I'VE JUST INVENTED THE BLOBBOGRAPH

This is a new form of graphic communication, (or most probably it isn't), but these two examples of this sort of mutant Venn diagram show some of the differences between the roles in my life before I retired two years ago , and after.

BEFORE


AFTER


So it seems that there could be an analogy between the impact of retirement on my life and that of the internet and its associated technological innovations on the print media. Whereas as one element used to predominate now various differing ones compete and overlap in confusing way and believe me, I wish I knew how to monetise it!

MORE AGIT PROP POSTED ON GPTU & GLeft BLOGS

Yesterday it rained heavily and incessantly I went to supermarket then drank gin and wrote minutes for hours. At the moment they're on the Green Left Blog (follow link if you're a nerd for for the boring minutiae of obscure political organisations).

As I get older my bladder gets weaker so I got up to piddle in the middle of the night and a blackbird sang, either the first of the dawn chorus or an all-nighter kept awake by urban light pollution.


Hear the blackbird here


powered by ODEO

Agit Prop posted up on Green Left and GPTU sites today

Busyish day in bbkbar then to class on possible 'democratisation' via new internet associated media. Some things ring a bell eg when I was at a recent demo in Parliament Square (see http://gptublog.blogspot.com/ entry for 21/03/08 'Anti War march London 15/3/2008' ), the police tried to move back a couple of protestors behind a barrier, Brian Haw, who has been camping out in the Square as a protest against the Iraq war jumped out with a video camera to film them. I wonder if he would call this "Political disintermediation"?

STRANGE POLITICAL DONATIONS IN OBSCURE CIRCLES

Write up minutes for Brent Green Party Meeting which took place last night, the most sensitive bit is the finances ie

Brent and Harrow GP current acc’t £6.59
Brent and Harrow GP elections acc’t £0.92
Brent GP Co-op current acc’t £6.00
Expected Cheque £6.50
Total £21.04

Who can the sinister magnate who is trying to buy political influence with an 'expected cheque' in Brent be? Whoever he/she is he/she has the value of Brent Green party about right.

I SEEM TO BE DEVELOPING a TIME LAG And I'm certainly running up a sleep deficit, Sunday (18th May) was spent mainly in the Birkbeck computer rooms finishing off coursework, so no day of rest there. Then Monday was also productive, but I don't mean any Calvinist implication that that is a good thing. On the way to work a Green Party comrade rings me in a rage with another Green Party comrade who has called a meeting to clash with the all important Green Left AGM next saturday. So when I get to Birkbeck I have to compose and send various electronic Fatwas about this, and print out papers and flyers for a London Federation of Green Parties meeting that evening. To do this I have to treck round Birkbeck college searching for a computer room that is not being used for an exam and has any paper in the printer. Then more people come into the Birbeck bar wanting drinks after their exam (see below;)





so I don't get much work done on the laptop. Then I go to London Fed which is surprisingly good tempered, now that the electoral obsessives have had their fix (ie after the Greater London Authority and Mayoral elections on May 1st), we can do some real poiltics and a motion that I wrote re S.African dockers goes through unan nem con. "Gleft/London Federation of Green parties congratulates the Durban dockers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), and the police trade union (POPCRU) members who supported them for turning away the Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe where it might be used to attack trades unionists and others engaged in the struggle for democratic rights in Zimbabwe. We note that such action would be illegal if taken by British Trades unionists and call for a restoration of the rights of British trades unionists to take solidarity action with other groups nationally and internationally." Prop P.Murry sec John Carver (PP: GPTU) Good drink in the pub afterwards too

YESTERDAY was well shitty.

The backward incompabitility of new versions of Microsoft messed up my morning plans for getting my college coursework out of the way and I've posted a draft of it to the blog so that I can aceess it from different machines by cutting and pasting it from there.

Then I went to a Campaign Against Climate Change TU group planning meeting and as I had got up early in the misguided hope of doing some coursework, I slept through half of it because I was still knackered from the unexpected rush of bar work the day before.

I might as well have stayed in bed, (that could be another title for this blog), especially since some bright spark decided to call an editorial board meeting for "Post 16 Educator", a magazine, in the forecourt of Euston station, which looked like this.

Clearly both the architect of this place and the person who decided to meet here must have assumed that Britain has something like a mediterranean climate, wishful thinking,I fear,after all this is almost mid summer.

CAMDEN TRADES COUNCIL: part2, The frustations of attempting to be a webpage/ blog designer.
Oh, the frustations of attempting to be a webpage/ blog designer. I'm about to give up before I've even started. I'm having a row with one client over content, which should teach me no to belong to, or even care, even a little bit about the organisations I might work for. Now CTC having been presented with a proposal, a month ago, which in effect asked them to decide what content they might want on a website and some design basics, eg do you want a logo? (see last entry). Have decided that they can't decide whether to have a blog until they have decided what content they might want on a website and some design basics. Naturally they formed a sub committee to decide this and as my friend who introduced me to them said, we might get a website by about 2020 at this rate and some how I suspect the process could involve me in more unpaid work.

CAMDEN TRADES COUNCIL: Website and/or Blog Peter Murry 14/04/2008

Another role which occupies some of my time is the attempt to get some webpage/blog design/ maintenace work, below is a pitch to a potential client, who I will see tomorrow.

Dave Welsh asked me to prepare a brief outline of what services I might be able to offer CTC in regard to a web presence. I will not be able to be present at the CTC meeting on 17th April, but I hope Dave will be able to table this paper for me.

There two options, a website (cost approx £250 p.a. including updating content) or a blog (cost approx £100 p.a. including updating content).

I have drawn up possible website design (see below)

This is a design for a home page that could link to four other pages (Aims, Join Us, Committee, News, Meetings). CTC could decide it wanted more or fewer pages and
That they should have different content and/or names. Equally the colour scheme, logos, and layout are only rough suggestions. A website has the advantage that a visitor to the home page could rapidly find out some salient points of info re CTC without going through the whole site, but if they want more detailed info (e.g. how to contact the treasurer, what did the last meeting decide etc) they can be directed to pages holding that info. It is possible to add, subtract and rename pages and add subsections of pages within this structure (e.g.; a meetings page could link to archives containing minutes of previous meetings). The links to external organisations are also entirely at CTC’s discretion; the list given is purely illustrative.

Blogs (short for weblogs) are much easier to maintain and so cheaper than websites, the use a ready made design template usually with chronologically organised content centre page and more permanent notices at the side, here are a couple of examples:

1) FPS Blog

2) LSFC Blog

Blogs can contain as much content as a website but it are less accessibly organised and the user has to know that s/he needs to scroll back through previous content to find everything that is on the site

Another option is to link a blog to website page so that the blog can be used as a kind of noticeboard/newspaper for members of the organisation (see: http://gptublog.blogspot.com/).

P.Murry
Peter Murry has been an active Trades Unionist and Green Party activist for over twenty years. After retiring from lecturing he is devoting more time to political and Journalistic work. He is Secretary of the Green Party Trades Union Group and Co-convenor of Green Left. He has regularly contributed pieces on Green politics, education and trades unionism to ‘Post-16 Educator’ magazine (post16educator@runbox.com).

He has designed and runs websites for:
The Green Party Trades Union Group, http://gptu.net/pssess4X/3c/hpage.shtml
The Campaign Against Tube Privatisation. http://gptu.net/catp/catp.shtml
Green Left http://gptu.net/gleft/greenleft.shtml
Dodo Modern Poets http://gptu.net/dmp/dodo.shtml

He runs the Free Painters and Sculptors blog http://freepands.blogspot.com/
And updates the London Socialist Film Co-op site socialistfilm.blogspot.com