Intending to do the latter, I headed over to my old pals, the Tory Society at the University of Bath.

They’ve always had a clumsy redirect from the old, and much neater named, http://bathcf.co.uk to http://bath-conservative-future.co.uk, but imagine by surprise and delight horror to discover this black and white message:

This website has been disabled. Unfortunately the host, Fractix, have now ceased trading. Fractix previously rented webspace through Heart Internet via a Reseller Account. The account has now been disabled.

That’s market forces for you, lads. Lucky I’ve got your backs!

(Three posts in one day? He must be up to something!)

It’s my Party Election Broadcast for the Labour Party, as part of the House of Twits PEB competition, where I could stand to win an amazing £20.10, more than twice the cost it took to make!

As you can see, I went with the “No Tie.”

Hopefully this will signal the start of more videos from me, depending on critical reaction.

So, here it is, TORIES BEWARE:

The background is the flag of the Conseil Régional Provence-Alpes-Cote D’Azur; it just seemed appropriate as it was a present from our victory in March. I’ll be in Cannes this year for the Film Festival; I haven’t been invited, but I’ll be in the area.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory PPC for North-East Somerset, really is the comedy Tory gift who keeps on giving. (Giving tax benefits to the super-rich that is, ho ho!)

His latest gaffe, since November, sees him once again faking he truth.

Private Eye picked this one up, and in the Christmas edition explained how he shipped a London-based member of his London-based investment firm staff on a 260 mile (about 420km) round trip to Midsomer Norton to take part in a photo opportunity to illustrate his website.

Here’s a scan of the article:

However, what Private Eye doesn’t tell you is that the very same picture, also appears on the front page of Rees-Mogg’s latest hard copy newsletter which has been circulated across N E Somerset, under the title of “Honesty on the Economy”. Take a look:

If you head over to this page on Rees-Mogg’s London based hedge-fund management company and scroll down to the bottom, in last place you have Fiona Tyrrell. Then, if you head to his political website you’ll see the same picture Private Eye was talking about.

If you still in any doubt, right-click the image and choose “save as” and you’ll find that Rees-Muggins has even named the picture “Fiona”.

In fairness, the caption “Honesty on the Economy. Jacob talking to a lady in Midsomer Norton” is technically true. That is Jacob. Fiona is a lady. The pair of them are in Somerset. Her mouth is presumably moving.

Actually, Jacob isn’t allowed to talk any more. Conservative Central Headquarters issued a gagging order after he told The Scotsman in October 2001:

I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth.

Looks like there is a theme emerging here from Honesty Mogg. Time to add this one to the list, having been in trouble for plagiarising Trevor Kavanagh from The Sun he now has to fabricate ‘in the constituency with constituents’ pictures to give an impression he’s connected to the community.

I’ll leave you with this thought for Christmas; the Rees-Muggins newsletter was delivered by the Royal Mail. I suppose his crumbling campaign means he has no local volunteers to deliver for him!

Click here to see other classic Ress-Mogg gaffes.

Jan 6th Update: Venue Magazine has also featured the story as their main news article, to supplement other pieces in The Telegraph, in The Daily Mail and a little bit in The Independent. Nothing from The Times, not that that would have anything to do with Rees-Mogg’s father as former editor and columnist, of course.

Finally, can anybody tell me why I published this on December 23rd, yet the Nationals waited until December 28th/29th? Guys, come on, a little credit here.

I finally won my copyright battle on Youtube!

I had filed a complaint once before about by video, “Ricky Knight against the BNP” which was downloaded and re-uploaded by a user called “nobnp4uk,” a YouTube magpie who will grab any bits of footage that fit his aganda. I’m not saying his agenda is wrong at all, I’m against the BNP as well, I just don’t believe stealing my video helps anyone in the fight against fascism.

I filed another complaint on Friday, and first thing this morning it was accepted and acted upon, with the offending video removed. Within 5 minutes, “nobnp4uk” was on my case.

He told me:

you could have just asked instead of sending copyright infringements threats. i was in that video. so is this how the greens work? unite against the bnp? all over a crap pixelated video that you wouldent have been able to film if it wasent for the people who did the action. thanx mate its good to know that you put this first rather than fighting fascism. your just another glory seeker who is in it for him self.

And I was like:

1. I did ask, and you were very rude in replying, just as you’re being rude to me now. 2. I find that hard to believe. 3. I’m not a Green, just a bystander. 4. If it was “a crap pixelated video” then you shouldn’t have stolen it and faked “freedom of information.” 5. I didn’t get paid or any glory at all, I just got hassle from both sides of the same argument.

So he was all:

erm excuse me. rude? do you remember the first rude comment the one you deleted? then you asked for credit and i gave you it? rude…sending a copyright infringement. now thats rude. you could have my account closed down why? because you think your important? keep your video mate and next time i will ask you not to film us when we do an action ok. thanx for nothing.

so whats your idea of freedom of information? you use it in your blog.

And I was like:

I don’t consider Writing “originally uploaded by some called hadleighroberts” at the end of a very long (and inaccurate, IMO) description does not constitute appropriate credit. See this link for what Freedom of Information actually is: http://tinyurl.com/dflzph and this one for the Creative Commons license that I own: http://tinyurl.com/cknoxa
Have a nice day

And then he deleted the comment, after, I like, totally won!

That’t the problem with YouTube, EVERY video on any topic descends into bitchslapping, the same arguments repeated over and over on every video, no matter whether it’s relevant or not!

I was originally hoping to extend my Facebook holiday to the entire month of May, were it not for a few people asking me to do things that required the site. Nevertheless, my essays are done and I did learn a thing or two from my experience:

- People are bitter. On Saturday I responded to a comment on this website which required the use of Facebook; since I was under no contractual or religious obligation to stay away, I decided to honour the request. I doubt I was particularly “missed” but the result was a few snide comments like “I thought you were giving up Facebook?”

It was as if they were hoping I would “fail” my little experiment. I’d apparently disrupted the social consensus that everybody has to love Facebook and be on it for an hour a day, it seemed that this deviation was unnerving to them. The response was hardly “Yes we can.”

- The next thing is that people still don’t get Twitter. I have a simple function that when I post something to Twitter, Facebook automatically picks it up and uses it for a Status Update. I find it convenient as I don’t tweet too often to make it spammy. It was assumed that I was logging in to update my status; they decided not to see the “via Twitter” small print.

- However, I have discovered a new relationship with FB. For me, it’s like a huge Yellow Pages. If you ignore all the chitchat and groups and distractions, it’s a pretty useful tool.

Conclusion: I doubt I’ll be “checking” Facebook very often, but I will be using it as a sort of Big Brother database if I need to check up on you, as we’ve discussed before. It’s not going back on my blackberry. (If you need something, email. If you don’t have my email, find it on Facebook!

Though I will make a special mention of my bit of Facebook: If 1,000,000 People Join This Group, Nothing Will Change. It’s A Group

The rules are that I’m not going to log in to Facebook in any way until Saturday 30th of May. I have to pretend that “I don’t have Facebook”.

The aim of the experiment is to test whether Facebook is a positive or negative influence on my life. My friends and “friends” will know I’ve always been a facebook-sceptic, but I do like the way you can find people and publicise events.

When I went to deactivate the account (you should try it, even if you don’t want to confirm) I was subjected to an interesting piece of emotional blackmail. Facebook gave me a quick heart-wrenching montage of my photographs with the caption “[Person A] will miss you”, “Person B will miss you.” I was doubtful for some of them, but it was enough to make me reconsider.

Here are the reasons:

+ THE SPAM, oh the spam. They will know who they are, but I just can’t stand getting a notification because such-and-such posted some inane comment on a thread that already has 73 messages on it. It zaps my phone battery and my patience until I stop reading. Then when I want to know some information I am told “it’s on the Facebook thread” expecting me to wade through a swamp of small talk to find a location on an event. It’s a little bit like when Jim hacker from Yes, Minister is looking for some information, and his civil servant has hidden the tiny little note in the middle of a 500 page report in the fourth briefcase full of documents. Anybody will know, from when I write emails, if I am supposed to attend something, I need the time/date/place in simple calender-entering format.

+ The next big thing for me is the layout, I’m not doing this to protest against it, but I am really fed up of what other people are doing. Sounds silly for a social networking tool, but I need the homepage to have what I need on it. I don’t need to know if someone I barely know has had a chat to someone I really don’t know. Simple as that. I miss the “Less of this person” tool to get rid of some people who spend too much time on the site.

+ Facebook has become commercialised. I’m not a fan of all the adverts and products and things you buy. A global social networking system should be somewhere between socialite and socialist.

+ All those extra optional features, applications and so on. I’m tired of saying “No” to zombies, vampires, gangsters, poker and others.

+ It’s exam time, so I should be concentrating on work. (Despite blogging)

More in-depth stuff will follow, but I really need to get on with essays. So until the end of May, send me an email, a Tweet, a Comment or use the “Contact” page on this website. My Facebook is closed.

On my birthday (coincidentally), Tom Harris MP wrote a post asking whether “Twitter is more leftie than the blogosphere”. /

I ask this because when I check my Twitter feed, it tends to contain slightly less criticism of the government — in fact, less politics in general.

In fact, it’s almost certain that there is “less politics” due to the fact that on Twitter, the chatter is a lot more inane, “so-and-so is making a cup of tea” or “watching the Apprentice” as opposed to “such-and-such dislikes the third reading of the South West transport bill!”

Blogs are, in contrast, a more personal space. The chances are that like searches for like. Harris concludes that blogs are like dinner parties, while Twitter is like the pub. I’m certainly inclined to agree, based on my previous post.

Though, this should provide an opportunity, as blogs define themselves in the search for an identity. By having a space for “intellectual” (longer) thoughts, and a space for “who cares-ities” (“X is going to the shops!”) the two become more distinct.

The overlap would be the Livejournal; the internet diary. Many people use blogges to talk about their morning toast or their yoga lessons in more depth than the average tweet would allow.

We might even be rid of the “Hi. How are you?” “Hi. Didn’t you read my Twitter from 3 minutes ago?”

The “deal” with Twitter, for any middle-aged readers who might wish to engage with one of the “young people” we hear so much about, is that it provides a forum in which you can post your least important thoughts, 140 characters at a time. Sceptics will say that Twitter is basically identical to Facebook, but with all the features removed except for the status updates. Instead of online friends whom you’ve never met, you now get ‘followers’.

The concept of followers is interesting; they are not stalkers, but it certainly makes any would-be stalker’s life a lot easier. Find your celebrity of choice, hopefully one that really wants to “engage with the youth” (politicians are probably best for this), follow them on Twitter, and then follow them in real life. If the terrorists get hold of Twitter, the west is doomed.

The reverse is also true, for all the furore over Britain becoming a Big Brother state, people seem to be more than willing to give up their personal information on Facebook. The police no longer need to invest millions in security cameras and CCTV; they just need to get a Twitter account. Fortunately for the libertarians, the only people anywhere near the British government who come close to understanding Twitter are Alastair Campbell and John Prescott, who like to advertise their own blogs rather than tell us when they’re making a cup of tea. Twitter seems perfectly suited for ‘proper news’ items, like when it snowed in Bath earlier this year and the University told us that lectures we cancelled. However, the meaning of news is notoriously flexible.

During President Obama’s State of the Union Address, it was revealed that Members of Congress were tweeting or twittering throughout with important information like “the best seats are reserved for the Senators”. A small number of MPs have tweeted in the middle of Prime Minister’s Questions. Surely, if someone is busy typing on their Smartphone while they are supposed to be listening to something, it means they are not paying attention, and advertising that very fact.

So Twitter has become very popular in media and political circles grasping for any sort of relevance. The problem is not that their ideas and thoughts are too complex, but that they jump on any sort of gimmick that lessens the credibility of institutions in desperate need of authority. Through descending to shorter and more inane chatter, they have confused new with good.   

I’ve often said that the process of blogging is like talking to an empty room. By comparison, Twitter can only be described as talking to a very crowded room, with everyone else talking at the same time, frantic to make their own voices heard.

These awards are intended to highlight Great Britain’s most effective services which improve citizen and business transactions with councils, central government departments and other public sector organisations.

Bath University Computing Services put forward a proposal entitled Bath, Drains and Web 2.0 which has been shortlisted for the Excellence in innovation at a local level category.

In the quest to provide students more bandwidth with which to download large files like videos, the project added fibres into the city’s sewage infrastructure. BUCS managed to complete the experiment in only eight months and managed to add digital free-to-view television services and internet telephony to all student residences.

Key themes in this year’s finalists list are services which help build a fairer society, and are based on sustainable or carbon-neutral green IT. There is no higher commendation for the UK’s public sector information and communication technology leaders.

The award winners will be announced at a ceremony on 20th January 2009 in London’s Guildhall by Tom Watson MP and Government CIO John Suffolk.

The proposal is expected to ensure a fast, transparent and reliable elections process with improved clarity for students. It is also hoped that there will be an additional gain as these electronic elections will ease the administrative burden on departments while still making them an internal affair.

This scheme is being introduced because of the need to reform the Academic Rep process. In the Student Opinion Survey conducted in December 2007, (completed by 2,099 students), 77.9% of students feel it is important to know about the role of Academic Representatives but 52.5% know very little or nothing at all about the position.

The idea has already been tested in a pilot scheme participated by some departments earlier this academic year, including MLES and Chemical Engineering. The results of this pilot have been encouraging, as Tom Milburn, VP Education explained; “Overall the pilot was judged to be successful because all students that wanted to run, could, and all those who wanted to vote, could. There were also useful features such as candidates being able to have a manifesto and a slogan to run with.”

In the VP Education’s report to the Senate, he predicts that “Online elections would provide a simple way for students to elect Academic Representatives and a campus wide election process would make promoting the role more efficient and create more awareness.” It should also be stressed that online elections would not remove the role of Departments from the appointment process.

The role of the Students’ Union shall be to provide the elections software that would ease pressure on Departments’ while enabling students to run a publicity campaign for the position.