Recently in Digital Category

I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Palin's diaries of his years in Monty Python, he's amusing, literate and as has been widely noted very very very nice, but reading them made me feel somewhat inadequate. Here's a man that was writing and performing not only in Python, but films, his own Ripping Yarns series, and various theatre appearances, he was on the board of Shepperton studios, partner in an arts publishing business, father to three small children, having "rather nice claret" at lunch with various luminaries of the day, but the killer was that he still found time to be on his local residents committee.

You can easily imagine the hopelessly amiable Palin, bumbling though life painlessly overachieving in all of his chosen fields, as well as the feeling of inadequacy it also inspires you a little that nice guys don't have to finish last. Especially if they don't consider they're racing anyone.

I'm glad I read it thirty or so years after the event though, imagine how wearing it would be to read Palin's blog each day or worse hear about every effortless triumph on twitter.

Last month a dear friend of mine had to spend the whole night sitting on a public toilet.

Why?

Because she was using the loo in a community centre and the caretaker, not realising there was anybody left in the building, accidentally locked her in and went home for the night.

My friend had no option but to sit it out until the community centre opened for business the next day.

That would have been a horrible experience for anyone, but particularly for my friend as she is frail and recently bereaved.

Of course if she had had a mobile this would never have happened, but she is in her 70s and she did not have one.

I mention this because I am astonished to think that anyone could think the digitial divide is a myth.

Buses aren't the most romantic form of transport, or at least aren't romanticised. Car driving gets the Route 66 treatment, the concept of "the road movie" and any number of soft rock classics, trains get Brief Encounter, Night Mail and er, Jimmy Saville. Ask anyone to name a piece of culture about a bus -- Summer Holiday and funny looks are all you'll get.

I think it's something to do with the bus being the middle ground, not the romantic freedom of the car, nor the regimented closeness of the long distance train. Buses are always just that one step up from Shank's pony, and bus stops don't get names so there's isn't even a Mornington Crescent type game to play.

We didn't have a car when I was a kid, and for one reason or another I'm just not bothered by them, trains were always expensive (they were competing with the fabled 2p fares on the bus, remember) and still to me seem a middle class way of travelling I'm not totally comfortable with. So buses are where it's at for me culturally, not that I get aroused by a shapely MCW Metrobus or even a Gardner engined Daimler Fleetline (I am however quietly obsessed with the 11 route, the local network in general and harbour fine memories of the tracline 65).

The interweb, of course, is nothing if not home to the nichest of niche content so, along with the bus-spotting and the tiny sites I've made that track people using twitter on the bus, there is something genuinely interesting and bus-related happening.

A cross-party group of Christian MPs released a report this week that suggested that people were going wrong in striving to be happy. While the non-believers may question their motives, and yes they did suggest that an "erosion of religious values" was a cause of unhappiness, are we as a society happy? How can we tell?

It seems that social scientists measure happiness by just asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10. Governmental scales take more variables into account, crime figures, health, and even economics. Clearly, while money doesn't make you happy you need enough for the grind of existence not to make you unhappy.

There's an almost standard move to blame "progress". Each new invention ties us more closely to our employers meaning we can't even hide. Each new labour-saving device ends up creating more work, as anyone who's attempted to clean a smoothie maker will testify. At the other end, there are claims (like here on the New Generation Arts blog) that technology will be what sets us free.

But what if technology could help, in the first instance at least let us work out just how happy we are. The measurements used now don't really get near enough for me, they're too general too subjective, and too slow to allow us to work out what effect events have.

These days there is much more information floating around that can be used to help measure happiness, we can look a news headlines, what people write on their blogs, even the "ambient information streams" that are tweets. So, is it possible to snatch a bunch of this as it passes, look at how people are feeling and work out if Birmingham is happy?

The thing that worries me most about Birmingham City getting relegated to the Championship is that I might have to go and watch them every week. Even an average Premier League team is on television enough to make it possible to see every goal and costly individual error without setting foot in the ground, but if we go down I might have to go down and that isn't going to be fun.

Up until a few years ago I had a season ticket in the main stand at St Andrews, and was in the habit of meeting the guys I went with around two hours before kick-off in The Sportsman on Garrison Lane. A few pints in a pub shorn of all its furniture to pack more people in, at least I assume that's what happened -- I never went in when there wasn't a game on so the pub could possibly just have had no chairs or tables at all.

A combination of Brady et al deciding to evict a section of the people that sat in the main stand, in favour of people who could pay for padded seats and access to a bar offering us much worse tickets as replacements, and the spiralling price of watching poor football meant that I stopped going to every game. Once out of the routine it's difficult to rouse yourself to go and watch on a cold Tuesday night, or a cold Sunday at four o'clock especially when the game is on TV. Much of my footballing budget was transferred in to watching England more regularly, and while I'm not sure the standard of play was any higher (and the frustration levels are much the same) at least I got to go to Frankfurt or Barcelona rather than Small Heath.

I still go to St Andrews and in truth it probably costs more to do it the way I do (£40 to watch us throw away a two goal lead against Liverpool, £40 to watch Agent Ridgewell put through his own net against the Villa), but this year I've seen almost every game home and away -- through a combination of pixelated internet feeds and darkened rooms in pubs.

Last night and into this morning the Council, presumably under the inspired guidance of Director of Public Affairs and Communications Debra Davies, set up a simple but effective live video stream of the election results hosted by Adrian Goldberg aka The Stirrer. When this project was announced there were the usual cries expecting it to be a car crash of classic proportions but whatever way it swung this was going to be pretty unmissable.

What was interesting for those of us who find this sort of thing interesting was that for the first time the Council was providing what you could call "the online community" with material for them to discuss. There wasn't a feedback loop direct to Adrian and his team (next time maybe) but given that it was being broadcast over the internet those communities that gather online were able to converse about it on their own terms.

Naturally The Stirrer board had a lively thread and there may well have been other blogs and forums following proceedings (links in the comments please!) but I was over on Twitter, the microblogging text-based social networking thingy Editor Marc talked about the other week. There's a few hundred of us in Birmingham using Twitter in varying degrees from the harcore digerati/nerds (delete according to your prejudice) to perfectly normal folks and a few of them stayed up to keep a record of Adrian's show. Which was handy as it doesn't look like it's being archived anywhere yet. (Tip: whack it on Google Video or something - this is historic stuff which needs to be preserved.)

I'm going to reproduce the whole transcript here so that it's on the record and because I can. But first, a brief explanation of some of the terms as like all online environments Twitter has it's own language to a certain extent.

I'm about to reveal my prejudices, worse still those that manifest themselves on the web the supposedly most democratic of mediums.

I don't hate you if you demonstrate these, they won't even make me like you less, I'll just get mildy irritated. That said I will probably refrain from attempting to explain Twitter to you, then again that may be just what you want.

So, without attempting to upset anyone, here's my top twelve interweb no-nos :

On the face of it the Encyclopaedia Britannica's decision to open up free web access seems like the ultimate victory for Wikipedia, or at least for the free over the expensive, but neither are perfect. There's just not enough information in them.

In a way Britannica's shortcomings are more understandable, they can't cover everything for reasons of space and editorial costs. The restrictions of the paper format and having to pay the editors, although most contributors are unpaid, gave rise to decisions about the relative merits of different subjects - information you could infer rather than read (Birmingham's entry gets 1271 words, Manchester's 5257, hmm). Wikipedia has no such constraints, but while it (or rather the community that controls it) doesn't seem to stop huge long posts on obscure topics - 5875 words on Star Trek as a franchise, not counting pages on each series or film - it does seem to have a downer on which topics are included.

Add an entry on Mr Egg, the café rather than the Scottish Musician, and it will soon be deleted with a message something like " Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed". This is because, while it's often called an uncontrollable lawless place by its critics, Wikipedia has a whole wiki full of rules (don't think you'll be able to edit those either).

It's that gate-keeping of what's considered important that stops Wikipedia becoming the free sprawling Hitchhikers' Guide of geek imagination. Where as Britannica carries restrictions of size (and even the Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy willont - that's why Earth was "mostly harmless" after all) Wikipedia doesn't have that excuse - which is sort of why, for the truly local interest there's Brum Guide.

As someone who doesn't own a television the BBC iPlayer has had an interesting effect on my viewing habits. Normally if I fancy watching an hour of so of moving pictures I'll hit the torrents. Now I have a quick glance at the BBC4 page and see if anything catches my eye. Tonight, over dinner, it was Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press which was highly enjoyable as most things with Mr Fry are. (Do check out his podcasts, especially the odd-numbered ones which consist of him rambling about whatever takes his fancy - bliss!)

When you become someone without a TV license you enter into a strange world of moral grey areas as the TV license also funds BBC radio, online and a host of other minor services many of which we, by dint of not having a TV, use a fair bit. Radio 4 is always on when I'm in the kitchen and news.bbc.co.uk is my first port of call for breaking news. I like that these don't carry advertising and would feel obliged to pay for them were it not that they cost but a tiny fraction of the BBC's television bill.

Birmingham tuned in to wireless revolution reported this august organ on Monday and since I posted a long screed declaring the current wifi provision in the city to be a bit rubbish the other week I feel the need to respond.

Since the actual report this is based on appears not to be online we only have Steve Pain's article to go on, so let's Fisk this beast and figure out what it actually means. (No offense intended to Steve here, I hasten to add. He's just reporting what they give him.)