From the Arab Spring, to the London Riots, there appears to be a serious disconnect happening between huge swathes of groups of people who are supposedly meant to be living together in the same parts of the world, usually between the youths and the governments in power in their respective countries.

Whilst most people would say that there’s no comparison, or connection between the political activism that occurred in the Middle East, and the looting and rioting that’s been occurring on the streets of London, I would suggest looking at it from a different perspective, to see the common thread, that does occur between these two.

In both situations, if we take motives, and actions out of the equation for a second (assuming that the cultural norms in each society led to different actions and behaviours), we see groups of young people expressing a united opposition to the ‘authority’ and the social status quo.

Whilst in London, and the UK, we’re not exactly murdering and torturing people on a physical level who are not in agreement with our government and political leadership, as was happening in some parts of the Arab world, what if we are destroying the lives, and removing all opportunities for joy and happiness from the people that need it the most?

What if the social disconnect that has occurred between impoverished communities and the ‘rest’ of society, is as mentally and emotionally jarring to the kids in London, and the UK, as the absence of democracy and threat of speaking out had been to the youth in the Arab world?

For ultimately, what was the reason for the outcry in either place? To say, we will not tolerate this any longer.

Admittedly an onlooker with some education, living in a society with certain levels of acceptable behaviour, and social conditioning wouldn’t just take to the streets and take to looting, and vandalising. But what if the people taking those actions in the streets of London don’t have any education? What if those kids haven’t been conditioned socially? What if their education has been at the level of tribal warfare, and their socially accepted conditioning is that it’s ok to take what you want, as long as you’re stronger, in bigger numbers, and more threatening than the people in front of you?

The gang culture that has been developing in some parts of our societies, here in the UK, coupled with no doubt, endless hours of violent video games, movies that glorify violence, and crime, as well as no sense of accountability or responsibility would indeed end up generating groups of children, that act in herds, behave like animals, and have no sense of regard, or respect for others.

In their mind they’re taking what they’ve somehow justified they’re entitled to, and whilst we need to use force, to stop them, put them behind bars, and put an end to the violent disruption, that is clearly not going to be enough to solve this problem.

Just like dictators in the arab world were using violence to maintain their control and power, the children on the streets of London have been rising up, to show they deserve respect, and can command power too. So much so, that for the first three nights, the violence in London continued to escalate, with the police watching on almost helplessly from a distance.

But as Laurie Penny so rightly points out,

“Violence is rarely mindless.”

she goes on to say:

“In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.”

If we look back over the last few months, just in November and December of 2010, the Student Protests in London eventually led to a minority of troubled youths engaging in violence, and disruption caused by people reacting increasingly to a government that they felt was acting in an unjust manner, making decisions about the future of their education system. Yet even then, there was no clear rhyme or reason. One of the students convicted, Edward Woollard was clearly not of your typical youth with a troubled background, unstable family, or with no prospects. And yet was able to get caught up in the wave of emotion, and frustration that the crowd acted with. Whilst the judge thought he was making an example of him, and others like him, no one really examined or bothered to ask the question what could possibly provoke someone to so readily engage in such public violence?

Then earlier in March 2011, more people took to the streets, in outrage and in protest to the government spending cuts.

This is an unseen social tension that has been brewing and brewing for some time now. This didn’t just happen overnight. The events themselves may have, but the causes, and the environment that allowed for this to break out in didn’t.

Whilst the ‘rule of law’ is enforced, and police and politicians partner up to clamp down on the ‘trouble makers’, it is a shame to think that all that will happen is the denouncing of the violence, and covering up of the real issues that plague our society.

There isn’t a single reason or cause that’s singularly responsible for the situation that’s occurred across the UK. (Violence and looting now on this 4th night occurring in Salford, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham and Liverpool to name but a few.) But there are many many reasons that all compounded to create this reaction.

There’s the school holidays – which means more children are out of school, and have nothing to occupy their times with.

The fact that people are looting high value goods and targeting stores like Curry’s, JD Sports, and other Fashion and Designer clothing stores suggests that money or wealth may be part of the problem.

Large numbers of unemployed people, feeling worthless, living off benefits, could be part of the reason. However, with evidence of some of the people being tried in courts pointing to people having jobs, studying at university, and even meant to be joining the army, you can’t just use wealth inequality as a reason for this looting.

Looking at the targets of the crimes, they all seem to be focussed on property of value, so there’s always the potential that there’s some underground crime scene being masterminded behind all the violence. Especially if the crimes were in response to a possible network that lost approx £300m of Cocaine, from the boat from the caribbean that was apprehended on it’s way to the Netherlands, but I’m just speculating there.

That said, it’s hard to imagine so many of these kids being part of some international crime cartel. Often fear, and violence go hand in hand, with people who are afraid, or frustrated lashing out. Perhaps there’s some social cause that’s being made known for the rest of the world to start to pay attention to.

The lack of a social fabric bridging these disparate communities together.

It’s easy to attack, deface and vandalise the property of people who you consider alien, or the enemy. If they had genuinely considered themselves a part of the society that they attacked, they may not have been so violent. However, if they live with this fear, lack of trust, and the constant need to earn respect, in their own backyards, then why would they be any different out on the streets?

It’s easy for us to sit back and blame them for causing all this violence and crime. It’s much harder for us to see ourselves as responsible. For cutting funding to key resources like Libraries and Youth Centres that they rely upon. Some children even went so far as to predict the riots, after the closures of youth centres.

Is it any wonder that when we’re pulling out the support and network that is responsible for helping them cope, then leaving them to roam the streets with no-where to go that the youth in our society aren’t going to start causing trouble?

To top it all off, to then expose them to a constant barrage of advertising that creates desire for products they can’t afford, taunting them of a lifestyle that is inaccessible to them, and creating cravings for the finer things in life, whilst all the time making it harder and harder for them to be inspired by any of the life choices that lay ahead of them, it’s not hard to believe that violence looting and theft are some of the only ways they see themselves as being able to ‘have’ the things that matter, in our ‘material’ world.

The sad fact of the matter is, that the world is falling to pieces (supposedly, according to the rising inflation, and global depression), people don’t feel like they belong in the society they’re living in, and they lack the role models, ambition or desire to do much more than live an ‘easy’ life, with all the luxuries they yearn for, but without the debt that normally is associated with it.

Drugs, Alcohol, and crime, as much as we don’t want to admit it, are all part of the social fabric that leads to the violence, looting, and crime that has been happening.

Most of the looters were carrying off large quantities of alcohol. Alcohol which they presumably would never be old enough to buy in stores.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that we don’t really know what’s happening in our back yards, and in our neighbourhoods. Many of us work too much to have time for our families, let alone our neighbours. Most of us live in neighbourhoods, where we don’t make time for the people around us.

Our virtual communities, coupled with always on communication channels means we’ve gradually been slipping away from the real world, from the physical community that we inhabit, and just as we’ve been slipping away into our own worlds, so have those steeped in their own communities of violence, crime, and gangs gotten ever deeper into theirs.

Unfortunately, we all have to live together, and it’s become really clear that the answer is not to just step away, or live in fear one of the other. In order to overcome this fear, this segregation of social groups, we need to start bridging those gaps. We need to start connecting together all the different elements of society. Recognising that sometimes the mental and emotional traumas of living in our western world, are sometimes more perilous than the physical challenges of famine or drought.

Why is it that people on the verge of starving can remain humane and composed, whilst those with everything to live for, in the developed world are the most likely to commit suicides? Is it because whilst the absence of food might lead to starvation of the body, that is nothing compared to the starvation of dreams, ambitions, and hope?

Faced with a monotonous life of petty theft, crime, selling drugs, living on benefits, or being indentured in servitude at minimum wage, because of inescapable debts, and no possible light at the end of the tunnel, you too might have taken to the streets and considered it appropriate or even your right to take what you could, when you could. Especially if you’ve been conditioned through films, video games, and popular culture that crime is a part of life. (Go on, admit it, it did remind you of Grand Theft Auto, didn’t it?)

Those people suffering for lack of food, and clinging on to survive don’t have the benefit of TV, internet, Cable television, Sky, Cinema’s, Magazines, DVD’s and the constant barrage of advertising and marketing making them feel inferior, and inadequate if they don’t have the latest TV, or the latest trainers. They’re only able to focus on what they have around them, their challenge to find food. Their challenge to stay alive. To keep their children alive. To stay warm. To find shelter. To make it through another day. They exhibit the innate human spirit that wishes to survive. That wishes to better itself.

If we took those kids that were on the streets of London, and across the UK, looting, and breaking into stores, and we gave them challenges to learn from, discipline and structure to work with, and a sense of belonging in the wider community we probably wouldn’t have had the expressions of outrage, fear and violence that we saw on the streets.

We’re as responsible for this situation as they are. As people, as politicians, and as members of this society it’s our responsibility to reweave the fabric of society to include everyone in the process. Not just the educated, and cultured.

The question is are we yet mature and grown up enough to admit it?

Google+ is loved by some and hated by others.

Ever since news of the trial invitations kicked up a buzz on twitter, and sites started blogging about every mundane feature left right and centre, I’ve been curious to see what all the fuss is about.

Unfortunately, Google, in their infinite wisdom, just aren’t ready to share their treasures with all of us, and the frequent invitation to ‘wait’:

means that even people who have received invitations aren’t able to sign up and trial the service.

It’s a bit of a ‘pot luck’ at the moment, and whilst I’m sure it’s all very interesting, and new and shiny, I’ve gotten tired of the way that Google releases a service, to the general public, and then ceases to make it available to the actual people that they have invited to come and try out the service. If you can’t deal with the load, then don’t send out so many actual email invitations Google!

I’m sure the publicity is great for Google, in the way that Gmail invites only trickled out to people in the start, and made them all the more desirable.

But in the long term, the real value from these services isn’t going to come from who signed up first, but rather from how do you use it on a day to day basis.

I don’t really have an opinion on Google+ right now. I’ve resisted the temptation to actually read all the posts, and articles that are making the rounds speculating, and postulating as to where Google+ will land, and all the great and wonderful features it posesses.

When I do finally receive an invitation from Google+ that I can actually use, then I’ll indeed consider taking a look at it. Until then, it’s just ASNW (another social network), that we’ll need to add to the list. In practice, only a few platforms will own my relationship, and ideally those will be differentiated by context. Perhaps Google+ will be an appropriate context for something, perhaps not, for now, I’ll hold off on pressing that plus button repeatedly to find out..

And in all honesty, when I eventually do log into Google+, the amount of effort it takes for me to connect to my disparate social graphs, across multiple platforms, contexts, and communities, will dictate just who I do or don’t connect to on it.

June 8th, 2011, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech to the eighth graders at Belle Haven Community School in Menlo Park, CA, as Facebook plans on moving to Menlo Park, and was keen to get to know the neighbours.

During his speech, Zuckerberg, shared a few things that he’s learned, that has enabled him to not succumb to the attitude of “I can’t”.  He talks about how building a company, or a product like Facebook is about determination, and believing that you can.

His three key learnings, were:

1) Everything that’s worth doing, is actually pretty hard and takes a lot of work.
2) Focus on surrounding yourself with great relationships and friends that you trust.
3) Do what you love.

In a bit more detail:

1) Everything that’s worth doing, is actually pretty hard and takes a lot of work
Anyone that tells you it’s easy, or you can do it overnight, is just wrong.
Whether you’re an Athelete, or a musician, or you’re building a company, it’s not about a single moment of inspiration or brilliance it’s about years and years of hard work, before you get there.
It’s really the hard work that underlies everything that you do.
If you want to do anything  great, that’s just something that you need to remember.
Anything that’s really awesome to do takes a lot of work, and a lot of practice to get there.

2) Focus on surrounding yourself with great relationships and friends that you trust.
Things are hard – only your real friends, and the people around you are the ones who will tell you that you can do it, and support you in doing it.
It’s not about the one person, or the lead singer of the band, because no one ever does anything alone, they always do it with their friends, and partners.
Those relationships enable you to build awesome things.
So focus on those, and have fun.
Great friendships are what makes life fun and meaningful and enables you to do awesome things.

3) Do what you love.
You can make yourself do things that you don’t like doing.
You can overcome things, that you don’t like doing.
But it’s a lot easier to focus on  challenges that you really do enjoy doing.
If you have the option to play a game, even if it’s really hard, if it’s something that you like, you’re going to power through that, and find a way to do it.
Life is like that a lot of times.  You can make yourself do challenging things that you don’t like, but if you actually do stuff that you love it’s a lot easier, and takes on a lot more purpose.

Some great words..  I’ll be adding my own thoughts later, but for now, I just wanted to share the video, with you all..

And it’s you!

That’s the premise of a film that I’ve just watched last night. We Live in Public, a documentary styled film, that’s just been released in the UK yesterday, through DogWoof is a truly insightful film.

I find life so amusing at times. Thursday evening, I was at the YesAndClub listening to Shed Simove, the editor for Big Brother. The following day, I was sat watching We Live in Public, seeing how the original Big Brother idea had been done, long before, in New York by a man named Josh Harris.

Josh Harris, a name that most people nowadays don’t recognise or know, was a man who was far ahead of his time. In the early days of the internet, Josh was already creating streaming video content, embedded with chat windows, and real time conversations. The film takes you through Josh’s various projects, and businesses, some hugely, lucrative, others massively successful, and some which just seem completely off the wall.

He started off with founding Jupiter Research, after understanding what sort of market survey data was needed in the Internet sector, then following the trends, and knowing the direction that things were headed, after he became a success with Jupiter, he worked with Prodigy and established their chat rooms. Being given creative license, and the freedom to be a little more risque than the traditional corporate types would have been comfortable doing, he got sex chat rooms going, and eventually ended up having close to 25% of Prodigy’s traffic happening as a result of people in chat rooms. From there, he went on to founding Pseudo.com where he started live streaming video, and having chat rooms alongside the live video. As you watch We Live in Public, you really start to see how even though this was all happening across dial up modems, and this was the late 1990′s Harris really had a vision of what would be emerging, or the direction that things be going in from an industry and tech perspective.

At it’s peak, Pseudo was creating multiple channels of live streaming content each with their own embedded chat rooms, and each one on different topics or subjects. It was an achievement, if you look at it, like no other. He had managed to create more channels than were publicly available through any other medium at the time, and because the tv channels all ran autonomously, the folks producing and editing the shows had an unprecedented level of creative control, and came up with some compelling viewing. But being so far ahead of it’s time, Harris was unable to sell Pseudo off to one of the bigger players, and never really established the dominance in the market place that other media channels had at the time.

Following on from Pseudo, Harris launched into a project called ‘Quiet Place’ which was essentially a ‘closed environment’ live in community in the depths of New York, having taken an old factory, and repurposed it internally to accomodate his ‘under ground’ experiment. Being notorious on the New York scene for throwing wild parties, and perhaps in an effort to further his ‘work’, Harris recruited in something like 100 people, who were each interviewed, screened, and then became inhabitants of this underground community. Everything you wanted was supplied, for free, including food, drink, drugs, and even firearms. But once you came into the community you couldn’t leave, and everyone had to wear the same clothes. Josh himself was a member of this community, but subversively so, as he would often be shown ‘off set’ behind the scenes, getting feedback from a group that was helping him enforce control, and order in the environment, from outside.

The set up was impressive, in so much as it was a full ‘Big Brother’ style experiment. There were cameras everywhere. From the loos and showers, to the beds, there wasn’t anywhere that you couldn’t go, or hide, and not be seen. But more interestingly, he had set up a ‘pod style’ bank of beds, essentially a hundred bunk beds all stacked tightly next to each other, and each contained a tv screen in one corner and a camera in the other. From any bed, you could flick through all the channels, and see what people were doing in any of the other beds, with the idea being that if two people were watching each other at the same time, then there would also be live audio between them. The experimental community ran for the month of December, 1999, right through to the Millenium New Year, but given that they also had a ‘church like’ room, rumors reached police that there was a massive cult and that there would be mass suicides, and so came down to investigate on the morning of either the 1st or 2nd of Jan (the exact date escapes me). Fortunately for Harris, he had grown tired of the project, and so it was the perfect excuse to just shut things down and move on.

His next experiment was in living in public (hence the title, We Live In Public). He found himself a ‘girlfriend’, and played out the drama of being a couple under the scrutiny of the camera. It’s interesting in the movie that the filmmaker Ondi Timoner chooses to show Harris’s girlfriend/public romance as being something that genuinely happened, and genuinely fell apart. In Harris’s own words, after the film, during the Q&A, he confirms that he had pre-meditated the whole experience. Deliberately finding someone to recruit into the role of ‘girlfriend’ for his staged experiment of living publicly. He even claims to have the footage of him going over the moral dilemma of putting someone through that experience, and clearly, as is evidenced by the snippets of footage that’s shown of the experiment, he didn’t hesitate to follow through. Eventually the relationship breaks down, and Harris is left ‘alone’ with his viewing public which whilst at it’s high of as many as a 1000 people when he and Tanya, his girlfriend at the time were in love and all lovey dovey, drops to as little as 10 folks.

Eventually he leaves that experiment, packs up, and just disappears. Later it turns out he had bought an Apple Farm up north from New York, and was just working the farm, working the land. Almost as if he was unplugging himself from the grid, and just getting back to nature. It’s interesting, as I was watching that I was thinking about the Schumann Resonance and how as people we tend to ‘feel better’ in nature, because we get to discharge all the energetic charge we’re carrying from being exposed to technology and the ‘stresses’ of modern life, and have our energy almost ‘neutralised’ or ‘grounded’ and end up just feeling more peaceful or calm in the presence of a natural environment. (As an aside, some folks would also chalk that upto the ‘Aura’ being grounded in a natural environment, and all the energy that hadn’t been properly anchored or discharged from being in an electric and tech filled physical space, and from being deprived of being exposed to the natural base background frequency/radiation gets all balanced out, the way nature knows how to. But since this isn’t a review of Aura’s or energy fields, I’ll leave that as an initial thought for now – will perhaps one day write a more detailed review of some of the evidence to suggest it’s existence.)

After working on the Apple Farm, eventually Josh Harris ends up selling up, upping his roots, and disappearing to Ethiopa, where later we discover he’s bought himself some land, and has made his home. Deliberately living somewhere that isn’t wired up, and technically as forward, it affords him the opportunity to rediscover community, and his own humanity which almost feels like he’s lost at times, when living under public scrutiny in some of his experiments.

The film itself, whilst chronicling some of Josh’s past, and background, doesn’t do justice, in my opinion to his vision, or inspiration to create these experiments in ‘public’ living. After the film, we’re fortunate to be able to have a Q&A with Josh Harris, the ‘subject’ of the movie, and slowly it starts to become evident that Harris really sees himself as an artist, rather than a technologist, or futurist, though it seems he’s aptly positioned to fill any one of those roles. But unlike Orwell, and his vision of Big Brother, in 1984, Harris’s visions, and ‘experiments’ were attempts to understand our own innate desire to watch and be watched. Harris describes post screening how he wanted to capture the experience of losing yourself in the collective consciousness, of the people that are observing you, and relates how in the couples experiment, living with Tanya, in a flat, when he pushes her a touch too far, she goes completely out of character, and acts out the suggestions that her fans provide her, through the chat rooms. It seems that everyone else in the chat rooms is starting to influence Tanya’s thinking and behaviour, and she insists that Josh sleep on the couch, and that she get to stay in the bed. Eventually Tanya makes the decision to leave the flat completely. But Josh identified the moment where Tanya forced him to sleep on the couch, as a direct consequence of the user feedback and not something that she would have otherwise considered. It’s this nature of hyper connectedness, that your own mind, and your own control over what you say or do gets lost in response to the community around you that Harris was trying to capture, understand and express, through these experiments.

Whether he does that or not is a different matter. But it’s understandable why some folks would liken him to the ‘Warhol of the Web‘. Especially if he describes himself as an Artist, and when asked what his motives were he shares that he aspires one day to be in the major Art Galleries, being exhibited. He does make a valid point, that most great artists are never appreciated in their own time, and even shared that he was almost hoping that his content will one day be looked back upon and seen by people as being the revolutionary, ahead of his time visionary that he seems to be, by documenting and capturing in such detail all the content from all of these cameras from all of these experiments in living publicly. He also jokes about the cost of storing all this information, and refers to the half life of the video medium he’s stored all this content on, describing museums as being those repositories that are paid to store our history and keep our art alive.

Personally I had so many questions that I wanted to ask of Josh, but given that the Q&A was for a limited time only, and that there were other people in the audience, I didn’t ask more than a few questions of him, but as I let the fullness of the film sink in, and start to take some of my own background/experience and perceptions into account, I really get a sense of just how cutting edge Harris was with his work, and how his latest project, which he’s now pursuing, since the film is opening doors for him again, is really an attempt by Harris to understand and see through his project who’se name escapes me at the moment. It’s an attempt to recreate the ‘Quiet Place’ experiment, but this time to have ‘work’ for the people to do. Harris reflected that one of the reasons why Quiet Place descended into anarchy and chaos was partly because there was nothing to occupy people’s time and attention, and so apart from being ‘watched’ all the time, people had nothing else to do.

His latest vision is of a ‘wired city’ which will have everyone being watched under the camera, given everything, and also be given work, or tasks and activities to occupy them.

In brief, I think the guy is trying to create real life experiences of what might happen if everyone’s thoughts became conscious and everyone was plugged directly into each other. He even suggests that perhaps that’s what they Mayan 2012 is all about a firmware upgrade of the human CPU, so that we no longer operate as single autonomous units, but as an interconnected hybrid type massive parallell computer. Personally I’d been saying the same thing to my own friends. That all this technology like mobiles that allows us to be uber connected all the time, in any place, at any time is a way for us to physically train ourselves to start experiencing that ‘always on’ moment in preperation for some form of mass telepathy to emerge that will allow us to always be connected with each other. Some folks are already talking about such phenomenon through Indigo Children, and a coming of a new age type talk.. Others recount Mayan prophecies and ‘end of times’ type forecasts to mean just a transform of such a scale that it’s unprecedented, and beyond our imagination.

The one other insight that occurs to me, when reflecting on this film was Sheldrake’s work on Morphogenetic fields, and the sense of being stared at. What if we do communicate information by putting our attention on something. What if when we look at something we’re communicating with it, energetically, and telepathically, but our sense are so numb, and dulled, that we can’t perceive that communication. There’s always stories of Aborigines being able to communicate with each other over vast distances, and even traditional indigenous people having a ‘hyper connectedness’ that allows them to perceive and understand the natural world in a way that escapes most of us urban city dwellers.

It’s indeed an interesting perspective that Harris offers up, and indeed only time will tell how true a visonary, artist, or prophetic futurist he was, but given his track record so far, I wouldn’t disagree completely with him at all. In fact my own thinking and understanding are very much in line with the tack that Harris takes on the subject.

My final thought will be to leave you with an excerpt from The Foundation for the Law of Time, where this is expressed far more eloquently than I ever could:

In its essence, time is a frequency expressed as a mathematical ratio constant, 13:20. This constant defines a whole new realm of reality, the synchronic order. This is the fourth dimensional realm where synchronicity is the norm and can actually be mapped out by mathematical codes based on the ratio constant 13:20.

By means of this constant it can be demonstrated that the present civilization is not coordinated by the universal frequency of synchronization, but by an artificial timing frequency which is a major factor contributing to the present global crisis.

Rooted in an irregular 12-month calendar and a mechanistic 60 second/60 minute timing program, this artificial timing frequency (12:60) drives the human species ever farther from the natural order with alienating effects on human consciousness. In this analysis, the evolution of the human species is dependent on a return to the natural timing frequency.

For this reason the primary social application of the Law of Time is the Thirteen Moon/28 day calendar. By making the Thirteen Moon/28-day cycle the harmonic (13:20) standard of everyday time measurement, replacing the irregular twelve-month global standard, the Law of Time establishes a new foundation for the reformulation of the human mind and its systems of knowing.

[http://www.lawoftime.org/law/law.html]

If you’re reading this, and the film is still showing, I thoroughly recommend you get out to the cinema and watch it. If you happen to read this on Saturday the 14th November, I believe the 6.30pm screening at the Odeon in the Panton Street Cinema in London will include a Q&A with Josh Harris, after the film, and if you feel so inspired, I’d thoroughly recommend you get down there to watch it, and ask him a few of your own questions If you happen to live outside of London, there’s also nationwide screenings next week, for which you could win a ticket by entering the draw here.

So a while back, I decided to get back into a many months contract commitment with a mobile phone provider. Since completing my 18 month contract with T-Mobile I was loathe to get another phone with a long term contract, partly because I wasn’t sure back then if I would be in the UK long enough to fulfill the contract.

As time progressed, and I got further and further into my work here in London, I came to realise that I’m gonna be here for a while. I won’t be shooting off anywhere anytime soon, and I’m going to be in London for the long haul. That said, I decided that I couldn’t stick with the Sidekick Slide as my primary phone for much longer. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the Sidekick was a great phone, and it served me well for tweeting, and reading a few emails – but I was ready for something a little more ‘serious’, that would let me live stream with Qik, manage multiple email accounts, allow me to choose from a healthy eco-system of apps, and most importantly, still have a decent sized full keyboard.

Settling on a Blackberry, and having received my handset, I had a day before my number would get ported across, to my new network provider, Vodafone, and decided, since I had the handset that I would get it all configured, and set up, ready for when the Sim Card in my new phone went active. That’s when I discovered that my current phone at the time, the Sidekick slide, didn’t sync with a Mac. Worst still, it didn’t even sync with a PC. In fact it just plain didn’t sync with a computer. Terrible I know. And after having had the phone for two years, I realised that most of the numbers on the Sidekick Slide weren’t stored anywhere else online. They were on business cards and online profiles of the people I’d met, but they weren’t in any one addressbook that I could access, and I was loathe to start aggregating them all again, on yet another new device. After spending countless hours hunting, and searching, I finally discovered that I had access to everything that was on my phone, online. After more than 18 months with a Sidekick Slide, I only just discovered that T-Mobile had set up a portal for Sidekick users in the UK, and that I could see many of the items on my phone online. All my contacts were available online, as well as all the emails I had coming into my phone, the notes I’d made, my To Do lists – everything was on this online portal, that I had never once seen, or heard about. I suppose that’ll teach me to not properly read the manuals in the future!

Well, anyways, after spending a half hour with the portal, I came to realise that there wasn’t anyway of ‘exporting’ your data, even from the portal. It seemed just downright dumb, and silly, but it seemed like they expected you to be a customer of theirs for life, and to use the one handset that they had manufactured. Clearly mobile phone manufacturers still hadn’t learnt to think about or deal with people moving their contacts onto and off of a handset. Perhaps they all presume people will just copy it onto and off of the Sim? Well I wasn’t about to do that, given that my past experiences with using Sim cards to copy phone numbers resulted in names being shortened, and multiple numbers for a single person being turned into many entries.

Well, anyways, I ended up finding a ‘printable view’ of all my contacts – thank god they had the decency to think a person might want to at least ‘print’ off all their contacts. Then, with the print view, I at least had all the contact details in a table type view, that I could save and keep hold of

I then had to get that data out of the HTML encoding, and into a CSV format. That was no easy task, I can tell you. First I took the raw HTML, removed all the images, and empty columns, (with much experimenting, and using NVU constantly jumping between the source code, and the WYSIWYG view, to make sure I didn’t lose any data as I did it..

Eventually I managed to get the table down to a basic table that I could then copy into a spreadsheet (notice I didn’t say Excel? It’s cos I’m using Open Office!) Unfortunately, the ‘Name’ field was collapsed into one, and so I had to then edit that by taking that column into a text document, converting the table to text, and then re-converting the text back into a table, at the commas. Finally, with all my data in a spreadsheet, all the columns properly labelled, I was able to consider generating a CSV with all the phone numbers from my current handset. Then I realised, that I also hadn’t properly dealt with all the phone numbers on all of my previous handsets, having just started using a new phone, and then slowly just adding numbers as I was using them. Fortunately, most of the other phones I had were able to Sync with the AddressBook in OSX, using the Bluetooth on my Macbook. With the Motorola RAZR V3 it was no problem.. I’d sync’d that in the past with previous laptops, so knew that wouldn’t give me any trouble, and so merrily got all of the contacts off of that handset. Then came the Sony Ericsson Z310i – an old handset, in so much as I had stopped using it as a phone, but nonetheless, one that in it’s prime had been home to many many phone numbers. That one didn’t sync out of the box, but googling I found the iSync plugin for the Z310i. I did first land on the feisar.com website, and mistakenly thought I would have to buy a plugin, but believing that there had to be a free plugin for Sony Ericsson somewhere, I decided to just keep looking, and boy am I glad I did.. At that late in the night, I might have even bought that plugin, if I didn’t soon find the proper Sony Ericsson iSync plugin shortly afterwards.

So I got all of these contact details of mine into my AddressBook from my previous handsets and realised that I still hadn’t imported my Sidekick Slide phone numbers in. When going to import in AddressBook, I noticed that there were a number of AddressBook formats, and for the life of me I couldn’t see CSV. (Had I not been so exhausted, I might have noticed the ‘import text file’ option – but either that’s only just appeared, now as I look at it again, or I was worried about it importing the data into the wrong columns.. I can’t remember which it was, but I remember thinking I’ll just use Google to sync with, and then there was a Google Blackberry Contacts sync plugin that I’d read about somewhere, when looking for info on sync’ing so figured if I can just get all my contacts into Google, then I can just sync it over the air, with my BlackBerry, which I’ll be able to do from anywhere, so I won’t need to worry about being at my laptop anymore.

I already had my AddressBook on my Mac Sync’d with Plaxo, which had a whole bunch of information that was upto date ( I also had a heap of duplicates, as I wasn’t impressed by the idea of paying Plaxo to have duplicates removed from my addressbook). I knew of a hack that would allow me to make visible the sync with ‘Google Contacts’ option even though I wasn’t an iPhone user, and I didn’t use an iPhone.

Eventually I managed to get my MacBook, my Google Contacts, and my new BlackBerry all sync’d up, but boy did it take some time.

Now I’m keen to selectively filter out some of the contacts in my addressbook out of my mobile, but that’ll be for another day..

I’ve installed WordPress MU a few times since it was publicly available. In part, because I was keen to see if out the box, it would be able to meet my needs, and partly because there’s some projects that I was thinking of that would require something similar to WordPress MU. For those of you reading this wondering what the heck is WordPress MU – I presume you’ve heard of WordPress, right? That blogging platform that’s really easy to use, and freely available?

Well WordPress MU is it’s ‘big brother’. The idea behind WordPress MU is that if you want to set up a site where people can come and create their own blogs, then you can use WordPress MU to run your entire site. It’s a fully functional version of the main back end used at WordPress.com to host all the blogs on that site. It means that you can have users register, and create blogs, and start their own personal blog, on your site. Each user gets a blog, that is like having their own copy of WordPress installed for them, only it’s on your website.

Well the advantage of using WordPress MU becomes even more apparent, once you install BuddyPress, a plugin/set of modules that work with WordPress MU. BuddyPress effectively acts like a social network, allowing you to have ‘friends’, groups, and provides ‘activity streams’ kinda like status updates, but that can be the aggregate of all of your RSS activity across the web.

Now I’d recently set up a public installation of WordPress MU, and not having time to explore the multi-user side very much, I decided to just set up some basic content as a placeholder, and a few pages, so that if anyone came to the site they would be able to get some info, and leave it at that for now. (The site in question is http://londontechstartups.com)

Unfortunately, I hadn’t been paying too much attention to all of the spam blogs that were being created, until very recently. I presume they use some form of automation scripting to auto generate a bunch of email addresses, and then bulk signup to the site, which they then proceeded to post to every few minutes with more and more content, on all the spam blogs they had created. By the time I decided to do something about it, there was already over 3000 spam blog accounts on my site, and many many pages of content on each of those sites. Reading a few of the pieces of content, it soon became clear that not one of those blogs represented a real person taking the time to write real content. It was all ‘spam’ type text that meant that with a bunch of bogus text, there would be ‘links’ with different keywords pointing back to a site selling something or another related to the keyword.

It was most definitely a challenge to clear all of those spam blogs, off, as well as taking quite a few hours, and having to mindlessly click a check box for each of the blogs and spammers, before being able to finally rid my site of them.

Just in case anyone else gets caught out like I did, or is contemplating setting up a WordPress MU site, make sure you install some form of Anti Spam measures in advance, and save yourself countless hours performing maintenance and having to fix the problems like I did.

My initial thoughts were to jump into the backend and just delete the data directly from the MySQL database, which had I been able to access I would have. But unfortunately, I think the volume of Splogs (Spam Blogs) meant that my Web Based access to the MySQL Database using the PHP GUI ended up timing out.

Eventually, I had no choice but to manually delete the spam from the site admins control panel myself.

IF it weren’t for the WPMU Power Tools, I don’t think I would have ever finished! http://plugins.paidtoblog.com/wpmu-power-tools/

I also am indebted to the advice that was shared in the forums about manually editing the WPMU admin listings pages – http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/10811 to show more users, I then went and did the same thing for number of blogs.

I also found a bit of useful advice at http://www.gabrielserafini.com/archives/category/spam/ – though to be fair I think there was way too many individual IP addresses being used for me to be able to address them purely by IP address.

If I had been able to access the PHP MYSQL GUI – I’d have gone and used the advice shared here – http://blog.vipul.net/2009/02/01/how-i-cleaned-up-8k-spam-comments-from-my-wordpress-blog-in-less-than-30-minutes/

And used the code here – http://www.darcynorman.net/2009/05/20/stopping-spamblog-registration-in-wordpress-multiuser/ – to hopefully stop spammers gaining access to ther server

I’ve also since followed the advice here – http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/13982
and now have installed – http://ocaoimh.ie/cookies-for-comments/ and

http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/

I’ve also installed MontySpam based on reading about it here http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/10811

and ended up selecting about 100 users as spammers, at a time, through each page, then deleting the spam marked blogs and users using the power tools – that was after I tried to do a few hundred at a time, and the site wouldn’t refresh properly.

I also got some great advice from the form thread here – http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/11187 about a few tools that let you moderate a blog before it can be used – manual I know, but cool nonethelss.

This also looks like a great plugin for spam reporting – http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/13206