I’ve Been In Prison

August 28, 2008

I was asked a while back to go to Oxford and address the distinguished citizens who attend the regular Oxford Geek Night. I said yes, of course I will, and of course I don’t mind if there’s no money in it, and of course I’ll spend a week or so knocking up a coherent 15-20 minute talk (which works out at a not inconsiderable 3000 words.) Anyway, I did that last night. Jenny and I thought we’d make a swish 24 hours of it, so we got a cheap deal at the Malmaison Hotel in the centre of town, which we discovered on arrival was a converted prison. Looks just like a prison, but with nice carpets. Oh, and they’ve knocked through so you get two cells as your room rather than one. And if the service is bad, everyone in the hotel just bangs a complimentary container of shower gel on their door until the staff come around to restrain us, it’s brilliant.

There seemed to be a row coming from outside the hotel when we were getting ready to go down to the Jericho Tavern, and it was being made by 6 actors on a metal stage in the courtyard doing a performance of Animal Farm. A girl was doing a great impression of a horse – well, as good an impression as you can do of a horse while wearing a shirt and trousers. I’d have been more impressed if she’d donned a pantomime horse costume, but I guess that would detract from the underlying message that Orwell was trying to get across. It was tempting to bellow from behind the safety of the net curtain “Excuse me, could you keep it down a little, thanks” – but I didn’t. I’m too polite.

Bite to eat, then to the Jericho Tavern, where supposedly Google were sponsoring the event to the tune of a free drink each, but I didn’t bloody get one, because I didn’t want to stumble onstage all incoherent and boozy. Hey ho. Ben Walker kicked off with a few pleasant tunes, and then it was my turn to embark on the weighty stuff. The text of the talk is up here, if you’ve got a few hours to spend wading through it – but it seemed to go down very well. Relieved at not having burst into tears or called for my mummy half way through, I had a drink or two – not bought by Google, but by j4 and addedentry. Yum. My talk was followed by one from the founder of Songkick, who said that live music was where the musicians were making money these days, to which I politely shouted “bollocks” from behind my hand. Couple more drinks, few more talks, bought chips from a van in the town centre at 1.30am, went to bed, got up, came home, rest of life, end.

Tomorrow, I will address the subject of tomorrow.

The Independent: Stumbleupon

November 20, 2007

The first time I ever heard the wheezing rasp of a modem, typed the letters “www,” and ventured online was back in 1994. The dotcom revolution was still inconceivable – in fact, the first ever search engine had only just been invented – but the internet still seemed to herald such rich promise. I gasped in wide-eyed, youthful wonder at the extraordinary possibilities of the world wide web; in retrospect I like to think that I pondered the future of humanity, the way this new tool could impact on democracy, end international conflict, and save the planet from environmental collapse – although I probably started with a conceited search for my own name.

Much of that promise has come to pass. Dissidents in totalitarian dictatorships use email to communicate with the outside world; western consumers access a dizzying array of producst and service from the comfort of an armchair. The web has bought people friendship across continents, and allowed scientists to share academic advances with colleagues on the other side of the planet. From Amazon to Ebay, Facebook to ITunes, it’s surely greatest cultural force of our lifetime.

That, at least, is the theory. In practice, of course, the internet also has an inconceivable capacity to provide distraction. When we surf the web, we want to be surprised, diverted, entertained. Sure, we also want to have our eyes opened to the infinite possibilities that the world holds, but we wouldn’t mind having a game of Hangman or Scrabble first. A recent report by the law firm Peninsula concluded that UK office workers spend £130m worth of company time each day browsing online; that’s the price corporate Britain pays for progress.

It may not be long, however, before aimless internet browsing becomes a thing of the past. A website and associated piece of software called Stumbleupon is revolutionising the way we trawl the web. The idea behind it runs something like this: currently, we either spend countless hours randomly wading through websites in the search for something diverting, or have our well-oiled routines interrupted by emails from friends, urging us to drop what we’re doing and go and visit some URL or other. But Stumbleupon provides a means – via a single mouse click – to find, or literally “stumble upon” fascinating new webpages that you’ve probably never seen before. If Stumbleupon continues to blossom – and currently it looks like being the biggest online craze since Facebook – it may one day become as powerful as Google.

The site works by harnessing the critical skills of its users – now approaching 4 million in number – as they’re surfing. When they’re shown a new site, they give it either a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” by clicking on buttons on a Stumbleupon toolbar which they’ve installed on their web browser – Internet Explorer, or Firefox. Not only do these users provide a vast testing panel to democratically decide which sites are good and which aren’t, they also feeding back to the website information about the sort of stuff they’re interested in.

With this huge community constantly ranking websites, Stumbleupon is creating an internet utopia where the good stuff is preserved, and the dross filtered out. If you want to see something that’s been deemed fascinating by fellow Stumblers, you just click “Stumble” on your own toolbar, and you’ll be brought a randomly chosen page from the internet’s top table, tailored to your particular interests. Bingo.

So, what’s the history? Stumbleupon has been around for some six years, but 2007 has been its biggest yet. Back in May it was bought by eBay for $75m, and in the last couple of months traffic has suddenly surged. And anyone involved in publishing on the internet – from news, to blogs, to video and photos – is beginning to wake up to the increased power that its users are wielding; some have cited it as more important to get a good ranking on Stumbleupon than on Google if you want to drive traffic towards your website.
Indeed, once you’ve installed the Stumbleupon toolbar, the results of your everyday Google searches are also transformed, with the ones ranked highly by Stumblers being highlighted with gold stars. No wonder that getting Stumblers on-side is becoming a crucial part of website promotion.

But can I trust Stumbleupon to show me a good time? Would a day spent stumbling make me any wiser, any more culturally enriched, or more of a hit at parties? There was only one way to find out…

08:00 Bleary eyed and with a highly-caffeinated mug of coffee in my right hand, I left-handedly click my way through the Stumbleupon sign-up process. First I have to choose a username; rhodrimarsden hasn’t yet been taken, which is a bonus. Then it asks me to tick some interests that define me as a human being. Yawning, I come up with a list of categories that probably marks me out as a generic male, mid-30s dullard: news, alternative rock, technology, independent film, oddities, humour, food, news. Oh, and of course I have to install the Stumbleupon toolbar, which has added another row of meaningless icons to the top of my browser – including the crucial Stumble button. Let’s give it a press.

08:20 I’m welcomed to the Forbidden Library. This is an exhaustive list of books that have been banned at some point, along with the dubious justification for their censorship – mainly sexually explicit language or blasphemy. But among the calls for book burning sits a judgement by the Alabama State Textbook Committee who, in 1983, called for the banning of The Diary of Anne Frank on the grounds of it being a “real downer”. How they expected Anne to put a positive spin on the Second World War, I’ve no idea. Another click on the Stumble button takes me on to www.miles.be, which is described as “the best ear-training resource on the internet”. I download some software and spend 15 minutes testing my ability to discern an E flat from a C. The distant memory of my “O” Level music lessons floods back, and I score a respectable 36/40. Next: footage of Jimi Hendrix playing “Wind Cries Mary” in a Swedish TV studio in 1967. I suspect that it’s in E major. I quickly check this using my new ear-training resource. Yes, I’m right.

09:00 Another video, this time of Gordon Ramsay making perfect scrambled eggs. I should have a go at making them, but sadly I’ve got no eggs in the flat – just some cereal that contains “spelt”, which I bought because I liked the idea of eating something spelt “spelt”. The next half hour is spent tolerating various websites thrown my way because I stupidly ticked the box marked “humour”. A predictable spoof of what George W Bush’s Hotmail inbox might look like. Some Japanese TV clips I’d already seen on a Chris Tarrant “crazy foreign TV” round-up. Some courtroom quotes that have been doing the rounds for decades: “Were you alone, or by yourself?” The only thing that made me smirk into my spelt was a video sideswipe at Microsoft. “The company who taught the world to turn their computer off by pressing a button marked Start,” it began.

09:50 “Is there a worst way to die?” asks howstuffworks.com. The site believes that this is a subjective issue, but does admit that falling into a vat of sulphuric acid at work, climbing out and then dissolving in front of your colleagues is probably among the worst. I need to banish this image from my head; I immediately find “BriefSafe”, an essential product for the regular traveller which is designed to hold your valuables and is disguised as soiled underwear. Next up is an image of the head of a pin with the Lord’s Prayer etched into it, which was apparently discovered on the body of a prisoner by the name of Schiller at New York’s Sing Sing Prison. According to the website, he’d painstakingly done this himself, and actually gone blind in the process. But it doesn’t explain why microscopic examination of any pins found on dead convicts might be standard prison procedure. I detect a possible hoax, and give it the thumbs down.

10:15 Despite having included “news” in my list of interests, I don’t think Stumbleupon threatens any of the world’s major news organisations. The only news-related piece that I’ve StumbledUpon so far is a short piece from a couple of years ago, telling the story of a cigar smoker who insured his cigars, smoked them, claimed on the insurance, sued the insurance company and won. Without wishing to become one of those people who cry “hoax” at the slightest provocation, I don’t believe this, either – and sure enough, the fantastic Urban Legends resource at snopes.com reveals it to be made up. How dare these stumblers waste my time?

11:30 I’ve become seriously distracted by an interactive timezone map at timezonecheck.com, from which I’ve deduced a couple of facts. Firstly, Afghanistan seems to have a time zone all to itself – Afghanistan Time, it’s called. Secondly, if you saunter over the border from Tajikistan into China, you have to move your watch forward three hours. This kind of information is pub-quiz gold.

12:15 The webcams of the world page at opentopia.com threatens to be even more addictive. Under typically mundane footage of AutoEcosse Motor Sales in Dundee, a chap called “Lightning Fox” has posted a comment: “Fantastic cam! You can see the cars and people buying them!” He clearly can’t get enough, as two weeks later he posts again: “I see the Aston Martin has been moved.”

12:30 Sorry, I can’t stop watching these cams – although I’m avoiding the one that promises me “100% hardcore webchat” for the moment, I mean, it’s not even lunchtime yet. Instead I click on a webcam that’s set up in the main square of Most, a town in northern Bohemia. I once played a dreadful gig in Most in 1993. There was barely anyone there. Today, there’s barely anyone in Most’s main square, either, so my theory that my band was magnificent and Most is actually a ghost town is finally gaining a bit of weight.

12:45 Another way of using Stumbleupon is to check out the other sites recommended by a particular Stumbler, if one of theirs particularly takes your fancy. I have a look at the selection that has been thumbed up the chap who recommended the webcams page, but he seems to mainly like busty women reclining on a selection of sports cars. I prefer images of studious-looking women wearing cardigans and sitting on tricycles. He doesn’t have any.

13:00 Time for lunch – not that I’ve expended any energy today. I’m on a regime that allows me a banana and an apple; this is a one-handed challenge that fortunately leaves the other hand free for stumbling. But, annoyingly, I’m getting a load of food sites. Artisan bread makers are enthusing about their craft at thefreshloaf.com: “Baking is the cheapest, most rewarding pastime,” they say. Not if you’ve outlawed bread from your diet, it’s not. Next, khymos.org busts the myth that searing meat somehow “seals in its juices”. I blame TV chefs for spreading that particular lie. Now, can we stop them all saying “caramelized” instead of “browned”, too? I hope so.

13:15 I need to tick a few more Stumbleupon interests and broaden my outlook a bit. I go up to my maximum of 127, including lesbian culture, ethics, petroleum, glaucoma, billiards, divorce, fine arts, kayaking, wicca, teen parenting, Israel, and illusion. What a deep, complex individual I’ve now become.

13:35 This has nothing to do with Israel or billiards, but still. It’s a great online flash game called “Programming language inventor or serial killer?” You’re shown a succession of photographs, and you have to determine whether these men are computing pioneers or vicious murderers. It’s not as easy as you might think. My girlfriend and I, pooling our limited knowledge, score 7 out ot 10. I actually thought that John W Mauchly, who invented a high level programming language on a Univac Serial computer in 1950, looked like an axe-wielding maniac. Sorry, John.

14:40 Rock stars and their real names. Apparently, Mickey Dolenz is actually called George Braddock. Yngwie Malmsteen has a far catchier name in real life: Lars Lannerback. I also like the idea that Afrika Bambaataa is called Trevor Nympton, and Sade is Gladys Boot, but I made those up.

14:45 This site asks: “How are you feeling today?” You can rate yourself between plus ten and minus ten, with zero as your “lifetime average”, whatever that might be. Today’s worldwide average is minus 1.5, but people seem to have very different ideas of what constitutes misery. One rates himself as minus three: “My dog destroyed a $50 pair of shoes belonging to my daughter’s friend.” Another feels marginally better, at minus two, saying: “My wife woke up some time ago and told me that she was unfulfilled.” Ouch.

14:50 I’m going to get my hair cut. I’m getting addicted to this Stumbling lark, and I’m tempted to take the laptop with me.

15:10 I’m back. I’ve decided to give something back to the stumbling community, and recommend sites that aren’t yet in their index. There’s that live footage of Van Halen playing “Jump” horribly out of key a couple of weeks back, but no, someone’s already stumbled upon it. Ah, here we go. The official site of the Prague bid for the 2016 Olympics. Have you seen it? It’s fantastic. There’s a potted history, supposedly in English, which includes the wonderful sentence: “At which time Prague begun peep at peas in years 1932 and 1936. But while before for action inspire with politicians and people, in thirtieth years nobody after peas doesnt want. Whole it go out taperingly.” I’m positioning myself behind their bid, 100%.

15:45 The mass of information is making me feel horribly insignificant, but none so more than this. “Secret worlds - the universe within”, it’s called. It’s a series of images, starting with one 10 million light years from Earth, down to a carbon atom in a leaf on a tree outside the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida.

16:05 Random stuff is coming thick and fast, although still nothing about billiards. I know what “Rhodri” is in binary code. I know that there’s something called “Paris Syndrome” which renders Japanese tourists visiting the French capital stressed and anxious. I’ve seen some of the Stumbleupon recommendations before, but surprisingly few. One I had seen is the Wayback Machine at archive.org, which keeps snapshots of past versions of many websites. The first they have of The Independent website is dated 16th February 1998; it’s a higgledy-piggledy jumble of text and images, with the telling footnote: “Web Designer Wanted”.

16:20 lyrster.com is a nice little lyrics search engine. Just type in any bits of lyrics you remember, Lyrster scours a bundle of lyrics sites, and comes back with the results within a couple of seconds. I give it a go, type in “itsy bitsy polka bikini”, and sure enough, the full text of Brian Hylands outrageous 1960 hit about skimpy bathing suits is revealed. It also informs me that Devo did a version of the song. Now that I’d like to hear. It can’t be any worse than Timmy Mallett’s.

17:00 The outdoor pool at the San Alfonso Del Mar resort in Chile is 8 hectares in size, 1 km long and is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest in the world. Just saying.

17:10 I’ve just realised that I can click a “W” on my toolbar, and get given a random Wikipedia entry each time. This reveals to me that “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” can be parsed as a grammatically correct sentence. That Danish pastries don’t come from Denmark. Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, and there aren’t three wise men in the Bible – the number of men isn’t specified, only the number of gifts. But this is Wikipedia, so I’m obviously taking it all with a pinch of salt.

17:30 Here’s a wry, sideways look at the History of the Internet. It concludes with the following sentence: “Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to read advertisements for things they don’t want, while calling each other ‘asshats’.” Well, that’s a harsh assessment. After a day of stumbling, I think it’s a little bit more than that. Isn’t it?