Where to find me on Mastodon

Since Elon Musk is trying to ban any mention of Mastodon on Twitter, I thought I'd just make it as easy as possible to find me on the former.  I'm at 

https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody

I look forward to meeting lots of you there, where we can discuss the continuing and inevitable decline of Twitter under Musk.

South Korean Spy Agency Allegedly Tried To Influence Presidential Vote - By Posting 1.2 Million Tweets

Twitter is still a young medium, and it's interesting to see yet more uses being found for it. Here's a rather dubious one from South Korea: 

On Techdirt.

Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do

Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter, but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them. The first reason is practical: 

On Techdirt.

China's New Censorship Plan: Three Years In Prison If You Get 500 Retweets Of A 'Harmful' Post

As we've noted before, the online community is kept on a pretty tight leash in China, with information deemed subversive or just embarrassing disappearing quickly from the networks. But it seems that's not enough. Global Voices is reporting that yet another approach is being tried to discourage "offenders" from posting in the first place: 

On Techdirt.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter And Yahoo Refuse To Cooperate With UK's 'Snooper's Charter'

A month ago, we wrote about how the UK's infamous "Snooper's Charter" had been scuppered by Nick Clegg, the UK's Deputy Prime Minister. The Guardian now reveals that top Internet companies may have played a key role in this decision: 

On Techdirt.

Double Blow Against Freedom Of Speech For Twitter Users In Turkey

Techdirt has written a few times about Turkey's difficult relationship with new technology. Unfortunately, it looks like that now includes Twitter, as two troubling decisions against users have been handed down recently. Here's the first, as reported by the Turkish Web site Hürriyet Daily News: 

On Techdirt.

Reading the Google Reader Tea-leaves

If you were online late last night - and especially if you were on Twitter - you may have noted an enormous wave of pain and anger sweeping across the network. Here's what caused it:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Bizarre: Indian Government Orders Censorship Of One Its Own Sites

Techdirt has been tracking for some time the worrying moves in India that have involved censoring the Twitter accounts of journalists and political groups, or blocking sites. But this bizarre story from the Times of India goes beyond these in a number of ways: 

On Techdirt.

To Avoid Controversy, 'Realtime' Microblogging In China Now Delayed By 7 Days

Despite increasing competition around the world, China remains the leader when it comes to finding ways to censor the online world. A few months ago, the site Tech in Asia listed no less than eight ways in which users of Sina Weibo, China's hugely-popular homegrown microblog service, can be penalized for "inappropriate" tweets. Now it seems it has come up with a ninth: 

On Techdirt.

How Do You Say 'Twitter Joke Trial' In Chinese?

Techdirt wrote about how the UK's Twitter Joke conviction dragged its slow way through the various appeals before finally being resolved with the defendant's acquittal. As you will recall, the issue was somebody making an ill-advised joke about blowing up an airport if he couldn't fly out of it: 

On Techdirt.

UK Continues To Criminalize Bad Taste And Stupidity In Online Postings

In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there should be an "informed debate" about the boundaries of free speech for social media. That really can't happen soon enough, as the UK continues to arrest and punish people for the crime of posting stupid and tasteless messages online. Here are some of the latest developments. 

On Techdirt.

If Piracy Is So Devastating, Why Are We Seeing An Unprecedented Outpouring Of Creativity?

One of the favorite tropes of the anti-piracy crowd is that all this unauthorized sharing is killing culture, pauperizing artists and generally making the world go to hell in a handbasket. The only pieces of evidence adduced in support of that position are the market reports put together for the copyright industries that (a) say the sky is falling and (b) base that analysis on the industries' own unsubstantiated claims. 

On Techdirt.

Twitter Suspends Four Accounts Critical of Sarkozy: Is This What He Meant By 'Civilizing' The Net?

Nicolas Sarkozy, who hopes to be re-elected as French President this year, seems to have little love for the Internet. At best, he regards it as a "Wild West" that needs taming. Despite that, Sarkozy joined Twitter last week -- you can follow him @NicolasSarkozy. Posts are mainly written by his re-election team, although there seem to be a handful of personal tweets (marked "NS"). But at least he's finally engaging with the new medium on its own terms. 

On Techdirt.

The End Of The Global Internet? Google's Blogger Starts Using Country-Specific Domains To Permit Local Censorship

Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That's shown by the answer to a question on Google's Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs, which at the time of writing was last updated on 9 January 2012. Here's what it says: 

On Techdirt.

Newzbin Lawyer Struck Off For Posting Insulting Tweets During Case -- & Failing To Declare He Owned The Company He Defended

Well, this one's bizarre. Back in March 2010 we wrote about the UK Usenet aggregator Newzbin being found liable for the copyright infringment of its users. A year later, the ISP BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2, its successor. What amounted to the UK's first Internet censorship order was upheld soon afterwards. 

On Techdirt.

What Happens When The Company Backing Up Your Passwords In The Event of Your Death Itself Dies?

The unprecedented public outpouring of grief in the technical community at the death of Steve Jobs seems to go well beyond the fact that he was an undeniably important and powerful figure in that world for several decades. Perhaps it's because the people involved in technology are disproportionately young compared to most other industries: death often seems very far away at that age. The demise of the charismatic Jobs comes as brutal reminder that even leaders of the most successful companies must, one day, die. And hence, by implication, that we too will die. 

On Techdirt.

Welcome to Moody's Microblog Daily Digest

I joined Twitter on 1st January 2010 as an experiment. I wanted to see whether this trendy thing had any real merit, or was simply the latest fad that would come and go. I was was soon disabused of my prejudices about it being just for posting about what you had eaten for breakfast. Indeed, I discovered that the presence or absence of such culinary info was a very quick way of deciding whether someone should be unfollowed or not.

I was particularly impressed at the many different ways that people used Twitter. For some, it was truly an online diary, recording what they did, often in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. For others, it was a way of passing on news far faster than traditional outlets. And for some it was evidently a real microblog – a way of publishing extremely short piece of information with optional comments.

This turned out to be the way that I felt Twitter was most useful, and my own use soon conformed to this model. I realised that it solved a problem with blogging that I had been wrestling with for a while. I frequently came across stories that warranted passing on, but which looked decidedly thin when posted to one of my blogs. What I wanted was a quick way of saying: “hey, take a look at this – it's good/bad/stupid/funny/horrible” without needing to come up with anything more detailed in terms of analysis. What I wanted, it turned out, was Twitter.

As my followers there (and later on identi.ca and Google+) will know, I soon lost control completely, and started posting dozens of microblog posts a day. Indeed, I have had several people unfollow me because they say I post too many interesting links, which stops them working....

But for all that I feel my microblogs work well on their own terms, there is one huge problem. I have apparently posted some 43,000 of them in the last 20 months (really? How posts fly by when you're having fun...). Quite a few of them have useful information that I like to refer to. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter's search function is pretty useless. Even though I have supplemented this with bit.ly, which has its own search feature, it frequently happens that I can't find that super important link I posted a few months ago.

This is not just frustrating, it is becoming a serious problem. It means that the not inconsiderable effort that I put into choosing my links and commenting on them is effectively going down the digital drain.

So, in an attempt to preserve at least some of the more interesting posts, I have set up a new blog called, with stunning originality, “Moody's Microblog Daily Digest.” As its name suggests, each day this will provide a digest of those microblog posts that I think are worth keeping. These will be posted in an entirely minimal format, simply a paste of the microblog content – don't look for any prettiness here.

This will, I hope, have two advantages.

First, it will allow Google's not inconsiderable search engine capabilities to index stuff on the new site. That means any post should be retrievable by me and anyone who feels the need. Secondly, it offers an alternative way to deal with the Moody flood: not only will it be a pared-down list of microblog posts, but it will be one-per-day (I aim to update it during the day, and then close it at the end, although I'm not sure if that will mean multiple appearances in RSS readers...) This might help those who find that you can have too much of a good thing....

Obviously, I'll be reviewing how things go, and would appreciate any comments along the way as this latest experiment progresses.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

When Will Quora Be Quorate?

Almost without meaning to, I conducted a small experiment today.

Over on Twitter, Brenda Wallace asked me a very good question:

do you know a good umbrella term for things like ACTA, TPPA, 3strikes, guilt on accusation etc. ?

Since I couldn't think of one, I naturally turned back to Twitter to ask people what they thought. And since I've recently joined the all-too trendy Quora, it occurred to me that this was just the kind of thing it was designed to answer: what is effectively a "new" question whose answer is not available elsewhere, but which the collective efforts of qualified people might successfully address.

Literally within minutes, I had dozens of witty suggestions from people on Twitter, which you can see by scrolling this list of tweets; here's just a small selection:

copygreed

IP enclosure

legislative o'erweening

LRM (legislative rights management)

Corsair Laws

neo-mercantilism

(Any favourites there, or alternative suggestions?)

Meanwhile, over on Quora, I had precisely...nothing. Six hours later, I've still had precisely zero replies. Now, maybe I'm not important enough to attract answers, or perhaps I'm just doin' it wrong; but either way, this one data point tends to confirm me in my natural bias in favour of the wit of Twitter.

Of course, it might just be that Quora simply isn't big enough yet to have sufficient users/traffic to answers such questions. In which case, the issue becomes: at what point will Quora become quorate for these kinds of questions?

I shall probably be trying a few more experiments in the coming months in the hope of finding out, and I'd be interested to hear about the comparative experience of others in this respect.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Netflix Opens up About Open Source

Even though it is generally accepted that open source is used widely throughout the business world, it doesn't hurt having a few high-profile examples to point at when people doubt its suitability for this role. Obvious ones like Google and Amazon have been joined more recently by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And now here's another well-known name opening up, Netflix:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Beyond a Joke: On the Road to China

By now, you will have read all about the #twitterjoketrial. But you may not have come across this story:

On 17 of October, Wang Yi retweeted a post by Hua Chunhui who satirically challenged the anti-Japanese angry youths in China by inviting them to destroy the Japan pavilion in Shanghai Expo. She added a comment, “Angry youth, come forward and break the pavilion!” in her retweet.

The police interpreted her satire as a public order disturbance and asked the Labour Re-education committee to sentence her to one year labour camp, from November 15 2010 to November 9 2011 in Zhenzhou Shibali river labour re-education camp.

People will point out one year in a labour camp is very different from the few thousand quid fine meted out to Paul Chambers, and I of course would agree: the UK is not China.

But the *attitude* - that humour or satire is a "threat" of some kind, and must be punished in the courts - is shockingly similar. And that is what is most disturbing for me here in the UK about the #twitterjoketrial case: the authorities here are now *thinking* like their Chinese counterparts (who must be delighted to have this high-profile backing for their approach from those hypocritical Westerners). We are on the road to China.

Is this really the journey we want to take? Weren't we trying to get China to come to us?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.