Here are the most significant tweets mentioning @TheIPaper from the last 24 hours. Larger icons indicate greater significance (hence the size of tweets from @TheIPaper, which have seen a high level of engagement).

For a visualisation of all of our followers and the conversations they’re having about TheIPaper, try Social Collider; enter theipaper in the text box and history length 1 week. It works much better in Crome than any other browser.

Mapping our first 1000 followers by  location (as listed on their Twitter biog)…

Followers 1001-2000…

Followers 2001-3000…

Camden Crawl is not far off now, and as part of our extended coverage of the event (which includes a ticket giveaway, here), we’ve interviewed panel members for the event. First up is Sean Forbes of iconic music shop Rough Trade, to be followed by  Simon Raymonde of Bella Union and finally Orlena Yeung, VP Brand & Product at online music phenomenon Last.fm. If you’re as sick of the budget as everyone else is, read it as a quick distraction, and remember tickets for the event, which features such accomplished performers as Teenage Fanclub, Delays, The Drums, New Young Pony Club, Lightspeed Champion and many more, are still available.

Which bands are you looking forward to most at this year’s event?

Young Marble Giants – First gig in London in 29 years and 32 days
Best Coast – The best new band America has to offer
Veronica Falls – The best new band England has to offer

Are there any Camden Crawl venues you have a special affection for?

Koko – I saw my third ever gig there when I was a wee nipper – it was called the music machine then. And just in case you were interested it was by the UK subs

3. Any Camden venues you really dislike?

The Electric Ballroom – it smells of goths

4. Any Rough Trade favourites playing at the event?

Well, it seems only appropriate that the Young Marble Giants are playing the Rough Trade stage as the Rough Trade label released their one and only proper album ‘Colossal Youth’. Also we totally love Surfer Blood at the shop. The album is on heavy rotation everyday. You can’t help but love Surfer Blood.

5. How do you think 2010 is shaping up as a year for new music in general?

it’s a great year so far – lots of interesting records already – check into Harper Simon, Cours Lapin, Voice of the Seven Thunders, Gill Scott-Heron, Joanna Newsom, Caitlin Rose, Broken Bells, etc…

There are as many strands to contemporary discussions about globalisation as there are implications of the seemingly inexorable process by which the world’s industries and cultures are going global. But how do opinions about theses issues vary around the world? Finding the answer to that question was the task undertaken by Debatewise, who’ve set themselves the challenge of becoming a global platform themselves in the field of debate. I’d strongly encourage you to take a look at their site, but in brief, here’s their mission statement;

The first step was to collect opinions from Debatewise’s Global Youth Panel, a collective of 1,000 young people around the world who were initially assembled to help the site commentate on the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit last year. In association with the Future Stories project (an initiative whose aim it is to highlight the benefits of globalisation, it’s worth mentioning), and in association with the Independent, we’ve produced a YouTube-powered video-map, showcasing some of the opinions of their panel around the world. Click through to see the map (In it’s infinite wisdom, LiveJournal won’t let me embed it here):

If you want your opinion on Globalisation included on the map, just record a video of a couple of minutes long and upload it to YouTube, and send a link to j.riley [at] independent.co.uk with your name, age and location.

With the snow now subsiding and the country starting to get back to normal, I dropped a few questions over to developer Ben Marsh, whose #UKsnow map was one of the web highlights of the recent bad weather. It worked by asking people to tweet their postcode and how hard it was snowing followed by the hashtag #uksnow, and aggregating all of the information in the form of a map, which we embedded along with user-embedded pictures here (note the lack of snow right now). Besides looking pretty, the map provided an interesting visualisation of the weather conditions (as well as an indication of where all the country’s Twitter users are hiding). I asked Ben about what position he sees developers occupying in the new media landscape.

Do you see the huge success of the #uksnow map as indicative of the positive potential of geolocation? As something a lot of people are talking about as a tip for 2010 tech trends, there’s already been a lot of grumbling about privacy.

I definitely see geolocation being big in 2010, especially as more mobile devices are being released with GPS, the numbers of websites and apps making use of this can only increase. I think as long as this technology is used responsibly and as an opt-in feature, and as long as users are sensible when using it, then hopefully any problems can beminimised. Obviously there are possible privacy problems with this kind of technology but at the same time it opens up some fantastic possibilities.

How important is the role developers will have to play in more interactive news services/data mashups over the next few years?

I see developers as being very important. Its fantastic that people come up with ideas for mashups and services but having developers that can and know how to turn these ideas into a working app is crucial.

Are there any skills developers who want to emulate the success of projects like the snowmap should develop?

JavaScript is becoming increasingly more important, so get on board with a JavaScript framework – I use jQuery – but most of these will remove common tedious JavaScript tasks and free up time to work on the fun parts. Also read up on and have a play with webservices, many websites expose their key functionality through an API, so hook into these and mash something up.

Do you have any plans to launch similar services to snowmap, holsmap, the twitter music chart etc.?

I recently launched an app for lastminute.com (http://moodofthenationmap.com/) which tracks people’s #goodmood and #badmood tweets across the nation.

The dust’s settled and the results are in on our highly unscientific series of tests to ascertain whether the iPhone or Google’s Android phone (specifically the Motorola Milestone) is easier for new users to get to grips with. For the full introduction, here’s yesterday’s blog post, but otherwise let’s get on with the nitty gritty.

Playing the guinea pig was Simon Rice, the Independent’s Online Sports fella, who qualified himself as a control group by virtue of his blissful ignorance about the use and nature of touchscreens of any description. All in all though, he acquitted himself well over the three tests I’d devised to try and work out which of the systems was the most intuitive.

Test 1: Adding a contact to the phonebook and calling it.

Results – Android: 1min43 iPhone: 1min57

Though initially thrown off by the fact that process for adding a contact on Android involves pressing the ‘Menu’ or ‘List’ button, Simon was significantly faster at adding a contact to the Android phone than he was to Apple’s alternative, due, at least in part, to his inability to type first and last names in the specified boxes. Still, not bad, and 1-0 to Android.

Test 2: Sending an email

Results – Android: 1min46 iPhone: 1min42

To the first of the higher order functions of the devices, and Simon, who’d never sent an email from a phone before, appeared to be learning fast as both devices were dispensed with at pace. The fact that the iPhone has a highly visible ‘compose’ button on the inbox view helped, while the use of the Android menu button the only, minor, stumbling block. 1-1.

Test 3: Tweeting a picture

Results – Android: 2min30 iPhone: 2min50

The last, and most controversial, of the tests involved using Twitter to send an image taken with the camera. I chose Echofon on the iPhone and Twidroid on the Milestone as the apps to use, since they seem to be the best free ones for each platform from reviews I’ve read. Android wassignificantly faster here, and with the Milestone’s 5 MP camera, the picture was a lot better. 2-1 to Android, then.

But what did Simon make of the experience, qualitatively speaking? "I was surprised at how easy both phones were to navigate, especially considering I’ve never used Twitter on a phone before, much less tweeted pictures", he commented. "I’d pick the iPhone, but only just, and that’s down to the onscreen keyboard on the Android, which didn’t seem to pick my typing up. I tried the physical keyboard and gave up on it as I didn’t like the feel."

In the next set of tests, I’ll be pitting myself as a veteran Android user against iPhone devotee and feature writer Simon Usborne in a battle to the death for smartphone bragging rights..

The first time you hear Caitlin Rose, the Nashville-born singer-songwriter whose country-tinged arrangements are threatening to make a big impression in 2010, you’ll thank your lucky stars that she chose to pursue a career in music rather than go to college. With a full album scheduled for release later in the year, her 7-track Dead Flowers EP is out on 15 February, and in tomorrow’s Caught in the Net column we’re giving away the song Shotgun Wedding. Here’s a quick email interview with the 22-year-old starlet, covering the inspiration for that song, the recording plans, and how she came to be such a hot ticket in so many people’s next big thing predictions for the coming year.

What’s it like to come from such a mecca of country music as Nashville? Is it more of a burden or a blessing?

Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row. It’s a blessing to live in a town where two or three people could take turns explaining to you the entire history of country or rock and roll. Everyone here knows more than you about something so a good listener or observer can learn a whole lot in a short amount of time.

How do you come to writing your songs? Are they inspired by people you know?

I think I write in laymans terms. There’s really not much to dissect. Usually I say it straight ornot at all.
Writing songs about people I don’t know is easier. If I could be more vague I’d write more about people in my life, but I hate hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. I’ve done that before. Unless they’re sad songs. Those get finished fast, but the mean ones often end up at the back of the bottom drawer and it’s probably for the best.

I guess the next one follows on… is there a real Gorilla Man? [The song 'Gorilla Man' is a highlight of the EP]

Gorilla Man is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his Gorilla album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There’s an old notebook with at least three more verses in it somewhere. There’s a Gorilla Man part 2 that’s just as ridiculous, but is actually played on guitar instead of that obnoxious tambourine.

How was your recent visit to Britain? Are there any plans to tour here again?

It was a great visit. I met a whole slew of new fantastic people, played great clubs and drank good beer. There’s not much else to ask for.
The plan is to return soon after the completion of the new record, potentially mid-March. I can’t wait to go back even though I hate to fly.

Who are your favourite musicians? Do you listen to a lot of non-country music?

All I can remember listening to for two years is 650am(WSM) or random country records from the dollar bin. Being so fed up with the dead horse "indie sound" or any lackluster-named genre had me honing in on this one reliable sound that no one could call pretentious or unambitious or overly ambitious or washed out or "spector-esque". Nobody I knew really listened to country. It’s just about finding a good song. That’s something almost anyone can understand.
This past year though I’ve branched out or just gone back to where I was in high school. I’ve gotten pretty heavy into The Replacements. Paul Westerberg is one of my favorite songwriters. Fleetwood Mac has really made a mark on me as well, whatever incarnation. I never really understood pop music before Rumours, or at least what pop music should be. The mysticism(how corny) of Stevie Nicks is very appealing. She’s convincingly cosmic and makes me want to layer all of my ensembles. She also got me pretty heavy into Tom Petty who I love for being fun without being frivolous. His writing is honest, his melodies are beautiful and his attitude is rocknroll without taking his emotions off the table. That old Mudcrutch stuff is cool too.

My favorite contemporary artists are Phosphorescent and Deer Tick. The first of which has an obvious appreciation and feel for country, but whose records are recorded in beautiful and bizarre atmospheric style. He has a voice that soothes without sounding wimpy. This year he released a beautiful Willie Nelson tribute called To Willie, one of my favorites. I’m also very fond of Deer Tick’s ’09 release, Born on Flag Day. The writing is the kind that’s worth reading and their sound is something all their own, or maybe I just can’t place it yet. Either way it’s good. Julie Doiron from Canada is another artist/person I like. Woke Myself Up is all kinds of brilliant and Julie herself is a true sweetheart. I do love country music though and I’m a sucker for a sad jukebox tune. Justin Earle belongs in every jukebox cause he’s as country as Hank Sr. and a brilliant performer. I’m a big fan of his as well, but all these artists/front people are amazing with or without bands, which could be what draws me to them along with the good songs.

What’s the most challenging part of being a young musician? Have there been moments you’ve thought of quitting for something less complicated?

It might be because I don’t want to do anything else, but everything sounds complicated compared to making music. As difficult as it’s ever been trying to finish a record , put a band together or learning guitar, these things always came easier to me than school ever did. During my last two years of high school my only goal was to graduate. College was never on the agenda, save a couple of campus walk thrus and a stint at the local Community College. There was never much of an agenda to speak of, I just liked to play shows. There’s not much reason to quit unless you’re quitting for something else, but maybe this is all just some weird latency period and next year I’ll decide to be a veterinarian. Being a young musician should be the same as being an old one, unless you already know everything. The only challenge to being young is feeling like you have all the time in the world. It’s also the best part, but sometimes it’s hard to get things when the heat’s not on. I also grew up in a music scene with people 6 to 8 years older than me so I’ve always been kind of a kid sister in Nashville. It’s sweet, but I’m getting sick of all the noogies.

Do you have any musical icons? Who are they, and what do they mean to you?

Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt are two incredibly talented artists with vast musical knowledge and versatile tastes made apparent by the constant shift in styles throughout their careers. Linda made me want to sing all the best songs the best I could and Dylan’s words split my wig-dome and make me want to wear sunglasses all the time. I’ve honestly learned more about music through them than any other artists. With Dylan you’re starting off on folk, unwittingly learning and absorbing decades or even entire centuries of songs, then two years later you’re hearing some of the greatest, most unique rock records of all time, not thinking twice about how he got to there. His records defined themselves and I feel like he didn’t need to make excuses for the changes. With Linda you get to hear her voice mature from that barefoot-arizona-to-california-late-to-the-party hippie girl to one of the finest and most well trained voices of modern time (and hands down one of the best rock voices ever). I recently got into Amalia Rodrigues, a female Fado artist from Portugal, whose career is strikingly similar. Poets from all over would write pieces for her to sing, much like Linda becoming the song interpreter for many unknown singer songwriters in the mid-to-late ’70s. The two have some unique quality in their voice that moves people in some way and the same can obviously be said for Dylan, even if it’s just to hate him. I could go on, but I’ll just thank them and stop there.

What are the plans for your forthcoming album?

We start tracking the first week of February. This month we’re working all the songs out in rehearsals, but I’m still finishing up a few new ones. I’m recording with the band I play with live at a studio called the Beechhouse with Mark Nevers. He’s worked with a lot of my favourite artists and is a Scorpio. Anyway, I think we came up with a band name, Caitlin Rose and the Singles. Obviously nothing is set in stone.

Since we’re giving away Shotgun Wedding, I guess it’s worth asking whether it’s based on anything in particular?

Shotgun’s one of the first songs I ever wrote. It’s about a couple I met at Waffle House, an all night diner I used to hang at before I could go to bars. It’s southern breakfast/dinner/drunk fare. An eggs-or-a-t-bone-steak kind of place that you can usually find off every interstate exit where all high schoolers smoke (or did rather), play cards and talk a lot of shit in a civilized manner. Their story didn’t end well, by the way.

To download the track, visit Independent.co.uk/caughtinthenet any time from midnight

With an iPhone on loan courtesy of Vodafone, I’m attempting to get to grips with the Apple flagship device once and for all, having steadfastly stuck to using Android phones for the past year.

 As the debate about whether Android phones or iPhones are best, I’ve found interesting recently the idea that using the iPhone is somehow more ‘natural’ than its Google-backed alternatives (e.g. here). I’m sure there are lots of things people do that are natural; the mammalian diving reflex, for example, or blinking, but the idea that operating a touchscreen smartphone could be something somehow hardwired into the human experience is a mystery to me. Why evolution would choose to encode the information for using an Apple product over one by anyone else is a conundrum of Lucan-esque proportions.

To that end, and because Vodafone have lent me an iPhone to play around with to mark the phone’s arrival on their network, I decided to set up a small test of somewhat dubious integrity to see which interface really cut the mustard.

As any good scientist will tell you, the most important thing you need to conduct an experiment is a fusty lab coat. But coming in a close second is a control group, and to that end I enlisted the help of the Independent’s very own neo-luddite Simon Rice, the man responsible for such veteran journalistic endeavours as ‘Is Mike Ashley a sadomasochist?‘ and what’s now referred to on the Indy web desk as ‘that tweet about a monkey raping a frog‘ – as well as about ten per cent of all traffic to the Independent for his absurdly sucessful Sportbest series. He is also the man with the worst Twitter colour scheme you’ve ever seen.

I’ve set him a few challenges, and will time him performing each one this afternoon, on both the very swish new Motorola Milestone (a.k.a ‘Droid’ to the Americans) and an iPhone 3GS, neither of which he’s used before. The results will be posted back here, hopefully by the end of the day, or else tomorrow morning if I ask him to try and do more than one thing on the iPhone at once.

It may be the case that right now the only thing the phrase Camden Crawl makes me think of is how I’ll be getting home tonight.  But as sure as we’ll shortly be slipping and sliding our way through the commute, so will the sun soon be back out, and we’ll all be busily relearning how to make it to the pub and back without tennis racquets attached to our feet as ad hoc snow shoes. In that spirit, here’s the daytime lineup of this year’s Camden Crawl to whet your appetite, courtesy of the organisers.

Update 2 - As if by some weird kind of social media magic, it’s back. Twitter’s Status site records the fix, although no explanation is offered for its partial absence, nor for the downtime and missing tweets that have been going on all day.

Dust off your R and T keys, and get prepared to copy and paste once more; Twitter’s much-debated Retweet button has disappeared. The site is frantic with people wondering where it’s gone, and there’s no mention of the loss on the site’s status page or blog. Given that the reaction when it was first released was far from positive, in time people are likely to get used to going back to the old (that’s old in social media terms, mind) way of sharing others’ tweets with your followers. And, since retweets carried out using the button are now expanded out to include RT at the beginning (e.g.), what’s happened to any full 140-character messages that have been retweeted? Has Twitter broken its own 140-character rule?

Update: Kju has an answer – old retweets seem to be being cut off at 140 characters. And, as he notes, SMS updates have always been allowed over that limit.

This week has seen the realisation that the fundamentals of the advertising-based business model of online news are technically illegal, although that’s not going to be such a huge problem since a newspaper ‘race to the bottom‘ will see fast, badly written articles that no one really wants to read become the norm in the new fast-food journalism culture.

None of which matters, since it’s all going to be written by robots anyway.

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this plan was an obscure patent filed by Google in September of last year. The patent contained a plan for mobile networks to be freed from network-tethering, called the “Flexible Communication Systems and Methods” (see the diagram above left), and proposed a system by which mobile phones would be able to operate on a variety of networks at different times, with the choice about which network decided by the phone based on price, service

Click here to read more

Since the first pictures and tweets of the Nexus One started emerging, the mythical Googlephone has been the source of some intense speculation, much of it surrounding the two new symbolic developments it portends; firstly, that Google is now in the hardware business, and secondly, that it is (allegedly) planning to release the phone network-free.

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this plan was an obscure patent filed by Google in September of last year.  The patent contained a plan for mobile networks to be freed from network-tethering, called the "Flexible Communication Systems and Methods" (see the diagram above left), and proposed a system by which mobile phones would be able to operate on a variety of networks at different times, with the choice about which network decided by the phone based on price, service etc. In the words of the patent:

To be clear, this is not what’s going to happen with the Nexus One, whichis essentially just like any unlocked handset. Moreover, there are reports that the phone is going to be sold in two versions in the US, one unlocked, and one with a T Mobile contract. But the crucial difference about the unlocked handset is that it is, at the least, a move in the direction of openness on Google’s part, and an attempt to disintermediate the mobile phone market in a way which makes a lot of sense when you consider the context. There’s certainly a culture clash between Google’s tacit philosophy of encouraging as much openness as possible to help growth (and then steep the free, open content in advertising) and the world of mobile phones, where as it stands you can only get certain devices on certain networks at certain tariffs, with the market led by decisions made on the part of the network operators – the recently-dropped HD2 for example.

But what US commentators haven’t cottoned onto yet is that there is an emerging precedent for this in the release of the much-touted Droid in the UK, as the unlocked and network non-specific Motorola Milestone. I’ve had my review unit working since this morning, and it’s really good. But supposedly no network would touch it in the UK because there was no room for it in the European market. Google will be watching UK sales closely as a kind of guide to what kind of uptake they could except with a network-agnostic Google phone in the US.

There is some speculation that the phone may be discounted for long-time Google account holders, but I can’t see that happening – as usual, Google is going to be trying to bring down the barriers for entry as low as possible, and charging people what will look like a tax on not being a prior Google user of $100 of more would put a lot of people off. It’s worth noting that Apple are already doing their bit to weaken the mobile phone networks with the iPhone, which, if this graphic is to be believed, makes no money for it’s US network AT&T until the 17th month of the contracts if high data-users.

Also, in case you’re wondering why we’re seeing so many Google releases at the moment, that mystery’s been solved; it’s because the company has a freeze on products lasting for the next three months, so lots of releases have been rushing to get to the market before it hits. Top picture from patent, lower via Engadget

"Indie rock bands are leaking creativity. Why not harness their magical indie powers to help out those in need?" – so says the website of the Yellow Bird project, a Montreal-based charity whose offerings include sartorial items plucked from the imaginations of Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart and Of Montreal as well as multifarious other great indie acts who you’ve either heard of and love, or haven’t. Card-carrying hipsters will also recognise them as the people behind this year’s painfully trendy Indie Rock Coloring Book (sic).

For their latest releases they’ve employed the significant talents of angst-pop beat combo Bloc Party, folk hipsters Grizzly Bear, and Metric, the Canadian New Wave stars. Bloc Party’s creation (bottom left), a vaguely Impressionist false-colour landscape of a cornfield (I think) populated by butterflies and over-looked by wispy clouds, is being sold to fund the charity Bread and Roses, who champion social justice, while Grizzly Bear’s child-like rumination on the culturally transformational properties of the wheel (top left) asks people to splash the cash in aid of Brighter Planet, a suitably au courant Climate Change foundation.

At the time of writing, the Metric tee is yet to appear on the website, although some fine sleuthing by the LA Times suggests it may involve "pinstripes". Profits from their design will allegedly help fund MusiCounts; more developments as they come.

UPDATE: I’m reliably informed they ship to the UK no problem, so those with Christmas present slots yet to be filled feel free to put in an order. Still no word on the pinstripes

UPDATE 2: As per an email from Yellow Bird Project’s English half, Casey, the Metric tee is due out tomorrow (Friday). Paypal accounts at the ready…

MySpace, the News Corp-owned former social-networking behemoth, has been locked in tug-of-war with Facebook ever since the latter’s formation, but now it’s traffic has been overtaken even by Twitter in the UK, it seems fair to say that the direct competition is all but over. But one area it has always succeeded in is music, despite the site’s lack of polish. Today sees the relaunch of MySpace Music in the UK, just over a year after the service launched in the US, featuring shareable playlists, integration with iTunes for purchasing songs, and fully licensed streamable music and videos. As well as that, artists are getting more advanced analytics pages, so they can pinpoint where in the the world their fans are to be found, and there’s also some live concert footage from such pop luminaries as Lady Gaga and Eminem.

They’re marking the occasion with a raft of celebrity playlists, of varying quality; Katie Price is taking the opportunity to air her playlist "Songs that make me want to party" (featuring Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’, of course; despite the fact that he did, in fact, put a ring on it), the Jonas Brothers are letting us know their "Songs we can agree on" (the spectre of tense tourbus moments looms large), and the infinitely more palatable "Playlist for tour" by Weezer.

It’s unfortunate though that the site’s design for artists’ pages is still that clunky mixture of bland templates and (perhaps consequently) an over-active impulse to customise on the part of individual users. There are exceptions, of course, but the sad fact about MySpace is that the vast majority of its users’ pages and, to an extent those of artists’, still look like a thirteen-year-old girl has tried to consume the contents of her handbag, thrown it up onto a screen, and then attempted to rearrange the resulting mess into a website, blindfolded. And that’s before you even touch on the technical frailties of the infrastructure which is, as a friend of some technical expertise once told me, ‘held together by sticky tape and good hope’.

Still, the improvements can only be a good thing for the burgeoning market for music streaming sites, and services like Last.fm and Spotify, both of which operate in roughly the same space, will be watching the developments closely, though they may not be directly competing for users; the demographic for the new site is pretty clear from the sharp focus on pop music; not to raise the question of what age-group that might be directly, two of them just posted comments asking "Who is Mick Jagger?" and "whos mick jagure???" on the Video for K$sha‘s "Tik Tok", which is top of the site’s video chart.

Either hopelessly immobile or too small to be viewed by more than one person at a time, for all its advantages the screen has become modern life’s ball-and-chain. One technology, though, just might free us from our desks, liberate us from squinting at our mobiles, and change the way we consider everything from computing and gaming to watching films and television.

Read the full article here.

As usual, there’s never room for everything interesting you stumble across while writing for the paper, and so it was with the company central to my piece today on the future of projectors, and how that may well involve laser projections which we can interact with just as we can with touchscreens. Light Blue Optics, the company who developed touch-sensitive holographic laser projection technology, are promising big moves to allow computers, handheld or otherwise, to break free from the restraints of a display or built-in interface, like a keyboard. Imagine a Mac Mini you don’t have to plug anything into, but smaller, and you’re not a million miles off, although what’s really exciting is the potential for embeddable projectors in mobile phones and cameras (to the extent that those two will still exist as separate entities by the time the technology’s small enough to embed – 2011 at current estimates).

But the part I didn’t get chance to talk about was LBO’s other area of expertise in the field of projection, car heads-up-displays. With what they’ve got planned, the company’s HUDs might end up being just as revolutionary as their plans for portable mini projectors.

Having developed the technology initially for military use in conjunction with the French Thales Group (for some reason I find their website slightly terrifying), the company has been working on adapting some of their work for cars. "The requirements for defence are very different – only monochrome, for example, and in a lot smaller volume than you’d find in an automotive sector.", says Dr Edward Buckley, the company’s VP of Business Development. "It’s not a million miles away and basically the same principle."

The challenges of designing a decent HUD differ from other projectors in that you don’t really want people spending too much time looking at them;

"The less you look at them the more time you’re focussing on the road and it’s surprising the difference that makes to stopping distance; the eye’s a muscle, it has latency. Increasingly motor manufacturers are seeing [HUD displays] as a safety benefit, much like the way they once regarded anti-lock brakes. Our development effort has been focussed on building headsup displays which are full colour and significantly smaller than those on the market today. If you ripped one of these headsup displays out of the vehicle, you’d find they’re anywhere between 3 and 5 litres in size. As well as this, they’re heavy, and need a lot of heat extraction. The car makers have to design in the space in advance; you have to leave a massive gap in the dashboard to put them in."

"So our proposition has been we could design HUDs that have efficiency advantages. Rather than these larger light sources that throw lots of light away, we could make one that uses the light very efficiently. We can reduce the power demand and indeed one of the things we’ve demonstrated just recently is a display inside your wing mirror (pictured). The point there is that a lot of accidents happen there because of the blind spot. You can change lanes and not realise there’s a car next to you, and if you had a display in your wing mirror which gave you relevant information you’d avoid that entirely."

If the cost of these units can come down anywhere near as fast as the size, and the safety benefits can be proven, it mightn’t be too long before we see adoption of smart HUDs in the Fords and Vauxhalls of this world, as well as the BMWs.

It would be a brave person indeed to suggest that the economy is in anything other than an extremely unhealthy condition at the moment. But glancing over the Mail’s article on national debt today (shan’t link), it’s pretty clear that the sizes of the circles don’t correspond to the numbers in them. If they did, according to my rudimentary calculations, the 2009 national debt would be £1.257 trillion rather than the comparatively healthy £829 billion. And in the current situation, you might as well call that good news.

2007 circle width: 430 px – relative monetary value to scale: £621billion
2008 circle width: 484 px – relative monetary value to scale: £786 billion
2009 circle width: 623 px – relative monetary value to scale: £1.257 trillion

Since I got Google Wave yesterday, I’ve been encouraged by a few people to write a quick assessment of the messaging service its inventors see as ‘the future of email‘. With its focus on real-time communication and collaboration, there’s just one problem; there’s noone I know on it to communicate with.

At the moment, users are early adopters – the majority of whom will have either registered interest on the Wave invite site or begged their friends to let them in. As such the majority of Wave action right now is people talking about Wave itself. Self-reflexivity is no new problem for social media, and far be it from me to criticise a blossoming online communication medium, it’s just that now the friend who invited me has gone on holiday, I’m down to one contact. I could start a public wave with people I don’t know but… what would I collaborate with them on? and would I want to?

At first glance, the thinking behind Wave’s limited release is great; to generate a buzz built around exclusivity excites, frustrates and, eventually, increases the likelihood of widespread uptake when the floodgates open. Everyone’s favourite music streaming Spotify was released invite-only initially, to a highly limited group of users who evangelised sufficiently well for it to become ubiquitous amongst young music-lovers (at least those in the countries it’s rolled out in). But the success of that campaign was built on the fact that as an experience, using Spotify can be almost as fulfilling individually as when you’re sharing playlists with friends. Wave, on the other hand, is fundamentally social, and for that it suffers from this kind of promotion.

(Image via Twitter)

As America responded to last night’s attack at Fort Hood carried out by Malik Nadal Hasan, Twitter once again showed its value as a tool for breaking news with the updates of “Tearah Moore“, who tweeted pics and updates from inside the camp, before being shut down after roughly an hour.

Her account is now locked, but I’ve reconstructed the most recent tweets here from people rebroadcasting her updates using their own accounts. Thanks to Twitter’s lax indexing policy for older tweets, messages before the first posted below are no longer available to view.

MissTearah’s updates raise some major ethical questions about the appropriateness of using Twitter in such situations where others’ security might be at risk, as discussions on the TwitPic site used to post the picture above showed; while some commenters questioned whether legal restrictions (HIPAA in particular) should prevent the pictures being posted, others debated the moral implications of the postings, with one commenter saying “We are ALREADY freaking out and this shit just makes it worse”.

While Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time tonight is getting all the headlines, one musician has chosen today to highlight another way in which the BNP is attempting to hijack the mainstream media in order to create the veneer of respectability necessary for the party to continue its worrying growth as a political force in this country.

Chris Wood, Radio 2′s Folk Singer of the Year, has today released to the Folk Against Fascism campaign his song "Spitfires" (available to stream and download below), a track he penned in response to the BNP’s use of British military iconography on a campaign leaflet dropped in to his Kent home. The folk community are particularly concerned by the BNP, ever since Griffin gave them the dubious endorsement of playing folk music on his online radio show. According to campaign group Folk Against Fascism, "the BNP’s Activists and Organisers Handbook encourages its members to get involved in the folk scene". They add that "the BNP want to take our music, want to twist it into something it isn’t; something exclusive, not inclusive. We must not let them. "

I asked Chris some questions about folk’s reaction to the BNP and the song. In many ways, folk music and the Spitfires Chris sings about have in common exactly the sense of British tradition nationalist groups tend to draw on in their efforts to legitimise their political views by association. Drawing attention to these cultural misappropriations might well be our best bet at deconstructing the alignments Griffin and co have been working so hard to create.

What’s been the reaction amongst the folk community towards Nick Griffin’s folk radio show?

I’m not a particularly ‘Folk Community" type of guy but I guess they are somewhere between outraged and dismayed.

Why do you think Griffin and the BNP have targeted folk music particularly?

There is precedent, in the Tutsi and Hutu tribal massacres traditional songs were given new words and powerful ‘Oi’ beats. Likewise Serbia and, of course, the German population have not felt able to go anywhere near their own folk music until very recently. We have to accept though that the British establishment has constantly ridiculed or ignored England’s indigenous music and dance for generations, the BNP may just see it as ‘up for grabs’.

Is it right that the BBC have invited the BNP on Question Time tonight?

Absolutely. Like it or not, Nick Griffin is an elected representative of a legitimate political organisation and as such should be called upon to face the public and his peers. Our political elite have become so adept at spinning us whatever froth they are peddling they assume we are naive enough to succumb to Mr Griffin’s argument, whatever it is. Who knows, they might be right but may I quote from a folk song..?

"Awake arise you drowsy sleeper, awake arise arise it’s almost day, no time to lie no time to slumber, no time to dream your life away."

I’ll be singing that at a gig in Clerkenwell tonight so I’ll have to miss the program.

How are Folk Against Fascism working to dissuade the BNP from using folk to further their political aims?

I think Folk Against Fascism are attempting to counter ignorance and naïvety by raising awareness of just what folk music is. The greatest composer who ever lived was ANON: Britain’s songs and the ritual calendar represent the freely given gift of our ancestors. Folk Against Fascism are trying to demonstrate that this music is too rich, too variegated and far too sophisticated for any organisation to appropriate.

How did you come to write Spitfires?

The song was started before the European elections took place [in which Griffin gained a seat in the European parliament]. As a native of Kent I have grown up with the sound of the Manston Spitfire, just about every summer of my life I have seen it fly out to do some air show or other. I was at my desk when it flew across my back garden in late May, the first verse just came straight out of the pen. The question was how would the song be finished. It was about two months later when the BNP leaflet flopped onto my doormat that I knew exactly what the song needed to say. I have subsequently been told that the spitfire pictured on the BNP leaflet was from a Polish squadron"
 
Right-click here and click "Save target/link as…" to download, and stream below.

For a Northerner-in-exile like myself, The Cribs’ gig last night at the Kentish Town Forum was a peculiarly homely experience, to the extent that flying plastic pint glasses and pogoing parkas can be homely. My full review of Wakefield’s finest sons and their newest member, guitar prodigy Johnny Marr, should be online in the next few days, but in the meantime those who couldn’t it make it to any of the dates on this last tour can listen to the setlist reconstructed on Spotify here.

Setlist:

We were aborted
Hey scenesters!
I’m a realist
Emasculate me
Last year’s snow
Cheat on me
We share the same skies
Girls like mystery
We can no longer cheat you
Direction
Hari kari
Save your secrets
Our bovine public
Another number
Ignore the ignorant
Be safe
Mirror kissers
Men’s needs
City of bugs

What have "Bottle Up and Explode" by Elliott Smith, "Roller Coaster of Love" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and David Byrne’s giant clunking Camden Roundhouse installation got in common? They all feature members of Thom Yorke’s new supergroup, due to grace LA’s Echoplex tonight for a gig shrouded in mystery, and revealed to the world today on Radiohead blog DeadAirSpace. According to twentyfourbit, the gig will include Yorke’s "entire solo album, The Eraser, four new songs, and one Radiohead tune for good measure". In Yorke’s own words, it’ll be "total chaos and its kind of a rehearsal but .. if you are near by…". Here’s the line-up in full:

Joey Waronker

Drummed on Elliott Smith’s "Bottle Up and Explode" and "Bled White", so presumably no stranger to helping out a miserablist genius, Waronker has also worked with Beck, Smashing Pumpkins and REM; it’s conjecture, but he could well have first met Yorke when REM’s instrumentalists, including Waronker, performed with Thom at the Tibetan Freedom Concert back in 1998.

Mauro Refosco

Brazilian Refosco has been performing with David Byrne since 1994, as well as doing some soundtrack work, and playing with his main project Forro In The Dark, a group who specialise in forró, a genre they call "the hip-swiveling, dancefloor-filling, rural party music of Brazil’s northeastern states". Sounds right up Thom’s street, then.

Flea

Michael Peter Balzary to his friends, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers bass player is better known to the world under his insect-inspired stage name. I’ll leave the consternation over his suitability at performing with Yorke to the rest of the blogosphere.

Nigel Godrich

The veteran Radiohead producer has been spotted playing guitar on multiple occasions for a number of high profile acts, including , ahem, Zero 7.

Will it work? Who’s to know – I for one, will be scouring YouTube for clues come tomorrow afternoon.

Industry gigs are always strange events, particularly for bands who are in the ascendancy. Noah and the Whale, who I saw at the Hospital Club on Friday for a Mercury Music Session gig, struggled more than most to handle the unique challenge of playing to a crowd who haven’t paid to be there.

The first "webisode" of their ambitious online film/music project is below.

 …comes from page 5 of the Metro;

Update: Apparently the video is not official.

For those of us who rate ‘Eraser’ above ‘In Rainbows’, it’s nice to see Thom Yorke returning to his glitchy electro solo career for new song "The Hollow Earth", the video for which was released to the world on YouTube this weekend. Featuring the talents of the mysterious and disappointingly posh graffiti artist Banksy and US filmmaker Raymond Salvatore Harmon, it’s all a bit fast for a Monday afternoon. No matter;

The predictably gloomiy-sounding forthcoming album "Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses" is available to order from waste.com here. On the subject of Mr. Harmon, if you ever wondered why Wikipedia shouldn’t let fans edit their favourite artists’ pages, have a look at this. 

"So is folk now, like, cool with the kids?", I heard someone ask on my way out of last night’s astonishing Mumford & Sons show at Scala. As questions go, it was hardly the sharpest. I guess you could expand it out to "can one band re-popularise an entire genre?", and start trying to examine what the real effect of such a great show could be.

Of course, folk has never really gone away, and Mumford & Sons are just the latest exponents of the genre. But it’s true that ever since I first heard of Mumford, on one of Indy trendsetter Larry Ryan‘s infamously ahead-of-the-curve Barometer playlists for the paper months back, they’ve seemed to go from strength to strength, and last night’s gig was the culmination of what has obviously been years of hard work. Suggestions (from Twitter’s running commentary on last night’s show) that they’ll be in the running for next year’s Mercury Prize hardly seem overly optimistic, even considering that forthcoming album, "Sigh No More" isn’t out until October 5.

The set was brisk in a way that folk music rarely achieves, and the hour flew by in a whirl of horns, piano, acoustic guitars and double bass, with Marcus Mumford showing remarkable coordination in his ability to strum away and kick a bass and tambourine combo simultaneously (evidence here). Even in King Cross’ painfully grimy Scala, there was something clear and fantastic about the whole thing. Most people just stared transfixed, with Marcus taking the time to praise everyone for their attentiveness. By refusing to finish with "Little Lion Man" (video below ), which has been huge ever since Zane Lowe made it his ‘Hottest Record In The World’, they showed that they’re not willing to fit their set into the ordinary mold, which was nice. Last week, I saw La Roux at the same venue, and my friend correctly predicted the running order of their entire set; often it’s better to be surprised.

So, a bright future beckons for the third group from the London folk clique that’s already brought us Laura Marling and the now-quite-gloomy Noah and the Whale. And folk may now be, like, cool with the kids.

Casey, Crystal, Callum and Connor, watch out. Your names, along with Chelsea, Courtney and Chardonnay, are on the list of those most suspected of bad behaviour by English teachers in a survey of three thousand, conducted by a childcare website with some kind of strange bent against the letter C. In fact, the only name to break into the top three names for misbehavers which didn’t begin with C was Jack, which, coincidentally, was also revealed as the most popular baby name for boys today for the 15th time in a row.

This is a matter of some trepidation for someone who was named Jack a decade before it hit the top spot, back when it was still underground. Now, whenever I’m introduced to a child bearing this simple, informal version of John, with its Middle English roots as ‘Janken’, I’ll shudder to think of the socio-political implications of all of these little hell-raisers running around, sullying my good name with their miscreant antics.

But why, in this strange and unique instance, have popularity and infamy gone hand in hand? My guess is that ubiquity has ruined it, so that, just as a few too may strokes of a writer’s pen can turn poetry into cliche, so a lack of originality can result in a formerly great name becoming more common than Tom, Dick or Harry and similarly worn-out. Everyone knows unimaginative people are bad people – and unimaginative parents, it follows, are bad parents.

There’s also the theory that the current crop of celebrity Jacks just aren’t up to the task as role models as their namesakes of days-gone-by (I’m looking at you, Tweed), but I’ll discuss that in brief in tomorrow’s paper. For now, it’s time to come to terms with the fact that not only is there all the furore with Jack – as today’s results indicate, Riley is on the way up too.

Magazine at the Royal Festival Hall last night was a strange gig: a crowd of aging musical aristocracy, a post-punk revival 28 years in the making and, perhaps strangest of all, everyone was sat down until the last three songs.

After that, Howard Devoto issued a stirring call-to-arms for all the aging punks out there and there was some brilliant dad-dancing, and even some pogoing. For any fans who couldn’t be there, here’s a playlist of the band’s set, which started with ‘The Correct Use Of Soap’ and expanded in the second half to include material from ‘Real Life’ and elsewhere – but no ‘Shot by both sides’, which I don’t think was such a terrible decision what with it being quite wrongly the only thing that ever gets played. My full review should be online and in the paper in the next few days.

1. Because You’re Frightened
2. Model Worker
3. I’m a Party
4. You never knew me
5. Philadelphia
6. I want to burn again
7. Thank you (falettinme be mice elf again)
8. Sweetheart Contract
9. Stuck
10. A Song from under the floorboards

11. The Book
12. Twenty Years Ago
13. Upside Down
14. Parade
15. Rhythm of Cruelty
16. Permafrost
17. The Light Pours out of me
18. Definitive Gaze
19. Give me everything

Listen to the set on Spotify

Though it seems like we’re on the cusp of widespread uptake, in actual fact wireless electricity has been around for more than a century – the tragic tale of the Wardenclyffe Tower is worth a read, and so are some of Russian pioneer Nikola Tesla’s writings on the subject. Still, this video from TED is worth a watch, if only to see modern day applications like flat-screen televisions and mobile phones.

And, as if that wasn’t enough science/technology crossover news for the day, have a look at this new alarm clock which measures where you are in your sleep pattern and wakes you up according to when will be healthiest for you.

For this week’s Arts and Books playlist, I contributed a suggestion – Fanfarlo’s cover of the excellent Smashing Pumpkins song "We only come out at night" (original here) from the epic ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’. Here’s the full video - 

And while we’re talking bizarre covers, it’d be remiss not to mention Coldplay frontman Chris Martin’s attempt to channel the Beastie Boys at the recent All Points West festival. Intended as a tribute to BB member Adam Yauch, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, Martin made a solid attempt at ‘Fight for your right’; a solid attempt, that is, for someone who looks like he wouldn’t know a party if it spiked his drink, stole his wallet and left him tied to a lamppost in rural France.

And, for those of who still haven’t had enough of my musical blatherings, here’s another short playlist, entitled ‘I don’t like Fridays’ – Click here to launch in the ever-wonderful Spotify (ever-so-slightly-less-wonderful since it’s come out that they’ve had record labels as silent partners since their formation)

With the BBC under sustained assault, their move last week to allow limited syndication of their video content to four national newspaper websites (including The Independent, here, for example) was greeted with a healthy measure of cynicism by media commentators who wrote off the move as an attempt to distract from the uncompetitive advantage the Beeb receives in the form of tax-payer funding. But what has received far less coverage, in the UK at least, is the latest skirmish in the ongoing guerilla war that’s been waged by American newspaper co-operative Associated Press on those who share their content on almost exactly the same issue.

In essence the AP and the BBC, two journalistic monoliths of the modern media age, are wrestling with the same problem; how to control access to the wealth of expensive content they produce everyday. And while the BBC is a state sector institution, the AP (‘the world’s oldest newsgathering organisation’, although it’s probably best not to ask the exact age) is a co-operative of American newspapers who earn money selling their collective reporting skills to other outlets around the world. But the news agency has found itself the subject of mockery from the blogosphere for their badly-implemented new service for charging users for using copyrighted material. As James Grimmelmann found, the service, designed to charge users who want to pay to reproduce AP-copyrighted material on their blogs, fails to differentiate between text from the actual article and any other text, AP or not. It was thus that he managed to be charged $12.50 for the privilege of quoting Thomas Jefferson’s famous correspondence with Isaac McPherson regarding the ridiculousness of copyright rules (oh, the irony).

While there’s nothing clever about convincing a website to rip you off through your own misuse – plenty of people manage to do that without even trying – what is more relevant is that such poor checks and measures undermine the entire system of attribution AP is trying to put into place. AP’s crusade against those who would seek to use their headlines has previously targeted everyone from bloggers to news aggregator sites, as well as Twitter and collections of links like the Drudge Retort (who it started legal action against last year, before a quick about-face by AP vice president and strategy director Jim Kennedy). They’ve made their fair share of mis-steps in this crusade, none worse, perhaps, than sending out a cease-and-desist letter to a radio station (itself an AP affiliate) for embedding videos from YouTube which AP uploaded and selected to allow embedding for themselves.

While Messrs Arrington and Schonfeld‘s argument that the issue is one of outdated business modelsis perhaps one of the more grave opinions voiced in the debate, it’s worth listening to, even though it comes from a blog which has decided to protest the problem by pretending the Associated Press doesn’t exist. With news websites desperate for copy as soon as possible after an event has happened (and often willing to pay for it) on one side, and aggregators and bloggers comparably keen for fast, raw news of the kind AP offers on the other, their real dilemma is that they are now simultaneously more in demand, and more at risk, than ever.

It’s an inevitability in life that, just like buttered toast always lands upside-down, there will never be quite enough space in a feature to fit in everything pertinent to whatever it is you’re discussing. Such was the case with my ‘Rise of the Androids‘ article from today’s paper.

Here are a few topics which didn’t make it in:

Flash

The HTC Hero has Flash, the iPhone does not. Flash has become very important to the internet, not just for epilepsy-inducing viagra adverts, but also as a tool for web developers to let their imaginations off the leash. Sure, things are moving away from Flash in general, but still – in-browser Space Invaders on your phone? Who doesn’t want that? For web addicts (and most smartphone users are) this could easily be a deal-breaker, especially with the Hero garnering extreme praise from the ‘mobile community’ (as in tech reviewers, not travellers).

Market

I mentioned it in the piece, but it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge that a lot of developers are unhappy with Android’s App Store equivalent, the Market, paticularly with its lack of a searchable online interface. Such is the frustration that one developer I spoke to, Al Sutton, has created his own as an alternative, Andappstore. There are obvious limitations; one thing Anthony House from Google told me is that, like wishing to a genie for more wishes, ‘the only application you can’t put in the market is another market’. To this extent, Android can limit the potential for competition between new markets and the original one – and while there’s no set timeframe, it sounds like Google are working hard on changes following complaints not just from consumers, but also from employees, who all received the Android G1 for Christmas last year. Beats a piece of coal.

Chrome OS

When Google announced their new operating system last week, (over which I perhaps got a little too excited) you’d have been forgiven for wondering whether what they were describing wasn’t basically Android. They even mentioned netbooks in their blog post , an area previously presumed to be Android’s for the taking. So why the crossover? Firstly, it’s apparently not down to scaleability, as some have suggested. The difference between them is, I think, and from what I’ve heard, the extent to which the web is central to the experience – with Android it can’t be essential because mobiles still spend a lot of time without 3G coverage (especially in Wales). Chrome OS is going to be totally web-centric from what I can gather, which leads us to the last point…

The Cloud

It’s a sub-point really, but with Google investing heavily in cloud-computing, whereby all the minutiae of our daily word-processing/photo-uploading/crappy-powerpoint-making (and everything else) is handled centrally by giant server farms (possibly in the sea), Android, with its downloadable apps which can run while the device is offline, is in a way curiously old-fashioned. Chrome OS shows the direction Google wants to go in as far as it will attempt to make cloud computing the norm, but it’ll be a long while before mobile networks are ready for the data demands of doing everything online. So, with the claim made last week by Vic Gundotra, Google’s engineering vice president that the "the browser…will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing”, it could be that the future of the Android platform doesn’t lie in the much-maligned Market at all, but in the browser, which is after all made of the same building blocks as Chrome.

Ok, I’m taking my geek hat off now.

Want to see which nations have the worst teeth? Where in the world has the lowest fertility rate? How about plotting those two factors against each other? Gapminder, a statistic visualisation tool from the non-profit Gapminder Foundation, is a mind-bendingly clever tool for showing the interplay of all manner of different international socioeconomic indicators over the past 200 years, including life expectancy, national debt, poverty and education levels. Brits can take heart from the smooth ascending lines of good health which begin with the formation of the NHS and run to the modern day.

From micopayments to online giveaway, from retiring paper editions to reinvesting in printing presses, there have been a fair few mad ideas aired in the great debate about the future of newspapers (or as the blogosphere so affectionately refers to it, ‘the death spiral’). Just when you thought you’d heard it all, someone in Russia came up with this bright idea:

God only knows how you’re expected to do the crossword, but still: ten points for innovation.

(via EnglishRussia)

It had been a bad news week for Google, with a big ruling on book search that might cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia closing down rumours that Google’s Android would appear on its new phones and, perhaps worst of all for the insanely wealthy multinational corporation, our own Rhodri Marsden questioning the viability of YouTube, as if the prestige of having 20 hours of nutty cats and Mentos and coke explosions uploaded every minute wouldn’t be enough to keep any business afloat.

So how better to respond to this trifecta of negativity than to announce you’re about to turn the world of computing on his head, dazzling geeks everywhere and infuriating everyone’s favourite Redmond-based software billionaire in the process? With the appearance of ‘Chrome OS‘, Google’s new operating system, the tech world is gearing up for a year or so of speculation about the future of the industry, followed by the release, and with it the distinct possibility that the dominance of Microsoft’s Windows might be seriously challenged for the first time in a long time.

For anyone intrigued about what the news might mean in terms of how computers will look in a few years, your first port-of-call should be the Google Chrome download site. Since it’s release last year, Google’s web browser has kicked Internet Explorer to the curb for speed and security as well as looks, and even the ever-popular Mozilla Firefox doesn’t quite measure up, for my money. It’s within Chrome, with it’s flashy blue tabs and big user-friendly buttons, that you’ll be able to run programs (Some both on and offline, via Google Gears). For a handy five point rundown of the implications read this on Wired, but to surmise here, it will be –

Secure – In the way Macs don’t have viruses, I guess

Free – Because it’s built on software (Linux) developed by utopian communities of super-geeks in their spare time rather than Microsoft’s corporate boffins, and because free is Google’s philosophy, whatever the economics.

Simple – Google’s announcement says things will just work. So there.

Bloody fast – Because I guess there was only so much of their lives Googlers could spend watching computers boot up before they contemplated making an alternative for the masses.

While it’ll prompt plenty of head-scratching from people who’ve fallen for Android, Google’s mobile operating system which is built to do pretty much the same job as the new Chrome OS, for the majority of people this is great news. Most people haven’t even realised how bad Microsoft Windows has become, because there hasn’t been a viable alternative (quiet, Linux users, we’ve been over this). Now, that’s all about to change.

Simply Red aside, Manchester, the great Cottonopolis, has plenty to boast about culturally. We’ve had the lot, from painters to sculptors, from poets to musicians, from philosophers to buskers murdering ‘Is this the way to Amarillo?’ (and who can blame them).

The Madchester dance music movement and the paintings of L.S. Lowry are just two events from Manchester’s cultural history which have achieved international recognition. But despite the juxtaposition between a dour old Salfordian with a penchant for painting Manchester’s starving poor and some of civilisation’s least graceful human beings dancing around on ecstasy a few decades later, a new exhibition at Salford’s Lowry museum is attempting to bring the two together, with a new ‘Family Dance’ exhibit with the tag-line:

The exhibition’s promo video soundtracked by Salford University MA student David Rothery, below, will raise a chuckle from anyone familiar with Lowry’s painting style, which can perhaps be best surmised as ‘bloody gloomy’.

Express Yourself from Rob Martin on Vimeo.

‘Express Yourself – A Family Dance Exhibition‘ will run until Sunday 27 September 2009 at The Lowry Centre.

Opening Glastonbury has to be one of the toughest gigs of the Summer festival circuit. This year, the task has fallen to Maximo Park who, on the Queen’s Head Stage at 7pm on Thursday, will be kicking off proceedings with a set they’re letting their fans choose online. The poll, on the band’s official Facebook page, allows Park-heads (as their fans probably aren’t called) to vote for ten songs they want to hear, including B-sides and covers. So far, voting looks like this (in order of popularity):

1. Our Velocity
2. The Kids Are Sick Again
3. Apply Some Pressure
4. History Books
5. Limassol
6. Going Missing
7. Overland, West Of Suez
8. Graffiti
9. By The Monument
10. Books From Boxes

Click here to listen to the selection so far on Spotify (sans the B-sides, which aren’t on there)

So far, the signs are good; there’s a good balance of older and newer songs, B-sides and more popular offerings. But is asking your fans to vote for your set a good idea? Wouldn’t you just end up with obscure choices from online smarty pants keen to showcase their musical smarts? Or maybe the opposite, a set-list composed with the sole purpose of making the band ‘play one we know’, without any of the unusual, often unexpectedly great, choices you only get to see live? Or, as the Daily Mail showed this week, could your attempts to allow democracy take its course be scuttled by online rabble rousers?

Maximo Park are known for being pretty handy online with a nice-looking website (built, full disclosure, by a good friend of mine), but best of all their offerings might be the official band drum machine, below. Hours of fun.

Satire comes in many forms, but few can be stranger than a newsreader in a wig purporting to smoke a lettuce in a sing-song voice reminiscent of the chorus to Cher’s Life After Love. Sure, Jonathan Swift it ain’t, but for me New York’s ‘The Gregory Brothers‘ are about as entertaining as YouTube gets, and they don’t pull their punches when it comes to making American news channels look ridiculous. The fifth instalment (below) of their ‘Auto-tune the news’ series takes aim at Lettuce Regulation in the US Senate, Katie Couric’s attempts to empathise with the unemployed, and Fox’s inability to find a correspondent able to deliver a ‘fascinating’ news report.

With more than 800 contributions in the last 45 minutes, the hashtag #beatlesporn has taken Twitter by storm this afternoon; just look at trending topics for a cascading wall of bastardisations of Lennon/McCartney collaborations smutty enough to make your eyes water. For the uninitiated, hashtags are employed by users of the microblogging service Twitter to link together status updates on a certain topic.

Predictably, contributions range from the funny ("Got To Get You Into My Wife") to the laughable ("Come together"). My personal favourite? Click here if you dare.

(Image: Official Beatles Stockings, circa 1964, complete with slightly creepy Beatles Faces pattern. Getty)

Looks like tomorrow’s 48-hour London Underground strike is going to go ahead, beginning at 18:59 BST; just the time to punish anyone working late or planning on heading out for a pint of an evening. As far as reports on the strike go however, you’d have to go a long way (by bus, presumably) to beat this headline, from the TFL website:

RMT leadership threatens strike over wildly unrealistic pay claims and avoids reality over duplication of jobs

Either someone’s quotation mark key has broken, or that’s the most propagandised headline I’ve seen in a while. Tube strike action seems to have a pretty much 50-50 record of going ahead in London, with some planned walk-outs causing chaos, and others failing to materialise. Fingers crossed they’ll come to some resolution.

Unearthed in a barn in rural France, the 270 never-before-seen World War One pictures available exclusively from The Independent provide an intriguing insight into the history of the period. But their origin is shrouded in mystery, and the questions they raise are manifold; who is the seven-foot-tall giant pictured towering over his comrades, for example? What can we make of the rare image of a black soldier serving alongside his white comrades? And, perhaps the most strange, how did it come to be that one soldier is photographed sporting a tattoo depicting the British Royal Family which covers his back?

While Matilda Battersby has conducted preliminary research into some of the most compelling of the images, the real work is yet to be done; and this is where we need the help of Independent readers to help piece together the clues and reveal the stories behind these new pictures. It’s difficult to imagine such fascinating images not having some interesting tales attached to them; and with your help we hope to uncover as much as possible of their fascinating history. We’ll follow up with the most relevant reader analysis being posted on independent.co.uk. Here are the ways you can contribute:

1. Leave a comment on the article with any details you’ve noticed or relevant facts, along with the image number for reference

2. We’ve created a specific place where you can discuss the origin of the most compelling images; to see them and leave your comments, click here.

5. Spread the word using social media – Tweet a link to our investigation, or vote for the stories on Digg and Reddit

"Sack your con MPs", reads the Sun’s campaign for an instant general election ("And elect a Con government", mumbles Captain Subtext, though that’s by-the-by). But lest you come to the conclusion that the Sun’s only thrown it’s support behind the Conservative early election plan to dance to the tune of David Cameron’s big smug drum, they’ve had a ring around and assembled a merry band of ‘famous names’ to help put the case across to the British Public. But who? Well, there’s Carol Vorderman, for a start, and Cliff Richard-addict Tony Blackburn. It becomes obvious quite quickly though that the phrase ‘famous names’ was carefully chosen, because the final few entries consist of men who happen to have the name Oliver Cromwell. The Sun explains the relevance:

That’ll be the Oliver Cromwell who banned drinking and cavorting and Christmas then? Doesn’t sound much like the Sun’s normal vision forthe country does it?

(Image: Oliver Cromwell dismissing the Long Parliament, 6th December 1648. Getty)

Kanye West is hardly known for his even-handed reserve, but his latest blog post detailing the current crop of pop stars and the legends they most resemble is enough to suggest the rap star might have had one Hennessy too many.

Maybe you could describe Justin Timberlake as the new Michael Jackson. Possibly, it would not be too greater stretch of the imagination to think of Beyonce as the new Tina Turner. But "Wayne is Hendrix"? As in Lil’ Wayne, with a suitcase with a million dollars inside for a birthday present? As in Jimi Hendrix?

That one pales in comparison, however, to the suggestion that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is this generation’s Roger Waters. Laugh at Kanye’s New World Order in full here.

…sounds like one of John Rentoul’s occasional series of "Newspaper headlines to which the answer is ‘No’". And fair enough, because they aren’t, but with an earthquake occuring in what is perhaps the capital of the Twitterverse, the residents of LA responded quickly to today’s tremor.

Compare, top, a graph of tweets containing the word "earthquake", and, underneath, seismological charts of the same period from the Anza Seismic Network in Southern California. Twitter response even had a few aftershocks of its own.

Spotify, the Swedish streaming service fast gaining traction as the trendiest place to listen to music online, is rumoured to be launching a subscription-funded download service. Brand Republic claim that for £9.99 a month users will be offered the opportunity todownload an unlimited amount of music to keep and listen to as they please. The company has a pre-existing deal in place to offer downloads in association with 7 Digital.

This deal already put  it squarely on a collision course with iTunes, whose music download service is the most popular on the web, with particular dominance in regions where Amazon’s MP3 store is unavailable (like the UK). The interesting thing about the unlimited downloads story, though, is that it’s a feature iTunes doesn’t offer. As well as this, the rumour suggests a mobile phone-compatible music store for Spotify might also be imminently announced, a popular service already offered on the iPhone.

Record labels are frequently reported as frustrated with Apple for what they see as an inflexible pricing structure and seemingly punitive charges associated with the distribution of their content. Spotify has gone from strength to strength over the last few months, and the kind of interest they’re generated is really impressive. Comparable streaming services have been through some serious difficulties recently. One such site, iMeem, has had to go to its investors to ask for an emergency cash injection, and others are rumoured to be taking part in the bizarre practice of under-reporting their user numbers in order to avoid being squashed by the music industry, who seem to direct their ire at such services at random. Because the big four record labels own the rights to pretty much all the music offered by these services, it’s always going to be a risk to anyone; but given the cachet Spotify has built up over the past few months, it’d be little surprise to find out formally that the industry has chosen to team up with them over their competitors. If this gets confirmed, it’ll be big news, and Apple will have to sit up and take notice.

Do many hands make light work, or too many cooks spoil the broth? The age-old debate about the merits of delegating and the dangers of over-delegating might seem only distantly related to journalism, a profession defined by the notion of lonely hacks tramping the streets for leads or else hunched over a typewriter tapping out their findings.

But if newspapers are going to survive the ongoing perfect storm of falling ad budgets, declining circulation and the residual pressures of operating in a recession, sharing the responsibility for sourcing, researching and maybe even writing stories is a concept which journalists are going to have to get used to.

So, though it’s certainly not the first example of this kind of endeavour (that plaudit perhaps goes to Assignment Zero), The New York Times has taken a big step in the direction of crowdsourcing journalism today, with the release of 658 pages of the diary of US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, from his time as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Grey Lady’s editors have removed all references to personal addresses and phone numbers, and contributed a fair number of their own observations, but they’re asking for help from the paper’s online readership in combing the release, obtained by a Freedom of Information request, to try and find any stories they might have missed; already unearthed is Geithner’s previously unknown involvement in "backing a controversial temporary ban on shortselling." Eagle-eyed citizen journalists are encouraged to post their findings here.

(Illustration by James Jean, via Wired)

I’ve been editing the Indy website since 8:30 (so yes, any mistakes since then are entirely my bad), and one nice sub-plot to the morning’s work has been the snowballing interest in a piece I wrote for today’s paper on the Pirate Bay trial, which is currently camped out in the number three slot on my favourite news aggregator website, Reddit.

While serving up cheap Star Wars references to an unashamedly geeky audience might seem like a challenge similar in difficulty to stealing candy from babies, seeing your pieces reach an audience online who are outside of the paper’s print distribution is an edifying journalistic experiences. On top of that, if those who are working on determining the direction journalism must head in to survive the next few years are to be believed, we’re all going to have to become more aware of social media in the coming years- just see this video and blog from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for details.

With this piece, I didn’t use Twitter or Facebook, two big sources of traffic, to try and move people along (as I did for a picture my sister made on Photoshop which cracked me up earlier in the week); I just submitted it to Reddit first thing with a snappy quote and hoped for the best.

In other Independent-based social media news this morning, our Twitter-using journalists have been added to fab new online journalism directory Muck Rack, which lists all the updates from journalists from a bunch of international media organisations.

And don’t forget to vote for the Indy in the Webbys; we’re really proud of our inclusion alongside such titans of the industry and hoping for a good turnout in the People’s Voice award.

In case the smell of hemp and unwashed armpits isn’t enough to let you know when a rabble of anarchists is about to beat you up for having shined your shoes, take a look at the map currently circulating of targets for protests tomorrow and the day after (click to enlarge):

Unlikely targets include the Tea Brokers association – those dastardly purveyors of tea –  and Sainsbury’s – fascist posh supermarket ponces.

Annoyingly, the bankers are being told to dress like us lazy mainstream media types, raising the possibility of some terrible mix-ups. Would it be too much to pull the old switcharoo and wear a top hat?

I suppose it’s all you could expect from the blog of someone who claims to be "right about everything" and "exceptionally funny and wise" (all of which could be taken as ironic self-deprecation were he possessed with even a modicum of those qualities), but The Telegraph’s James Delingpole has really excelled himself in his latest blog post "Was ‘Lady Macbeth’ behind Barack Obama’s snub of Gordon Brown?".

It’s a dog-eared piece of rhetoric to compare the wife of a political leader to Shakespeare’s most infamous female nutbar (see: Hillary Clinton, Cherie Booth) and one that always seems to come with a pinch of latent misogyny. Even Delingpole must acknowledge that criticism of Barack is not the easiest political manoeuvre to carry off, and if he hasn’t, the fact that his recently published take-down "Welcome to Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future, and it Doesn’t Work" has reached the princely position of 75,338th in Amazon’s rankings of best-selling books might give him a hint.

But by drawing focus away from the most highly-regarded politician of recent times and piling criticism on his wife Michelle, Delingpole (whose other recent hit post, the not-at-all elitist "At least Gail Trimble wasn’t an Oxbridge reject" included a charming wander through his interview for the not-at-all elitist Christ Church, Oxford as well as, and I literally gasped when I read this, the phrase "ethnically challenged") shows how Republican sympathisers on both sides of the Atlantic really are clutching at straws in their attempts to denigrate what was perhaps the biggest liberal election success story of recent times.

But the most shocking section of the whole turgid diatribe is when the writer comes around to describing Michelle Obama’s much-discussed Princeton thesis "Princeton Educated Blacks And The Black Community" Here’s the section:

The italics are mine, but the entrenched ignorance is entirely the writer’s own. From the look of his index page, his blogging career for the Telegraph has only got as far as its third post; let’s hope it doesn’t continue much further.

Wordle is a website which generates images like the one above to show the most common words in a block of text, where the size of the words represents how frequently they’re used. It’s been around for a while and has been used in more creative ways than it’s worth listing, but as far as I can tell (do let me know in comments if I’m wrong) noone so far has used it to plot a newspaper’s output in a day.

So, as an alternative way to look at what we’re writing about what’s going on in the world today, the image above represents all the news from the Independent in print and online. Aside from a ruggedly defiant dedication to the correct form of "per cent", the observations that can be drawn from it and questions it raises are manifold; why is south on there but not north, and "One" so much bigger than "two", for example.

(Image copyright of Wordle)

For an indication of how much internet users rely on Google, you need no look further than the impact of this morning’s Gmail downtime. Aside from being the most talked-out about subject on twitter since Google’s email service went down (we’re at 45 minutes now and counting), there are numerous reports of business users being left with no means of email communication, and reports that the service is unavailable in Japan, mainland Europe and the US as well as the UK. Follow the unfolding saga at twitscoop or twitfall, or maybe spend the time more productively trying to work out an action plan for how best to limit the impact one company’s temporary IT problems can have on your internet life. 

Update: More than an hour in and Google are, apparently, stumped. "We aren’t sure what the problem is, " a Google spokesman told Pocket-lint, adding "Our engineers are working on it". Meanwhile, a post on Gmail’s official discussion forum promises an update from the company on the situation in three hours but notes that "this resolution time is an estimate and may change".

Update 2 (1300 GMT): Seems like Gmail is up again, although the service is requesting some users to fill out a "Captcha" before they get in. Still no word from the Googleplex on the reason behind the outage. It’s funny to see that the Guardian and the Telegraph have posted two of the most anxious pieces on the story – both papers moved their internal email to Gmail recently and will have, I suspect, been in a bit of a pickle for much of the morning.

Update 3 (14:45 GMT): Users are confirming that the service is coming back online globally, while Google’s official blog carries an apology for the service’s disruption:

Of all the great imitated bands of our times, Radiohead seem to have inspired the most genuinely talented crop of pretenders to the throne. Following the path trod by such luminaries as Muse and Coldplay, Operahouse are the latest additions to the list. Possesssing an "icy clarity" according to the Guardian, and with three single releases already under their belt (Man Next Door’, ‘Born A Boy’ and ‘Diane’), they look set for big things in 2009. 

But aside from their musical sensibilities, they also have a rather smart new website which is worth taking a look at. Featuring a quiz which is updated weekly, it’s nice to see a band really embracing the finer side of the internet rather than just adding a squillon people as friends on MySpaceBook.

"Have a shit day" –

Spotted in London, the British sense of humour, alive and well.

I guess their slogan "Don’t be evil" doesn’t extend to not harming members of the deer population, as one animal resiedent of Rush in upstate New York found after a collision with one of the controversial Google Street View cars.

[Use the arrow to go forward, and remember you can rotate the view]

It isn’t the first strange sighting in Street View by a long way, but it could well be the saddest. The worst part is that the images stop just after, as the driver realises what’s happened.

Via Reddit

UPDATE: It looks like Google might have taken the images down, as they’re listed as "no longer available". Handy, then, that someone has copied all the relevant material and posted it here.

Ahead of her three-night residency at the Camden Roundhouse (dates below), Grace Jones’ ‘William’s Blood’ video (also below) is in the wild. The single, taken from album "Hurricane", was released in December, at which time John Walsh conducted this interview. My highlight:

"When starring with Schwarzenegger in Eighties movie Conan the Destroyer, I learnt to ride bareback, fighting, turning the horse on a dime." Just imagine.

And, as a sidenote, a quick mention to shakeytimes who’s contributing breaking music suggestions to the site at a rate of knots…

(Picture: Lawrence Watson)

With all and sundry frenziedly dissecting the past year, just one brief review further for anyone with a spare forty seconds:

While job security must be top of a lot of people’s Christmas lists this year, there have been a fair few smaller but not insignificant annoyances which have gone hand-in-hand with the more reported ramifications of the recession. The one which has affected me the most has been the recent cuts to the Indy canteen. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, they’re doing little to woo the staff.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got to love Google Search Trends..

And Happy Thanksgiving, America.