I’ve just come across this infographic on the eternally-fantastic good.is webzine.

I’ve pasted it above to give you an idea, but I highly recommend you click through to the interactive version.

The purpose of all the little people standing in their serried ranks like that is to demonstrate visually the number of Americans who took part in volunteer work last year. Some of the individual trends are rather piquant, such as the most popular voluntary activity among 45 – 54 year olds being that of a religious nature, and the fact that in every age group, women consistenly  out-volunteer men.

But overall, this is a happy story. In 2009, while in the grip of a recession, around a quarter of Americans of all ages chose to give up their time for free to do something for others. I hope it wasn’t just because some of them were unemployed.

Everyone (or rather, 32ish million people at last count) knows about Youtube sensation Susan Boyle.

But the most recent episode of Britain’s Got Talent offered us a contender to her feel-good crown: a 12-year-old Welsh boy called Shaheen. Observe:

[UPDATE: you'll have to click the picture to get the video. Youtube have disabled embedding for all versions of the video, and who can blame them. If he gets even a fraction of the hits Susan Boyle did, their advertising revenue will be off the scale and they want you all on their site, not mine.]

Obviously, the kid’s a fantastic singer, and is going to be a millionaire. But this clip made me realise something else – that is, Simon Cowell is a genius.

He’s still a git (you can practically see the dollar signs appearing in his eyes when he looks at this child), but here for once we get to see the acumen that has got him where he is – he knew the child was singing a rubbish song, and put him under greater pressure and got better results.

He’s still doing all the things that music moguls have always done: auditioning and scouting new talent, releasing their records, managing their image and coaxing them to stardom and riches, but he’s come up with a way to get paid for every part of this process, instead of just when an artist successfully reaches the final stage.

Perhaps I’m a bit behind here, but that is absolutely brilliant. I’ve spent many years derriding the man and his programmes without realising quite how cleverly conceived they are. Maybe if we could somehow sell the process of creating and printing newspapers as ‘entertainment’, the future of journalism would be assured.

A while ago I posted on the increasing dominance of wikipedia in the online encyclopaedia stakes.

I call this phenomonen ‘wikimperialism’, and since I first wrote about it, one of the rival powers has fallen: Microsoft has announced that it is to discontinue Encarta. If, like me, you grew up in the 90s, you might remember Encarta as the confusing, slow CD-ROM your school considered to be the height of modernity and progress.

The statement claims that this decision has been taken “as part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer”, but it’s clearly because Encarta just doesn’t get enough hits anymore to make it viable.

This frees up more online territory for the expansion of the wiki-empire. Enjoy.

I love coming upon a cybertrend well after it has been over and done with. You get to see an idea (admittedly, a really stupid one in this case) emerge, run until people are bored with it, inspire parody, and ultimately be forgotten, all with a few clicks.

Last night I stumbled across this:

This guy took a picture of his own face every day for six years, edited them together, put some cheesy piano over it and released it into the world. To date, 12,334,360 people have watched his hair be slightly different each day. This has to be the nadir of the noble art of time-lapse animation. Oh, and his name is Noah, which pleases me for some reason I can’t explain.

Originally, he was just posting the photos (which he is still taking, but the way), but then apparently he saw this and decided to do a video as well…

He posted this two and a half years ago, and yet just two hours ago as I write this someone commented (with no trace of irony, I’m sure of it): “amazing! you can see the glow of youth disapear from the beggining towards the end. simmply amazing though [sic]“

Read the rest of this entry »

The UK’s Channel Five has started putting a special daily news round-up on Myspace. While this has been widely attributed to a desire to hook in the younger demographic the site represents, I can’t help feeling this is just one failing institution reaching out to another in a desperate attempt to save itself from further obscurity. This cringe-worthy promo video featuring Natasha Kaplinsky just about says it all, really:

ITV recently joined Bebo’s OpenMedia project, which makes programmes available online to its members, although that isn’t quite the same as what Five have done – at least Bebo are only showing things they think bored teenagers might potentially watch (like Gossip Girl and Keith Lemon).

When will these people learn that putting things online doesn’t make them better and won’t save them from being rubbish? The internet demands quality content, just like everything else.

Lots of people have expressed disgust at the new Facebook layout, and for a variety of reasons. Some feel it’s a shameless rip-off of twitter, others just think it’s impractical and irritating. Some of these complaints are quite funny. I found this comment on one blog post on this topic:

I just “became a fan” of you on Facebook. But I’ll tell you what I’m not a fan of… The new Facebook layout. It can go swallow some rat poison. IMHO. Of course, I’ve been on Facebook since you used to have to receive an invite from someone else to even be on the thing. So, I guess I’m sort of one-sided on the deal and am un-accepting of the new… But, I don’t have much of choice other than quit using. Naaaaaaah.

Actually, the best response I’ve seen has come from twitter. Someone called Mokokoma commented that “i love the way i hate the new facebook layout – it saves me a lot of time + bandwidth.”

Hilarious. But there’s now a much more serious reason to consider giving social networking sites a miss altogether: the government has plans to try and bring them under the remit of their “intercept modernisation programme” which is already supposed to collate information about email and internet usage.

This has been in the pipeline for a long time; the EU Data Retention Directive which came into being following the June 2005 bombings in London has prompted proposals of this kind for the purposes of monitoring potentially terrorist activity.

Since use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace has rocketed in the past year or so, the Home Office have now decided to include them in the database’s remit.

However you feel about civil liberties and even without getting into the whole ends versus means discussion, it is still slightly strange to think that the government can know things about your electronic correspondence that you didn’t actively tell them. Strange, and worrying.

If it’s any comfort, the database won’t actually store the contents of your messages. Just when and to whom you send them.

That’s acceptable, right?

I like reading diaries and letters, especially those of people that I think have had influential or amusing lives — Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man is a well-thumbed favourite of mine, to name just one. Part of the thrill for me has always been the sense of privacy a diary or a letter has; it wasn’t written with a reader in mind.

(Incidentally, I found this image on Compfight. Can’t recommend that search engine highly enough).

I always thought you had to actually buy a book to get your hands on this kind of thing, but no. There are now a number of famous diaries available in blog format (mostly facilitated by Project Gutenberg) which have been cunningly set up so that you can read the entries day by day as accurately as the modern calendar allows.

The Diary Junction blog has to be the first port of call for any diary enthusiast. They post intermittently on the musings of individuals as disparate as Neville Chamberlain and John Lennon and Linda McCartney. It makes for interesting reading, especially for those who are fed up of being credit crunched from every angle as soon as they boot up of a morning.

You can find a more comprehensive listing of historical diaries elsewhere, but I thought I’d highlight a couple of my favourites here.

Topping the chart has to be Samuel Pepys. Not only is he one of the most entertaining diarists of all time, but Phil Gyford, who runs the site has put a great deal of thought into it, including an archive, a search facility and a series of articles on the issues raised by Pepys’ entries.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve seen the future. Of journalism, that is.

A group of journalists in the San Francisco Bay area have set up spot.us – a new model for the way news provision works, which they are calling ‘community funded reporting’. The project is run by the ‘Center for Media Change’, who are a ‘501(c) 3 non-profit organization that enriches our culture… by facilitating the creation, development and use of new Internet-based business models to preserve the economic and professional viability of journalism.’

The idea is that people can post ideas on the site for stories they’d like to read, and then others can pledge money to fund someone to write the article. When the total needed to fund the investigation is reached, the article is written and is licenced under Creative Commons, so that anyone is free to republish it as long as the author is credited.

At the moment, it is tightly integrated with local news provision in the Bay area, but the creators hope to be able to expand its scope in the future. The idea of non-profit news has also been taken up by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, who set up his own version, ProPublica, in 2007. This one perhaps has slightly more international clout, being located in Manhattan and staffed by high-profile ex-editors, but I have to say I admire the integral optimism of what the San Fran lot are trying to do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Encyclopedia Britannica president Jorge Cauz has thrown down the gauntlet in terms of online encyclopaedia provision. Last week, Britannica launched a new drive for user-generated content in an effort to reduce the internet’s dependence on Wikipedia.

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2006, Cauz stated that “Wikipedia is to Britannica as ‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School.” More recently, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, he blamed Google for propping up the world’s dependence on Wikipedia by allowing it to the top hit for many common searches. He said:

“If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” he said.”Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?”

Google’s PageRank algorithm seeks out the most relevant and most cited webpage to any search criteria. Following Cauz’s line, this wikimperialism can only accelerate: the more times it is cited the higher up the PageRank it comes, and thus there is a higher chance it will cited again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at the ‘most read’ articles at TimesOnline (it’s the white box over on the right of the page).

Topping the list is this article, about the identity of ‘The Stig’ from Top Gear.

Below that, is this – surely the most important and interesting thing happening right now in the world?

And yet, there are more people (or Times-readers, rather – there’s a difference) who want to read about Top Gear than the Inauguration.

Baffling. But it does provide a new perspective…

UPDATE: Now Michelle Obama’s dress is the most important thing to Times-readers. That’s more like it.