Luke's Blog

I moved to London 9 months ago and since then I have learnt a few things which I wish I’d known when I arrived.

The People

London has a lot of people in it. Like, really a lot. Think of all the people in Northern Ireland and Scotland put together and you still don’t get close to the number of people in London. And these Londoners are famous for being a diverse lot, or at least that’s what the media likes to say. Walk down a street in London and you’ll see people of all sorts of shapes and sizes; a varied range of races and cultures. But there’s one group that’s drastically under represented in the London population: Gingers. Sure, you’ll get the odd guy with strawberry blonde hair who claims to be ginger, but a true red head is a rare sight indeed.

The weather

Contrary to popular belief, London doesn’t have any real weather. Sure, there’s the occasional fluctuation in air pressure or humidity, but nothing worth mentioning. On the odd occasion when London experiences an event which resembles actual weather, don’t worry you’ll know about it: it’ll be on all the front pages, tv shows will be interrupted with ‘breaking news’ and twitter will crash with number of peole trying to tweet about it. A few weeks ago there was a bit drizzle, so they made an announcement on the tube warning people to be careful of the “adverse weather conditions”

Local Media

In most cities, if you want to find out what’s happening in your area, you have to wait through half an hour of irellevant stuff until the section called “local news” or “the news where you are”. In London it’s a lot simpler, your section comes first and is called “national news”, or often just “the news”.

Transport

Ask any Londoner about transport and they’ll tell you how terrible it is. But that’s just because they’re a bunch of spoilt whingers. The great thing about London is that when one form of transport inexplicitly stops working, there’s always loads of other to choose from:

Cars

One tip about driving in London: don’t bother.  Cars just spend all their time sitting in traffic jams.  Anyone I know in London who owns a car doesn’t actually use it for day to day travel.

Buses

In most cities I’ve lived in, there is a clearly defined city centre where all the buses go (or at least pass through).  London doesn’t have one of these, instead a map of all the bus routes looks like someone has given a two-year old a bunch of crayons and let them draw some lines.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean you can’t make any assumptions about where a bus is going or how it’ll get there.

Buses in London are slow.  It’s not their fault, it’s because of all the cars that get in their way.  But they are frequent.  In fact, they’re so frequent that usually bus stops don’t bother with proper timetables.  They just give a rough approximation of the gap between buses at various times in the day.

There’s generally two situations when it’s best to get the bus:

1. When you’ve missed the last tube at night.
2. When other forms of transport have broken down.

Boats

There’s lots of boats in the Thames and some will give you a lift if you give them money.  The problem with the Thames is that it’s very bendy, so it’s rarely the quickest route.  Also, boats are usually more expensive than other forms of transport.

One exception to this is the Woolwich Free Ferry, which is basically there because they couldn’t be bothered to build a bridge at that point in the river.  Like its name suggests, you don’t have to pay any money to use it.  If you’re ever in East London, I do recommend a ride on it - it’s also got the best view of the Thames Barrier you’re likely to see.

Bikes

Bicycles are the fastest way to get round in London, as demonstrated by Top Gear’s thoroughly unscientific race through London.

Cycling in London can be a bit daunting at first, but once you learn to be assertive it’s fine.  Cycling in the middle of the lane is a good idea as cars are less likely to attempt dangerous overtaking manoeuvres and you’ll avoid being hit by a parked car’s door opening.

One thing to be careful of is roads which randomly turn into motorways.  Well, technically they’re not motorways, which means there’s no sign telling you not to cycle on them.  But they look and feel just like a motorway, so they’re not the most pleasant place to cycle.

London Underground (aka the Tube)

Getting on the tube is so much fun.  You’ve got trains, tunnels, history, strategy and hidden shortcuts.  The key to enjoying the tube is simple: don’t use it to commute.  Lots of Londoners make this mistake and as a result they hate the tube.  There’s also lots of popular misconceptions about the tube, the biggest one being the time of the last tube.  You’ll often hear “About half twelve, but later at the weekends.”  In fact, most lines have the same last tube timetable Monday through Saturday and stop earlier on a Sunday.

Talking of last tube trains: these are even more fun than normal because you get to see the men with green torches.  Each platform has a person standing on it with a walkie talkie and a green torch.  When the last tube arrives, they check with the people upstairs to make sure that noone is running to catch it.  When they get the all clear, they shine the green torch at the driver who then knows they’re good to go.  Isn’t that so cool?

Another thing to watch out for on the tube is the pink oyster card readers.  Normally you tap the yellow oyster card readers on the way in and out.  But the pink ones are special: you get to tap them in the middle of your journey.  Basically, they let you tell the TFL super-computer that you didn’t go through zone 1 and that therefore you should get a cheaper fare.

Trams

Apparently London has trams.  Not Edinburgh-style trams, these ones actually move.  I’ve never actually been on one yet, because they’re in South London and I’ve no reason to go there.

Trains

Lots of trains go to London, yet it’s one of the few cities not to have a central train station.  Instead it has a big ring of stations which are connected by the tube.  This is because Parliament in the 19th century didn’t want trains coming into central London.

Sunday Trading Hours

Growing up in Belfast, I always found it absurd that shops had to close at 6 on a Sunday.  But then, Northern Ireland is a bit backward and it’s only to be expected.  When I moved to Scotland, I found they didn’t have this silly rule and I assumed that it was just a Northern Irish thing (like Tayto crisps and segregated education).  So on moving to London, I was shocked to find that not only did they have the silly rule, but their shops close at 5 - an hour earlier than Northern Ireland!

London also appears to extend the silly rule to bank holidays too.  But, of course no-one bothers to tell you - they just assume you know.

The sky at night

I had heard that London has a lot of light pollution, so when I moved I was expecting a slight reduction in the number of visible stars.  But, it turns out there’s hardly any at all.  In fact, there’s often more planes visible in the night sky than stars.

The Water

London water isn’t very nice.  Growing up, I always wondered why anyone would buy bottled water when the stuff out of the tap tastes nicer.  I’ve now discovered that bottled water is aimed at Londoners.

Also, London water isn’t very good for cleaning stuff with.  Anything you wash gets covered in a cloudy residue.  And of course, you can’t wash the residue off, because the water you’re using contains the same stuff.

Parks

London has some massive parks.  You should definitely go check them out, they’re generally free in (like most parks).  One exception to this is Kew Gardens - they want you pay to look at their plants.  If you find yourself in Kew but don’t want to pay to look at plants, don’t worry, there’s a nice path which goes round the outside of the gardens.  On one side of the path is the Thames, on the other the moat of Kew Gardens (yes, they actually have a moat to stop you getting in).  On this path, you get to see the Kew Meridian - it’s a bit like the Greenwich Meridian, except it’s in West London and free to look.

Markets

London has lots of actual markets.  And I’m not talking about those pretentious ”Farmers’ markets” that they have in every other city.  London has real-life cockney markets like you see in films and on the Apprentice.  You can get your fruit and veg from them cheaper than in the supermarket.

One thing that might seem odd at first is the stalls which have all their fruit and veg in plastic bowls, but no prices to be seen anywhere.  In fact, the pricing is simple: the contents of each bowl cost a pound.  Doesn’t matter how big the bowl is, or what’s inside it - they’re all a quid.  Of course, like lots of other things in London, no-one actually tells you this; they just look at you as if you’re stupid if you don’t know.

Bumping into people you know

If you’ve lived in a normal sized city (such as Belfast or Edinburgh), you’ll find that you often bump into people you know when you’re out and about.  In fact, there’s times when you can walk into a pub and be confident that there’ll be someone there you know.  This doesn’t work in London.  As I might have mentioned before, London is big.  The chances of you seeing someone you know are slim (unless you know a lot of people).  If you want to be social, you need to arrange to meet people in advance or be prepared to socialise with absolute strangers (there’s always loads of them hanging around).

Money

Money in London isn’t worth as much as the rest of the country.  No one is really sure why, but most employers accept it and pay people more to compensate.  As a result, you will find that when you visit people back in the rest of the country, you are comparatively rich.  Try not to rub their noses in it (unless they used to do the same to you back when you lived there and they had more money than, in which case, it’s fine.)

Dodgy areas

Growing up in Belfast, I learnt the tell-tale signs of a dodgy area: flags, murals, bunting, painted kerbstones, burnt-out cars etc.  So far, I’ve only found one area in London with any such indicators; it’s known to Londoners as “The Mall”.  It has a Union Jack on every lamppost, a high army presence, regularly has police road blocks and most of its residents are reliant on state handouts (though some of them are clearly “doing the double” as it’s know in Belfast).

The cities of London

London is often said to be a city, but there’s actually more than one in here.  There’s the one known as “The City” where all the bankers work.  This city has its own police force and is England’s smallest county.  

Next to it is the City of Westminster.  You can tell it’s a city because it has its own cathedral (not to be confused with its Palace or its Abbey).  This is the area where we keep all the politicians, royalty and other posh people.

The two cities are joined by Fleet Street, where we used to keep all the journalists.  Recently, it was felt that having all the politicians, bankers and journalists in such close proximity was a bad idea - a single nuclear bomb could destroy much of the country’s supply of hated professions.  To prevent this, the journalists have been distributed across London and some of the politicians have been moved to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast.

You may some people refer to “London Town” - it turns out this just means the same as “London”.  Some other useful geographical definitions used by Londoners are:

• Greater London - anywhere within the boundaries of the M25.
• South of the River - anywhere in London on the southern side of the Thames.
• The Regions - anywhere where your Oyster card doesn’t work.

Postcodes

There is a tendency of some people in London to refer to areas by the first half of postcodes, rather than using their real names.  If you’re from a normal place, then London postcodes may confuse you.  Instead of just using LN to mean London, they decided that they needed 8 different postcode areas.  These are generally named after the direction from the centre of London you need to go to get there.  For example N for North, W for West, NW for North-West.  Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this (There’s no S, but there is a WC), but I won’t go into them here - check Wikipedia if you want a list.

Conclusion

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to London, but just a few helpful hints.  I hope it’s a bit helpful to atleast someone.  If you are moving to London, hope you have a good time.

On the 1st May 1707, two counties got married. Now one of them is considering divorce. The pros and cons of Scottish Independence are still a matter for debate, but what I want to know is: what about the children? Most of children of the marriage between England and Scotland have long since left their parents, only seeing them every couple of years at the family reunion where they all get together and play sport.

What should be discussed is who gets custody of the children who still live at home: Wales and Northern Ireland. (Yes, I know there’s British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies too, but they mainly do their own thing, so I’ll leave them out for now).

Wales is an easy one - they were part of England before the marriage and still are much closer to England than Scotland (both culturally and geographically), it makes sense that they should remain part of England.

The more tricky one is Northern Ireland. It is the delinquent of the family: a drain on whichever country will have them, full of people fighting and home to politicians so bigoted they make American Tea Partyers look like tree-hugging hippies. So, should Scotland be allowed to just cut its ties and leave England to deal with Northern Ireland?

Well, if we followed the marriage analogy, then Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to just leave and drop its responsibilities. So how do we resolve this? Perhaps we should ask the child.

Northern Ireland politics consists of two groups: Catholics and Protestants (they may try to dress it up a bit, but that’s what it boils down to). Catholics don’t want to be tied with Britain because they don’t like the Brits. Protestants want to be part of Britain because of their shared culture and heritage. (Yes, yes, I know I’m trivialising the whole thing). So, how do these opinions fit In with the Scottish Independence debate?

Well, when Catholics say they hate the Brits, they actually mean they don’t really like the English. They actually get on quite well with the Scots. And if you ask the Protestants for examples of culture they share with Britain, they’ll give you examples of Scottish culture - not English. Ever seen Morris dancing in Belfast? No, people would just just laugh at them (or more likely, throw stuff at them knowing Belfast).

It is clear that the North of Ireland has a lot in common with Scotland. More than it has with England, or even arguably, the South of Ireland. The idea of a United Kingdom consisting of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is frankly ludicrous.

So, how about a solution which not only shuts up Alex Salmon and answers the West Lothian question, but also solves the problems in Northern Ireland? A new country consisting of Scotland and Northern Ireland. (Personally, I’d like to also include Donegal, Rockall and possibly one or two counties from the North of England, but we can quabble over the exact boundaries later.)

Any suggestions for a name?

One of the hardest parts of creating the theatre ontology was deciding how to represent roles.  It’s arguably the most important part too (a theatre archive which doesn’t say who did what is pretty useless).

The Problem

Basically, the problem that needed solving is that a Person (represented using foaf:Agent) does some stuff in a particular project.  For example, Alice directed Theatre company foo’s production of Macbeth.  Here Alice is the Agent, Theatre company foo’s production of Macbeth is the Project and directing is the stuff they did.

Solution 1

The first approach that can be taken is nice and simple: each stuff they did becomes a predicate linking the subject (Agent) and object (Project).  So our example becomes:

<http://example.org/alice> ex:director <http://example.org/foomacbeth>.

This is an easy-to-understand approach, that would work well if there were a limited number of stuff they dids.  However, in real life, there is a vast number of stuff they dids and each production is different.  If I took this approach, the ontology would be full of predicates for obscure stuff they dids and I’d have to update it every time someone came up with a new one.

Solution 2

This solution was suggested to me at Culture Hackday.  Rather than having lots of unrelated predicates linking Agents to Projects, each of these predicates would be a subProperty of a predicate defined in the ontology.

This would mean that I’d only have to include the more common stuff they dids in the ontology.  If someone else wanted to use some obscure stuff they did, then they could write their own ontology which creates a new subProperty for it.  So in our example:

<http://example.org/director> rdfs:subPropertyOf ex:didstuffin.

<http://example.org/alice> <http://example.org/director> <http://example.org/foomacbeth>.

This is certainly a clean and logical approach.  However, it does require people to write their own ontology in order for the theatre ontology to be useful.  After discussing this option with some people, I decided that that would be too big a barrier.

Solution 3

The first two approaches represented stufftheydid using predicates.  This approach uses a class called Position.  Obviously linking three classes (Agent, Project and Position) can’t be done using a single triple, so I used a fourth class, Role, to join them all up.  (In fact, I found an existing Role class in the Participation Schema)

Whilst this method is a bit more verbose, it means that no stufftheydids are included in the ontology whilst, at the same time, others aren’t required to write their own ontologies.

So, our example becomes:

_:role rdf:type ex:Role;

        ex:holder <http://example.org/alice>;

        ex:position <http://example.org/director>;

        ex:project <http://example.org/foomacbeth>.

Conclusions

In the end, I opted for solution 3 for the reasons mentioned above.

(As usual, any feedback would be much appreciated).

Recently, I’ve been thinking of the best way to organise my music library.  

To summarise, my library is:

• All stored digitally, though in a variety of formats
• Eclectic in taste.
• Contains many tracks which I don’t want to hear when on shuffle (e.g. Sound effects, Radio Dramas, Rap).
• From a wide range of sources (CD rips, downloads, own recordings, attempts at my own remixes, sample tracks that come free with media players, stuff that seems to just appear from nowhere…)
• Varying degrees of quality metadata. (From accurate metadata to patchy metadata to just plain incorrect metadata)

The Semantic Web

My first thought was the semantic web.  It’s got loads of music metadata.  I’ve read about the BBC aligning their music site to MusicBrainz which sounded great.  I came across a site where someone had linked their music collection to musicbrainz using semantic web tech.  The instructions for how they’d gone about it seemed simple enough:

1. extraction of ID3 metadata from my MP3 collection, transformed into RDF according to Music Ontology Music Ontology ;
2. automated alignment of these data with data from Music Brainz made available on the Linked Data on Dbtune.org by Yves Raimond ;
3. data linked with Music Brainz, extracted from Dbpedia and BBC Music.

However, this approach wouldn’t work for my collection.  It made the assumptions that the collection a) has correct metadata, b) is organised by album, and c) only contains stuff that’s on MusicBrainz.  (I don’t think MusicBrainz has an entry for my teenage-self’s version of Mad World).

Also, I’m not entirely convinced by MusicBrainz’s album-centric approach to organizing tracks. In my mind, Queen’s original Bohemian Rhapsody is a single track which features in many different albums.  However, according to MusicBrainz, each time it appears on a different album, it is a different track.  For me, a track’s albums are just an extra bit of metadata, not a defining characteristic.

Unique Identifiers

Originally, I wanted to use some existing set of ids to identify my tracks (eg MusicBrainz, LastFM or something similar).  But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that no self-respecting service is going to include an ID for my attempt to remix a recording of a university lecture on software development techniques.  Therefore, I’d need to come up with my own uids (which I could later map to MusicBrainz, LastFM etc).

The simple solution to this is to use each track’s file path which is guaranteed to be unique.  However, this would make it very difficult to rearrange my music collection without losing metadata.

Then I thought of storing a unique id in each track’s ID3 tag.  However, the more I looked into it the more unappealing it seemed.  There are numerous versions of ID3 and other music formats have their own tags each of which would need to be supported.  Also, I don’t really want to overwrite existing metadata and as far as I can tell, ID3v1 doesn’t support custom fields.

Acoustic Fingerprinting

Recently I’ve been reading about Acoustic Fingerprinting.  Basically the idea is to turn an audio track into a string which will be the same if two tracks sound identical, otherwise it’ll be different.  This appeals to me, as it doesn’t rely on any metadata which may well be inaccurate and should remain constant if I move/rename the files themselves.

There seems to be many algorithms for doing this and I’m not yet sure which one to use.  I don’t want to use a proprietary one hosted elsewhere, as then my whole music collection would be reliant on a third party. (or is that second party?)  I have come across a few open-source solutions, but most of these seem to be dormant projects so may not work too well.

I guess the only way is to experiment with a few different ones to find out which works best.  If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

As part of culture hackday 2011 a group of us decided to hack the Royal Opera House’s archive into RDF to make it more manageable.  Obviously, the first thing we needed was an ontology.  We went through the archive taking note of what classes and properties we would need, whilst trying to keep it generic enough to not just apply to Opera.  Its was great to be able to discuss stuff with people in person, any previous attempts of mine to design an ontology were mainly done alone, or with discussion over the internet.  I was also able to talk to a range of different people involved in theatre (both amateur and professional) and see what they would like to see in an ontology.

As a result, I have made a number of changes to the Theatre Ontology:

• Instead of a Show class, the ontology now refers to FRBR’s Work class
• A move away from the use of foaf:Project in favour of FRBR terms.
• Deprecating ‘PerformableProject’ and using owl:unionOf to group classes.
• Letting several properties apply to individual performances as well as whole productions.
• The introduction of some new special subclasses of performances, such as Press Nights and Rehersal Readings
• The introduction of Accessibility Provisions, such as sign language, surtitles and audio descriptions
• The introduction of a Voice class to indicate what sort of voice (soprano, tenor etc) a particular character was scored for.
• A number of new properties to describe things such as which production company put on a production and who sponsored a production or performance.
• A property to indicate that a performance has been recorded for broadcast which links into the programme ontology.

Any properties or classes which have been superseded have been left in the ontology, but marked as ‘archaic’.

The latest version of the ontology can be found at http://purl.org/theatre#. As usual, I’d love to hear any feedback about what I’ve done / how I could improve it.

In my last post I mentioned that I was unsure about creating superclasses of other people’s existing classes (apparently known as “ontology hijacking”).  I also wasn’t keen on using the label “Entertainment” to describe anything with an audience.

Well, I had a closer look at the music ontology and found that a number of its classes are subclasses of FRBR classes.  I hadn’t previously heard of FRBR, but it seems to be what I’ve been looking for.  It describes a number of what it calls “Endeavours”, best summed up by this diagram from wikipedia: 

It seems to make sense for an audience to be related to each endeavour.  Also, the audience of a work could be said to be the union of the audiences of all the work’s expressions. (Similarly, an expression’s audience could be defined in terms of its manifestations).

In order for this to be useful, other ontologies’ classes would need to be subclasses of FRBR classes.  Here’s my attempt at mapping a few ontologies to FRBR:

I’d be grateful for other people’s opinions on this.

One thing that is missing from this is events (po:Broadcast and mo:Performance) - perhaps these could be said to be frbr:Items?  I’m not really sure what an “item” actually is.

I know this approach isn’t anywhere near perfect, but I think it’s closer than my previous “Entertainment” and “EntertainmentEvent” classes.  Again, any feedback would be appreciated.

There are quite a few existing ontologies which describe things that are done for audiences, for example programmes, music and theatre.  However, I was unable to find any ontology to describe the relationship between these things and the audiences themselves.  I first thought of this because I wanted a way of recording which episodes of tv/radio shows I had seen/heard.  Using this, it would be possible to create a recommendation engine which doesn’t recommend stuff you’ve already seen/heard.  Another use for an audience ontology could be to publish audience figures.  I asked a question at semantic overflow and got lots of helpful responses.

I wanted to make the ontology as generic as possible; my original use case only covered programmes, but the same audience relationships could be applied to music, theatre and possibly even art.  I created an “EntertainmentEvent” class, representing any event meant for an audience.  I then declared po:Broadcast and mo:Performance to be subclasses of this.  I’m not really sure if declaring someone else’s class to be a subclass of mine is allowed/good etiquette (please let me know if there’s a more appropriate way to do this).  Associated with the EntertainmentEvent class, is the “Audience” class, which is a foaf:Group consisting of audience members.  Each Audience class can have “AudienceFigures” classes, which contain the size of the audience and the source of the figure.

This model should work for audience figures, however I saw a problem if it were used for a recommendation engine.  It would be possible to infer that if a someone was a member of the audience for a particular broadcast then they had seen/heard that specific episode.  However, if a user was only able to remember that they had seen a given episode, but not which broadcast, then there would be no way to record this in the model.  To get around this, I created the “consumed” property.  This relates a foaf:Agent with an “Entertainment” class.  The Entertainment class groups EntertainmentEvents which the audience would think of as repeats of each other.  I declared po:Episode, mo:MusicalWork and thea:Production to be subclasses of this. (Again, please correct me if this is bad).

This new model seems a bit hacky as it includes a property which could be inferred from other data in the model.  I would welcome any feedback about the model, the naming (Is ‘consumed’ too generic? Does “Entertainment” include things which aren’t entertaining?), declaring other people’s classes as subclasses of mine or anything else.  I have put up an early draft of the ontology at http://purl.org/audience, please let me know what you think.

Today, the BBC announced their new iPlayer advertising campaign.  It seems that they want to focus less on what iPlayer does, and more on the warm fuzzy feeling you get when using it.  This reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: what actually is iPlayer?

Let’s start with what BBC Webwise has to say on the subject:

BBC iPlayer is part of bbc.co.uk and it allows you to watch the TV or listen to the radio on your computer.

That seems clear, but isn’t really a definition.  Let’s attempt to find a definition which fits:

Hypothesis 1: iPlayer is all audio/visual available on demand on bbc.co.uk.

Well, this is clearly wrong because the news has loads of a/v which isn’t branded as iPlayer.

Hypothesis 2: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on demand on bbc.co.uk.

What about live streaming?

Hypothesis 3: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on demand on bbc.co.uk and live streaming.

Well, the archive isn’t branded as iplayer.  Also, some clips are available on iPlayer.

Hypothesis 4: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on demand bbc.co.uk which have been broadcast in the last 7 days and live streaming and some, but not all audio/visual clips.

But what about series catch up?

Hypothesis 5: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on bbc.co.uk which have been broadcast recently and live streaming and some, but not all audio/visual clips.

Nope, podcasts aren’t branded as iPlayer either.

Hypothesis 6: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on bbc.co.uk which have been broadcast recently and have “iplayer” in their url and live streaming and some, but not all audio/visual clips.

Leaving aside whether or not a/v on /programmes is iPlayer or not, how about iPlayer on a Virgin Media TV box?

Hypothesis 7: iPlayer is all full length TV and radio programmes available on bbc.co.uk which have been broadcast recently and have “iplayer” in their url and live streaming and some, but not all audio/visual clips and BBC content on Virgin Media boxes.

But only the on demand stuff on a Virgin is branded as iPlayer…

Hypothesis 8:  iPlayer is anything branded as iPlayer.

Leaving aside third-party clients, this pretty much covers it.  Basically, iPlayer is iPlayer.

There’s been quite a bit of talk on twitter today about Google Scribe.  At first I tried it and didn’t really see the point as I’m able to type quicker than the suggestions appeared.  However, then I tried just typing a phrase and accepting the first suggestion given at each point.  I began with “university challenge” and the result was:

university challenged by their fierce ambitions, their friends and family togetherness and then they will become more apparent from the following detailed description of these properties are not well understood and therefore not available for this item is available online at the comfort of your home close to your family and friends together for another year of amazing pictures online featuring the world famous Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus for Blind and Visually Impaired Children Committee, therefore, that there is anything you would not believe

Now, of course this is complete gibberish to humans.  But I can see one potential application of this: spam creation.  Spam filters are getting good at filtering out text that is complete rubbish.  But using google scribe type technologies, spammers could easily create lots of unique blocks of text which would appear to any spam filter to be well spelt and grammatically correct English.  I wonder how well gmail’s spam filters deal with this.

Every blog needs to begin with a silly placeholder post.  You know the type of thing: all about how I’m new to all this etc. etc.  I’ll also tell about how I tried audioboo a while back, but ran out of things to say before I’d started. Maybe I’ll go on to mention a blog I created when I was a teenager that has long since been lost in the mists of time.  Perhaps I’ll even chuck in a photo I took a while back to show you how creative I am:

To be honest, the point of the first post isn’t really for the reader.  It’s a brand new blog, so therefore unlikely to have any regular readers.  No, the point of this post is for me, the blogger, so I can say that I “have a blog”, even if like the majority of blogs on the internet, it never gets updated again.

So you can ignore this post.  If you want to judge a blog, don’t bother with the first post, wait and see what comes next…