Full Fact is an independent fact-checking organisation. We remove the spin from political statements and make it easier to see the facts and context behind the claims made by the key players in British political debate.

Our main work is to:

• Analyse, challenge and expose misleading claims
• Enable people to verify or rebut claims and campaign for improved standards

So I was interested to see how they’d tackle the controversy over Chris Taggart’s criticism of the way in which Spikes Cavell are publishing council spending data on their SpotlightOnSpend website.

Full Fact’s rigorous fact checking technique in this case involved asking a company that had come in for public criticism whether their critics were right. Spikes Cavell’s CEO Luke Spikes duly reported that their critics were misguided, leading Full Fact to come to the only obvious conclusion that his word should be plenty good enough for anyone.

Full Fact concludes:

Whilst Full Fact supports calls for greater access to local government data, bloggers and commentators do need to ensure that the clamour for transparency doesn’t obscure the facts. In this instance, it seems that the ire that has been directed at the SpotlightOnSpend website has been misplaced.

As FullFact hasn’t yet published the comment I submitted to their story outlining some fuller facts, I’ll put it here instead:

Here are some more facts for you to check:

1. The CountCulture blog which originally raised these concerns is written by Chris Taggart. Chris is a long-standing and well-respected open data developer and activist who runs one of the country’s leading open data websites, OpenlyLocal, and formally advises the government on open data policy as a member of the Local Public Data Panel.

2. As if to make the latter point any clearer, Chris is one of the people who actually defines what the government means by “transparency” and “open data”.

3. To my knowledge, no-one on the Local Public Data Panel or in the wider open data community disagrees with Chris on this matter.

4. The government’s Public Sector Transparency board has released a statement saying, “We understand that urgent measures are already taking place to rectify the problems identified by Chris [Taggart]“. The Public Sector Transparency Board is chaired by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and includes world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

5. Spikes Cavell is a company that has never published a single item of open data according to the government’s accepted principles and definitions.

6. To my knowledge, Spikes Cavell has never advocated any policy to increase the amount of open data released by government in the sense that the government is advocating.

7. In the case of Windsor and Maidenhead’s data, Spikes Cavell turned open data into closed data by republishing data that was free in an
unfree way.

8. The other councils for whom Spikes Cavell has published spending data are under the false impression that they have complied with the
government’s request to release their data in an open way. They have not.

9. A full list of the councils that have published their spending data is available on my Armchair Auditor website.

10. Today, this list shows only two councils that are publishing their data in a truly open and transparent way as defined by the government: The Greater London Authority and Windsor and Maidenhead. These are the councils that have both an open licence and machine-readable data.

11. Neither of those two councils are using Spikes Cavell’s Spotlight on Spend to publish their data openly, though as already mentioned above, Spikes Cavell are publishing Windsor and Maidenhead’s data separately in a closed way.

12. Windsor and Maidenhead’s data is available as open data through Armchair Auditor and OpenlyLocal. OpenlyLocal also has open data for
other councils’ spending.

Spikes Cavell has rightly been called on its practice of substituting its own definition of transparency for the one used by the government
and the open data community, thereby muddying the waters about what is expected of councils to bring about a situation in which their
finances can be best scrutinised by the public.

Please get in touch if you have any further facts about this matter to be clarified.

Keep up the good work, Full Fact. Transparency and accountability needs your unique voice.

This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

So here we have what is supposedly one of the world’s leading technology companies launching what it calls a “magical and revolutionary” product. And what does it do? It goes and encourages developers to build twee simulacra of physical objects. How unmagical. How unrevolutionary. How dull. Apple have seriously employed top-flight designers and developers to build digital representations of address books and books and goodness knows what else that computers are designed to get rid of. And by “get rid of” I mean “eliminate as a concept” not “replace with a digital lookalike”. Now they want everyone else to do the same. No thanks. This is 2010 not 1910.

This approach is an enormous dead end that’s wrong on so many levels and plays itself out in various ways, some quite obvious, others more subtle and insidious. In a pragmatic sense, it just doesn’t work on its own terms. Digital metaphors of physical objects are full of leaky abstractions, being both capable of things that their physical counterparts are not and (surprise!) not capable of things their physical counterparts are. No-one seriously designs these metaphors to be perfect — it’s impossible. With computers being mainstream for at least twenty years I’m wondering why anyone’s still bothering at all. The desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was a smart-ish idea compared with the alternatives in 1984. With every year that passes it gets shot through with more and more holes. And the iPad is supposedly the device that moves on from all that. It certainly has the potential as a piece of hardware, as an OS, as a platform. So why try to limit designers’ approaches to something so decidedly retrospective?

But the real problem is much worse than some of the cheesy UI elements like page curls, as excruciating as they may be. What’s wrong with this scenario?

I go to the (virtual) bookshop and browse through the (virtual) books. I find one I like and I pay real money for it. The (virtual) book gets transferred to me and placed on my (virtual) bookshelf alongside the other (virtual) books I’ve bought and that I now have to store and organise.

Hey! It’s just like the real world!

Quite. With most of its limitations, inefficiencies and exclusions comfortingly intact. Business as usual.

Page curl and page turning is a cartoon of something that’s an artifact of pagination which is a consequence of the former necessity for long-form texts to be printed and bound and distributed as such in the physical world. So are bookshops. So is the concept of owning a book. So are bookshelves and private collections of books. And yes, I notice that the age-old tradition of handing over real money for the non-exclusive opportunity to access a particular small and pre-defined chunk of content is still going strong.

Designers: You can think of better ways of doing it than this. Numerous better ways. You could get the genius lovechild of Edward Tufte and John Pawson to redesign iBook’s UI and it’d still be a bad idea. We don’t need iBook any more than we need books. We still need ideas. We still need texts. But where they start and where they end and how we represent them and how we can explore them — that’s all up for grabs. Can we do this on the iPad? Probably. Should we try? Definitely. Does Apple want us to? Frankly, probably not.

Someone mentioned beauty. Supposedly there are 80% of people that like “functional” stuff and 20% that like “beautiful” stuff. That 20% are supposedly Apple’s customers. and the rest still use slide rules, telephone directories and Windows Mobile. I’m not going to pick apart how right or wrong that may be right now. But I’ll say this:

If beauty is making digital simulacra then we need a new aesthetic. If beauty is perpetuating not just the appearances but the cruel limitations of things past, it’s time to move on. We need a digital aesthetic that’s more than skin deep. One based on possibilities and power that continue to delight us as we use our new digital tools rather than briefly amusing us when we first encounter them. And yes, given that these are new things they should look like new things too. Get the message? If you’re not experiencing Google Search on an aesthetic level you’re not paying enough attention. I’m not talking about how it looks. I’m talking about what it can do for you. We need more of that. A whole lot more. In the short term, it’s about companies paying their bills, thriving, profiting. In the long run it’s about the entire field of computing progressing or stagnating, not the fortunes of any particular company. It’s about having an information society rather than an information technology society. You want to have something worthy of an upgrade in 2020? Step away from those horseless carriages. Don’t look back.

In short, if you love notebooks, buy a Moleskine. If you want to be a cartoonist, go and work for Pixar. If you’re confused about which way time’s running, go cyberpunk or trawl eBay for a Newton. And if you want to make a genuinely “magical and revolutionary” break with the past on the iPad platform — and I think you should — then forget about physicality and virtuality and retro computing and go and make something that not only doesn’t exist in the physical world but doesn’t exist in the digital one either. After two decades of mainstream computing we’re more than ready for something genuinely digitally native. We can stand the shock of the new. I hope that someone at Apple still understands that sometimes you’ve just got to break the rules — including your own.

“I make no apology for being a committed Christian. However, it is categorically untrue that I believe homosexuality to be an illness and I am deeply offended that The Observer has suggested otherwise. I have spent 20 years working with disturbed people who society have turned their back on and are not often supported by state agencies; drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill and the homeless that I and my charitable friends in the public sector have tried to help over the years. The idea that I am prejudiced against gay people is both false and insulting.”

I do not speak for Mrs Stroud or the Conservative Party and I have no other information on this matter than what I have posted here.

Hat tip to Cardiff Blogger (@cardiff_blogger) for posting this first.

“With Labour and Plaid out of the race locally, only John Dixon and the Lib Dems can be trusted to stand up for people in our area!”

“With Labour now a spent force both locally and nationally, I believe I am the clear alternative here to Cameron’s Conservatives.”

“Remember, with Labour and Plaid out of the race here, only the Lib Dems can keep the Tories out!”

“Don’t forget. In our area, only the Liberal Democrats can stop Cameron’s Conservatives. Labour are a spent force — they don’t even have any councillors in Cardiff North!”

“The race to be Cardiff North’s next MP is set to be a close-run contest. Local Lib Dem campaigner, John Dixon, is providing a strong challenge to the Tories.”

And to top all that we get one of the Lib Dems’ customary bar charts:

Get the message? That’s just from one leaflet.

If you didn’t know better, you might be forgiven for thinking that Cardiff North is a Tory marginal seat where the Lib Dems are the main challengers and Labour are “out of the race” with no realistic prospect of winning.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Cardiff North is a Labour marginal under serious threat from the Tories. Labour have held the seat since 1997 when they took it from the Tories. John Dixon and the Lib Dems are lying to suggest otherwise.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the facts.

We all know that the Lib Dems are very fond of bar charts. I’m keen on them too. Unlike the Lib Dems, I like ones that are drawn to scale, accurately labelled and that show data relevant to the point I’m attempting to make.

First, let’s see the most recent general election result in Cardiff North:

We can see that Labour hold Cardiff North with a majority of 1,146 votes. It would take a 1.27% swing to the Tories to unseat Labour here. This seat is very marginal based on the 2005 general election results. The Lib Dems are in a distant third place with less than half the votes of Labour. Based on these results, the other parties could quite genuinely be described as “out of the race”. Catherine Taylor-Dawson standing for the Rainbow Dream Ticket polled just a single vote in 2005. Never was a deposit lost with such panache.

This bar chart looks very different from the Lib Dems’ one which, using a statistical airbrushing technique that would shame Stalin, eliminates the bar for Labour entirely and fails to show the very slender gap between Labour and the Tories. How did that happen? They cherry-picked their data not just from a convenient election but displayed it in a way that’s entirely irrelevant to how voting works in the general election.

In other words, John Dixon and the Lib Dems in Cardiff North have lied with statistics.

Here’s how they did it.

Based on recent elections, all the results show that the Tories and Labour are the two most popular parties in Cardiff North. We’ve seen the 2005 general election results above. Labour won with the Tories very close behind.

In 2007 there was an election for the Welsh Assembly. Usefully, the Welsh Assembly constituencies are the same areas as the constituencies for the UK Parliament at Westminster. Here’s how that election turned out in Cardiff North:

Once again we see the Tories and Labour as the two biggest parties by far. The Tories won this seat in the Welsh Assembly with a comfortable margin over Labour. The Lib Dems were in a distant third place. Obviously, these election results don’t help the Lib Dems’ case that they, and not Labour, are the main challengers to the Tories in Cardiff North. Which, of course, is why the Lib Dems don’t mention them.

In desperation, the Lib Dems turned to the local council elections in 2008. While Cardiff Council is a different body to the Westminster Parliament, the Lib Dems have chosen to use the council election voting patterns as a guide to the relative strength of the parties in the area. You can draw your own conclusions on the extent to which this is a valid exercise.

There are eight Cardiff Council wards in the same area as the Cardiff North Westminster constituency. They are:

• Gabalfa
• Heath
• Lisvane
• Llandaff North
• Llanishen
• Portprennau/Old St. Mellons
• Rhiwbina
• Whitchurch and Tongwynlais

Let’s have another look at their bar chart:

I’m going to label this Lib Dem effort as Chart A.

Given that I’m the kind of pedantic, dull chap that prefers their bar charts drawn to scale and with a bar for every party, I’ll redraw it properly. I’ll call this Chart B:

While my Chart B is based on exactly the same data as the Lib Dems’ Chart A, drawing it properly shows something very unusual that isn’t apparent in the Lib Dems’ own chart: Labour and Plaid Cymru don’t have any councillors in Cardiff North.

We can also see more clearly that when the correct scale is applied, the Lib Dems have fewer councillors relative to the Tories than their own bar chart would suggest. The Lib Dems’ bar chart shows them as having at least half as many councillors as the Tories. In fact, the Lib Dems have five councillors and the Tories have 13. Scale matters.

It’s also notable that there are three independent councillors. Should we infer from this that independents are more popular in Cardiff North than Labour? Hardly.

Now the Lib Dems aren’t actually trying to hide the fact that Labour don’t have any councillors here. In fact, they mention that point specifically in their leaflet to bolster their case that “Labour are a spent force locally”.

But how do we explain the anomaly between Labour having no councillors in Cardiff North, yet they hold the seat at Westminster and put in a strong second place in the Welsh Assembly elections?

That’s down to the first-past-the-post system used for the council elections. In the 2008 council elections, Labour were the second biggest party in the eight “Cardiff North” wards in terms of votes but got no councillors at all. They came in second place in six of the eight wards but won none of them. In the “winner takes all” first-past-the-post system, Labour’s strong showing across all eight wards counts for nothing as it’s not sufficiently concentrated in any ward to win them councillors.

Here is Chart C, the number of votes each party got in the eight Cardiff North wards in the 2008 council elections:

And now we’re back to the familiar story of Cardiff North: The Tories and Labour are the two biggest parties with the Lib Dems a distant third.

Chart C is the bar chart that the Lib Dems should have used but that they don’t want you to see. Unlike Charts A and B, it shows the relative strength of the vote for the parties in the Cardiff North area in a recent election. And unlike the Lib Dems’ chart, it correctly reflects the fact that the council ward boundaries within the Cardiff North area mean nothing whatsoever in a Westminster election. The number of councillors the parties have locally is an entirely inaccurate reflection of local voters’ preferences across the whole area. It is utterly disproportionate representation.

In Cardiff North, all the votes for each party across the whole constituency are added together to elect the MP. It makes no difference at all what the relative strength of the parties in each ward is. But that’s what the Lib Dems chose to show, because it’s the only set of figures that supports their entirely bogus case that Labour are weaker than the Lib Dems in Cardiff North.

Out of all the data on recent elections and all the ways of presenting that data, John Dixon and the Lib Dems in Cardiff North have chosen the one anomalous case that least represents local opinion as expressed at the ballot box and best represents something entirely untrue that they want you to believe.

That’s how to lie with statistics, Liberal Democrat style.

The Lib Dems were advocating voting tactically against both Labour and the Green Party on the entirely false claim that they “couldn’t win”. As it turned out, Labour polled much higher than the Lib Dems in London and the Greens got a single MEP, albeit on a lower vote, just like the Lib Dems. For a party that supports proportional representation and campaigns strongly against what it sees as the shortcomings of first-past-the-post, this was the most unbelievable hypocrisy.

Remember these bar charts whenever you hear the Lib Dems talk about how we need a new kind of politics. Well we certainly do — and one where the voters can at least expect the parties to be truthful about straightforward things like previous election results and how the electoral system works.

• The Straight Choice where I downloaded John Dixon’s election leaflet. You can add any leaflets you receive to this website so that all parties’ claims can be better scrutinised.
• Matthew Somerville (in a personal capacity) advised on administrative areas and boundary changes
• Cardiff Council who advised on wards and from whose website I downloaded election results

If you like this kind of thing, I recommend Darrell Huff’s classic book How to Lie with Statistics and the complementary volume by Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps.

Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

How many accounts do you need?

The simplest approach, for you, is just to have one account on each service. You might have a Twitter account that covers everything in the whole library service, a Facebook page which people can “fan” and get updates, and a Flickr account where you post all your photos.

With all these accounts, you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of cross-posting, too. Some of your photos — possibly all of them — will go on Facebook as well as Flickr. Twitter doesn’t handle photos very well so you might find yourself posting links to Flickr photo pages there. You can even automate this using an RSS to Twitter service like Twitterfeed.

This isn’t going to be much fun for your readers. People tend to be interested in one or maybe two local libraries, not the whole service. An event on the other side of the borough probably doesn’t interest them, let alone hearing about new titles in stock or changes to opening times there. So people get deluged with information that they have to skip past to get to the 10% that matters to them. Some people will unsubscribe, feeling your services don’t provide good value for their time. Others will just feel a bit ambivalent skipping past the noise every time they read your feed. It’s not a great approach for them.

Social networks make it easy for people to mash feeds of content together but very hard for them to filter them. I can mash by simply choosing what I subscribe to. And filtering is the same thing — choosing what I don’t subscribe to. Most social media tools make it difficult or impossible to filter within a feed. So you have to do this on behalf of the people who might read what you write: separate your content into as many distinct and separate feeds as necessary. For a library service, this might mean creating separate feeds for each library and possibly ones for subject areas or children and teens too. This is more work for writers, and rightly so. Managing several accounts is harder than just one. But the onus is on us to do the legwork so our readers don’t have to plough through mountains of irrelevant content to get to the good stuff. The reward is that our readers will care more about what we write and consequently we’ll probably have more of them too.

The closely related topic of recycling identical content across several media or social networks is skilfully dissected at Unlink Your Feeds.

Variously, I found numerous ads that seemed to act against the direct interests of the council, preyed upon some of the most vulnerable local residents or were just downright sleazy or inappropriate.

Specifically:

• firms specialising in business rates avoidance on empty commercial properties
• payday loans at extortionate rates of interest, often over 1000% APR (you read that right)
• stag and hen nights featuring visits to strip/lap-dancing clubs
• pole dancing lessons
• solicitors specialising in defending people on tax and benefit fraud charges
• exercise and diet programmes of dubious worth including the infamous “1 tip of a flat belly”

It took me about 15 minutes to find all of these. The conclusion I drew was that Nottingham City Council either didn’t monitor which ads were served on their website or didn’t particularly care. Either way I found it hard to see how the council and the community got a net financial benefit from this advertising, quite aside from issues of appropriateness, likely offence and web clarity/usability.

Good reputations can take years to build and seconds to lose. Rightly or wrongly, many people are sceptical or outright cynical about the value and probity of their local councils. Councils should take enormous care to ensure that they are not seen to be endorsing or in the pay of businesses. People rightly expect government to be above the fray of commerce and private profit. That’s what supposedly makes government trusted and different — serving the whole community, not just the highest bidders or those with the ability to pay.

Assuming you even want to make the calculation, has anyone running ads on their websites actually balanced the net revenue from ads against the reputational risks?

Even if you value your corporate reputation at zero, you still need to consider the direct costs to the council of running certain kinds of ads, particularly those from Google AdSense. How many business rates avoiders, families impoverished through predatory lending, skilfully-represented benefit fraudsters and neighbourhoods plagued by anti-social behaviour due to businesses advertising on your website does it take to nullify any profit from running such ads? Not many, I’d suggest.

A bit of joined-up thinking is required here. Councils using Google AdSense are playing fast and loose with their reputations and taking big hits in revenue and costs in other departments for the sake of pennies coming back on their websites.

It’s just not worth it.

At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.

I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.

Mass-market consumer digital cameras started with the Casio QV-10 in 1995. With a resolution of a quarter of a megapixel (0.25MP) combined with pathetic image processing it was clearly a pale precursor to the intelligent and vivid cameras we enjoy fifteen years later. Yet it was essentially a modern digital camera: A (large) pocket-sized device producing colour pictures, with internal memory, a colour screen on the back and the ability to transfer pictures to a computer. The digital camera technology of today may be better but it isn’t fundamentally different.

In this first stage, the mass market and many pundits view the new technology as a loser. It’s both far more expensive and has far worse quality and usability than the thing it’s supposed to replace. This is the “birth” phase of a technology, where the early adopters spend a fortune to get something that’s massively compromised, yet shows promise and provides a fair amount of exclusivity.

I got my first digital camera in 2000, five years after the QV-10. It was a Fuji MX-1700. Costing around £400, it produced 1.3 megapixel images and had a 3x zoom lens. There were cheaper cameras, but they had even lower resolutions, worse image processing and no zoom lens. On the upside, it was extremely pocketable and produced crisp, well-exposed pictures. On the downside, the pictures were still very low resolution and it was very slow to use, with a lag of what seemed like around a second between pressing the shutter release and the camera capturing and storing the image. Compared with most compact film cameras, it was incredibly expensive toy. Yet for these faults, it was a good replacement for much of my film photography. I could see my images immediately after they were shot and show them to other people. Having paid for the camera, each shot was effectively free. Best of all, I could transfer them to my computer and put them on my website, which was in the process of becoming a far more common way of sharing photos than making prints. For its time, and for the things I did, it was fantastic. But not everyone “got it”, or was prepared or able to spend that amount of money to replace the “perfectly good” film camera they were used to using.

This is the “growing-up” phase of a technology, where products reach a wider audience who are prepared to make some compromises in respect of older devices in return for benefits in areas which they consider to be more important to them. Often these benefits are in cost and convenience rather than quality.

Now digital cameras are ubiquitous. When we talk of “cameras” we mean “digital cameras” and tend to specify “film cameras” if we mean otherwise. Film is the preserve of retro enthusiasts and a tiny minority of professionals. Businesses based around film technology have either died or revolutionised their operations towards digital. Any discussion of “will digital replace film?” now seems anachronistic and nonsensical.

In this “mature” phase of the technology, the new technology is superior in almost every way to the old. Generally, it’s cheaper, quicker, more convenient, more flexible and has better quality. Not using it involves a large degree of compromise to get a niche benefit that the mass market simply doesn’t care about.

This is where I see ebooks and ebook readers going. Right now they’re in the “birth” stage. Often they’re more expensive, lower quality and more hassle than just buying a printed book. It’s easy to see why relatively few people bother — and why those that do are considered a little strange. To most people it makes little rational sense.

But before long — and I believe we’re just entering this phase with devices like the Kindle and particularly the iPad — we’ll be in the “growing-up” phase. There will be definite pros and cons to ebooks and printed books, but not a clear-cut overall benefit either way. Which you choose will depend on what matters most to you. Cost, convenience (of carrying, purchasing and storing), display/reading quality, the ability to share and annotate, style and image. Some (richer) students will plump for an iPad over carrying a rucksack full of half a dozen fat textbooks. Other people will stick to the venerable printed book for a variety of reasons, including simple cost.

So how long before ebooks reach their “mature” phase? Five years? Ten? Almost certainly not any longer. Whatever device you’ll use to read them (phone, tablet, laptop, something else) you’ll have anyway, so no-one will think of that as a significant cost. The ebooks themselves will be much cheaper than their paper equivalents, where those even exist. Ebook reader quality will far exceed what’s possible on the printed page, in resolution, clarity and flexibility. Annotating ebooks and sharing those notes will be far easier and more powerful than on a paper page. You can’t search a printed book in any automated way at all, yet the ways we’ll be able to search, analyse and navigate ebooks in a few years will seem incredible compared to the best search technology we have today. And while some will wax nostalgic about the heft, the texture, the smell and the patina of the traditional printed book, in most cases they simply won’t be buying new ones. “Book” will mean “ebook” in common speech, and discussions about “ebooks vs. print” and will seem as quaint as the battles between digital and film photography advocates in the mid- to late-1990s.

I’ll miss printed books in some ways but I’ll be constantly reminded that the ebooks that have replaced them will have done so because they’re in every reasonable sense better. Rapid, incremental technological advancement will turn that potential into reality.

I just hope I’ll have the time to read more, but I won’t bet on that.

Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.

What competition, anyway? Netbooks, the Kindle and other e-book readers, smartphones and even Windows 7-based tablet computers are all aimed at different uses and audiences. Assuming Apple wants to keep selling iPhones, MacBooks and iMacs, it clearly doesn’t believe the iPad is a replacement for your phone, laptop or desktop. The iPad is in a category of its own for now.

So cutting past the “I wanted two cameras, multi-tasking, Flash and a 500GB hard drive” crowd, let’s ask the real question: Why wouldn’t you want an iPad on your coffee table?

What would be so terrible about being able to pick up a hand-held device with a lovely big screen and browse the web?

Why would such a thing be so awful if you wanted to curl up in a chair — or in bed — and watch a film or some YouTube clips?

Could you really not enjoy reading a book on such a thing?

No-one is stopping you popping your (smart) phone in your pocket when you go out. And no-one is stopping you working on a fully-featured laptop or desktop computer with all its multi-tasking, power and disk space when you want to do some serious work. The iPad is for sitting back, browsing, watching, listening. Writing the occasional email, tweet or comment. The kind of thing you probably either squint at a smartphone to do, or struggle to do with a netbook or toasty laptop and its poorly-suited trackpad.

You don’t need a full, multi-tasking OS to do any of these things. You don’t need Flash. You don’t need USB ports. And you don’t need a lot of storage, although by many sensible standards, the top 64GB model has a lot of storage — but not if you’re the kind of chap that has a computer dedicated to running BitTorrent.

No-one needs an iPad. Even at what appears to be a modest price for what it is, it’s a luxury item. While I would definitely argue that most working people and students need a computer and that many would benefit from having a smartphone, this in-between category of slick media viewer is pure indulgence. It will stand or fall not so much on what it can do, and even less on what it can do that other gadgets can’t. The user experience will be everything.

The test of the user experience isn’t on the spec sheet or in the promo photos or videos. It’s in getting into your hands (and hopefully, living room) and having a go. I’ll reserve further judgement until I get a chance to do just that, but if it’s as much of a joy to use as the iPhone and iPod Touch then it’ll definitely be finding house room and earning its keep by pure pleasure alone.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of devices in future, from Apple and many others. Not just tablets, but a myriad of things-that-compute-that-aren’t-computers. For all its versatility, the general purpose computer and operating system is lousy to use, still feebly perpetuating the same interface and interaction design of the first Macs (and Lisas) back in the early 1980s.

Smartphones show promise, but their small screens will always limit their uses for many applications, at least until we can wire them into our goggles or optic nerves. The future is computers that are smaller, more specialised and more numerous, each of which is limited to but hopefully beautifully suited to its task. With its screen, controls, software and storage, what is a digital camera if not an elegantly-specialised computer?

If you ran a big organisation, why wouldn’t you want half a dozen iPads in the waiting area at reception?

So you decide to do the community-spirited thing and help to clear ice and snow from your public street. Then someone slips over and hurts themselves. Can you be sued?

John McQuater, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers might be able to help.

According to the Telegraph:

Legal experts said home owners could fall victim to the same laws if they tried to clear an icy path but failed to do the job properly. John McQuater, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, admitted: “If you do nothing you cannot be liable. If you do something, you could be liable to a legal action.”

That doesn’t sound too good.

But fortunately John McQuater of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers is much more encouraging in the Guardian:

By clearing the snow from your paths, you do not invite any extra liability that wouldn’t have existed had you done nothing and left the snow on the ground. The only circumstance in which you might invite a claim was if you acted completely unreasonably, and somehow created a new latent hazard that had not existed before your actions.

I’m glad that’s cleared the matter up.

Elf and safety gorn mad or just very sloppy reporting? You decide.

Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

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Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware