Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put?

The panel was originally inspired by my Sydney Morning Herald op-ed You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and I thought we’d also talk about some of the issues I raised in my more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment.

But we covered a lot more, including research by Sophos that showed around 50% of people would automatically befriend anyone on Facebook, the progress of the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill and the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, the fact that The Greens’ Senator Scott Ludlam seems to be the only Australian politician paying attention to this stuff, using TOR to help make your web browsing anonymous, the surveillance policy split between the NSA and FBI, anonymous currencies like Bitcoin and Canada’s MintChip, Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Pirate Party Australia, Georgie Guy’s blog, and data mining company Acxiom — which in the recording you’ll hear me misspell as “Axxiom”.

The recording was made using my Zoom H4n sitting mid-way between me and Mr Tudehope, so Mr Fennell is off in the distance somewhat. But at least we have a recording.

If there are any issues you’d like to follow up, well, please post a comment.

Facebook, Twitter and social mobile applications encourage you to share your life. But what happens when you share too much? Every time you share, tweet, email or browse a website you leave a digital footprint that reveals far more than you may realise — or want. Find out what Facebook, Twitter and the secretive online advertising companies know about you and take control.

The full presentation itself will appear here as soon as the video can be processed, and across this last weekend in April I’ll be adding the references.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and there’s a version at the ABC website.

Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put? Technology writer Stilgherrian discusses the implications of what we share with social media consultant Thomas Tudehope.

I daresay I’ll be covering material like that in my Sydney Morning Herald story You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and the more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment, but the conversation will be up to you, the audience.

The theme for SWF this year is “the line between the public and the private”. As artistic director Chip Rolley says in his welcome message:

The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.

“Privacy is for paedos,” ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan told the UK Leveson Inquiry into the media. Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know. And the state knows few boundaries (personal or political) in its need to prevent another 9/11.

(If you want a high-powered discussion of these issues, Sydney Town Hall discussion on Friday 18 May with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former director general of MI5-turned-thriller writer Stella Rimington, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, media and news blogger Jeff Jarvis and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.)

iSpy is on Sunday 20 May 2012 at 2.30pm at the Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay. It’s free, and you don’t need to book — but I’m told that it can sometimes get busy at SWF.

Before that I have speaking engagements on 27 April at DigitalMe in Perth and 11 May at the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012.

(These events are part of the City of Perth’s Innovation Month. It looks like there’s some good stuff happening, including the screening of some classic futuristic films.)

DigitalMe is a full day of activities that “takes the individual on a journey through the digital landscape of blogging, video, personal privacy, personal reputation, mobile web and social media helping to demystify the digital world and understand more about your personal digital footprint.”

My half-hour session at 2pm is “Destroying your world, tweet by tweet, like by like”:

Facebook, Twitter and social mobile applications encourage you to share your life. But what happens when you share too much? Every time you share, tweet, email or browse a website you leave a digital footprint that reveals far more than you may realise — or want. Find out what Facebook, Twitter and the secretive online advertising companies know about you and take control.

I covered some related themes in a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks back.

DigitalMe is being held at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free, but you’ll need to register online.

I’m flying into Perth on Thursday 26 April around lunchtime and leaving on Sunday 29 April in the mid-afternoon. My schedule is fairly open so far, so other diversions are welcome.

As it happens, it’s worth updating this story. Yes, Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter and we’ve been analysing every single tweet as if it’s being delivered on a stone tablet. But while that was happening, Twitter decided to verify not only Murdoch’s Twitter account but the one belonging to his wife Wendi Deng.

Except they verified the wrong one. @Wendi_Deng was a spoof account set up by a chap in London. Business Insider ran a transcript of the fake Deng coming clean, and questions were asked about Twitter’s still-secret verification process.

It should’ve been @wendideng, without the underscore, although as I write this the real account has been taken offline.

Mathew Ingram’s piece at GigaOM summed it up nicely: Why Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters. It’s about trust.

Anyway the ABC Radio conversation wandered well into other matters and hardly touched upon Rupert and Wendi. The pace of news. The appropriateness of Twitter marketing. Potential revenue streams for Twitter. And so on. And so forth.

The Sundays presenter was Jennifer Fleming, who’s filling in for James O’Loghlin over summer. The producer was Siobhan Moylan.

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Apparently Sundays is usually podcast, but I’m going to post my interview here anyway.

In this episode you’ll hear what I think about the Prime Minister’s Christmas Message, which doesn’t hold a candle to my own Christmas Message from 2008, let alone the Queen’s Christmas Messages, such as Her Majesty’s 50th such message in 2007; the NRMA’s claim that petrol pricing is too hard to predict and their call for an inquiry; the fact, or supposed fact, that Twitter gets more news mentions than Facebook, even though the latter is much, much bigger; and a really, really stupid tweet from Shahira Abouellail, whose blog is called fazerofzanight.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. Mark Zuckerberg news item from NewsyTech.]

Here’s my conversation with Richard Margetson on ABC 105.7 Darwin about the Facebook changes, broadcast on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 September 2011.

Again, this bounces off last week’s Crikey piece, Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous, but Mr Margetson was also aware that I’d just come from a lunchtime briefing with a bunch of information security people so he explored that angle too.

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them.

As I mentioned on Monday, I was scheduled to do more radio spots this week about Facebook’s changes and what they meant for privacy. Here’s another of them, and there’ll be a third posted shortly.

For most of the presenters, the kick-off was my Crikey piece from last week, Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous — and I’ll have more to write about that before the weekend is finished.

This conversation with Nicole Dyer from ABC Gold Coast was broadcast on the morning of Monday 26 September 2011.

It’s interesting to hear how different presenters explore different aspects of the issue, I think. Earlier the same morning I spoke with Katya Quigley on ABC Mid North Coast NSW, and she was much more interested in the idea of being always-connected and whether that gave people enough down time, as it were.

Alas, that radio station isn’t streamed online so I couldn’t record it.

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them.

Today on I’m a Goddam Expert it’s Facebook, the recent round of changes, and what it means for users and the world of social networking generally. It began with Friday’s piece for Crikey, Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous, and so far I’ve been booked to do four radio spots. And counting.

I did two spots on Friday afternoon, one with Lindy Burns ABC 774 Melbourne the other with Melanie Tait on ABC 666 Canberra. Here’s the audio for the Canberra conversation.

The Melbourne conversation (2.1MB MP3) covered similar territory, but the recording dropped out near the end so I haven’t bothered posting it as a proper podcast.

This material is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but they generally don’t put these interviews online — and hey, it’s a good plug for them. Well, a minor but useful plug.

I’m doing two more this morning, also for ABC local radio stations. The Gold Coast at 0940 AEST and North Coast NSW at 1010.

Today I returned to the print media with an opinion piece, Trends on Twitter brief but telling, just like in the real world, in the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s an overview of Twitter’s “Trending Topics”, including the observation that marketers who try to game the trends are probably wasting their time. Research by Hewlett-Packard’s social computing lab [PDF] shows that there’s probably no point in focusing on the “influencers”.

Topics will trend or not based on whether people found it interesting to retweet at that moment. Just like Yahoo! Research’s Duncan Watts said a few years back.

Somehow I managed to refer to the fisting incident without using the word “fisting” itself.

I wouldn’t have thought about writing this piece myself, being too immersed in Twitter to realise that it needed explanations. Blame Joel Gibson, the SMH Opinion Editor. He commissioned it and did a decent job of improving my Sunday-written words.

I think it’s quite sweet that Fairfax decided to explain my name.

If you’re not yet at least experimenting with Twitter, the real-time social messaging service, you should be.

Suppress the corporate paranoia. It’s a lot easier than you might think. And while Twitter does get far more attention than its relatively small size might suggest — truly active Twitter users number perhaps 20 million globally compared with Facebook’s 750 million active users and counting — it punches well above its weight in terms of connecting with influential community members.

Twitter may not ever become the core real-time service used by the masses. Or if it does, it may only be for a few years. You only have to look at the last decade to see the then-leading MySpace surpassed by Facebook in 2008, just four years after Facebook was founded. Google’s launch of Google+ in June this year has generated plenty of speculation that the search and advertising giant’s foray into social networking will in turn wipe Facebook off the planet. Who knows?

There will always be some real-time social messaging service, however. Whether that’s Twitter as a stand-alone service, or whether we all end up using a real-time component of Facebook or Google+ or something that has yet to be deployed — none of that matters. The principles and practices of real-time messaging will doubtless end up being much the same.

Anything you might do with Twitter will be easy to migrate to any other real-time messaging system. The lessons you learn will carry across too.

Now some social media expert gurus (SMEGs) make a big deal about how it’s vital you get Twitter right. Silly beginner’s mistakes will destroy your reputation, they say. Well, that’s only partially true.

If you make a mistake on Twitter, sure, you’ll be slammed within minutes. But most of the criticism will come from SMEGs who spend their time worrying about such things wanting to demonstrate their relevance, or whingers with too much time on their hands. Just remember that it’s all a storm in a teacup, and while the storm might have sprung up within minutes, it’ll also be forgotten within minutes.

Take a deep breath, and move on.

Besides, the SMEGs are trying to sell you their consulting services. Of course they’ll make Twitter sound hard.

It’s not.

Twitter is just people talking to other people, where their conversations are visible to the world.

That’s why I prefer to describe Twitter as social messaging rather than micro-blogging. It’s not a one-way street. You need to listen as well as talk. Respond to the people who talk to you and, just as importantly, introduce yourself to people who are talking about you, or about matters that affect you. That’s how you slowly build connections.

But I get ahead of myself.

“You”? That’s the first key question. In the context of a local government, who is the “You” that’s talking with people?

Many organisations imagine that since their Twitter account is another “official” voice it should be run by the marketing department, or corporate relations. I think that’s a mistake. The usual result is that the Twitter stream becomes nothing but links to media releases, and the tone becomes cold and bureaucratic.

The best organisational Twitter accounts seem to be run by customer service. CSOs are already responding to the general public. They know what issues come up. And they’re usually across everything that’s happening.

The question then becomes one of choosing the right person or people to run the Twitter account. In general that won’t be the newcomer 22-year-old who’s got lots of Facebook friends, but the receptionist, office manager or CSO who’s been around for a decade and a half.

They key is finding someone with the broad knowledge of the organisation and its communities. Learning Twitter, as I say, is the easy bit.

That person then needs to be given the authority to tweet themselves, without having to ask for every tweet to be approved. Real-time is important, and natural language is important. Don’t make the mistake of one federal government department of having every tweet approved by a committee and scheduled for transmission. That way lies Twitter death.

Besides, do you get the marketing department to approve every sentence in every telephone conversation? No, you trust in people’s ability to say the right thing.

Make sure you identify the person operating the account publicly.

A human face always helps communication. Add their name to the Twitter profile, and link the Twitter account back to a page on your website that explains who is tweeting, what they will and won’t be tweeting about — for instance, they might mention road closures but not building approvals — and what their hours of operation are.

Of course in a large organisation you might want to have several people operate the account. In that case, tag every tweet with that person’s name or initials. Margaret Jenkins becomes “^MJ” or “-Margaret” or even “-Marg”. They’re the most common methods, but it really doesn’t matter how you tag the tweets as long as you’re consistent about it.

Another method might be to have the Twitter account be the mayor’s, particularly if he or she is a hands-on kind of person. If you do that, again it’s important to distinguish between the mayor’s own tweets and those added by the team. For example, when he was Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would sign the tweets he write himself with “KRudd”, while the rest were signed “KevinPM Team”.

I’d have gone for something shorter than “KevinPM Team”. On Twitter, space is always at a premium. We already know it’s about KevinPM since it’s from his twitter account. “KTeam” would work nicely.

You’ll also have to think ahead, and know what you’ll do with the account when the mayoral robes and chains eventually get passed on.

But what would a local government tweet about?

Anything short that people might want in real time, either because it’s live information they need to know now, or it’s of high value and you want to spread the word widely.

Here’s some examples off the top of my head.

Bin collection back to normal after industrial action. Bins still full? Phone NNNN NNNN to book extra pick-up. ^MJ #rubbish

Garbage truck breakdown. Bin collections in Lilyfield running 3 hours late, but we will finish today. ^MJ #rubbish

Jenny Smith Gallery: Photo portraits by Andrew Jones opens 6pm tonight. FREE. http://counc.il/466 #art ^MJ

Council meeting tonight 7pm Bullathinga Town Hall. Agenda at http://counc.il/468 ^MJ

Council agenda item 4 approved: $20k funding for new pet health centre. http://counc.il/467 ^MJ

Flooding closes Perkins Rd at Hangmans Creek. Will not re-open today. Divert via Bullhorn Rd. Next update 7am. ^MJ

Smithfield Library has 200 new romantic fiction titles. Borrowing is free. Full list at http://counc.il/454 ^MJ

Pensioner? Free cholesterol tests at Bullathinga Town Hall this Friday 8am to 12pm. http://counc.il/467 ^MJ

DA received: shop renovations at 127 Smith St. Comments close 17 Aug. http://counc.il/556 ^MJ

Next on stage at Bullathinga Park: Folk Off, Irish comedy folk trio. http://counc.il/546 #bullafair ^MJ

Spraying footpaths for asthma weed today in areas west of Perkins Rd. It’s safe for humans. http://counc.il/549 ^MJ

See the hashtags, the keywords starting with “#”? They serve two purposes. One, they add keywords to a tweet that might not otherwise be present, so they’ll turn up in searches. Two, by categorising your tweets with hashtags, you allow people who aren’t interested in art, say, to filter out those tweets.

Note that I’ve put the critical information at the front of the tweet, making it easier for retweeters to chop off bits at the end if they want to add their own comments. I’ve used a custom URL shortener to create short web addresses. Twitter does URL shortening anyway, but the yourls.org tools make it easy to set up your own shortener for added branding and a whiff of professionalism.

Note that every tweet must stand alone. Tweet often get retweeted out of context, and in any event people usually only see the most recent tweets. If you opened conversation on an issue then you need to close it again, and use all the key words on the closure.

Flooding subsides. Perkins Rd has re-opened at Hangmans Creek. ^MJ

I haven’t covered how you respond to tweets directed at your account, or how you do customer service via Twitter, striking the balance between answering immediately or directing people elsewhere for more comprehensive answers. They’re whole topics in themselves.

But for some good examples, look no further than Telstra. Despite their once-traditional reputation for poor customer service, Telstra is actually doing really well on Twitter.

So how do you start?

Register an official Twitter account, and also get whoever will be tweeting on your organisation’s behalf to set up a personal account. Fill in all your profile. Don’t stress about getting it 100% right, you can change it at any time.

Install TweetDeck as your Twitter client software, rather than using the Twitter website. It provides a lot more flexibility, and it’s available for Windows, OS X, iPhone and iPads and Android.

Start by listening. Set up search columns in TweetDeck for the names of the towns an suburbs in your area, and note what people are saying. Start to follow the interesting people in your area. Note the regular questions people have, and answer them. Note the misconceptions and correct them.

Follow other local governments, here and overseas. Think about what works for them and might work for you, and what doesn’t. Adopt what seem to be good behaviours. Follow a few high-profile tweeters and learn from them.

Tweet about a small subset of things at first. Choose easy, non-controversial things to start with, like letting people know when and where meeting are and pointing them to the documentation. Then add in new sets of tweets as you become more comfortable with the medium and can persuade staff members to contribute from their area. The fact that you’re adding more to what you’re tweeting about is worth its own tweet.

Don’t panic. Have fun.

[Image: Twitter bird drawing by Hugh McLeod.]

Earlier this evening I recorded this interview with Iain Dale, who’s keynoting the Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum in Canberra on 1 June. He’s one of the UK’s leading political bloggers, a former Conservative Party politician, publisher of Total Politics magazine and host of the evening show on London’s LBC Radio — amongst other things.

I’d originally intended to use a slab of this in the Patch Monday podcast I do for ZDNet Australia, but it’s not really about technology. Our conversation did touch upon the way political parties use social media such as blogs and Twitter — or, really, why they don’t. But we also covered the attraction of broadcast radio as medium and why it’ll survive, authenticity and much more. So I decided to post the entire recording here as a podcast.

I began by asking Dale about a piece he wrote for The Guardian earlier this month, Is this really the death of political blogging? It turns out the headline is misleading.

For more on Iain Dale, read his Wikipedia entry or follow him on Twitter.

I’ve been thinking of doing a more podcasts of interviews along the lines of this one — not necessarily about politics or technology but whatever strikes my fancy. Indeed, I created the blog post category Conversations for this purpose, although so far I’ve only used it to post random audio I’ve been involved with. What do you think?

What a week! If you were following my Twitter stream this evening, you’d already know that one of the cats, Artemis, is gravely ill tonight. She is in hospital. My cashflows are thoroughly depleted. And I am severely stressed. But I am also astounded by people’s generosity of spirit.

In writing all this, I run the risk of alienating those who want to see a supposed-professional’s website full of serious things like my media work and serious commentary, or at least mildly amusing satire, not that supposedly lowest-of-low, “cat blogging”. My good friend Nick Hodge has already written this week about professional versus personal social media projections and the risks of letting them intermingle.

But you know what? Fuck all that!

If I am to be an honest human — and I would like to think I strive to be one — then what I write about should be what is on my mind. And this is what dominates my mind today. If you don’t like it, well, stop reading now and pop back another time. Maybe next week.

And if you think less of me for writing about the personal issues that happen to be dominating my life, well, fuck you too.

So, to Artemis…

Yesterday we thought she had food poisoning of some sort, and figured she’d recover today after spending the night flaked out on the bed. But her appetite did not return, and late this afternoon she took a turn for the worst. No energy, unable to stand on her own feet, weak pulse.

I got her to our local vet just as they were closing, but she was too ill to stay overnight unattended, so we took her to the Sydney After-hours Veterinary Emergency Service at the University of Sydney’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital.

Initial treatment with fluids restored some of Artemis’ strength. She’s sitting up again.

The initial consultation revealed symptoms of small kidneys and possibly infected bladder, which could mean anything from kidney disease of some sort to a urinary tract infection. Comprehensive urine and blood tests will be required. Some bleeding was also revealed in her mouth, with unusual tissue growth. This can be indicative of mouth cancer, although someone on Twitter did say something about kidney problems causing mouth ulcers. However the vet flagged the likelihood of cancer. A biopsy will be needed, but at the moment Artemis isn’t strong enough for the anaesthetic needed for that.

Now all this couldn’t have come at a worse time.

As I wrote the other day, I’m already in the difficult position of having to find a new home when I’m skint. One of my tasks over the next few days is to figure out how to get sufficient cash in while we’re in the slow-income post-holiday period to enable househunting and moving before 3 February.

This evening, however, I emptied my bank account and my wallet into as much as I could muster to cover the required 50% deposit for the estimated treatment costs.

That wasn’t enough for the full recommended option that included all the analyses for this first night. It was enough for the consultation and hospital cover, fluids, initial essential treatment and some methodone. That’s $640, of which I’ve paid half. So Artemis is alive, and my task now is to figure out the next steps — including paying the rest of that, deciding the course of action from here, and then paying for that.

As far as I understand the options from here, Artemis will need at least a few days in hospital, plus those tests to properly diagnose her condition, including the potential cancer. I imagine all that won’t be less than an additional $1000. If it is cancer, and operable, then that’s a jaw section to be removed. I don’t see that being under another $1000, given that when her tail was crushed in an accident in 2007 and had to be removed that cost around $1000, and the jaw sounds more complicated.

So there’s my challenge for tomorrow. Pay for the initial treatment and investigations. Then, once they’re done, figure out how to cover the rest of the problems once they’re revealed or, face the other potential decision, consider whether it’s all too hard, too much of a burden on everyone including the Furry One herself, and go for The Long Green Sleep.

I must be honest here and say that I am overwhelmed.

People might imagine that because I have a reasonably high profile and have travelled overseas twice last year that I have a respectable income. I do not. The media work I do pays very little. The geek-for hire work I do is relatively low in volume. The overseas trips were paid for by others — Microsoft and Salesforce.com, to name names.

And my total volume of work, and hence income, is patchy because over the years I’ve had an on-again off-again battle with depression — something I don’t make a big deal of because, well, it’s as boring as all fuck. But several nastier-than-usual bouts over the past few years, each representing stretches of some weeks without any real income, have left me with zero cash reserves and no credit cards. Like most people with even less income than me, I pay as I go and pray there’ll be no unexpected glitches.

Like having to move house.

Or sick pets.

As it approaches midnight on this Wednesday night, I am not depressed. But I do have a very large question mark sitting in front of me.

However I am overwhelmed by people’s generosity, and generosity of spirit.

Friends have offered to sort out what happens tomorrow morning. We still have to work out the details, but at least tomorrow is OK.

What has astounded me, though, is the generosity of strangers. On the left-hand side of my website there’s a PayPal donation button. People have used it occasionally over the years. However in the past three days there’s been five donations totalling over $200 — all but one from complete strangers. People I barely know have been offering help on Twitter this evening — logistics, cold hard cash, or both. The other day, when I first mentioned my accommodation problem, people offered to help cover the bond on new premises until the old one is refunded, as well as other kinds of support.

I am surprised, pleased, feeling supported but nevertheless overwhelmed. And today has been the first day in the last few weeks that I’ve been able to focus well enough.

Tonight several people suggested that I set up a microfinance donation thingo to cover Artemis’ treatment. That is an option, and I’ll consider it properly in the morning, because I am certainly in no position to pay back loans of the magnitude required.

But all that is enough for now. The facts of the matter have tumbled out. I am exhausted. I’ll get a phone call between 6.30 and 7.30am tomorrow with further news. And right now Apollo, the other cat, is demanding attention. Loudly.

Thank you everyone, truly thank you, for your support tonight.

[Photo: Artemis with her prey, a noisy miner bird, from 23 May 2005.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t very much at all because I lost a couple of days returning from San Francisco.

Articles

None this week.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 69, “Service goes social, but how?”. Based on material recorded at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco, this episode includes a chat with Fergus Griffin, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud product.

Media Appearances

• On Wednesday I did another brief spot with Paul Turton on ABC Radio Statewide NSW.

Corporate Largesse

• On Friday I had lunch aboard the South Steyne at Darling Harbour, courtesy of Watterson Marketing Communication.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Since I didn't take any photographs this week, here's one of the rather serious seagulls they have in San Francisco.]