Blogs and blogging

I have just send a complaint – or “negative feedback” as the website wishes to call it – to the Crown Prosecution Service in South Yorkshire for its prosecution of Paul Chambers for making a (stupid) joke on Twitter. I reproduce it below:

If you also wish to complain, you can do so at: http://www.cps.gov.uk/contact/feedback_and_complaints/index.html

No doubt you have received numerous complaints about the prosecution of Paul Chambers for a joke he made on Twitter regarding Robin Hood airport.

I would like to add my name to that list.

This was a severely misguided prosecution and raises serious questions about the CPS’ ability to manage cases.

I understand you feel obliged to investigate complaints, even when the complainants feel similarly obliged to lodge a complaint for any form of threat made against them.

But as soon as it became clear that this was never taken seriously as a threat and if you had applied some basic commonsense, you would given the person in question a warning.

But to proceed to prosecution on a clearly light-hearted comment on a social network site beggars belief.

If Paul Chambers does appeal – and I hope he finds a lawyer that will allow him to do just that – it is inevitable that the CPS will not only lose this prosecution but be undermined in the eyes of the public.

I sincerely hope this case is being reviewed high up in your chain of command, and I hope that whoever makes the call recognises the ridiculous and insidious nature of this prosecution and issues a formal apology to Mr Chambers.

I also hope this sparks a review of your systems for deciding whether to go ahead with a prosecution. And I hope the whole CPS is also given some basic training on modern social media so you don’t make similar mistakes in future.

Yours sincerely

Kieren McCarthy

Popularity: 1% [?]

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What does a truly democratic Q&A format look like?

by kierenmccarthy on February 8, 2010

Internet thinker and political operator David Weinberger has posed an interesting question: how do we design a question-and-answer format for politicians that is truly democratic?

Weinberger’s blog post was noted by Andrew McLaughlin on his Facebook page – Andrew is the White House Deputy CTO and the man more than any other that could make a democratic Q&A system a reality.

And so I figured I’d have a stab at designing something since this is an area where I have a fair amount of knowledge and experience both as a journalist and as ICANN’s general manager of public participation. Here then is a rundown of a system that I think would broadly work:

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Popularity: 2% [?]

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Stand up to Trafigura abuse of outdated libel laws

December 16, 2009

In October, there was outrage when UK libel lawyers Carter-Ruck prevented a newspaper from repeating questions asked in Parliament. The issue was regarding the lawyers’ client, Trafigura, which several media outlets including The Guardian and the BBC reported had dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, leading to many deaths and other health issues.
Trafigura took [...]

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Twitter wins the battle, now journalists and politicians need to win the war

October 13, 2009

Delighted to wake up this morning to find out that people acted on appalling press gagging regarding Trafigura and had used their collective voices to flip things over.

Much of the credit is going to Twitter so it is fitting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger twittered himself about the “victory” when Carter-Ruck solicitors backed down [...]

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Tr.im conceeds tiny URL fight to bit.ly

August 10, 2009

If you don’t use Twitter, that headline will look like gibberish, but basically one company that produces very short URLs has given up and publicly conceded defeat to a more popular service.
What’s annoying is that I have been happily using the loser – tr.im – and been enjoying the stats it produces. No more – [...]

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Twitter success at crucial point

August 6, 2009

So everyone and their dog knows about Twitter. Now the problem is they have started using it – and you can see it through the pretty drastic impact on third-parties the past two weeks or so.
Services you use to make Twitter more manageable keep getting knocked offline. A few months ago Twitter itself was suffering [...]

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Twitternomics: the URL shortening market

April 29, 2009

Twitter has just hit a crucial milestone for becoming a long-term viability rather than an Internet flash-in-the-plan: it has started generating its own sub-market.

Part of Twitter’s beauty is the fact that it restricts posts to 140 characters, forcing you to have to be economic with your words and making it easier to quickly digest others posts. The problem with the domain name system is that it produces long Web addresses (URLs) so if you want to point people to a certain webpage, you lose almost all the room you have just posting the URL, leaving little or no room for an explanation of why people should click on the link.

URL shortening applications have been around for years but they tended to be used only for ridiculously long web addresses that could often break in emails and IM messages. Twitter has given them a new lease of life.

And this was made clear this morning when the usual URL shortening site that I use – Tiny URL at http://www.tiny.cc – stopped working properly due to demand. The website wouldn’t load. More crucially someone Twittered me to tell me that an earlier link I had posted was now pointing somewhere completely different.

So I had a look about and found a new service: Trim, found at http://tr.im/. This has several advantages over Tiny URL. For one, it produces shorter URLs – the name of the game. But also it lets you lets you create an account, plus post directly into Twitter, and it provides stats on how many times the link has been clicked on.

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Why Google has a dangerous amount of power – Part 1

January 9, 2009

I have long said that Google is going to become the new Microsoft. People forget that Microsoft was once also a poster-child, before its control over the majority of the world’s operating systems turned it into a monster.

The fact is that Google has a dangerous amount of power and it is only a matter of time before that level of power corrupts. The fact is that Google has gone beyond providing neat, market-changing products for free and has started to dictate what is allowed online through the rules it creates. Again, it is only a matter of time before those rules start being bent in favour of the corporation, rather than the improvement of its products or an improved end-user experience.

So, my first quick example of where Google has a dangerous amount of power. This site – kierenmccarthy.com and my other main site kierenmccarthy.co.uk – have this morning completely disappeared from Google. Last night my sites existed, this morning, they do not.

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Hello and welcome to KierenMcCarthy.com

November 17, 2008

The site is currently being populated with information so expect to find it out-of-date and jumpy at the moment. Please come back soon when it should be a veritable feast of journalistic delights.

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The participative web – follow my Web2.0 ramblings at the OECD meeting

October 3, 2007

For those interested in Internet things – and in this case the sexy side of the Internet, Facebook and all that stuff – there is an interesting conference due to start in two hours in Ottawa, Canada.

I know because I’m here and I’m on of two official bloggers. See can see the full agenda here, and the front page to the blog, which I will be updating all day can be found here.

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