Taking Out The Trash

Predicting swine flu through Google

I've been meaning to post about the new UK-edition of Wired magazine but the usual things got in the way.
Suffice to say I was impressed with the first issue. Not overwhelmed, but certainly enthused by its intelligence and the luxury of its presentation.
Not overwhelmed because you expect a launch issue to blow your socks off. It's six months down the line that the quality shows through. You imagine that Conde Nast are in for the long haul so let's see what happens by issue six.
What did spark me to finally getting round to this was an item I caught today on their web site about how traffic analysis of Google searches pre-dated media reports on swine flu. It has interesting implications for journalists (and business and spooks) who want to get the jump on imminently breaking events.

Blogging and the BBC

Just done an interview with Dickon Hooper from the BBC West's Politics Show for a piece this Sunday about politics and blogging.
Passing swiftly over my meagre contribution, look out for James Barlow and Kerry McCarthy MP who are must reads if you are at all interested in Bristol bloggers and politics in particular.
Meanwhile I was interested to see Freelance Unbound celebrate a huge rise in his/her/their Technorati ranking. Up some two million places. Go Freelance Unbound.
So, of course, I had to check out my own ranking and I think 816,035 is pretty reasonable, um, based on  nothing more than it's below a million.
(That's enough stats, ed) Need to start putting together an article for the Guardian's Work section on people who staff complaint lines which should be done tonight and then heading to London tomorrow to the studios of This Morning.

Update 1: Technorati's top blog by authority is the Huffington Post (Iain Dale is 2,500ish - watch out Iain, I'm catching you up).

Update 2: kind of appropriate that this is the topic for my 200th post.

We're all doomed

According to reports, seven people from Wiltshire being tested for Swine Flu (aka: the end of the world as we know it).
It's great that the cases timed themselves just right the weekly newspapers. How irritating would it have been to have found out on Thursday that Wiltshire was about to be wiped out by this deadly diseases.
A Very Public Sociologist has a nice take on the media's latest outbreak of hysteria.
Meanwhile, I'm just about to got out and take my turn on the barricades. This is one Wiltshire village which won't get infected.

Update: The Daily Mash, as ever, has the news that matters.

Update II: Fleet Street Blues has an excellent primer for journalists on how to cover this story. Of course if, like this freelancer, you're trying to pitch ideas which don't involve people wearing face masks you know that newsdesks at the moment have a one track mind. Still, gives me a chance to finish my review of Slow Tech.

Update III: in defence of the media, by Charlie Beckett from POLIS.

Firstly, I think it is the media’s job to panic. Government would love to keep everything nice and calm. It  doesn’t want to be rushed into expensive precautionary measures. Surely, it is journalism’s job to challenge the authorities to come clean about the dangers and to make them share their thinking and information with us.

The wasteland that is Wiltshire's blogosphere

I spoke earlier with a BBC reporter who is researching a piece for The Politics Show about blogging.
I mentioned that in Bristol, while traditional print media was declining, bloggers were having some success filling the gap when it comes to holding people and organisations to account.
See this for instance.
But as you go further east, while the print media is similarly tardy, the blogosphere becomes ever more quieter.
There are now parts of Wiltshire, patricularly on the Hampshire border, which are a wasteland as far as traditional and new media are concerned and it's just the good old parish magazines left.
So is our new unitary authority, which serves a population of over 400,000, getting an easy ride or the press it deserves from the print media?

Hat tip for the BBC contact to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal

Blacklisting in publishing

Interesting snippet from an interview in The Guardian with Claire Walsh - long-term partner of the writer J G Ballard.

It says:

When they first met, Walsh was politically engaged on the left. "My contribution to the women's movement was to try to organise trade unions at publishing companies where I worked to get women better paid. I lost my job over that and was blacklisted."

You can read the full interview here.

PM on blacklisting: let's consult again

At Prime Minister's Questions yesterday Michael Clapham asked Gordon Brown about the prospects for a change in the law to make blacklisting illegal.

Q5. [269364] Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone) (Lab): The Prime Minister will be aware that the Information Commissioner recently found concrete evidence that blacklisting was widespread in the construction industry. Given that there was a consultation exercise in 2003, does he agree that it is now time to bring in the regulations to prohibit blacklisting, rather than—and before—going to a further consultation?

The Prime Minister: I am, as are the whole Government, very concerned by the evidence uncovered by the Information Commissioner about the re-emergence of blacklisting in the construction industry. In 1999, we established a power to introduce regulations to outlaw blacklisting, and we also consulted on draft regulations in 2003. Evidence at that time suggested that blacklisting had been eradicated but, given that there is new evidence that that is not the case, we are looking urgently at what we can do. We will assess whether the 2003 regulations, amended as necessary, should now be introduced to the House of Commons.

Update: UCATT has just issued a press release which takes a more positive line on Brown's comments (perhaps to paint him to a corner) and reveals that former minister Ian McCartney, who intoduced the original legislation, is now in favour of a ban.

An extra from the release says:

In response to Mr Brown’s statement Alan Ritchie General Secretary of construction union UCATT, said: “I am pleased that the Prime Minister has clearly indicated that blacklisting will be banned.
"It is monstrous that in the 21^st century the majority of major construction companies were engaged in blacklisting. They were content to deny work simply because of a persons union membership or because they had tried to improve site safety.”  ... 
Meanwhile Ian McCartney the former minister, who in 1999 was responsible for introducing the Fairness at Work Act, has written to UCATT expressing his full support for the regulations to outlaw blacklisting being enacted at the earliest opportunity.
Mr McCartney, said: “The Government now has to hand the evidence required to prove the existence of blacklisting in the construction industry and that the commitment to enact the relevant sections of the 1999 Act should be implemented without delay.”

 
A piece I have just written for Tribune takes up the same theme. A BERR spokesman told me that the gobvernment was planning to issue a consultation document in the summer. Whether that counts as "urgent" is one thing - whether another around of consultation is needed is another.

My first couple of pars of my article are below.

The government looks set to carry out a consultation on possible changes to employment legislation to outlaw blacklisting.

It follows a raid earlier this year by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on a firm in the

Midlands

which compiled files on trade union activists. Investigators also uncovered invoices from some 40 construction companies which subscribed to The Consulting Association.

In a House of Commons debate a month ago, employment minister Pat Mcfadden, said he and his officials would be studying the evidence seized by the ICO closely and would “come to a conclusion in the near future”.

Now a spokesman for the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform says that it “will hold meetings with interested parties though April and issue a consultation document in the summer”.

Next month Ian Kerr, who ran The Consulting Association, is due to appear before Macclesfield Magistrates Court charged with offences under the Data Protection Act. Kerr kept files on more than 3,000 people in total with detailed information on around 1,600.

ENDS

Bosses spies are loo-dicrous

Good piece from union member Steve Kelly about being on Ian Kerr's blacklist of construction workers.

Kelly obtained his file from the Information Commissioner's Office. He says:

"It was an 18 page document containing allegations that I was a “trouble maker”, “trade union militant” , “strike organiser” , “intimidating workers to join the union”, “threatening supervisors”, and even “writing abuse on the toilet walls”!"

So, was it some poor sap's job to inspect toilet graffiti and match it against suspect employees? That time could perhaps have been better spent insuring people were not needlessly being killed or injured at work one thinks.

note: if you think you can do a better pun for a headline then you try it.

Journalists last in the queue for MoD FOI responses

Thanks to FOI News for pointing out a report from an American academic which shows our Ministry of Defence is far from neutral when it responds to FOI requests.

Alasdair Roberts, from Suffolk University in Boston, looked at the data relating to 15,627 FOI requests made to the MoD.

He found that MPs and Peers had “Quick Response” stamped on 64% of their requests (the most of any category of requester) while bottom came journalists with a third getting a “Quick Response” stamp.

You can bet that those third came from the national media; your poor old freelancers and local reporters are unlikely to have been given preferential treatment.

FOI News says:

So much for the MoD being blind to who is making the request. ‘Quick Response’, who decides if a question gets that stamped on it? But I don’t want to attack the MoD as my experience is that of all the Government departments they are the fairest and most professional when it comes to FoI requests. Heaven knows what this study would have looked like if it had been using data from the National Offender Management Unit at the Ministry of Justice!

And I can second that comment about the National Offender Management Unit having spent two years trying to extract basic information from them. I currently have an appeal with the Information Commission about their abject failure to respond to requests in time.

You can read Prof Roberts report here.

Review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown

Update: Interesting (if short) review from Tom Watson MP

Tribune has just published my review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown, on the global economic crisis. You can't see the review online so a copy is below.

"A succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism" is my bid for the sentence which ends up on the back of the next edition.

It's one of a number of books on the credit crunch (such an innocuous term) and while I'm not that bothered with Vince Cable's The Storm I would like to try The Gods That Failed by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson which predicted many of the current problems.

But, as it is, I have Jason Cowley's The Last Game on the Liverpool v Arsenal title deciding match in 1989 to review next (reviewed by the excellent Jim White here). It's bringing back a lot of good memories.

If there’s one boom caused by the global financial bust then it’s in books telling us how it all happened.

Paul Mason, Newsnight’s relatively new economics editor, got to cover the biggest economics story of the last 70 years and could hardly believe what he was reporting. The one constant through the breathless prose is the sound of his jaw dropping as another low is breached.

The book is roughly in three sections. The initial part is the traditional bit where a journalist talks in the present tense as events unfold around them. Mason is always being woken at some ungodly hour to be told another venerable institution has gone belly up and then has to rush off to stand outside a big glass building or watch Alistair Darling give a press conference.

There are nice details such as the body language of Treasury officials betraying their terror.

Having set the scene, Mason then tries to put the crisis in context. Some of this will please supporters of the position that it’s all America’s fault. For Mason it stems from deregulation during the Clinton presidency combined with a complete lack of oversight by all the institutions we usually rely on. That includes the media.

As the mind boggling sums of money accumulated nobody thought to peek behind the curtain. It’s here that Mason sticks it to Brown. Second only to America in cheering on this gigantic house of cards was the Labour government and the then chancellor. It had given up on manufacturing as a basis for the country’s prosperity and bet everything on the City of London.

Mason does not spare us the complex details of the financial deals. Reassuringly he tells us that MPs have been left holding their heads in their hands having tried to similarly fathom where the money went. A glossary of terms at the back helps you get through this.

He also makes the vital point that the collapse has already had a direct and savage impact on the poorest. Swathes of urban America have been cleansed of people who defaulted on their mortgages as industries folded. Meanwhile the short lived commodity bubble priced food directly out of reach of millions of people in the Third World.

In a short final section of a short book, Mason suggests how this changed financial and political landscape might develop.

He sees an opportunity to institute systems “shaped by the willingness of ordinary people to impose limits, standards and sustainability on capital”.

Being such a short, and somewhat rushed, conclusion it doesn’t quite have the force that it might have. However this is a succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism.

ENDS

Gearing up for June 4

After months of preparation, starting to really gear up for the local authority elections on June 4.
Just had this Facebook site set up for my local campaign.