Freelance Unbound

Well, after a bit of random copying and pasting of RSS links, I have got some kind of feed visible in the sidebar column. But bizarrely, it bears no relation to the Tweetfeed I copied it from, and if you click through to the RSS feed itself, it bears no relation to that either.
In fact, I have no idea how these Tweets are being generated. Which leads me to think this may not be the added-value bonus that it is supposed to be.
I’m going to leave it up for a while, just to emphasise how tricky the web can be, and to remind myself how difficult it is to be clever. Let it be a lesson in humility.
I suspect that all this might work a lot better if I had a properly hosted WordPress.org blog, with full plugin functionality. And all this after less than a month of real posting! Next stop Joomla…

The nice folk at BlogCatalog sent me a link to use their new Tweetfeed service, which allows you to create a custom Twitter feed on the topic of your choice (say, journalism, just to pluck something out of the air) and then stick the feed on your blog via a widget.
Typically, of course, I can’t get it to work – though it’s in Beta, so it may not be my fault. After tripping up over their search syntax, I managed to sort out a feed OK – but when I tried to add it to Freelance Unbound, it wouldn’t play ball. Instead of looking like this, it just comes up as a Tweetfeed.com link under the blog roll on the right.
I’m not a huge Twitter fan – it’s a bit too much like SMS for my taste. And unlike blogging, which you can kind of do on your own as it has other, non-social-network uses, you really have to build a network for it to mean anything.
Having said that, I can see its uses in things like microblog reporting from live events (I followed the London Mayoral elections in 2008 on the London Paper micro blog as it happens, as it was the only thing like live coverage that seemed to be available where I was, since I didn’t have a TV).
Out of technical interest, then, I’m going to keep trying to add various social networking functions to this blog. Even if I am too old to actually get anything out of them…

Apparently Technorati is as dead as print publishing, according to the WordPress cognoscenti. So I’ve also registered on BlogCatalog – the blogger’s social network. Now to figure out how to add those stumbling and digging things on to my posts…
UPDATE: Now I have to wait 24 hours for a real person to approve my blog. Imagine! How 20th century!
UPDATE 2: Will these social bookmarkings work? My god! They do! Now I have to post something worth passing on – curses…

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I’ve just registered with Technorati [no idea how it works, but I think it’s one of the rules of blogging].
I find I have a ranking of 4,770,814.
As the great David St Hubbins might have said, that’s a bit too much flaming perspective…

So, ever-reliable blog fodder the Daily Mail believes social networking sites damage children’s brains.
A selection of accurate criticism about the lack of evidence beyond one person’s opinion based on one anecdote can be found here in the comments to a Cafe Hayek post, so I won’t bother adding to that.
But seriously – how can you read the following and trust anything the Mail has to say about the matter:

But while the sites are popular – and extremely profitable – a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists believe they may be doing more harm than good.

No, really – can’t they just use Google for a few seconds to check? If they did they’d quickly find out that Twitter makes no money at all – unless you think that $35 million in VC funding is actually income (which, given the Mail‘s general economic illiteracy, actually wouldn’t surprise me).
Oh, and nor does Facebook, actually – it bled an estimated $150 million in cash in 2008, and founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he doesn’t really know how to monetise the site. (Nor does he seem that bothered about it – shades of the dotcom bubble).
No research, no thought. Another day on Fleet Street…

Pesto jumps on the castigate-corporate-excess bandwagon today [that’s BBC business editor Robert Peston, of course], with a post about RBS selling its private jet – one it was embarrassed to be caught owning a few years ago apparently.
But while RBS makes a great target for, well, any criticism really, Peston completely misses the point about corporate jet ownership.

The point about private jets – for shareholders who own banks – is that the expense of using them (let alone the capital outlay in buying them) is usually more than the price of first-class and business-class travel on a mainstream airline.

No – actually the point about private jets is they maximise the time the CEO, or whichever expensive manager du jour is using it, can do their job, as opposed to hanging around at Heathrow – even if it is in the business lounge.
Taking his base salary alone – £1.29m – that’s a daily rate of £4,134.62 – assuming he works a six day week – or £344.55 an hour on a 12-hour day. Factor in the annual bonus of £2.86m last year, and you’re talking £1,100 and change for every hour he’s not spending face time with RBS management or other corporate movers and shakers [OK, it’s a very rough figure, but you get the drift]. And since face time is basically the valuable bit of a CEO’s job, perhaps making them kick their heels in the UK’s congested airports is not the most profitable way to spend shareholders’ money.
You can argue – persuasively – that chief executives and other top managers shouldn’t get paid so much. And you can argue, with the beauty of 20:20 hindsight, that they helped balls up the banking system and thus the economy [though I would make sure I pinned much of the blame on lax government monetary policy too].
You can also argue that even factoring in the savings of CEO time, a private jet is an extravagance that can’t be justified. But to criticise corporate spending without looking at the real costs of the alternatives is sloppy.

Mayhem on Saturday morning at Animated Exeter, when I got my first taste of a full-day animation workshop for 12-15 year-olds.

Disappointingly, despite the promise of Plasticine modelling in the brochure, workshop leader Josh vetoed it on the grounds that it would be “too messy”. Frankly I thought this was a bit too grown-up, until I had to sweep up at the end and I realised his prescience. Still – as no one running animation workshops for kids seemes to want to bring in modelling clay, I think it opens the field for someone else to offer it. Watch out for the Plasticine Unbound Animation Day next February at the festival.
The kids were really nice – though this may have been down to Josh’s verdict that the workshop was the calmest he’d had for a year. I even got a “special thanks” credit on one lad’s film – just under his mum. Bless. In the excitement of it all I forgot to take a picture of it – but I guess my ego can manage without. My contribution was the impressively minimal moonscape and space background for his work “The Alien Tea” [see above].  

And while the quality of the animation was a bit variable [let’s face it, when you’ve only got 20 minutes or so to film, it’s going to be], the graphic ability on show was really impressive. The kids produced a whole range of inventive characters, with bold, clear styles, and used a range of techniques to animate them. One team of two did replacement animation – creating a whole series of nearly identical figures to be filmed in sequence. It was a labour of love and impressive that they managed to get the whole lot done, and shot, by the time they had to run for a train. I also really liked the knight in armour here. Not only was it a cool design, but the artist had thought through his animation and drew a number of different leg positions, as well as different head angles.
 No video examples from the day, unfortunately. One young animator had the presence of mind to film his animation on his mobile as it was playing back on screen. Sadly, I am not yet so tech savvy…

Interesting post on the FT’s Alphaville blog [from last week, but I’ve only just caught up with it]. Reuters files a story based on an FT interview with Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission. In the course of it, Mr Luo passes comment on the current US policy of monetary loosening:

Mr Luo, whose English tends toward the colloquial, added: “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

What does Reuters do? Decides on balance to edit out the paragraph to leave the interview a bit safer for US/Chinese relations. Well – fair enough. 
Except that the Implode-Explode blog reports that it had received an early version of the Reuters story with this paragraph still in:

The bolded paragraph, particularly, was removed. Completely. I know because a copy was originally emailed to me. Note: Reuters did not disclose that this was an updated version of the release, nor did they change the timestamp on it from Thu Feb 12, 2009 8:22am EST.

It’s a big problem for web-based journalism. With print – once you set the presses rolling, there’s nothing much you can do to revise copy short of pulping the whole run and starting again. Going to press means just that. But with online, well – you needn’t ever actually finally go to press at all. You can edit something way beyond the time of publication if there’s some legal problem with it, or factual inaccuracy. Or if you simply don’t like something you’ve written. 
I confess I have done this in this blog – after all, when you’ve worked as a print sub for years and you see a typo in copy, there’s an almost irresistable urge to go in and fix it if you can and have the time. But it’s a dangerous business. Strictly speaking, once the publish button is pressed, the content should be treated as sacrosanct. Any alteration, for whatever reason, should be flagged up with a strikethrough and an explanation. 
Some bloggers [I can’t remember where I read this unfortunately, but it was probably in the Whatever or Coyote, since they’re the ones I tend to read most] have a policy that they can change posts up to the point where a comment is made, after which it is officially “published”, since there’s a definite reader involved. Possibly a bit like the eBay policy that you can make changes to a listing up to the first bid.
It’s an interesting problem – when does online material become fixed? Does it ever? Should it have the same status as print material? 
Yes, we can noodle with our content for ever if we want to to get it just right. But we run the risk of making the truth much more fluid. [What did that company say about its privacy policy last week? I could have sworn I had more protection…]
For some things, like high-profile actions by governments, there will probably be enough scrutiny in the media to keep track of it. But for smaller things – local government, corporate governance, web-based comment like this – there might not be. 
Perhaps in the future factual accuracy will become even more subjective, depending on how many observers agree on the history of a piece of information. Maybe we’ll see online information rating, stamping information with an accuracy grade of AAA for 95% certainty – or BBB for ‘junk’ stories with less than 60% credibility…

It’s all-too easy to take this blogging nonsense too seriously – you know: try to burnish each post so that it flies off the Google listing straight into readers’ browsers and pushes you to the pinnacle of the Technorati rankings.
Which is why I always smile when I visit my pal Peter Ashley’s Unmitigated England blog [which I am happily going to pimp here].
He writes poetically and idiosyncratically about an England we half recognise – a mixture of the nostalgic and the fantastic, that may possibly have existed once in someone’s drowsy, mid-afternoon reverie. Perhaps in the 1930s.
He also never uses the same tag twice – preferring to treat web metrics with the contempt they often deserve. Visit Unexpected Alphabets No 8, for example, and you’ll see it tagged MILK CHURNS, WEIGHING MACHINES, WICKER PIGEON BASKETS. And there’s not an example of any of these anywhere in the post. Meanwhile, the Old Gits post is labelled:  BATH CHAIRS, PEOPLE’S FRIEND MAGAZINE, SMITH KENDON TRAVEL SWEETS, WINCARNIS. Whatever they are.
Also, I notice from the blog, it was Len Deighton’s 80th birthday this week. Though he’s best known for his Harry Palmer novels, my favourite is the alternative history SS-GB. Many happy returns to him…

Before I got so tired that I had to go to sleep in the cinema at last weekend’s Animated Exeter, I ended up at a presentation of the techniques behind What’s Your News – a new combined CG animation/live action kids’ TV show from Nick Jr.

Despite the irritating theme music, the show is actually quite fun – it’s the kind of news that is central to the lives of very small children, like getting a new puppy, or being able to do a double somersault. And presented by ants. Go figure.
I’m not that interested in CG as a rule – I am a big stop-frame fan, mainly because working with the puppets is like real acting, (only very, v-e-e-e-e-e-ry slow). In contrast, trying to breathe life into a computer-generated character using a mouse and keyboard seems really unnatural.

The difference with What’s Your News is that, instead of being made by Maya wizards, the animation has been created by a team of puppeteers, who have worked on the Jim Henson/Creature Workshop-type shows I remember from my childhood. This means the production process is far more intuitive than typical CG, and also much quicker, as a lot of it is done in real time.
The initial character design is done on computer, as normal, but then the main body animation is done using motion capture, the same way Gollum was created in Lord of the Rings. But the clever part is that traditional puppeteering hand controls are hooked up to the computer system to move the character’s digital hands, mouth, eyes and other bits and pieces. The puppeteer acts along to a playback of the action, manipulating the various body parts in real-time or half-time. Better still, different sets of actions can be layered up, multi-track recording style, allowing the puppeteer to build up a performance of impressive complexity very quickly.
It’s a really attractive approach. If it weren’t for the fact that I’d have to lay out so much money for the equipment, I’d be tempted to switch to this technique to create my next animated masterpiece. Instead, it’ll be back to the garage to make foam and wire puppets of knights and horses. Look out for Troll Bridge at Animated Exeter in, oh – around 2012, I reckon…