Sue Bailey

Image stolen from The Telegraph.

I read the history of the internet. Maybe. Here’s mine.

• 1992: first time I heard anyone say the word “email” out loud (it was GreekBoy in the kitchen in Grantchester Meadows, talking about a dear but weird South African friend who’d overstayed his visa and gone on the run… I’d love to know what happened to him (South African friend, I mean; I know where GreekBoy is, he’s an all-too-easy Google-when-drunk))
• August 1995: B’s boss says he will buy us a PC for a wedding present. I question why on earth we would want one. B says “we can get the internet”. I question why we would want the internet. First browser Mosaic 2.
• October 1995: Dump Compuserve because of horrible number-based email address, claiming “I am not a number”.
• November 1995: first all-night-on-the-net session.
• December 1995: first time type “porn” into search engine (Yahoo, iirc). Police do not come straight round.
• 1997: learn HTML. Make own clickable home page with links to other favourite sites.
• 1998: register first domain name; set up first personal website; figure out something that looks like blogging; learn javascript. Win £800 on Birthday Bongs with Chris Tarrent: spend money on holiday in Egypt, make first “what I did on holiday” website. Was possibly last time went on holiday.
• 1999: first time get paid for making website. Put silly pictures of boss on “secret” page on company site: will later claim this as figuring “going viral” all by self.
• January 2000: boss says fatal sentence: “have you heard of eBay?” Then says “make me an internet shop in two weeks or you’re fired”. Later claims was joking; site finished anyway. PHP was learned.
• November 2002: Russian scammers plus eBay policy changes put paid to that cunning plan.
• February 2004: quit job to work for self on eBay-based thing.
• October 2006: start writing TameBay.
• April 2007: people want to buy advertising on TameBay. Start thinking there could be something in this blogging malarky.
• 2009: had enough of eBay. Wonder if could make living in some other way. Write fatal tweet: “I love WordPress, would marry it if I could”. This apparently enough to start over on whole brand new crazy rollercoaster.
• … to be continued …

Things I don’t remember: switching from Mosaic to Netscape; my Compuserve email addy; what it felt like when we first got broadband.

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News – Presentation at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex in Silicon Valley from John Temple on Vimeo.

Because some things deserve more than Tweeting (and also because my tweet got retweeted by an actual MP which is quite cool), I’m blogging this wonderfully frank, open-eyed assessment of why the Rocky Mountain News went under. Rupert Murdoch, I hope you’re watching (I also, tbh, hope your shitty newspapers go bust, but that’s an argument for another day).

Stolen from TechDirt, Post Mortem For A Dead Newspaper, which is one of the more beautiful blog post titles I’ve seen this week.

Apropos of not much…

This post by the founder of HostGator amused me. Brent writes:

When we first moved into the new building, me and a few other employees took up residency throughout the building. There was very few employees at first and nothing but empty space. Many people that I met had no idea what web hosting was and were convinced that I was a drug dealer.

In early 2000, when my then-boss’s brother, DG, wandered into my office and said “you know about the internet, don’t you? want to run my new idea?”, and turned my life from limited 9-to-5 stress into ABSOLUTELY ALL THE FUCKING TIME STRESS —

Him, on phone: You sound a little unfocused?
Me: It’s Saturday morning. I think it’s about 7am. I’m more hungover than I can tell you. What do you need?
Him: Oh, I just wondered how our sales were overnight.

– my sister in law asked me what my new job was, and at the moment she heard the word “internet”, wanted to know whether I was a credit card scammer, or a pornographer.

(As it happens, I’m the latter, but I don’t think she knows about that.)

And even the people who are meant to get it, don’t. My sister doesn’t think you can make a living blogging and shakes her head in astonishment when told what my friends do for a living.

I think it’s fun, this brand new, 25 year old industry. I wonder when we’ll go legit?

My new WordPress theme is the bestest WordPress theme evah. When you download and preview it, it looks like a one-to-four column, widget-ready magazine-style theme. It is SEO-optimal, AdSense-ready and designed for fluid width flexibility. Via an extensive control panel, it is fully configurable to be minimalistic in any colour you desire. It requires 408 plugins to work correctly, all of which are bundled with the theme.

The preview looks, in short, cooler than Thesis, cooler than anything that Brian ever made, way cooler than Matt’s new theme.

But when you install it, all it gives you is the WordPress default. I call it Kubrickrolled.

Ba-dum tish.

I’ll get my coat.

Various news websites including TechCrunch ran the story over the weekend that the UK government is – again – trying to regulate the internet. Culture Minister Andy Burnham is proposing a cinema-style age-appropriatness rating system for websites, which he believes would protect children from offensive and damaging material online.

If you want an enumeration of all the reasons why this is a bad idea, that’s been done very well in the comments to Civil Service Minister Tom Watson’s remarkably open post asking for opinion on the proposal. So in brief, here’s my objection:

It won’t work.

It won’t work because the internet doesn’t work like that, because parents who were really, truly bothered would supervise their children’s surfing, and because curious adolescents want to look at porn – and wouldn’t you rather they did it in the comfort of their own homes than by having to shoplift from newsagents like my generation did?

I think there was an opportunity here. Those of us who make our livings around the internet are not very good at remembering that we’re in a tiny minority and not everyone sees it like we do. When I first told my sister-in-law I was working for an internet company, she thought I had to be either a credit card fraudster or a pornographer: not everyone updates Twitter from their iphone on the way to dconstruct. So this prospectively big debate could have been the perfect moment to talk about what the internet is, and what it can do: how it’s not just about porn and gambling, how it can be a force for democracy, for social change, how it can empower the politically disenfranchised. And how restricting that isn’t something that any of us should want to do.

But we didn’t. Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK and arguably one of the highest profile internetters in the UK, wrote a blog post, entitled “PWN3D!!1! Dude i totally got ur name. w00t!!!” Ahem, sorry, no. Entitled I stole the culture secretary’s twitter account.

Well, no. He didn’t. He registered an account on Twitter with the ID andyburnham. Which is the name of the culture secretary. And he put “culture secretary” as the bio. Hacking Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account this ain’t.

And though it made it to the FT, engaging in reasoned debate it ain’t either. I’m sure that people who use Twitter understood what Mike Butcher was trying to do, and the other 99.999% of the population didn’t understand or care one jot about his stunt.

I think it’s a safe bet that the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports doesn’t care about Twitter either, or he’d already own his name. We might guess, realistically, that Mr Burnham doesn’t have the first clue what Twitter is. But somewhere in the department of culture, media and stuff must be a group of civil servants whose job it is to know about the internet – otherwise their minister wouldn’t be making these pronouncements about it. And presumably those people know what Twitter is. So they don’t consider it important enough to have advised their minister that now he’s in the Cabinet, he ought to own his own name. In fact, they haven’t even bothered to registered the position or the department as a Twitter id – I know, because I registered @cultureminister and @DCMS this morning. Maybe Twitter isn’t quite as vital as we thought?

If we’re going to argue effectively for the non-regulation of the internet, we’ve got to look beyond our own navels; people who use Twitter are not the ones we need to convince. Let’s come up with a message that’s going to convince the 99% of the population who don’t see it our way, who think the internet is something like an extra TV channel but full of paedos and gambling. Because they – like Andy Burnham – are the ones we need to convince.

PS To Mr Burnham or anyone else at the Dept. of C, M and S – No hostages; I’ll be happy to hand over @cultureminister and @DCMS to you any time you like. I’ll ask only that you might use them now and again.

I love how half-hearted the BBC are about their link to their Twitter stream. No wankr 2.0s here

Troubled Diva Mike once said a wise thing:

I think it’s dangerous to set too much store by the number of comments that one receives. From my own experience, the pieces which I’m happiest with are often the pieces which get the fewest numbers of comments. There’s no correlation. They’re no good as an index of appreciation – no good at all.

I think he was right, but also hopelessly optimistic if he thought that thought could spread. We’ve all been there, bearing* our soul, only to see “0 comments” sitting there forever, while the newest crap from Quizilla gathers dozens of “ooh, me too!”s.

Sometimes, it’s a problem. There are posts where I’ve clicked the comments box a dozen times, written stuff, deleted it, left without saying anything. People I love have posted about death, divorce, disease and disaster, and I have remained silent. Even though in my heart, I’m doing that secular version of praying that I call “thinking good thoughts of you”, I’ve written nothing publicly for them or others to see. “(((hugs)))”? No thanks.

And maybe it’s mainly when I write about mental, but it seems to happen a lot: the comment that says “I haven’t got anything to say, I just wanted you to know I read this”. My pre-WordPress alter-ego had a solution: the “I read this” button. Instead of leaving a comment, it leaves just a linked signature (“Sue read this post”) gravatarred and datestamped as normal.

Let me know what you think. If anyone else wants it, and if I can figure out how, I might make this a WP plugin.

* that started out as a typo, but somehow, it seems too apposite to edit.

When I make websites for other people, one of the hardest parts of the job is often getting the client to express just what it is they’ve got in their head as their vision of the new site. The client who tells you, “oh, I don’t care, you should just do what you think”, is usually incorrect: though they might not be aware of it, they do know, they do care, and if they don’t exactly have a vision of what they want, they know what they don’t want. Sod’s law says that the first thing you make them will be a pretty close approximation to what they don’t want. “But I don’t *like* orange!” Fortunately, that only has to happen a couple of times before you start learning the questions to ask first.

The flip side of this is the client who knows exactly what they want. “One like this” – usually pointing to their competitor’s shiny new site. And then we figure out what’s so good about the competitor’s site, and what we can do better. Finding sites you like – and sites you don’t like – is a good place to start.

Many people don’t care to give it that much thought: “My logo’s red; make it red.” “Oh, just pretty-up OSCommerce and sort the checkout out.” “Make it match my eBay Shop.” Fair enough… if just a little bit dull to work with. The more involved the client is with the process, the better the result is likely to be.

And then some people are a gift. Dan is one such. Here’s what he sent me as inspiration:

A cigarette sign, Hillary-as-communist-icon, a beer bottle and a scarf: really, was anyone ever given such fun things to work with? Add in DailyWP’s gorgeous Brightness theme, and here’s what we came up with. What do you think?

Edited to add: that amazing Hillary image is by Tony Puryear.

Twitter reminds me of blogrolls in the dim and distant past: people get so terribly upset if links only go one way. They get distressed if they get unfollowed just like they used to get upset about getting delinked. Somehow this stopped being about content, and started being a popularity contest.

I’ve already had emails asking why I don’t follow someone. And emails asking why I appear to have stopped following someone. And emails telling me that someone’s friend was upset that I’d blocked them, and could I please unblock them and follow them again. Actually, it reminds me less of blogrolls than the primary school playground.

Which is why I’m so distressed to hear about Qwitter. Qwitter emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter, with a message telling you what your last post was. It’s possible that people will be able to use this to measure the effectiveness of their twittering: is the signal-to-noise ratio wrong? too many tweets? too many @ private conversations going on in public? too much spam social media marketing?

Or not. I think TechCrunch has it right:

If someone unfollows you, you’ll know and you’ll be able to ask them why.

I don’t want to have to justify my unfollowing. I just want to read the people I’m interested in reading, and ignore the rest, however much I might like them in other contexts. I don’t want to turn this into an ego contest.