Izzard's the perfect fix for broken Brown

Eddie Izzard is really cool. He was cool when he was a bit overweight and caked in makeup. He was cool when he was a bit overweight, wearing chunky 90s heels and just a smidgen too much PVC. And now he’s done it again. He’s cool in a Labour party election broadcast. The first person in history to ever look cool in a party election broadcast.

http://www.youtube.com/v/oZDreHPzU94&hl=en_GB&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

In the video released today Izzard manages to talk about issues we have heard a million times before in a witty, engaging manner. He didn’t preach nor did his words come across as an air-headed celebrity endorsement. So how did he do it?

Simply it seems by sticking to what he does best. Comedy. Comedy is, invariably, hooked on politics. Pointing out a societal elephant in the room or two – like the fact that tories don’t tend to be very nice people but do tend to have a lot of money that they don’t like to share – is the essence of many a comic routine . And it is this cynical social commentary that Brits are famous for – shining a bright often unflattering light on to the realities of our society.

But comedy is also uplifting. Encoraging you, literally, to laugh at yourself and at the mess that we’ve got ourselves and the world into. Cynical it may be, but comedy also relies on optimism.

So it doesn’t suprise me that an accomplished comedian like Eddie Izzard is practically the only person in this electoral campaign that comes across as genuine, honest and appealing. The reason is simple. We mayshare a joke about a broken Britain but we’re only able to do so because deep down we know it’s also pretty brilliant.

Election tools pre-leaders' debate update

Tweetminster: Twitter's virtual house of commons credit:Tweetminster.com

I’m working at The Telegraph this week tracking down PPC from obscure constituencies –  which has led me to stumble across another couple of election sites – all of which are really informative and, well, great.

The first one I found is a fantastic crowd-sourcing idea to keep up accountability at a time a manic electioneering. The Straight Choice is a site to which you can upload photos of all the thousands of obnoxious, often outstandingly false election leaflets our dear PPCs are determined to stuff through our letter boxes. Judging by the crap they tend to write on these things I think it’s a great idea someone’s keeping their eyes peeled for the more outrageous breaches of truth telling.

I’d also recommend Your Next MP a site that holds information on 3276 candidates from 62 parties standing for 650 seats. Ominously they claim they ‘know about’ 412 parties. I don’t know what that means but if I was a party I’d be scared. The site is feuled by interested constituents and so the candidate information is quite a bit more up to date than the Guardian info (and I should know, I’ve trawled through 164 of them.)

Tweetminster, the site that tracks MPs and PPCs tweeting on twitter (and does some pretty impressive analysis too) has a facility for finding the twitter handles for all the PPCs in your constituency. It also features a live stream of party twitterers, a regional electoral map based on twitter canvassing and a ‘Westminster Wire’ which streams general political tweets. Well worth a visit and a follow on twitter. Be warned though a few PCCs are on twitter but not filed under the right constituency. Others are standing down and so have little relevance to the battle in the constituency they are listed under.

And so to Bingo. Not as an exciting alternative to trying your luck at the polls but rather as an engaging way to enjoy this evening’s electoral debate festivities. One Society has made Bingo cards featuring words they and other political organisations think the debates will be buzzing with. With phrases like ‘postcode lottery’ ‘bankers’ bonuses’ and ‘fairness’ on the Unison card you’ll probably get a Bingo (can you get a Bingo?) in the opening statement, regardless of which leader is speaking.

The online tools to personalise your election

This morning I woke up with election fever.

While City colleagues have spent the last week watching Lib Dem Battle bus launches and making their way to the wilds of Leeds on the trail of Ed Balls I’ve felt quite detached from the election.

Which is odd considering how newspapers, TV and social networking sites are heaving with election themed commentary.

So I have decided to make use of some new tools that the wonderful world of the internet has provided and personalise the battle. To try and remove the personality  politics of dave, gordo and Vince, sorry, er, Nick, and actually think about why I am voting and who I am voting for.

credit: flickr/Tom Edwards

First up it’s policies.

Often members of top three bamboozle you into thinking they are offering the same thing nicely packaged towards your political leanings.

But while I like to think I am a liberal left wing thinker I don’t want my decision to be made purely on the basis I buy The Guardian and grew up in North London. As luck would have it, there are these wonderful things called policies to help you make informed decisions.

Vote for Policies is a website that creates a personalised survey for you based on policy areas that most interest you. You are then presented with a selection of policy pledges which are each from the 6 main parties but are un-labled.

You’re forced to actually think about what changes you agree should be made to the NHS or the voting system rather than being distracted by samcam’s baby bump or Gordon’s eery smile. Be warned though – on policies the people think seem to think more UKIP and BNP combined than they do of Labour.

It turns out my Guardian reading was probably quite an accurate barometer. I came out as 85.71% Labour and the rest Green…

Next up – your constituency.

It’s easy to forget you are voting for your own MP not for a the Prime Minister. What is easier to forget is that your vote counts for a lot more or less depending on where you live. VoterPower powered by the Guardian and TheyWorkForYou is an aesthically pleasing breakdown of how much a vote in your area is worth – based on the seat’s marginality.

My constituency – Bethnal Green and Bow – is marginal. This means that my vote is worth the equivalent of 0.732. Initally that seems like a raw deal, but when put into context of the wider UK picture the sites shows that I actually have 2.9x more voting power than the average Briton. Voters in ‘hyper marginal’ contituency Arfon in Wales have a voting power of 5.17x the national average with each vote cast their being worth 1.308 votes.

Don’t forget the national picture

My MP – who thankfully will not, at least be Gallaway – will be just one of 646 MPs. The Telegraph’s recently launched election 2010 is the most comprehensive coverage I have come across. This interactive election map allows you to map out different election layers from Labour target seats to newly created constituencies.

What’s missing?

I’d like an MP and PPC tracker tool that shows me what the little tykes are up to once parliament is no longer in session. Where can I see them? Who have they seen? Are their claims stacking up?  This is a niche that I think local newspaper sites are really missing out on. Who knows the PPCs and the MPs better than their local rag? But then again that would assume that local paper had the resources and the appetite for such activities. Which – inexplicably considering the wealth of online tools at their disposal –  is rarely the case.

Indeed the most ‘multimedia’ piece on my local paper’s – The East London Advertiser – is a poll on a new conservation area. Oh the innovation.

Generally this sort of stuff have been left to more tech savvy bloggers – Brian Jones has done this great social media tracker for Bethnal green and Bow candidates (thanks to @fransingh for the recommendation.)

Again from the local paper side i’d like a discussion board – with threads suggested by the paper and members of the public – that keep the MPs in check. It could work as a localised version of Kathy Newman’s fantastic C4 fact check blog. A staple of my election reading.

Any other suggestions for making the election count at a local level? Post them here…

Should journalists talk to spooks?

Would you speak to this man? credit:Flickr/Dunechaser

In some ways this blog is a bit off topic – it was written in slightly longer more politicised form for a different project, but I think it brings up some interesting ideas about how controlled journalism’s relationship with MI5 is. It is especially pertinent when you consider that news is being heavily dissemintated and is no longer based solely in traditonal news orgnanisations and yet it is only a single person belonging to each influential newspaper or TV channel that is able to have any access to the entire MI5 operation.

It’s hard to argue that a state, particularly a post 9/11 state, does not need a secret intelligence service. And as long as the state itself is legitimate and democratic this required secrecy seems broadly acceptable. Since the greater openness forced on the MI5 by the European legal rulings culminating in the Security Service Act of 1989 and its adoption of the lead role in counter-terrorism since the Irish Troubles of the 1970s, the organisation has cultivated a benign and trustworthy public face, an image which is rarely challenged by politicians or the media.

But as Bernard Porter argues, the concept of a British secret service has not always been so acceptable – espionage, for much of the nineteenth century, was thought to be a low, foreign practice that was abhorred by the British in part because of its tactics of immoral deception and in part because the state could not always be relied on not to abuse it.

These arguments still ring true today. Espionage is not a universally constructive; often it is counter-productive as the practice itself is often claimed as a cause of war. Domestic surveillance too has moral ambiguities. Secrecy has led to past abuses like the surveillance of Labour MP Harriet Harman – how many other misuses of power are internally justified on this basis?

Journalists, therefore, have a fraught relationship with MI5. There is no press office or cheery PR manager to answer a journalist’s query, the identities of its employees are, by nature, a well protected secret and the public face of the organisation – its head Jonathan Evans – strategically micro-manages his contact with the media to ensure it remains on his terms.

Contact is maintained through a single journalist from each publication who is given a card with a number, an untraceable email and a name. For the vast majority of newspapers this single contact is their only keyhole into MI5. An invaluable source of official information and confirmation, the source provides the media with a rare opportunity to hold a powerful and secretive organisation to some semblance of account in the stories that spring from these meetings.

However, it is also a source that must be kept at arms length. The challenge is to produce decent, serious journalism about the MI5 on the basis of one heavily vetted completely un-attributable source. It is impossible for colleagues or rivals to critique the basis of the reporter’s argument as exclusive access is granted only to the chosen few. Meanwhile, no one within in MI5 is held accountable for the claims that they make. And as the claims they make can have some dangerous repercussions there is an argument for such influential and unanswerable be kept out of the press.

Cronyism and over familiarity is a real risk to journalistic integrity in situations such as this when one journalist is to be trusted and favoured above all others. If journalists only speak to one source how can their judgement is naturally clouded by their personal impressions of that person, and if those meetings are held in secret. Away from the prying eyes of their colleagues there is little motive for impartial interviews to be conducted.

And yet it is hard to imagine it being run any other way. It’s not MI5’s raison d’etre to be open and accountable. They are there for “the protection of national security and, in particular, its protection against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage.” And despite the fact that our taxes pay their wages, MI5 agents do put their lives on the line when infiltrating dangerous terrorist organisations and secrecy is one of their most powerful weapons. Understandably it is not something they will be willing to give up in the name of journalistic integrity.

Journalism’s relationship with MI5 is not ideal; the power balance is dangerously in favour of the secrecy demands of the service. However, it falls to the individual journalist, and their editor, to maintain integrity and make the appropriate checks on the information they choose to use.

Is Murdoch's paywall the beginning of an intellectual property revolution?

Murdoch has finally spoken. Times Online must be paid for and the millions of eyeballs viewing the pages are still not cutting the mustard with advertisers. A paywall will be erected in June costing £1 a day or £2 a week for online access to both The Times and The Sunday Times Online (which will, from June, have seperate websites.)

In a leader this weekend The Sunday Times defended this position, it said:

“At present we are in the absurd position of charging people £2 for our newspaper while simultaneously offering the same content free online. The flawed logic was that Internet advertising would pay for it. The recession has put a stop to that, so giving away expensive journalism is financially unsustainable and ultimately bad for us and our readers.”

Of course this is an issue, fundamentally, of revenue. Revenue to enable these papers to keep funding quality journalism. But there are more important philosophical issues here. It’s about how we, as a society, value the rights of intellectual property.

I have spent years as the annoying person at the dinner table admonishing people for downloading music or streaming TV or film content online without paying for it. The look I get for having never downloaded a song illegally would lead you to believe that it is me who is breaking the law, or at the very the least the status quo.

I know that my blank stare when the conversation turns to bit torrents and tv-link-sites makes me seem old fashioned and out of touch, but the endemic disregard of my peers for the rights of ownership over creative content really grates.

My go-to argument is that the inherent value of a CD from a shop is not the physical packaging but the music that it holds, the same music that can be downloaded illegally online. And,while few of my friends would walk into a shop and steal that CD, even if there was no chance of them being collared by an angry HMV worker, downloading claims no such moral boundaries. There is an anarchic idea that we are some how entitled to this creativity without reaching into our pockets. Just because we want it.

What a sad view of the world we are creating for ourselves. Over the centuries great works of literature, of music, of drama have endured alongside the great creations and inventions and yet their value has diverged sharply in the last decade. We are happy to pay for electricity to power the sparkly new speakers that blast our music but not for the music itself. In the same way newspapers have suffered. We want news, more news than ever, directly beamed to our laptops (which being physical objects we are of course more than happy to pay for) but we have given the reportage of this news a false value.

People claim that if forced to pay for it readers will go else where, which may be true. But is it right? Such arguments demean the intellectual output that newspapers produce. If your favourite band managed to find away to force you to pay for it’s music would you change you taste and switch allegiances? If a prolific author decided to give away their books for free would you stop reading Shakespeare or Austen?

The FT has managed to keep a loyal following firmly behind it’s paywall. But specialised content, like that the FT provides to business leaders is easily quantifiable in terms of value. These people need it to do their job. And so it makes perfect sense for them to pay for it.

The general public need to be re-educated about the value of the intellectual material that they consume but it is the responsibility of the producer not the consumer to re-evaluate the business model and make this choice easy, affrodable and appealing to the punter.

If a paywall by the biggest hitters in newspapers – The Times, The New York Times and news group Axel Springer (publisher of over 150 newspapers and magazines in over 30 countries in Europe) is the beginning of this re-education then more the better.

Success or failure is irrelevant – independent citizen journalism is unsustainable

The good old days of Fleet Street, where journalists spent afternoons nursing a hangover from their liquid lunch and boasting about their ability to avoid putting pen to paper, are well and truley over. And about time too to be honest.

These days the journalist is expected to be a jack of all trades. Not only by providing more content, but by being involved with the entire production process of a story. Often they are writer, photographer, sub editor and SCO-er on numerous stories a day.

Learning these skills is neccessary to streamline the production process in the fast moving world of news websites, but the integrity of the reporter is still essentially maintained.

The story is still the centre around which these new skills revolve.

For the citizen journalist this quid pro quo is manifestly unfeasible in the long term. How can someone with no support network around them ensure the story remains at the heart of their operations? If unsuccessful (and by that I mean unprofitable) the citizen journalist has no wage and journalism becomes  merely a passion, not a career, fitted awkwardly around bar shifts or a release at the end of a soul destroying 9-5.

Yet with success the challenges increase. The bigger the operation grows the more it will demand diversification and innovation – and those things demand time. As soon as a website grows stories must begin to be delegated and reponsibilities of the day to day running of the website, which has much more to do with advertising, marketing and web based development than any actual journalism will leave no time to write.

The danger then is that you are not a journalist you are a web developer. Probably a disaffected not particularly good one.

A successful society is based on a separation of skills. You don’t ask your plumber to write you a sonnet because the likelihood is you’ll end up with a leaking toilet and a shoddy sonnet.

That’s not to say some plumbers are not great poets, just that theres a good reason it’s not a requirement of the job.

In the same way this idea of convergence of news constantly being touted to young journalists is unsustainable simply because the skills sets are too diverse. Sure there may be a whizz kid here and there who is at home in FTP as she is in a press conference, but it’s a unrealistic expectation of the wider profession.

Already the best citizen journalist ventures are being harnessed or absorbed into more traditional news organizations, MSNBC picked up Newsvine back in 2007 while The Guardian hired three local beat bloggers for what PaidContent described as “properly paid positions” to cover Edinburgh, Leeds and Cardiff. The alternative for those who can make money is that they develop their project using strikingly similar business models to the larger news organizations. The Huffington Post started as a small blog run by 6 people. It now has a staff of over 50 and is based in the high-ceilinged offices of an ex-Soho art gallery. It is also now the most linked to blog on the internet.

Politico is another US example of success forcing citizen journalists back into the traditional media business model. Initially a blog started by journalists who felt the politics the politics of Capitol Hill was being neglected by the Washington Post it now produces a print edition alongside it’s online coverage that is distributed across Washington DC – the site is run by web developers, the paper is printed at a printers and the stories are written by political journalists. I’ll bet their taps are fixed by plumbers too.

Exclusive Interview: Iain Dodsworth creator of TweetDeck

Earlier this year SkyNews ordered all it’s journalists to install TweetDeck and now, it claims, it is reaping journalistic rewards. Fascinated by the rise of this Twitter search platform that has become such a journalistic sensation I tracked it creator down on Facebook and requested an interview.

So here is Ian Dodsworth the creator of our beloved TweetDeck talking to me about the Silicon Roundabout, Tweets and journalism and the future of twitter.

1) You work on the ‘silicon roundabout’ a hub of internet based business in London. Some people are comparing to Silicon Valley in Califonia. Do you think having one tech-hub it is important to London?

The idea of having a tech start up hub in London is very appealing but since there are so many tech start ups distributed all over London just talking about Silicon Roundabout is only part of the story.

2) Where did the original idea for TweetDeck come from? How did you realise so early on what a powerful tool twitter would be?

Long story short, I was finding it difficult to consume all the info coming out from twitter so decided to develop an app which could allow me to segment those people I follow into groups and display those groups all at the same time via multiple columns.

It wasn’t long after using TweetDeck for a while that it became obvious this UI could be just as effective on other types of “stream” data such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc etc.

Now, the power of TweetDeck comes from displaying numerous sources of information together where the “whole could, potentially, be greater than the sum of its parts.

3) What’s next for twitter?

 Advertising, greater location functionality, competition from google/MS/FB/Apple, possible consolidation of the ecosystem

4) Do you think Twitter and TweetDeck have changed journalism?

Twitter is certainly an additional medium for information gathering especially in a real time sense. This in itself has raised new issues over the quality of the information.

5) Sky news just announced that rolling out TweetDeck has made it’s workforce more productive – was that a coup for you?

It was very gratifying to see Sky News using TweetDeck in this way and even more so that we were not involved in the process – they chose TweetDeck on the merits of the product itself which is a superb validation for all the work we’re putting into TweetDeck.

UK's first town based app launches in Thame

A tiny town in Oxfordshire called Thame has become the UK’s very first town with a dedicated iPhone app – iThame.

Being a Londoner and a recent iPhone convert I am spoilt for choice with apps for my home city. Whether it be restaurants, train times, art galleries or narrated historical tours there’s guaranteed to be an app for that.

But smaller towns and cities across the UK, and I’d bet the rest of the less tech-savvy areas of the world, are largely forgotten by application creators. Indeed, even Bristol with its 400,000 people suffers from a severe lack of transport and hospitality apps – a fact I learnt to my detriment while waiting on a snowy roadside for a bus.

With a population of 11000, Thame might not be seem to be a likely innovator in the small-town app market – indeed a population as small as this does make you wonder how many iphones are even in use in the town.

However, the app – which will be free to download and offer information on local amenities, historical walks, sport, travel and events in Thame and information for the younger generation – is an exciting innovation. It increases the usability and relevance of your smartphone based on the area you live and work in and allows local businesses to advertise on a platform suited to the localised nature of their trade.

The app will even include an RSS fed of news and seems to be marketing itself, as it is as a sort of hyper local hybrid – not quite a newspaper, not quite a city guide.

It will be interesting to see how the local Oxfordshire rags react to fresh challenger for already diminishing ad revenue. If they are bright they should be seeing this as an opportunity to try out a new business model – a hyper local, app-based news and local amenity aggregator that reaches the lucrative youth and tourist market that local papers have all but given up on.

iThame has been put together by local businesses consultants, Andy McDonald and Simon Ralphs with the assistance of www.Thamenews.net editor, Sonja Francis. Thamenews.net has supplied a large part of the content including text, images and links to its own site and external sites of interest.

Can a $15 mobile phone increase development in Africa? it's got a better chance than Bono

Vodafone is launching a handset that will sell for under $15  – making it the lowest cost mobile phone on earth. It is built with what, Patrick Chomet – Vodafone Group Director of Terminals, describes as ’emerging market consumers’ in mind. What he really means is poverty-struck ones.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FEYtf-E-fP4&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

It is easy to forget, with all the hype around apps, smartphones and spangly products like the iPad that basic mobile phones are facilitating a much more basic and fundamental transformation in developing countries across Africa and Asia

In countries where huge swathes of the population live in rural areas with little or no communication infrastructure the introduction of mobile technology can have a profound impact.

The mobile phone has been a significant contributor to the development of free and fair elections in Africa. Most modern election observation efforts take advantage of the recent proliferation in mobile phones and nearly all use mobile phone calls as part of their communications system.

In Zimbabwe the Movement for Democratic Change’s to used camera phones to photograph blue protocol documents posted at all polling stations in Zimbabwe in an attempt to document their poll-watching.

The South Africa-based election monitoring group, The Independent Result Center, set up a website, ZimElectionResults.com, to publish independent election results. The website was updated by specially trained agents who were taking pictures of the results on their mobile phones. The polling agents took photographs of the data displayed at individual polling and sent the images back to a manned call centre.

photo: futureatlas.com

Even when camera technology is not available, mobile phones can be a powerful tool for fledgling democracy. In the recent election in Ghana, for example, mobile phones were an integral part of the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers’ (CODEO) observation effort. Even without cameras texts and phone calls allowed them to quickly collect and share a comprehensive body of information on the conduct and results of the election analyzing 54,570 datapoints within a few hours.

Much of the news dissemination in Africa is already through mobile phone technology. As more people have access to a mobile phone than to electricity access to internet is still relatively rare (6.7% penetration – in comparison to 37% for mobile phones) and printed papers don’t make it very far out of the cities so mobile phones and radio provide for the news to most of the continent. Headlines are sent out in as SMS messages and or a special news headline number can be called to

Unlike radio it is hard for authorities to block mobile signal without severely disrupting the country’s infrastructure and economy. In times of unrest or authoritarian rule the SMS can function as the only source of news. The London-based SW Radio Africa sends out a selection of headlines to 30,000 people in Zimbabwe via SMS.

Mobile phones are an important economic stimulus too – and it is in this sphere perhaps that the new Vodaphone models will have the most significant impact.

Bangladesh is often used as the case study for the impact that mobile telephony can have on the economically disadvantaged. In the late 1990s Grameen Bank, a Dhaka-based for-profit enterprise set up Grameen Telecommunications, a non-profit organization that provided low-cost phone services in rural areas. Village entrepreneurs purchased mobile phones and then sold on phone services to other villagers. The investment created a swathe of rural mobile phone entrepreneurs, 95 percent of whom were female.

Meanwhile villagers benefited from instant communication – they were able to contact distant family members making it easier to find employment opportunities, it enabled farmers to check prices in different markets before selling produce, and eventually allowed the quick and easy transfer of funds. After it’s success in Bangladesh a similar project – village phone – was launched in Uganda.

With the launch of a mobile phone costing under $15 these micro-economies fuelled by mobile access will become more accessible across the developing world and should, in time, have more impact than a hundred Bonos could ever hope to achieve.

Nobody does it better – The Boston Globe

You might not know it, but there is something very special about the Boston Globe.

I can’t say I’ve ever been drawn to the paper’s news content – in terms of America I tend to stick to my mainstream RSS feeds: New York Times, Washington Post a bit of Huffington (except its celebrity journalism – John Cusack sssshhh)

But then there is the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture – a stream that makes my newsreader glow with anticipation.

Surrounded by a website so scruffy it would put most UK weeklies to shame, sits some examples of the best photojournalism I’ve ever stumbled across

Simply, it’s beautiful, heartwrenching photography – no matter how happy, sad or obscure the subject they always go the extra mile and assemble a story in a way words could never even hope to compete with.

Here are a few of my favourite galleries from the past few weeks – have a look at add you favourites in the comments and i’ll add them to the roll.

Boston Snowdogs in Massachusetts – Dogs and Sleds

Fiery Festivals – does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, a couple of fiery European festivals

What a way to tell the story of globalised industrialisation- At work 2

Heartbreaking – Haiti six days later