In the course of excoriating BP, a noble end in and of itself, he says this: "You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions." To which I can simply say: Yes. This. Now please all got and read the whole piece, because it's great.

You know, I don't think I have a spare 120GB of storage space. I may need to do something about that. In any event, this might well make things interesting over the next while, as people start digging into how much is spent where…

Interesting piece about the mapping of digital community to real-world local-level community.

Oh look. Facebook "likeing" has security vulnerabilities. At the moment, what's out there appears just to spam your facebook friends by inserting extra "likes" into your feed. Wonder how long before someone uses it to do something more malicious? This is pretty much the ne plus ultra of my problems with Facebook – it's not just that they're shady privacy invading bastards, it's that they're actively encouraging people to have bad security habits, by teaching them to trust things that are not trustworthy, and it's only a matter of time until someone gets seriously screwed by that.

For those of you that have remained with them, here's a step by step guide to sorting out your privacy settings so that they'll give you maximum prviacy, until the next time the rules change. It's over 800 words long, and contains a video, and I'll restrain my ranting for now but the point is that at least you can get the job done.

Lovely idea. Wish that a) I had a garden and b) they operated in the UK. Still the US-ians among you might get something tasty out of it.

Bookmarking because I want to come back to it and look at any comments, once it's had a chance to garner a few. Work-related, obviously.

"A few inches of skirts, page three girls, children swearing, glue-sniffing and acid house parties. How will it end? Is this progress? " This has been my amusement for today.

It turns out that sometimes good things *do* happen in Milton Keynes. I know, I'm as shocked as you. A new thing, by the people who did the Sultan's Elephant. If anyone fancies making a group trip out of it, Miranda and I have tickets for 3pm on the 31st of July.

If you're staying on facebook, I thoroughly recommend that you use this, to be absolutely sure of what your settings are. Remember, if you don't set everything correctly, you friends can share information about you without your knowledge, so do make sure to check…

Yes, someone at BERG has done a thing, and I'm linking to it again. What this thing is is a short exploration of bottom-up ubicomp, and how it is making our cities come alive. Cleverness is basically the art of drawing useful connections that others don't, and Matt Jones is bloody good at it, skating here from Archigram to Clay Shirky via Muji and Guy DeBord, and laying out a way of bringing on the future of our public spaces. Plus, I love the idea of the porch being the point where the public and the private mesh. Much friendlier that the computer-nerd term DMZ, much more useful.

Nifty little app for visually mining the history of London while out and about.

This looks really good. I suspect I shall want this, possibly along with a second twitter account to subscribe to news-based twitters.

I'd always thought Gen X stopped in about 1975, but apparently I'm a gen Xer. But this survey isn't about me, so much as it's about a lot of the people I know. It's, er, interesting. I'd like to see similar stats for the UK….

Well, here's an interesting test case for out new government, and for caring sharing Dave and his compassionate conservatism. But more importantly, do like the article says, and start writing, if you'd prefer that Britain not deport people who will be tortured or killing for the crime of being a lesbian.

I'm not sure I've got all this locked down, even on my ultra-locked-down work-only account. And I am by any reasonable lights, an expert web user. How is the casual user supposed to get it right?

This, by the way, it why I get so het up over privacy. This page contains a link to some talk about how facebook until the other day, made it possible to trace your location. I didn't blog the link, because Facebook fixed the hole before I could, but the fact it existed at all relates to a wider point about their privacy culture – they either do not think, or do not care, about how it will affect vulnerable people for whom privacy is a very important concern. And it's all very well for them to say "if you don't want it public, don't put it on facebook", but why should the vulnerable, for whom it might make the most difference, have less rights to share with their friends? Why should excluding the vulnerable from Facebook be acceptable?

I shall be shopping here later.

I know I keep on this hobby-horse. But this article is an excellent summary of why I remain on it, of all the things you now simply cannot do privately on Facebook. It doesn't even get into the information that leaks out about you just because your friends do things on the internet. I simply do not understand how it can be considered acceptable for a company to do this and remain in business they appear to have total and utter contempt for the people who use their system…

You never know when one of these will come in handy.