editorialgirl

This blog has gone crazy with the hits over the last couple of days. Here’s why:

You sick puppies )

Well, no. So why, when someone asked that question in the office this morning, did at least two people nod vigorously and begin to earnestly discuss the poor man’s demise?

I was bemused. Normally, the punchline to the question “did you know Neil Buchanan’s died?” is “yes, he had an Art Attack”. Boom, boom. Had someone misunderstood the joke? “No,” said my colleague, who’d heard the news from her sister. She shook her head gravely. “It was colon cancer. No-one even knew he was ill.”

I checked Google news. I checked the BBC. Nothing, anywhere. I checked Wikipedia, where I found a paragraph dedicated to the “death rumour”. Wikipedia’s source for the rumour pointed me to facebook.

Yes, it seems this current urban myth is down to a facebook group called RIP Neil Buchanan (the art attack guy), which has 9,218 members. The group’s homepage says that he died on 21st March 2008 after “a long struggle against cancer of the colon”. Eh?

But wait. A comment underneath, presumably by the groups’s admin Nick Hernshaw says: “It has been recently suggested that Neil is still with us, contrary to announcements on several radio broadcasts and on blue peter (bbc!). If you are in anyway offended or consider being disrespectful to this group, please bear in mind, that even if you do not necessarily believe, the sole purpose of this group is to show RESPECT for Neil, and this should be done whether he is alive or dead. It would be a shame for the small minority to ruin this opportunity for the majority.”

A bit of backtracking going on there. Sounds like he doesn’t really believe it himself. So was it a genuine misunderstanding? Or was it just set up to see how quickly and how widely a rumour can spread? Pretty damn quickly and widely, it would seem, when it’s on facebook.

Out of interest, I’ve just counted twelve facebook groups set up to debunk the myth, from the jolly sounding “Neil Buchanan is alive and well actually! lets get him back on tv!” (14 members), to the rather more angry “Nick Hernsahw [sic] is a sick cunt…..Neil Buchanan isnt dead” (32 members). However, even adding the membership of all twelve “it’s not true!” groups together, the naysayers have still only got around 300 people on board. The mysterious Nick Hernshaw has nearly 9,000 more. It looks like the rumour will be doing the rounds for a good few weeks yet.

Councillor Deirdre Alden, “your Conservative Parliamentary Spokesman for the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency”, has a blog. And on her blog, she posts pictures of herself doing Councillor-like things, with a lovely big grin on her face. Not for her the gritty YouTube documentary choice of other local councillors – no, our Deirdre (sorry, Cllr Alden) sticks to the simple digital still and a smile. At a rate of around one every single day.

So it was only a matter of time before the lol meme came to Edgbaston, wasn’t it? That’s right – it’s loldeirdre!

I defy any lolcat fan not to see this and immediately want to have a go themselves. I know I have. And poor Pete Ashton‘s been getting a little bit fixated on smiley D. “I’ve spent most of this afternoon obsessing over Deirdre”, he muses. “I’ve never met her but I’ve built up this complex character in my head, one that I’m starting to care about. This isn’t a parody for me and it’s certainly not an insult. It’s something else. What, I’m not quite sure, but thankfully there’s a whole year of photos in her archives just waiting for the captions.”

Go on, you know you want to…

… about to remove the “is” from its status updates, apparently.

At least, that’s what I think this means:

Starting with tonight’s push, any API calls that return information about users’ status messages, including FQL and users.getInfo, will be changing slightly. The return value will now start with a verb, so prepending “is” is no longer required. So in order to construct a full status message it is now $name + ‘ ‘ + $message, instead of $name + ‘ is ‘ + $message. Additionally, users.setStatus will be able to avoid prepending the word “is” by passing in an additional parameter: “status_includes_verb”. If you pass in true for that parameter, it signals to us that we should *not* prepend the word “is” to the status you give us. In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb.

Funny; it’s not like developers to over-complicate things, is it? </sarcasm>

I’m the sort of person who can’t leave my desk for a minute without having to check every email account on my return, just in case I’ve missed something vital. When I go away I worry about how many Yahoo Group posts I’ll have to read on my return, or how many hits my photos will have had on flickr. Sometimes I realise I’ve spent whole hours with three or four windows open on different messageboards, just hitting F5 like a chimp.

So as you might imagine, Twitter scares the life out of me.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about – and if you’ve spent any time on the internet recently, I don’t know how you’ve missed it – Twitter allows you to post little messages to the world, telling everyone what you’re up to, right now. Yup, it’s all there; “I’m watching TV”, “installing Visual Studio”, “in a science class”, “wondering whether to shave my legs”, “I’m checking out Twitter” … well, you get the idea. It’s not quite instant messaging, it’s not quite mini-blogging; it’s snippets of user-created content with no point at all. It’s just more information that we don’t need, floating about saying “read me”. And like most people, I can’t help but read it.

I haven’t actually subscribed, though. I’m not, like, a Twitterholic or anything. To be honest, up until yesterday, I hadn’t even been tempted. But yesterday, I saw Twitter in a whole new light. Someone’s put Twitter onto Google Maps and created a monster. Purdy, ain’t it? And if regular users start taking hold of their own identities, perhaps talking to each other on there (you can already see this happening a little, with some users directing their messages to other specific users, using the @ symbol) – it could become very addictive indeed.

One of my favourite blogs, Creating Passionate Users has summed Twitter up very nicely with a post entitled Is Twitter TOO Good? … and, of course, one of their ever-brilliant graphs.

I’m a bit late blogging this, but I think it’s still interesting.

“I waved to one of them I recognised – who then shouted out ‘It’s Mullaney!’. And the whole crowd mobbed me outside the front door of the Bulls Head.

“They all wanted to shake my hand and have their photos taken with me – these photos have now appeared on the net. Even one of the three guys arrested in December was shaking my hand. Beatlemania in Moseley, eh?”

Beatlemania? Well, not quite. The quotes above are from my local councillor, Martin Mullaney, on a local e-group recently. Over the last few months, Martin’s been attempting to “get down”, in a way that only a local councillor would, with local taggers and graffiti artists. He’s managed it by going online, onto MySpace, YouTube and all the other places where the yoof of today hang out. The funny thing is, they kids (or at least, one particular group of them) are responding.

At first Martin made a few comments on graffiti websites either run, or heavily populated, by known local taggers. The investigation work was already well underway, with people like Moseley’s Street Wardens Kim and Graham having spent nearly three years gathering evidence, but it was Martin’s dad-like warning in the taggers’ “private space” that got the kids nervously shuffling (if you can do that online). “Unless you and your friends want a criminal record,” he wrote on one website’s guestbook, “I suggest you stop tagging in this area immediately.”

But then came the YouTube video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVf1AP6EBW4]

Uploaded at the beginning of January, it’s already received nearly 300 comments – a direct chat between taggers (sUm oF wHoM hAv ReLy iNtRezTiN RiTiN sTyLez 4 sUpPoSeD KiNg EdWaRdS pUpiLz) and Martin, which makes interesting reading.

It’s also been the lead item on Central News, which has no doubt delighted both the taggers and Martin himself, who’s known round these parts for his – how do I say this in a nice way? – attention seeking (sorry, MM).

The best news to come out of all of this is that it’s not all just talk; three of the taggers were arrested just before Christmas and more are bound to follow. I’m not a fan of tagging (decidedly unartistic if you ask me), so anything that gets rid of spray can scrawls – with or without turning a local Councillor into a local hero – gets my vote.

Now reverse graffiti, on the other hand …