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I’ve just realised that I put the date in the title of our podcast over at Big Ideas. Actually I don’t think that was a good idea - the material isn’t time dependent, and there’s a date tag in the rss. I suppose putting the date in the title can only put people off.

Actually I’ve been quite busy with Rich Cochrane, setting up Big Ideas. We’ve just launched our first podcast - given Rich and I have both been doing stuff on the net for 15 years we are surprisingly lax in getting into new forms - which I spent the weekend editing. The edit - of a discussion about pyschogeography - simply involved taking an hour’s worth of audio and making it into 45 minutes of something coherent. Armed with the excellent Audacity, some headphones and a quiet room I thought it would take no time at all. 7 hours later…

It’s amazing how difficult it is to select the material. I hope our contributors think it accurately reflected their contributions.

After I blogged ID cards below, I noticed an ad in the Google ads on the right of this page from MI5, advertising MI5 careers. Now what keywords triggered that?

Oyster cards (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/oyster) are really quite popular amongst people I know. People really like how convenient they are. Yet they have to be one of the most intrusive tracking systems ever effectively imposed on a large population in modern times. They are actively used by the authorities for reasons other than transport efficiency (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4800490.stm). But that doesn’t seem to bother people. I think it’s because they’re the nearest thing you can get to a membership card for London - they kind of betstow a London ethnicity, and identity.

So if the government’s plans for ID cards are to gain popular acceptance they’ll have to promise more than entitlement to services. They’ll not just have to verify your identity, they will have to give you an identity. I wonder if the Home Office have got a branding consultancy on this yet?

Last week’s local council elections in our borough in London kicked the Labour Party out of power and brought in the Conservatives. It was quite a shock to me as Hammersmith & Fulham has been fairly solidly Labour for years. Looking at the election map of H&F shows that the Tories gained ground near the border with posher Kensington & Chelsea. I suspect that one big reason was transport.

The proposed extension of the Congestion Charge zone right into Kensington & Chelsea has provoked lots of reaction on our side of the fence (actually it’s provoked lots of bumper stickers, but I reckon people with bumper stickers are more likely to vote). Also, the proposed tram down Uxbridge Road seems to have quite a few people frothing.

I don’t get it - the Congestion Charge is at worst a minor inconvenience (if you can afford to keep a car in London, the odd 8 quid a day isn’t going to break the bank) and the tram will completely change Shepherds Bush Green for the better and make getting down Uxbridge Road a lot quicker for the average resident. I think it just bothers people that it’s getting harder to get out of H&F without having to interact with the locality. I think lots of people who live here rather wouldn’t, and any reminder that they do - ie, having to walk or take public transport round here - is an affront.

So why don’t they just take the plunge and escape to the country?

Since I last posted I have:

• met one new grandparent
• lost two other grandparents
• changed jobs

…so the blog hasn’t been the highest priority. But since then all this 2.0 stuff really has leapt forward. There’s also been a lot of “2.0 is so much hype” (for example, see http://www.schillmania.com/content/opinion/2005/10/dont-believe-the-web-20-hype/), but it occurs to me that although the label is lame, the user-generated content thing really is a shift. And that shift, I think, is down to the fact that for the first time users have tools that work. I have a number of clients who spent a vast sum on a ropey CMS that now isn’t used or is broken, implemented relatively recently. Now there is so much excellent software that is esy to implement and use, the does so much more than produce webpages from dull templates. I know it’s a more complex story, but I can’t help thinking that 2.0 isn’t so much building on what went before on the web, so much as destroying it and getting it right this time.

Actually, having thought about it more, what irks me about the cartoon thing is the way in which both sides seem to be playing roles in their clash of civilisations fantasy. Having knocked out Christianity, the Enlightenment warriers are now looking to take out Islam. Likewise, the extreme response suggests there are plenty of Muslims ready to take up the challenge. Now if they were to keep their role-playing to themselves that would be one thing. But all of the more reasonable, and reasoned, people caught in between are cajolled into taking sides. This sort of things stiffles dialogue, and that is what is intended by ideologues on both sides.

Is it hypocritical to defend free speech and to wish that cartoons of Muhammad had never been published? Without too much reflection, this seems to be my natural position. I have little empathy with those who are offended by the cartoons. At the same time, I have no idea why someone would see their publication as a great defence of free speech. They just simply offend one group of people, titilate another group by crossing a boundary, and make little impact on anyone else. I can’t help the feeling that the publishers are at best creating controversy to sell newspapers, and at worst trying to whip up hate.