Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

MeeTimer and myware and SQLite

Posted by Roo - 31/03/09 at 11:03:06 pm

I’m interested in the idea of self-interested self-surveillance. Long before we had PMOG (the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, now called The Nethernet) to make a game of it, Seth Goldstein was calling the idea ‘myware’ and building the (short-lived) AttentionTrust site. As Fred Wilson said at the time, “If someone is going to spy on you, it’s probably best if its you.”

With that in mind, I installed MeeTimer over the weekend. It’s a Firefox plugin which…

records where you spend your time online. It does it in a rather useful way, by allowing you to group websites into activities … so you can make sense of where your time is going. Finally, it accumulates time spent on a site over the course of a day…

I’ve been using it for 3 days and it’s giving some interesting food for thought.

You can even optionally set up ‘tab warnings’ on specific groups (sites you’ve labeled ‘Procrastination’, say) which will pop up with a nice overlay telling you exactly how much time you’ve wasted in this site, and others in the same category (though allows you to click through and ignore the warning just this once or for the current browsing session if you still want to). I’m already finding this feature useful on the handful sites whose feed I’m subscribed to but for some reason still find myself visiting out of habit. (For me, it’s Waxy links and Boing Boing. I love them, but I’d rather be reminded to enjoy them as part of my feed reading routine rather than browsing out of habit. I bet you have your own which make you ask is this really what you want to be doing right now?). A little reminder is really useful for habit-breaking here.

Mostly MeeTimer is just quietly keeping track of a bunch of per-site accumulators, cleverly based on whether Firefox has focus and which is the currently active tab. The results are already interesting. I realised that I was spending a bit less time on Twitter and Flickr, and a bit more time on work webmail, than I thought.

This is all very well, but I want more. Specifically, I wanted to get at the data. Not just the accumulated weekly/daily/monthly (etc) totals and averages, but the number of visits to each site per day. The raw visits. In as much detail as possible. I want CSV exports, or an API, or something. If I’m spending a daily average of 21 minutes on Twitter, how many visits comprise that time? MeeTimer simply doesn’t tell me.

Or does it?

Digging around my Firefox profile, I find a very interesting file at /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/{profile-id}/meetimer.sqlite. Ooh, I bet I know what that is. So I open up SQLite and start poking.

Sorry. It’s about to get a bit dull from here on in. Unless you get excited about the idea of being able to manipulate this data you’ll probably want to scroll down to the end. Honestly, I won’t mind.

They’ve gone? Right. Let’s get hacking.

$ sqlite
SQLite version 3.6.12
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> .restore meetimer.sqlite
sqlite> .tables
deterrent_stats  groups           log
deterrentlinks   groups_urls      url_maps
deterrents       ignored_urls     urls

Excellent. We’ve got tables with sensible names and everything. Let’s see what log looks like.

sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> select * from log limit 3;
url_id|startdate|duration|day|week
4|1238324612508|3|200987|200913
5|1238324617244|44|200987|200913
6|1238324647668|17|200987|200913
sqlite> select * from urls limit 3;
id|url
1|mail.google.com
2|www.google.com
3|www.google.co.uk

Lovely. Easy enough then. The groups and groups_urls tables do what you’d expect too. For now, let’s make url_id more meaningful by doing a join with the url table.

sqlite> select
  url_id, duration, day, week, url
from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
limit 5;
url_id|duration|day|week|url
4|3|200987|200913|google.co.uk
8|40|200987|200913|meetimer.productivefirefox.com
4|16|200987|200913|google.co.uk
11|10|200987|200913|technorati.com
12|14|200987|200913|google.com/reader/

What if we wanted to show the number of visits, the total duration, and the maximum length of duration for visits to Twitter…

sqlite> select
  count(url_id), sum(duration), max(duration), url
from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
where url = 'twitter.com';
count(url_id)|sum(duration)|max(duration)|url
34|2712|455|twitter.com

Excellent. I wonder what the top seven URLs when ordered by the number of visits?

sqlite> select
  url_id, count(url_id), sum(duration), max(duration), day, week, url
from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
group by url
order by count(url_id) desc
limit 7;
url_id|count(url_id)|sum(duration)|max(duration)|day|week|url
9|34|2712|455|200989|200914|twitter.com
10|30|1075|249|200989|200914|search.twitter.com
1|22|2505|928|200989|200914|mail.google.com
4|20|206|57|200989|200914|google.co.uk
17|18|476|114|200989|200914|flickr.com
21|10|2480|2125|200989|200914|bbc.co.uk
39|8|13152|10212|200989|200914|webmail.bbc.co.uk

Twitter, with 34 visits. Sheesh. And for comparison, the top 7 sites by total duration of visit?

sqlite> select
  url_id, count(url_id), sum(duration), max(duration), day, week, url
from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
group by url
order by sum(duration) desc
limit 5;
url_id|count(url_id)|sum(duration)|max(duration)|day|week|url
39|8|13152|10212|200989|200914|webmail.bbc.co.uk
9|34|2712|455|200989|200914|twitter.com
1|22|2505|928|200989|200914|mail.google.com
21|10|2480|2125|200989|200914|bbc.co.uk
12|6|1355|633|200989|200914|google.com/reader/

13152 seconds (3.6 hours) on my work webmail between Sunday morning and Wednesday aftenoon. And all done in 8 visits. Yuck.

Ok. Let’s start thinking about daily summaries. Grouping by day, and then by URL (since I’m not very good at SQL, and don’t know how to limit it to 5 per day, I’ll just manually snip out all but the top 5 for each day for now)…

sqlite> select
  url_id, count(url_id), sum(duration), max(duration), day, url from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
group by day, url
order by day, sum(duration) desc;
url_id|count(url_id)|sum(duration)|max(duration)|day|url
1|2|306|228|200987|mail.google.com
9|6|296|217|200987|twitter.com
12|2|225|211|200987|google.com/reader/
28|1|128|128|200987|hunch.com
21|1|66|66|200987|bbc.co.uk
[...]
39|3|10222|10212|200988|webmail.bbc.co.uk
21|3|2155|2125|200988|bbc.co.uk
9|18|1494|235|200988|twitter.com
1|12|1003|185|200988|mail.google.com
10|14|777|249|200988|search.twitter.com
[...]
39|5|2930|2667|200989|webmail.bbc.co.uk
1|8|1196|928|200989|mail.google.com
9|10|922|455|200989|twitter.com
12|1|394|394|200989|google.com/reader/
21|6|259|151|200989|bbc.co.uk
[...]

And returning to the original question of just how many visits do I make to Twitter

sqlite> select
  count(url_id) as visits,
  round(sum(duration) / 60.0, 2) as total,
  round(max(duration) / 60.0, 2) as longest
from log
left join urls on log.url_id=urls.id
where url = 'twitter.com'
group by day
order by day;
visits|total|longest
6|4.93|3.62
18|24.9|3.92
10|15.37|7.58

So it seems that on Sunday I made 6 visits for a total of about 5 minutes and a single longest session of 3 and a half minutes. On Monday it was 18 visits for a total of 25 minutes including one session of nearly 4 minutes, while today, 10 visits so far (including one of over 7 minutes) have already added up to over 15 minutes.

.mode csv

in SQLite is handy too, because it changes that list format to look like

visits,total,longest
6,4.93,3.62
18,24.9,3.92
10,15.37,7.58

so it’s trivial to open it in a spreadsheet.

Even better will be something cunning and programmatic. Maybe in PHP or Ruby or something. Even this exploratory manual approach is fun though. It will obviously be better once I’ve built up a bit more history but now I know that MeeTimer is storing my data in a way that I can access it, I’m even more excited about it. Thanks, MeeTimer. You rock.

Apprentice + Twitter = data flood

Posted by Roo - 26/03/09 at 09:03:16 am

Series 5 of The Apprentice started on BBC One last night. Wondering what the web would be saying about it, I enjoyed the two-screen experience by watching the programme on TV while also looking down at a laptop on my lap with tabs open on Anna Pickard’s live blog on the Guardian, the Apprentice message board, and, of course, Twitter.

Initially, I thought I’d be able to regularly search to keep an eye on people using the word apprentice, or the #apprentice tag. (Of course, searching for the word ‘apprentice’ gives both, so what’s with the fuss around hashtags? Surely the ultimate tag is one you use anyway, without having ugly markup around it?)

With new updates appearing about as fast as I could read them, and sometimes faster, I turned to Twitterfall. Now it gets fun. Here’s a capture from early in the episode.

By the end, it was updating at three times that speed. In fact, Twitscoop tells me that during the boardroom scene that forms the climax of the show, there were 300 updates per minute using the word ‘apprentice’.

5 messages per second is more than I can manage in real time, but I did spot some lovely gems in there.

By the end of the show, 4 of the top ‘trending’ (e.g. currently most popular) words and phrases, according to Twitter search, were apprentice, Sir Alan, theapprentice and Anita.

The Apprentice was always going to be popular on Twitter, but I’m impressed at the scale here. Of course, most of the time you don’t care what everyone is saying about the Apprentice, just what your friends are saying. And that’s what Twitter’s good at. The ability to tap in to this real-time flood of info is pretty powerful though, even if it’s getting hard for one person to be able to even monitor it in real time.

SXSW panel snippets – ‘EA Dead Space: A Deep Media Case Study’

Posted by Roo - 15/03/09 at 05:03:00 pm

Andrew Green (Online Marketing Manager, Electronic Arts)
Frank Rose (Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine)
Ian Schafer (CEO, Deep Focus)
Chuck Beaver (Senior Producer, Electronic Arts)
Ben Templesmith (Director, Singularity7)

Abstract: This in-depth case-study reveals the method and the madness behind Electronic Arts use of cross platform marketing to communicate separate, self-contained elements of the much anticipated release of their first survival horror game, Dead Space. For this release, EA packaged a comic book, a prequel DVD, and an online experience in order to build, create, and cultivate an audience around the Dead Space brand prior to the official ‘street date’ launch.

• Rose: We’ve had a century of linear storytelling, now the internet makes a new kind of narrative possible. Not just watch, but participate. Entertainment can be immersive. e.g. Battlestar Gallactica tells its story through TV, online video, multiple blogs, etc. EA has a new strategy, IP cubed, rich storylines that can be extended into other media, not just as spin-offs but as a core way of telling the story. Dead Space was the prototype. It’s an example of Deep Media.
  1. Comic book
  2. Animated feature
  3. ‘No known survivors‘ web experience
  4. The game itself
• Green: Challenge – how do we build a community and build an audience around 500 years of back story? Content that also works as marketing. Each component should stand on its own. The marketing is the content.
• Templesmith: 6 episodes make the comic valuable thing in its own right. It wasn’t perceived as pure marketing.
• Q – Which element was most successful?
  A – (Green) The comic and the animated short. Website was deep and rewarding, but the comics made use of dissemination. easier to port & share content (youtube etc). Much wider viewership by creating value everywhere. Website, as linear narrative, is only going to give you so much benefit. Microsites are always inherently limited because they are a destination. If you have to drive people to a destination, it’s important that its coupled with content that allow it to be shared
• “The content is the marketing” – someone in the audience thought that was ‘pretty insightful’. [Personally, it makes me concerned for people in marketing who don't think this way already.]
• Shafer: in this case, the story was art. In other cases we can listen to the community, understand what they want and be nimble enough to change based on their input.. that will drive success in the long haul.
• Q – How much resource does each component take? Can you do it without all the components.
  A – (Green) I don’t think you need any budget. You need a community platform with a passionate, creative centre. Give it to the community and allow them to participate and create around it, and maybe even help write it. It’s all about starting. Start building a community.
• Q – Would you do the website again?
  A – (Green) Yes. From ROI perspective it was high. Also useful to get the analytics, which you wouldn’t get from offsite services.
• Q – for the website, what were the biggest sources of traffic?
  A – Editorial mentions creating organic traffic. Getting on Kotaku and the link from Wikipedia.
• Q – Does the website still get traffic?
  A – (Green) Yes. We still get 100-200k visitors from main website. 10k new visitors a week
  A – (Schafer) One fifth of the traffic to site has come after launch of game.
• Q – How important is having premium downloadable content
  A – it’s become a consumer expectation.
• Q – How hard is it to break new IP in games industry?
  A – it’s risky. That’s why EA has (up to now) built a career on licensed IP. Budget levels for new games are hard. It’s also a sequel business.

Rose’s thoughts on Dead Space as Deep Media can also be found in this post on his Deep Media blog.

SXSW panel snippets – ‘HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!’

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 09:03:00 pm

Merlin Mann (43 Folders, You Look Nice Today)
John Gruber (Daring Fireball)

Abstract: John Gruber (DaringFireball.net) and Merlin Mann (43Folders.com) discuss the current state of blogging as a medium for creative expression, weighing the opportunities and challenges of building a thoughtful online presence in a world where everybody owns a printing press. They’ll consider the ascendance of Digg-friendly “problogs” and debate the subtler pleasures of careful writing that reaches smaller, but potentially less “profitable” audiences.

Acknowledging the silliness of their title, Merlin and John did a great job of being entertaining whilst also being interesting and useful. Well worth listening to the podcast of this one, whenever it comes out.

Snippets:

• Mann: Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ talks about ‘the ideal reader’. Others call it ‘the first reader’. Have a picture in your head, the face in the monitor. Who are you writing for?
• Mann: I think social media is important enough to take seriously. Social media is not about what you have to say, it’s about having the tolerance to cope with what people say to you. It’s a giant set of extremely sharp knives. You can use it for good or for ill.
• Mann: How do you know you should start a blog? Because people keep telling you to shut up. You just won’t shut up about a subject. “You love the Cowboys so much? Either gay marry them, or start a blog”. It’s OK to have a strong voice about something. The opportunities are not through the ads, they’re through being awesome at what you do. Ancillary revenue streams and opportunities …
• Gruber: human attention is valuable and limited. There’s nothing you can do to give yourself more attention in a day. “You can’t pay your rent with attention … but it has value. You’d be surprised at what you can do with it when it builds up.”
• Mann: Don’t have a blog about star wars, have a blog about Jawas
  in fact, have a blog about that one Jawa who is only the scene for a minute. It’s going to be so much easier for you to dominate.
• When writing, include not just what happened, but what does it mean, what do you think about it. There’s a ton of people who can tell you something happened.
• Gruber: relating Mann’s tips for success:
  1. Give away more stuff than you think is sensible, and make it easy to get to.
  2. Focus on diverse rev streams and always be looking for new ones
  3. Don’t do stuff that seems profitable but potentially messes up the reasons people like you

Update: you can listen to the session on 43 Folders and read what John has to say about it too.

SXSW panel snippets – ‘Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?’

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 04:03:00 pm

danah boyd (Researcher, Microsoft Research)
Judith Donath (MIT Media Laboratory)
Alice Marwick (PhD Candidate, New York University)
Siva Vaidhyanathan (Assoc Professor, University of Virginia)

Abstract: While many assert that “privacy is dead,” the complex ways in which people try to control access and visibility suggest that it’s just very confused. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, let’s discuss people’s understanding and experiences of privacy and find ways to 2.0-ify it.

Some snippets from the four speakers:

Siva Vaidhyanathan

• Writing a book: The Googlization of Everything
• Myth: privacy is the opposite of publicity
• Putting information about yourself on websites doesn’t mean you don’t care about what you don’t share. ‘Over-sharers’ still want control over how they’re represented
• Myth: privacy is a substance that can be traded away. He’d been frustrated by recent “people are willing to trade a little bit of privacy for a better user experience” quote from Google, but this assumes it’s something you can trade in little bits
• But: personal information is a form of currency

Alice Marwick

• Need to recognise the value of sharing, but also that it’s useful to data miners
• Information can be aggregated into valuable profiles
• Microcelebrities are different to real celebrities because they know who is reading their blog etc, but there’s still a power inequality.

Judith Donath

• Your history is to online as your body is to the physical-world
• We’re largely unaware of the information companies hold on us.
• Need to design spaces in a way that makes it obvious how much is public, and what is seen by whom
• If we saw it we’d make more intelligent choices.
• Your data trail is invisible to you. We need an every day experience of our data selves, in the same way a mirror provides a reflection of our physical self
• Children don’t regard their home as private, because they don’t have control there

danah boyd

• Information is currency not just in economic sense, but in social sense
• We’ve gained a lot by sharing information about ourselves and our thoughts, but current design is not allowing us to negotiate control of context
• See Jane Jacobs on surveillance – we invite a level of surveillance that is useful to us.

At this point, with about 10 minutes to go, I was becoming frustrated that it had not opened up for questions. I don’t think I was alone, because while Vaidhyanathan complained about the way that Facebook can “unliaterally change its policies” without having to act in a way that was accountable to its users people in the audience were desperate to join in the discussion, literally shouting “but they did!” from their seats. Finally, when questions from the floor were invites, Jeff Jarvis was straight up. Voicing what Tom Coates was obviously also thinking, Jeff said

“we have to see the positive here. there is economic widsom in giving us visibility and control over our data.”

and you should read Jeff’s post about the panel too.

I love Donath’s digital mirror concept. Also, I need to read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Being tall

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 03:03:54 pm

:-(

Steve Bowbrick, the BBC’s critical friend

Posted by Roo - 11/03/09 at 10:03:35 am

For the past seven months, Steve Bowbrick has been exploring the BBC from the inside. Last night, Nick Reynolds (Editor, internet blog) invited Steve to share his findings.

First, Steve’s short lecture in which he described openness as

An uncomplicated, generous use of license fee funding to generate content and code, as well as sharing the way we make it

He quickly rejected the commonly held notion that because the license fee paid for the BBC’s output it therefore it should all be freely available in all formats as “an unimaginative heat death for the economic value of the BBC”.

In describing why openness should be important to us, Steve pointed out that public value is a big deal at the BBC

“the BBC is not a business, it is a machine for the production of public value … Open organisations make more effecient use of resources … while businesses are typically good at concentrating capital and talent but inefficient at maximising public value.

It’s partly about “liberating the archive for the nation’s benefit” but while “this is not about raiding the content library … I think the conclusion will be that we can liberate access to some content for free, or at trivial cost.”

“Since Ross/Brand, there are catastrophic levels of caution at the BBC”

On the same day that the Guardian had announced their Open Platform Steve was concerned that Backstage, the BBC’s developer network, needs more love.

Steve concluded with some challenges, including the question of what to put at http://open.bbc.co.uk.

Next, a panel session. Joining Steve on the panel were

• Emily Bell (Guardian)
• Ian Douglas (Telegraph)
• Jim Killock (Open Rights Group)
• Tony Ageh (BBC)

It was lively, with some fascinating insights and opinions expressed.

Emily Bell – The BBC is so big that it’s very easy for it to roll over in its sleep and kill a few people with its tail.

Nick Reynolds – When there’s no consensus, we don’t want to talk about it at all. All big institutions avoid disagreeing in public.

From the floor (Michael.. missed his surname) – “people talk about ‘new media’, ‘future media’, but it’s just digital media. Having a department called future media is an open sore, and it’s embarrassing. Digital is open. You talk about openness, but when it’s digital you need to build relationships, not try to control your content.”

Steve – I’m also a school governor, and you’re told you have to be a critical friend. The BBC needs lots of critical friends.

Tony, talking about middle management – the bit in the middle is the problem. It’s the bit that won’t thaw. But they’re also the ones who actually get fired, who get criticised and who get the blame for perceived failings.

I was watching the openbbc tag on Twitter, as other people took live notes, so I noticed Tom Dolan when he expressed a view that “entertainment and comedy suffer really badly if you increase the openness”. And to underline his point, wondered whether “It’s time to start each episode of EastEnders with the doofdoofers, and then show that none of the sets join up in real life.”. Since Tom wasn’t in the room, I lobbed his point at the panel for him. Steve thought that the richness of just what’s in filing cabinets alone would make it worthwhile to do something. It doesn’t have to be everything. while Emily pointed out that it’s theatre – when you’re putting on a play you don’t want to see the guy putting the set together. Openness doesn’t mean you have to involve the audience at every point in the creative process. For what it’s worth, I agree with Emily.

One of my favourite quotes, which had my typing frantically, came from the ever thoughtful Tony Ageh:

We’ve never involved ourselves in the DRM issue, which we should have done. We don’t own much of the iPlayer code, but the bits we do own we should open. We don’t have significant contribution to the technical space which produces our media in the way that previous generations did. … Not just TV episodes. Content, information, millions of BBC Copyright still images, histories of localities … our brands could be made available for certain audiences in certain ways … all of which can allow self actualisation and stimulate a creative nation.

A useful and thought-provoking session.

Guardian Open Platform

Posted by Roo - 11/03/09 at 12:03:16 am

The Guardian today announced the Open Platform, comprising two products: a Content API built on top of their existing search engine allowing other people to build applications on top of the Guardian’s content, and the Data Store which is a collection of public and Guardian-owned data sets made freely available for reuse.

I was invited along to the announcement, and took some hurried notes during the introductory talks. They’re by no means comprehensive but I did manage to capture a few quotes from some of the speakers and most of the Q&A session too. Here are the highlights…

Tim Brooks, Managing Director

Before the web, we reached around 6 million people per week. We now reach 33 million in a good week.

Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content

We take risks. … Handing this over to you guys is a risk. But one that I’m sure will pay back in multiple dividends in terms of the creativity it unlocks. It’s a significant step towards the idea of ‘Guardian Everywhere’.

Mike Bracken – Director of Technology Development

showing Chalkboards…

We can’t do everything ourselves … We want you to show us how to improve

Stephen Dunn, Head of technology strategy

shared a timeline of some of the Guardian’s online activity, pointing out that today’s announcement is a step in a journey.

• 1995 – Guardian first on the web
• 1996 – Guardian New Media Lab
• 1998 – Unmoderated Talkboards launched
• 1999 – Guardian Unlimited launched with registration sustem, but was removed in the same year.
• 1999 – RSS feeds and headlines distribution service
• 2001 – first Guardian blog
• 2006 – Free Our Data
• 2006 – Comment Is Free
• 2007 – RSS Everywhere
• 2008 – Full feeds (with ads)
• 2008 – First guardian hack day

and their web principles:

1. Permanent – (a cool URI is one that does not change)
2. Addressable – (resources are about something, ready fort the social web. We live in ‘the age of Point-at-Things‘)
3. Discoverable – (multiple routes to content. Tagging drives discovery)
4. Open – (hackable URLs, using and contributing to open source tech)

Matt McAlister, Heard of Guardian Developer Network

Today the Guardian announces the open platform. It’s the suite of services allowing partners to build services with the Guardian

Some more detail from Matt on the terms of use. You get rich, tagged article content. Full content, not just the headline and abstract. And you can publish it in your apps

We decided that the best price point for fueling growth is free. We want you to be able to make money on your site too.

Looking at the site, there are Commercial partner programs to enable commercial use. The FAQ says that “The Content API is free to use. There are some terms that you must adhere to for the free access level. For example, our default limit on queries per day is 5,000 calls, and we will in the future ask partners to display advertising from our ad network on pages with our full content.”

Explaining that it’s a beta trial, and they’ll be approving API keys on a limited basis (which has pissed off Dave Winer), Matt said

We’ll be doing that slowly so that we can understand what the dynamics are, and what you want to build … But we do plan to open more widely soon.

Simon Willison

Simon demonstrated the API explorer (the first app written using the API) and how each set of results also specifies a set of usable filters which are available in source, and shown in explorer.

New concepts can be prototyped in less time than the meeting you’d have needed to discuss it in the first place

and demonstrated this point using several demos including contenttagger.org (from Chris Thorpe) and APIMaps from Stamen Design. Pleasingly, AMEE are another launch partner for the Data Store too. Exciting stuff.

Q&A session

Q – (Jon Slattery from Press Gazette) – Are you happy for news organisations to use your material?
A – (Emily Bell) – They do already! Frequently. The free model is built with developer community in mind. If other news orgs want to use the data because it’s better then theirs, that’s fine within the terms.

Q – (James Cronin) – Can we store data in your data store?
A – (Matt McAlister) – we’re publishing data into the store at the moment, but tell us what you’ve got, we’d love to look after it.

Q – (Stefan Magdalinski from Moo) [re 5000 hit daily API limit]
A (Simon Willison) – 5k hits is what you can ask from us in 24 hours. You’re allowed to cache that data though, so could serve as many pages as you like. We’re also serving smart caching headers with 50 min expiry.

Q – Are you exposing photos & media?
A – (Matt McAlister) – Not yet. But we return headline and description and URL for our photo pages.

Q – (Andy Pipes) – Any plans to share personal data, like the New York Times?
A – (Matt McAlister) – No. None at all.

Say hello to my little friend

Posted by Roo - 08/03/09 at 03:03:38 pm

My wife and I bought a (nearly) new car recently.

It’s a Citroen C1. Citroen says it’ll do 51-72 mpg, which is about 500 miles on one 35 litre (£30) tank. So far, this seems pretty accurate.

It’s cheap to tax, too (£35 this year, which will go down even further next year to just £20).

Its little 3 cylinder, 1 litre engine is quieter and more civilised than I expected. For driving around town, and short journeys to the station, it’s perfect, and even short motorway trips are OK.

Clarkson says

In many ways, it’s the spiritual successor to the old 2CV, that poisonous upturned bathtub favoured by the sort of hippie who’s currently handcuffed to the tow hook of your Land Cruiser.

Rachel owned one of those upturned bathtubs when we first started going out together, and they’ve always had happy memories for both of us.

I like the C1. I like it a lot.