Tom Phillips

Sky News has, by common acclaim, just shot itself painfully in the foot by effectively banning its staff from using Twitter in most of the important ways that Twitter is used. As reported by The Guardian’s Josh Halliday, the new rules say, in short: Do not retweet any non-Sky News account – not journalists from rival organisations, and not members of the public; do not tweet news without passing it to the news-desk first; and do not tweet about topics that aren’t part of your beat or a story you are working on. In other words… er, don’t use Twitter.

(It’s worth noting that Josh tweeted virtually all the key details of his story in advance of it being published – presumably without running his tweets past Alan Rusbridger first – and yet still managed to file and publish quicker than anyone else. And in doing so, you have to suspect, made it far more likely the Guardian’s story would become the canonical telling of the tale once it was published.)

The reaction of Twitter users to this has been neatly Storified by Elena Zak – a concise summary would probably be “WT actual F?”. It’s reminiscent of the kerfuffle that broke out last year when Associated Press told its reporters not to tweet breaking news, because they were scooping the wire. While I broadly agree with the slightly incredulous reaction of Anthony De Rosa from their rivals Reuters, you could at least see AP’s point – they have clients who pay a lot of money for the privilege of getting AP’s scoops first, and getting them accurately. If they can just follow AP’s staffers on Twitter, bang goes the business model.

Like AP, but in different ways, Sky News is all about the scoops and the breaking news – far more so, even, than directly competing news channels. For such a prominent channel, it has relatively few viewers – around 0.6% of total viewing, less than Channel 4+1, CBBC, Dave or Yesterday, for example. But what it does have is a high percentage of viewers in lots of important places. Anywhere where breaking news is vital (like, say, every newsroom in the country) is likely to have Sky News on its TVs. With the best will in the world, they’re not there for its analysis or its coverage of under-reported topics – they’re there to find out about news a few minutes ahead of anywhere else. The old joke that you watch Sky News to find out what’s breaking, and then turn over to the BBC to find out if it’s actually true, is terribly unfair to the journalists behind Sky’s editorial and fact-checking processes – but it is also a fairly accurate description of how a lot of people behave.

So it’s not entirely unreasonable that Sky might want to control its journalists’ Twitter output in some way. At the time of writing, neither Sky nor any of their journalists have commented on the new rules, so there’s still a lot of ambiguity over how they will be applied. With that in mind, here’s five things I think Sky News could do that would downgrade its approach from “brain-fryingly incomprehensible” to “mildly baffling”:

1. Clarify what accounts will be affected
The Guardian story says that the new rules apply to “professional accounts” – and thus, presumably, not to personal accounts (and it’s hard to see how Sky could expect to police that). But Sky really need to clarify this further; on Twitter, that distinction isn’t a black-and-white issue. Does it just mean to accounts that explicitly have the Sky branding – e.g. with “Sky” in the username, or the Sky logo in the avatar or background? Does it mean anybody who openly identifies themselves as a Sky News employee? Does it mean anybody who could be identified as a Sky News employee, even if they don’t explicitly say it? This matters – Sky’s Neal Mann, aka @fieldproducer, is a big figure in the UK journotwittosphere, to the extent that a hefty proportion of the reactions to this news were essentially wondering if a Neal Mann-shaped hole had just been left in the wall of Sky’s HQ. His account falls into the second category – it’s clearly a part professional, part personal account, where he explicitly identifies himself as a Sky employee, but without any Sky branding. Does he have to follow the rules? What about the large percentage of Sky staffers who are freelancers (as sometime Sky freelancer Dave Lee asked)?

I expect Sky will clarify the rules to say that it only applies to explicitly Sky-branded accounts (and that Sky reporters will be given a chance to change their accounts to remove the Sky branding if they wish to carry on tweeting as before). Anything else would be needlessly draconian, and would completely miss the positive effect that staff personal accounts have on humanising an organisation.

2. Have it only apply to breaking news
Given that the rationale for this move has to lie with the importance of both getting scoops, and fact-checking news, Sky would do well to explicitly restrict it to that area. There’s a fair argument for making sure that news coming from Sky-branded Twitter accounts has gone through the same editorial checks that news coming from any other Sky-branded news platform would do. Likewise, it makes a certain kind of sense to stop reporters on official Sky accounts from straying into news areas that aren’t their beat, just as you wouldn’t expect your chief football writer to file a 1200-word review of the Lana Del Rey album* in lieu of a match report from the Reebok Stadium. But it makes no sense to apply it to anything else – if a Sky News journalist wants to retweet another journalist’s interesting analysis, or a good joke, or a link to the genuinely brilliant Rats In Hats Tumblr, then why on earth stop them? Once again, humanising = good.

3. Get serious about giving credit
Regrettably, Sky already has a bit of a dodgy reputation when it comes to crediting the work of other journalists, thanks to their habit of having ticker items (and, indeed, tweets) prominently ascribe news that was already broken by someone else to “Sky sources”. In their defence, they say people have misunderstood what they mean by this: it’s not that they’re claiming to have broken the news, just that they’re saying they have independently confirmed it with their own sources. Which is fine, as far as it goes, even if it doesn’t quite match up to how many other organisations use that form of words. But the “no retweets of rivals journalists” policy pushes it into a territory where, once again, it might start to look like an organisation that’s trying to mislead its audience about how many stories it breaks compared to its rivals. It may seem like a small thing – journalists fretting over bruised egos at not getting credit, added to the Twitterati’s mad obsession with getting a tweet out seconds before someone else – but if they want to avoid accusations of dishonesty, Sky will need to work out robust and transparent ways of clearly acknowledging that a scoop isn’t theirs.

4. Acknowledge that exceptions must be allowed
During the UK riots in August last year, Sky News’s journalists were extremely prominent on Twitter, helping to report, fact-check and amplify useful (indeed, potentially life-saving) information. They were outstanding, and I suspect they did a huge amount to improve the reputation of the station in the minds of a lot of people. The Guardian’s Reading The Riots analysis of how Twitter was used during the unrest showed how professional journalists – both breaking news and retweeting others – played an important role in stopping false rumours from spreading and getting good information to those who needed it (it’s worth noting that at least four Sky News journalists, as well as a several centrally-controlled Sky accounts, were among the most retweeted users during that time). There are times when the public service aspect of journalism – even in news organisations that don’t have an explicit public service remit – has to take precedence over everything else. And there are times when a story gets too large, and too important, for any organisation to pretend its coverage can be comprehensive. These rules would utterly crush the potential for them to do that again.

5. Trust your journalists
Ultimately, a lot of this kind of palaver – micro-managing your employees’ social media accounts – comes down to how much you trust your staff. If you don’t think you can trust them not to tweet unverified information, or to produce interesting output related to their beat, then these kind of rules make sense. If you don’t think they can understand the norms and practises of social media, then you don’t let them try (it’s notable that Mann, Sky’s Digital News Editor and one of the UK’s top experts on the intersection of news and social media, said that he “didn’t take part in the discussions” that led to the policy). But I honestly don’t think Sky’s journalists are deserving of that lack of trust, and I don’t think this will magically make them better reporters, or Sky a better news channel. I think Sky’s staff are smart, talented and professional, and Sky should be celebrating that fact, rather than trying to hide them away behind a mountain of managerial dictats.

If Sky clarify those points and apply the guidelines as liberally as possible, then the new policy might at least make some sort of coherent sense – even if many would still see it as narrow-minded, short-sighted and rather Cnutish. But if they go in the opposite direction… well, that sound you hear is a thousand social media gurus preparing ten thousand slides for a hundred thousand presentations with Sky as their number one example of “old media not getting it”. And I think that’s a fate we all want to avoid.

*Though why you’d need 1200 words to say “it’s crap”, I’m not sure.

Update: Oh dear. Now the BBC’s getting roughly the same stick that Sky got, prompted by another Guardian story titled “Don’t break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told”. I think this criticism is likely mistaken, though. It’s based around this blogpost written by Chris Hamilton, BBC News’ s social media editor, clearly in response to the Sky brouhaha. The key line that everyone seems to be picking up on is the final one:

“…we’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.”

But in interpreting this, everybody seems to be completely ignoring the directly preceding line:

“We’re fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts.”

I’m honestly not sure how you go from “the BBC have developed technology specifically to allow their reporters to break news on Twitter while keeping the newsdesk informed” to “don’t break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told” – it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any ambiguity there. It’s just flat-out misleading. Chris Hamilton made this clear himself, in a slightly world-weary tweet:

@darrenwaters @stuartdhughes I’m not sure the 2nd last par of my blog could be much clearer, but i will be clarifying things

— Chris Hamilton (@chrishams) February 8, 2012

Of course, there’s still an argument to be made that even simultaneously filing to Twitter and your newsdesk is now unnecessarily restrictive. But I think of all news organisations, the BBC is clearly the one where keeping your colleagues updated through centrally controlled mechanisms is of the most obvious importance. Even on large national newspapers, you can reasonably use Twitter as an ad hoc internal comms tool – teams are small enough for pretty much everybody to follow each other, and you only need to co-ordinate news awareness across a relatively limited number of platforms. The BBC, meanwhile, has several national TV stations, a global TV station, quite a few national radio stations, 48 regional and local radio stations, a global radio station broadcasting in 27 languages to several hundred million listeners, a website available in 32 different language editions… all run by a constantly shifting workforce thousands of staffers, casuals and freelancers. Oh, and a statutory duty to not mislead people. When news breaks, you really need to be able to let everybody know in a predictable and controllable way…

This video, “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work”, is getting passed around a lot right now. From the description: “Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person : a baby.”

To which, might I humbly point out: IT’S A BABY. I’m not sure it tells us much about the nature of user interfaces because IT’S A BABY and it DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT MAGAZINES ARE. It also doesn’t understand what an iPad is, or what a user interface is, because it’s a one year old baby and it doesn’t even understand what itself is. Babies aren’t “digital natives” (and by the way oh god stop calling your daughter that), because they aren’t even themselves-natives yet. I know it was kind of cute when Clay Shirky said that thing about the four-year-old looking for the mouse on a television and videos of babies always seem really meaningful and stuff, but ultimately what we’re dealing with here is a thought process that’s going “OOH LOOK SHINY THING want milk now OOH LOOK SHINY THING let’s see if I can break it WANT MILK also I have done a poo.” Babies don’t offer much insight into the functionality of information transmission mediums because fundamentally, brilliant as they are in many ways, BABIES ARE IDIOTS. In fact, if you’ve ever tried to give a baby a present of any kind, you’ll realise that to them an iPad is a broken Box That The iPad Came In, because it’s harder to make it part of a tower you can knock over and Daddy gets nervous when you try. At the most basic level, to a baby, everything that isn’t Mum is broken. An iPad is a Mum that doesn’t work. A Samsung Galaxy Tab is a Mum that doesn’t work. A magazine is a Mum that doesn’t work. Dad is a Mum that doesn’t work. Because, as I might have mentioned, it’s a BABY.

Also the video actually seems to show that the baby can’t operate the iPad at all in a meaningful way, but giggles when shiny thing does whooshy bright light stuff, while she’s already getting the hang of the page-turning interface of the magazines pretty well.

So the other weekend, I took part along with m’colleague Chris in NomNomNom ’11 – a kind of Mastercheffy cooking contest for bloggers. It was, as always, huge fun (also as always, I didn’t win.) I was hoping to write up my full experience, but unfortunately I find myself in a field in Derbyshire with only my phone to blog from. As such, this is a bit truncated… but it does give you probably the most requested recipe I cooked on the day, for Billionaire’s Shortbread.

Billionaire’s Shortbread is like Millionaire’s Shortbread, except MUCH MORE CLASSY. By which I mean it’s got peanuts in it, and is decorated with gold dust. Peanuts, of course, are noted for their exclusivity and connotations of a luxury jet-set lifestyle. Note: the alternative name for this recipe, which it was given on the day, is “Posh Snickers”.

Billionaire’s Shortbread

For the shortbread
Ingredients:
250g Plain Flour
75g Caster Sugar
185g Butter

Mix the ingredients up in a big bowl until you’re got a nice, smooth, malleable gloop that – assuming you’ve measured all the things right – should be substantial enough that you can pick it up and shape it without it trying to escape.

Stick this into a pre-greased cake tin, or similar receptacle – you’ll want something roughly a foot square. Ish. Slap it about a bit until it’s roughly flat and evenly distributed across the tin. Whack this into an oven pre-heated to 180°C for around twenty minutes (until the surface starts to turn golden), then once it’s done, allow it to cool and harden. Because you’re probably impatient, “allow it to cool” means “stick it in the fridge”.

For those of you who like to keep up with such things, this is what’s technically known as a “buttery biscuit base”.

For the peanut butter layer
Ingredients:
A jar of crunchy peanut butter

Scoop about half the peanut butter into a bowl, and stick it in the microwave on a medium heat until it’s a bit runnier than it normally is.

Once your buttery biscuit base is cool and solid enough that you can do things to it, slop your slightly melty peanut butter all over it and spread it out evenly.

This is definitely the easiest step of the recipe, which given that the rest are also very easy is saying something. Also, you’ve got half a jar of peanut butter left over. Bonus.

For the caramel layer
Ingredients:
40g Butter
50g Light Muscavado Sugar
400g Condensed Milk
1 tsp Cornflour
Large handful of salted peanuts

First, pummel the crap out of your peanuts with a pestle & mortar (or other peanut-destroying device), until your large handful of peanuts becomes a large handful of small peanut fragments. Retain your fragments in a bowl for later.

Splodge the butter, sugar and condensed milk into a saucepan, and stir constantly over a medium heat for some time until it starts to thicken. At this point, carry on stirring over a medium heat for longer than you might think. Basically, the point is it needs to be really rather thick – if it’s too runny, it’ll RUIN EVERYTHING. Once you’re convinced it’s really quite thick (little bits will probably have started caramelising), stir in the cornflour for added thickening, then stir in the peanut fragments.

Spread all this lot over your buttery biscuit base and peanut layer, then “allow it to cool” (stick it in the fridge) again.

For the chocolate layer
Ingredients:
150g Milk Chocolate
50g Dark Chocolate
Gold Dust (edible type)

Obvious bit: once your caramel later has solidified a bit, melt the chocolate in a bowl in the microwave. If you do this cleverly and just stir it gently, the milk and dark chocolate should make a pretty swirly pattern. Put your melty swirly chocolate over the caramel and spread until it’s even.

Then comes the pointless but fun  tarting-up section. Get a small amount of edible gold dust, and using a very fine sieve, scatter it lightly over the chocolate.

(Edible gold dust note: you know how the phrase “it’s like gold dust” normally denotes that something is very rare and extremely expensive? Turns out you can get small pots of it in Waitrose for under four quid.)

Allow to cool (FRIDGE) again, then serve (ideally) when the chocolate is mostly solid but still slightly gooey. If you’ve done it right, it should have roughly the density of a neutron star, and should be able to give a horse diabetes at fifty paces.

There’s been a bit of a wailing and a gnashing of teeth on the interwebs today about the libel decision handed down yesterday by Justice Tugendhat which found against the Telegraph and Lynn Barber, over a review Barber wrote in 2008 of Dr Sarah Thornton’s book ‘Seven Days in the Art World’. Possibly because of how the case is being reported – for example, the BBC’s report begins with the line “An author has won £65,000 in libel damages over a “spiteful” book review that was written by a journalist for a broadsheet newspaper” – lots of writers appear under the impression that the libel damages (and £65,000 isn’t really that much for a libel case) have been awarded because the judge found that the review was just too nasty.

Obviously, this would be profoundly worrying for anybody in the business of reviewing things, where spitefulness is sometimes, regretfully, a necessary literary tool. And because the judgment itself is a) very long, and b) mostly quite boring, very few people seem to have read the full thing – which would reveal that their concerns are unfounded. In fact, the judgment appears to be entirely fair, and moreover it casts the actions of Lynn Barber and (to a lesser extent) the Telegraph in a very unflattering light.

Mostly to save me trying to make the same point over and over again on Twitter, here’s the three major misconceptions about the case:

1) A review being “spiteful” now places you at risk of a libel action

No, it doesn’t. The libel decision has very little to do with the tone of Barber’s piece, and a lot to do with the fact that it made several highly defamatory – and entirely false – allegations about Dr. Thornton’s work. Tugendhat J is crystal clear about this in paragraph 76 (highlighting mine):

“A reviewer is entitled to be spiteful, so long as she is honest, but if she is spiteful, the court may more readily conclude that misstatements of fact are not honest, since spite or ill will is a motive for dishonesty.”

Good news, reviewers! You can carry on being as spiteful and vitriolic and snarky and pissy as you ever were. The one caveat there (as we’ll see in a bit) is that if you do make some entirely false claims in your review, and if the tone of your piece is extremely spiteful, you might find it a bit harder to claim in court that you made an honest mistake, and that you weren’t attempting to damage the reputation of the person whose work you’re reviewing.

2) All Lynn Barber is guilty of is being forgetful

Nope. Not only does the judge conclude that it’s unlikely Lynn Barber was actually forgetful, but it doesn’t really matter: the crucial question isn’t whether she forgot a key fact, but that she apparently didn’t care (and never bothered to check) whether what she wrote was true or not. Which, when you’re making an extremely damaging claim, is really not on.

The libel claim, which made up for the majority of the damages (there was also a secondary claim of malicious falsehood), was over Barber’s claim that Thornton had falsely said she had interviewed Barber for the book (about her experiences of being a Turner Prize judge). As it happens, Thornton had interviewed Barber for the book; Barber’s claim that she hadn’t (“I gave her an interview? Surely I would have noticed?”) was completely untrue.

In her defence, Barber said she’d simply forgotten that the interview had happened. Indeed, she noted that she’s written before about how poor her memory is, for example in her memoir ‘An Education’. That would seem to be a reasonable thing to say in her defence – but Tugendhat considered this, and found it a poor excuse on two eminently reasonable grounds.

First (and treading carefully here) he found reason to doubt that Barber’s memory was quite as bad as she made out. Not only did he find that her descriptions of her poor memory in An Education to actually be examples of perfectly ordinary memory (in parargraph 92 of the judgment he goes through her examples one by one, dismissing each with a deliciously blunt “That is normal”), but he specifically suggests that she only introduces the idea of poor memory as “a literary device to warn the reader that the memoir does not purport to be completely accurate”.

Moreover, Tugendhat suggests that Barber’s supposed bad memory appears, on the basis of her evidence, to be selective at best – for example, being able to remember clearly an email in the afternoon of one day that supports her case, but not another email that same evening that hinders her case (paragraphs 84 and 85).

In summation, the judge writes: “Ms Barber wrote in her witness statement in a number of places that she has a notoriously bad memory. In reading the documents and in listening to her oral evidence, I did not see any sign that that was true. On the contrary, her memory of events in 2006, as recounted in the Review, and her memory of events when she gave evidence, seemed to me to be normal or in some respect better than might be expected. I do not accept the accuracy of her statement that her memory is bad.“

And regardless, he secondly notes that it makes very little difference to the judgment whether her memory really is that bad – because if she knew she had a bad memory, then relying on her memory to make as damaging and defamatory claim as sayng that a book’s author lied without checking if it was true is enough to turn the case against her. The defence admitted that Barber had in fact made a mention of having done the interview in her diary (paragraph 28); it would have been the work of minutes to check the facts. Tugendhat writes (paragraph 127): “It is with some hesitation that I reached the conclusion that Ms Barber knew the interview allegation was false at the time she wrote the Review. I have had no hesitation in reaching the alternative conclusion that (if she did not know it was false) she was reckless, that is indifferent as to whether it was true or false.“

3) It was an honest mistake

On the basis of the judgment… er, not so much. In fact, the judgment really is quite brutal about Lynn Barber’s actions, and also shows the Telegraph’s response to an entirely reasonable complaint in a fairly bad light. As noted, Tugendhat repeatedly says that Barber was “indifferent” to whether the claims she had made were true or false (paragraphs 121 through to 127). He says (paragraph 106) that “I found nothing in her demeanour which suggested to me that she cared one way or another whether the interview allegation was true or false. She manifested no sign of caring at all.” That’s a pretty damning indictment of any journalist – a profession in which, you’d hope, caring about whether things are true would be a pretty central character trait.

Furthermore, Barber didn’t respond to emails from Thornton, shortly after the review was published, pointing out the mistake (paragraphs 35, 102); the Telegraph took four months to remove the review from their website, and a further six months to issue an apology (paragraph 187), none of which suggests much in the way of good faith in their approach to the issue. Then the Telegraph, in their first full response to Dr Thornton’s complaints, chose to use the the quite baffling (to me) argument that the 35-40 minute interview hadn’t actually been an interview, because it hadn’t yielded much useful information (paragraph 55, given shortest possible shrift in paragraphs 94 and 95).

I think that for most journalists this will come as quite a surprise: the idea that slightly rubbish interviews retrospectively stop having been interviews at all. I mean, I was quite excited when I got to interview Matt Smith – he’s The Doctor, for goodness sake – even if it was just a 15 minute phoner where he straight-batted everything right back at me. Turns out that, according to the Telegraph’s legal team, I never interviewed him at all, which is definitley some sort of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans about which I’m not very happy.

It gets worse for Barber – in papragraph 96, Tugendhat bluntly states that, in her evidence, “she told what is certainly a lie.” As he notes a while later (parargraph 107) “it is a very serious matter for a judge to find that a witness has lied” – but he’s in no doubt that she did, based on what she wrote in her original review.

—–

In summary: the judge found that Lynn Barber lied in her evidence, didn’t care whether the allegations she made were true or false (when it was easy for her to have checked and found out that they were false), and both she and the Telegraph were slow and obstructive in their response to Dr Thornton’s complaint. The only area where the ‘spitefulness’ (or otherwise) of the review comes into play is that it’s indicative of Barber’s “state of mind” (see paragraph 76, the only time in the entire judgment where spite is mentioned) when writing it; it’s a factor that harms her particular defence, not a cause of action in itself. Spite as a journalistic method lives to fight another day.

While many journalists may be worried about this judgment based on some stray headlines, in actual fact it’s a result that all good journalists should be able to support – even though many of us, myself included, have enjoyed and admired Lynn Barber’s work for many years. Because ultimately it’s about the basics of journalism, our version of “first, do no harm” – “First, don’t say something that isn’t true.”

At work today, I wrote the following review of the new levels of Angry Birds Seasons – an update that celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, following on from previous batches of fresh levels themed around Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day. After a brief discussion with my line manager, we mutually agreed that the piece wasn’t entirely right for the tone of our site.

As such, I’m publishing it here instead.

—–

Dear Finland,

Ah. We see you’ve updated Angry Birds with some new levels – all in celebration of our patron saint, St. Patrick. That was nice of you! However, one or two quibbles. Now, we might be reading a bit too much into this here, but having had a brief glance at our history books just to remind ourselves, we can’t help but wonder at your decision to depict Irish people as pigs. Thieving pigs, to put not too fine a point on it. Is that possibly, we don’t know, a touch insensitive? A little awkward on the symbolism front? Thieving green pigs in green hats with big red beards, in fact. No. Wait. Thick evil thieving green pigs with stupid beards WHO HABITUALLY STORE LARGE AMOUNTS OF EXPLOSIVES IN THEIR RAMSHACKLE HOUSES.

Jesus, honestly, why didn’t you just superimpose Oliver Cromwell’s face on the Red Bird and have done with it? Look, perhaps we’re getting a little paranoid here – that is probably because we are ALWAYS DRUNK, by the way – but still, we’re picking up a pretty strong ‘the thieving Irish pigs must be destroyed at all costs’ vibe from this thing.

We suppose we should be thankful that we’re just portrayed as stealing eggs. We half expected it to be Lucky Charms.

Still, it’s all just a bit of fun, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of jovial national fraternity, let us simply say: Finland, go fuck yourselves, you reindeer-munching, Renny Harlin-producing, forty-four places below us in the FIFA rankings, haven’t made a decent smartphone in years, can only win Eurovision when dressed as a bat, so boring we had to look you up on Wikipedia to find out enough bloody stereotypes runkkarit.

To be sure.

Lots of love,

Ireland

P.S. Don’t suppose you could lend us some money? We’re a bit short.

A couple of weeks ago, I did something that doesn’t come naturally to me: I paid a fairly hefty wodge of money for an Apple computer. I’ve never owned a Mac before; while I’ve got nothing particular against Team Cupertino, I’ve always been a PC boy at heart, ever since I first laid eyes on my dad’s Amstrad 1512 many, many years ago.

More to the point, I’ve never seen myself as the sort of person who casually gets their MacBook out in a Starbucks to fire off a quick email to Tristan, and certainly not the sort of person who then writes a blog post braying to the world about how awesome their shiny new toy is. You know, one of those bloody people. And yet here we are.

I did it because I’d reached the point where I realised that my faithful four-year-old ThinkPad was finally giving up the ghost, and that my first generation EeePC (as much as I still love the adorable, plucky little thing) wasn’t even remotely capable of actually doing what I needed it to do. More pressingly, I was heading away on a trip in a little over a week for work, so I needed something that would, you know, work.

But still, I hadn’t planned on going full Jobs.^[4] And I’m not sure what it was that made me go back and take a second look at the MacBook Air, given my first reactions to its announcement had been the standard ones of “LOL I thought Steve said you’d never make a netbook” and “it costs HOW MUCH?”

Of course, I’d read loads of the major tech writers raving about it, but it didn’t really connect; they were those people, after all. Instead, I think it might have been James Cridland’s post on one month with his new Air – notably the suggestion that it was good enough as a primary computer that he was pondering eBaying his MacBook Pro. I asked around a bit more on Twitter, and the responses from various smart people made me even more intrigued. Two consecutive evenings spent playing around in the Regent Street Apple Store, and I’d somehow decided to spend about three times as much money as I’d originally planned, for a computer I’d been cheerfully mocking a few weeks earlier.

So how is it? Well, obviously, it’s love.

I’ve seen and used other parts of the MacBook range plenty over the years, of course – my brother has a now slightly ancient MacBook, my flatmate Chris has a number of MacBooks Pro, and you can’t really work as a journalist without absorbing Macs as a sort of background radiation (they are to the media industry what radon gas is to Cornwall). And they’re all excellent machines, but none of them has made me go “fuck, that’s good” like this one does. This is the first Mac that’s actually made sense to me, as a PC lover, of the endless cries of “but they’re just better” we’ve been filtering out for years. ^[5]

First up: aaahhh, just look at it. Sod the iPhone, it’s far and away the prettiest product Apple currently puts out; a flawless ultra-thin wedge of pearlescent metal that, when shut, looks slender enough that you could plausibly use it to jemmy open windows. Now pick it up. It’s barely there. (My 11inch model weighs about 140g more than the original EeePC, for comparison, but size-for-size feels far lighter.) I’m taking it to work with me most days, and I barely notice it in my bag.

And it’s seriously quick. At almost everything. It’s usable from a cold start-up in a shade over 10 seconds (this is known as the “fuck you, Chrome OS” feature), powers down in two or three; it comes back from hibernation instantly. Web pages load likethat, programs open without a pause you could make a cup of tea in, and you can overload it with open apps and tabs without it creaking and groaning and belching smoke at all. The only thing I’ve found so far that it dawdles over is processing video files, but then most devices that aren’t dedicated video file processing machines get a little clunky over that. Given the fact that, on paper, its specs are a little underwhelming, I’m not sure how it’s actually doing all this. Maybe the performance will swan-dive off a cliff after six months, but for now, it rocks.

That the keyboard is great won’t surprise Mac users, but it’s the best on any computer I’ve ever owned; full-sized and well-spaced despite the Air’s small dimensions, with the keys just the right height, springiness, and responsiveness. Because I have tiny, childlike fingers, I’ve never had much of an issue with netbook-sized keyboards, but even Edward Sausagehands would be fine using this one. Only the keyboard on the slightly ridiculous Asus Bamboo (it’s a computer made of wood!) comes close in my recent experience, and it’s got such a similar chiclet design to the MacBook that you suspect they may have been copying.

The screen is gorgeous and impressively high resolution. The battery life is grand (four hours solid use, five or six if you whack the brightness down, turn off bluetooth and don’t watch loads of Flash videos). It makes you realise that you never used your optical drive any more. Oh, and unlike most previous computers I’ve owned, at no point has it got hot enough that you could lightly sear a sea bass on it.

But really, it’s the trackpad that makes it. Apple have pretty much nailed it on the gesture front, incorporating all the smart bits of iOS without the shitty not-really-multitasking and rage-inducing notifications. It’s the clever use of different finger numbers, which you think will be annoying but actually becomes second nature within a day or two: one finger to tap, two to scroll, three to swipe back and forward and (my personal favourite) the four-fingered flick that brings up all your open apps. ^[6]

The Air does everything I love about netbooks – fast, lightweight in size and usability, ditching the unnecessary – without the compromises and brick walls you hit with netbooks. Unless you’re a serious power user in the picture or video field (or you really need a 300GB+ hard drive), it’s not a secondary computer, it’s your main one. And it makes the idea of owning an iPad as anything other than really expensive portable telly you can play Angry Birds on seem faintly ridiculous.

1. ^[4] In fact, my original plan was to go for a cheap but decent Windows or Linux netbook (an Acer Aspire One, or similar) and then maybe add in a Mac Mini as a desktop a little while later. I quite liked the idea of having access to more than one OS ecosystem; moreover, I was drawn to the notion of shifting away from the increasing ubiquity of the laptop-as-primary-computer. I’d been thinking about the ways computers fit into and shape your life for a while, mostly while trying to work out the point of the iPad. And having your main computer being something you casually schlepped around with between bedroom, living room and the outside world was (I reasoned) pushing your relationship to it into an awkward and unhelpful territory – a perpetually present but always peripheral screen. Relate to your computer in this way, and it becomes a distraction device; a no-strings-attached fling for your unfaithful attention span. Something you use to casually look up actors on IMDb while watching films, or to complain about Masterchef on Twitter. Not something you use to get things done. Sod convergence, I decided – what I needed was to compartmentalise my screens. A portable, utilitarian one for basic on-the-go productivity; a fixed one far away from other screens for hardcore, ignore-distractions doing stuff; and if I must use Twitter to bitch about how Gregg Wallace looks like a judgemental thumb, I can do that from my phone (Android, of course). And bollocks to tablets. Naturally, I then did the complete opposite of this. ↩
2. ^[5] It also prompts this reaction in others, as Armand demonstrates nicely. ↩
3. ^[6] Weird thing: for-some-reason, tap-to-click seems to be turned off by default on all demonstration models in Apple stores – something that nearly put me off entirely before I realised there was an option to turn it on. Given that worries of the “but there’s only one mouse button” type are still a big psychological barrier for many people switching from PC to Mac, it’s bizarre that they deliberately disable a feature which would make many potential new recruits feel instantly more at home. ↩

Tahrir Square in Egypt. Pearl Square in Bahrain. Green Square in Libya. May First Square in Algeria.

Dictators have always loved squares. They’re good for big military parades, shows of national unity, triumphalist architecture, and statues of you riding a horse. You can’t be a good dictatorship without a proper square; if you can, you co-opt a pre-existing square and rename it, adding horse statues and massive flags to taste. If no appropriate square exists, you’d better get building one quickly, or all the other dictators will look down on you.

Revolutionaries have always loved squares. They’re good for large gatherings, shows of defiance, and are usually handy for burning down nearby government buildings. Squares have so often been the focus of mass protest, successful or otherwise: Trafalgar Square in London; Tiananmen Square in Beijing; Azadi Square in Tehran. They’re well suited to symbolic purposes, providing the focal point and defining iconography of the movement; they’re good for sustaining the narrative of a drawn out revolutionary movement, as with Tahrir and currently with Pearl (as long as we hold the square, the revolution lives); and possibly above all, they’re good for pragmatic purposes (when communication is cut off, a simple message – head for the square – is the easiest to spread and to follow). If you want to have a revolution, a proper square can be invaluable.

Of course, everyone else loves squares as well. Capitalists like them because they attract commerce; communists like them because they emphasise collectivity; monarchs like them because they’re monuments to nobility; republicans like them because they belong to the people; tourists like them because they’re good for sightseeing; locals like them because they keep all the bloody tourists in one place. There’s nothing about any one group or ideology that seems inherently more pro-square than any other; humans just seem to really dig a good square, from the tribal village to the post-industrial megacity.

But it makes you wonder: is there an architecture of revolution? Are there styles of urban planning that are inherently pro-democracy, built – deliberately, or unconsciously – to empower the expression of mass protest? Conversely, how would you design a city if you wanted it to be best suited to suppressing uprisings, to give the secret police and the elite presidential guards the run of the streets? Do dictators like squares mostly for style points, not realising they might hold they key to their ultimate undoing? Could there be an evolutionary process of architecture at work, whereby urban layouts that help build better societies become desirable and spread for that very reason? I’ve checked, and BLDGBLOG doesn’t seem to have written anything on this recently, so that’s pretty much me left flailing. But the thought occurred, so it seemed worthwhile to put it out there in case anybody smarter or more up to date with this field than me wants to drop some knowledge…

One of the more interesting things about the subpoena served on Twitter by the US Department of Justice, demanding information about the accounts of various people connected to WikiLeaks (which Twitter commendably fought to have unsealed, so they could warn the users and give them a chance to challenge it before handing over any data) is that significant parts of it don’t seem to apply to Twitter at all.

It’s always possible that the DoJ’s subpoena is just incompetently written, or that the DoJ has little understanding of how Twitter works (it certainly seems sloppily put together; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp’s name is spelled wrong; the request specifies a combination of real names and Twitter usernames for no apparent reason; Gonggrijp and Icelandic MP Brigitta Jonsdottir are both named twice, under their real names and usernames.) But it also raises the possibility that it’s a boilerplate request, giving some credence to the widely-floated theory that Twitter isn’t the only recipient of such a subpoena.

The first section asks for, among other account information:

6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records

Twitter, of course, is a free service, so it makes no sense for the DoJ to ask for this non-existent information. Google & Facebook, who WikiLeaks have publicly suggested may have also been subpoena’d, also don’t charge for their basic services (Google of course do offer paid-for Apps for Business accounts) – does this suggest that other sites and services, which do offer paid-for individual accounts, have been targeted?

The second section then asks for:

1. records of user activity for any connections made to or from the Account, including the date, time, length and method of connections, data transfer volume, user name and source and destination Internet Protocol address(es)
2. non-content information associated with the contents of any communication or file stored by or for the account(s), such as the source and destination email addresses and IP addresses

Some people seem to be interpreting “any connections made to or from the Account” as a demand for information on people who follow the Twitter account, but I’m not sure that’s correct – surely that would have been more clearly specified if that was the case? (And would a court have allowed such a wide-ranging request?) And other parts of this section, once again, don’t seem to apply to Twitter at all – “data transfer volume”, “file stored by or for the account”. These make a lot more sense if they’re actually talking about online file storage and sharing – services something like Dropbox, YouSendIt, and so on. (And “destination email addresses” suggests email providers are also likely on the DoJ’s radar.)

As far as I can tell, in Twitter’s case the only non-public information that the DoJ could get from this request would be IP addresses, phone numbers and a record of who users sent direct messages to (from my non-expert reading, this wouldn’t give them the actual content of the DMs – it’s “non-content information” they want). Potentially useful for investigators, certainly, but not exactly smoking gun stuff. Given the nature of the case revolves quite heavily around the transfer of files – something Twitter doesn’t do at all – we should probably be asking email and cloud storage companies what their policies are complying with legal demands for user data.

I know there’s other, bigger, more topical things going on right now, but I couldn’t let this little gem of self-aggrandising historical revisionism from Clare Short slip past. Speaking to the Guardian about how Gordon Brown will be remembered, she says:

On Iraq he was marginalised by Blair for most of the time, but if he had moved with Robin [Cook] and me, we could have stopped it. But he didn’t move. I just think the young Brown wouldn’t have believed what he ended up doing.

That’s funny, I was sure I recalled Clare Short also not moving with Robin Cook, supporting the war at a crucial time when her resignation could have helped prevent it, and only quitting two months later when it was too late and the invasion was done, because people weren’t treating her as a Big Important Person like they did when they wanted her vote.