I enjoyed reading Michael White’s piece in this morning’s Guardian about the furore over the fate of Learco Chindamo, who may soon be released from prison after being convicted, aged 15, of the murder of schoolteacher Philip Lawrence.

A kneejerk reaction from certain quarters has been a call to repeal the Human Rights Act. It’s indicative of people’s seeming desire to take tabloid newspaper reports at face value, since it was they, and not the judgement of the asylum and immigration tribunal, which attributed the decision to allow him to stay in the UK to the Act. In fact, it was neither the HRA nor the European Convention on Human Rights, which the HRA allows to be enacted through British courts rather than taking a substantially more expensive route via Strasbourg.

But since when have little things like factual accuracy bothered the tabloids, and the politicians who crave their audience?

Some words of wisdom from Tinu Abayomi-Paul on how to measure the value of a Facebook friend:

…Facebook Friends aren’t All necessarily friends, not in the American sense of the word.

They’re people you know. But Facebook calls them friends and I like to treat them that way until such a time that they prove me wrong - which I doubt will ever happen with 99% of the people I know there.

Something that all social networks suffer from to some degree is a lack of distinction between different types of contact, grouping them all under one nebulous category of ‘friend’. Facebook does give you the option of providing information about how you know them, but that in itself only gives you a clue about the start of the relationship, not its intrinsic worth.

What I like about Tinu’s approach is that it turns this potential drawback on its head, to make it an advantage — everybody in your social circle known as your ‘friends list’ has the potential to be a friend.

To whit, she has three points which, she says, illustrate what makes a Quality Facebook Friend:

1. They’re Active - they log in often enough for you to maintain a connection through Facebook, and do they do interesting things when logged in.
2. They’re Friendly - they may not all be your friends, but if you say hello/poke/message/write on their wall, they’ll eventually return the greeting in a fashion of their choosing.
3. They’re Enigmas in the inspirational sense of the word - enough alike me that we have common ground, but different enough for me to be fascinated by what they do.

I have people on my friends list that I’ve only met once, through work; some who I went to school or university with; people I work with every day; friends I’ve met elsewhere, and wish I could see more often; and people with whom my relationship has, to date, been exclusively online. But pretty much all of them fit those three criteria.

PS: If you’re on Facebook, I’m easy to find — I’m the Scott Matthewman who lives in the UK and not Florida.

This comment piece on PC Pro’s website by Barry Collins gets some of the points about social networking spot on. In particular, it understands that Friends Reunited — which, for a while, was one of the biggest sites in the UK — now looks like more of a dinosaur:

Friends Reunited — once the multimillion pound poster child of the social-networking generation — is now little more than an online time capsule from 2001, with swathes of profiles that haven’t been updated in years. The site recently sponsored a TV programme on ITV (Friends Reunited’s parent company), about a woman who came out of a coma after 18 years. I’ll be amazed if Friends Reunited comes back to life that quickly.

Annoyingly, Collins doesn’t connect that situation with another nugget of information about Friends Reunited:

I’ve yet to see any evidence that Facebook can generate significant profit from its millions of users. There’s no charge to use the site or make contact with friends — even Friends Reunited had the gumption to tap you for a fiver if you wanted to get in touch with the girl you used to ping rubber bands at in Geography lessons.

The charging structure must surely be one of the principal causes of FR’s decline. While it’s true that Facebook as yet shows no sign of having a clear, reliable and long-term revenue model (something that Collins gets spot on through his piece), ITV’s problems with Friends Reunited show that choosing the wrong revenue model can kill your site faster than any competitor ever can.

Jeff Jarvis always puts up compelling arguments in the ‘old’-versus-‘new’ media debate. Friday’s piece looks at a report that says that local newspapers are most threatened by the internet. Replace ‘local’ with ‘specialist’ and the argument (and counter-argument) remains the same — and Jarvis’ points about how to succeed in the future still apply.

Some useful tips on the best way to learn effective chopstick use (via Lifehacker).

I tend to do okay with chopsticks, but always think I could do better. Still, practice makes perfect…

More for my sake than anything else, here are the links to each of my TV Today weekly reviews of the BBC’s hunt to find a West End Joseph, Any Dream Will Do.

• Week 1 — the auditions and callbacks
• Week 2 — ‘Joseph school’ and the final selection
• Week 3 — first live show; Chris Crosby eliminated
• Week 4 — Johndeep More eliminated
• Week 5 — Antony Hansen and Seamus Cullen eliminated
• Week 6 — Chris Barton eliminated
• Week 7 — Robert McVeigh eliminated
• Week 8 — Daniel Boys eliminated
• Week 9 — Craig Chalmers eliminated
• Week 10 — the ‘semi-final’; Ben Ellis eliminated
• Week 11 — the final; Lewis Bradley third, Keith Jack runner-up, Lee Mead winner.

Also, my interview with Daniel Boys after his elimination.

If you’re in Edinburgh this weekend — which, sadly, I’m not — and are in any way shape or form into Doctor Who — which, happily, I am — then make sure you go along to a one-off charity event in aid of ACCORD, the hospice where David Tennant’s mother worked and, recently, passed away.

Comedians appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe are staging a special one-off Dr Who-themed comedy show as part of the David-Tennant.com fundraiser, which intends to raise money for the ACCORD hospice in Paisley, Scotland.

The comedians taking part were moved by the response from Dr Who fans to the recent death of the actor’s mother Helen from cancer.

The gig will take place at Laughing Horse@Linsays (Fringe Venue 56) on Saturday 18th August 9.10 - 10.10pm. Although the show is not ticketed, and is not part of the official Fringe programme, those attending will be asked to donate £10, with all proceeds going to the ACCORD hospice appeal.

Venue details: Laughing Horse@Linsays, 15 Brunswick Street, Edinburgh, EH7 5JB Box Office & Enquiries: 0131 556 8974

Full details can be found here.

Those taking part will include Toby Hadoke, the genius behind Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf, and Mitch Benn, star of (among others) Radio 4’s The Now Show.

Of course, you’ll all know of this already, thanks to its plug on Show 12 of The Stage/TPN Fringe podcast. You have been listening, haven’t you? If not, subscribe now in iTunes. As I type this, we’re at no. 11 in the Arts chart and with a few more subscribers we could well go Top Ten!

Oh, and if you haven’t been lucky enough to catch Toby live, here’s a taster of his live set:

As usual, Martin Stabe is the guy to go to for all things related to new media journalism.

His post of August 1, Essential reading for online journalism, contains links that say all the sort of things that we should keep in our heads at all times. Sometimes, though, when you have your head down because you’re stumbling from one minor job to the other, you can lose track of what route you should be taking.

Of course, it doesn’t help if you have people in your organisation who seem to be working to a completely different map…

So since I relaunched the site, I’ve been monitoring which pages have been triggering the most 404 Page Not Found errors, and have ported a selection across to the new site. I definitely prefer doing it this way, even though it’s more labour intensive: I’m ending up with a clean blog with much less cruft.

Unfortunately, as part of the whole cleanup operation I’ve scrapped my original Feedburner feed, which was sharing an account with various feeds I’d set up for The Stage. So it means I’m effectively going to be building up a regular audience from scratch, which I suppose is no bad thing in its own way.

Anyway, to celebrate this blog being back on its own two feet, I’ve published Requiem for a Songbird, a Doctor Who short story I wrote for Big Finish’s open submissions competition a couple of months ago. A previous draft of the story has previously appeared on this blog as The Nightingale’s Song, but this pass took on a number of notes I’d received from various authors in the intervening years. I hope you like it.

It was the hardest entrance he’d ever have to do. Walking into the room, confronted by people who were there to celebrate his wife’s death. How could he face them?

Gilbert looked at their faces, full of sympathy for him. No, not sympathy, pity. They were there out of courtesy, friends of the new nightclub owner. Mickey Hamilton. Word was he was the new gangster around these parts. Gilbert sighed — if it were any other day than today, he’d have squared up to him. Told him exactly how the drugs and the dirty money were changing places like this.

On any day but today. Today was different.

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