It would be a brave person indeed to suggest that the economy is in anything other than an extremely unhealthy condition at the moment. But glancing over the Mail's article on national debt today (shan't link), it's pretty clear that the sizes of the circles don't correspond to the numbers in them. If they did, according to my rudimentary calculations, the 2009 national debt would be £1.257 trillion rather than the comparatively healthy £829 billion. And in the current situation, you might as well call that good news.


2007 circle width: 430 px - relative monetary value to scale: £621billion
2008 circle width: 484 px - relative monetary value to scale: £786 billion
2009 circle width: 623 px - relative monetary value to scale: £1.257 trillion

Since I got Google Wave yesterday, I've been encouraged by a few people to write a quick assessment of the messaging service its inventors see as 'the future of email'. With its focus on real-time communication and collaboration, there's just one problem; there's noone I know on it to communicate with.

At the moment, users are early adopters - the majority of whom will have either registered interest on the Wave invite site or begged their friends to let them in. As such the majority of Wave action right now is people talking about Wave itself. Self-reflexivity is no new problem for social media, and far be it from me to criticise a blossoming online communication medium, it's just that now the friend who invited me has gone on holiday, I'm down to one contact. I could start a public wave with people I don't know but... what would I collaborate with them on? and would I want to?

At first glance, the thinking behind Wave's limited release is great; to generate a buzz built around exclusivity excites, frustrates and, eventually, increases the likelihood of widespread uptake when the floodgates open. Everyone's favourite music streaming Spotify was released invite-only initially, to a highly limited group of users who evangelised sufficiently well for it to become ubiquitous amongst young music-lovers (at least those in the countries it's rolled out in). But the success of that campaign was built on the fact that as an experience, using Spotify can be almost as fulfilling individually as when you're sharing playlists with friends. Wave, on the other hand, is fundamentally social, and for that it suffers from this kind of promotion.

(Image via Twitter)

As America responded to last night's attack at Fort Hood carried out by Malik Nadal Hasan, Twitter once again showed its value as a tool for breaking news with the updates of "Tearah Moore", who tweeted pics and updates from inside the camp, before being shut down after roughly an hour. 

Her account is now locked, but I've reconstructed the most recent tweets here from people rebroadcasting her updates using their own accounts. Thanks to Twitter's lax indexing policy for older tweets, messages before the first posted below are no longer available to view.


MissTearah's updates raise some major ethical questions about the appropriateness of using Twitter in such situations where others' security might be at risk, as discussions on the TwitPic site used to post the picture above showed; while some commenters questioned whether legal restrictions (HIPAA in particular) should prevent the pictures being posted, others debated the moral implications of the postings, with one commenter saying "We are ALREADY freaking out and this shit just makes it worse".

While Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight is getting all the headlines, one musician has chosen today to highlight another way in which the BNP is attempting to hijack the mainstream media in order to create the veneer of respectability necessary for the party to continue its worrying growth as a political force in this country.

Chris Wood, Radio 2's Folk Singer of the Year, has today released to the Folk Against Fascism campaign his song "Spitfires" (available to stream and download below), a track he penned in response to the BNP's use of British military iconography on a campaign leaflet dropped in to his Kent home. The folk community are particularly concerned by the BNP, ever since Griffin gave them the dubious endorsement of playing folk music on his online radio show. According to campaign group Folk Against Fascism, "the BNP’s Activists and Organisers Handbook encourages its members to get involved in the folk scene". They add that "the BNP want to take our music, want to twist it into something it isn’t; something exclusive, not inclusive. We must not let them. "

I asked Chris some questions about folk's reaction to the BNP and the song. In many ways, folk music and the Spitfires Chris sings about have in common exactly the sense of British tradition nationalist groups tend to draw on in their efforts to legitimise their political views by association. Drawing attention to these cultural misappropriations might well be our best bet at deconstructing the alignments Griffin and co have been working so hard to create.

What's been the reaction amongst the folk community towards Nick Griffin's folk radio show?

I'm not a particularly 'Folk Community" type of guy but I guess they are somewhere between outraged and dismayed.

Why do you think Griffin and the BNP have targeted folk music particularly?

There is precedent, in the Tutsi and Hutu tribal massacres traditional songs were given new words and powerful 'Oi' beats. Likewise Serbia and, of course, the German population have not felt able to go anywhere near their own folk music until very recently. We have to accept though that the British establishment has constantly ridiculed or ignored England's indigenous music and dance for generations, the BNP may just see it as 'up for grabs'.

Is it right that the BBC have invited the BNP on Question Time tonight?

Absolutely. Like it or not, Nick Griffin is an elected representative of a legitimate political organisation and as such should be called upon to face the public and his peers. Our political elite have become so adept at spinning us whatever froth they are peddling they assume we are naive enough to succumb to Mr Griffin's argument, whatever it is. Who knows, they might be right but may I quote from a folk song..?

"Awake arise you drowsy sleeper, awake arise arise it's almost day, no time to lie no time to slumber, no time to dream your life away."

I'll be singing that at a gig in Clerkenwell tonight so I'll have to miss the program.

How are Folk Against Fascism working to dissuade the BNP from using folk to further their political aims?

I think Folk Against Fascism are attempting to counter ignorance and naïvety by raising awareness of just what folk music is. The greatest composer who ever lived was ANON: Britain's songs and the ritual calendar represent the freely given gift of our ancestors. Folk Against Fascism are trying to demonstrate that this music is too rich, too variegated and far too sophisticated for any organisation to appropriate.

How did you come to write Spitfires?

The song was started before the European elections took place [in which Griffin gained a seat in the European parliament]. As a native of Kent I have grown up with the sound of the Manston Spitfire, just about every summer of my life I have seen it fly out to do some air show or other. I was at my desk when it flew across my back garden in late May, the first verse just came straight out of the pen. The question was how would the song be finished. It was about two months later when the BNP leaflet flopped onto my doormat that I knew exactly what the song needed to say. I have subsequently been told that the spitfire pictured on the BNP leaflet was from a Polish squadron"
 
Right-click here and click "Save target/link as..." to download, and stream below.

For a Northerner-in-exile like myself, The Cribs' gig last night at the Kentish Town Forum was a peculiarly homely experience, to the extent that flying plastic pint glasses and pogoing parkas can be homely. My full review of Wakefield's finest sons and their newest member, guitar prodigy Johnny Marr, should be online in the next few days, but in the meantime those who couldn't it make it to any of the dates on this last tour can listen to the setlist reconstructed on Spotify here.









Setlist:

We were aborted
Hey scenesters!
I'm a realist
Emasculate me
Last year's snow
Cheat on me
We share the same skies
Girls like mystery
We can no longer cheat you
Direction
Hari kari
Save your secrets
Our bovine public
Another number
Ignore the ignorant
Be safe
Mirror kissers
Men's needs
City of bugs

What have "Bottle Up and Explode" by Elliott Smith, "Roller Coaster of Love" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and David Byrne's giant clunking Camden Roundhouse installation got in common? They all feature members of Thom Yorke's new supergroup, due to grace LA's Echoplex tonight for a gig shrouded in mystery, and revealed to the world today on Radiohead blog DeadAirSpace. According to twentyfourbit, the gig will include Yorke's "entire solo album, The Eraser, four new songs, and one Radiohead tune for good measure". In Yorke's own words, it'll be "total chaos and its kind of a rehearsal but .. if you are near by…". Here's the line-up in full:

Joey Waronker

Drummed on Elliott Smith's "Bottle Up and Explode" and "Bled White", so presumably no stranger to helping out a miserablist genius, Waronker has also worked with Beck, Smashing Pumpkins and REM; it's conjecture, but he could well have first met Yorke when REM's instrumentalists, including Waronker, performed with Thom at the Tibetan Freedom Concert back in 1998.

Mauro Refosco

Brazilian Refosco has been performing with David Byrne since 1994, as well as doing some soundtrack work, and playing with his main project Forro In The Dark, a group who specialise in forró, a genre they call "the hip-swiveling, dancefloor-filling, rural party music of Brazil’s northeastern states". Sounds right up Thom's street, then.

Flea

Michael Peter Balzary to his friends, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers bass player is better known to the world under his insect-inspired stage name. I'll leave the consternation over his suitability at performing with Yorke to the rest of the blogosphere.

Nigel Godrich

The veteran Radiohead producer has been spotted playing guitar on multiple occasions for a number of high profile acts, including , ahem, Zero 7.

Will it work? Who's to know - I for one, will be scouring YouTube for clues come tomorrow afternoon.

Industry gigs are always strange events, particularly for bands who are in the ascendancy. Noah and the Whale, who I saw at the Hospital Club on Friday for a Mercury Music Session gig, struggled more than most to handle the unique challenge of playing to a crowd who haven't paid to be there.


The first "webisode" of their ambitious online film/music project is below.

 ...comes from page 5 of the Metro;

Update: Apparently the video is not official.

For those of us who rate 'Eraser' above 'In Rainbows', it's nice to see Thom Yorke returning to his glitchy electro solo career for new song "The Hollow Earth", the video for which was released to the world on YouTube this weekend. Featuring the talents of the mysterious and disappointingly posh graffiti artist Banksy and US filmmaker Raymond Salvatore Harmon, it's all a bit fast for a Monday afternoon. No matter;



The predictably gloomiy-sounding forthcoming album "Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses" is available to order from waste.com here. On the subject of Mr. Harmon, if you ever wondered why Wikipedia shouldn't let fans edit their favourite artists' pages, have a look at this. 

"So is folk now, like, cool with the kids?", I heard someone ask on my way out of last night's astonishing Mumford & Sons show at Scala. As questions go, it was hardly the sharpest. I guess you could expand it out to "can one band re-popularise an entire genre?", and start trying to examine what the real effect of such a great show could be.

Of course, folk has never really gone away, and Mumford & Sons are just the latest exponents of the genre. But it's true that ever since I first heard of Mumford, on one of Indy trendsetter Larry Ryan's infamously ahead-of-the-curve Barometer playlists for the paper months back, they've seemed to go from strength to strength, and last night's gig was the culmination of what has obviously been years of hard work. Suggestions (from Twitter's running commentary on last night's show) that they'll be in the running for next year's Mercury Prize hardly seem overly optimistic, even considering that forthcoming album, "Sigh No More" isn't out until October 5.

The set was brisk in a way that folk music rarely achieves, and the hour flew by in a whirl of horns, piano, acoustic guitars and double bass, with Marcus Mumford showing remarkable coordination in his ability to strum away and kick a bass and tambourine combo simultaneously (evidence here). Even in King Cross' painfully grimy Scala, there was something clear and fantastic about the whole thing. Most people just stared transfixed, with Marcus taking the time to praise everyone for their attentiveness. By refusing to finish with "Little Lion Man" (video below ), which has been huge ever since Zane Lowe made it his 'Hottest Record In The World', they showed that they're not willing to fit their set into the ordinary mold, which was nice. Last week, I saw La Roux at the same venue, and my friend correctly predicted the running order of their entire set; often it's better to be surprised.

So, a bright future beckons for the third group from the London folk clique that's already brought us Laura Marling and the now-quite-gloomy Noah and the Whale. And folk may now be, like, cool with the kids.

Casey, Crystal, Callum and Connor, watch out. Your names, along with Chelsea, Courtney and Chardonnay, are on the list of those most suspected of bad behaviour by English teachers in a survey of three thousand, conducted by a childcare website with some kind of strange bent against the letter C. In fact, the only name to break into the top three names for misbehavers which didn't begin with C was Jack, which, coincidentally, was also revealed as the most popular baby name for boys today for the 15th time in a row.

This is a matter of some trepidation for someone who was named Jack a decade before it hit the top spot, back when it was still underground. Now, whenever I'm introduced to a child bearing this simple, informal version of John, with its Middle English roots as 'Janken', I'll shudder to think of the socio-political implications of all of these little hell-raisers running around, sullying my good name with their miscreant antics.

But why, in this strange and unique instance, have popularity and infamy gone hand in hand? My guess is that ubiquity has ruined it, so that, just as a few too may strokes of a writer's pen can turn poetry into cliche, so a lack of originality can result in a formerly great name becoming more common than Tom, Dick or Harry and similarly worn-out. Everyone knows unimaginative people are bad people - and unimaginative parents, it follows, are bad parents.

There's also the theory that the current crop of celebrity Jacks just aren't up to the task as role models as their namesakes of days-gone-by (I'm looking at you, Tweed), but I'll discuss that in brief in tomorrow's paper. For now, it's time to come to terms with the fact that not only is there all the furore with Jack - as today's results indicate, Riley is on the way up too.

Magazine at the Royal Festival Hall last night was a strange gig: a crowd of aging musical aristocracy, a post-punk revival 28 years in the making and, perhaps strangest of all, everyone was sat down until the last three songs.

After that, Howard Devoto issued a stirring call-to-arms for all the aging punks out there and there was some brilliant dad-dancing, and even some pogoing. For any fans who couldn't be there, here's a playlist of the band's set, which started with 'The Correct Use Of Soap' and expanded in the second half to include material from 'Real Life' and elsewhere - but no 'Shot by both sides', which I don't think was such a terrible decision what with it being quite wrongly the only thing that ever gets played. My full review should be online and in the paper in the next few days.


1. Because You're Frightened
2. Model Worker
3. I'm a Party
4. You never knew me
5. Philadelphia
6. I want to burn again
7. Thank you (falettinme be mice elf again)
8. Sweetheart Contract
9. Stuck
10. A Song from under the floorboards

INTERVAL

11. The Book
12. Twenty Years Ago
13. Upside Down
14. Parade
15. Rhythm of Cruelty
16. Permafrost
17. The Light Pours out of me
18. Definitive Gaze
19. Give me everything

Listen to the set on Spotify

Though it seems like we're on the cusp of widespread uptake, in actual fact wireless electricity has been around for more than a century - the tragic tale of the Wardenclyffe Tower is worth a read, and so are some of Russian pioneer Nikola Tesla's writings on the subject. Still, this video from TED is worth a watch, if only to see modern day applications like flat-screen televisions and mobile phones.


And, as if that wasn't enough science/technology crossover news for the day, have a look at this new alarm clock which measures where you are in your sleep pattern and wakes you up according to when will be healthiest for you.

For this week's Arts and Books playlist, I contributed a suggestion - Fanfarlo's cover of the excellent Smashing Pumpkins song "We only come out at night" (original here) from the epic 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'. Here's the full video - 



And while we're talking bizarre covers, it'd be remiss not to mention Coldplay frontman Chris Martin's attempt to channel the Beastie Boys at the recent All Points West festival. Intended as a tribute to BB member Adam Yauch, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, Martin made a solid attempt at 'Fight for your right'; a solid attempt, that is, for someone who looks like he wouldn't know a party if it spiked his drink, stole his wallet and left him tied to a lamppost in rural France.



And, for those of who still haven't had enough of my musical blatherings, here's another short playlist, entitled 'I don't like Fridays' - Click here to launch in the ever-wonderful Spotify (ever-so-slightly-less-wonderful since it's come out that they've had record labels as silent partners since their formation)

With the BBC under sustained assault, their move last week to allow limited syndication of their video content to four national newspaper websites (including The Independent, here, for example) was greeted with a healthy measure of cynicism by media commentators who wrote off the move as an attempt to distract from the uncompetitive advantage the Beeb receives in the form of tax-payer funding. But what has received far less coverage, in the UK at least, is the latest skirmish in the ongoing guerilla war that's been waged by American newspaper co-operative Associated Press on those who share their content on almost exactly the same issue.

In essence the AP and the BBC, two journalistic monoliths of the modern media age, are wrestling with the same problem; how to control access to the wealth of expensive content they produce everyday. And while the BBC is a state sector institution, the AP ('the world's oldest newsgathering organisation', although it's probably best not to ask the exact age) is a co-operative of American newspapers who earn money selling their collective reporting skills to other outlets around the world. But the news agency has found itself the subject of mockery from the blogosphere for their badly-implemented new service for charging users for using copyrighted material. As James Grimmelmann found, the service, designed to charge users who want to pay to reproduce AP-copyrighted material on their blogs, fails to differentiate between text from the actual article and any other text, AP or not. It was thus that he managed to be charged $12.50 for the privilege of quoting Thomas Jefferson's famous correspondence with Isaac McPherson regarding the ridiculousness of copyright rules (oh, the irony).

While there's nothing clever about convincing a website to rip you off through your own misuse - plenty of people manage to do that without even trying - what is more relevant is that such poor checks and measures undermine the entire system of attribution AP is trying to put into place. AP's crusade against those who would seek to use their headlines has previously targeted everyone from bloggers to news aggregator sites, as well as Twitter and collections of links like the Drudge Retort (who it started legal action against last year, before a quick about-face by AP vice president and strategy director Jim Kennedy). They've made their fair share of mis-steps in this crusade, none worse, perhaps, than sending out a cease-and-desist letter to a radio station (itself an AP affiliate) for embedding videos from YouTube which AP uploaded and selected to allow embedding for themselves.

While Messrs Arrington and Schonfeld's argument that the issue is one of outdated business models is perhaps one of the more grave opinions voiced in the debate, it's worth listening to, even though it comes from a blog which has decided to protest the problem by pretending the Associated Press doesn't exist. With news websites desperate for copy as soon as possible after an event has happened (and often willing to pay for it) on one side, and aggregators and bloggers comparably keen for fast, raw news of the kind AP offers on the other, their real dilemma is that they are now simultaneously more in demand, and more at risk, than ever.

It's an inevitability in life that, just like buttered toast always lands upside-down, there will never be quite enough space in a feature to fit in everything pertinent to whatever it is you're discussing. Such was the case with my 'Rise of the Androids' article from today's paper.

Here are a few topics which didn't make it in:

Flash

The HTC Hero has Flash, the iPhone does not. Flash has become very important to the internet, not just for epilepsy-inducing viagra adverts, but also as a tool for web developers to let their imaginations off the leash. Sure, things are moving away from Flash in general, but still - in-browser Space Invaders on your phone? Who doesn't want that? For web addicts (and most smartphone users are) this could easily be a deal-breaker, especially with the Hero garnering extreme praise from the 'mobile community' (as in tech reviewers, not travellers).

Market

I mentioned it in the piece, but it's worth taking a moment to acknowledge that a lot of developers are unhappy with Android's App Store equivalent, the Market, paticularly with its lack of a searchable online interface. Such is the frustration that one developer I spoke to, Al Sutton, has created his own as an alternative, Andappstore. There are obvious limitations; one thing Anthony House from Google told me is that, like wishing to a genie for more wishes, 'the only application you can't put in the market is another market'. To this extent, Android can limit the potential for competition between new markets and the original one - and while there's no set timeframe, it sounds like Google are working hard on changes following complaints not just from consumers, but also from employees, who all received the Android G1 for Christmas last year. Beats a piece of coal.

Chrome OS

When Google announced their new operating system last week, (over which I perhaps got a little too excited) you'd have been forgiven for wondering whether what they were describing wasn't basically Android. They even mentioned netbooks in their blog post , an area previously presumed to be Android's for the taking. So why the crossover? Firstly, it's apparently not down to scaleability, as some have suggested. The difference between them is, I think, and from what I've heard, the extent to which the web is central to the experience - with Android it can't be essential because mobiles still spend a lot of time without 3G coverage (especially in Wales). Chrome OS is going to be totally web-centric from what I can gather, which leads us to the last point...

The Cloud

It's a sub-point really, but with Google investing heavily in cloud-computing, whereby all the minutiae of our daily word-processing/photo-uploading/crappy-powerpoint-making (and everything else) is handled centrally by giant server farms (possibly in the sea), Android, with its downloadable apps which can run while the device is offline, is in a way curiously old-fashioned. Chrome OS shows the direction Google wants to go in as far as it will attempt to make cloud computing the norm, but it'll be a long while before mobile networks are ready for the data demands of doing everything online. So, with the claim made last week by Vic Gundotra, Google’s engineering vice president that the "the browser...will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing”, it could be that the future of the Android platform doesn't lie in the much-maligned Market at all, but in the browser, which is after all made of the same building blocks as Chrome.

Ok, I'm taking my geek hat off now.

Want to see which nations have the worst teeth? Where in the world has the lowest fertility rate? How about plotting those two factors against each other? Gapminder, a statistic visualisation tool from the non-profit Gapminder Foundation, is a mind-bendingly clever tool for showing the interplay of all manner of different international socioeconomic indicators over the past 200 years, including life expectancy, national debt, poverty and education levels. Brits can take heart from the smooth ascending lines of good health which begin with the formation of the NHS and run to the modern day.

From micopayments to online giveaway, from retiring paper editions to reinvesting in printing presses, there have been a fair few mad ideas aired in the great debate about the future of newspapers (or as the blogosphere so affectionately refers to it, 'the death spiral'). Just when you thought you'd heard it all, someone in Russia came up with this bright idea:



God only knows how you're expected to do the crossword, but still: ten points for innovation.

(via EnglishRussia)

It had been a bad news week for Google, with a big ruling on book search that might cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, the world's biggest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia closing down rumours that Google's Android would appear on its new phones and, perhaps worst of all for the insanely wealthy multinational corporation, our own Rhodri Marsden questioning the viability of YouTube, as if the prestige of having 20 hours of nutty cats and Mentos and coke explosions uploaded every minute wouldn't be enough to keep any business afloat.

So how better to respond to this trifecta of negativity than to announce you're about to turn the world of computing on his head, dazzling geeks everywhere and infuriating everyone's favourite Redmond-based software billionaire in the process? With the appearance of 'Chrome OS', Google's new operating system, the tech world is gearing up for a year or so of speculation about the future of the industry, followed by the release, and with it the distinct possibility that the dominance of Microsoft's Windows might be seriously challenged for the first time in a long time.

For anyone intrigued about what the news might mean in terms of how computers will look in a few years, your first port-of-call should be the Google Chrome download site. Since it's release last year, Google's web browser has kicked Internet Explorer to the curb for speed and security as well as looks, and even the ever-popular Mozilla Firefox doesn't quite measure up, for my money. It's within Chrome, with it's flashy blue tabs and big user-friendly buttons, that you'll be able to run programs (Some both on and offline, via Google Gears). For a handy five point rundown of the implications read this on Wired, but to surmise here, it will be -

Secure - In the way Macs don't have viruses, I guess

Free - Because it's built on software (Linux) developed by utopian communities of super-geeks in their spare time rather than Microsoft's corporate boffins, and because free is Google's philosophy, whatever the economics.

Simple - Google's announcement says things will just work. So there.

Bloody fast - Because I guess there was only so much of their lives Googlers could spend watching computers boot up before they contemplated making an alternative for the masses.

While it'll prompt plenty of head-scratching from people who've fallen for Android, Google's mobile operating system which is built to do pretty much the same job as the new Chrome OS, for the majority of people this is great news. Most people haven't even realised how bad Microsoft Windows has become, because there hasn't been a viable alternative (quiet, Linux users, we've been over this). Now, that's all about to change.