Like most industries, the web design industry is affected by fashions and trends. As soon as one website tries something and coincidentally happens to be successful, people instantly presume the design was the key factor and update their websites accordingly.

Google introduced the minimalist website at a time when most websites were cluttered and suddenly everyone wanted to pull in the Digital Feng Shui experts and de-clutter their websites.

Blogs looked like the future once, and big corporate websites not only needed blogs written in a casual way by the Managing Director Press Office, but this expanded to making the whole website look like a blog, and in some cases putting out key financial information in in blog postings rather than in the investors or financial news section.

Now there is a new trend – the analogue clock.

I am not sure where it started, but the first version of it I saw was on the relaunched UK Parliament website, which apart from being full of bugs had suddenly acquired an animated clock at the top of the page. Despite being fairly universally disliked in the comments section, the website designer was adamant that it would remain.

Recently,  the BBC website received one of its periodic evolutions and gained a clock at the top of the page. Semi-tolerable in that it is in the style of the BBC clock from about two-decades ago, so old people will like it, but I still wonder what functionality it adds to the website.

Recently I noted that the Chinese website, Xinhua had gained a clock – although it looks suspiciously like the BBC clock and even had the same animated seconds hand. The file name is different though, so they have at least tried to cover their tracks if plagiarism has occurred.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a website promoting a course about tea tasting (nice idea, ouch price tag) and it has a clock on the top of the website. Are people timing their tea making process by website clocks I wondered?

These are just the websites I could recall this morning – I’ve seen clocks sprouting up all over the place over the past couple of months.

The clocks are taking over!

As quite a fan of both the art and the science of Horology, and at one time had about a dozen different clocks in my living room, I love clocks – but not on websites.

If I want to see clocks, I’ll go here. I don’t need to be reminded of the time every time I visit a website though.

Please, let the fashion for putting analogue clocks on the tops of websites be a short-lived one.

Update:

It’s been drawn to my attention that the beta version of the new BBC website has dropped the clock. It seems the era of website clocks may indeed be a short-lived one. Hurruh!

Although the State Opening of Parliament happens every year pretty much without fail, the people involved in it tend not to be there every year, so the huge precession needs to be practiced before the live event.

While a fair bit of the public procession is basically following a route along easily defined roads from point A to point B, it is still nice to try the route out in person, and on horseback.

In the absence of a fake Westminster to play with, last night at around 3am, parts of Westminster were sealed off to traffic and various members of the Household Cavalry and other ceremonial horsy types cantered around Westminster in rehearsal of the formal event later this week.

Thinking this would be potentially quite an interesting thing to watch, I checked the night bus options,  dutifully went to bed rather early last night…

…and slept through the whole thing.

Therefore, I don’t have a selection of photos of large contingents of horses ceremonially parading around a deserted Westminster to present to you this morning.

Sorry.

You can see the main event on Wednesday though (Nick Clegg not withstanding) and if you wear very dark glasses maybe try to imagine what it would have looked like last night.

There should be two State Openings next year – one for the new government and one following the Summer recess – so maybe I will manage to stay awake for one of those rehearsals. Maybe.

Let me tell you a story – was how a talk this lunchtime by Prof. Steven Levitt started as he gave a talk about economics and some of the weird but true facts he has come across in his research.

He is noted for being the co-author, along with Stephen Dubner of best selling book, Freakonomics and is in the UK promoting the suitably titled sequel, Superfreakonomics.

A quick run though of some of the more interesting or plain funny anecdotes started with the tale of John Szilagyi.

Mr Szilagyi, who worked at the US tax office wondered why American children were being given increasingly weird names and had a suspicion. After some effort, the tax returns form was changed to require a social security number to be placed alongside each child being reported by parents when claiming their $250 child’s tax credit.

In 1986, some 7 million children “vanished” from the USA, including as it later transpired, a non-existent brother and sister to Prof. Levitt. The moral was that if you create an incentive, then people will find a way to abuse it.

The purpose of the talk, and the book, is to expand on how simple insights into information and human behaviour can lead to surprising outcomes.

For example, the oft-cited, but not acted upon finding from studying the data that special seats for children in cars make no difference to fatality rates in car accidents when the child is more than 2 years old.

Unfortunately, the politicians felt the facts disagreed with their political policy and not only disregarded the findings, but actually attacked them. Although the talk was being given in a House of Commons Committee Room, no mention was made of a more recent episode of politicians and facts conflicting – this time the recent Nutt sacking over drugs policy.

A more recent bit of work he has been engaged in lead to the title of this blog post – and that was the analysis of bank account activity (with necessary privacy issues dealt with). Not the big stuff that governments like to worry about, and pass silly laws on – such as money laundering etc.

How about monitoring when a person uses a cashpoint machine? If they never ever use one on Friday evenings, is there a chance that they are Jewish or Muslim? What if they lack life insurance or other long term financial plans?

It’s a lot more sophisticated than that – but out of 10 million accounts enough data existed to identify around 30 accounts that had particularly unusual behaviour.

He said that any suicide bomber seeking to evade detection prior to their crime should simply take out a life assurance policy. You can bet the security services have a few other key items they are watching that haven’t been put into books though. Indeed, they might be watching for a spike in people who never use ATM’s on Friday evenings suddenly taking out life assurance policies!

During the Q&A session, much time was spent dealing with their fairly controversial views on climate change – but if you get away from the tabloid media hype, their views are not actually that weird and indeed make a lot of sense.

In essence, it will cost a fortune to reduce CO2 emissions, and whatever we do will take 50+ years to have an effect. Or, we could spend a comparatively tiny amount on geo-engineering which can have an effect almost immediately and if it doesn’t work, we haven’t really wasted any time.

He is arguing that we should look at mitigating CO2 in the short term, and spend the money saved on developing the low-carbon economy that we will need in the future.

Hardly controversial, but the way some in the green-lobby have reacted you would think he was one of the climate change deniers. He isn’t – he just thinks that spending $1 trillion per year on reducing CO2, when alternatives costing maybe $200 million are available seems a bit odd.

His metaphor was that of an approaching asteroid.

One team of scientists come up with a plan that costs $1 trillion, takes 50 years to work and requires every human on the planet to be involved.

Another team comes up with a plan costing $200 million, can be tested in just one year and involves a few thousand people.

Lacking a Bruce Willis to save us, which option would you try first?

If you want to know more, then the duo are giving another talk, this time tomorrow at the RSA, and they will be broadcasting it over the internet.

Tune in, it will be entertaining (especially if he includes the potty training story), and quite possibly enlightening.

Thanks to the Henry Jackson Society for the invite to the event.

If you had been in Westminster today, you might have seen a group of distinctive looking people striding purposefully down Whitehall to Downing Street.

Today, on the 5th November, is the day that political blogger, the Old Holborn takes a casual wander down Whitehall in the guise of V, from the film to present a Carson Rose to the police at the gates of 10 Downing Street.

Once the group got to the gates, the lead V leant over to present the rose, but the police were noticeably uncomfortable and didn’t want to play along. After a few attempts, V carefully placed the rose on the barrier as a gift, pointing out that he had paid his taxes on it.

As the group processed down Whitehall to a pub, some speculated about the future fate of that rose and wondered aloud if it was about to be dealt with as a potential bomb.

I had to leave them at the pub, although they went onto Parliament later to seek entry as a member of the public is entitled to do. I popped back to Downing Street, but the rose had already been removed.

I also arrived late, so missed them congregating at the pub. Opps!

Some photos at my usual haunt on Flickr.

Wandered over to a debate in Parliament yesterday evening entitled “The Internet: Saviour or Corruptor of Democracy?” with a panel of various new and old media types.

The panel was made up of Nick Robinson (BBC Political Editor); Peter Kellner (YouGov); Grant Shapps MP (Shadow Minister for Housing); Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes blog) and Michael White (The Guardian). The Chair was Danny Alexander MP.

I was hoping for two things from the debate – one, to learn about ideas and thoughts re the debate topic. However, to be honest, the other draw was the chance to see Paul Staines sparing again with Michael White and Nick Robinson – who he seems to have a rather fraught relationship.

True to form, the opening statements from the panellists swiftly degenerated into personal animosity between the three of them – which is amusing, but hardly informative.

Grant Shapps I thought was the most open minded about the whole concept of using the internet as a channel to talk to his constituents – although quite of lot of people expressed the usual concern that too many politicians use internet publishing tools as just A.N.Other broadcasting tool, and ignore the opportunities for two-way conversations.

I notice an increasing number of politicians using Twitter, and some do engage really well with other users, and some just use it as a broadcast tool to spit out news to all and sundry. I do slightly worry that people expect MPs who have Twitter to respond to every single comment fired at them, and that is unfair.

The other area where old media journalists just “don’t get it” is that Twitter can be conversational and it actually is nice to hear boring politicians using Twitter to chat with people and have non-political conversations. Grant Shapps has been told off by the media for daring to have a private life, and Tom Harris MP has faced the same problems.

Peter Kellner expressed this concern in a different way and suggested that if this goes too far, then people might actually start wanting to bypass MPs and seek direct democracy – with referendums on everything. He warned that would probably result in the instant return of the death penalty, where MPs are certainly out of step with public opinion – although I would have drawn more comparisons with the State of California where nearly perpetual referendums have almost ruined the State as a functioning entity.

I agree that direct democracy is bad, but doubt people want it as it is just too much hard work. We like to outsource the responsibility to MPs, and we can them blame them when things go wrong. In a society with a lot more direct democracy, we have to accept the blame for mistakes we make and I doubt many people will like that idea.

Nick Robinson seemed to me to be interested in the potential of the many strands of communication that the internet offers, but seemed more frustrated by the sheer amount of noise that it engenders. The internet phenomenon of trolls and sock-puppets also distressed him, and the panel agreed with the implications he raised. I read a heck of a lot of political blogs, but now rarely read the comments as they do often seem to bring to attract the most extremes of the political spectrum. I get the impression that Nick Robinson could become a huge advocate, but needs more time to work out a how he can be more comfortable with the medium.

I’ll be blunt about Michael White, who came across as incredibly arrogant though the whole evening and seemed to be really of the opinion that anyone who is not a “pwopper” journalist is just scum to be ignored. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just felt that he treated everyone with disdain and anyone who doesn’t get on the floor and do the “we’re not worthy” bow when meeting him is being disrespectful.

Throughout the debate, those of us in the room were using twitter to comment on the points being raised – as were people following the Twitter debate from elsewhere. A big screen was set up in the room so that everyone could see the (unmoderated) comments as they flowed down the screen. A bit like the weekly PMQs chat on Twitter, some of it was good, some funny, and some was just trolling.

While the evening was highly enjoyable, especially the evident animosity between several panellists, the problem is that I left the evening with actually only one comment that was at all interesting. Grant Shapps MP is aiming to have collected the email addresses of around 20% of his constituents before the next election and wants to use that as a tool to speak (and hopefully, listen) direct to his constituents.

Considering the huge success the Obama campaign had in the USA using emails as an additional route to talk to activists – it is surprising that this was the first time I had heard of a UK politician expressing an explicit “sales target” for collecting email addresses. Of course, the downside is that bulk email sending is much more complex than sending a few emails, and if the IT side is not managed properly, then he could find everything being blocked by ISP spam filters, who keep a rather closer eye on bulk-email senders than on private individuals.

The whole evening was basically how the internet changes the rules for news publishers – and a bit about use of email and social networking websites.

For me though, the BIG and exciting opportunity for the internet to improve democracy is in the very nature of what democracy is. A democratic nation is one where the electorate hold the elected to account and can remove them when necessary.

To hold MPs accountable we need information – and while blogs etc are improving that to a degree, the real change could come from, to use some buzz-words, the power of mashups, crowdsourcing and open data.

Governments sit on a vast pile of information, statistics etc which are not available to the general public to look at, or when available are limited and in weird computer formats.

A good example of how the internet improves things was the day the expenses were finally published by Parliament – in a slightly odd PDF file format and with most of the information blacked out. The Guardian newspaper had a crowdsourcing tool up and running that let the general public flick through the files and flag up anything of interest. Something that couldn’t have been done (easily) by the newspaper on its own.

That is one specific example – but what if most government data was made available online, in machine readable code so that anyone can take it and do anything with it . Obviously personally identifiable stuff would be blocked.

People can sit at home and play with the numbers, throw them against other numbers and see what happens. Most of the results of this will be banal, stupid or plain mischievous – but someone, somewhere will do something that no one else ever thought of. Their pie chart will make us all sit up and gasp – and it will change government policy.

To me that is the most exciting opportunity for how the internet can boost democracy, and slowly (very slowly) that is starting to happen in some government departments.

Thanks to the Henry Jackson Society who provided me my ticket, and to co-organiser, DelibConsults. Some other bloggers who were there include, the aforementioned Delib, ToryBear and Guido Fawkes.

Update – Grant Shapps has added his opinion to the Conservative Blog.