There was a small ripple around the internet this morning caused by the Home office opening up the Beta terrorist reporting tool.

To what extent the reports from this tool are monitored is unclear, but I suspect this will cause more problems that it solves.

Even before we consider the rather broad definition the government has for illegal material (which on the face of it could cover a number of science and religious texts), I can see the tool quickly becoming buried under false positives – whether through over sensitive citizens or through plain vindictiveness – which would need to be investigated.

Even if no further action is taken after the investigation, the cost in both time and resources must surely represent a significant risk that things that are actually a threat will be missed.

Today saw the release of Data.gov.uk, the government data website spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee which hopes to collate government data and make it available for people to build on.

Although it is clearly aimed at developers, it is my hope that innovative and genuinely useful tools will quickly start popping up as entrepreneurs get to grips with this new wealth of information.

The launch has triggered a fair amount of buzz, and a flurry of blog posts elsewhere which do a much better job at explaining the ins and outs of the site than I have time to.

Personally, I think this is a good step in the right direction. It is also good to see that they have opted to go ugly early – publishing the raw data so we can begin hacking straight away – rather than wait until their cathedral-like semantic web interface is perfect.

True, while the data is in this state it is not so useful to the wider world – yet. Projects such as Scores on the doors have proven that turning raw data into something useful can be a useful and profitable undertaking, so I’ve no doubt that this will change.

The biggest disappointment is the choice to release much of the data under crown copyright. While this was almost certainly a compromise to get anything to happen at all, it would have been nice if the government had taken the bolder step and released it unencumbered and let the economy profit from it.

I would also like to see more local authorities opening up their data, moving away from the idea that everything has to be centralised.

Still, the new site follows a general positive trend of data glasnost which has already seen the promise to open up the postcode database, and in that spirit I welcome it.

Image “New, Improved *Semantic* Web!” by Duncan Hull

I have just written a very small Akismet plugin for Elgg.

When enabled and configured, this plugin will scan newly submitted comments of the ‘generic_comment’ annotation class.

While spam comments are rarer on Elgg due to the fact that most sites don’t allow anonymous comments, this could be useful for people who are getting spam comments from people who have signed up.

This plugin comes into its own when you allow anonymous comments, such as on a site I recently built for a client.

Extending this plugin to scan other content should be fairly straight forward for even a novice coder, but if I have time I’ll provide an interface to do so.

Anyway, go get it here, or check out the project page on google code!

Image “Spam! [don't buy]” by David Trattnig

On Tuesday 12 a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti causing near total destruction and widespread loss of life.

Estimates of the death toll vary from 30,000-100,000 casualties, with most news agencies picking the figure of 50,000 casualties on the first day.

To put this figure into some kind of context, that’s:

• 10 times the number of coalition deaths in Iraq from the start of the war to present.
• 17 times the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks in New York.
• 66 times the total number of people killed or injured in the 7/7 London tube bombings.
• Or the death of one person in every three in the City of Oxford (where I live – population ~151,000 living within the district boundary)

This figure is certain to rise as many have been left without shelter, food, water or basic healthcare.

Aid charities and NGOs from around the world are mobilising, and I encourage you to help if you can.

Here are just a few:

1. The British Red Cross
2. Oxfam
3. Medecins Sans Frontieres

Image from the BBC world service.

So, I was reflecting on my last post about the Libdems by having a little nose around the internet to remind myself of what they have out there policy wise.

The thing that really irritates me about the Liberal democrats is that when you dig you discover that their policies are actually pretty reasonable. You have their standard policies, but you also have things like the Freedom Bill (which I have just re-read and my only complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough) and the new Take back power campaign.

Unfortunately it seems to be that they drop the ball when it comes to pushing this message out to people who aren’t necessarily actually looking for it – i.e. those who really need to know.

It also seems to be somewhat uncoordinated – lots of disparate messages with no coherent strategy or label making it obvious that it is the Liberal democrats who are responsible.

There is a marketing truism which goes something like you have to see a message through several different mediums for it to stick. The Obama campaign shows what you can do if you try – high exposure using free or near free media which turned their message into a coherent brand which connected with people on an emotional level.

The Libdems do some things reasonably well. Their web site is comprehensive and they’re using twitter (albeit primarily as a press release mechanism), they have an image gallery (which is hard to find and has no mention of copyright).  Unfortunately they seem to fail when getting the basics right – for example I attempted to find a web button for the take back power campaign, and when I eventually found a link for the page it returned a 404.

It seems as though all the pieces are there, but it hasn’t been put together into a coherent and easily accessible message.

What is more, they really need to be pushing their message our in print and on TV. Going out and talking people… in other words, campaigning. The internet isn’t all that there is.

With only a few months left until the election we have precious little time to change this country’s direction. So assuming that the Libdems are the true to their word (and even if they are fibbing about half of it, they certainly seem to be better than the alternatives), what can we do to help them?