for it, and when.

My phone number - even if I didn't get it to them (and I probably did) it's going to be easy enough to get.

My age - fairly closely, though if I'm ever asked for my birth date I give it a year or so out.

My gender. Pretty easy, given my name.

Now, that's all basic stuff. Let's see what else they can work out.

Marital status

If I'm dating someone, with (potentially) a rough indication as to their age

Physical appearance

If I have any medical conditions

Any allergies

Drug related issues

How healthy I am

If I am an alcoholic

Race

If I've got pets

If I live on my own, or have children

If I have children, how old they are

How often I have friends over

If I'm vegetarian or not

My religion

If I have any pets

If I have a car

If I prefer a shower or bath

How often I shower or bathe

What I like to read

What I like to watch on television, which channels and when

(Potentially) my sexual activity and sexual preference

My hobbies

My disposable income

Friends birthdays

If my parents are alive or not

How many children I know, or are close to, and their ages

Size of my house

If I have a garden, and how large it is

How susceptable I am to advertising

If I go on holiday, and probably where

How much I drive

Have you figured out which company I'm talking about here? If you'd said Facebook, you'd be wrong. Ditto if you said Amazon, but I can understand why you would have said either company. Similarly, it's not Google either. In fact, it's not primarily an internet company at all - it's Sainsburys. All of the things that I've mentioned above they could work out by watching by buying patterns via my loyalty card. Of course, the more that I shop in one chain, the more they'll know. I'm also guessing that I haven't actually even scratched the surface of what they could logically deduce from what I buy.

Suddenly, what Facebook/Google/et al know really rather palls into insignificance doesn't it! If you can think of anything else a supermarket could work out, based on your buying patterns, please add them into the comments - I'd love to see what I've missed out.

 

eBooks and bookshops

The eBooks saga is continuing to run and run, as we all knew that it would. The latest entrant into the field is the Booksellers Association chief executive Tim Godfray. Apparently, libraries are once again targeted as a major enemy - who knew that we had such power? He is quoted in a Bookseller article as saying "The BA has campaigned for several years to mitigate the potential damage that library e-book lending could have on our book retailing sector." He is very concerned that if libraries end up charging for eBooks (as Justin Tomlinson suggests) the money might be used to finance a variety of library services. He is of the opinion that the money raised should be used to buy books.

Now, before I actually respond to this bizarre Alice in Wonderland suggestion, let's get a few things clear shall we? First of all, libraries are not the reason why bookshops are having problems. Libraries INCREASE book sales, they don't decrease them. A recent study by Library Journal and Bowker PubTrack Consumer reports

"Our data show that over 50% of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” Miller noted. “This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.

Moreover, if we look at a recent report from Pew, they are quite clear that Device owners are more likely to buy books. Some 61% of e-reading device owners said they purchased the most recent book they read, compared with 48% of all readers. Another 15% said they had borrowed their most recent book from a friend or family member (vs. 24% of all readers), and 10% said they borrowed it from a library (vs.14% of all readers). Asked their preference for obtaining books in all formats, e-book reading device owners were more likely to say they prefer to purchase than to borrow books in any format – print, digital, or audio. In related fashion, they are also more likely to say they start their searches for e-books at online bookstores.

And again, if we look at statistics from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, we see that inclusion in their collection increases sales of authors other work - 24% of customers who borrowed the Hungar Games bought 'Catching Fire' and 24% also bought Mockingjay, despite the fact that the entire series was available to borrow for free. Since the launch of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library in November 2011, the paid retail sales of backlist trade titles in the library have seen 229% higher growth than corresponding titles that are not enrolled.

It is clear that readers and borrowers also buy books, in significantly large numbers. I am getting sick and tired of both publishers and booksellers trying to pin the blame for their failures on libraries. So, let's take a look at failure in more detail, and where better to start than with the bookshops. Figures from the Booksellers Association show that the number of independent booksellers stands at 1.094 at the end of 2011. This is down from 1,159 in 2010 and 1,289 in 2009.That is a bookshop a week closing.

According to Godfray it's because of competition from the internet and eBooks. This willful blindness is quite astonishing, since he seems incapable of thinking it could, in any way, be the fault of bookshops. Now, I go into bookshops a lot because - unsurprisingly, I like to buy books in a print form as well as in a eBook form as well as borrow them from my library. My knowledge of the stock of Forbidden Planet is as good as of my local library - and probably better if I'm to be honest. However, I can't recall the last time that I saw any real innovations in a bookshop - can you? Oh, apart from the nice little handwritten staff pick notes that I see in Waterstones. If I grabbed someone from 100, or even 200 years ago who frequented bookshops and put them in any bookshop you care to name today they probably wouldn't blink that much, and certainly wouldn't have any difficulty in working out what to do.

Let's take a case in point. I'm reading a series of graphic novels at the moment called Fables. Volume 14 in Forbidden Planet was priced at £14.99, but had been reduced to £10.99. On their website it was available for a web price of £9.32. In Amazon, it's available for £7.00 as a print publication, and as a Kindle publication it's actually £8.52. In a library it's going to be free of course, but this is a collection that I want to own, not just to read. Now, in what world, Mr Godfray are libraries or eBooks responsible for this situation? I'll tell you - they're not. I could have saved myself £3.99 by buying via Amazon. This little tale replicates itself over and over again, and then when we start to factor in the price of books in supermarkets, we're entering an entirely different league again.

Bookshops are failing - not because of libraries or eBooks - but because they have proved themselves totally incapable of adapting to the current market. They are trading (and trading badly) on past success, and the emotional ties that people have to them, which overcome their inclination to get books more cheaply. That's where the issue is, Mr Godfray. You need to look no further than your inability to move with the times, and the unedifying spectacle of you expecting 'a seat at the table' of Ed Vaizey's review of eBook lending would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic.

I'm sick of libraries being tied to the whipping post, and being seen as the enemy by publishers and booksellers alike. We're an easy target, and because of that it leads to sloppy and lazy thinking. It's far easier to blame someone else, rather than look at your own failures and shortcomings, but if bookshops want to exist in a world of eBooks, supermarket sales and online vendors then quite frankly, they'd better buck their ideas up and pronto.

UK Internet Access 2011 - a place for libraries

The ONS has released their report on Internet Access - Households and Individuals, 2011 and it makes very interesting reading. Access to the net now reaches 77%; 19 million households in Great Britain had an Internet connection. That's a great figure until you realise that's still only really 3 in every 4. Of those who don't have access 19 per cent indicated that equipment costs were too high, while 21 per cent stated that lack of skills prevented them from getting the Internet. However, half of those without a household Internet connection said they didn’t have one because they “don’t need the Internet”. That 50% figure isn't going to increase; I'll happily predict it's going to fall away in the coming years. So here's a library placemarker, and I'll be coming back to it in a moment.

An extra 6 million people using their mobile phone to access the Internet than was reported in 2010 with noticeable increases across all age groups. Mobile Internet use via a laptop, tablet or other portable computer also proved popular in 2011, with 38 per cent of Internet users using these mobile devices away from the home or workplace. The bottom line figure here is that 45 per cent of Internet users used a mobile phone to connect to the Internet. Placemarker #2.

Social networking proved to be the most popular activity among 16 to 24 year old Internet users in 2011, with 91 per cent saying they took part in social networking on websites such as Facebook or Twitter. However, the figure that I particularly like is that almost one fifth (18 per cent) of Internet users aged 65 and over indicated that they participated in social networking. This is another great statistic coming up and it should hopefully blow your socks off; those people aged 65 and over who purchased films/music, 34 per cent downloaded the product compared to 20 per cent in 2010. There was also an increase among the oldest age group downloading books or reading material, at 23 per cent compared to 15 per cent in 2010. We're not just dealing with a younger digital generation - the internet and social media is entirely pervasive. Placemarker #3

A more worrying statistic shows that one in five Internet users (21 per cent) said that their current Internet or computer skills were not sufficient to protect their personal data. A similar proportion (19 per cent) said that their skills were not sufficient to prevent a computer virus. Placemarker #4

There's also another really interesting piece of information over at Digital Buzz on the growth of social media. US figures are broadly in line with the UK results - internet usage is up in all categories. Facebook has a huge 64% market share of social media sites visited (Facebook has 310m unique visitors every day), and 1 in 4 Americans watch a YouTube video every single day. 53% of employees research potential job candidates on social networks. 3,500 images are added to Flickr every minute.

We've also had a lot of articles recently which are looking at the ineptitude of people who are searching the net. (Harsh, but I don't mean it in a particularly perjorative way - they're simply not very good at it!) Another interesting article is 'Teaching Search' which makes the point that 90% of users don't know how to use CTRL-F. (G'wan - did you just try it out to see what would happen?) Another report illustrated that students equated the position of results in a Google search with authority.

So, where does that leave us? Let's start with schools. Clearly there is a need - at the earliest possible age, to start children using computers - not just with the purely mechanical 'this is how you create a word document', but by exposing them to as much technology and resources as possible. There's a really useful article that's worth reading: 10 Internet Technologies Educators Should Be Informed About. I urge you go and have a read of it, but to spoil the surprise and keep you reading my post first, these include things such as video and podcasting resources, presentation tools, mindmapping, pinboard and social media resources. None of this stuff is going away; just the opposite - all of this stuff is just life - it's not a 'digital life' it just IS. And then we get (and excuse my intemperate language) the complete moron that is Russell Hobby, National Association of Head Teachers’ General Secretary who makes the insane and quite frankly laughable statement that “Facebook is becoming a bigger fear for schools than Ofsted”. Another report in a study by the National Literacy Trust, mentioned in the Telegraph says "schoolchildren are significantly more likely to be exposed to mobile phones and computers in the home than novels, according to researchers." So if we have children who are using these resources at home, and in an environment where their parents often admit that they are not competent in using the net (my placemarker #4) it's no wonder that they're not reading books, and no amount of forcing is going to make that happen. Rather - and this is a radical idea for the likes of Mr Hobby I'm sure, is that schools need to embrace, not shy away from Facebook and mobile phone technology and all the rest. And what better place to learn and to come to grips with it, than the school library, backed up by an effective librarian. And yes, I know this is a pipe dream, but we have to start from somewhere. Even more so, when we see reports that show that more librarians mean higher reading scores. If librarians can have that effect with reading, just think what they can help to do to prepare students for university and the rest of their lives? If we don't do it at that early age, we're going to continue with a situation where "although many people who come to the library associate the library with librarians, as well as associating libraries with information, they don’t associate information with librarians." (From a fascinating blog post by A Searching Librarian.) In order to overcome this perception, we have to go to where the conversations are.

WE have to go THEM. I'm sorry to labour the point, but I think it's necessary. Using social media isn't fun, it's not a fad, it's not a waste of time it is exactly where librarians need to be. We need to be highly visible on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the rest. We need to be found by students (and members of the public as well - this isn't just about academic librarians) where they are. That's increasingly less likely to be in the library. It astonishes me when I still have librarians telling me that it's wrong for libraries and librarians to be on Facebook, because in some way that I totally fail to understand it's 'invading students space' (yes, that is a direct quote). It's too easy to assume that because students are using Google, Facebook and so on they know what they're doing. I would question that assumption, and the rest of us need to as well.

Librarians have, in my personal opinion a duty to their users - be they schoolchildren, graduates, members of the public or CEOs - to offer a professional and knowledgeable service. This means that we have to have excellent skillsets and knowledge of a variety of search engines. We need to have ourselves and our libraries on Facebook. We need to be able to direct users to our RSS feeds, our Delicious accounts and our blogs. We need to use all of the tools that are available to help people who don't come into the library. The library needs to provide access to the net - not simply because it's the net, but that's where the information and the knowledge is (more and more so than in books) because that's what we deal with - knowledge, in any and every format. We have to offer to teach those people who can't, won't or who are too scared to use the net. (Placeholder number one there - see, I haven't forgotten all of those). I'm sure we've all had the joy of watching people learning to read, and the same delight and enjoyment can be achieved from helping people do a really good search on the net - and God help us perhaps without using Google!

I know that you're getting tired of this, but I'm going to say it again - we have to be actively involved in social media. Use Facebook to find information - go to Flickr to grab good images, use YouTube to find good quality instructional material - and create it yourself! Spend time accessing the internet via a mobile phone, borrow an iPad and explore - even if you have to go to an Apple store to do it, and see how other libraries and museums are using apps. Reach out to the elderly who can't get into the library, but who are perfectly able to connect from other places.

The biggest barrier to all of this of course is your middle and senior management. Doesn't matter if it's a head teacher or the CEO, it's all the same. I put together a '25 barriers' presentation a while ago looking at some of the misconceptions of social media access, and what you can do to overcome it. Do not be put off when the answer comes back that you can't do it. That answer will often have come from advice from the IT or PR departments - and it is not in their interest to encourage social media use. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say that in many cases, they are the ones that are the really big obstacles - middle and senior management just do as they're told. We need to move away from the idea that social media means 'social' as in friends and leisure time, and move the conversation around to the idea that social means talking to our user groups in a way and in a place that is effective and efficient as well as cost effective. I know that for a lot of people it's really hard (and I hate doing it as well), but I think librarians need to become more militant, perhaps more egotistical but above all, more confident that they/we actually DO know better than IT. We CAN manipulate the message better than the PR people. Because we use information - it's our job for heavens sake, and that information, that knowledge - in whatever format it comes is our stock in trade.

Don't let ANYONE tell you different.

2 million children with no web access at home

We're used to thinking about the "Google generation" and the "Facebook generation" and there is a common misconception that children know all about using computers and using the Internet. Of course, this isn't true; I've spoken to many school librarians and children themselves to know that while they are comfortable with using the Internet their actual use still remains quite limited, and their understanding of what can be achieved, how to find the information you require, and assessing it is not as good as one may first expect. This is the case for those children who have access to the Internet; how much more difficult is it therefore for those children that do not. A recent article in the Guardian No web access at home for 2m poor pupils, warns charity point out the quite shocking figures which go to show that too many children still don't have access to the Internet; especially from the poorest homes in the country. In the richest 10% of homes, 98% had a home computer and 97% had internet access, but in the poorest 10% of homes only 38% had a home computer and 30% an internet connection. Even in the South East which is one of the richest areas in the country, if not the richest one in four homes cannot access the Internet.

This therefore puts not only children but their parents a grave disadvantage. We are all familiar with the situation in which a child requests help with algebra homework and the parents can do no more than do a good goldfish impression, so how much more difficult is it going to be for both child and parent when it comes to accessing the Internet when neither know what they are supposed to be doing. A school can only do so much and of course a child can only access Internet computers in school when the school is open. This is surely where the library comes into play. Children who do not only need access to the Internet they need access to reading materials and educational material. The library is in a perfect position to provide both, and indeed librarians who are confident and happy with using the Internet can also provide further assistance to children and their parents on getting the information that they require.

This can of course only be done in those situations where libraries do have access to the Internet, with a fast broadband connection and machines which are up to specification. We also need to remember that just because a child is sitting in front of an Internet computer it does not necessarily follow that they know what to do with it. These figures, grim as they are, surely provide further ammunition, if ammunition should be required, that libraries needs to be well staffed, and with good access to the Internet. Reduced funds and reduced access to the Internet certainly harm the poorest in our society but they are also helping to rob the future of its digitally literate population.

British Government wants to block porn

I will do my best to ensure that my sarcasm doesn't entirely take over this post, but I can't promise it. The insanity, fear and hatred of the internet as shown by this shower of imbeciles continues unabated. Claire Perry, a Tory (it would have to be really wouldn't it) wants to block all UK access to pornography. Now, I'm not going to get into a debate about the merits or otherwise of pornography itself - it's a worthy debate to have, but I'm coming at this from a different tack. Perry is reported to have said to the Sunday Times “We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see.” So once again, we're back to the 'we must protect children' approach. Shouldn't the government rather be encouraging parents to take responsibility for their own offspring? She has also proposed that all internet service providers (ISPs) should block porn universally - and adults should ask for blocks to be lifted if they want to look at it.

Now, the first issue here is 'what exactly is pornography?' We don't have a definition in the UK other than 'material likely to deprave or corrupt' which puts the onus on the ISP to decide for themselves, moving the job off the Government and putting the responsibility into the hands of ISPs who no doubt will be dragged before a court if they get it wrong. If the Government can define pornography on the net, they'll end up defining it for print material as well, unless they take the view that it's what children can see. To be honest, I'd rather block access to violent and racist material first, or actually, I'd rather not block access to anything based on what may or may not affect a child. And what is the age of this child that we're supposedly protecting? How is that supposed to work? Can we see the evidence that children are viewing pornography all of the time, and the extent to which it has damaged them? Can we also take into account the fact that children take part in 'sexting' images of themselves around the net as well? Is the Government going to take into account people who move this material around the net via mobile phone?

Even if we get this sorted out, what next? Is Ms Perry suggesting that we have a banned list of sites? Because once we go down that route, Wikileaks is going to be right at the top of any list. The problem with a banned list is that material simply goes underground - any list is going to be impossible to maintain. Furthermore - and here's a worrying thought, suppose that we get some sicko who wants to take photographs of young teenagers I can just hear the line 'Look, I can access the material online that I've taken previously - this must be ok, because it's not been banned by the Government'. This does not help children, it doesn't protect children, it is actively going to be putting children in harms way.

So, if a list isn't going to work, are we to expect that the ISPs are going to have to institute some 'skin processing software' which is able to intercept images on their way to a computer, work out a percentage of skin on show, and block it? What about perfectly innocent and legal pictures of people on beaches? Or even on nudist beaches? Naked does not equal pornographic. Are we going to see the ridiculous Facebook breastfeeding saga writ large across the UK? What about videos that show women how to breast feed? If we can't stop those, does that mean that the whole of YouTube is going to be banned, or access to Flickr?

Next, is the government seriously expecting people to add their names to a list of people who want to view pornography? Given the lack of any kind of coherent structure to looking after our personal data can we expect that to be safe? The confusion continues - if the government is saying that viewing pornograpy IS legal, but you have to register for it, the government is tacitly agreeing to the existence and free flow of material. Are we going to have a Minister for Pornography to decide what can be viewed and what's still regarded as hard core and not allowed? Ignoring all of that, once the populace has to register in order to take part in a legal activity - where will that end? Are the government then going to introduce a bill to say that all smokers need to register in order to buy cigarettes - because that would help 'protect the children' as well, wouldn't it.

Who is going to pay for this? If it's the ISP, they are going to pass the cost onto the consumer, which means that your bills are going to go up. Do you really want to be charged extra to allow someone else to watch pornography, because that's what it's essentially going to mean.

I can see so many ways to get around this it's ridiculous. The use of proxy servers will go up, someone will create software that turns skin green in the transition from server via ISP to monitor where it magically goes back to skin colour again. And of course, we mustn't forget the fact, as we're constantly being told - children are very good at using the internet, and the first people who can work out how to get around the ban are going to be... children. Not because they particularly want to look at porn, but because getting around any kind of block is going to be a badge of honour 'I'm clever enough to have worked out software and defeated the Government' is going to be a cool thing to say. Besides, if it's banned, children will want to view it. Does banning smoking stop children smoking? Of course it doesn't. Does banning under age sex mean that young teenagers are not going to get pregnant? Of course it doesn't.

The Government has absolutely NO clue when it comes to the next. Absolutely none. And I'd suggest that you email Ms Perry and tell her so, though when I tried to visit her site this morning this is what I was shown:

Yes folks, she's so clueless, so inept and so incapable, she can't even keep her own website up and running.

Why the press hate Twitter

There have been a couple of really interesting stories in the press recently both about Twitter and what they both have in common is a complete failure by "the establishment" to understand how the resource (and by implication social media in general) actually works.

Earlier in the week Paul Chambers lost an appeal against his conviction for threatening to blow up an airport in a tweet that he posted in a moment of annoyance. Unbelievably the judge felt that his tweets contained menace and that Chambers must have known that it would be taken seriously. The judge in question said the tweet was "menacing and its content obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed." This is to entirely ignore the context within which the "threat" was made. If the threat had been made in a telephone call to the police I would have agreed with what she said. However if the threat had been made in a pub and I overheard somebody chatting to his mates I would take the threat and in entirely different way. Any reasonable person who used Twitter would understand that the tweet was sent in a moment of frustration and was not to be taken literally. That is how those of us that use this resource understand it. We are familiar with the way in which this type of communication takes place.

Twitter is a communication tool and it's one that can be used in many different ways; for social chitchat, as a news resource, for general information, for requesting, seeking, and answering questions and so on. Unless the case was heard by a judge who understood the purpose of the resource and the ways in which we understand there is absolutely no way possible the judge could fully appreciate this. Consequently that specific judge should have either refused to take the appeal or she should have asked for expert witnesses to explain the resource to her in much more detail.

We now come to another situation in which once again somebody who writes on Twitter is being paraded before society as somebody who is evil or wicked. I am in this instance referring to a civil servant by the name of Sarah Baskerville who tweets in a private capacity about the things that she is involved with, including her job. Now, one could argue that if you start referring to what's happening in your job you are opening yourself up to a world of trouble, and I wouldn't disagree with that for a moment. However, it is at least possible, and perhaps likely, the Sarah Baskerville will lose her job as a result of what she is tweeting in a private capacity. That's the first issue. The second issue is the way in which this has been treated by the press. This is the thing I find particularly interesting. Yesterday the Daily Mail wrote a vitriolic piecein which she was attacked personally in a language that only the gutter press can manage in a way that they do. Today the Independent on Sunday picked up the Daily Mail story and ran with it themselves. However they didn't have anything extra to add and they simply continued the attack. One does have to wonder if a middle ranking civil servant actually deserves the attention she has unwittingly achieved. I don't think that she does and I think what's actually happening here is that she is the stick that the press is using to attempt to beat Twitter and social media in general.

It seems quite clear to me that the traditional and established press are deeply threatened by the rise of social media resources and the way in which everybody can be their own journalist. One of the things that interests me on the courses that I run is that quite often people say that they don't think that they can trust the information that they find on Twitter, but they can trust the information that they find in the press. Clearly this is a nonsensical state of matters, and we only have to look at the recent case of, surprise, surprise the Daily Mail in which one of their reporters wrote a piece about the new iPhone based on a fake Twitter account. Not only are judges unable to understand the role and the value of Twitter, it seems that journalists are unable to do so either. It is no surprise therefore that of course they are going to attack the results at any and every possible opportunity.

Moreover, news is becoming available on social networking and social media sites including Twitter much more quickly than the traditional press are able to find and report it for themselves. I am reminded of the post that I wrote earlier this year which was about the earthquake that took place in Mexico and California. Within the space of 2 minutes there were 132,000 tweets, and it still took over 10 minutes for the BBC, Sky News, CNN and other major news agencies to catch up with the story. These resources are now regularly showing up old-style news and journalism as out of date and behind the times. It should therefore come as no surprise that they will attack Twitter, Facebook and any other resource whenever they possibly can. As readers and as information professionals I do not believe that we are in a position to regard the news as anything other than a very biased source when it comes to reporting anything in this area. Furthermore, if we as information professionals are keen on the use of these tools and wish to use them as often and as well as we possibly can do they are not going to be very keen on us either!

Nonetheless I believe that it is important that we use these tools because they are becoming at least as good, if not significantly better than the traditional reporting mechanisms that we have had to use up until now. While of course I'm not advocating that libraries should not stock, offer, promote, and use newspapers and so on when we come to finding out information for our users I believe that we need to start taking social media reporting much more seriously. We all need to know how to search Twitter and Facebook for example to get the information that we require. We need to make better and more use of tools such as the Google Timeline resource to narrow down the information we require to specific time periods. When we need information about what is happening in the world now, and by "now" I mean within the last few seconds to the last few minutes perhaps it is time to start considering using the BBC etc as a secondary resource, which when it can catch up with the news is admittedly, able to give us more information then we will get in a single 140 characters.

Should we trust one tweet? I think the answer to that depends on who was doing the tweeting, and as information professionals we need to evaluate these tools and encourage our users to do the same thing. Certainly, sometimes I would trust a single tweet if I know who wrote it, but if I didn't I wouldn't necessarily ignore it but I would seek further corroboration either in my Twitter time stream or elsewhere. However the fact that you can get 132,000 tweets within 2 min on a single event does make me much more likely to believe that the event is taking place and to be able to get a variety of attitudes towards it, then I will be to believe in a second rate piece produced by a newspaper, be it the Daily Mail or sadly the Independent on Sunday.

Flickr: The National Archives UK's Photostream

If you're looking for some interesting historical documents, 19th/20th century photographs, artwork or illuminations, you would do worse than visit the Flickr: The National Archives UK's Photostream. It currently has just a shade over 200 images, but there are no known copyright restrictions on them, so you can use them however you'd like to.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Welcome the National Archives UK to the Commons! (flickr.net)
• Flickr Gets A Lesson In UK History (thenextweb.com)

UK housewives rule in online time

Fun article from the BBC NEWS | Technology site which has picked up on a TNS survey looking at internet use. UK housewives spend 47% of their leisure time online. I'm rather doubtful of this figure to be honest, but it's a statistic so it must be right! Other UK related results showed that the UK is the least trusting of print newspaper based information of any of the 16 countries surveyed. Students spend 39% of their time online, while the unemployed spent 32%. 58% of UK respondents had met online friends, the average being 60%.

UK Govt Minister looks like a fool...

I've resisted this one since Saturday, but can manage no longer. In the BBC news story Website age ratings 'an option' it's reported 'Culture Secretary' Andy Burnham wants to apply film-style ratings to websites in an attempt to 'save the children'. The lack of understanding this man shows regarding the internet is quite astonishing. I can only suppose his civil servants dislike him as well, given that they didn't actually stop his gibberish getting published.

It wasn't so long ago that the government was talking about having chat rooms policed to 'save the children', and a fat lot came of that. Quite how a rating system is going to stop children looking at anything is baffling to say the least. The best that it'll do is encourage children to look for X rated sites, leading to the exact opposite of what Nitwit Burnham wants.

I love some of the things he says: "content standards online are not as clear as we've all been used in traditional media". No, that's right, and that's because the internet is not traditional media - we do things differently here y'know. (I'm going to sidestep the whole WWW v Internet debate since I suspect it'll be a definition too far for him). The classic political doublespeak however comes when he says that he doesn't want to curb free speech while in the same breath saying that he wants to protect the public from 'unacceptable' material. So that'll be censorship then?

I could weep sometimes, really I could.

A lot of Brits don't understand search engines | Technology | guardian.co.uk

I think we can probably file this under 'no surprise there then!' I doubt that many other people really understand search engines either. However, as information people it's worth knowing what they particularly don't get, and acccording to the Guardian article A lot of Brits don't understand search engines 24% believe that website owners can't affect the ranking, 22% believe ranking is paid, 19% have no clue how ranking is arrived at, while 5% believe it's arranged at random.

So, next time you're showing a user around the net and pointing out search engines to them, those are the things that you might want to address in particular.