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Is America ready for an oven-ready President? It’s all good!

I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are - for want of a better term - civic hackers. Read the rest of this entry »

With Barack Obama neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, it’s worth recalling a virtuoso performance by comedian Chris Rock back in 1996 when Colin Powell was rumoured to be considering a presidential bid. Have things changed much since then? Could Rock’s cynicism about white people saying they’ll vote for a black candidate explain the inaccuracy of opinion polling in the New Hampshire primary?

Enjoy a master at work (caution: strong language).

Many Eyes is a web-based data visualisation tool that is still in alpha but already looks impressive. It’s very simple. You cut and paste data (numbers or text) and then choose from a variety of data visualisation tools to make your dataset come to live. We hope to be doing some cool things with it over at caphealthcheck.eu and farmsubsidy.org. In the meantime, here is a rather silly visualisation of the most frequently used words in speeches made by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative Party Leader David Cameron. Can you tell whose words are whose? Answer after the jump.

Many Eyes has got some glitches but it seems a lot better than its rival Swivel. Here is a good comparative review of both.

Read the rest of this entry »

From today, all the content at the New York Times website will be free - ending a practice that saw some of America’s best reporting and column writing hidden behind a 'pay wall'. Why a website with a Google Page Rank of 8/10 and therefore huge potential for paid adverts should ever have considered charging for content was always beyond me. Now they appear to have seen sense and have gone the whole hog by opening up their full digital archives back to 1987.

How long before the FT and The Economist follow suit? Amazingly there are still some think tanks out there that are charging for their policy reports - such as the Centre for European Reform, which has some of the best thinkers around, but when it comes to the web is rooted firmly in the dark ages as this £5 for a PDF download demonstrates. I’m sure it’s a great read.  

Read more at nytimes.com

Last night I attended an interesting talk at the Frontline Club where Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, argued that blogs, social networking and user generated digital content pose a threat to our culture, economy and civilisation. Very quickly it became clear that Keen relishes his role as contrarian and provocateur and that his tongue was very often in his cheek. Even so, he did express with passion his concerns about Web 2.0 as a toxic mash-up of, as he put it, ‘the countercultural Sixties, the free market idealism of the Eighties, and the technological determinism and consumer-centricity of the Nineties’. Read the rest of this entry »

Help locate London’s fine heritage of Victorian drinking fountains, in celebration of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.

Public drinking fountains are a simple, modest yet precious civic amenity under threat from neglect and the rise of environmentally catastrophic bottled water. Turn away from the bottle and join a treasure hunt and celebration of the public drinking fountains of London (not forgetting troughs for the cows).

Use the Google Map below to add your favourite fountains:

View Larger Map

Links:

Photo Essay

Victorian Art and Water

Wikipedia entry

Eight years – and a lifetime – ago, I was working as a political aide to the UK agriculture minister Nick Brown. It was a difficult time for British farming. Prices were down, the backwash of mad cow disease was impacting the livestock sector, the strong pound was hitting exporters and there was genuine discontent in many rural communities. At the same time, the member states of the European Union were negotiating a reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP), the collective name for all the support programmes that exist to give a helping hand to European farmers. At a time of crisis, farmers said, why tinker with the government support programmes that are our lifeline? Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever dreamt of playing in a symphony? Have you heard of the early-20th-century-futurists favoring the street over the canvas or the stage? Maybe Godfried-Willem Raes’s 2nd Symphony could be your chance. And, it isn’t even very difficult: join the symphony with your bicycle. We carefully prepare and tune your instrument; you and bicycle orchestra ride in a long row at a regular pace; the last cyclist overtakes the whole group. The Symphony will delight in a wonderful and exciting way.

The Bike Show (the weekly radio programme I present on Resonance FM) is organising a performance of Godfried-Willem Raes’s (pictured, right) second symphony for ’singing bicycles’. It will take place on the morning of Saturday 7 July on London’s South Bank. This is first day of racing of the Tour De France’s Grand Depart in London, and the Symphony will almost certainly be the most eccentric contribution to a weekend of cycling in the capital. Read the rest of this entry »

At noon today at a meeting at the Trimdon Labour Club in his constituency, Tony Blair told a group of his friends and political supporters (link requires Real Player) that he has tendered his resignation as leader of the Labour Party and will be stepping down as Prime Minister on 27 June after ten years and eight weeks in the job. The much-trailed announcement is all-but-certain to result in a smooth handover of power to Chancellor Gordon Brown who will lead the Labour Party into the next General Election slated for 2009. Read the rest of this entry »