There was an argument in class this week over definitions: how items are defined, and, in this case, colours. To be fair my lecturer did not use a particularly favourable example. She pointed to an obviously red bag (#FF0000 in hex) and said, “to me this bag is red, but to someone else it could be another colour”.

Luckily I also take a semantics class, and the prior week we had actually covered colours and how the spectral nature of them leads to the highly technical term of ‘vagueness’ being applied across the board. If red is defined as a colour that exists between orange and purple, how do we tell when something ceases to be red and becomes purple, or orange, or vice versa. These fringe colours are always subject to interpretation and subjective analysis. The other definition of the colour, by saying objects in the real-world that are coloured similarly, falls flat should you encounter a species or item that does not fit the rule, but it”s pretty difficult to fault spectra (at least perfect spectra anyway).

I retorted that unless someone had defective cones then that bag was most definitely red and subjective opinion didn’t come into it. We can define red to be precisely that colour (even if you look at our RGB values for colour we can assume anything without green or blue is most definitely ‘red’). And I guess I did learn something this class: never argue with English students with a year of experience in misdirecting ‘logic’. After a while I gave up, but it seems a little like this every week, every time losing one ounce of sanity to Derrida or Foucault.

Oh well, at least I have other, real classes, to fall back on. I feel bad for pure comp lit students.

What I have been paying attention to is technology, as always. I can’t get away from it not matter how hard I try. Something that’s sparked my interest recently in configuring and customising the new QMessenger website is CodeAcademy’s CodeYear, a year of weekly tutorials for free of JavaScript programming.

They can all be accessed here, substituting the week number for that you want to access, and it seems like a great way to get into JS programming, probably one of the more complex early web languages that is now taking a much larger role in the functioning of websites we use frequently.

Another thing that has sparked my interest in learning JavaScript as fast as I possibly can is nodejs, which is a webserver built on javascript. Something I’ve found on StackExchange allows you to get a computer to run a local nodejs server through the browser and tunnel audio through it, which could be really useful when finding a way to get past the browser-memory-limit that is plaguing our student radio at the moment. Still, until then we’ll have to stick with heavy explanations of getting media clients with better garbage collection to play the stream rather than running anything via the browser.

Throughout the disturbances in London and across the UK that have, over the past week, inflicted hundreds of millions of pounds of damage, people – particularly foolhardy journalists and politicians – have been quick to try to find a source for blame, charging at their usual suspects of Twitter and Facebook. This time, however, the public networks have been the target of people looking to clean up after the damage, rather than those searching for others to cause it. Instead the veil of guilt has fallen on Blackberry’s private messaging protocol, Blackberry Messenger (commonly known as BBM), known to be increasingly popular amongst the youth of today.

BBM has been called out on allowing ‘protesting’ rioters the opportunity to communicate and broadcast opinion and information instantly and anonymously across their networks. BBM is a private and encrypted method of communication, requiring intervention by Blackberry to intercept the messages and decode them.

But why do we have to blame any network at all? Calls of the last few days have varied, with the public wanting water-cannons, rubber bullets, even bringing in the Army; but among the most popular have been calls for Blackberry’s BBM service to be entirely shut down.

Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the Blackberry series of smartphones, have been in trouble in previous years with the Saudi government, who refused to allow their phones to be sold with the business-level secure messaging. The two solutions given to Blackberry were servers located inside the country, or a patch applied for the government to intercept and decrypt communications in cases of “national security”.

There seems to be a fear in the country of the unseen. In an increasingly public world where Twitter updates are retweeted to thousands and Facebook statuses copied across the internet, the issue of privacy has become one of ‘if you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’. Far from me to get political about people’s’ right to privacy, but there’s greater reasoning besides the liberal agenda for keeping the network online.

BBM is actually assisting police more than a lot of people think. In similarity to how messages posted publicly on Twitter and Facebook spread virally not only to potential criminals, but also to the law-abiding public; BBM correspondence via the ‘broadcast’ system was leaking to the press heavily from users receiving them from their friends, anything that leaks to the press in this regard can quite as easily also be forwarded to the police. At lot of the messages were posted online: the riot in Enfield, spread virally via BBM, was quickly posted to Twitter to be retweeted to thousands by 1pm, with the gathering scheduled for three hours later.

The issue we’re seeing from politicians is a complete misunderstanding of the issue: they completely neglect to see the benefits we’re seeing from a still-new method of communication, and at the same time, completely forgetting other methods exist.

So the scenario they want, where social media is ‘shut down’ for criminals, would actually work out worse for the police and public. Without these ‘new-fangled’ easily leak-able, forward-able, retweet-able methods of communication, what would people resort to? SMS, telephone calls, the old greats used by drug-dealers and head-honchos for years, and how would you be finding the originator, the context, the volume of people who have seen and may respond to that message? You can’t.

Yeah, let's limit SocMed It's so terrible. If only there was a way to bypass that... maybe... being able to hit numbers and speak to someone

August 11, 2011 9:47 PM via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@journodave

Dave Wyllie

It will be no secret to a lot of you when I say that I play a substantial amount of video games. When everyone else is drinking, going out, watching football, I’m with four other truly awesome guys playing what, until today, was our absolute favourite game: Heroes of Newerth. Born from the ashes of the Warcraft 3 custom map, Defence of the Ancients, HoN is an action-packed, highly strategic, and tactically intense battleground of five versus five. Whilst not the king of eSports it is by no means the littlest, with as many concurrent players around the world as the latest CoD game, and in this regard it has been, for the most-part, balanced at the competitive level. The developers have always said that balance for competition is what they strive for, and I completely agree; juggling numbers to help lower players face-off strategies they have no experience for is not a move to be made, but today… today something changed.

Today, this game went free-to-play.

Previously, HoN cost $30 for the lifetime of your account. This allowed for the company to pay for servers, bandwidth, hosting, staffing and other charges associated with running this kind of operation. In this model, S2 incurred upkeep costs that meant they had to maintain a level of new sales and outgoing players. Clearly they were not making enough money, as late last year they unveiled an in-game shop with vanity items, such as extra models for your character, at the cost of earnable in-game currency, or via your credit card. These had no real effect on the game’s balance, all skills were the same, the pool of choice was still equal for all, and we were relatively happy.

Now, for free players, the individual heroes are purchasable, and the $30 one-time price-point is gone. If none are purchased then each week a pool of 15 rotates. Not to mention that, on top of this, each new hero will now be part of a four-week ‘early-access’ period, whereby they can only be played at additional cost to the player.

So with this in mind my friend, Loz, who plays in our team and studies Computer Science, put together an article on how this changes the state of the game, and why, in effect, we’re leaving. It’s a great read and he’s allowed me to cross-post it below.

Asymmetry with regards to balance, game-instances and playing to win.

A game is defined to be, ‘A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.’

This article assumes that both you and your opponent are playing to win, which I define to be picking (what you believe to be) the optimum strategy, given all available information.

The concept of playing to win is essential – if both players are playing to win, then the outcome of the game is meaningful; we can derive a conclusion that the winner was higher in some quantified measure or combination of skill, strength and luck. This is the great thing about winning games, and especially those with a higher skill component. By playing a game, you are essentially abstracting your skill into some more easily measured form, and then mathematically demonstrating your superiority.

Now, if one person has an unfair advantage over the other player, then any conclusions that could previously have been drawn from the outcome of that game are immediately null and void. To rephrase, if a game is not equal/fair/balanced/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, then it is not a valid measure of whatever it is testing, and if it is not a valid measure of what it is testing, then the results potentially don’t reflect the actual situation.

Asymmetry causes balance issues in games. A game is said to be asymmetric if one player has different knowledge or a different set of options to another player. A game such as Starcraft is a perfect example of an asymmetric game – if one player is Terran, and another is Protoss, then the game is, by its very nature, imbalanced; both players have access to completely different units, options and play-styles. However, Starcraft has been very well balanced, and huge amounts of work have been put into making sure the three races have no real advantages or disadvantages over the others. (And indeed, the ‘mirror’ matchups where both players are the same race, are symmetric and perfectly balanced, with the exception of map spawn positions, which are negligible in well-designed maps). This is true for all good asymmetric games; those which are played at a competitive level. While they can never be a perfectly balanced abstraction of skill in the same way a symmetric game is, they are often so close as to be considered so. Examples of Asymmetric games would be all RTSs with multiple races and Heroes of Newerth, among others. Obviously, if a game is symmetric then it is generally balanced by its very nature; some examples of symmetric games could be Quake, Counter-Strike or Chess.

Purchasable, stateful content with regard to Heroes of Newerth, how this causes extreme-asymmetry and destroys balance, refutations to common arguments and the future competitive viability of this model.

Heroes of Newerth has recently adopted a Free-To-Play model, with a rotating pool of freely   available heroes, where players are required to purchase access to others before they can be played. This is a stateful transaction; buying a hero with real money gives you the permanent option to play that hero.

This absolutely and unequivocally ruins any semblance of game balance, by giving those with a real-world advantage (namely money), an in-game advantage, by way of having access to additional heroes. This isn’t the sort of slight asymmetry acceptable in a game of this nature; new accounts only have access to fifteen heroes, of which there are currently seventy eight. Given that some heroes directly counter others, I don’t think I really need to explain why this is so bad.

Common arguments: The following are refutations to some arguments which I’ve read in defence of this model, usually related to League of Legends.

The ‘Each hero is individually balanced so I can’t use money to buy an overpowered hero, therefore I can’t buy an advantage‘ argument.

This one is just ridiculous, in Heroes of Newerth there are several heroes which are practically required to play against others. Let’s say someone on the other team picks Tempest. In order to counter Tempest, a hero such as Hellbringer, Andromeda, Pharaoh or Vindicator is generally a good idea; otherwise you’re going to have a really hard time. Imagine you haven’t bought any of these heroes, you’re now royally fucked, directly because you hadn’t purchased one of the appropriate heroes beforehand in the stateful, unrelated, out-of-game system.

Not only that, but imagine you’re playing Quake. The opponent has the choice of three weapons. Gun A does 2 damage per hit, firing every second; gun B does 4 damage per hit, firing every two seconds; and gun C does 6 damage per hit, firing every three seconds. These are all individually balanced: they all do the same damage per second. However, you haven’t bought B or C, so you only have the option of using A. Regardless of the fact that you’re both doing the same amount of damage, your opponent has an inherent advantage in having choices available to him – he has a wider range of tactical options. To claim otherwise is simply incorrect.

The ‘Every hero can be unlocked just by investing time into the game anyway, so it’s not imbalanced‘ argument.

This argument doesn’t really make any sense. Firstly, it’s not logistically feasible to unlock every hero without paying. At a current total cost of 25620 silver coins, you’d have to play 3200 games winning an average of 8 coins per game. At an average of thirty-five minutes per game, this totals almost 1900 hours of in-game time, not even counting the fact that every fortnight a new hero will be released, setting you back about 400 coins, or another 29 hours.

Not only that, the balance issue is with regards to a single instance of the game, not the stateful progression of your account, so in the minimum 3200 games you’ll be playing before you have every hero, each one will be horribly imbalanced in various directions, and the outcomes of which will be practically meaningless.

The ‘If you really like the game and you want to play it seriously then you’ll fork out for all (or a large majority of) the heroes’ argument.

Again, this is silly. People should be able to play a balanced game at all levels of play, and to say ‘Well all the good players have all the heroes anyway’ is both condescending and contemptuous. Not only that, but people should, in most circumstances, follow the philosophy of playing to win. I would go as far as to argue that not buying every hero is deliberately putting you at a disadvantage, and runs contrary to that philosophy. Given the choice between not playing and spending over $200 to play optimally, I’ll take not playing, thanks.

I think S2 really need to think about how they wish to push Heroes of Newerth. I do not believe that a game this fundamentally flawed with regards to balance should ever be accepted as a being competitively viable, which is a great shame given the skill, difficulty, intensity and depth of play demonstrated in the current (pre-2.1) tournament scene. I can’t honestly play and support a game which goes quite so against my own personal beliefs of fair-play, equality, and the separation of a game and the outside world (particularly stateful interactions involving money!). I’m extremely disappointed that this has happened, and I hope something is done to remedy it. My suggestion would be a single, one-off payment, no-more than that of buying a new game, which unlocks every current and future hero for play, permanently, similar to the model Stunlock Studios have implemented in Bloodline Champions.

Looks like we need to set down some rules, fellow tweeters. It’s been discussed before, but let’s expand given how the world has changed, native retweet has been introduced, and Twitter’s become an ethical minefield.

Twitter launched, and survived for a long time, without a native retweet mechanic. People soon discovered that the problem of sharing something another posted was a common one, and solved it through inventing what we now know as ‘the retweet’: RT prefixed the username, and then the statement. It was a simple, easy system to start promoting others, but soon we came to people retweeting retweets. This was mainly a client issue: the power-users (inevitably those who had the most to gain from Twitter) used the retweet button inside their client to prefix RT once more. We ended up with tweets that looked like this…

RT @CarbonImpact RT @greeneconpost Shareholders bring CSR to the boardroom http://bit.ly/mJTjKy #sustainability #csr

May 22, 2011 4:13 PM via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@FabianPattberg

Fabian Pattberg

Okay, so that wasn’t that bad back in the day. But since then a new mechanic has popped up.

See, the problem with the original retweet method, innovative as it was, is that with all this combination retweeting, often the original contributor was lost in the crowd. Indeed, often the original contributor was omitted entirely. Native retweet looked to solve this: by clicking the button you effectively pull the tweet into your followers’ timelines, giving the original contributor credit just as if they were being followed.

So now we’ve gotten that out-of-the-way, my three, simple, proposed, unwritten-until-now, rules:

Use native retweet whenever possible

Unless you have something to add to the tweet, for god’s sake, just retweet the damn thing natively. It’s polite, it gives the original contributor credit, and should people have blocked native retweets from you because they’re not interested, it doesn’t get through to them. People work very hard on bringing us stories and articles that they then tweet out to the world, let’s not turn it into narcissistic self promotion by affixing a RT to the thing and sending it out again. This also helps with breaking news stories: I don’t want to see ‘Breaking: Dog eats cat’ from 15 different people who have decided to break the news themselves for self promotion. If you’re getting informing someone else in your timeline, retweet them. Native retweet ensures that I don’t see any one tweet more than twice in quick succession.

Use old-style RT and/or attribute when you want to add information

Using old-style RT can be useful if we want to add information to the topic at hand. Say more news has emerged on the topic at hand, or we can combine multiple sources to make our tweet even more valuable: go for it, just make sure to attribute the sources. “Cat has died RT @bbcnews Breaking: Dog eats cat” is not the best example, but you see where this is going.

RT @MattieTK: News International DNS servers serving thesun.co.uk are now not responding #notw #lulzsec http://i.imgur.com/w2XQw.png #fb

July 18, 2011 11:19 PM via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Dweezil1968

Rae Lovejoy

See this one? @Dweezil1968 didn’t add anything as such, but she did want to share via Facebook, which is increasing the audience and thus still okay.

Never take tweets from others and repackage them as your own

How simple does this sound? Too often does it happen. If someone else has taken the time to gather information and put a link together about something, how about we give them the credit? Rather than seeking once again to self-promote by shamelessly copy-pasting their tweet into our own submit box. If you’ve nothing to add, as with the first rule, use native retweet. If you’re really that unashamed, don’t be surprised that when you break something, they go to steal your content as their own.

 Bonus: MT = Modified Tweet

If you change the original tweet in your old-style RT, that’s anything following the username, make sure to change your RT to an MT. This helps people identify that the original tweet has been modified in your format, and really helps your relationship the original poster if you add something they don’t quite agree with!

Most importantly, when you see someone flouting this courtesy, let’s find the original tweet and get natively retweeting it. They only do it because it fuels their self-promotion, we should redirect that promotion to the deserving content-creator.

How’s that, are we all in agreement? Any other ideas?

Edit:

They may arrest you anyway. RT @danielhewitt RT @MattieTK: "I've found a vulnerability in NASA.GOV, but science is cool, I'm telling them"

July 21, 2011 2:28 PM via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@manipulative

Manipulative

Who said the quote I’m referring to? Is the statement at the front of the tweet aimed at me? This is the kind of information we lose though the culmination of added comment and retweet chains.

MySpace did one beneficial thing for the Generation-Y/Z society: it taught us the basic concepts behind the web’s two favourite markup languages: HTML and CSS (HyperText Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets).

Wherever you go on the internet, these two languages will dominate what you see, your browser takes code delivered from the server in HTML/CSS and turns it into what you view on the page. There are various programming languages that take information from databases and manipulate it for display such as PHP, python and ruby, but their output is just standard HMTL, CSS and javascript.

Should you be looking to be employed in media in the future, I predict it will be expected of you to know full HTML and at least basic CSS and javascript (though the latter is significantly harder). HTML and CSS are very easy to write and understand, though CSS can become frustrating for even the most advanced designer. Indeed, the most complicated part of HTML is merely the difference between tags on how a screen-reader interprets them. Knowing  HTML, CSS and basic Javascript is going to be as key as skill as owning a driving license (which I still need to catch up on, note to self), and your employer will discriminate on it as any other skill. It’s not that hard, and it’s a good thing to have on the CV…

So let us begin:

TK’s relatively-unimpressive-but-hopefully-easy-to-understand-guide to super-basic HTML

<b> for example, the tag to make the text that follows bold until a </b> tag is delivered (the slash meaning ‘end’) differs from <strong> only in that strong-tagged text is read in a ‘bigger’ voice by screen readers</strong>. The same is with <i> for italics </i> and <em> which adds emphasis </em>. See how we’re going so far? It’s not so hard.

Let’s make something bold, and italics, just to be crazy!

<b><i>We are just wild!</i></b>

Notice you can just nest tags on-top of tags, but make sure to close them in the right order: it can cause an error to close them out of order, it may render differently on browsers, and when you write things more complicated it becomes a hassle to remember what tag is which!

Let’s embed an image: the tag being <img> but this time there needs to be more parameters. There are significantly more than these, but all you need to know are src and alt, source and alternative-text respectively. Let’s go!

<img src="http://the.image/here.jpg" alt="If the image doesn't load this is what is displayed or read by the screen-reader" />

Notice the slash before the end denoting the end of the tag, this would be the correct way to close tags that don’t enclose something else that is being formatted (See comment).

Links have the same formatting too, with extra parameters. <a> is the tag for a link, and the stuff between the tags </a> becomes the link. The parameters you need to remember here are href and name, depending on what kind of ‘anchor’ (hence <a>) you are making. Names allow you to do the http://this.is/a/url#bookmark ‘hashtag’ trick to draw you halfway down the page (see wikipedia where this is employed a lot) where the anchor with the same name is held, and href is the url of a hyperlink.

Hrefs can be absolute, relative or anchor urls (links to ‘names’ on the same page). Relative and absolute values are descriptions you should also recognise: absolute urls are the full package, http://teekay.me/mypost/images/, wheras if you were already at the /mypost/ part of the site you would only need a relative url /images/ to reach that directory.

So let’s link to Google:

<a href="http://google.com">This texts links to Google</a>

And let’s link to the guide at the top of this page using the name:

<a href="#guide">The guide!</a>

So there, we’ve learnt the basics of how HTML is formatted in itself. There are many guides online that you can read to help you with HTML, but it really doesn’t get more complicated than that, so definitely get stuck in.

But what if you want to flow some text around an image? or change the colour of a link? or remove that horrible underline? Well, that’s all for styling ,which is part of CSS. And considering I’ve just about hit 700 words describing two tags, I might save that for another relatively-unimpressive-but-hopefully-easy-to-understand-guide to CSS. Or a video should you be so inclined. Let’s learn how to mess up our blogs together!

Google Plus has a unique opportunity to take control of real-time social, and unless Twitter gets their act together, it could change how we communicate and dominate the market.

Twitter and Google Plus, at this point in time, both share the same problem: noise. The more people you follow, the harder it is for you to notice them as individuals; their importance and influence in your feed tends to move towards the frequency rather than the quality of their posts. For important posts Twitter has trends and retweets, Google Plus has the rather inferior ‘sharing’ mechanic, which duplicates the post rather than pushing the original to the top (rather like the user-made twitter retweet), but there’s a better way.

Google have almost nailed this. They’re so close with circles it’s tantalising, true filtration on a basis of importance and your own interests is inching closer, and it’s a shame that it didn’t launch with this integration of feeds as standard. For those of you not already experiencing the new network, its primary feature, ‘circles’, allows you to nest your contacts into different groups with Google suggesting ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘acquaintances’ and a twitter-style ‘following’. Contacts can be in as many or as few groups as you wish and with each update you send, you can choose which groups it sends to, allowing you to fine tune your privacy. Contact groupings are not adjusted from the circles page, as with Facebook, but are instead on the page of every user.

A lot of technology pundits have applauded this feature, as it makes Facebook’s advanced and highly intricate privacy controls, much simpler in Google Plus, and much more social. You can click on each circle in your sidebar to see only updates from that circle, but at the moment you cannot group circles together and see more than one: it’s all of them, or one of them. Circles are also private, and there is no way to make them public, as a Twitter list could be, and Google Plus has no way of tagging posts for categorisation as hashtags are used on Twitter. And it’s these features that need to change in order for Google to take the crown.

Consider the following scenario: Google allow HBO to create a public, taggable circle for ‘A Game of Thrones’ on Google Plus. People can add content to the circle simply by sharing it as they would normally. You can follow the circle by clicking it in your sidebar, as you can already, and you can mark it as less-important, keeping your other circles pinned for longer periods of time. You instantly have the whole social experience of the show, and at the same time, those that follow you and do not follow the TV show, do not have to see your posts in their feed. You can do this with everything you watch, you can create and curate public circles for live, spontaneous events, suddenly twitter is showing its age very quickly.

If Google are smart, they won’t be refreshing their real-time search contract with Twitter, because soon they will own that stream, and with the extra metadata and reputation indicators Google can glean from their own system, rather than relying on another, it will likely be much more powerful.

With the news that Twitter is looking at developing its own photo-sharing service in conjunction with photobucket, and moving into the ad-space with its acquisition of AdGrok, I started thinking about the ways Twitter could innovate at home; the service really hasn’t really changed that much over the years: it’s still 140 characters, @ to reply, # to tag, and even in their new photo service, it looks like you’ll still be posting a URL  instead of an embed. This may all come back to the trust, or lack of, they have in their #NewTwitter layout, as with over eight months on the cards since launch, users still are given the option on logging in to change back. Is this legacy holding them back?

I love Twitter. Don’t get me wrong; on the 22nd of April 2008, at 17 years, I signed up to the service when the front page had a video promoting the use of the site to monitor your family members activities. It’s little wonder my first tweet was about as cliché and boring as they get:

watching the telly =)

April 22, 2008 4:57 PM via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@MattieTK

Matthew 'TK' Taylor

Finding a use

I left a few months later, only to return moments before the service broke it big with this photograph. That moment really defined what journalists and news-junkies see twitter as now: a continuous stream of information from all over the globe, citizen and correspondent alike adding to the pool, where news travels at lightning pace. It changed how I viewed the service: as a medium to broadcast more than what I was doing when I went out, publicly; Facebook and Twitter switched places, with Twitter becoming my professional public persona online.

But the service is so slow to evolve, with 547 employees at the time of writing you’d think obvious expansions like that into photo-sharing would have been made much sooner. But Twitter don’t need to build a new architecture to increase Twitter’s value, they need to increase the usability of search. There’s a lot of value in Twitter as a communications tool, but actually using it for that purpose is only getting more difficult as the noise builds.

There are two things Twitter needs to do to make an instantaneous improvement on their already iconic service:

Reputation

Twitter needs a reputation engine. There needs to be some manner of making tweets more reliable, and reducing the heavy spam that is currently associated with hashtags and would only get worse in the case of my second idea. Clearly a captcha isn’t enough, and serious spammers can manipulate any points-based system as easily as they do tweets, so give twitter super-users, already proven to be trustworthy, the ability to mute others from appearing in searches, just for a few hours, just long enough for the account to be verified spam and removed. The moment three accounts vote on the same person they are blacklisted until Twitter support looks into the issue, and once they do the power is their to take or re-enforce at will. If Twitter wasn’t such a bot-broadcast friendly medium of pushing RSS feeds I’d demand a unique phone number for each account, but unfortunately that’s just unrealistic.

Search Channels

You’re halfway there with my being able to save searches Twitter, but you could go so much further. Imagine being able to tweet til your heart’s content about #xfactor or #americanidol without annoying your TV-snob friends. Prefix your tweets with the #tag and boom, they form a separate channel. Upon searching for a hashtag, or tweeting using one, Twitter can subscribe you to the channel, much like you follow people today, allowing you to see all your friends opinions. You could even follow someone’s specific channel. Want to follow a TV critic but only care about the latest vampire drama? Follow their channel for it. There’s so much potential in even the idea of splitting twitter feeds that I’m sure it can be put to good use. Basic filtration from your main feed is what we need to start with, I don’t want to have to apologise for watching the #apprentice anymore.

So yeah, those are my two cents. Anyone else have any quick and simple fixes for twitter?

I moved my blog to WordPress on my own servers, partly because I think it might encourage me to write more, but also because – despite being a social media hound – there’s nothing quite like running your own site.

Though I think tumblr is a fantastic service, it is certainly not the place for anything much more than the casual photoblogs it was built on and has become popular with. Tumblr has built a fantastic community around many topics, and before it was removed, tumblarity was a really egotistically-inspiring metric to blog around: words per day, week, month; number of posts, reblogs, likes; your followers always communicated to you that someone would have at least seen the copy you took an hour writing. However, this has since been removed, constantly being ‘redeveloped’, and the site has had famous stints of downtime lasting days, usually precisely when I want to write something. For something I used to forward my personal domain to, seeing the tumblr gremlins pictured above was probably not the greatest experience for my viewers.

WordPress really could break tumblr’s grip on the social bloggers in this respect by offering their own plugin for wordpress.org, perhaps through the Jetpack system. The social side of blogging has really broken down in self-hosting, no longer part of an integrated set of writers, bloggers are spread wide and thin. The greatest innovation in the last few years in blogs has been hosted commenting: Services such as livefyre, DISQUS and IntenseDebate have leveraged your social services to provide single-sign-on across the ‘blogosphere’, though the density of different systems is now starting to wear the idea thin. RSS works for Google Reader, but services such as Feedburner have shown how this standard is still lacking.

The web has turned social, and thus we need a social subscription system for blogs, an open standard we can all use. Something that will self-report views and subscribers, that integrates and communicates to the writer the number of times their content has been reposted, ‘liked’ and tweeted about regardless of the short-url service used.

Until then I’ll just have to install Google Analytics, hack my RSS up to Feedburner, and hope it’s remotely accurate. Or you can comment, of course, using livefyre here, just to let small-time bloggers know you’re listening.

Apple’s iPhone recording your location isn’t exactly a new concept to the mobile sector. Mobile networks are already recording your location to private databases deep in datacentres; should you ever go missing, or need to be found, law enforcement agencies can gain a warrant to access your last recorded locations. In-app mobile advertising is also becoming the norm: location-aware social applications such as Gowalla and Foursquare are already at the front of a new form of hyperlocal advertising, leveraging your location via GPS or cell-tower triangulation in order to provide offers and commercials for nearby business.

And this ‘locationgate’ issue on the iPhone, the recording of your location to your device, is not exactly brand new: the functionality has been known about for a good while, and it’s only recently with the launch of a program that can parse the file into map data, scarily demonstrating all your regular and irregular haunts for up to a year, that the press have taken note.

Android, the marked competitor to iPhone, is not completely immune to this discovery, as investigation sparked via the iPhone has found an encrypted file in every Android device which records the last fifteen cell towers the phone has connected to.

The issue with the iPhone is that the file is easily accessible on the device and unencrypted. This turns every iPhone into a record of the owner’s life: a private detective, obsessive spouse or thief could immediately access. It synchronises to every computer your iPhone syncs with, so while you’re out your computer is vulnerable to your data being taken without your knowledge.

Location is an intimate informational sector, and though people are becoming increasingly free with their data online, the idea of being tracked whenever you go is something you still reserve to the idea of a ‘secret service’. The concept that a private company may have access to your location without your knowledge is unnerving. The difference between iPhone and Android in this case is that the file is unencrypted and transferred to the machine (admittedly as part of a backup). This can be seen to have implications that Apple may want to access this data.

At worst it’s Apple spying on its own customers, which I don’t believe it is, but even at best it’s a terrible moment for Apple PR. There is no reason for the file to exist, and if there is, Apple not informing journalists of this reason is worrying.