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Arms fair hoax report prompts all-time record number of visits to my blog

Had an astonishing, gobsmacking, all-time record number of blog hits at the weekend from my post about the London arms fair Life Neutral hoax.

http://fwords.co.uk/2011/09/16/arms-trade-hoax-is-outed-as-organisers-admit-it-was-%E2%80%9Can-elaborate-stunt%E2%80%9D-to-embarrass-weapons-dealers/

The number of views on Friday was a record for me – nearly FOUR TIMES higher than the previous most-hit-making post in my relatively short blogging career.

My hits were already getting close to the previous record by 5pm, when I wandered up the health club to get the latest gossip from the Boys in the Steam Room. The Boys were in earnest discussions about veruccas, hip replacements, The Dirty State of the Steam Room Walls, and How To Rehabilitate Prisoners, so I didn’t stay long before returning home to more absorbing subjects.

When I got in the hits had gone way, way, over the previous record, and every time I checked back throughout the evening the number was still rising.

Saturday saw 2.7 times my previous record number of hits and yesterday got me 1.4 times the previous record – almost all views of that one blog post.

Interest was boosted by retweets – notably by the hoax organisers, www.spacehijackers.org , and by www.stopthearmsfair.co.uk. I had about 300 hits from Facebook alone, after someone posted a link to my blog there. There were also links through from other blogs and, bizarrely, from a cycling forum whose members had taken an interest in the arms fair.

My hit-rate was partly due to timing – I happened to be mooching about watching Twitter when the hoaxers were being “outed” on the BBC. Until then, a lot of people had taken as a sick reality the spoof, claiming that arms manufacturers wanted to “offset” the deaths they caused in the developing world by funding Western parents to have more children. I listened to the BBC World Service interview, during which Space Hijackers ‘fessed up to it all being a big hoax, and quickly banged out a blog post on the subj.

But more than sheer timeliness, the number of hits, I think, reflects the growing unease about the way our country happily sells weapons of mass destruction to certain countries and in the next breath accuses other countries of attacking their own people. There is a particular, and peculiar, contrast between Libya (where we are backing the overthrow of a government to which we sold weapons until recently); and Bahrain, which is openly attacking its own people, yet to which we were selling weapons at last week’s arms fair. It seems we really don’t care whom we furnish with murderous weapons, as long as there’s a profit to be made. There are too many commercial interests involved for the mainstream media to openly criticise our country’s warmongering, so people are turning to the internet to get the information they want about the steadily-growing peace movement.

A minority continue to believe that the arms trade is necessary for our economy. As many have more sensibly pointed out in response to this specious argument, “they said that about the slave trade”. Our economy survived the cessation of slavery; why shouldn’t it survive the end of the trade in mustard gas, leg irons, restraint equipment, white phosphorus, and bullets and bombs without end?

Pic credit:  Africa, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1803

In which I wonder if social media is really for me…

Parts of this great big interweb intrigue and absorb me. I love the randomness of Twitter. Among the rash of posts about the Norwegian massacres and Amy Winehouse’s death, everyday life went on as normal. Metrobus announced that a new route would be in effect from August on Route 93 in Surrey, Leyton Orient Football Club (according to a retweet) has completed its summer signings. And a BBC travel reporter described being stuck in a “mahoosive” traffic jam on the north circular.

Young people, we’re told, stay in and do social networking because they like it. Old people stay in because they like watching the telly – they’ve heard of social networking but don’t like it. I’m in an awkward kind of middle ground; I’m doing social networking in a sort of half-arsed way, because everyone says I should, but I’d secretly rather go out and talk to human beings.

The pubs are consequently only half full, their populations consisting of middle-aged people talking to other middle-aged people and tutting about the few under-25s who’ve not understood the “social” media rules and hence sneak into the pub but spend the evening ignoring their companions and poring over their mobile phones.

Apparently, fooling around on the computer is the only way to get work these days. In the old days, getting work was all about personal recommendation. Imagine the scene. Two journo types in a pub, 10 years ago.

Bloke A: Crap, I need to get someone to do that 2,000-word feature by Thursday. Know anyone?

Bloke B: Mm, I used to work with this bird called Sue Fenton. NCTJ-qualified, knows what a deadline is, good at research, can understand a brief – even her spelling’s not bad if you can catch her sober. And she’s desperate at the moment, I gather. Here’s her number. Your round, anyway.

Bloke A: OK, I’ll give her a ring. Same again?

Picture the scene today. Two journo types sitting in their respective living rooms.

Bloke A: Crap, I need someone to do that 2,000 word feature by Thursday. Know anyone? Preferably someone you’ve never met and never worked with, of course? If you haven’t got the first idea who they are, all the better.

Bloke B: Mm, well I’ve got 214 friends on Facebook and about double that on LinkedIn. Why don’t you trawl through the lot of them and see if any of them have failed a Meeja Studies degree? Cheapest way of doing it. Take you all morning, of course.

Bloke A: Oh, bollocks.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I’m not down the pub on a Saturday night disapproving of the young people.

When mocking people’s spelling mistakes stops being funny

There are gangs of self-appointed spelling police who lurk about on Facebook looking for errors. Their aim, according to the link below, is to “publicly challenge and humiliate sloppy wordsmiths”.

The Best Obnoxious Responses To Misspellings On Facebook | Happy Place.

Happyplace.com collated loads of examples of Sloppy Spellers meeting Spelling Pedants online, and some are quite amusing.

On the other hand, some of the spelling police are effectively trolls, since they set out to bait and denigrate rather than to educate – and they appear to be targeting complete strangers in order to make their points.

But some of the exchanges contained in the link are really very funny.

+ One pedant remarked on a badly spelled post: “There are no correctly spelled words in your message… perhaps you have an involuntary movement disorder in your fingers.”

+ Another spelling troll took exception to being called a “dooshbag”, and kindly supplied the correct spelling so that he could be insulted more accurately.

+ “Margerhitas make everythuing betterr”, commented one poster, only to get the rapid response from a lurking troll: “Except spelling”.

+ Another troll wittily responded: “What a gneiss father” to a Facebook user who said her father had told her never to “take anything for granite”.

+ There was an amusing exchange when someone called Rachel announced that she was “board”. A troll wittily responded: “I’m chalk, we should get together”. Rachel sniffily replied: “BOARD. Like I don’t have anything to do. Not BORD, like a chalkbord.” Rachel went on to suggest that the troll should “learn to spellcheck”, perhaps inevitably prompting the response: “Oh god, I hope you don’t breed”.

+ And someone called Jesse proudly announced to the world “I past my test!!!”, only for a troll to comment: “I hope it wasn’t a spelling test.”

+ Sometimes the victims bite back: one wrote to his tormenter: “Got nothing better to do than troll pages looking for spelling errors… you probably haven’t been laid in 10 years.”

+ One feisty young woman, named Candace, responded: “Go dig a hole and fall in it” to a post correcting her spelling. The troll pedantically pointed out that if he had dug a hole he would already be in it and wouldn’t need to fall in. “Fine,” said Candace, “go dig a hole and die in it.”

The irrepressible troll replied that if he were about to die he would probably be unable to dig a hole. Candace, who one imagines had already lost interest in this exchange, responded tersely: “Shut up” and the dialogue concluded.

+ There can also be harsh words between those who know each other. One girl, called Nicole, took exception to her partner stating what an “amazeing girlfreind” she was – it wasn’t those spelling mistakes she objected to, but the fact that he spelled her name “Nichole”.

Much to chuckle about, in short, on this link. But I found myself rather dismayed about the way some trolls seek to make a point at the expense of people who appear to be genuinely distressed.

On reading a post saying: “My gurl gav me her pies – dunno wat 2 do next”, some wit suggested he should eat the pies, to which the poster responded: “U nasty ass.. I don’t need this shit..” explaining that he was referring to “bumps on ur dick”.

If the poster genuinely has an STD, the would-be wit of the spelling police is unhelpful and somehow a little cruel.

Other examples go further into the realms of unpleasantness. One Facebook user wrote that his girlfriend had left him, he’d fallen out with his best friend and his grandfather had died. “Its only getting worse,” he added mournfully, admitting “I need help”. A Spelling Troll popped up briefly to point out that he’d missed the apostrophe out of “It’s”. Other trolls also stepped forward to correct the spelling of two potentially suicidal posts, one from a boy who didn’t “wanna live anymo” and the other from a girl wishing “congradulations” to those who, she believed, wanted her to die.

We’ve all been tempted to correct others’ spelling: but there’s surely a line to be drawn; those who should know better, like companies, professional communicators and anyone who’s had a university education, are fair game as far as I’m concerned. But there’s something not quite nice about seeking out and criticising the personal communications of individuals who appear to be in distress, with the sole aim of scoring points.

Pic credit: Ambro, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499