Now I am not really a comic fan. That is one realm of geekdom which I haven’t much fallen into. (Although I do have some old copies of 2000 AD up in the loft that someone gave me once.) However, Lovelace and Babbage is different and I have been eagerly pouncing on new editions whenever (rather erratically) they appear.

Why? Well how could you resist stories that combine history, greek myth, steam punk, epic engineering, jokes about mathematics and literature, and extensive footnotes? Or a cast of characters that include, amongst others, Queen Victoria, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin, a whole host of romantic poets, and some flying monkeys? Not least the eponymous heroes, those early founders of the science of computing (and dynamic crime fighters), Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace?

Oh, did I mention the extensive footnotes?¹

If you have no idea what I am going on about, or if you haven’t even heard of Ada Lovelace or the Difference Engine, I suggest you begin your education here.

The pocket universe in which our two heroes fight crime was created, apparently by accident, by Sydney Padua for the 2009 Ada Lovelace Day. For this year, the really good news is that the web comic has been turned into an iPad app. I’ve downloaded and played with it today and my early verdict is that it is fabulous. It is this sort of thing that the iPad was invented for.

You can get the app here.

¹ Can you tell that I really love this stuff?

The pages available are:

• Recommended plugins
• Using custom menus
• Setting up your home page
• Home page image dimensions
• Using widgets

Normal service will resume shortly.

I hope…..

These provide a fascinating snapshot of how the journalistic profession and media organisations of all types are adapting to the challenge of social media.

• If you are interested in this sort of thing it is well worth watching in full.

What follows is a couple of things that stood out for me that I thought I should make a note of:

Cultural change within organisations

The first session looking at the cultural change needed for media organisations to adapt to social media gave these insights that I think are applicable to organisations outside the world of journalism:

Meg Pickard, Head of Digital Engagement at the Guardian talked about three areas of focus, a “holy trinity” that were critical to managing and supporting the integration of social media into an organisations work:

Products: what are the supporting new technologies, or packages of technologies, that are needed by the organisation. These products are either existing ones that can be embraced, new ones created in-house or ones developed by working with third parties.

People and skills: do people understand the possibilities and have the skills to make use of social media. She placed a great emphasis on education and training to equip staff with the knowledge thy need. Once they have acquired this they should then be trusted to use social media in an intelligent manner. In developing this emphasis on education and training she talked of a “sandwich” strategy, from above senior management have to provide leadership to say that this is important and that is OK for staff to engage with social media, from below opportunities need to be given for grass roots experimentation and enthusiasm.

Editorial proposition: how does social media help to tell better stories. Where does conservation and interactivity help us to achieve what we are trying to achieve. You must think through what the value of using social media is to your organisation.

I was also interested in the point made by Raju Narisetti of the Washington Post who emphasised that key to an organisations response to social media is the use of data. “Numbers are everything in our business” he said. Social media is able to provide clear data and the use of metrics is crucial in demonstrating the business benefits of using it. You can get support for the use of social media if you can use statistics to demonstrate what impact it has.

How social media is changing the behaviour and the habits of news consumers

I also found highly informative the presentation from Nic Newman from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism who was looking at the latest data on the behaviour of users of social media.

It shows, he says, that social media works to the benefit of mainstream news organisations. The different forms of social media are not a competitor to mainstream media. Instead the two are working together in complex ways to create a new ecology of news production and consumption. Often it is social media that is driving to traffic to news sites.

There is a common idea that stories are being generated in Twitter and then picked up by the mainstream media. However, the data shows that it is mainstream media that is driving the social media agenda and not the other way round.

Of great importance are the sites and online sources that generate a significant amount of the links and discussion found in social media. These are the ‘network nodes’ and they include a very strong presence from mainstream media organisation. But we are also seeing the rise of individual journalists and commentators as significant network nodes. He says that there is a real challenge for organisations to try and become one of these nodes. There is a “race for influence” to establish your brand or you as an individual as one of these hubs.

Social media is know becoming important for traffic building. People are finding news through social media. There is a rise in social discovery. People are finding new content through there use of social media. If there is a loser it seems to be search that is losing out. For the first time we are seeing evidence of the decline of search as a method of traffic generation.

His final point was, what I thought was the big unanswered question of the summit, that social media is disrupting the business models of news organisations. In particular the difficulty of using social media alongside the use of pay-walls to generate subscription revenue.

The three legged stool

Finally, I was interested in what Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had to say about how he saw his organisation. Increasingly they see themselves as a “three legged stool” made up of;

• Editorial
• Commercial
• Technology

Although he admitted that they were not strong enough in technology.

This rather precise figure has been calculated by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) who have done a statistical analysis of the impact that a move to AV would have on voting in the UK. As people prepare to vote in the referendum on AV on the 5th May it can be difficult to get a handle on the reasons for and against the change. I, along with others who favour a change to AV, would argue that moving to the new system gives more power to the ordinary voter. What NEF have tried to do in their research is to put a number on that increase in power.

They have calculated that a move to AV means an increase in the average power of UK voters from 0.285 of a vote to 0.352 of a vote (where a score of 1 is a fair vote). This means an increase in the number of very marginal seats from 81 to 125, an increase of 44 seats, and a reduction in the number of very-safe seats from 331 to 271 a reduction of 60 seats.

For Luton North AV would mean a change from 0.210 to 0.275.

For Luton South AV would mean a change from 0.236 to 0.308.

Both would mean an increase in voter power of 31% for Luton voters.

What does this tell us? Well if you accept the NEF analysis, and they are a very respected organisation so I see no reason not to, it shows that a move to AV would give more power to voters. It is still a long way short of a fully fair voting system – one where your vote has the full voting power of 1 vote! But it does increase voter power, in Luton by just under a third.

That 31% is not to be sniffed at and is as good enough as any reason to vote Yes in the referendum on May 5th.

If you go beyond the “lady with the lamp” myth making you will find the story of a highly determined and principled woman who used her fame, her connections, her research skills, her understanding of statistics, and the forcefulness of her personality to shape public opinion and change government policy. In fact she used skills and techniques that would be very familiar to any modern lobbyist or public affairs professional. As a result she not only transformed the British Army, but founded the modern profession of nursing and as a result is responsible for saving thousands, if not millions, of lives.

I was reminded of this by a brilliant programme in the BBC documentary series “The Beauty of Diagrams”.

The programme is still available to watch on iPlayer and I would recommend anyone interested in political and other forms of campaigning to watch it.

This tells the story of how Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and the use of graphics as tools in political campaigning. The programme is centered around her famous rose diagram that she designed to dramatically demonstrate how significant disease was as the cause of death amongst British soldiers in the Crimean War as opposed to other factors, and so persuade the government that lives could be saved with better sanitation in hospitals. No one before her had used this kind of diagram, a kind of pie chart that you can see below, in such a way.

The use of a diagram to make a political argument in this way was highly unusual at the time. Just one of the ways that Nightingale was innovative. But it is something that we, well Liberal Democrat activists at least, are much more familiar with today.

If you have ever included a bar chart on a Focus leaflet in an attempt to make clear and visual the concept that “so and so can’t win here”, although you probably didn’t know it, you have been directly following in Florence Nightingale’s footsteps.

Today I am making the WordPress theme that I have developed for Liberal Democrat websites available for download for free to party members.

I wrote the first version of this theme some time ago and have been using it without any real problems on the Luton Liberal Democrats website since before the General Election. One of the reasons blogging has been a bit light over the last few weeks has been that I have been revising and tidying up the code to make the theme ready to be released for other people to use.

For more information about the theme and to download all the theme’s files visit it’s home page:

• Lib Dem Aqua WordPress theme

I’ve called the theme “Lib Dem Aqua” as it aims to reflect the look and feel of the national party website and fit with the current Liberal Democrat branding by using an “aqua” colour palette.

Using an installation of WordPress, the Lib Dem Aqua theme, and selected plugins from the WordPress plugin directory; candidates, campaigners and local parties should have all they need to create and maintain an easy to use, flexible and professional looking online presence.

If you have a WordPress powered website why not download the theme, try it out, and let me know what you think?

I’ve only been vaguely following the major political events this week because I have been busy working on a new website for Bridget Fox for her to use in her slection campaign for the GLA list. I’ve just finished adding the final touches today and you can see the site at www.bridgetfox.org.uk.

This project involved setting up a new WordPress driven website, developing a new theme, adding a choice of plug-ins, before implementing the initial page structure and content.I am pleased with how the theme development went. It enabled me to refine some techniques and design concepts. It also reminded me of the frustration that Internet Explorer does not yet properly implement drop shadows and rounded corners in CSS. Which spoils the impact for anyone looking at the site using IE. Although it doesn’t really have an impact on the look of the website this was also my first attempt to use HTML5 techniques in anger.

The starting point for the development was the Toolbox theme which helped give me a head start with the necessary PHP code. It works very well as a base template and I would recommend it  for anyone thinking of doing their own theme development.

The theme’s colour scheme is based on my Lib Dem colour palette with the addition of more variations of grey. Which is something I will look again at using when revising my other Lib Dem related websites.

The new theme, which has the very unsurprising working title of ‘Bridget’, needs some further refinement, after which I may consider making it more freely available.

As part of an ongoing attempt to put my online world into some sort of order I have today refreshed the website for my company, Grit & Oyster Limited.

This website hadn’t been properly updated for quite a while. So it needed to be changed to reflect the current status of the business, given a more attractive look, and to be brought into line with current internet standards.

I also wanted to move it to WordPress as its platform for content management. This was not only to reflect the fact that a large part of  the work I am doing at the moment is developing WordPress themes, but also to provide greater flexibility in publishing content and highlighting some of the projects I have been working on.

As a temporary measure I have used the same theme that I have used for update to my personal website I did a few weeks ago. This is a temporary measure as I intend to develop a specific theme for the company website when work on other projects allows me.

I admit that it doesn’t look very exciting, but I intend to add some photo galleries and there will be new content as we get closer to next year’s local elections. I also hope to get one or two more people involved in updating it so that it isn’t just reliant on me and we can get a bit more regularly changing content.

The website is based on WordPress and uses a special WordPress theme for Liberal Democrat websites that I have written. I will be blogging a bit more about that in the next few weeks.

The address is: www.lutonlibdems.org.uk

This was a project that for a long time had badly needed doing and I am pleased to have finally sorted it. It will need a few tweaks here and there but I am happy with the result.

The idea of the site is an attempt to bring all my online activities together in one place.

The place where I will continue to blog will be here at ‘Strange Thoughts’ but  I have a number of roles and responsibilities in my life and the people I meet will usually know me through one or other of them. If any of them were to Google me I wanted them to be able to find a place where they could quickly get a a rounded picture of who I am. I also wanted them to be able to easily access the other online places they might be looking for, whether it is this blog, Twitter, Luton Lib Dems, or my company website.

I hope the new design and content will achieve this. If you feel inclined, check it out and let me know what you think here.

http://twitter.com/andymstrange/luton-south

If you spot any I’ve missed you can suggest them by commenting to this post.

The Twitter hashtag for Luton South is #LutonS (taken from this list http://bit.ly/GE2010).

The people behind the political ‘tweet’ aggregator Tweetminster are conducting an experiment to see whether “activity on Twitter correlates to electoral success”. They explain their experiment like this;

“Our inspiration for this experiment comes from last year’s General Election in Japan, when a group of software engineers and PhD graduates from Tokyo University undertook a study analysing the correlation between ‘online buzz’ and election results. The aim of the study was to assess if word-of-mouth mentions of candidates could help to predict which ones would be successful. The study found that in a majority of constituencies the most mentioned candidate won the seat ….

We thought it would be interesting to run a similar experiment to the Japanese study in the UK using Twitter. From now until the election we will be tracking the most mentioned (i.e. posts and conversations about) constituencies and candidates on Twitter and using this data we will try to map the correlation between buzz, word-of-mouth and the eventual election results through a predictive model.”

In their initial analysis they have identified a number of key battlegrounds defined as seats where the difference between mentions of candidates is 20% or less. They have included Luton South as one of a handful of seats where there is “the narrowest margins between the various parties contesting them”. Is this an indication of how competitive the seat has become and how hard the parties are campaigning?

You can follow Liberal Democrat candidate Qurban Hussain on Twitter.

Unconvinced by certain evangalists that it was the solution to almost everything and with a contrary desire to avoid following the herd I thought I could stay away from it indefinately. I was naive. It’s powerful pull was too strong.

Yes, I have signed up to Twitter.

You can find me at: http://twitter.com/andymstrange

To be fair I can see the logic of the service and how it can play a useful role in my ongoing project to simplify my online life.

Still it did take a stern talking to – thanks Helen – for me to realise that I would have to bow to the inevitable. I’ve just now got to start joining it up to my other online services.

“The blog of Andy Strange; lutonian, liberal activist and occasional geek.”

The first two descriptive terms are understandable and accurate. But what of the third? I confess to having a moment of doubt. Am I really an occasional geek? Perhaps I am actually an occasional nerd? What is the difference between the two?

I consulted the internet in order to help me to define my terms.

Unsurprisingly the internet disagreed with itself. However, it did seem to agree that both terms are associated with people of high intelligence who have an intense interest and knowledge of a particular subject or field of study. It also agreed that this was accompanied with a lack of social skills. Please note that I qualify each term with ‘occasional’ when applying them to myself.

However, it does seem that the term ‘geek’ is more often associated with an interest and knowledge of technology, especially computer technology. Which is what I was intending to convey.

So that’s all right then.

I did rather like the definition of ‘geek’ given by the Urban Dictionary;

“The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.”

Also I have learnt that, whether you are a geek or a nerd, the key things is not to be a ‘dork’!