Lord Carter is unveiling his Digital Britain report thingy today. There’s been a lot of talk about this though it’s sometimes hard to get your head around exactly what it’s about since the scope is huge. But one key thing struck me today while I was trying to read something online.

UK needs industrial policy for a digital age is an article written by Lord Carter for the Financial Times. If you’d gone through the ft.com front page you wouldn’t have been able to read it without registering and then you’d only have free access a limited number of articles before having to pay. This is their business model and it’s fine. But you should be able to click on that link and read the article without registering. Why? Because I hacked the URL.

How did I know to do this? Two things:

1) Someone in the know spotted my retweeted request for someone to copy and post it elsewhere and told me. Yes, I’m lucky part of a network that includes people who know stuff I need to know but I’ve been building that network for years now. The point is the information is about there and I immediately shared it (while protecting my source).

2) More importantly, I knew what to do with this information. I can look at a complicated URL and figure out how to edit it. It’s not hard but I’d imgine most people wouldn’t know where to start.

This is digital literacy. Not using Word or Excel. Not uploading photos to Facebook or Flickr. And certainly not leaving comments on newspaper sites. Digital literacy means being able to take digital stuff make new things with it, just as literacy means taking words and making new sentences with them. Literacy is about understanding the rules of a thing so that they can be worked within or broken as applicable. It’s about making the world our own. This is why we teach reading and writing to children, not so that they can fill out forms or write tedious reports, but that they might question and understand the world in which they live in.

The same applies to online. Lord Carter wants to give every house in Britain a broadband internet connection. This is laudable. But unless they know what to do with it you might as well leave them with a TV aerial.

HTML isn’t complicated. It just looks a bit like code so people’s brains switch off. Even programming is fundamentally pretty simple: If this then do that or else do something else. That’s programming. I can’t write a computer program but understanding the principles of how they work has helped me understand why WordPress works they way it does, for example.

Digital literacy, to the level I’m at anyway, is not hard. And yet even I shy away from explaining how an XML document is structured or how style sheets work. This stumbling block needs to be removed so that people are able to understand how this digital thing works and then hack the shit out of it. That way people will be able to innovate online whether it’s creating a world-changing online service or tweaking a forum for a neighbourhood so it works just right.

But more importantly we’ll help reduce the digital divide. After all, I’m able to read online news for free because I can hack a URL. Can you?

For some reason I’ll be at the bigwig’s Digital Britain event at the ICC tomorrow morning – watch my Twitter for reactions. Do be aware there’s an unconference fringe occurring in Digbeth at the same time to which anyone is welcome.

Addendum: By “hacking” I’m not talking about breaking into a secure computer system. I’m talking about this sort of thing: “the re-purposing or re-configuring of stuff to make it do something it wasn’t originally intended to do.”

What’s wrong with these pictures:

Google Blog Search is a fantastically useful service. It takes RSS feeds from blogs and similar platforms and allows your to track certain keywords using the Google Alerts system. So if someone mentions you on their blog and you’re tracking your name you’ll get a notification. This isn’t a vanity search – it’s an essential part of what makes the distributed network of weblogs conversational.

It’s also a valuable tool for blogging about a subject. One of my jobs is running the Custard Factory site and every morning I check through my “Tracking” folder to see what blog posts, news article, Flickr photos and YouTube videos have been put online about the Custard Factory. It both speeds up my job and allows me to bring in things that might otherwise have slipped past the traditional radar.

That is until Google tweaked Blog Search.

I can’t find any official announcement but a few days ago a few of us noticed our alerts were suddenly a hell of a lot less useful. Previously Google would just index the content of the RSS feed, in other words the stuff you’re reading here between the title of the post and the title of the next post. Now, for some bizarre reasons known only to themselves they’re indexing the whole page including the sidebar.

And that’s what’s wrong with the above pictures. That post has no mention of the Custard Factory yet it appeared in my “Custard Factory” alert because the phrase appears in the sidebar. The thing is, that phrase appears on every page of the blog meaning that every time I post something it’ll appear in the alert regardless of whether it’s relevant or not.

And it gets worse. Check out this one:

That’s from this post by my old chum Rol but if you search the page you’ll find no mention of Custard Factory at all. That’s because Rol has a widget on his sidebar that has a a snippet of the last post from all the blogs he’s following. When Google indexed the page this post of mine was the most recent thing I’d published. Now it’s not. And even more stupidly it had nothing to do with Rol whatsoever. He probably never even knew the words appeared on his site.

If you think this is stupid and would like Google to make their Blog Search useful again please let them know using this form. I thank you.