Maria

Today is the first ever OneWebDay; “the one day a year when we all – everyone around the physical globe – can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities”. OneWebDay was started by Susan Crawford who’s also one of our Board Directors at ICANN and an all round good egg. The idea is to celebrate all the good things about the web, and the Internet more broadly, and do things that either make it better or remind ourselves how great it already is. Fun things, chatty things, useful things, things like teaching people to blog, getting grannies online and building community spaces.

We’ve not planned anything quite as concrete as all that here at CT. In fact, we’ve not planned anything at all. But we can certainly do the celebrating and reminiscing part of it.

Things like sharing:
How the web changed my life
How I found my job online
How I found friends online
What the web means to me
Or, my own category; mad things the web lets us do that we’d never thought of before and now can’t live without.

You know, the little things. So here goes.

How the web changed my life: well, I used to work in tv and film and had to get up very early. Which was no good as I’m emphatically not a morning person (not really a night owl or a middle of the day person either, for that matter). Now I make my living more or less directly from the Internet as I’ve worked in Internet policy for the last six years. So that’s pretty obvious.

The real way the Internet changed my life, though, is by making expat life a bit less like living with a running sore. I IM with at least one sibling every day, blog with another, and share photos and emails with all the rest. And if I ever figure out this Skype thing, I won’t even have to phone my parents any more. (They already have video-conferencing with their 8 month old grand-son in Washington, and will get it up and running next week for their 5 day old grand-daughter in Shropshire.) I read the Irish Times (and the Guardian, Washington Post and Le Monde) every morning, so I never feel completely out of touch with events. I download Questions and Answers and the evening news from Irish television and probably see more of my pundit/public figure type relatives than I ever did when I lived at home. I buy my flights online, knowing that the instant arbitrage of the Internet has helped drive prices down to the point where I can afford to be at home every six weeks. I manage bank accounts in four countries and shopped around for the best mortgage in one of them. And I get loads of silly joke emails every day, just as if I was in an office in Dublin. Of course, nothing is the same as living in your own country, speaking in your own accent, sitting in your best friend’s kitchen talking rubbish over a bottle of wine, going to a crap movie with your little brother because, hey, you’ve got the time. But the Internet helps. Lots.

So that’s a start, anyway. There’s lots I could say about how I got into Internet policy back in the days when we had all that west coast libertarian guff about the Internet making us free (because information wants to be free. Right.) and I started to worry that it was actually the ultimate technology of control. But it’s OneWebDay, the day when we think about the happy, shiny stuff the Internet has brought us.

So think. And share. Thanks!

I thought I’d lost the ability to be shocked and awed by spammers’ ability to construct useless spam sites full of spammy spam. A google search for “learning and development consultancy” yields a top of the page result as follows:

“Learning and Development – consultancy and services from …
Performance By Design provides consultancy on how to increase the benefits of learning in organisations and enhance management development.
www.performance-by-design.com/Learn.htm – 38k”

Plausible tagline, plausible blurb, plausible url. But when you get there, it’s a bunch of advertising links for curtains, drapes and after-dinner speeches.

It looks like these people aren’t just busy gaming search engines for the top spot, but are putting significant effort into appearing to Internet users to be content-rich, legitimate sites. And yes, I do believe it is illegitimate to fool users into thinking they’ll find something relevant and useful when they click through, and not a page full of third party advertising, however ‘relevant’ it may be. (Parked domain monetization was a hot topic at a recent ICANN meeting. I wrote a long MBA paper about this issue a while back, and found these two papers on search engine gaming absolutely fascinating. And my colleague Dave Piscitello has rather firm views on the topic.)

Within a week of eachother, both my and a younger sister’s re-conditioned ipods have died. This was my third. After a year’s solid service, my first (they’ve all been 20 gig clickwheels) deteriorated over a couple of days before completely crashing. I sent it to a crowd in Kentucky who promised to either fix it or replace the hard drive. But not before they’d posted me an ipod ambulance to send it in, completely mislabelling it so I spent 3 months arguing with DHL over a customs fee of 45 Euro for said empty box. With its new drive, my little ipod zombie struggled on for another two months. Ipod no. 2, a secondhand job, is probably still working. But last time I saw it was tucked into the seat-back pocket on a Singapore Airlines jet. A week ago, ipod no. 3 upped and produced a black screen of death. After a stern talking to and a 24 hour time out, I sat it into its little charger only to pull it out 10 minutes later because of the sharp smell of burning. Now I truly understand what a meltdown is. So, no more ipods for me. Nor for my sister Annaick, who was on no. 2. That is, until the prospect loomed of an 8 month trip with no music.

What to do? I’m leaning towards a SanDisk, hoping the flash memory might be less likely to ignite. And figuring anything that avoids iTunes control-freak closed standards and copy controls is a good thing. Annaick’s considering a nano, but open to something with a non-proprietary format that can be more easily updated while on the road. She’s checked out Zens, but their distinguishing feature seems to be the ability to die the week their 1 year warranty expires.

Then there’s the mp3 player / mobile phone dilemma. Is this a hybrid device whose time has come? I lost my tri-band phone on a trip a few months ago (bit of a pattern, that) and replaced it with a cheap and cheerful Nokia that doesn’t work outside GSM land. If I spend enough $$$ for a posh new phone that works in the US, might I just as well buy something that plays mp3s as well? Might I even be less phone-phobic and likely to turn it on if it did nice things like play music while I run?

Questions, questions. Answers would be welcome, and sneering or ribaldry for a repeat ipod offender will be taken on the chin.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I kept my television at the bottom of a cupboard. The idea was to waste no time watching tv when I should be studying. Now I watch the news every morning instead of reading improving literature. And it is starting to drive me up the bloody wall.

Whatever channel is on, it’s always the same set up; an older man and a younger woman tag-team the reporting, switching hyperactively from screens on either side, back to each other, and on to full-screen reports. Which is bearable, if patronising. Whenever the man is talking, the woman looks at him, listens, clearly engaged, nods slightly at the right bits, matches her facial expressions to his speech. It’s almost imperceptible, a simple empathic behaviour most women do when others speak. But every bloody time the woman opens her mouth, the man stares straight ahead, completely ignoring her, and only barely acknowledges her when it’s his turn to cut in.

I know, I know. This is how conversations go, whether in a private or professional settings. I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen women colleagues cut off by men in a group conversation. The men don’t seem to even notice they do it – it’s as if they have a divine right to speak at any moment. Yet when male colleagues are in full flight, we do our ‘active listening’, and send out all those signals which we think are supportive of their right to speak, and they probably think are just weak. Because they sure as hell almost never send them back.

There are several ways to respond to being cut off and talked over. Mostly I ignore it unless he’s a repeat offender. Then, I just keep talking. It makes the point that you were already talking and aren’t about to back out of the conversation. It injects a noise level and tension into the conversation that wasn’t there before and is frankly unpleasant – which is a fair way to spread the pain around, I think. Otherwise, of course, I just turn off the telly.

I am very pleased to be introducing a dear friend, Matthew Bishop, as CT’s guest blogger this week. Matthew is a fellow Fellow of the Twenty First Century Trust (Henry and I are also fellows.). His biog at the Economist tells us that, apart from being ‘Chief Business Writer/American Business Editor’ of that newspaper, Matthew has written several worthy sounding books. I can add to the official blurb that while Matthew was on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005 he met and briefed Angelina Jolie on micro-finance. Rmphf!

Also, and perhaps this is where the professionalism of journalists trumps us amateurs, Matthew is a consummate hack (in a good way). Several years ago, Matthew and I were at an after-dinner speech by a former prime minister of a slightly out of the way country. The PM’s heavies all wore Pele style mullets and insisted that the drink stop pouring during his speech. The speech went on and on. Several people nodded off. I believe Matthew snored, but maybe that’s embroidery on my part. I mostly stared into the middle distance and fretted about the lack of booze. The speech abruptly stopped. Our devilishly handsome chair thanked him and asked desperately for questions. Our minds were blank. The silence was painful. Someone gave Matthew a dig. He spluttered awake, took instant stock, and asked a very clever and well-backgrounded question on the politics of that country. What a pro. While others are asleep with drool on their chins, the hack is awake (just) and parlaying a little knowledge into a lot of kudos. That, I said to myself, is a man born to blog.

Maurice Manning has an excellent piece in today’s Irish Times (pay-walled) marking the 80th birthday of Declan Costello. Costello wrote ‘Towards a Just Society’ in the 1960s. The pamphlet re-defined Irish politics in terms of social justice, energised a new generation of activists, and probably cost Costello a Cabinet position when Fine Gael got back into power in 1973. Some of the ideas of the Just Society – especially its emphasis on direct government intervention in the economy – seem outdated today. But Costello helped to make Fine Gael a Christian democrat party, back when that meant something more than fighting stem cell research and gay marriage.
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There are good reasons why I haven’t bought Wired Magazine in about five years. The whole bleeding edge thing frayed a bit with the dot com crash. And that hyperactive, slightly autistic gadget-boy take on the world (a planet which only spanned the west coast of the US and the high tech bits of Asia) just started to seem ever so recursive. But today, in honour of being on the west coast and much delayed on a flight from L.A back to Europe, I cracked and bought the magazine.

Wired now has fashion tips for how to wear your bluetooth, a rather pointless feature on ‘Earth 2.0’, advertisements for Gilette (because the best a man can get is a whopping five blades), and far more car ads than I remember – most of them for Japanese vehicles that improbably combine performance, high tech fuel efficiency, and the nodding respect of other techies. So ‘Wired Man’ is slightly more environmentally aware than he used to be, but just as insecure and rather implausibly hirsute.
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A recent British expat writes today about life in Belgium; a familiar topic here at CT. But what strikes me is this sentence; “It’s my first proper visit to the “UK” (as expatriates and no-one else calls it) since I moved to Brussels”. Admitedly, ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ is inconcise. The writer evidently calls it ‘Britain’ – something I hardly ever heard, despite living there for three years. I had a non-expat British friend visiting this week, and she only ever called it ‘the UK’. ‘Britain’ sounds like something the Queen would say. It sounds mustily heroic. As in ‘The Battle of’. ‘The UK’ is much more now, much more New Labour, totally Third Way. And not as cringingly embarrassing as Cool Britannia.

Several years ago, I gave a talk to a mixed group of Northern Irish business people (It was on compliance with the E-Commerce Directive; they were rapt.). Half way through, I realised I didn’t know how to refer to, er, ‘the mainland’. But they were a lovely, warm audience and only slightly embarrassed for me, and during the Q&A they gently illustrated the accepted usage. They say ‘GB’ to mean the island of Britain, and ‘NI’ for their own patch. I know they also had an elegantly benign name for the South, I just can’t remember it. Maybe it was ‘the South’.

But the worst, the absolute block your ears, nails on a black board worst is when people say ‘England’ instead of ‘the UK’ or even ‘Britain’. And, sorry, but Americans are the worst offenders. They say things like ‘London, England’ which is of course superfluous because there is only one London. (I say this having spent a weekend in London, Ontario.) We all know London is located in England, but it is the capital of the UK. It’s a really bad habit to keep saying ‘England’ as if it’s interchangeable with ‘Britain’. It’s not. Saying ‘England’ when you mean ‘Britain’ is gauche and annoying and very, very blonde.

There are moments to say ‘England’, but they’re actually quite rare. One of those moments is when England plays in the world cup – it’s the England team, as of course the Scots and Welsh are too rubbish to qualify. But England does not enter the Olympics; Britain does. And England will not decide whether to join the EMU, Britain will. (Arguably.) England has never held the presidency of the EU, or hosted the G8, or invaded a country on its own (at least not in a few hundred years), because it’s not a state. Of course England has a certain status. And there’s that constitutional oddity that has the Welsh and Scots deciding their own issues at their own assemblies, but being able to chip in when Westminster decides purely English questions. But that is no excuse to toss your hair and talk about your summer holidays in ‘England’ where you also took in the Lake District.

An (English) rose by any other name does not smell so sweet.

When I heard Jonathan Edelstein, aka the Head Heeb, had been to Ireland recently and was planning to write something about it, I knew we’d be in for a treat. Today he’s posted a very informative piece on immigration in Ireland. It’s a good overview from someone who has a lot of comparative knowledge about immigration and can place our experience in a wider context. From being a net exporter of people up to 1995, we’ve been an immigration nation since, with 10% of people living in Ireland today born elsewhere. And it’s only getting started.
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Like many others, I’ve spent much of this week thinking about the bombings in London on 7th July last year. I want to mark the day but find it hard to write anything that’s not superfluous or self-regarding. So I invite you to read the thoughts of anonymous blogger Rachel from north London who was caught up in the bombings, and perhaps to consider signing a petition calling for a public inquiry into the bombings and their aftermath.

Well, this will be a short post…

Usually I avoid writing about annoying aspects of Belgian life and its weird mix of individual opportunism and ossified institutional arrangements (what I call ‘the dodgy and the stodgy’). There are endless examples; landlords that leave their non-Belgian tenants without power or water but sic the authorities on them at even the threat of non-payment; the ISP I never received service from which nonetheless billed me for months, ignored registered letters, and only desisted when the very efficient Dutch debt collection company they used reviewed the correspondence and sighed ‘yes, this seems to happen a lot, there’. And then there’s the schizophrenic Belgian tendency to ignore people in distress in public places (ask any ex-pat whose been knocked off their bike, attacked, mugged, or just fallen over in the street) yet go on enormous public protests following murders. And don’t get me started on the bizaare collective amnesia about the Congo.
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It’s not often (well, ever) that I blog about anything directly work related. That’s because I work for an organisation that gets sued every 5 minutes, has a unique (and uniquely exposed) institutional model, deals with complex and controversial issues, and has endless stakeholders from dozens of bloggers to international organisations. That’s all by way of encouraging you to join in the fun!

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Hot off the presses. No idea when I’ll have time to read it, on account of me being so ‘time poor’ that I may as well have a peptic ulcer.

You know when you look at a word, and suddenly it appears to be spelt wrongly? ‘Vendor’ is a classic. Somehow you’ve stepped outside the frame, and the obvious no longer appears right.

I just cast my eyes over a press release from an Irish political party that shall remain nameless, and realised, ‘either this is a poor translation from the Manchurian or I have been abroad for way too long…”
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