Journey to the East Pole October 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : randomness , add a comment
Listening to Dave Gorman’s “Genius” on radio 4 this morning one of the ideas put forward for scrutiny was to claim the East and West poles. Hang on a minute, I thought, that was my idea, which sounded just a little bit childish coming from somebody who holds to the philosophical position that ideas cannot be stolen. You can’t effectively prove the ownership of an idea, even if there is such a thing as a single point of origin, which is unlikely, so I was suitably chuffed when the verdict was pronounced that the idea is in fact, genius, (although I did think the hitchhiker geotagging idea was the better one.)
Ah, but one of the features of the 21st century is that Google remembers everything.
So there it is, as posted to “free.uk.boredom” in July 2000 complete with misspelling of “Walthamstow”
Newsgroups: free.uk.people.mad-scientists, free.uk.boredom, england.biz.misc, free.uk.talk.l-b.waltham-forest
From: Andy Roberts <andyro…@zetnet.co.uk>
Date: 2000/07/02
Subject: Year 2000 Expedition to the East PoleYear 2000 Expedition to the East Pole
===============================
In the year 2000ad, a group of intrepid explorers are setting off on an expedition to the East Pole. The team has been put together from various scientific, creative and cultural communities and is fully trained and ready to go. There are, howerever, still a few places left so if you feel you have the right qualities to join in you could yet make a contribution to this world shattering event. Just follow this thread for further details.
Because of the unprecedented pioneering nature of this expedition, we cannot place any estimate on the amount of time the journey will take, but the organisers are confident that it should be possible to keep in touch wiv dem front line explorers using da hinternet and that everyone will return home safely eventually.
SPONSORS
More sponsors are required. If you know of any groups that might harbour potential sponsors please add them to the right hand side of the newsgroups line.
DIRECTIONS
After much deliberation the organisers are convinced that the best place to set off from is Walthamstowe. After that, we haven’t a clue and really. Anybody with a sense of direction should map out the path by adding geographical groups to the newsgroups line.
RULES
No more than eight groups in total please. Ignore cynical bystanders who try to mock or complain - they’re only jealous.
Please retain this complete message between the E- lines without snipping and delete attributions and chevrons from time to time.
Andy R
–
Support the free.uk.* newsgroups hierarchy
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list of newsgroups http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rob/freefaq/fgroups.htm
Song thrush October 6, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wildlife , 2commentsSong Thrush Pair on my Rowan Tree
I think this is going to be the first bird blog here since A flock of Geese or Blackcap Warbler, because there’s rarely news and seldom photographs related to the appreciation of wildlife and birds. This morning I was delighted to have a brand new visitor to my garden, well new to my observation anyway. A beautiful yellow cream and brown spotted song thrush came and perched right outside the bedroom window for about ten minutes, and then was joined by another. So a pair of these territorial little snail eating machines has probably moved into the neighbourhood, and could well breed in the vicinity next spring.
Join the RSPB“So what is so special about a song thrush, we get them all the time” you may be thinking, depending on where you live. They were certainly very common in gardens I knew as a child, both on the edge of the countryside and in the suburbs and parks of the city. I moved to my present house in 1991 and after a while I became aware of the lack of diversity in the wildlife population. I think I counted only seven different species of birds, which is pretty poor even for an urban garden. The song thrush was not amongst them. They must have been around once, but I know they are particularly susceptible to moluscicides, so maybe they were all wiped out by the type of gardeners who administer slug-death in a vain hope to protect their hostas.
About ten years ago a neighbour planted a silver birch tree right near the boundary, and this very quickly shot up to become a tall, mature tree which had an enormous positive impact on the bird life. Finches, wrens, warblers and other tit species arrived. Slowly my little oasis of urban garden environment has become more wildlife friendly with the addition of a pond, larger shrubs and climbers, native plants and trees. Having a pond leads to providing a home to frogs toads and newts, and toads tend to stick around and eat slugs, which is great, but they haven’t mastered the art of extracting snails from their shells yet. Only thrushes can do that, so the absence of thrushes makes for a flourishing snail population. That is until today.
The little rowan tree which I bought as a whipling helped provide a source of berries through the autumn and winter to blackbirds, bluetits and robins, which always brings a cheer to weekend morning lie-ins, but the arrival of a pair of thrushes was the best. I’m delighted. They don’t hop about so much like common blackbirds, they like to stay motionless, taking advantage of their spotty camouflage to break their own visual outline. A male blackbird is shiny black with a bright yellow beak so there’s not many places they can dissolve into the background but a thrush has a more sedentary habit and can be easily overlooked unless seen on arrival. A grand entrance indeed.
Song thrush
Originally uploaded by bramblejungle
Stardust Memories October 4, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, London , 2commentsStardust memories is the name of a 1980 Woody Allen film which I had forgotten all about, but the name kept occurring to me on a subconscious level as an echo to seeing the posters for “Stardust“.
Warning: This is a rambling account of my activities yesterday, with no particular purpose other than to blog for the sake of recording events and thoughts. I spent most of yesterday in central London starting out with a Creative Coffee Club meeting at Foyle’s bookshop, which was a drift in and out kind of gathering where I met several people for the first time including Toby Moores, Sue Thomas and Karyn Romesys. We discussed the nature of creativity, the role of peer group meeting venues for random philosophical discourse during periods of historical change, online community and social networks, use of real names, intellectual property and the ownership by celebrities both dead and alive of their own image amongst other things. I’ll go again.
The afternoon I had designated for photography, with a mission to capture buildings and phenomena of the West End for a future website. A pleasant little task I imagined, strolling about taking pictures but it turned out to be much harder work than I thought. By “hard work” I just mean physically active, akin to walking up and down stairs within an old school building or supporting a roomful of people seated with technology. You can get a strange feeling at the end of the day called “tired” which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on the internet.
Back to the old London buildings. Most places need to be photographed from the other side of the street or even further back if possible. This means a lot of walking back and fore, crossing busy roads, trying various angles and waiting for gaps in the traffic, both motorised and pedestrian. I took more than a few shots of a glorious facade obscured by double decker bus until I had practiced the art of keeping both eyes open while looking through the viewfinder.
Talking of viewfinders, I’ve been looking for a replacement compact camera, the type that fits easily in a shirt pocket, and I get the impression that many of them these days don’t have a viewfinder, only the LCD screen. That’s no use to me. I can’t make out the details of an image on such screens in daylight let alone sunshine, and anyway, I like to feel the camera up against my nose, not suspended in mid air.
In another capacity I took the opportunity to look in on The Harp and was pleased to see Ross-On-Wye perry being stocked.
In Leicester Square, there were crowd barriers being erected between the theatre tickets booth and the Odeon cinema.
People were assembling, hanging about by the barriers and looking in, giving the appearance of spectators watching three Westminster Council road sweepers tidying up the ground. Some had large cameras and big bags so then it dawned that they must be papparazi waiting for an event. A glance around confirmed loads of posters for “Stardust” a new film which I surmised must be having a premiere in Leicester Square. That’s where they have them. Probably they were staking claims on the best vantage points from which to get a shot of Robert DeNiro a few hours later, as he steps from a taxi into the Odeon.
Maybe he was due to grant a TV interview outside, amongst the little tropical islands which lined a green carpet walkway, as a kind of temporary film set, leading nowhere. The most serious papparazi had bagged the line immediately outside the cinema and brought those little lightweight stepladders with them, in order to be three feet taller than everybody else, except when they all have them.
After traipsing around The West end for hours I was in need of a sit down and was lucky enough to find a seat upstairs in The Cove, above the pasty shop in Covent Garden, with half a pint of lovely Cornish Knocker, brewed in Newham, Truro. The pub above the pasty shop can get very busy at weekends but at 4.00pm on a weekday it was quiet and restful, so that was another thing I could appreciate about my new flexible lifestyle 
At six O’clock it was time to make my way to Baker Street for London Wiki Wednesday. This month’s host was ?WhatIf! an innovation company, with a bright and youthful atmosphere compared with some of the corporate hosts we are more used to. The hosts made a presentation using card storyboards rather than powerpoint live slides, and asked for suggestions about the usual issue - how to improve take-up and participation. Discussion this month took a turn more towards Wikipedia, with it’s growing control culture and victims. “It’s getting more nasty” said Gordon. Another told of how he fought Wikipedia and won, and an update on yellowikis - since “Yell Ltd” owns the colour yellow the wiki can be accessed from anywhere in the world except the UK, apparently. I’m not sure how that works, doesn’t it make our internet a bit like China? And they’re moving to Wikia.
I transferred 197 pictures from my camera when I got home and began processing some but it was too much to get through in one batch late at night, so will have to be interweaved with other tasks as the week continues. Looking up the news, I find out that DeNiro wasn’t there. They must have been waiting for Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller and Charlie Cox, the other stars of Stardust. The BBC couldn’t have been there either, otherwise surely they would have noticed that the red carpet was a green one.
Google Analytics for Action Research October 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : marketing, blogs and community, Action Research , add a commentI’m using Google Analytics as a metric to provide quantitative data towards an Action Research cycle.
Web Stats
I get pretty good web logs and working awstats from my web hosting provider for distributedresearch.net, but back in August I decided to try adding the Google Analytics package as part of an Action Research approach towards improving the effectiveness of my blog.
Action Research
Action Research is more than just testing and tracking, but the testing and tracking methods used by professional internet writers, bloggers, developers and marketers begin to look quite similar to distributed action research in some aspects since they are being applied in complex adaptive situations where pure quantitative metrics and ideas such as a ‘fair test’, split testing and testing against a control set are mostly inapplicable.
Goals
The specific and limited aspect of the blog which I have been trying to improve in this way has been the attraction of new visitors to specific posts via the search engines. So I added the Google Analytics code, that’s one action in itself and a very powerful one, and I adopted a more consciously search engine friendly writing style for a series of posts. The research programme ran for about six weeks but during that time I was also making other adjustments to the overall performance of the blog. So there is no way that I can attribute any increase in traffic as being entirely due to one specific action, but that is OK because my goal is to improve the reach of the blog, it isn’t to prove a point. Besides, when you are dealing with unknowns such as the Google ranking algorithm or the interactions between thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of casual web surfers then nothing is either constant or predictable. A page can drop from position number 5 on the first page of search results down to number 13 over the page for two days, and then return at position number 3. The amount of traffic thus fluctuates wildly for those few days with no action having been taken on my part. The totality of all the variables involved is unknowable in a complex adaptive system, but that doesn’t mean research is impossible. You can still prod and probe and gain actionable insights, that’s what action research is all about
Where Google Analytics helps is in the automatic generation of trend tracking graphs for multiple slices of data, which is just great for research purposes. I can look at the traffic which arrived via search engines for the period involved and see a nice upwardly moving path.
So some of my actions may be working well, and I can drill down further to visualise traffic for specific posts, see the most popular pages, aggregate data for individual keyphrases and then zoom back out to see the overall picture.
Those little saw teeth are spikes caused by StumbleUpon by the way. The temporary traffic increase from that route is fleeting and not sustained, but may pick up one or two more interested readers, you never know.
The optimised posts combined are steadily gaining attention according to the stats, but what are the limitation of this approach?
Limitations of Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides only quantitative data. For Action research to provide a full picture you need to collect qualitative data, which would means gathering narrative from the visitors and readers - not an easy task with distributed action research based around search engine traffic, but not impossible either. Any ideas posted in the comments to blog posts for example would count as valuable qualitative data. Watching over a friends shoulder as they search and surf is another way to gain insights as to some of the alternative habit which different people adopt. Then there is all the data in my RSS reader which comes in as a mixture of advice from subject experts and experiential narratives from fellow learners.
Reflection
Action Research requires a process of reflection between cycles. This prevents the process from running away on its own momentum, provides a check that events are moving in a direction which is in line with stated goals and values, and offers an opportunity to asl wider question which may reveal deeper insights leading to a positive change of direction for the action research project overall.
The graph of traffic via referral causes me to pause. In pursuing one goal, search engine traffic, am I leaving some previously regular readers behind. That’s a known risk, but I wonder to what extent there may be conflict between subtly optimising for search engine traffic and providing value for regular readers. I hope to have kept any such conflict to an absolute minimum, but what do you think? Can I realistically spend two months working on one type of traffic, then just switch over to a different focus for another period, perhaps engaging with regular readers more or attracting RSS subscribers. Or could it possibly be a better approach to try and combine everything at once, always considering every aspect?
data links
The four posts which have been attracting most search traffic are
couscous recipe
homemade scratter
what is bluetongue disease
theatre breaks in london
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
