Yesterday, LA Fitness were on the receiving end of a concerted Twitter kicking as they acted like bean-counting idiots when dealing with a jobless, soon-to-be-homeless, heavily-pregnant and previously-loyal customer. Rightly so.

A bit of sense and compassion at the outset would have been a lot less expensive than the hit to their brand equity that resulted. And it all ended with a heavily-lawyered press release which reads like fingernails down a blackboard in its grudging repentance.

Today, Tom Watson’s intern has her Clare Swire moment when she posts an ill-advised tweet from his unattended laptop. That goes viral. Tom Watson responds with a post that summarises as “Yes, she was an idiot. We’ve all been idiots. She won’t do that again. Nothing else to see here. Move along.”

One was the end result of faceless cack-handed PR fuckwittery. The other was grown-ups behaving like grown-ups.

I still can’t quite figure out why supposedly professional public relations people automatically fall into faceless press release mode. Don’t they ever read their own words back themselves and think “do we really sound like that?

I’ve taken this site down today, as part of the world-wide protest about two pieces of legislation currently going through the US Congress and Senate.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate equivalent (PIPA) are intended to give additional powers to US law enforcement agencies and the content industries. According to their supporters, the acts will target online copyright infringement.

The way the legislation is framed undermines the structural integrity of the internet as we know it. It is also wide open to abuse, to target commercial competitors and silence contrary opinions. It mandates exactly the same technical and legal processes that are used in China, Syria, North Korea and the like to censor the internet.

The “content industries” in the shape of the RIAA, MPAA, Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have a track record of opposing every new technological innovation of the last 100 years as a threat to their established business model.

They were opposed to piano rolls, and radio, and broadcast television, and cable television, and the video recorder, and the DVD, and the MP3 player, and online bookstores. All of these subsequently turned out to be massive money spinners for the content industries.

None of these technologies and services would have seen the light of day if the content industries, and their lawyers, had enforced their way. This legislation is primarily about protecting business models that have had their day. It’s the horse and cart industry protesting the rise of the internal combustion engine – and abusing the political process to do so.

I live in the UK, and this site is hosted in the UK. But I’m taking part in these protests because what happens in the US eventually finds its way over here. If SOPA and PIPA pass in Washington, then it’s a racing certainty that we’ll see the same laws introduced in Europe and the UK – with the same chilling effect on innovation and free speech.

Richard Stallman was in Leeds last week, talking about what he considers “free” to mean in a digital society. It was worth making the trip over to see him speak – it’s hard not to have at least some degree of respect for someone who has devoted virtually their entire adult life to promoting an ideal. And continues to do so even when the alternative would make for an easier day-to-day existence.

My problem is, that’s also a definition of the worst kind of religious zealot. And there were some occasions listening to him that there was more than a little religious fervour to what he was saying. Not that I think Stallman is necessarily a zealot in the truly religious sense. His principles seem to be based around “you can if you choose to”, rather than “you must because I say so”.

His internet would be run on the noblest of principles – although that works only so long as everyone involved sticks to those principles. That doesn’t seem to fit with actual experience of what human nature is. There’s a lot of talk of “they” – by which he means governments and corporate interests, and presumably “society” in the most general sense. But if those are “they”, who are the “we” that he also talks about?

There was a certain irony about seeing him speak in Leeds. The city centre is an architectural theme park for the kind of corporate interests that he rails against, and the soulless, nagging announcements that blanket the station in aural passive aggression are how corporations would sound if they had a voice to match their legal existence as pseudo-humans.

There’s an irony too, that I’m typing this on a laptop designed and made by Apple. Stallman’s not a fan – the Apple model of restricting an iDevice to running only “approved” software runs counter to all of his rules of free software.

I do get the feeling that perhaps he somehow undervalues the tremendous positives that the internet has been responsible for, compared with the negatives that he’s concerned about. An internet that conforms entirely to Stallman’s ideals would be a less colourful place – even if that colour comes with a price.

Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it.

Fred Brooks

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been to a couple of events which have had a common theme of data – or more precisely, what effect access to data can have on the way our organisations behave. First was a quick trip to London for the October Facebook Developer Garage. The overarching theme last month was Government and Data, so there were various speakers from the intersection of technology geekery and policy wonkery that has sprung into existence over the last year or so.

One of the speakers was Chris Thorpe – I’m not quite sure how best to describe him, other than he makes and thinks about stuff online – and he was talking about how you make public data personal and pertinent. One of his examples was data from Guildford Borough Council, which he’d visualised by showing the ebbs and flows of spending over time.

When you think about it, it’s perfectly logical that spending on the Lido would be greater during the summer than the winter – but when you make those sort of visualisations, you also realise that there are spikes around the end of financial periods. Is that because this is when the invoices come in, or is it frantic efforts to empty the budget before the end of the financial year?

The point here is that raw statistics are all very well, but they’re only half the story. if your local hospital has had 300 cases of MRSA diagnosed in the last year, that might be a bad thing (particularly if it’s you that’s caught it). But whether it’s a disaster or a triumph depends on more information – if there were 3,000 cases the year before then you can argue that things are improving, whereas if it started from a base of 3, something’s gone wrong.

Which is why I’m also a bit wary of sites like Schooloscope. Although it’s built by people with brains the size of planets and the noblest of intentions, it still makes me slightly queasy that on the surface at least, every facet of a school’s existence is boiled down to a smiley face on the side of a cartoon building.

Yes, there IS much more nuanced information behind that, and yes, it’s not THAT difficult to find – but there’s still a snap smiley/frowny judgement plotted on a map. And the data is sourced from Ofsted – talk to virtually any teacher for more than a few minutes, and they’ll tell how that information is the product of the poster-child of box-ticking-as-a-substitute-for-dealing-with-the-underlying-issues approach.

Making the snap judgements, and not bothering to question the information is a symptom of what Schuyler Erle has called “red dot fever” – maps plastered in splodges of data points as an alternative to analysis. I’ve got a depressing feeling that there’s the same red dot fever when it comes to open public sector data – give a lazy journalist a Freedom of Information request and they’ll turn out 1,000 words of “why, oh why” about waste and inefficiencies.

And open data can be used as a weapon, too. I’m convinced that the raft of stories in the last few days about apparent junketing at the Audit Commission – and that organisation’s impending abolition – are completely un-coincidental.

Small wonder that some organisations are taking great lengths to ensure that their data is worse than useless – “it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard‘.”

Which is where the second of the two events comes in. Scraperwiki is the product of a startup that does something that on the face of it is relatively simple – it enables you to scrape websites to retrieve data. By exploiting the fact that the web is a structured medium, with a few clever tools and some persistence it’s possible to harvest data into a form which then becomes usable for analysis.

Scraperwiki does more than this, though – because it glues all the tools that you’ll need into a single cohesive application, it dramatically lowers the cost-of-entry to this kind of work. If you’re a half-competent geek, chances are you’ll be able to rig up a Ruby interpreter, an XML parser and a database so that you can pipe the results into Google Maps. But those are “10,000 hour skills”, to misquote Malcolm Gladwell – what Scraperwiki and tools like it do is to start to put those capabilities into the hands of civilians.

At the moment, there’s a culture change beginning to take place inside the public sector with data becoming seen as something that’s public property. It’s going to take a long time, because there’s a lot of cultural inertia to overcome. I think we’ll find that most of the data that gets release will tell the tale of decent people doing the best they can in trying circumstances. But some of it will shine some bright lights into some murky areas, so it must be tempting for organisations to think that they can limit the potential damage by burying the data away in obscure formats, or freezing it into a PDF.

But that’s a mistake, because it’ll cause an arms race. This is the kind of behaviour that your average geek sees as a challenge. Given enough time, neurons and lines of code, the information is going to get extracted, parsed, analysed and published – hiding it away is only postponing the inevitable.