This month I have been mostly Tumbling.


Tumbling is like blogging. But faster. And hosted by a company called Tumblr.

My new Tumblr is called Harlequin Spitfire, and it's been running for a little while now.

And it suits me well, because it's a fast way to collect and share things you like. I've been using it to collect music and pictures. It's dead simple, and full of pretty sounds an images, so please go take a look. It's updated several times a day so there should always be something new on offer.

This week we've had Solargraphs, Florence, meteor strikes, and Adam Ant, among other beautiful fragments.

Someone probably called it a mosaic of genius. Someone else enjoyed it so much they're still there, grinning at the pictures, nodding at the sounds and dribbling on their trousers.
Others havn't seen it yet, and they're even poorer than the rest of us for it.

I'm not saying it's better than your favourite blog, but...

Pretty soon I'm sure I'll set Harlequin Spitfire up as a feed over here, but it looks quite pretty over on Tumblr.

Go see > link > share > tell > worship > die.

Some of the many treats on offer at Harlequin Spitfire.

The British Army is planning to issue new 'full cover' body armour to soldiers in Afghanistan by 2011. That's head to toe bulletproof protection.

The SAS are deeply unhappy with the Land Rovers UK forces are using, and troops face helicopter shortages. Add to this rising fuel costs, and the army is looking for a supply of cheap new rides.

The Army main battle rifle, the SA80 has a history of problems, despite a reputation for accuracy and recent fixes.

Paras coming back from Afghanistan reveal the close quarters nature of most of the fighting out there.

Regimental cuts and long deployments are leaving the Army as a smaller, more elite force.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking...



Ready for the next crusade

Sometimes if I like a story I see in the newspaper, I throw it up on Reddit, to share it with other witty, intelligent beings. This afternoon I enjoyed a story about an Octopus called Otto, so I shared it in a few places with a new headline:

Bored Octopus shoots out lights, then trashes aquarium and juggles crabs

As I approach my 2,000th vote of confidence, I'd like to thank the Internet for electing me Halloween winner. Otto, I couldn't have done it without you.

Some reactions from the fans:
tmiltznc "This is the best damn title ever on reddit for me :-)"
mizaya "This is my favorite Reddit submission ever."
HeywoodFloyd "The story itself cannot possibly be as awesome at the title so I won't even other reading it."
Maxxover "One of the best stories here, ever."
tempyra "The coolest thing I've read involving an animal all week (cat photos don't count)."
cruise02 "That might be the best headline I've ever seen on reddit."

But also some fascinating things about Octopi - because we all love animal facts.
They are actually shockingly clever animals, but sadly their learning is limited by their very short life spans. People have been popping up on the comments with all kinds of anecdotes and warnings about the intelligent octopus threat. I've copied a few of the best across here.

Saydrah - "I was 13 and on a school trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. Each kid in the class had been assigned a sea critter to study, and mine was the Cuttlefish [closely related to Octopi - Ben]. I realized while writing my report that in almost every photo of a cuttlefish where it was clear that it could see the person taking the photo, it held its tentacles like this: http://www.thepasty.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/Cuttlefish.jpg
I was also learning some sign language at the time, and it clicked: It's a greeting. At least, that was my theory, and as soon as I got to the aquarium I sought out the cuttlefish to test it.

There were 16 cuttlefish in the tank. I asked a staff member about them, and she said, "I know we put 16 in there, but they blend in so well we haven't seen more than 6 at a time since then. There haven't been any bodies, so I presume there are still 16."

At first I could spot two, camouflaged on rocks. I went up to the tank, knelt down, and held my fingers in the greeting pose from the photos. Incidentally, cuttlefish have 10 tentacles, two of which are set back and only shoot out to grab prey. Much like 10 fingers with two set back thumbs. It's easy to make your hands into a recognizably cuttlefish like shape.

With 10 minutes, I had 13 cuttlefish lined up at the front of the tank doing the greeting pose back at me. My teacher got all this on video, and a couple staff members came over and were floored at the sight. They started doing the sign language at the cuttlefish too, and the cuttlefish responded to them also. Some of them also changed color, which obviously I couldn't mimic, and made different tentacle poses, which I tried to repeat back to them.
After a couple minutes, one smallish cuttlefish turned red, grabbed a shrimp that was in the tank as a snack for the cuttles, and pushed the shrimp up against the glass in front of my hands. It seemed to be offering it to me. Then a larger cuttlefish turned white, grabbed the shrimp from the smaller one, and the big cuttlefish then repeated the effort to push it through the glass to me! The small cuttlefish turned gravel patterned, shot a jet of water out, and went to hide behind a tank decoration.

That was the high point-- I kept talking with them for about an hour, and I did manage to identify what I think were a few other specific signs. I do think the one I originally used was in fact a greeting, since they returned the same sign to me and to each other. There was also a pose that I think is a threat, because they did it to each other and then one (the submissive/weaker one?) would move away and sometimes change color. If I did that pose, they would either return it to me and have a standoff of sorts, or would move away from the glass. There also seemed to be a friendship/relaxation type of sign, because after a while of holding the greeting pose, a few of them shifted into another pose but didn't change color or move away."

So they can use tools, control their environment, and we can communicate with them. Nice - That's really A-List stuff for animals.

AlejandroTheGreat "Someone needs to lobby for a law forbidding researchers from letting an octopus occupy the same room as a crow, if the crows taught the octopuses how to use tools we're doomed."

ibisum "I love octopus. They are just the coolest creatures. Once, when I was snorkelling in my homeland (down under) I happened to notice this sort of 'lazy bit of weed' sprouting, unusually, out of a hole .. with the hollowed out head of a cray fish attached to it. As my eye is usually tuned to such things (never once paid for fishing tackle in my life, courtesy of all the stuff I've collected off the reefs), I decided to get a closer look and, of course, it turned out to be an octopus - FISHING!
You see, he was just sitting in his hole, lazily dangling an arm out of it, using the crayfish to attract small whiting and other fish stupids to his lair .. as soon as they'd come in for a quick feed - BANG! - out he'd shoot, grab 'em, and into his hole he'd go. I watched him fishing like that for about an hour, and it was truly awesome.. the way that little arm swung around in the current, just lolling about with his craftily deployed crayfish head. Brilliant little buggers."

trevdak2 "Octopi are really quite brilliant creatures. They have a grasp of tool use that almost rivals chimps and are very creative, adventurous, and learn quickly.
I have a friend whose mom is a marine biologist. She goes out on crabbing boats, and has a great story of octopi boarding the boat, opening the freezer, and stealing caught crabs for themselves."

crusoe "I for one welcome our new octopus overlords!"

Final thought for the day:
tehxaton "Otto would have been a better pick for VP than Palin."

I like Boingboing.

It's a very popular Blog - one of the biggest on the planet in fact, and the 2,083rd biggest website in the USA at the time of writing. A link up on there and... well I'll be able to add an exact figure tomorrow, but tens of thousands of extra readers show up.

If (and this part is crucial) if you get the address of your blog right. Otherwise it's just a nice post and a link that goes nowhere and lots of confused readers.

gjtm.blogger.com I wrote. gjtm.blogspot.com it is. Who knew.

So, great, I got a story posted to Boingboing. But, oh. What might have been.

Still, if I'd thought about it I'd have had a tidy up first anyway and posted something literate. Like the US election October Suprise post I've been working on that keeps being rapidly overtaken by the news. And I think avoiding the attention is probably more useful for me right now. Yes, that's my line and I'm sticking to it.

[Possibly corrected by morning]

Just a quick heads up:
Fascinating post from Wired - 2008, the end of blogs.

Not the death of blogging as such, but the death of personal blogs. Blogging powerhouses like Gawker and online link aggregators and magazines like Drudge or the Daily Beast now dominate, and half the functions of individual blogs are now well served by social networks. Link swapping and lifestyle commentary have now found homes and blogs have become professional.

An old idea I picked up from Jim Rossignol - The internet will become a set of personality based filters for content.

The internet loves lists, it loves animals, it love pictures and it loves fights. This post has it all. May I present - a list of unusual animal conflicts that I've come across in the last few weeks.

Giant Spider eats a bird
Popular this week: A giant Golden Orb Weaver spider in Australia traps and eats a passing Finch. The web is strong enough to hold the 10cm bird while it is drained of blood by Shelob's young cousin.

Great White Shark acrobatic eating
Jaws here is mainly a tube of muscle with a whole bunch of teeth at one end. Nothing unusual about a Shark eating a seal, but rather impressive pictures. The shark seems to be' showing off; dinner with a backflip.

Pelican feasts on puzzeled Pigeon
There have been Pelicans in London's St James' Park for more than 300 years. Exactly when they decided Pigeons were tasty is unknown, but anything that clears the flying rats from town is welcome.
More pictures Here.

Mouse bites venomous viper to death
The plucky mouse dives and rolls, avoiding the clumsy strikes of the ancient serpent, before spotting an opening and striking true. I name this mouse Bard.

Leopard savages crocodile
Two true predators, an even contest. Sure, the Croc looks rather small, but lets not take anything away from the cat who decided to make a meal of the longest surviving species on the planet.

Horse and Hound: The Revenge
Now we don't know what happened after this photo, but I have to assume horse trampled hound to death and ate the dog's guts and eyes, before wearing it's skin as a grisly hat.

Heron gulps down Rabbit
This one shocked me the most. This is a cute bunny we're talking about here, but the heron knows no mercy. Clever bird, because I'm pretty sure drowning won't work on it's usual prey, fish. It must have done this before...

Alien Vs Predator
Who cares.

'iPod generation' most at risk from credit crunch as one in five has £10k debts

I'm not an economist and I don't know what I'm talking about.
But let me list the things that seem wrong about the study in this article:

"Dubbed the "iPod generation" as they are Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-Ridden" - I'd hate to think they just tacked 'Insecure' on the front there to make it spell iPod. Where did it come from though? It has no basis in the article. Don't you love it when analyists try to get trendy, making nonsense of their points.


"Over half of those surveyed said they had debts of up to £10,000" - That'd be the student loans then, not just throwing money at shiney things. I believe we protested those at the time.

"Yet few know about the value of pensions and investments, which puts them at great risk as the economic boom of the past decade ends" - Um, pensions and investments? Arn't they the things that just crashed? Pretty glad I didn't waste my cash on them. Investing my money in tinned food and second hand gold.

"In addition, the study of 1,000 people found half of young adults rely on friends and family for advice on money rather than independent financial advisers." - This is a study by Independant financial advisors. And what excellent advice they've been giving out in the last decade.

"With the global credit crunch ransacking financial markets, this generation will struggle to pay off debts and find lenders prepared to finance house purchases" - Or... wait till houses become affordable again. It's not my generation that fucked up the world by calling home 'property'.

""A continuation of current trends would see ever-increasing distrust of government and financial institutions coupled with a lack of capability to do anything about it."

The start of a new weekend feature on Terminal Moraine - link blogging all the best things I've read online in the last week.

The Things He Carried - The Atlantic
I havn't had the pleasure of heading to the US in recent years, but with Russian and Iranian visas at the front of my passport and a Hamas TV-Shirt, it could be fun no matter how blue my eyes. US border authorities the TSA have an awful reputation for paranoid bullying, which achieves precisely nothing in terms of security. The Atlantic exposes just how useless they are.
Not that it's just a US problem - My lovely lady recently got in trouble for trying to take saline solution to France. The War on Moisture at British airports continues.

How We Lost the War We Won - Rolling Stone
On the ground with the Taliban. Nir Rosen is the only western journalist for some time to get frontline access to militia groups fighting in Afghanistan. It's important we all know who we're fighting out there.

The night I was 'killed in action' - Telegraph
Telegraph man in Afghanistan embedded with US National Guardsmen gets hit by IED.

Unleash the Puppies of War! - Danger Room
More from Afghanistan - The dogs adopted by US soldiers and their struggle to take them home to the US at the end of their service. There are now groups set up to help get the dogs vaccinated and flown back.

A Crisis of Conscience - Change.org
The bank bail outs cost a lot of money. In the US alone it's cost $850billion. Sure the idea is that the taxpayer will get a lot of it back at interest, and we need the banks to opperate to keep the economy running, but the sheer size of the investment is staggering. Like the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war in Iraq, you have to wonder how else it could have been spent. Change.org look at what kind of difference $850bn would make to the third world. Hint: Free healthcare for everyone on the planet for a decade.

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams - The Telegraph
"I only dream in black and white" sang Iron Maiden. Probably because they're old you see. I wonder what the next stage is, because my dreams frequently feature a crosshair and health bar. Too many games?

Moving pictures

Zero Punctuation: Stalker review - The Escapist
Talking of games - Breathless snarky video reviews that manage to be funny, opinioned and also damn good criticism.

The Daily Show - Comedy Central
Comedy writing inspired to match the scale of current events. I've been watching the show daily and it does a brilliant job of addressing all the big issues with smart understanding, warmth and wit. Stewart can get a little too Dr Evil, and the correspondants arn't as funny, but the shows a powerhouse of intelligent commentary.

Vernon Kay denies death rumors

Such an awful story in so many ways.
According to ITN/MSN News/Yahoo, people who edit Wikipedia pages are "Hackers".

The Buckinghamshire advertiser has an even worse write-up of the same crap.

I'm astonished any journalist out there doesn't know how Wikipedia works. Anyone can edit with a single click. This doth not a "Hacker" make. Pathetic. Massive fail ITN and everyone who posted the story or got their pet gibbon to mash out an ignorant re-write.

Chrome is a new web browser developed by Google. It was launched yesterday and will compete with Firefox and Internet Explorer and some Apple browser thing.

Things you should know about Chrome: Each tab can crash separately, it doesn't like Facebook at the moment, it has a porn mode, and they moved the tabs above the address bar.

Chrome isn't just a browser though. It's a statement of intent: Google is coming for your desktop, and Microsoft had better watch out. It's the next stage of Google bringing together all their services and applications into a single package.
Soon you won't need anything else.
Wait until they start building Chrome into TVs and phones. Games, office programes, e-mail and file storage are all moving into web browsers. When I start my PC the browser's the first thing I open. What if there was only a browser?

They call it the cloud, and it lies heavy on the horizon.

Google launched Chrome with a comic by Scott McCloud, smart comics legend.

Sadly, the comic's rubbish, full of smug marketing speak and dry technical nonsense, veiling corporate expansion behind utopian dreaming.
That's until the internet got hold of it and started to re-mix it.

Check out more here and here.

Last month I published a little rant about Charlie Brooker getting frightened and confused by search engine optimisation. I made a point of optimising the rant before publishing.

And now... victory. My rant is second on Google only to Brookers own piece when you search any combination of his name and the words Search Engine Optimisation.

I don't know why you would. But it proves that with a little savvy editing you can jump up the search rankings. In my case, that's ahead of Journalism.co.uk and a lot of other blogs that people actually read.

A tiny victory for slow explicit headlines. Remember kids, if it's good for toddlers, it's good for search engines.

One month on, my website is done. Finished. Over. I can't touch it again.

Which is a shame really, as it's full of mistakes, typos, errors and generally poor writing. And it has an awful name.

But you don't need me to tell you that. Go take a look.

The Nebula Science Monitor

(I suspect in the next few days i'll clone the site and correct a copy for wider public showing. It was just tough getting everything done on this one, and a few errors crpt in at the end.)

So yeah, I'm off working on my MA website.
No name yet kids after three months of work, and it's due in 16 hours time... (tis but a simple banner swap when I pick one).

I've built a search engine into my site, thanks to Google. But it won't work because Google is refusing to notice my little chunk of work in progress.
But we can do something about that - we, together, the people, standing up and making ourselves heard by the big boys in California.

Basically I need to get a page-rank so Google's machines think my site is worth reading for the search engine. And to get that I need links, links to my site from active, popular websites.

So would anyone who feels like doing me a favour please link to this page: http://jusnews.shef.ac.uk/ma07_08/final-projects/BenHazell/

And that way by the time my tutor tests it next month the search engine should work.

That is all. Thank you in advance for your co-operation. Feel free to drop the link again in a couple of months. Feel free to put it in tiny white letters on a white background. Feel free to tell all your friends.

Just don't message me about typos. I'll get there...

Head over to me other blog to read the live account of the demolition. Full story and video will follow soon on the (still un-named) Science news beta website.

This month I won't be blogging. I'll mostly be working on another project - some kinda Science News type website. The site's being built from scratch and is nearly ready, but it'll be accompanied at launch with a new blog.
It's running now but branding isn't finished yet. At the moment there's a stack of great links up there, and a pile of news will follow shortly. Go have a look, maybe even link to it.

Wise man once say: "If a dog bites a man it is sad for man, but not a story. But if a man he bites a dog, then this is news!"


Spotted in Friday's Telegraph.

This week at the Guardian former PC Zone Editor and TV critic turned usually funny ranter Charlie Brooker penned a little rant against agressive online news marketing.

To my mind he's a little off the mark. Brooker suggests that news websites are dropping popular online search terms into stories just to build hits and advertising revenue.

Sure he's being deliberatly absurd when he drops BRITNEY and POKER into his headlines, but he never calms down enough to make a rational point or provide a single real example.

He suggests that popular but irrelevant terms are inserted into stories to make the stories rank higher on search engines. Personally I've never seen any example of this at the Telegraph. It's nonsense. Putting random words like Britney into an unrelated headline would distract the search engines and bury your story behind a mass of existing Britney content. And if readers did end up there they'd be quickly disapointed, which is fatal for free media which relies on it's reputation. So if you tried Brookers tricks you'd quickly find both search engines and users ignoring you.

The practice he's really aiming at but doesn't seem to understand it the dark art of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about making your story easy for interested readers to find; it's about being clear and explicit about your content so it can be easily located.

Online headlines on website news stories are read by machines, not people. The headline people read is the link that takes them there. It's the search engines which give priority to the page headlines and so yes, they are dull and descriptive. And descriptive means using the words a reader might associate with the story. If it's about Obama then you write "Barack Obama", you add "US Elections" to clarify the context and you outline the issue in the obvious language. This has always been the way because web users like to identify content rapidly and all good sites help them do this. Confusing newspaper headlines with puns that take a moment to register are no use online.

As for Brooker's suggestion that writers control the positioning of words on the page in an F shape; this is the sign of a chap who doesn't venture into the newsroom much. Writers rarely have any control over the published layout of their copy and thus little control over what words appear on what line. It'd be nice if they could, and I'm sure the F shape theory is true, but in practice it doesn't happen.

What is true is that writing should be diferent online from newspapers. I believe Amazon once calculated that users spend only 4 seconds on any given web page. The writer then has 4 seconds, or just a couple of lines, to impart the most vital information to satisfy the reader. Many users don't even read in chunks online. Studies that track eye movements show most users are able to rapidly scan for details and answers to their questions without reading whole paragraphs.

Writing should be tailored differently for the web to take into acount new forms of reading. There are dangers to the accurate and impartial ideals of journalism and I have a number of reservations about online news practice, but Brooker doesn't really pick up on them.

Wrote this quickly for the Sheffield Star this afternoon. I think it explains itself.
They’ve been to New York, Paris and London, but yesterday they arrived in Sheffield: The Google Streetview cars.

Google’s revolutionary Streetview service lets you view panoramic pictures from ground level around city centres as part of the popular Google Maps service.

To obtain these pictures, cars with hi-tech cameras fitted to the roof are driven around the city to capture images of everything they pass, taking pictures in every direction, every second.

These photographs are then stitched together by computers and positioned on the map at the exact location they were taken.


Click and drag to look around. View Larger Map

When processed the images become a frozen model of the streets, allowing internet users to move around the city looking down roads and peering into shop windows.

The movements of the Streetview cars are kept secret to keep the scenes as natural as possible and avoid advertising displays being erected for the cameras.

The distinctive Google cars have been spotted driving around the UK for the last week, being seen in London, Birmingham and Manchester. Yesterday one was spotted filming along West Street.

A full launch of the Streetview service in the UK is expected in the near future.

Privacy concerns were raised in the US after the initial launch of the Streetview service resulted in a number of individuals being pictured at embarrassing moments, including falling off of bikes and sunbathing topless.

Google maintain that all the images are taken from public space and they allow users to flag any images deemed inappropriate or private for removal from the service. They are also reported to be considering blurring faces and number plates for the UK launch.

Did you know there are two types of quote mark on computers?

I didn't until a few months ago when I arrived at the Telegraph and was sent on a search and destroy mission for the wrong sort.

It's so irritating I wanted to share.

It seems there are both curley and straight quote marks in the world, even within each font.
We have the curled: “ ”
And the straight: " "

When you type you'll probably only use the straight ones. But if you copy and paste something from a document, you could find yourself copying the curley ones. Even if they look exactly the same in whatever you're typing - they won't when you publish.

Mixing them up is just madness.

So don't you let anyone try to tell you you don't need specalist elite training to be a Web Journalist.

I'd just like to take a moment to post a response to some of the accusations thrown out in Rhoda’s awards blog post.

She's getting a bit of an official reputation for libel and inaccuracy this week.

Eight of us made the trip for the awards: David, Marie, a rep from each post-grad course and a single hanger on.

We rose early for the train to London where we were unfortunately placed in the quiet carriage. This went so badly that one gentleman put earplugs in while Broadcast girls discussed midget sex-tapes. Peter Cole travelled separately in a pink stretch Hummer.

David's comment about our lack of newspapers and the death of Print media was well founded. Rhoda's suggestion I pay for the Mail is not. While we didn’t have a paper between us all day, I had a freshly updated RSS feed of BBC News on my phone and a Hemmingway novel stashed in a fag packet, while his printed bog-roll Guardian was already dated.

To be fair though, the man had a yellow plate of pure future strapped to his bag: A solar panel charging up his camera.

The problem with the Awards reception, the difficulty that led Rhoda to accuse me of "an eating competition" with Matt, was the difficulty of obtaining the promised "lunch".

Patrolling the stiflingly hot reception room were twice as many wine slaves as there were Canapé bitches, and the Chardonnay girls were much more attentive to my needs than the oiks who couldn't ensure a reliable supply of tiny burgers.

It was a case of more top-ups than tasties, and this meant we had to keep snatching at any passing morsels to soak up all the free wine.

Free drinks were a theme of the day and I’d like to thank all those who kept up a constant supply of offers for over 13 hours, including David, Peter, and the editor of the Press Gazette who didn’t bother to get my name but passed over a beer anyway. Special mention to the very generous Marie Kinsey for the fizzy.

I’d dispute Rhoda’s suggestion that our esteemed tutors are "immune" to alcohol. Immunity doesn’t breed the kind of desperate dependency that leads to a huddle in the corner of the restaurant car at 8pm drinking warm cheap wine from stolen Champagne glasses. They’re as guilty as the rest of us.

I think I’m the only person who noticed a rival journalism award nominee push past muttering that it wasn’t a bloody bar on the train.

When we eventually got back to the beautiful North, Rhoda spent some of her winnings on more wine for us, which was very kind.

If I was her, I’d save it for the courts…