- "Blog" vs "blogpost"
-
This isn’t a new problem, I’m not unique in being annoyed by it, and others have explained it more extensively, but still. I WILL NOT GIVE UP. An email to the Guardian’s Readers’ Editor (slightly re-formatted for the web):
Hi,
I’m noticing more and more instances of writers using “blog” when they mean “blogpost”. For instance, here’s one from today:
According to Shenton, who wrote a detailed blog about the incident for the Stage…
It’s quite jarring as one has to stop and think, in this instance, “Do they really mean ‘Shenton wrote an entire blog about the incident,’ or do they simply mean ‘Shenton wrote a blogpost about the incident’?”
It’s like being confused about whether someone has written an entire magazine about a subject, or only a single article. The difference is often apparent from the context but surely language should avoid ambiguity where possible, and in this case it is perfectly possible. One instance of where it’s extremely ambiguous is in your own column yesterday:
A Guardian colleague objected when she spotted this in a TV blog about a Channel 4 programme that seeks out hidden talent and featured a grandmother who climbed the Old Man of Storr.
I can’t tell from this whether you’re referring to an entire blog about the Channel 4 programme, or if it’s a single blogpost about the programme.
The distinction is already clear in your style guide, so perhaps writers should be more aware of this, and maintain the clarity in their writing that I’m sure they usually strive for.
Many thanks,
PhilI think I usually write “blog post” myself, but then I don’t have a style guide to stick to.
In Misc on 9 May 2012. Permalink
- A Bauhaus for today
-
I thought I’d post this before the Barbican’s Bauhaus exhibition opens, so it doesn’t seem too fuelled by the excitement of the moment. Because for years I’ve fantasised about what a Bauhaus for the 21st century would be like.
I don’t think I’ve written about this before because sometimes it’s a faintly embarrassing fantasy. I have friends who teach in art and design schools, full-time or occasionally, and given my last contact with such institutions (a few life-drawing classes aside) was two decades ago, I don’t feel best placed to decide what’s needed. Or even if it is needed.
There’s also the danger that this fantasy seems like a form of nostalgia. In fact, a doubled nostalgia, both for the least troublesome bits of utopian early-20th century Modernism, and for my own youth when I first got excited about this stuff.
Having protected myself with a shield of caveats, I still find myself wondering about such a place today and what it would be. I’m not interested in simply reanimating the Bauhaus’s corpse, but perhaps using the skeleton and replacing its Euclidean organs and leathery Weimar flesh with 21st century alternatives. We have the technology.
Maybe, even, the Bauhaus isn’t the model, but simply an inspiration. I like the idea of combining many art and design disciplines into a single way of thinking and crafting, and of being forward-looking and modern (whatever that means at the time). Don’t study “graphic design” or “information experience design” or whatever; study “design”.
While focused vocational training is great for some people, in a world where tools and materials and processes change so quickly, I see this place as somewhere for giving people a framework on which to build their 50+ year careers. If you only want to learn how to use Illustrator really well, then just practice, go and do it! Knowing what to teach is difficult, and I tend towards wanting people to learn everything. People rarely say students should learn less of something, only that they should study more of this subject or that topic. Thinking about should be taught, and what shouldn’t, is, at least, a fun game.
Also, I like the idea of being above the educational treadmills of grades, and league tables, and the problems of larger institutions, and all that stuff of which I am happily ignorant. The grade I got at university (never mind A-Level grades) has never been important — it’s all about what you can do, and how you think, and how you work.
This wouldn’t be for everyone. Most students will always want the reassurance of an established institution, the focus of a narrow field of study, and the seal of a recognised grade. But there must be some willing to take a risk and learn more, and learn differently.
Although higher education, like so much else, is having a hard time these days I do wonder, with my naive optimism, if that presents opportunities. It’s bad that most students in the UK now have to pay for standard higher education. But, on the other hand, maybe this helps level the playing field for smaller, non-accredited institutions that have always have had to charge fees. Now the financial difference between the two is smaller. LISPA, for example, where I studied theatre a few years ago, is small and non-accredited, and charges several thousand pounds a year. Now that standard higher education costs up to £9,000 a year, it seems more of a bargain. I’m guessing that this is part of the reason an institution like the New College of the Humanities can get underway with fees of £18,000 per annum. Now it’s “only” twice the norm.
If you’ve found this naive handwaving interesting, please do write your thoughts up somewhere, or just get in touch. I’d love to talk about this stuff with people who have experience of design education and who, when they’ve finished laughing or sighing wearily, can tell me where I’m wrong or, maybe, right. Thanks.
In Misc on 29 April 2012. Permalink
- The value of our historical Instagram products
-
Matt Webb has an interesting post looking at the sale of Instagram to Facebook through the eyes of an aspect of Marx, particularly this quote from this very good article about Marx by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:
This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world.
Matt applies this to Instagram:
What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos — this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos.
I, too, tend to think of this sort of thing when an Instagram-like company gets sold, and hence, suddenly, valued in monetary terms. It’s the sale of the value created by the users.
This isn’t quite right of course — the users wouldn’t have created that specific lump of value without the framework (or factory, in Matt’s metaphor) that was first put in place, and then maintained and improved, by the company’s owners. But still, the factory would be worth little without the subsequent “work” (a loaded term, so we could just say “activity”) created by the mass of people.
But then, also, Matt talks about the products these people create: photos and comments and “likes”. And the trouble with this whole analogy is whether those products are actually worth any money. Has someone who’s posted 1000 photos over the past year increased Instagram’s worth more, right at this moment, than someone who’s only posted one?
The answer varies. For Instagram, which is mostly about the stream of current photos, I’m not sure there is much value in all these photos posted in the past. In fact, they could be a liability — unless Instagram has a policy of deleting photos after a certain time, each one adds incrementally to the service’s running costs. By posting thousands of photos you could say I’m reducing Instagram’s value, not increasing it.
A service like Twitter, which is also very much about the now, is similar. What’s the value to Twitter of all the tweets posted by people over the first few years of its existence? It’s practically impossible for anyone to see them, so can they increase the company’s value?
But maybe a service like Flickr, which isn’t quite so focused on the sharing of the moment, and makes it easy to catalogue and share and explore and discover the archive of past photos, does gain value from all those historical products. People can access them, and they’re part of what make Flickr Flickr. Plenty of people use the site as their own photo archive or portfolio and, for them too, the old photos are much of the value and attraction.
(I’m glossing over the wrinkle that Flickr charges people for Pro accounts, which let you keep your old photos visible, while Instagram and Twitter are free. I’m not sure this makes a vast difference to the discussion.)
And this is odd, this difference in possible value between Instagram and Twitter’s old products, and Flickr’s. Because it suggests the value of these millions of photos or tweets is purely determined by the product strategy and design of the service.
We could say that Instagram’s old photos give it little value because exploring them isn’t terribly easy and (I suspect) almost no one does it. But what if tomorrow Instagram suddenly launched a website that made it beautifully easy to search and explore that vast archive. What if people started using it to do amazing things with these old photos, attracting lots of eyeballs and activity and new users. Do each of these photos suddenly acquire more value?
If so, then where was that value? Where did it come from? We did say those photos had no value, and that all those people hadn’t actually added value to the company by taking the photos. And yet, suddenly, when those old photos are visible and start attracting people, it looks like value had been created after all.
Maybe it’s more about potential value, a value that has to be unlocked and maximised by the service’s owners. By posting a photo, or tweeting, or liking, we don’t necessarily create any value. We could even reduce value. But it’s up to those running the service to determine this, and to give our actions as much value as they are able.
I’m not entirely sure this is right. I’m prodding at my knee-jerk application of barely understood Marxism. And, of course, there’s much more to the value of an internet service than the things created by users in the past. And I think we know this. It’s about the potential to increase the number of users and to keep those it already has (if there is inherent value in each photo, it’s in the photo’s ability to make its taker feel more locked-in, and unable to leave). And it’s about the potential ability to make money from the eyes and activities of all those users, possibly in entirely new ways.
While there’s definitely something in the Marx analogy -– Instagram would be worth very little without all that past activity — I’m not sure it’s quite right, and certainly not the whole story. Each Instagram photo doesn’t necessarily add a unit of value to Instagram. If there is any value in each photo it needs to be unlocked and maximised by Instagram’s owners.
In Misc on 11 April 2012. Permalink
- Doors with no handles
-
I’m a few dozen pages into China Miéville’s The City & The City, too early to comprehend the nature of its world, but the story’s allusions reminded me of this letter from the London Review of Books I read last week:
Reading Neal Ascherson’s account of Moresnet-neutre reminded me of another quirk of European geography (LRB, 22 March). The border between East and West Berlin followed the pre-existing municipal boundaries, but this line was quite irregular and when the Wall was built it cut a few corners. I remember seeing, in West Berlin in the mid-1980s, a collection of Gruftis and Autonomen — goths and anarchist punks — who had set up camp on a triangle of land about fifty yards on each side, hard up against the Wall, where they were playing very loud music and smoking spliffs without any interference from the West Berlin authorities. This was because the campers were on what was technically East German territory. I also saw some doors, with no handles on the Western side, set into the Wall where it ran alongside this triangle, and I was told, although I didn’t see it myself, that every so often the Volkspolizei would come through the doors, drag the Gruftis and Autonomen into the East, rough them up and throw them back out.
Nick Wray
DerbyThat sounds so like speculative fiction, rather than a description of the recent past.
In Periodicals on 10 April 2012. Permalink
- 1960s videos of London
-
I was going to just link to a couple of these videos of London in the 1960s from the Look at Life series, but there’s too much to say.
Take ‘Rising to high office’ from 1963:
It’s great simply as a look at all the modern office buildings appearing in London, and what it’s like to work inside them. It concentrates on the 26-floor Shell Centre on the South Bank, where
5000 people work in this building. If they all arrived at once it would be chaos, so staff arrivals are staggered. Some start at twenty-to-nine, and others at five past.
They look at the “mechanised” typing pool. A man (of course) in a suit calls a special phone number and dictates a letter. It’s automatically recorded and the women (of course) audio typists type the letters up on their big typewriters. At least some of them have a nice view.
Some nice footage of the controls for the air conditioning and heating.
And then, ooh, the postal system. Packages are sorted by hand and then put into trays on a conveyor belt. It looks like each tray has a series of little levers underneath and which levers are depressed determines when the tray, having trundled on the conveyor belt around the building, tips up and deposits the mail in a box. Automation!
Even better, there are also rectangular containers that hold post, and “a code of letters and numbers” is dialled into controls on the top. These go on a conveyor belt to a point where they’re fed into a compressed-air system on their way to one of 44 receiving points. It looks great.
And I’ve listened to this several times (at 4:51) and I’m sure the narrator says “robots”:
In the computer room, the robots are busy on company accounts, tax returns, sales figures and the rest of the complex arithmetic of a vast concern.
I can’t work out if he’s referring to the desk-size calculating machines or the women who are typing things into them.
There’s also an “up-to-date”, wire-free telephone exchange system (still requiring many operators).
And it trumpets the kinds of things that today I might more associate with West Coast Googleplex indulgences: free three course meals, an art gallery for paintings by staff members, an office swimming pool (“electronic race timing equipment”), squash courts, table-tennis tables, archery, shooting range, fencing, judo, hairdressing salon, and changing rooms for when you need to change into evening wear for your night out.
Very good. I haven’t watched all the others. But they all seem beautifully clear and colourful. This 1959 one on Soho’s coffee shops is well worth a look:
Stick to one class of customer, keep the rest out. A square, in the wrong hole, is just not dug, even by the jukebox.
You might also like 1960’s ‘Top People’, about the construction of tall modern buildings, including the Barbican (still at the planning stage), Moor House, the Golden Lane Estate and a brand new London Wall road:
Footage of men in flat caps and braces clambering around on scaffolding without any safety equipment. Lovely stuff, seeing what are now well-established buildings (some of which have already been demolished) being built. Worth sticking with to 7:20 for the serving of, ha ha, “high tea”.
Plenty more of the videos here. Thanks to my mum and sister for the pointer!
In Misc on 11 February 2012. Permalink
- Zing!
-
A couple of good quotes about our glorious leaders from recent articles.
First, from Stewart Lee’s excellent recent Guardian article about the film industry and how to make art and media successful:
Good artists do what they believe in and don’t merely court public approval. In these respects they are the opposite of politicians. Zing!
Second, Simon Hoggart, in today’s Guardian, has an article which both starts well:
Over in the Lords they were debating whether to cap the income of poor people. In the Commons, the government was explaining why it wouldn’t cap the income of rich people. We’re all in this together!
And ends well:
Over in the Lords, they were having a quiet, moderate, thoughtful debate about the cap, largely based on experiences of real life. So it would never have worked in the Commons.
Zing! Some light relief, because it’s all too depressing otherwise.
In Misc on 24 January 2012. Permalink
- Password protecting a Django site
-
Bit of a techy one, but I thought if I spend ten minutes writing this down it will, in the future, save me five minutes of re-Googling. Hmm. Anyway, if you want to add htaccess-style simple password protection to a Django website, here’s one way to do it fairly painlessly.
The django-password-required app is designed for this kind of thing. You set a password in your settings file and add a decorator to any views you want protected. Visitors to those pages are then presented with a very simple (not pretty) form. Seems to work.
But that’s a bit of a pain if you want to protect your whole website — decorating every view. Another way would be to add the decorator in your urls.py. Hopefully, your main urls.py has something like this:
urlpatterns = patterns('', (r'^', include('appname.urls')), )This gives us one point at which to affect all of the site’s URLs. It’s not too tricky to apply a decorator to a Django url rule, but I don’t think there’s a way to apply it when including another url file. So you need the django-decorator-include app. With this installed we can change the above to this:
from password_required.decorators import password_required from decorator_include import decorator_include urlpatterns = patterns('', (r'^', decorator_include(password_required, 'appname.urls')), )And there we go, your whole site is password protected. A bit more of a faff than htaccess, but sometimes that’s not possible.