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“Dear Newsnight team: you’re fabulous at what you do, really terrific journalists (though that guy Paxman gets on my nerves occasionally). Here’s a comedy drama series I’d like you to make. Thanks. Yours, The Commissioner.”

You’d never see a memo like that. Obviously. Current affairs journalism is clearly a different specialism to, say, drama script editing. An individual might happen to be good at both, but one’s expectation is otherwise. Even technical staff will be different; a studio camera operator is a long way from a drama Director of Photography.

Yet, many of us still approach the web like this. We assume that we can ask anyone who ‘knows about websites’ to build us any type of site. Newsflash: those days are over. I suspect they never really existed, we were just all rubbish at building all types of site, which flattened out the differences. We still don’t really have the language to describe the specialisms, and we’re a long way from an appreciation of each others’ values. Communication is hard, bordering on impossible.

This is why the SciCast site doesn’t have an RSS feed. In my world – the bit of the web in which I move – building a site in 2007 without things like comment counts, pervasive RSS, metadata tagging, view counts, and so on, is completely bizarre. Incomprehensible to the point of being inconceivable.

The people who’ve built the site, however, aren’t in that world. They do different sorts of websites, for different sorts of people, that are run in different sorts of ways. I’ve lots of reasons to believe they’re very good at it, too – but from what I know, and where I stand, I simply don’t understand what they do. There’s no connection to the web in which I move. In return, they don’t understand my obsession with feeds, and with community, and with dynamism.

They’re not wrong, they just see a different world. And the site they’ve build isn’t bad, it’s simply different. For teachers – who are, often, quite a long way behind the technology curve – their implementation might be more appropriate than mine.

But it’s an interestingly stark lesson to have learned. And I’m profoundly thankful they aren’t Flash developers.

My chum Martin is standing in the Scottish Parliament elections tomorrow, in Glasgow Kelvin, for the Scottish Green Party. Here he is at a site that really should have been built by the MySociety folks.

Anyway: only 4.7? He’s far better-looking than that, curse him.

My lovely funders NESTA have an interview about our new project Planet SciCast. It gives you a brief overview of what we’re trying to do, and – more importantly? – some of the background as to why. In the grand scheme of things it’s a relatively small-scale project, but there are some Big Ideas behind it, and around it. I’m pushing for it to be seen as a useful test case for some of the debate that’s going on about public service publishing, for example.

The site itself is now live too. The ETB have done a cracking job of munging their content management system to deliver the design work that was done last year – but you’ll rapidly notice that it’s a work in progress. In the short term you’ll see mostly bug fixes and tweaks, but I’m hoping I can talk everyone round to understand the difference between what we have now, and the living community site we should have.

But hey – SciCast is now officially happening. The competition will open for entries later this month, and we’re already getting a terrific response from schools about the films, the site, the competition, and the project.

Children’s TV 2.0.

[still no comments on Quernstone.com, sorry]

Ah, too much to do, too much to say, too little time. Fleetingly:

The Science Council are building (yet another?!) new science careers website, and they’re taking the branding/design thing commendably seriously. How seriously? Well, I’m glad you asked, thank you dear reader. They’re taking it seriously enough to have thrown up a stylish little examples-and-voting site; they’re asking for opinions.

To my eye there’s a direct correlation between the funkiness of the branding and the obscurity of the message, which is a bit of a shame, but you can’t fault them for trying. One of the ideas in particular I’d love to see rolled out as a sort of ‘kite mark’ for science engagement work – it’d be a neat little bit of branding.

Anyway, take a look, cast your vote.

More from me later. Promise. Mostly because if I don’t post lots this week, Patrick will get angsty in email again.

[comments are still down, by the way. Yes, yes, I know. Humph.]

I’m in Cleethorpes. Or rather, I’m in an hotel in a village just outside Cleethorpes, in a place that’s probably more correctly Grimsby. Since my last post, I’ve:

• Struggled to get my brain working again, and into a new project.
• Entertained Flossie in Glasgow, briefly.
• Taken her (back) to Leeds, to meet my parents (again). She’d previously taken my mother to Gilgamesh at the Playhouse, which as ways of introducing oneself counts as plain weird. But hey, it worked.
• Accompanied her back down to Cardiff, where a week’s holiday was somewhat interrupted by Other Stuff, as follows:
• Participated in Demostorm, a slightly muted but nevertheless hugely fun flurry of science demo-based activity. There’ll be videos and things, honest.
• Panicked about SciCast, which kicks off in earnest tomorrow, with a formal launch event on Friday. Eek!
• Cooked some extremely good food. If Wendy or Dan are reading this, I’m actually talking about the bangers and mash the night before, sorry.
• Arranged for my car to be collected next week.
• Been included in some group emails with senior bits of the US Marine Corps, and co-opted onto a Task Force. True story.

SciCast is proving tricky to sort – we originally had a plan for a part-time admin assistant, and we were right about that. But the real pain is having to get everything sorted by the launch day on Friday, when we have a few press trogging into a school near Rotherham to watch an MP being made to look mildly silly by 14 year-olds.

You’ll notice I’m not linking to a website. That’s because… er… it’s not done yet. Yes, this is a matter of [cough] some concern.

But meanwhile… well, Flossie’s fab.

[Comments are still hosed, by the way.]

Utterly amazing video of a guy doing things that just shouldn’t be humanly possible. Via The Gupta, who’s back into blogging again and posting far too many good things to be healthy.

[Video of particular interest to John, I suspect, who in a previous life – if memory serves – designed several of the original games in Gladiators. Strange but true.]

Spool back a few posts to my [cough] announcement of TransLoading: Uploads in Disguise. Then read this article about a new technique from Carnegie-Mellon University. Then tell me I’m not something like a genius who’s wasted round these parts. Go on, dare you.

[update: it occurs to me that the CMU technique should have been called ‘Differential Torrent,’ shortened to ‘Difforrent’.]

Today, for the first time, the delightful Flossie met my parents. Tonight she’s taking my mother to a telling of Gilgamesh at the Playhouse in Leeds, and she’s staying with them until tomorrow.

Those of you who are paying attention may have worked out that I’m in Glasgow. This circumstance is… unsettling. Perhaps even nerve-wracking. It could all go so, so badly wrong.

Ah well, too late to worry now.

[update: Dad has sneaked online via his bedroom PowerBook to email the following:

Mum really enjoyed Gilgamesh & the company.

When they came back I serenaded [Flossie] with a CD of music on the Oud.

Mum’s tea seemed to go down well (Chicken Chasseur)

So far so good !

…which is more forthcoming that what I got out of Flossie herself. Tsk.]

Charles Hope and Ian Betteridge discuss whether journalism is a craft or merely information gathering; Giles Turnbull answers them rather succinctly. Though ironically, I think they’d each take something different away from Giles’ story.

As for me: I’ve been making television for a dozen years or more, but I’ve enough respect for journalists that I’ve never considered myself to be one. Curiously, I sometimes think what I write here at The Daily Grind is closer to journalism than anything I’ve done in TV… but I still don’t think of myself as a journalist.

[still no comments here, annoyingly. Ideas on how to avoid mt-comments.cgi spawning hundreds of instances when under attack welcome.]

I left university in 1994, which in those days meant losing the email address I’d used for three years. Still, ‘jjs13@cus.cam.ac.uk’ was never very catchy. For a while I managed to hang on to ‘jonathan@ricx.ri.ac.uk’, which was much cooler – heck, it was on a supercomputer! – but I needed ‘net access so I could Telnet into it and use pine.

There weren’t any internet cafés back then, but I did have Quern, a charming little PowerBook 165. Greyscale screen, undersized keyboard, oversized trackball, and a 33MHz 68030. Banzai! I found a cheap(ish) modem for it, and I signed up with Demon Internet, one of the fledgling dial-up internet service providers around at the time.

The service was initially great, then mostly terrible: Demon were one of the first ISPs to hit scaling problems, and they had horrible growing pains. For the most part, however, they were communicative. Once I’d seen a few ‘flavour of the month’ ISPs hit similar problems a few months later, I elected to stick with Demon since, on average, they were OK. Besides, the demon.local newsgroup was a hoot.

One advantage of Demon was getting a proper subdomain all to my lonesome. Rather than account@isp.net, with Demon one was anything_and_everything@account.demon.co.uk, which presented much more flexibility, but also a challenge. What would I use as my account name? I ended up using the name of the PowerBook, Quern. Hence: jonathan@quern.demon.co.uk.

At length the PowerBook died, and was eventually replaced. Several times. But the Demon account soldiered on, as a backup email address, an emergency dial-up account, and for a neat little fax-to-email gateway they offered. I used it from at least four different Macs, and from my Newton.

By the time Quern IV came along, however, the account was a bit pointless. WiFi still isn’t pervasive in the UK, but Bluetooth dial-up over mobile phones is now less hassle than finding a phone socket and remembering to pack a cable. I never did bother setting up Quern IV to talk to Demon directly. I completely forgot about it instead.

Which was a bit stupid of me, so last week I cancelled my Demon account entirely. www.quern.demon.co.uk: gone. The old Pondlife Newton user group site: gone. My last connection to my old email address: gone.

I’m a bit sad about this. It’s a bizarre coincidence that Quern IV should have chosen the same week to effectively die, too.

Heigh-ho.