Alex Muller

Euan posted a photo to Twitter tonight from a tabloid (though I’m not sure which one). The headline read:

Beautiful Issy was sucked into drugs by the Internet… it killed her

This of course is the story of 15-year-old Isobel Jones-Reilly, who (at the risk of speculating a little) died after taking ecstasy at a friend’s house.

Euan’s dead on with his caption:

Oh FFS

Arthur Martin and Tamara Cohen, writing for The Mail (God, I hate it so), are reporting that she was “sucked in by the drug-taking exploits of the celebrities she idolised” and “was hooked on the internet”. Take it from somebody who, according to his mother (!), does have an unhealthy addiction to “that machine” (as she so affectionately calls it): I may be screwed up in all sorts of ways, but I’ve thus far managed to avoid ingesting lethal doses of various drugs. I’m not particularly sure the two are related.

The way they’re trying to spin this makes me so angry:

Isobel, described as a ‘member of the Myspace Generation’, used at least seven social networking sites

As do a huge number of 15-year-olds, I’ll bet. How many die each year?

Jaye Williamson, who was Isobel’s English teacher at Chiswick Community College, in west London, said: ‘She was into the kind of things that teenagers get into, but she got hooked on the worldwide web. She was part of the Myspace generation. She got caught and we are devastated.’

I’ve seen first hand the difference between the words a journalist hears and what ends up on the page, so I’m hoping that Ms Williamson doesn’t stand by that quote. What on earth does “she got caught” mean?

There’s already going to be a backlash of protective parents stopping their teenage children from leaving the house, at least in the short term. And thanks to articles like this, it’s going to extend to the web as well. Why do journalists (shudder) always feel the need to find something that’s obviously unrelated to blame? I’d love to be a fly on the wall watching articles like this being produced. The little jokes across the office, the one-line emails, the instant messages, would all be so revealing.

I don’t mean for this post to sound insensitive. While what’s happened is obviously incredibly sad, I wish the papers wouldn’t see it as an opportunity to push the bizarre agenda du jour.

Chromaroma is a London-based game involving Oyster cards; you link your card up to your account and it pulls data in from TfL’s journey history.

I wanted to be able to see more of the data that Chromaroma has stored up, so I took the stations off the leaderboard (the most visited stations) and plotted them onto TfL’s tube map. The more swipes a station’s had, the larger it appears. Oh, and coloured according to which team currently owns it.

The result?

Yep, it’s just blobs and a river. But hey, they’re pretty blobs. I’d love to see some kind of simple visualisation like this on the site.

I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go:

If you’re a brand strategy/web development/whatever we’re calling it today company and your homepage (and therefore, my first impression of your company) looks like this, please change it. Like, right now.

(I use the very excellent and very open source ClickToFlash by Jonathan Rentzsch.)

After writing about spending time online, something obvious to everybody else quickly became obvious to me. I spend far too much time on the computer. An unhealthy amount of time? Probably, actually. (Dear me, I sound like my mum.)

So that’s what I’m going to do less of this year. And, because anything that doesn’t include nice big numbers makes me feel queasy, I’m going to use a computer to show me that I’m spending less time on the computer. I’m sure there’s something wrong with that.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that free time. Might possibly… read a book? That’s very last decade, I’m sure. If I manage to finish one this month, it’ll be Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind, as recommended by David far too long ago. Might even do some work. Crazy, I know.

I’ll let you know how things unfold, partly to keep me motivated. And I’ll see you in the flesh sometime? It’d be a nice change to your Twitter profile picture popping up now and then. Have a great year.

I got bored this evening and decided to create a graphic showing where I spend most of my time in the browser – the data is pulled from my Wakoopa account. I’ll probably get round to publishing the source sometime.

On the ‘social’ web.

Giggle.

I just don’t get the Digital Economy Bill. I don’t understand how it’s got to this point.

Cory wrote that article which we’ve all read by now.

Tim linked to Francis Davey’s take on part of it.

And then I started clicking, and reading, and clicking more. And I took a look on TheyWorkForYou.com to see if anybody cares about it. And I found out that Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer cares. And she asked one of the best questions I’ve ever read:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have sought the advice of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the adviser to the Minister for the Cabinet Office on public information delivery, on clauses 4 to 20 of the Digital Economy Bill and on any impact on access to the internet; and, if so, what was his advice. [HL441]

To which Lord Young of Norwood Green, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, replied:

While we are always interested in the views of acknowledged experts, we have not directly sought the advice of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in relation to Clauses 4 to 20 of the Digital Economy Bill.

Her Majesty’s Government did not consult the inventor of the World Wide Web – who already works with the Office of the Prime Minister – on the Digital Economy Bill. Can you tell where the stupid is yet?

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block make a good point on the gdgt podcast, one that made me stop and think:

• I think the tell will be a year from now, how many people at Google are running Chrome OS as their primary, or say sole, operating system at work. And I think that that number will actually be relatively low. I think that most people will still be running a more fully functioning install of Linux.
• I don’t think you could develop code in Chrome OS.
• There isn’t really a good, at least that I’ve heard of, a good web-based IDE, web-based code developing. You can’t substitute a terminal in the browser.

I’ve seen nothing so far that makes me want to get rid of TextMate (my text editor of choice on the Mac). But like I’ve said (somewhere, possibly on Twitter?) before, there’s nothing to stop this from being a secondary machine.

Listen to it »

Just in case you nonbelievers don’t think Google Chrome OS is going to change anything, take a look at this:

As a second computer (laptop), there’s no reason this can’t take over the world.

After looking at it more accurately (my 80 most used pieces of software), 63% of what I do today could happen on Google Chrome OS with no change to my habits whatsoever.