Update 2 - As if by some weird kind of social media magic, it's back. Twitter's Status site records the fix, although no explanation is offered for its partial absence, nor for the downtime and missing tweets that have been going on all day.

Dust off your R and T keys, and get prepared to copy and paste once more; Twitter's much-debated Retweet button has disappeared. The site is frantic with people wondering where it's gone, and there's no mention of the loss on the site's status page or blog. Given that the reaction when it was first released was far from positive, in time people are likely to get used to going back to the old (that's old in social media terms, mind) way of sharing others' tweets with your followers. And, since retweets carried out using the button are now expanded out to include RT at the beginning (e.g.), what's happened to any full 140-character messages that have been retweeted? Has Twitter broken its own 140-character rule?

Update: Kju has an answer - old retweets seem to be being cut off at 140 characters. And, as he notes, SMS updates have always been allowed over that limit.

This week has seen the realisation that the fundamentals of the advertising-based business model of online news are technically illegal, although that's not going to be such a huge problem since a newspaper 'race to the bottom' will see fast, badly written articles that no one really wants to read become the norm in the new fast-food journalism culture.

None of which matters, since it's all going to be written by robots anyway.

Since the first pictures and tweets of the Nexus One started emerging, the mythical Googlephone has been the source of some intense speculation, much of it surrounding the two new symbolic developments it portends; firstly, that Google is now in the hardware business, and secondly, that it is (allegedly) planning to release the phone network-free.

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this plan was an obscure patent filed by Google in September of last year.  The patent contained a plan for mobile networks to be freed from network-tethering, called the "Flexible Communication Systems and Methods" (see the diagram above left), and proposed a system by which mobile phones would be able to operate on a variety of networks at different times, with the choice about which network decided by the phone based on price, service etc. In the words of the patent:
To be clear, this is not what's going to happen with the Nexus One, which is essentially just like any unlocked handset. Moreover, there are reports that the phone is going to be sold in two versions in the US, one unlocked, and one with a T Mobile contract. But the crucial difference about the unlocked handset is that it is, at the least, a move in the direction of openness on Google's part, and an attempt to disintermediate the mobile phone market in a way which makes a lot of sense when you consider the context. There's certainly a culture clash between Google's tacit philosophy of encouraging as much openness as possible to help growth (and then steep the free, open content in advertising) and the world of mobile phones, where as it stands you can only get certain devices on certain networks at certain tariffs, with the market led by decisions made on the part of the network operators - the recently-dropped HD2 for example.

But what US commentators haven't cottoned onto yet is that there is an emerging precedent for this in the release of the much-touted Droid in the UK, as the unlocked and network non-specific Motorola Milestone. I've had my review unit working since this morning, and it's really good. But supposedly no network would touch it in the UK because there was no room for it in the European market. If this is true, it's madder than a march hare on crack, but either way Google will be watching UK sales closely as a kind of guide to what kind of uptake they could except with a network-agnostic Google phone in the US.

There is some speculation that the phone may be discounted for long-time Google account holders, but I can't see that happening - as usual, Google is going to be trying to bring down the barriers for entry as low as possible, and charging people what will look like a tax on not being a prior Google user of $100 of more would put a lot of people off. It's worth noting that Apple are already doing their bit to weaken the mobile phone networks with the iPhone, which, if this graphic is to be believed, makes no money for it's US network AT&T until the 17th month of the contracts if high data-users.

Also, in case you're wondering why we're seeing so many Google releases at the moment, that mystery's been solved; it's because the company has a freeze on products lasting for the next three months, so lots of releases have been rushing to get to the market before it hits. Top picture from patent, lower via Engadget

"Indie rock bands are leaking creativity. Why not harness their magical indie powers to help out those in need?" - so says the website of the Yellow Bird project, a Montreal-based charity whose offerings include sartorial items plucked from the imaginations of Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart and Of Montreal as well as multifarious other great indie acts who you've either heard of and love, or haven't. Card-carrying hipsters will also recognise them as the people behind this year's painfully trendy Indie Rock Coloring Book (sic).

For their latest releases they've employed the significant talents of angst-pop beat combo Bloc Party, folk hipsters Grizzly Bear, and Metric, the Canadian New Wave stars. Bloc Party's creation (bottom left), a vaguely Impressionist false-colour landscape of a cornfield (I think) populated by butterflies and over-looked by wispy clouds, is being sold to fund the charity Bread and Roses, who champion social justice, while Grizzly Bear's child-like rumination on the culturally transformational properties of the wheel (top left) asks people to splash the cash in aid of Brighter Planet, a suitably au courant Climate Change foundation.

At the time of writing, the Metric tee is yet to appear on the website, although some fine sleuthing by the LA Times suggests it may involve "pinstripes". Profits from their design will allegedly help fund MusiCounts; more developments as they come.

UPDATE: I'm reliably informed they ship to the UK no problem, so those with Christmas present slots yet to be filled feel free to put in an order. Still no word on the pinstripes

UPDATE 2: As per an email from Yellow Bird Project's English half, Casey, the Metric tee is due out tomorrow (Friday). Paypal accounts at the ready...

MySpace, the News Corp-owned former social-networking behemoth, has been locked in tug-of-war with Facebook ever since the latter's formation, but now it's traffic has been overtaken even by Twitter in the UK, it seems fair to say that the direct competition is all but over. But one area it has always succeeded in is music, despite the site's lack of polish. Today sees the relaunch of MySpace Music in the UK, just over a year after the service launched in the US, featuring shareable playlists, integration with iTunes for purchasing songs, and fully licensed streamable music and videos. As well as that, artists are getting more advanced analytics pages, so they can pinpoint where in the the world their fans are to be found, and there's also some live concert footage from such pop luminaries as Lady Gaga and Eminem.

They're marking the occasion with a raft of celebrity playlists, of varying quality; Katie Price is taking the opportunity to air her playlist "Songs that make me want to party" (featuring Beyonce's 'Single Ladies', of course; despite the fact that he did, in fact, put a ring on it), the Jonas Brothers are letting us know their "Songs we can agree on" (the spectre of tense tourbus moments looms large), and the infinitely more palatable "Playlist for tour" by Weezer.

It's unfortunate though that the site's design for artists' pages is still that clunky mixture of bland templates and (perhaps consequently) an over-active impulse to customise on the part of individual users. There are exceptions, of course, but the sad fact about MySpace is that the vast majority of its users' pages and, to an extent those of artists', still look like a thirteen-year-old girl has tried to consume the contents of her handbag, thrown it up onto a screen, and then attempted to rearrange the resulting mess into a website, blindfolded. And that's before you even touch on the technical frailties of the infrastructure which is, as a friend of some technical expertise once told me, 'held together by sticky tape and good hope'.

Still, the improvements can only be a good thing for the burgeoning market for music streaming sites, and services like Last.fm and Spotify, both of which operate in roughly the same space, will be watching the developments closely, though they may not be directly competing for users; the demographic for the new site is pretty clear from the sharp focus on pop music; not to raise the question of what age-group that might be directly, two of them just posted comments asking "Who is Mick Jagger?" and "whos mick jagure???" on the Video for K$sha's "Tik Tok", which is top of the site's video chart.

As usual, there's never room for everything interesting you stumble across while writing for the paper, and so it was with the company central to my piece today on the future of projectors, and how that may well involve laser projections which we can interact with just as we can with touchscreens. Light Blue Optics, the company who developed touch-sensitive holographic laser projection technology, are promising big moves to allow computers, handheld or otherwise, to break free from the restraints of a display or built-in interface, like a keyboard. Imagine a Mac Mini you don't have to plug anything into, but smaller, and you're not a million miles off, although what's really exciting is the potential for embeddable projectors in mobile phones and cameras (to the extent that those two will still exist as separate entities by the time the technology's small enough to embed - 2011 at current estimates).

But the part I didn't get chance to talk about was LBO's other area of expertise in the field of projection, car heads-up-displays. With what they've got planned, the company's HUDs might end up being just as revolutionary as their plans for portable mini projectors.

Having developed the technology initially for military use in conjunction with the French Thales Group (for some reason I find their website slightly terrifying), the company has been working on adapting some of their work for cars. "The requirements for defence are very different - only monochrome, for example, and in a lot smaller volume than you'd find in an automotive sector.", says Dr Edward Buckley, the company's VP of Business Development. "It's not a million miles away and basically the same principle."

The challenges of designing a decent HUD differ from other projectors in that you don't really want people spending too much time looking at them;

"The less you look at them the more time you're focussing on the road and it's surprising the difference that makes to stopping distance; the eye's a muscle, it has latency. Increasingly motor manufacturers are seeing [HUD displays] as a safety benefit, much like the way they once regarded anti-lock brakes. Our development effort has been focussed on building headsup displays which are full colour and significantly smaller than those on the market today. If you ripped one of these headsup displays out of the vehicle, you'd find they're anywhere between 3 and 5 litres in size. As well as this, they're heavy, and need a lot of heat extraction. The car makers have to design in the space in advance; you have to leave a massive gap in the dashboard to put them in."

"So our proposition has been we could design HUDs that have efficiency advantages. Rather than these larger light sources that throw lots of light away, we could make one that uses the light very efficiently. We can reduce the power demand and indeed one of the things we've demonstrated just recently is a display inside your wing mirror (pictured). The point there is that a lot of accidents happen there because of the blind spot. You can change lanes and not realise there's a car next to you, and if you had a display in your wing mirror which gave you relevant information you'd avoid that entirely."

If the cost of these units can come down anywhere near as fast as the size, and the safety benefits can be proven, it mightn't be too long before we see adoption of smart HUDs in the Fords and Vauxhalls of this world, as well as the BMWs.

It would be a brave person indeed to suggest that the economy is in anything other than an extremely unhealthy condition at the moment. But glancing over the Mail's article on national debt today (shan't link), it's pretty clear that the sizes of the circles don't correspond to the numbers in them. If they did, according to my rudimentary calculations, the 2009 national debt would be £1.257 trillion rather than the comparatively healthy £829 billion. And in the current situation, you might as well call that good news.


2007 circle width: 430 px - relative monetary value to scale: £621billion
2008 circle width: 484 px - relative monetary value to scale: £786 billion
2009 circle width: 623 px - relative monetary value to scale: £1.257 trillion

Since I got Google Wave yesterday, I've been encouraged by a few people to write a quick assessment of the messaging service its inventors see as 'the future of email'. With its focus on real-time communication and collaboration, there's just one problem; there's noone I know on it to communicate with.

At the moment, users are early adopters - the majority of whom will have either registered interest on the Wave invite site or begged their friends to let them in. As such the majority of Wave action right now is people talking about Wave itself. Self-reflexivity is no new problem for social media, and far be it from me to criticise a blossoming online communication medium, it's just that now the friend who invited me has gone on holiday, I'm down to one contact. I could start a public wave with people I don't know but... what would I collaborate with them on? and would I want to?

At first glance, the thinking behind Wave's limited release is great; to generate a buzz built around exclusivity excites, frustrates and, eventually, increases the likelihood of widespread uptake when the floodgates open. Everyone's favourite music streaming Spotify was released invite-only initially, to a highly limited group of users who evangelised sufficiently well for it to become ubiquitous amongst young music-lovers (at least those in the countries it's rolled out in). But the success of that campaign was built on the fact that as an experience, using Spotify can be almost as fulfilling individually as when you're sharing playlists with friends. Wave, on the other hand, is fundamentally social, and for that it suffers from this kind of promotion.

(Image via Twitter)

As America responded to last night's attack at Fort Hood carried out by Malik Nadal Hasan, Twitter once again showed its value as a tool for breaking news with the updates of "Tearah Moore", who tweeted pics and updates from inside the camp, before being shut down after roughly an hour. 

Her account is now locked, but I've reconstructed the most recent tweets here from people rebroadcasting her updates using their own accounts. Thanks to Twitter's lax indexing policy for older tweets, messages before the first posted below are no longer available to view.


MissTearah's updates raise some major ethical questions about the appropriateness of using Twitter in such situations where others' security might be at risk, as discussions on the TwitPic site used to post the picture above showed; while some commenters questioned whether legal restrictions (HIPAA in particular) should prevent the pictures being posted, others debated the moral implications of the postings, with one commenter saying "We are ALREADY freaking out and this shit just makes it worse".

While Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight is getting all the headlines, one musician has chosen today to highlight another way in which the BNP is attempting to hijack the mainstream media in order to create the veneer of respectability necessary for the party to continue its worrying growth as a political force in this country.

Chris Wood, Radio 2's Folk Singer of the Year, has today released to the Folk Against Fascism campaign his song "Spitfires" (available to stream and download below), a track he penned in response to the BNP's use of British military iconography on a campaign leaflet dropped in to his Kent home. The folk community are particularly concerned by the BNP, ever since Griffin gave them the dubious endorsement of playing folk music on his online radio show. According to campaign group Folk Against Fascism, "the BNP’s Activists and Organisers Handbook encourages its members to get involved in the folk scene". They add that "the BNP want to take our music, want to twist it into something it isn’t; something exclusive, not inclusive. We must not let them. "

I asked Chris some questions about folk's reaction to the BNP and the song. In many ways, folk music and the Spitfires Chris sings about have in common exactly the sense of British tradition nationalist groups tend to draw on in their efforts to legitimise their political views by association. Drawing attention to these cultural misappropriations might well be our best bet at deconstructing the alignments Griffin and co have been working so hard to create.

What's been the reaction amongst the folk community towards Nick Griffin's folk radio show?

I'm not a particularly 'Folk Community" type of guy but I guess they are somewhere between outraged and dismayed.

Why do you think Griffin and the BNP have targeted folk music particularly?

There is precedent, in the Tutsi and Hutu tribal massacres traditional songs were given new words and powerful 'Oi' beats. Likewise Serbia and, of course, the German population have not felt able to go anywhere near their own folk music until very recently. We have to accept though that the British establishment has constantly ridiculed or ignored England's indigenous music and dance for generations, the BNP may just see it as 'up for grabs'.

Is it right that the BBC have invited the BNP on Question Time tonight?

Absolutely. Like it or not, Nick Griffin is an elected representative of a legitimate political organisation and as such should be called upon to face the public and his peers. Our political elite have become so adept at spinning us whatever froth they are peddling they assume we are naive enough to succumb to Mr Griffin's argument, whatever it is. Who knows, they might be right but may I quote from a folk song..?

"Awake arise you drowsy sleeper, awake arise arise it's almost day, no time to lie no time to slumber, no time to dream your life away."

I'll be singing that at a gig in Clerkenwell tonight so I'll have to miss the program.

How are Folk Against Fascism working to dissuade the BNP from using folk to further their political aims?

I think Folk Against Fascism are attempting to counter ignorance and naïvety by raising awareness of just what folk music is. The greatest composer who ever lived was ANON: Britain's songs and the ritual calendar represent the freely given gift of our ancestors. Folk Against Fascism are trying to demonstrate that this music is too rich, too variegated and far too sophisticated for any organisation to appropriate.

How did you come to write Spitfires?

The song was started before the European elections took place [in which Griffin gained a seat in the European parliament]. As a native of Kent I have grown up with the sound of the Manston Spitfire, just about every summer of my life I have seen it fly out to do some air show or other. I was at my desk when it flew across my back garden in late May, the first verse just came straight out of the pen. The question was how would the song be finished. It was about two months later when the BNP leaflet flopped onto my doormat that I knew exactly what the song needed to say. I have subsequently been told that the spitfire pictured on the BNP leaflet was from a Polish squadron"
 
Right-click here and click "Save target/link as..." to download, and stream below.

For a Northerner-in-exile like myself, The Cribs' gig last night at the Kentish Town Forum was a peculiarly homely experience, to the extent that flying plastic pint glasses and pogoing parkas can be homely. My full review of Wakefield's finest sons and their newest member, guitar prodigy Johnny Marr, should be online in the next few days, but in the meantime those who couldn't it make it to any of the dates on this last tour can listen to the setlist reconstructed on Spotify here.









Setlist:

We were aborted
Hey scenesters!
I'm a realist
Emasculate me
Last year's snow
Cheat on me
We share the same skies
Girls like mystery
We can no longer cheat you
Direction
Hari kari
Save your secrets
Our bovine public
Another number
Ignore the ignorant
Be safe
Mirror kissers
Men's needs
City of bugs

What have "Bottle Up and Explode" by Elliott Smith, "Roller Coaster of Love" by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and David Byrne's giant clunking Camden Roundhouse installation got in common? They all feature members of Thom Yorke's new supergroup, due to grace LA's Echoplex tonight for a gig shrouded in mystery, and revealed to the world today on Radiohead blog DeadAirSpace. According to twentyfourbit, the gig will include Yorke's "entire solo album, The Eraser, four new songs, and one Radiohead tune for good measure". In Yorke's own words, it'll be "total chaos and its kind of a rehearsal but .. if you are near by…". Here's the line-up in full:

Joey Waronker

Drummed on Elliott Smith's "Bottle Up and Explode" and "Bled White", so presumably no stranger to helping out a miserablist genius, Waronker has also worked with Beck, Smashing Pumpkins and REM; it's conjecture, but he could well have first met Yorke when REM's instrumentalists, including Waronker, performed with Thom at the Tibetan Freedom Concert back in 1998.

Mauro Refosco

Brazilian Refosco has been performing with David Byrne since 1994, as well as doing some soundtrack work, and playing with his main project Forro In The Dark, a group who specialise in forró, a genre they call "the hip-swiveling, dancefloor-filling, rural party music of Brazil’s northeastern states". Sounds right up Thom's street, then.

Flea

Michael Peter Balzary to his friends, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers bass player is better known to the world under his insect-inspired stage name. I'll leave the consternation over his suitability at performing with Yorke to the rest of the blogosphere.

Nigel Godrich

The veteran Radiohead producer has been spotted playing guitar on multiple occasions for a number of high profile acts, including , ahem, Zero 7.

Will it work? Who's to know - I for one, will be scouring YouTube for clues come tomorrow afternoon.

Industry gigs are always strange events, particularly for bands who are in the ascendancy. Noah and the Whale, who I saw at the Hospital Club on Friday for a Mercury Music Session gig, struggled more than most to handle the unique challenge of playing to a crowd who haven't paid to be there.


The first "webisode" of their ambitious online film/music project is below.

 ...comes from page 5 of the Metro;

Update: Apparently the video is not official.

For those of us who rate 'Eraser' above 'In Rainbows', it's nice to see Thom Yorke returning to his glitchy electro solo career for new song "The Hollow Earth", the video for which was released to the world on YouTube this weekend. Featuring the talents of the mysterious and disappointingly posh graffiti artist Banksy and US filmmaker Raymond Salvatore Harmon, it's all a bit fast for a Monday afternoon. No matter;



The predictably gloomiy-sounding forthcoming album "Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses" is available to order from waste.com here. On the subject of Mr. Harmon, if you ever wondered why Wikipedia shouldn't let fans edit their favourite artists' pages, have a look at this. 

"So is folk now, like, cool with the kids?", I heard someone ask on my way out of last night's astonishing Mumford & Sons show at Scala. As questions go, it was hardly the sharpest. I guess you could expand it out to "can one band re-popularise an entire genre?", and start trying to examine what the real effect of such a great show could be.

Of course, folk has never really gone away, and Mumford & Sons are just the latest exponents of the genre. But it's true that ever since I first heard of Mumford, on one of Indy trendsetter Larry Ryan's infamously ahead-of-the-curve Barometer playlists for the paper months back, they've seemed to go from strength to strength, and last night's gig was the culmination of what has obviously been years of hard work. Suggestions (from Twitter's running commentary on last night's show) that they'll be in the running for next year's Mercury Prize hardly seem overly optimistic, even considering that forthcoming album, "Sigh No More" isn't out until October 5.

The set was brisk in a way that folk music rarely achieves, and the hour flew by in a whirl of horns, piano, acoustic guitars and double bass, with Marcus Mumford showing remarkable coordination in his ability to strum away and kick a bass and tambourine combo simultaneously (evidence here). Even in King Cross' painfully grimy Scala, there was something clear and fantastic about the whole thing. Most people just stared transfixed, with Marcus taking the time to praise everyone for their attentiveness. By refusing to finish with "Little Lion Man" (video below ), which has been huge ever since Zane Lowe made it his 'Hottest Record In The World', they showed that they're not willing to fit their set into the ordinary mold, which was nice. Last week, I saw La Roux at the same venue, and my friend correctly predicted the running order of their entire set; often it's better to be surprised.

So, a bright future beckons for the third group from the London folk clique that's already brought us Laura Marling and the now-quite-gloomy Noah and the Whale. And folk may now be, like, cool with the kids.

Casey, Crystal, Callum and Connor, watch out. Your names, along with Chelsea, Courtney and Chardonnay, are on the list of those most suspected of bad behaviour by English teachers in a survey of three thousand, conducted by a childcare website with some kind of strange bent against the letter C. In fact, the only name to break into the top three names for misbehavers which didn't begin with C was Jack, which, coincidentally, was also revealed as the most popular baby name for boys today for the 15th time in a row.

This is a matter of some trepidation for someone who was named Jack a decade before it hit the top spot, back when it was still underground. Now, whenever I'm introduced to a child bearing this simple, informal version of John, with its Middle English roots as 'Janken', I'll shudder to think of the socio-political implications of all of these little hell-raisers running around, sullying my good name with their miscreant antics.

But why, in this strange and unique instance, have popularity and infamy gone hand in hand? My guess is that ubiquity has ruined it, so that, just as a few too may strokes of a writer's pen can turn poetry into cliche, so a lack of originality can result in a formerly great name becoming more common than Tom, Dick or Harry and similarly worn-out. Everyone knows unimaginative people are bad people - and unimaginative parents, it follows, are bad parents.

There's also the theory that the current crop of celebrity Jacks just aren't up to the task as role models as their namesakes of days-gone-by (I'm looking at you, Tweed), but I'll discuss that in brief in tomorrow's paper. For now, it's time to come to terms with the fact that not only is there all the furore with Jack - as today's results indicate, Riley is on the way up too.

Magazine at the Royal Festival Hall last night was a strange gig: a crowd of aging musical aristocracy, a post-punk revival 28 years in the making and, perhaps strangest of all, everyone was sat down until the last three songs.

After that, Howard Devoto issued a stirring call-to-arms for all the aging punks out there and there was some brilliant dad-dancing, and even some pogoing. For any fans who couldn't be there, here's a playlist of the band's set, which started with 'The Correct Use Of Soap' and expanded in the second half to include material from 'Real Life' and elsewhere - but no 'Shot by both sides', which I don't think was such a terrible decision what with it being quite wrongly the only thing that ever gets played. My full review should be online and in the paper in the next few days.


1. Because You're Frightened
2. Model Worker
3. I'm a Party
4. You never knew me
5. Philadelphia
6. I want to burn again
7. Thank you (falettinme be mice elf again)
8. Sweetheart Contract
9. Stuck
10. A Song from under the floorboards

INTERVAL

11. The Book
12. Twenty Years Ago
13. Upside Down
14. Parade
15. Rhythm of Cruelty
16. Permafrost
17. The Light Pours out of me
18. Definitive Gaze
19. Give me everything

Listen to the set on Spotify

Though it seems like we're on the cusp of widespread uptake, in actual fact wireless electricity has been around for more than a century - the tragic tale of the Wardenclyffe Tower is worth a read, and so are some of Russian pioneer Nikola Tesla's writings on the subject. Still, this video from TED is worth a watch, if only to see modern day applications like flat-screen televisions and mobile phones.


And, as if that wasn't enough science/technology crossover news for the day, have a look at this new alarm clock which measures where you are in your sleep pattern and wakes you up according to when will be healthiest for you.