http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/about-us/consultations/equal-civil-marriage/

Just so everyone knows where I stand on this, I’ll share with you my response to the consultation here. Please do get involved – your views are important.

Question 1 – Agree

Question 2 – Discrimination in relation to state recognition of a loving relationship, whether same sex or opposite sex, has no justification in logic, ethics or morality. Allowing only civil partnerships for same-sex couples amounts to discrimination and, inherently, civil partnerships will continue to be seen as ‘lesser’ than marriage.

Question 3 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 4 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 5 – Agree but subject to comments in response to Question 16 below in which I argue that the civil element of marriage should be removed from religious organisations.

Question 6 – Disagree.

Question 7 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 8 – Disagree. Although I would not support the continuation of civil partnerships if marriage is to be introduced, if civil partnerships are to be retained, there is no reason why opposite-sex couples should not enter into one.

Question 9 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 10 – Disagree. It should be automatic.

Question 11 – Yes, there should be an option.

Question 12 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 13 – This question does not apply to me.

Question 14 – 2.36 – This is an issue with maintaining civil partnerships and civil marriages for same-sex couples. If they are all viewed as a marriage, then this problem does not arise. It is the job of Her Majesty’s Government to protect Her subjects. While all efforts to continue to persuade other countries to recognise same-sex relationships, HMG must continue to offer all possible help to those in same-sex relationships, particularly being mindful of those countries who may not be as forward thinking as the United Kingdom.

- 2.37 – It is bizarre that the situation could be different in the constituent parts of the United Kingdom and it would be heartening to see each of the devolved bodies working together in a show of unity on this issue. Human rights should not recognise territorial boundaries.

Question 15 – It would be a sad day for the United Kingdom when any costs involved in protecting people from lesser treatment based on their sexuality outweighed the incredible benefit of acting in the correct way to other human beings.

Question 16 – While nothing should slow the move towards same sex civil marriage, the conduct of several religious bodies and leaders in the run up to this consultation has been less than enlightened (let alone in line with their own strictures to love their fellow humans and treat them with love and as they would wish to be treated themselves). As currently outlined, the Government’s proposals allow churches to continue to discriminate on the grounds of sexuality by barring same-sex marriage. This is nothing short of outrageous – especially given their role in the civil side of marriage. Just because someone believes a particular form of discrimination is correct does not mean they should be able to force that view on others – nobody should be above the law of discrimination. For historic reasons, churches and other religious organisations have controlled marriage. However, we do not live in history and we should be open to considering the church’s dual role in marriages – carrying out both the religious and civil elements. Other countries, notably France, operate under a concept of laïcité – religious involvement in government affairs is not allowed nor is government involvement in religious affairs. There, couples may be married (in a religious sense) in church but only once they have been married in civic premises will the marriage be recognised formally by the state. I would suggest that the United Kingdom should move to a position where marriage is made a state function and people may have their marriage solemnised in church if needed but that that should be separate. In its words and deeds, the church has shown that it is no longer an appropriate guardian of marriage as a recognition of a relationship of love.

Anyway, in an online poll that was open for around 30 hours, I asked “Which biscuit would you crown King of Biscuits?” and the results were as follows:

Chocolate Digestive (Milk) 15%

Custard Cream 14%

Hobnob 11%

Bourbon 10%

Hobnob (chocolate) 7%

Ginger Nut 6%

Jaffa Cake 6%

Rich Tea 5%

Other 5%

Chocolate Digestive (Plain) 4%

Shortbread 4%

Garibaldi 3%

Jammy Dodger 3%

Party Ring 3%

Oreo 2%

Digestive 1%

Nice 1%

Shortcake 1%

Viennese Whirl 1%

Cookie (any) 0%

I think you can see that this proves, if nothing else, that that Rich Teas are much more rubbish than Custard Creams. That’s scientific fact now.

But I give you the King of Biscuits 2011 – The Milk Chocolate Digestive!

THE END

…

Except it isn’t.

I couldn’t help but take a look through the stats surrounding the #KingOfBiscuits poll. So, here are some stats (forgive the rounding):

Approximately 70,000 tweet impressions were created containing the #KingOfBiscuits tag.

Tweets including #KingOfBiscuits reached approximately 21,000 people (during the poll – not including post poll discussion).

Votes cast were 102.

This gives us a click thru rate (CTR)* in excess of 4.85%. Average CTRs on tweets tend to peak around the 2.5% mark for a good tweet (I’m not talking about my tweets here but an industry standard). Of course, there are anomalies for particularly targetted campaigns but, as a rule, CTRs over 2.5% are rare.

So, what have we learnt? We have learnt that a carefully crafted campaign using good hashtags can spur people into action. Or maybe that people care a lot about biscuits.

Most of all, we have learnt that Rich Tea are rubbish and Custard Creams are fab.

All Hail The Custard Cream!

*Although we are talking about CTRs here, our 4.85% is actually a tweet-to-action rate. This is normally much lower than the CTR as people do often click links without ‘doing’ the thing they are asked to do.

To those of you who tweeted links to directory services that show ‘recommended’ tradesmen, you miss the point. The flaw in such directories is that the ‘recommendations’ come from people I do not know or trust. Actually, if I’m being honest, I tend to assume that recommendations on such sites are at least 50% from ‘mates’ to improve the chances of their friends.

The joy of social media is that I can ask for recommendations and then judge them by the people giving me the information. A ‘recommendation directory’ has little more value to me than a phone directory (actually, the phone directory is useful to me because Google, my rabbit, likes ripping them apart).

So, next time someone asks for a recommendation, give a real one. Don’t try to promote your directory sites – that’s just not what social media is about.

It’s a trust thing.

Over the past few weeks, a campaign has been running to raise money for the Christmas lights in Exeter City Centre. The main focus of the campaign is to get money out of city centre businesses – and, in particular, the banks.

On Twitter, the City Centre Manger, John Harvey (who, I want to put it on record, I like a lot) has been attacking various targets for not putting money in to the pot.

Due to the deficiencies of Twitter (140 characters and all that), it’s not easy for me to put my point across on this and I feel a bit like I’m talking in soundbites. So I thought a blog might be in order to put some flesh on the bones. So, here we go…

This year, for various reason, there is no money for Christmas lights. Traditionally, this was something paid for out of the Council’s budget and it appears to cost somewhere in excess of £50,000 to put on. The lights are lovely.

Exeter City Council is, at the moment, making some big cuts to services. The pressures are coming at them from all angles – losing money in Icelandic banks, general Government cuts, spending on failed unitary bids and so on. But, at the same time, they are also writing off over £600,000 of unpaid rent and Council Tax. So they are obviously in no position to put their hands in their pockets.

Neither is Devon County Council. They are under pressure too.

So, the campaign is targeting the city centre businesses.

Now, maybe I’m looking at this a bit too simplistically but, if the Councils have no more money, why go after the businesses? Why assume they have money? Or that we are somehow entitled to it? Given how difficult it is to walk through Exeter without getting attacked by dozens of chuggers, it is possibly not surprising that they same tactics are being used now against the city’s businesses.

The level of vitriol being directed to these companies is simply wrong. They have already paid what has been asked of them. They have put in their contribution and now they are under attack.

I also do have a problem with a non-elected, predominantly publicly funded person attacking private companies for not donating money to something – whatever it is. It is their decision and they are not required to donate – respect that and don’t call them out. To read “Unacceptable that other #HighStreet banks haven’t yet come forward to support” on Twitter from the City Centre Manager is, I think, really unacceptable.

It is not right that organisations in Exeter do not feel they can speak out about this for fear of getting cast as the bad guy or somehow mean-spirited. And trust me, from the contacts that I have had that is exactly how they feel. They should feel free to speak and feel free not to contribute without fear of retribution.

I am now going to say something really unpopular but I hope that the illustration I give makes the point:

It is not mean-spirited to say that we have priorities and, when times are hard, maybe a few Christmas lights aren’t that important.

We are in the middle of an economically difficult period – possibly the worst there has ever been – and there is not an awful lot of money floating about. If we cannot afford Christmas lights, it will not kill us to go without them until there is enough money to pay for them. And if we can afford them, in the circumstances, maybe giving the money to one of the many organisations who are facing cuts that protect and support the most vulnerable in society would be a better use of it.

In fact, wouldn’t not having the lights and giving the money to the most vulnerable be in the real spirit of Christmas?

—

This attack on Exeter businesses has been very public so far and, therefore, I think it is only right that this discussion of the counterpoint is in the public domain too. I would welcome your contributions to this – especially from you, John! This is a discussion and I hope that you will take it in the manner in which it is meant. Your right of reply is absolute!

Sorry. Did that shock you? It’s a serious question. Believe it or not, there is a steady trade of amusing rape-based t-shirts in this country at the moment.

Marketed as ‘funny’, they are aimed at the assortment of weirdos who would not think twice about wearing them down the pub on a weekend where they would be joined by other halfwits who think that wearing amusing ‘rohypnol’-based t-shirts is a jolly jape.

I noticed one of these companies, 1stoptshirtshop, on Saturday. After a very short period online where fellow tweeters started pointing out who their commercial partners were, 1stoptshirtshop decided to remove their selection of rape tshirts from their website. Which was a shame because I had not taken a screenshot to prove that they were on sale. Rookie error on my part.

And it puts me in a difficult position because if I started to call 1stoptshirtshop sick and weird for selling them, what proof do I have? I could get in all sorts of trouble. Especially as I thought it might be an idea to contact some of their suppliers including Play.com, iWoot, Sky and others, to let them know who they were being linked to.

Shame.

Anyway, fear not because you can still buy your rape tshirts online! I found them! (I can hear your sense of relief!)

And you can still get them from 1stoptshirtshop (or at least on their Amazon store)! Yep, you too can be the proud owner of a “Funny Rohypnol can be persuasive baseball style t-shirt white with black sleeves“. Or, for the ladies, there is the “Funny Rohypnol can be persuasive ladies fitted t-shirt – Black“.

Incredibly, 1stoptshirtshop has a list of ‘partner’ companies that it displays on their website. For ease of reference, these include:

Expedia

iWOOT

Comet Electricals

InterFlora

LoveFilm

SkyTV

Play.com

Red Letter Days

CD WOW

Zavvi

You may know that the co-owners of Red Letter Days are Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones. We think that Peter, being a massive name on Twitter, would be a great person to help us spread the word about this company and maybe put a little pressure on 1stoptshirtshop to stop selling these tshirts. If you are on Twitter, you can send the following tweet to Peter Jones just by clicking it: “@dragonjones Did you know that 1StopShirtShop sells ‘rape’ tshirts and says that Red Letter Days is a partner company? #Stop1Stop”

If you can follow up with “@DragonJones You can see the rape tshirts here http://amzn.to/pl1cYd and the partner page here http://bit.ly/qvOcmp #Stop1Stop”

There are other companies who are selling these. Chargrilled have a selection of rape tshirts, there’s a rib-tickling “It’s not rape if you shout surprise” from Offensive TShirts UK and there are others too. They are next on the list…

Later this month, Apple is due to announce the most revolutionary mobile phone ever. It will redefine what a mobile phone is, how it looks and what it is meant to do.

The new device (an exclusive picture of which can be seen here) is called the iPhone Shuffle.

The iPhone Shuffle does away with the recent innovations of apps and music but it also does away with the traditional phone keypad.

The way it works is that you upload all your phone numbers to your iPhone Shuffle using a PC or Mac and, when you want to make a call, you just shake it. The iPhone Shuffle will then dial someone at random and you can have a chat with them using the supplied headphone/microphone combo.

An Apple insider told me, “We did a lot of research and it turned out that in 99% of cases when people make calls, they don’t really have anything interesting to say or care who they are saying it to. Once we found that out, doing away with the keypad made perfect sense.”

Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense and, at $49 for an unlocked iPhone Shuffle, it’s going to fly off the shelves. Expect queues around the block of your nearest Apple Store very soon.

“It’s yellow, it’s ugly, it doesn’t go with anything but it could your life!”

Brilliant!

Mongolian Flag by Nick Farnhill

Social Media around the country and beyond

I seem to have been doing things everywhere – at one point, it felt as if I was living on trains to or from London or around the south east. If I can have one slightly unconventional highlight, it will be seeing the Mongolian flag at the University of Hertfordshire where I was doing a talk on libraries using social media at CILIP’s annual conference, Umbrella. The flag was up because the University has a walkway above which is a flag for each different nationality student they have studying there at any particular time. How nice is that?

Anyway, Mongolia’s a stunning place with wonderful people – you should visit it. Seriously!

My only regret when going to Mongolia was that I was not able to spend more time in Russia during my stopover in Moscow. As it was, the stopover was only a few hours. I would have liked to have been there for days not hours!

Which links nicely to an interview that I did with Vitaly Alexandrov, a Russian journalist, when I was in London doing another talk. It is a long time since I have done an interview like Vitaly’s – which is a worry! Vitaly put me at ease far too easily and we talked for hours about social media and culture – the interview should be out soon – I hope I didn’t say anything too controversial!

Exeter’s where it’s at… and Birmingham

But I’m now back in Topsham ploughing through a mountain of things, working out plans for world domination, putting together proposals, working on websites, working on training courses, running social media campaigns, doing PR and more.

Then I’m speaking at LikeMinds in Exeter on 19-21 October and CILIP’s Marketing Excellence event in Birmingham on 11 November. Oh and there’s a course on Social Media for South West businesses to fit in on 4 November too.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. What about you?

I am the first one to mock these injunctions (although for professional reasons I probably shouldn’t). I mock them because of their utter futility. When I was growing up, a book was banned under the Official Secrets Act – it was called Spycatcher by Peter Wright and it revealed some things about MI5 or MI6 or MFI or something. During the period of the ban, I acquired a copy. I suppose, on a level, this means that I breached that Act – although, in my defence, I was about 14 at the time and did not really pose much of a threat to national security.

The book did though. I read some of it and I genuinely believe that had the whole country been able to buy the book and read it, it would have led to the end of the civilisation – primarily as they all dozed off into a boredom induced coma. Man alive, it’s an awful book. I suspect it did more to convince people not to join MI5 and take up accountancy instead than any other book in history.

Anyway, back to the plot. 14 year old me acquired a copy of Spycatcher. I did so using my best espionage techniques – which included remembering that it had been on the news and seeing a copy of it on a stand outside a newspaper stall at Paignton train station.

Of course, it sold far more copies banned than it ever would have done if it had been available from the outset.

And, of course, if we had all had access to the world wide web at that time and it had been banned, we would literally all have had a copy – not just those of us who happened to see a copy freely available to buy at Paignton train station.

Superinjunctions are a bit like the Spycatcher thing. The press is banned from telling anybody anywhere who is subject to these superinjunctions or what they are about but it’s pointless. If you go on to certain social media websites and search of some kind of secret squirrel subversive text (‘superinjunction’ for instance) you’ll start to find the list of names of people who may have one – and the reasons too. Google is also useful for these purposes.

Like I say, pointless.

But there is more to this in my opinion. It is our prurient Victorian view that other people should act in an ‘appropriate’ manner (normally involving sex) and that their behaviour has something to do with us if they do not.

Sure, I will point and laugh at them – but I’m laughing at them because of the fact that they’ve run off to court to do something pointless not because of what they have done.

None of the people that I have read about so far (with the exception of Andrew Marr who seems to have berated, on the one (oversized) hand, politicians for their sexual peccadilloes and, on the other, the idea of judge-led privacy laws at around the same time that he wandered off to court to get a superinjunction) have been hypocritical to me. Far from it, they’ve done things in their private lives that are nothing to do with me. The footballer hasn’t preached at me on the subject of marital fidelity, the actor hasn’t held forth on morality – so what does it have to do with me what they get up to in their own lives? Literally nothing.

Statute law will intervene in this because we cannot kick the habit of thinking that other people’s private lives are something to do with us. Just because someone is famous does not mean that we own them and it does not mean that they are our play thing. They are people, just like you and me, who deserve to get on with their own lives, do what they want and make mistakes in private.

What I’m saying is that we should leave them alone – for our own sake. As soon as there is a proper privacy statute in place in the UK, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be people who use it for corrupt purposes – things that will really have an impact on you and me. So, let the politicians and footballers and actors do what they have been doing for years – it’s nothing to do with us – and, in return, let’s not have a privacy law that stops us knowing things that we need to know.

It strikes me that there are enough of us living and working around and about to get a monthly Tweet Up going.

In an attempt to make this happen, I hereby institute #TopsTues – or Topsham Tuesday!  Topsham Tuesday will take place on the first Tuesday of every month in the fair town of Topsham on the River Exe.

My suggestion for the first #TopsTues is that we meet up for a coffee (and cake) at The Cafe (I’ve not mentioned it to them yet but I’m sure it’ll be fine!) at 10.30am.

So, spread the word – #TopsTues Tuesday, 5th April 2011 at 10.30am in The Cafe, Topsham.

Be there or be … square?