The pie man’s little stunt hasn’t gone down too well with almost anyone over the mental age of 12, whatever their politics. So should the Guardian have given Jonathan May-Bowles a.k.a. “comedy persona” Jonnie Marbles the opportunity to put his side of the story?

Guardian contributor Sunny Hundal thinks May-Bowles is an important voice and deserves to be heard. Moreover, the little people below the line like me shouldn’t have the temerity to question the Guardian’s weakest editorial decision since that nasty Max Gogarty business.

 

Free speech is a wonderful thing. Freedom of the press likewise. But that doesn’t mean that quality newspapers should give space to every immature half-wit that manages to barge his way into 15 seconds of live TV, especially if they end up in handcuffs with a face full of shaving foam. Interview them if you really must, but give them their own column? No.

So for the future reference of those with editorial tin ears, here’s a selection of Guardian readers’ thoughts on the issue.

—

tkforde

Comment may be free but the Guardian should exercise more wisdom in choosing who to allow advertise themselves. Marbles’ action had no merit.

He should have been left to fade into obscurity or to be a curious footnote to this sordid News Corporation story.

—

bradley1

Whilst he may not have been paid for this is it right and proper for the Guardian to give him more oxygen of publicity? I think not

—

MaryVirgo

Hey Guardian people

So you didn’t want the comments to turn into an ‘abuse fest’?

What did you think would happen?

I can’t believe you wasted time on the idiotic behaviour of a feeble-minded publicity hounded. I really am disgusted with him and a little with you too, I’m sorry to say.

—

SoAnnoyed

The appearance of this article shows really poor judgment on the Guardian’s part.

—

AzrinMyst

Why Guardian? Why?

—

richardoxford

this being run by the Guardian is up with the articles saying cyclists shouldn’t be prosecuted for injuring and killing people or it’s fine to burn down a Tesco’ s

—

solipticat

You, my friend, are a shameless self-promoting opportunist. I guess your stunt worked because now the Guardian has given you a platform.

Just go away. Don’t give any interviews, don’t write anything, stop commenting, stop tweeting. Your ridiculous “activist” affectations are not welcome. You have humiliated yourself. Just leave.

—

OccamsClaymore

Is this what the Guardian has come to?

—

branimira

Can the Guardian please explain why you have given space to this man to further promote his actions?

The less we hear about/from him, the better.

—

TarzantheApeMan

Jonnie you shamed UK Uncut, you shamed the Labour Party which you are a member, by attacking an 80 yr old man. Now you have shamed and soiled the Guardian.

—

1ITGirl

Dear Guardian.
Just why are you giving this guy a platform to speak about his hideous actions..

—

PeterGriffin

This is the sort of piece the Guardian sticks up to gather unique hits isn’t it? Also, it’s giving Marbles the attention he’s clearly seeking, which is annoying to say the least as he’s not the bloody story. Widespread corruption of the establishment is the story, not someone looking to push up their profile under the thinnest of excuses.

After the sterling work the Guardian have done over the hacking I expected better than them giving space to this ‘comedian’.

—

chrispicable

Own goal by The Guardian

—

SoAnnoyed

Nick Davies and his historic work on the hacking scandal is why I love the Guardian.

Jonnie Marbles and click-whoring articles like this one are why I hate the Guardian.

—

WSobchak

Guardian, you’ve come up with the best investigative journalism in years, you really don’t need to give space to someone who makes Colin Hunt look self-aware.

—

jijiandnoah

It was a stupid and crass act, and to be honest I’m disappointed with the Guardian for even letting you get any further publicity by putting this feeble explanation up here.

—

bananacannon

we could just ignore the fool… eh Guardian?

—

HunterKincaid

Who made you the voice of the public?

I don’t for one minute think you did this for anyone other than yourself. Shame on you! And shame on the Guardian for giving you a voice!

—

PeterGriffin

I get the impression the Guardian thought this would be a piece where people would actually defend Marbles (his real name is Jonathan May-Bowles) and we’d have a nice piece where Guardianistas would cheer our brave hero on. I don’t think they genuinely expected the venom being thrown at him from all side of the political spectrum, though they obviously expected the right to pile on and therefore generate lots of lovely web traffic.

—

Helioss

The Guardian has totally misjudged giving this sad loser the oxygen of publicity that he so craves.

But at least he now knows how hated he is by the very people whose approval he sought.

—

aureliano5

You should not have done it
You should not have tried to justify it
The TV streams should not have given you the shots afterwards
The Guardian should not have given you space

—

AngloAndy

Shame on The Guardian for running such a piece by one whose actions detracted from the due process of a parliamentary inquiry of national importance.

It seems that both The Guardian and the attacker are both getting to be ‘far too big’ for their boots.

—

timwilkinsonlewis

This guy might be the worst waste of space on the Guardian since that feller who thought he deserved an opinion column just because he wore skinny jeans.

—

Red98860

Guardian has debased itself by giving this execrable specimen column space.

 

Nothing in its life became it like the leaving of it.

We all know the story: 4000 people’s phones hacked. Milly Dowler. The murdered Soham girls. Families of dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan.

£100,000 paid as bribes to the police and a Met Police investigation that manifestly failed to find the truth.

And evidence growing daily of a huge cover-up by News International staff. Thousands of emails deleted and police misled. They even hauled off one staffer’s desk to a solicitor’s office and refused to let the police see it.

And yet today the News of the World has five million copies on sale, twice its usual circulation.

If there’s one word to sum up the final issue of the News of the World, it’s “unrepentant”.

Squint and you might find it among this grand celebration of journalistic trash. There’s a five-sentence apology of sorts buried in the long leader column on page three that spends far more space recounting notable stories preceding News International’s purchase of the paper in 1969 than it does tackling the reasons for its sudden and inglorious death.

“Phones were hacked”, it says in passive-voiced weasel words that surely must make it into the next edition of Mistakes Were Made, the classic text on cognitive dissonance.

As in all the worst apologies, the scale and persistence of the News of the World’s criminality is entirely glossed over. Like Nixon in Watergate, the cover-up can do more damage than the crime. It’s not just the phone hacking but the alleged bribery of the police and destruction of evidence that could see executives James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks face criminal charges. News International is rapidly becoming the media’s Enron moment.

In a last-ditch attempt to manipulate the public’s emotions and go out with a bang rather than a whimper, the News of the World has cynically chosen to offer the profits from its final issue to three charities.

Barnardos, the Forces’ Children’s Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity have a lot of explaining to do to their staff and supporters this morning. By taking the News of the World’s tainted cash their names are indelibly written in the final chapter of a legitimate news business that became an organised crime syndicate. Their support has been instrumental in ensuring that this final edition of lies, evasions and distortions was not only produced but widely read. The other charities that accepted free advertising in today’s issue are equally culpable.

We should reject utterly the convenient lie that the News of the World was a great newspaper that, in its own words, lost its way.

The News of the World stood for all that was worst in British journalism. Intrusion not investigation. Cynicism not critique. Prurience not propriety.

The worst failure of the News of the World was not what it did outside the law but what it did within it. Newspapers that leave their readers less knowledgeable, less genuinely critical and less civilised have no place in our society.

If you’re just curious to see what they’ve written today you can read it online. If you want to support charity, donate directly.

Don’t give the Murdochs and Brooks the satisfaction of a record final sale of their tawdry, dead rag.

A sense of lightness is what I appreciate most in the designs that I enjoy. It’s what I strive to create in my own work too.

In our increasingly frenetic world, things that let you do what you want to do with the minimum of obstruction, frustration and delay are needed more than ever. Like Don Norman’s invisible computer, this is design that all but disappears when you use it. It gets out of your way and defaults to shutting up. Its sophistication is not in trying to be smart, much less in trying to be impressive or entertaining. It’s subtle, humble and discreet, working in the service of you the user rather than trying to draw attention to itself. Most of all it is design as our servant rather than our master.

Dieter Rams says:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

Lightness can be measured as value for effort. The less effort you need to expend in learning, maintaining and satisfying the product you’re using for a given amount of genuine benefit the better. If you’re flying through the things you want to do without obstruction, that’s lightness. If it feels like you’re wading through treacle, that’s not.

Lightness is an imperative. We’ve got better things to do than to perform incantations and rituals just to take care of the mundane details of everyday life. Our energies should be directed towards curing the world’s ills, being with our families and making sense of it all, not coaxing printers to print, navigating endless telephone menus and jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Life is far too short to be a slave to a system or to a machine.

Here are a few examples of things that embody lightness, to a degree at least:

Gmail was revolutionary when it first launched. Aside from a generally slick user interface, the two features that really struck me as important were a huge storage quota for your mail and effective spam filtering. Being liberated from having to worry about whether you were running out of space for your mail really changed the way that people thought about webmail. It also led to other webmail providers following suit by increasing their quotas too. Removing 99.5% of spam from your inbox was another relief. Spam is something entirely incidental to what users want from email. Gmail showed that the spam problem was a solvable one, at least at the user’s end. Gmail is light because it lets you focus on your mail rather than the things — storage space and spam — that other systems forced you to think about just to be able to do your mail.

First Direct is a phone and web-only bank. It’s open around the clock, so you never have to worry about opening hours if you want to call. First Direct’s service is so resilient that it has been continuously available since it launched in 1989. When they say they’re always open, they mean always. First Direct is light because it fits itself to the customer rather than the other way around. The customer doesn’t have to memorise or look up opening hours. Customers can get on with their lives, knowing that they can always phone their bank in any spare moment they happen to have. The idea of 24-hour service doesn’t seem so strange in the age of the Internet but First Direct were well ahead of the game with building a very different relationship with their customers than was traditional in retail banking.

Dyson’s DC35 is a rechargeable vacuum cleaner that’s optimised for mobility. Which is more convenient — plugging in your cleaner when you’re using it or plugging it in when you’re not? The DC35 is both slim and light so it’s not a burden to carry the DC35 up stairs or around the house. The lightness of the DC35 comes from its literal light weight. It’s a physical product that you use while moving, so the lighter the better. Cleaning becomes a quick and effortless job rather than a tiring chore.

In urban design, decluttering aims to remove unnecessary and obstructive street furniture from pedestrians’ paths. Decluttering advocates like Living Streets reject the idea that pedestrians can and should be funnelled around a city like vehicles in the name of safety. People like to follow their desire lines, taking the most direct route from one place to another without having to negotiate a maze of barriers, bollards, cobbles and kerbs. A decluttered street is light because it removes physical obstructions and reduces delays and pinch points, leading to a sense of freedom of movement.

A webmail service, a bank, a vacuum cleaner, a street. These aren’t the kinds of things that many people would think of as requiring very sophisticated design approaches. This isn’t stuff to write home about. Most likely they would only draw attention when they’re wrong in some way. The inbox running out of space and full of spam. The bank that’s never open when you want to call them. The vacuum cleaner that you don’t want to haul upstairs. The street that throws up obstacles in your path rather than just lets you move. This is the mundane stuff of everyday life and much of it needs a great deal of improvement.

There is hope. The big four technology companies — Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft — all embody lightness in some of their products. As most of us are plugged into at least one of these companies’ products for much of our time, this is encouraging. These aren’t niche players. If the big four get lightness right it will be hugely influential across our broader culture. There is a possibility, perhaps even a hope, that at some point we will hit a tipping point where things in the main Just Work and our focus can return to dealing with the real issues of life rather than the contrived problems of lazy and thoughtless designers and bureaucrats.

As designers, it’s the lightness of people that we should we working towards most of all. We’ll try to take the weight from your back and clear the obstacles from your path so that you can move freely wherever you want to go.

Anyone can design a website, just like anyone can take a photograph. But good web design, like good photography, is really, really hard to do.

And the evidence is all around us. Most websites aren’t that great, even those from well-resourced organisations that can hire teams of people to work on them.

Council websites are just about the hardest kind of website to design. Councils are large organisations that deliver an extremely diverse range of services within a sensitive public/political context. And they have to serve the whole community, not just most of it. And so while it’s undeniably true that many if not most council sites have a long way to go before they realise their full potential, I have every sympathy for those who are trying to deliver such complex designs with often very limited resources.

Good design means getting the big ideas right and then sweating the details. These are both really tough jobs and you don’t have forever to do them.

You don’t need to be an extreme minimalist to understand that every time you add something to a website you take something away. You increase users’ cognitive load. You draw their eye. You displace other page elements, or if you’re adding pages, you add another item to your navigation and search results. It all adds up.

I’ve never seen a website that was improved by adverts.

Every great website has come about because people worked hard and smart at stopping it being crap. They had the balls to say “no” more often than they said “yes”. They trimmed out flabby content, sharpened up the writing, weren’t satisfied with second-rate images. Engineers worked to progressively trim fractions of a second from the page load times, tweaking the front-end code, the back-end application and the server infrastructure. Titles and headlines were rewritten. Everything was meticulously researched and tested.

It’s hard to see how slapping a couple of ad blocks on the page is going to make this job any easier. And it’s not like the average council website is so fast, clear and simple that it can afford to take any kind of usability hit.

Ah, but they do it in the private sector. Indeed they do.

And their websites are undeniably worse for it. Of course they’d rather not do it, but if selling ad space on your site is necessary to bring in essential revenue to run it, you don’t have a choice.

The best private sector sites running adverts are very different from council websites. Take The Guardian. Although this is a big and complex site, essentially all most visitors are doing is finding and reading news. That’s just a single task. Council sites have to support hundreds of tasks. And The Guardian has design and development resources several orders of magnitude greater than any council. All their content is produced by professional writers and photographers, too.

So councils have the challenge of producing some of the most complex websites imaginable. But they also have the advantage that they’re funded to do that. They don’t need to raise revenue through the site itself. They can concentrate their resources on producing the absolutely best user experience possible without having to shill for a few pennies on the side.

Councils should fight for every inch of quality on their websites. Adverts are a completely unnecessary and harmful distraction from the real task at hand. Make your site great and the benefits will far exceed any cash you can drum up by encouraging people to click away from it.

I am very unhappy with some of the adverts that you are running on your website. Many of them are directly exploiting poor people such as the advert for “claim bankruptcy” that I found in your advice and benefits section today. (Click image above for full size view)

I wrote about this issue over a year ago and it’s also been featured on The Guardian’s website.

When are you going to stop running adverts that harm your residents and the council itself?

9 May 2011: Some of my assumptions in this post are wrong so please read it in the context of Emer Coleman’s comment below.

Courted, used and discarded in less than a year. That’s Boris’s and Transport for London’s attitude towards independent app developers for the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

A month before TfL launched their new cycle hire scheme, Boris was very keen to get independent developers on board. Why? Some deep commitment to digital diversity or small government doing what it does best and leaving the rest to the market?

Not really. Just that in 2010 if you’re launching a public cycle hire scheme in a major world city you need an app. And there wasn’t any budget allocated for one so the open data line was expedient.

Let’s hear some of the bull from back in June 2010:

In build up to the launch of the Mayor’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme on 30 July, Transport for London (TfL) has relaxed its terms and conditions to allow commercial use of official data – opening the door for developers to provide accurate and reliable information about the hundreds of locations where hire cycles will be available, smart routes around town or proximity of docking stations to Tube stations and places of interest.

Of course this wasn’t actually true anyway. TfL didn’t release any live machine-readable data about bike or dock availability at that point. In fact, they still haven’t.

More bull from TfL:

Independently produced apps will complement the wealth of information that TfL is already generating to keep users up to speed about the scheme.

So what happened? Indie developers got on board only to find that they had to screen scrape data from TfL’s web map, the only publicly-available source of data. No real API, no service level standards, no support. And very often crap data.

The incident where TfL’s map started serving up data from the Montreal cycle hire scheme being just one case in point.

The indies have muddled through, producing some good apps that very often have been held back by poor and unreliable data. When it comes to realtime information services, your app is only as good as your data.

People have invested time and money in these apps, largely in the hope that TfL would see them right soon enough.

All the while, developers have been pressing TfL for a real API. The story has always been that it’s coming… one day.

I think it’s reasonable to say that indie developers have made a big contribution towards Barclays Cycle Hire’s success. There aren’t unlimited bikes and you need to be able to find them. It’s handy to have a timer to help manage the costs. And you need a map on the go just to find the docking stations. You need an app.

TfL have been happy to take the credit for the indie cycle hire app and analysis work that they’ve done next to nothing to support.

And now we get the final confirmation of where TfL really stands on indie developers and open data: This week Barclays launched official iPhone and Android apps for the scheme.

These free apps (with all of Barclays/TfL’s marketing support behind them) wipe out the largest markets for indie apps at a stroke.

 

Moreover, Barclays own apps will doubtless be using a private API to which they have privileged access. So their apps get good quality data while everyone else struggles along with the leftovers.

I’m told, unofficially, that an official cycle hire API is coming soon. But I’ve heard that story before.

When it comes — if it comes — it’ll be useful for the people doing data analysis and building cycle hire data into novel apps and games like Chromaroma.

But for the mass market — indie developers making and selling standard find a bike/dock apps — TfL just doesn’t need you any more.

The parallels with Twitter’s attitude to its API are clear: Having built a successful service on the back of indie developers’ labour, it’s now time to take the good stuff in house and reap the rewards. At least Twitter provided a proper API.

The question remains: Who’s driving Barclays Cycle Hire, Barclays or the mayor?

Perhaps the clue’s in the name.

Last month, Sutton Council was looking for ways to save £925K a year in waste collection costs. There was an online discussion where residents were asked to come up with ideas for making savings and also give their views on suggestions made by the council.

Some of the ideas such as reorganising waste collection shifts to enable the council to halve the number of vehicles are efficiencies that would have a relatively minor impact on residents. Others inevitably are focussing directly on how much of their household waste is being recycled by residents and how much is being sent to landfill.

Rewards for recycling

Rewards for recycling or fines for not recycling enough are among the options. Introducing penalties for bad behaviour isn’t a very popular idea among the public and also in many councils who would rather have constructive rather than punitive relations with their residents. Moreover, there are many practical difficulties in running a punitive scheme. It’s easy enough to put your waste in someone else’s bin unless every bin is fitted with a lock. A trial in Norfolk failed due to numerous technical problems and also led to a 250% increase in fly tipping.

Windsor and Maidenhead are in the process of rolling out a borough-wide recycling rewards scheme after a successful trial with 6500 households.

You can get fantastic rewards at participating businesses like M&S, Legoland, Magnet and Windsor Leisure Centres or you can donate your points to the RecycleBank Green Schools Scheme.

Chip and bin

As with the Norfolk scheme, Windsor and Maidenhead are using so-called chip-and-bin technology. Residents’ recycling bins are fitted with an RFID chip identifying the household to which it belongs. The bin is weighed automatically as it’s emptied into the collection vehicle and the weight is added to the appropriate household’s account. RFID is a short-range radio system that unlike barcodes doesn’t require manual scanning and enables bins to be identified automatically as part of the emptying process.

While we wait to see whether Windsor and Maidenhead’s scheme will have a positive long-term impact on residents’ recycling habits, there’s another approach we could consider. Instead of the council weighing your bin, why not do it yourself?

The quantified self

We’re all familiar with large organisations collecting data about us, whether it’s some part of government, or the supermarket recording our every purchase for their loyalty card scheme. Many people are sceptical about or outright hostile to the increasing amount of intelligence gathering directed at us as citizens and shoppers. Whether well-intended and well-managed or not, this database-building nonetheless chips away another little bit of our privacy.

But technology observers have recently been following the trend for some people to collect this kind of data about themselves. This concept of the quantified self pulls together a diverse set of self-monitoring and self-improvement practices in which people collect data about themselves, analyse it and use it as evidence to support decision making and behaviour changes.

Some quantified self (QS) applications need you to type data into a website. Want to ramp up your drinking? Try DrinkingDiary. Sex life too hot to handle? Bedpost can help you cool it down. Others use common gadgets like smartphones. Runkeeper will track how far and how often you run, where you’ve been and will let you share your progress with others in its own community.

Some QS apps are sophisticated product service systems that come with their own custom hardware that takes the pain out of data collection. Fitbit gives you a tiny clip-on device that works as a pedometer to track your exercise levels while you’re awake and monitors your sleep time and quality while you’re in bed.

The Withings Body Scale is no ordinary bathroom scale. It doesn’t just let you weigh yourself, it wirelessly and automatically transmits your weight to a central database, from where you can monitor your progress on the web and through various mobile apps.

So if we can weigh our bodies, why not our bins?

DIY chip and bin — the pilot project

My own “pilot project” for tracking my waste disposal has so far taken around ten minutes of my time and cost £3.50 in hard cash. The money went on a portable luggage scale that I picked up in my local newsagent and the time went building a simple Google Spreadsheet and form that lets me easily type in the weight of each bin bag before I put it out into the bins. Here in Sutton we’ve got a brown bin for landfill waste and a green bin for recycling. I’m weighing both. When I fill in the Google form the numbers get automatically added to the spreadsheet along with the current date. Then I can just total up the columns and see how much I’m landfilling and recycling over time. It’s a good start.

Despite its low cost and relative simplicity, my system requires a fair bit of effort to get started and to diligently weigh and record each bag as it goes out to the bins. But what if we could buy kitchen bins that did the weighing and recording for us like the Withings Body Scale? I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we can. Technologically it’s almost the same product, though the software would need adapting to the different context of having two or more bins recording weights of different waste products rather than a single scale recording many people’s weights. This isn’t rocket science.

But will you behave better?

What’s likely to be much harder than collecting this data is using it to help people actually change their behaviour. Someone who goes to buy or contrive a weighing bin is at least starting off with some motivation and a good intention. Sustaining that might be hard. As with many fitness apps, a social networking component where the user could share and compare their data with others in similar households might provide sufficient motivation and social reinforcement to keep going. A web-based system could send occasional suggestions for ways to waste less and recycle more, even in the form of advertisements for eco-friendly packaged products like those in Amazon’s 100% recyclable Frustration-Free Packaging.

Twenty minutes into the future…

Now imagine what could be done if this system had access (with your permission, of course) to your supermarket loyalty card data. Suggestions on how to substitute poorly-packaged products for comparable ones based on your actual shopping habits? Suggestions on how you could buy larger packs of existing products that would have proportionally less packaging? Having access to this info on your smartphone while you’re in the shop? Discount vouchers as a little extra nudge to get you started? It’s all perfectly feasible.

If people can do data for themselves, do councils still have a role to play? One way might be to sidestep the whole issue of people getting their own weighing bins and providing bin weight data collected through chip-and-bin straight to residents without operating a local penalty or reward scheme. Residents could then participate in any third-party reward scheme that they chose, most likely operated by a supermarket or another retailer. People would appreciate the choice and flexibility of being in control of how their data was used and could pick a reward scheme that suited them best. Retailers would have greater incentive to work with their suppliers to improve packaging. Councils would benefit from lower landfill taxes and greater recycling rates without going to the trouble of running their own reward schemes or getting out the thumbscrews.

Whose data? Our data!

The biggest barrier to making this happen isn’t the technology. We’ve already got that. The problem is getting the organisations that collect data about us to give us access. We need a new deal with the organisations that know more about us than we know ourselves: If you want my data I get to use it too and I get a secure way of sharing it with trusted third parties that can do something good with it that benefits me. If you want to log my phone calls or my purchases or the weight of my bin every time you collect it — show me your API. Quid pro quo or GTFO.

We’re starting to make good progress with the open data movement to get government to release its non-personal data for everyone to use. The next step is to get equal access to the personal data that government and business holds about us so it can work for us as well as it works for them. Then we can have an information society in which everyone benefits rather than an information technology society that just reinforces the status quo. It might start with our bins but it won’t end there.