The Welsh Assembly Government have made plans to enact law from March 2011 whereby any outlet within the confines of the Welsh border that supplies plastic carrier bags to consumers charge a mandatory minimum of 7p per bag – instead of the usual practice of giving them away for free that has stood firmly for as long as I have been alive.

Some retailers already impose a charge, in the case of the small retailers to recoup the cost of purchasing them, but in the case of department store Marks & Spencer – for environmental reasons, where the money made from charging for these previously free commodities gets put back into the local community.

The CBI, whose very business it is to challenge new legislation on behalf of UK businesses, have been sounding their tannoy – as is to be expected. They warn that consumers could be “confused” and that the levy could cause tension at the checkouts, but what is a brief explanation that “bags now cost 7p” in comparison to the environmental devastation the millions of plastic bags that are put into landfill every year causes?

It is my view that people generally do keep as many plastic bags as they can, often using them as bin-liners, and incentive programmes set-up by large supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsburys – where if bags are brought back to the store to be re-used a reward in the form of extra reward points is given – are working, but the sheer numbers that are required to stem an ongoing environmental disaster are not yet being hit.

Making a law that enforces environmental awareness is a good step forward, a step that will force the everyman to change habits of a lifetime – habits that have seen big-business as the enablers for so many years, so why should they not be the ones to break the bad news?

Big-business started giving away free carrier bags, as much for advertising as for convenience, and the world has become hooked on them. Now we all need to be held accountable and change our ways.

This tidbit from Annie Hovey, regional officer for the National Association of Headteachers Wales must go down as quote of the week.

On the subject of 70 parents of children attending St Alban’s Roman Catholic Primary School, Tremorfa holding a meeting to discuss;

Why 3 teachers have been suspended with no reason given to them, nor any reasons being forthcoming;
Why the school that their children attend has a high teacher turnover rate and;
Pupils as old as 9 not having basic literacy.

“This is parents getting involved in an area they should not be involved in.”

Classic!
This clearly demonstrates the view that I have always perceived teachers, and headteachers in particular, to have; that they believe parents to be a pain in the neck that are solely there to prevent them from doing what they know to be best for their children – that they must be in the right because it is their profession and that the parents know nothing.

Parents in revolt against city primary

To: ukinfo@starbucks.com
Date: 19/11/2008 10:32
Subject: Eggnog

To whom it may concern,

Why why why are Starbucks not selling eggnog latte this year? It is as much a part of the festive season as Santa or Jesus for many people.

I received the email telling me that ‘The red cups are here’ but when I walked into my local store there was no sign of the familiar yellow cartons labelled ‘eggnog’. With the state of the world this year I thought that Starbucks could at least be trusted to bring some cheer to this festive season.

With disappointment,

Nathan Collins.

Reply from Starbucks received 20/11/2008:

Dear Mr Collins

Thank you for taking the time to contact Starbucks Coffee Company.

I am sorry to learn of your disappointment that eggnog is not currently part of our Christmas range this year. You will be delighted to know that eggnog will be available for a limited time in December in all stores. Egg nog will be in store on the first of December.

We look forward to welcoming you into a store soon.

Yours sincerely
Lindall Kidd
Customer Care Specialist

Evidently there isn’t too much going on in Cardiff and the surrounding areas at the moment judging by the choice of stories published today by the Trinity Mirror owned rag.

Pin-up Abi may be eyeing up a Welsh property

FORMER pin-up Abi Titmuss has revealed she may buy property in South Wales.

Speaking at a book signing in Cardiff last night, the 32-year-old former girlfriend of ex-This Morning presenter John Leslie, told of her love for the Welsh capital.

Her only previous visit to the capital was a celebrity appearance at a nightclub.

The ex-glamour model said: “It’s really nice to see it in the daytime and I’m going to have a look round the Bay later.

“I’ve got family in Bristol so you never know, one day maybe I would like to have a place here. It’s beautiful.�

- Pin-up Abi may be eyeing up a Welsh property (WalesOnline)

So, not only are we supposed to be excited because it’s some woman who is only famous because she released a sex tape of her and a boring morning television presenter, but also to believe that, in her own words “you never know, one day maybe I would like to have a place here”, her move is a certainty.

Hell, you never know, one day maybe I would like to own a Ferrari. I wonder if I sent them that quote they would publish an article about me?

I particularly like the line “Speaking at a book signing … (she) told of her love for the Welsh capital”, quickly followed by “Her only previous visit to the capital was … at a nightclub” and “It’s really nice to see it in the daytime”.

Wow, what undying devotion she must have to our little town, on her second visit.

“Camilla?”

When robots are given the job of choosing advertisements, unfortunate placement is one of the risks.

On the right you can see one example, found on icWales.co.uk, a Trinity Mirror group website, that in the age of keyword based selection, things can sometimes go wrong and insensitive or inappropriate advertising can be displayed, something which would rarely happen in a newspaper or on television, where advertisements are placed manually by humans.

One way to counter this would be to use blacklists, as well as a keyword list. A list of words which, if found on the page, should prevent the advertisement from being served, instead, moving to the next in line. For most, this would be a very simple piece of code to implement and would do wonders for the credibility of the advertiser.

Google adwords already has this capability and would imagine that Yahoo!’s answer to the Google service, Yahoo SM (Search Marketing) would employ a similar facility.
However, it seems that Trinity Mirror control their own advertising using scripts and pulling banners from DoubleClick. Perhaps this is a feature they should look at building into their back-end?

I wonder how much the South Wales Echo was paid to make this look like a legitimate news story?
It’s kind of intriguing how now not only the corners of the page can be bought, but also a headline and text that fools the reader into thinking that it is another news article.
Is this common practice now? Did I miss a meeting?

Sales Appointment [icWales]

The South Wales Echo are up to their usual tricks again. Clearly the person who comissioned this article is neither a rights or technology specialist.

Todays “shocker” is that somebody has been allowed to create a group on the popular social networking website Facebook that is offensive to a particular individual.
Dubbed the ‘Gemma Trigg Cheap Tart Club’, the group was created by the wife of a man that Ms Trigg allegedly got involved with. Obviously, she thinks that this is below the belt, but, cheap tart or not, the view of Ms Trigg, and evidently of the Echo, having chosen to publish the story and tell it from her perspective, is that Facebook should not have allowed the group to be created in the first place.

“I was shocked that … Facebook would allow them to put that on their site.”

Facebook is frequented by millions of users worldwide, I have to say, even I make sure I log on at least once a day.
How does this lady suppose they police what is going on within the community and what all of their users are doing all of the time?

Being a webmaster myself, and previously one of a popular forum, I can tell you that it is a big job if your website serves even more than a hundred frequently active users.
It would involve going through all posts made and threads created, in the case of Facebook, it would involve going through all of the;

• wall posts made
• groups created
• group posts made
• events created
• even posts made
• profile updates (someone could have written something offensive there to try to trick the Facebook police)
• status updates (again, sneaky trickery)

And this would have to be done for all of its users, all 34 million of them.
Suppose each of them made just one change every day, this would involve 34 million checks having to be done. It surely couldn’t be done by a script, because there are far too many variables and the possibility of false positives would be astronomical which would degrade the usability of the site. If you set a list of words which, in order to be used on the website, had to be moderated first by a member of the Facebook team, the volume would still be absurd and completely unworkable. The site would then become completely user un-friendly as the waiting times for things to show up would fall into days, if not weeks or months, instead of instant and convenient as it is now.
A new website, which is just like Facebook, but without all the restrictions would then become the popular alternative for fed-up Facebook users and once again they are free to offend en-masse.

Do we want to be part of an internet where all of our actions are checked by a team of lawyers before they are accepted for publication? I’m not sure that is compatible with the whole ethos of social networking. The majority of uses of the site are legitimate, productive and are of great use to the subscribers of the content. If one person decides to slander another using a website or service that is open to the public, why should the creators or hosts be accountable for them? If I was to write ‘Tom is a twat’ on a cubicle wall in a toilet at the train station, should the station be held accountable because they have cubicles which can be used as an open stage for slander? If this whole ‘Gemma Trigg is a tart’ thing was being passed around by email instead of being hosted on a website, would she want the email provider (ie. Virgin Media, Hotmail, Yahoo, BT) to be reprimanded, because they allowed this email to be sent through their servers?

By means of a test, I have taken the Echo on with a challenge. If Facebook really should not have allowed a user to create such an insulting group, should the icWales forums have allowed me to create such an insulting thread?
[Edit: ICWales (South Wales Echo website) forums deleted the thread, named 'Daniel Grosvenor is a fat, pie eater', after approx 24 hours]

Cardiff has an extremely active community within Facebook, with groups existing for things as zany as our well known street people, like shakey hands man, Ninjah and Toy Mic Trev to friends of Clwb Ifor Bach and constituents of Cardiff Central, to name but a few.
Why does the South Wales Echo not run a story about amazing effect that Facebook and other websites are having on our city, by allowing us all to interact with each other in a way that we have never been able to before?
To share ideas, likes, dislikes and opinions, which I believe will make us a better city for the future.
It will shape the way we vote, as our political representatives have embraced it an are able to be interacted with at the push of a button.
It will shape our views, as city residents share thoughts about decisions made by the council and companies who are devisive in the radical changes that our city is currently going through.
Why has the local rag of Europe’s fastest growing capital city chosen to focus on the minor flaws caused by a minority when new media is doing so much to help grow it?

Regardless, to have written to a local newspaper about this attempt at slander, Ms Trigg has most definitely made the issue far worse for herself. Yesterday, 65 people were in a ‘hate club’ on a website, today, the whole of South Wales knows that there are 65 people who are of the opinion that some woman is a tart. In the article, the creator of the group is mentioned briefly, but the main text is of comments that have been copied and pasted from the group (none of which are objective), thus the contents of the group which have been completely wiped, since it had been removed before the paper went to press, can now be read, in print, by thousands of people who would not otherwise have seen it, and potentially millions online as the article is also published on the icWales website. The choice to publicise has most definitely backfired in this case.

So, through all of this, we now know that 65 people seem to think that Gemma Trigg is a cheap tart, but since the start of this fiasco, 5 now think she is a reasonably priced pastry.

I’ll leave you to work out the average.

‘I was bullied and humiliated on net‘ – icWales