More election stuff...this time, it's a set of questions the existing Advisory Board has asked of those standing for election. So here's my thoughts...

1) What do you think is the value of LJ?

I think LJ has a number of significant strengths and features that make it one of the best blogging/journalling sites out there, and vastly superior to many other products.

It's easy to set up and use, but uniquely has management tools that allow you to control exactly what it looks like, and who sees what. I know of no other blogging sites that allow you to easily define public, friends-only or filtered entries, so you can write what you want, confident that only those you've picked can read what you've written. On top of this, a simple but much-loved feature for me is threaded commenting. Many other sites dump comments in a list, making conversations much harder to follow.

Adult content flagging - dare I say it - also gives users more power to control their journals and more freedom to write what they want.

LJ goes beyond blogging into social networking, and unlike Blogger, Wordpress etc., it's extremely easy to find an audience of like-minded people for your writing, and I've genuinely made friends across the world with LJ. It has one hell of a lot going for it, and I know that the time and energy I've put into my blog has been massively worthwhile. LJ is a much-loved and appreciated place, and therein lies its value - and it's why people get so concerned about change.

2) What changes would you like to see LJ make in the next year?

I think LJ doesn't need to change anything fundamental. I don't subscribe to the view that things were better in the past - change happens all the time, and if LJ sat still, there would be lots of useful features missing. I regularly post videos and photos to my LJ now, and this is now very easy.

The one thing that needs to change is the quality of LJ's communication with users. Many of the controversies and arguments could be avoided if LJ was better able to explain why it does what it does. I think a lot of users feel that LJ is hiding things from us. Personally this is not a view I hold, but communication has been a little poor at times, and many issues could have been effectively resolved with clearer explanations for things.

I also think that, following arguments over censorship, strikethrough etc., LJ needs to clarify a number of issues relating to the rights and responsibilities of users. It's important to define clearly just what and what isn't acceptable content, explain the rights that users have and clarify the extent of their free speech on LJ. However, LJ has to act within the law, and users have to take responsibility for what they write. It needs to be made clear just how rights and responsibilities on both sides should sit together. LJ needs to take sensible and considered action when something goes wrong, and this can only be done when the terms of the relationship between author and host are made absolutely clear.

3) Why do you want to be the elected representative?

• Because I can do this. I have skills and experience that would make me excellent for the job.
• Because it promises to be great fun and very rewarding.
• Because I have no personal axe to grind, and would be happy to discuss anyone's concerns at any time. I'm not out there for the minority; I'm here for everyone, and that's good for LJ as a whole.
• Because I care about LJ, and I don't want this great opportunity squandered by someone unsuitable doing the job. I'm passionate about this.

4) What do you think are the community's greatest concerns?

People want freedom to get on with writing and interacting, and they want to do this with minimal interference. There's a trust issue out there in some quarters, with people feeling like the site is not in the best of hands, and that negative changes have come about. This is why I think better communication is so important.

A lot of people are cynical about these elections, and wonder if the advisory board will do much good. I think it could be really effective if the right people are elected, and a number of people are concerned about what might happen if an incompetent or deliberately difficult candidate is elected.

Some people feel LJ is censoring them, and clarification is desperately needed on why certain content is problematic and what both users and LJ can do to maximise freedom whilst acting responsibly.

Tags: advisory board election

The nomination process for the LJ Advisory Board elections closes today, so very soon we'll have a complete list of the candidates who will be up for election from 22nd to 29th May. I've already had my confirmation e-mail from marta, so I shall be one of those candidates.

It looks like plenty of people have got the 100 comments they need, including some who threw their hats into the ring quite late. Once you've got those comments, you need to sign a declaration that you can do what's required, and return it to LJ. I've done this, so I'm through. The requirements aren't particularly onerous, but I wonder if they've put anyone off? Especially the joke candidates, of which there seem to be several.

A lot of people are cynical about the LJ Advisory Board, and I think the joke candidates, some of whom are threatening to be deliberately obstructive if elected, might do pretty well. Anyway, besides all of that, and without any mudslinging, here's some thoughts on things I think you should be considering when making your vote.

• Don't vote for someone making promises they can't keep. A lot of candidates are making bold promises about things they're going to deliver, and make LJ all fine and dandy again, but this is completely beyond the board's remit. It's all well and good if we were standing for CEO, but we're not - the board has a specific task which is to consider, debate, advise, discuss, communicate and represent - and that does not mean going in, all guns blazing, making demands that almost certainly won't be met. Make sure you use your vote for someone who understands how stakeholder relationships work, and for someone who has some idea of how to negotiate and bargain effectively.
• Don't vote for someone representing only a small part of the user base. There are loads of fandom candidates standing. Some of these will be more than capable of representing non-fandom users, but a lot of them will only be out to push the fandom agenda, which is somewhat different to the agenda of an everyday blogger like me. Look out for people who understand that different parts of the user base have different needs, but ultimately we all benefit from LJ being a safe and successful place.
• Don't vote for someone with an axe to grind. There are still people out there angry about things LJ/SA/SUP has done, and these are people standing for election so that all of their personal gripes can be addressed. If it's obvious that someone only wants to deal with issues that happen to have affected them, they're not a wise choice. Elect someone with a neutral point of view, who won't push a possibly very limited personal agenda.
• Don't vote for a joke candidate. It might seem funny at the time, but that makes the cynics' constant whining a self-fulfilling prophecy. Vote for someone with the skills and attitude to do the job properly, and take it seriously. In London, we're stuck with an idiot for mayor, that people voted for "because he's funny". It won't be funny when he screws up and makes dumb decisions that spoil things for everyone else.
• Beware of "officially approved" candidates and popularity contests. It's going to be easy for certain people to whip up a lot of support, because they've become LJ celebrities and are particularly active on the site. Do you want to vote for someone simply because they've managed to spam the most communities, or because they have the time to keep up with hundreds of friends? It doesn't prove they're any better qualified for the job - it just proves they spend more time online. These are the people more likely to have personal agendas, because they feel they have more of a right to have them than "lesser" users. But however much a candidate uses LJ, the quality of their ideas matters much more than sheer quantity of activity. Also, be wary of candidates endorsed by particular communities - it's just likely that these communities have an agenda that said candidate will address, but they may not be much good for anyone else.

In saying all of this, I'm fairly obviously saying that I think you should vote for me. :) I'm not here to push my own agenda, I'm not going to boldly claim to be LJ's saviour, and I'm not a disgruntled user out for revenge. I'm just someone who honestly wants to do this job because I think I can do it, and will be fair, realistic and competent.

If you have any comments or questions on all of this, please get in touch - I'll be happy to answer them. Following soon will be a piece on my particular views on recent LJ issues.

Tags: advisory board election

Although my training course is in Birmingham, I'm staying in a hotel in Wolverhampton, because just about every hotel here is full. There's loads of events on at the NEC at the moment, which explains this situation. It means I have a little commute each morning, which the company is paying for, so it's no big deal.

I'm staying at the Linton Travel Tavern Holiday Inn next to the racecourse at Wolverhampton. It's a very unremarkable but perfectly adequate hotel, that bears a creepy resemblance to the one that was home to Alan Partridge for six months. The food wasn't fantastic, but I'm allowed to eat more or less as much of it as I like at the company's expense, so I ate until I was ready to explode last night, and then retired to my room to have a bath, a read, and a good muck about on the Eee as there's free wi-fi.

The training course today was pretty good, although in a very small room that soon got very stuffy. Still, I managed to stay awake, and we didn't need to work too hard. I texted my friend Anne-Marie, who works in Brum, to see if she was free to meet tonight, and discovered that she happens to work in exactly the same building I was in at the time. This building is called The Mailbox, and is an odd combination of shopping mall and office block. It seems to be huge, and it's rather disorientating, but I managed to avoid getting too lost in it. Anne-Marie won't be free until a bit later, so I'm killing time right now in a Costa Coffee, which has very shoddy service, but is practically empty, so it's a bearable enough place to hang out.

This is the first time I've been to Birmingham for quite a few years, and it seems to be a bit nicer than I remember it, although still home to a number of spectacularly ugly buildings, including the horrors of New Street station, widely regarded as one of the most horrible stations in the country. It's now handling more than twice the number of train movements it was designed for, and is hopelessly unfit-for-purpose, as well as being gloomy and depressing. Network Rail have some bold plans for it, though.

Birmingham always reminds me of Brum, a slapsticky kids TV show that Eddie and Tully are quite fond of, so I always associate the city with miniature vintage car versions of Knight Rider, and a cast of overacting slapstick villains. Thankfully I haven't seen any, though.

That will do for now - I shall now go and write about why you should all vote for me in the LJ Advisory Board Elections.

Tags: friends, work
Current Location: Costa Coffee, Birmingham
Current Music: ghastly muzak - where's my iPod?

As highlighted by dakegra, the superbly good B-52s have recently released a new album...



Is it any good?, I hear you ask. Hell, yeah! What else would you expect from a band as good as this? Brilliantly catchy and fun like just about everything they've done. Still they keep going - Kate Pierson is old enough for a free bus pass these days!

They're playing in London on July 24th. Anyone fancy coming?

I get the feeling that there's a lot of feelings of doom and gloom around at the moment. The news seems to be endlessly miserable, and the papers shout depressing things at us from the headlines, especially the more right-wing ones like the Mail and the Express. It's interesting that the right-wingers in this country seem determined to perpetuate the "this country's gone to the dogs" theory at every available opportunity.

Anyway, I'm generally quite an optimistic person, and despite the threatened onset of ECONOMIC CHROS and the less satisfactory elements of my life at the moment, I'm not too bothered by what's going on. However, I do feel overcome by a weary sense of deja-vu.

This all sounds a bit familiar, when you think about it...

• Powerful, long-serving Prime Minister gets pretty unpopular and steps down.
  
• No particularly good replacements for said PM exist, and so the ex-Chancellor ends up getting the job.
  
• Just as all this happens, an economic crisis rears its ugly head.
  
• However good (or not) they may have been at being Chancellor, they end up being shit at being PM.
  
• Party unity and discipline imposed by previous strong PM falls apart under ineffectual leadership, and government becomes seriously useless.
  
• PM limps on for a bit, but ultimately heads towards crushing electoral defeat that keeps his party out of government for years.

The only bit I'm unsure of here, in Gordon Brown emulating John Major to a stunning degree, is what will happen at the next election. Will it be a 1992, where Gordon Brown miraculously and against all odds scrapes a tiny majority together and limps on for another five miserable years? Or will it be 1997 all over again, with a massive Tory victory that shoves Labour back into their post-1979 wilderness?

All that said, before you all go slashing your wrists, life isn't bad for most people in this country, and going back to the misery of the right-wing press, I'm glad that the Mail and Express do so much to encourage emigration. A lot of the miserable old farts that read these papers end up emigrating to Spain, to roast under the sun and go on about how glad they are that they don't live in Britain any more, which has gone to the dogs because of all the dirty foreigners who won't integrate into the "British Way of Life", whatever that means. The fewer of these twats in Britain, the better - it's why I've never found cheap package holidays to Spain even remotely appealing.

Of course, the right to settle in whatever European country you like is fine for the English...who see no irony in locking themselves away in English-speaking Mail-reading ghettos, whilst whining about how immigrants to Britain fail to integrate.

There may be trouble ahead...but ultimately, almost all of us know where our next meal is coming from, and that's more than can be said for a lot of people. I hope that, in the midst of all the crap, I never let it drag me down too much. Life is as good as you make it a lot of the time, and there's lots of ways to make it fucking fantastic that don't have to cost very much or be particularly difficult.

Does anyone here remember the dubious delights of 0898 phone lines? Calls are charged at 38 pence per minute at peak rate, and 25 pence per minute at all other times.

These were, in case you're too young or too foreign to know, the first premium-rate lines set up in the UK for information and entertainment purposes, and as about 99.9999% of them featured extremely bad porn stories read out equally badly by breathless young ladies, they developed an extremely bad reputation. However, we furtive schoolboys quite liked them - this was before the Internet, remember...

Anyway, I just got hold of a couple of 1989 and 1990 issues of "Motive Power Monthly", a now-defunct trainspotter's rail enthusiasts' magazine, which in amongst a fascinating range of photos of the now-very-much-historic railway scene featured this ad:



Hahaha! The fact that it features the words "hot" and "steam" makes it even more hilarious. I suspect that even I would have found the line boring, and I can imagine that the information would have consisted purely of long lists of numbers read in a flat monotone*. However, perhaps it's a front for trainspotter porn. I can picture some breathy-sounding young woman reading "The first...ohhhh...class 158 units....mmmmm...have entered service....(moan)....between...ahhhh....Edinburgh...and...Glasgow....yessss! yesss!" - or perhaps not.

Of course, the numbers would by now be defunct, and the trainspotter grapevine these days is largely Blackberry-powered. How things change.

* Blimey, this makes it sound like a numbers station. Perhaps trainspotting is a front for espionage.

OK, I know my chances in the LJ Advisory Board elections aren't brilliant, but I want to give this a damn good try, and I want to do it properly. There's a lot of candidates standing who either have personal agendas, or won't take the role seriously, and I want to come across as someone who can and will do the best job possible of representing everyone.

All my election-related posts are tagged and can be found here, so for anyone who wants to know what I'm about, this is somewhere you can point them. Sometime soon, probably tomorrow, I'll set out some more of my thoughts in the hope of getting some good debate going.

If you want to point people towards me as a candidate they might want to consider, please give them the link above. I'd really appreciate a banner pointing to that link, so can anyone make me one?

A lot of people have got their required quota of support by spamming communities, or by being popular in fanfic groups etc. I want to get somewhere simply on merit, so I'm not going to spam anything at all, and would like to just allow what I'm writing to speak for itself. Pimp me about like you have been doing so far, and let's see what people make of me. I'd like this just to be a viral campaign, really - I'll leave people to read things for themselves, and decide whether to spread the word or not. Besides, I'm away from home during part of the election period and will have rather limited internet access.

You've been great in helping me get this far without really having to do very much besides comment as best I can on what I think of everything. I really want to do this job, so let's tell everyone how great I would be at it. :)

Tags: advisory board election

Big success!

I have the required support, and I'm through to the next stage - I just got the nomination confirmation. :)

Huge thanks to everyone who has supported me. Winning the popularity contest with fandom bigwigs is probably going to be nigh-on impossible, but I'll give it a damn good try.

Tags: advisory board election

...on rock and roll...

Looks like yet another fun way to waste lots of time. :)

I've long been a fan of the Mailwatch website, which has a good prod at the staggeringly low quality of journalism found in the Mail and the Express. It's usually good-natured ribbing, that's often a laugh, and the site has a lot of regulars of which I'm one (posting under the name Railroad Man).

Occasionally, the site lifts the lid on the horrible agendas these papers and a lot of their readers have - and here is a classic case in point. This particular post has at least three times as many comments as usual, mainly due to the activities of someone called Darren.

He initially appears to be a troll, but then turns out, apparently, to be a BNP supporter, and he ends up spouting the typical shit you'd expect from these people. I won't comment too much here, but this really is a case of people hanging themselves if you give them enough rope. He's demonstrating classic Daily Mail behaviour - coming out with distorted prejudiced bollocks disguised as "fact" and "news".

The Mailwatch regulars have absolutely demolished his arguments. It's a good demonstration of the fact that you can legitimately hold a wide range of views, to moderate degrees, both left and right - but there is always a danger of crossing the line into extremist territory. Whenever you consider yourself superior to those you oppose, it's a slippery slope into the realm of fascism, where you start to justify all sorts of things to get to where you want to go.

It seems to me that Islamic fundamentalists and BNP activists have a mutually dependent relationship with each other - pretty much along the lines of every action having an equal and opposite reaction. As the BNP gain ground, and criticise and point at immigrants, blaming them for all the ills of society, so sensible Muslims will become more and more isolated and pushed towards extremism, with depressingly predictable results. It happens so often when you get two sides who won't back down and constantly raise the stakes, creating massive issues that don't really need to exist, and could be dealt with if you'd actually regard those you disagree with as valid human beings.

Latest Portishead album - blimey. Everything this band makes is truly, truly stunning.

Current Location: SW20 0UE
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Portishead - Third

1. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by Roald Dahl (read to the children at bedtime)
2. "Bush Falls" by Jonathan Tropper
3. "A Bear Called Paddington" by Michael Bond (read to the children at bedtime)
4. "I Hate Myself And Want To Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard" by Tom Reynolds
5. "The Islamist" by Ed Hussain
6. "Dawn of the Diesels: The First Volume" by John Spencer Gilks
7. "Memoirs of a Spymaster" by Markus Wolf
8. "Dawn of the Diesels: The Second Volume" by John Spencer Gilks
9. "Britain Under Fire" - a book published in 1941 showing photographs of air raid damage in British towns and cities
10. "Dawn of the Diesels: The Third Volume" by John Spencer Gilks
11. "The Boy's Book of Survival: How to Survive Anything, Anywhere" by Guy Campbell
12. "Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945" by Tony Judt
13. "The Necropolis Railway" by Andrew Martin
14. "As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me" by Josef M. Bauer
15. "Love Jude" by Annie Porthouse
16. "He Never Said..." by Steve Chalke
17. "Dear Bob" by Annie Porthouse
18. "Affluenza" by Oliver James
19. "Live and Work in Scotland" by Nicola Taylor
20. Extract from "What Are We Doing Here?" by Brian Norris (the part about his time in East Germany) - sent to me by the author
21. "Working for Yourself" - Which? Essential Guides

This followed on from book 19, which talks quite a bit about setting up small businesses in Scotland. Interesting read, but not sure what I could do if I was going to set up my own business. I'd love to do it one day, though, if I ever hit upon some crazy money-making scam scheme.

Tags: books, books 2008

No work again for me today - Abby has gone on a church weekend away, so I've been off dealing with school runs etc. Not bad - another long weekend, after a working week of just two days. :)

I just happened to switch on the TV this morning to find an interesting Channel 4 Learning prog