An experiment with Storify, showing quite an interesting little spat between Labour peer John Prescott and the Sun over this credit card story. Unusually (perhaps even for the first time), the Twitter exchange directly led Prescott to refer the paper to the PCC.
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John Prescott is accused of using a governmental credit card to spend cash in an Australian casino during a Labour staff trip. This is widely reported on by a number of news outlets, including the Sun.
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Lord Prescott Used Taxpayers’ Money In Australian Casino On Procurement Card, Ministers Claim | Politics | Sky News
2:47pm UK, Thursday October 27, 2011 Figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government suggest Lord Prescott’s staf… -
Prescott staff spent taxpayers’ cash at casino
Documents show a government credit card was used to spend £456 at the Star City casino, £490 at a seafood restaurant and £75 at an aquari… -
Two months later, Prescott is cleared after it emerges that the card was cloned.
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“Inquiry clears @johnprescott over departmental credit card spending. £2,000 in transactions from cloned card. thisishullandeastriding.co…
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“Former DPM John Prescott cleared of misusing public credit card, officials revealed it was ‘cloned’ – Hull Daily Mail
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In his rebuttal on Twitter today, Prescott suggested the accusations came about after an “orchestrated” smear campaign.
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“Come on @ericpickles @grantshapps. What’s your response to Gus clearing me after your taxpayer-funded smear operation thisishullandeastriding.co…
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He also demanded answers from the Sun, which printed the story in October. The exchange is quite amusing.
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“Hello @sun_politics. As you printed @ericpickles & @grantshapps smear against me I trust you’ll print this thisishullandeastriding.co… #leveson
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“@johnprescott Merry xmas Prezza – it’s the season of goodwill, so drop all your angst!
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“@Sun_Politics So you’re refusing to correct a false smear? thisishullandeastriding.co… Forwarding your tweet to Lord Hunt at @ukpcc. Merry Xmas!
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“@johnprescott No smear Prezza, you spent lots of taxpayers money on a jolly Down Under in a casino. As we said tho, happy xmas.
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“@Sun_Politics Well done. You’ve repeated repeated the smear. I didn’t spend it. It wasn’t my card and I was cleared by Gus….
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“.@Sun_Politics Goes to show it’s business as usual at Wapping. At least I can raise this exchange during my #Leveson appearance next year
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“.@sun_politics For the record, who sent the last two tweets? Be good to have a name
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“@johnprescott You’ll also remember to tell #Leveson you admitted spending £400 on an Oz casino meal for your staff, won’t you big boy?
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“@Sun_Politics I’ll tell him it was a meal for 10 people – £40 per head- including Australian government officials. Another Sun distortion
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“@johnprescott Sounds like you all had a lot of fun. Thx for reconfirming our story, and so your point is…?
Filed under: Internet, Media | Tags: bill thompson, budget, charles arthuer, darren waters, g20, guardian, Journalism, justin williams, shane richmond, Social media, telegraph, twitter, twitterbitching, twitterfail, twitterfall, website
Ah, sweet proof that even the best of us are prone to the occasional FAIL, troll and snarkfest. First up in the Twitterbitching ring -
Charles Arthur v …the entire Telegraph web team
The Guardian was rubbing its liberal hands with glee after the Telegraph’s Budget homepage was spammed by Twitter-users merrily taking advantage of the #budget tag to appear on the site’s Twitterfall feed. The Guardian then went on to list its favourite spammers before the feed was eventually taken down….
….and then put back up. Rumour has it that the Telegraph now has monkeys (in fact, quite possibly my City colleagues who are currently working there) frantically filtering the tweets before they’re actually allowed onto the live feed – unsubstantiated as yet. Certainly the feed appears to have slowed down, which has not gone unnoticed by Guardian Tech editor Charles Arthur, who tweeted:
50 tweets with #budget for the past hour. I could do this faster than the Telegraph. I could *automate* this better than them. Guys, give up
You can read the response from Telegraph assistant web editor Justin Williams below. Miaow! The sniping played itself out over Twitter until BBC tech heavyweights Darren Waters and Bill Thompson eventually weighed in on Charles’ side. Rather sweetly, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond tweets, “It’s a snapshot of the conversation that’s going on around the Budget. Why is that so hard to figure out?” Because it’s “undirected and pointless” says Charles.
There is an interesting underlying debate here – Shane, Justin and co. seem to be entirely in favour of unfiltered conversation. Except when they have monkeys filtering it (hm). Charles and the Guardian crew lean towards using social media for journalistic purposes, but favouring ‘authoratative’ voices. Have a look at their G20 Twitterfall-style feed (actually using Scribblelive) by way of example. Rather than allowing all and sundry through with a #G20 tag, the Guardian only showed tweets from its own journalists and bloggers. Elitism, or a sensible way to avoid spam?
The Twitter fight, read from the bottom up.
UPDATE: A quick glance back at the Budget homepage shows the Twitterfall feed has been pulled off again. You can see a screenshot on the Guardian’s article, however. Ding ding ding!
Filed under: Internet, Social media, Technology | Tags: geeks, MUDs, online, twitter, warcraft, web 3.0
The internet jungle is full of predators these days, and it’s best making sure you’re at the top of the evolutionary scale before venturing into it. Are you predator or prey – or are you off the geek radar altogether?
Geek 1.0
The grandaddy of geeks, who used MS DOS and played Lemmings off a floppy disk – and that’s the whizzy ones who weren’t playing table-top role-play games like Dungeons and Dragons. Geek philosopher Douglas Adams knew what he was about when he said these people ‘still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea.’
There are very few female samples of geek 1.0, it being more of a hobby than a way of life. Geek 1.0 has moved with the times, in that he is now a 40 year old manchild more obsessed with Warcraft than painting his high-level elf warmage precisely the correct shade of red.
Primitive and pot-bellied he may be, geek 1.0 is still worth paying attention to. It’s old school graphics designers and coders like him who have created some of the most viral fantasy games on the market. And some slightly less viral ones which are nonetheless an excellent way of wasting 5 minutes. Sadly, he should have spent more time bringing up his kids properly, who have grown up to become…
Geek 2.0 
Just to wrench Chuck Palahniuk hideously out of context, this emo kid in the family tree is probably best described by Tyler Durden:
We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
At least, this is what 2.0 likes to think when he’s hideously overanalysing in his smelly hovel darkened bedroom. I should know – I am one. It’s only just become acceptable to confess to being socially challenged a 2.0 nerd, if your BO hasn’t given you away already. And even then, there are levels. You shouldn’t, for example, reveal that perhaps you didn’t spend your 90s childhood raving to Prodigy but in multi-user dungeons, which would mark you out as roughly the social equivalent of plankton.
You should also never, EVER admit to having been in a chat room. Even I would shun you.
When it comes to communication, 2.0 comes into his own as the inventor of the weblog, MySpace and Facebook. But there are drawbacks which haven’t yet been resolved. I, for example, have spent so many years communicating online that I now can’t think clearly when writing with a pen. No really, it’s a real disease. The mainstream press says so.
And now, 2.0 is in a state of crisis. Because suddenly there’s a cooler younger brother on the scene who goes by the name of…
Geek 3.0
Social life: I haz it, says 3.0, sashaying about with an iPhone and an ego to rival that really talentless guy from Razorlight. Because 3.0 uses the net to splat you with his opinions where possible. In any format possible. And he’s absolutely certain you’ll want to know the depths of profundity he can achieve in a mere 140 characters.
Not that a 2.0 like me is bitter or hypocritical in any way. But it’s a little disconcerting to see 3.0 journalists treading all over what should be your territory, worshipping the non-event that is Second Coming Life. And even more disconcerting to have your users talk back at you.
But I are serious cat, and this is a serious blog. Beautiful as interaction between writer and reader is, there are implications of 3.0 reporting which sees the spread of information to the general populace at breathtaking speed. And live blogging about terrorism even from the highest quality dailies risks making news into entertainment. At what point does constantly refreshing for an updated death toll become less about accuracy and more about the thrill of immediacy?
But there is no more terrifying evidence of 3.0 dialogue between content-provider and content-consumer than on YouTube. I mean, you really want to know exactly what kind of animal the online public is? Just go to any YouTube video and read the comments underneath. That’s the voice of the future, my fellow geeks. Phear.
Filed under: Social media | Tags: digital media, generation y, Social media, twitter
You know those couples who suck face on London Underground? That’s the frankly revolting way in which the media behaves with social technology. Morbid fascination with MMORPG World of Warcraft was swiftly followed by a brief flirtation with LolCatz until finally we married Facebook. This is a solid partnership occasionally supplemented with liasons with Second Life and, bizarrely, Rick Astley. Threatening, however, to topple Facebook in novel meeja communications came Twitter.
Twitter is the kind of heady midlife-crisis romance which excuses any idiocy, including using ‘tweet’ as a verb.
Twitter started off as quite a nice idea. So did communism. Usability News puzzled over its pointlessness, while New Scientist blogger Will Knight sums it up thus:
Twitter lets you post very short messages (140 characters or less) to describe what you’re currently up to. You can let friends know – or just announce it to no-one in particular. And you can post and receive messages via email, IM and even a mobile.
Mobile is the key word here. Short of clicking through 20 friends in your phone’s address book, what other way is there to hint at your unbearable loneliness get people to the pub en masse? Awesome device.
Naturally I caved. No more unbearable loneliness multiple texts! I used Twitter as a way of creating in-jokes with a select group of people I pretty much saw every day anyway. But its main appeal was vanity, said InformationWeek:
Twitter provides a public billboard for users’ interior monologues.
Kind of like an online version of writing on the wall, in fact. So much so that Obama has 111,371 online followers and McCain has…4,512. Make of that what you will.
But Twitter sounded its own death knell when it announced that status updates made online would no longer be delivered to followers’ inboxes – no longer mobile, in short:
Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.
Oh. So…back to unbearable loneliness mass texting to get people to the pub. That’s not to say you can’t twat tweet online still – but there’s no immediate thrill of someone texting back. So now, as far as I can see, Twitter is almost entirely useless. Its mobility was one of the few things which appealed to its fast-paced users – there’s nothing here which can’t be offered by a simple Facebook status update.
Twitter fails to cope with user demand. Again.
