The Open Data City might be a place where info about culture and tourism is all around us, making the fascinating history of Brighton and Hove really come to life in a much more joined up way; importantly, it may come to life for you as you walk around the place, not as you sit at home on a PC.

A more joined-up information space around us might mean closer connections between organisations that have content and data, and people who want to publish, make games, develop new services, connect us together as a closer society.

All lovely cuddly blue-sky stuff. Underneath the idealism, there’s some serious challenges that can be unravelled to help get things to work together; if City Camp starts to identify some of these development issues then I think it’ll be starting off in the right direction.

Firstly, for me, it’s *not* completely about quickly developing some flashy and innovative new projects. Yes, we need to make the case for open data by showing how it works with some simple but exemplary ideas. Yes, we need to paint a picture of how this stuff could really change life in the city – for those who don’t get the way that digital tech is revolutionising our world.

No – my first point is just to assert quietly about the need to survey or map the data that’s out there, and do some simple analysis of how connections could be made between the data clumps. What’s there? What’s missing? Are there digital ‘cold spots’ in Brighton and Hove? This , then, begins to turn into a city-wide data strategy.

Secondly; why have a strategy? Well, it helps if it’s someone’s job to develop clarity and quality in stuff like this. Can we have a small part in recommending that new start ups in the public sector ensure their data is free and accessible, if appropriate? Yes, I think we should. We get that chance by being organised, clear about intentions and outputs, quality and safety.

Third; who should be at the core of this? Whose job is it to make sure the open data city goes ahead? There’s no straight answer to that. My opinion, as a major media data publisher for the last ten years or so, is that it’s up to organisations of all kinds to realise that their own data has massive value and equity, and that data or information strategy must form the core of business development strategies for the future.

If you ‘own’ a business or culture niche space, and you aren’t the experts at capturing and exporting data about it, you’re ignoring the chance to nurture a key asset for your organisation. Look around you: how many companies consider the latent equity of data in their business? In the public sector, I’d suggest it’s one of the important roles funding bodies, the third sector and arts companies need to develop for the future.

Lastly, I’m hoping City Camp explores trust, consistency and factuality in open data activity. I spent eight years developing a publishing proposition that is now successfully driven by a reservoir of culture data about listings, events, venue info and more. we worked with people in culture places to encourage them to add their arts info themselves. They are the experts in this stuff, they know if it’s correct. We need data owners further down the transaction ladder to keep feeding the database; we need to incentivise them toi do it, we must meet their needs. They are the real heroes of Open Data creation.

I found that ‘crowd sourcing’ data didn’t work, if up the chain, media partners were going to be promised accurate, up to date information in consistent form, guaranteed by some sort of SLA. It’s not just about contracts with data users; one of the biggest issues we had was answering the phone to people who had visited a culture place like a museum only to find it was shut. People get angry if data is wrong or out of date.

But if you get it right, you can publish trustworthy data that others can mix and match into new products of all kinds. Look at any modern retail website, particularly something like an estate agent site; you actually are looking at five or ten different data sources melding into one coherent web publishing offer.

If public sector organisations want to support Open Data standards and opportunities, it’s key to produce data output that is good enough, reliable enough, and accessible enough to take it’s place out there in the city data mix.

Here’s hoping. See you at City Camp!

A glimpse of the Guardian's data visualisation of visitor attractions

There’s a really nice, thought-provoking data visualisation in today’s Guardian [February 23, 2011.] Have a look at the graphic here.

It’s thought provoking to me because it shows how useful simple stats showing a national picture can be. It’s not my interest to see ‘league tables’ of museums or galleries made easy; but it’s sure helpful when it comes to arguing the case for easier digital access, web creativity and the overall development of reach and audiences.

At the moment, we’re still waiting for a simple and functional set of guidelines for measuring web traffic and usage across the public sector media space. This sort of tourism-centric evaluation of reach and visitor patterns can be used and explored further – but until we all agree on ways to measure in consistent forms, this sort of easy to understand visualisation will be beyond the digital culture sector.

At the height of the New Opportunities Fund Digital-era in the museum and gallery space in the UK there were some really simple and useful guidelines for web development; Culture Online also put together some more complex recommendations too. We’ve moved on from that time; web technologies and ways to track user pathways through social media have become much more complex.

Interestingly, it’s become somewhat difficult to track down existing resources about web measurement and standards for public sector digital work. The NOF-digi resources have been superceded by pages on the UKOLN site which are somewhat museum-centric [though still very useful indeed] and the Culture Online ones have disappeared. I’m keen to index and collate what’s out there and what’s relevant today to all kinds of creative and cultural organisations. Can anyone help?

Digital Britain is all around us, right now. We already sit within a real-time web of data. We expect our interactions and cultural output to be geared together and to make new meanings and connections as we go.

As producers and creatives our best channel to audiences in this cloud of online culture comes through managing our core information. That perhaps sounds boring and blank but actually it just means, in the first instance, having simple policies in the museum or gallery to ensure core name and location info about our venue is consistently described then indexed correctly in Google.

That’s right. In the midst of all the perplexing and ever-changing technology we use today, the first step to cultural discovery online is just to use words intelligently to describe your stuff. When you master that, you can allow participatory pathways into collections, exhibitions and more.

If you do it right, someone else may want to share your content or info, or re-use it in another form.  When this happens, your data takes on new value; something we might call knowledge or information equity.  Equity? Does information have value? You bet.  Mobile computers – like iPhones or Android phones – are taking over as the first point of digital contact for many people these days, and they need data.

In his fascinating recent pamphlet about Cloud Culture, written for the British Council, Charles Leadbeater starts to explore the meanings, politics and moral challenges of putting this culture in the digital cloud.

To my eyes, Leadbeater sees too much danger and negativity in these geared and connected data spaces; it’s a chance for those who already watch us too much to watch us even more, he warns.  In reality, we’re already rigidly connected to countless databases that don’t operate in any sinister way at all.  When we book an airline ticket or tax our car we use the cloud of data.  It’s been making connections for us for the last ten years at least.

Forget the more pervasive big brother, the real-time web brings major gains for us as cultural producers: we can now develop data-led ways to put art into a relational landscape where it can begin to be judged and re-contextualised in a wider social space.

We can use real-time web info to market and promote arts and culture in regions where art and tourism are part of the regeneration agenda.  We can offer community arts projects online access and digital partnering opportunities with other groups situated more remotely.  We can tag items in collections so that stories can be woven between objects, places, eras and languages.

If we’re up to the challenge, we could make the new web work for us, not against us, as Leadbeater seems to imply it might.  Cloud culture may allow new kinds of creativity and digital innovation.  Is it possible for us to develop a new, more culturally-inspired or connected YouTube or Flickr? Perhaps; but let’s not forget sites like those morphed out of the very close relationship between academia and Silicon Valley in the States:  I’d question whether we have developed such fertile collaborations here yet.

Sergey Page and Larry Brin developed an idea for a search engine with a difference while at Stanford University, and they got Silicon Valley to invest in Google. The proximity of high-end tech companies, the culture space and universities in the US drive a lot of innovation in our web today.

Arts Council England’s ‘Achieving Great Art for Everyone’ consultation proposes the arts drive our creative industries; I’m assuming this phrase refers to conventional culture industries.  In the US, the creative industries are very closely aligned to new media and tech labs. There’s massive convergence between funders, galleries and tech companies.

TechSoup is a prominent stateside funding agency that blurs boundaries between sectors, funding types and agendas. In the UK, the only dedicated charity or trust that funds digital is the Nominet Trust. Seen side-by-side with Nominet recently at the National Digital Inclusion conference [NDI10] in London, TechSoup shone out as a beacon of developmental excellence, with partnerships linking the commercial web developer, culture venues and social development agencies.

Now shine the torch around us on this side of the Atlantic.  How many arts projects unite objectives/outcomes/ideologies from multiple sectors? Technologies like the real-time web, accessed by easy-to-use mobile platforms like the iPhone, give us a fascinating opportunity to converge the interests and agendas of many from within and outside of the culture sector.

To make good developmental connections now, I think we should closely look at the way ‘Stateside agencies like TechSoup have woven strong connections between commercial developers, culture agencies, universities and mass media organisations.  At a recent Arts Council-sector gathering I was struck by the almost total absence of professional experience from outside the public culture sector.

I think we need to look outwards more.  It’d be great to have a tech director at a National museum who comes from a retail, manufacturing or FMCG digital environment; but that will take a leap of imagination from current museum trustees.  No time like the present though!

“Hi everyone,  I’m hoping someone can advise me on an issue we’re experiencing with Google Earth.  I’ve been asked to check that our Museums (and Country Parks etc.) appear on Google Earth and noticed that,  for example, Bosworth Battlefield has about 8 different entries – only one of which is in the correct geographical place and only one of which has the correct name  “Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and Country Park”.

I think the problem stems from the Google Earth entries being fed from various different websites, each using User Generated Content (UGC),  so perhaps mistakes are inevitable? Has anyone else noticed this problem and how have they dealt with it? Thanks in advance!”
Adele Beeby

What a fascinating and topical enquiry! Sadly there’s no immediate remedy, but it raises lots of questions about how we in the museum/culture sector best interact effectively with major information providers like Google. And it’s currently something MCG members have been posting about, in threads about the Digital Britain report, and also Dan Zambonini’s challenge to nominate functions and scope for museum API’s. Dan asked - “if you could have an API in your museum, what would it do, or be for?”

I see these strands as closely related. Google Maps, and more recently Google Earth, have not been using any sort of ‘official’ data source for museum, library, archive and gallery venue info and location data. Most people can see it would be good for Google to be able to deal with one trusted, checked source of info for these useful types of information. I typed ‘Malvern Museum’ into Google Earth and got five different answers about where my local museum is, all info from different sources. Plainly useless. Agreed, one or two ‘reviews’ popped up too, and they were useful in a sense, but the reports were old, uncheckable, and ephemeral in a publishing sense. At the moment, I don’t think web users find this sort of info in any way useable.

So wouldn’t it be great if the Digital Britain report began to sketch out ways that centralised knowledge management could be delegated to one or national museum body, so it could take responsibility for co-ordinating collection of basic data about museums – things like venue info and location. Then Google just talks to one agency and gets the data in one live channel. [Of course - we already have the possible technical means to do this in the form of Culture24 - and that's no accident, it's been something the team in Brighton have been keen on for a long, long time...]

Why is centralised knowledge management (in some form or another) important? Everything needs to be paid for, infrastructure needs putting in place and it needs to be comprehensive. The place where info ‘pivots’ is the place to gather it. There’s not a lot of point in the data being generated regionally, one area at a time; a big player like Google wants national coverage, straight away, and it needs to be up-to-date, live and covered by some sort of service level agreement.

I know we all are keen on museums being participative and socially responsive, but the Google Earth example clearly shows why, when factual, unshakeable, reliable location data and core venue info is concerned, a more systematic approach would work best. So I’d suggest the best placed core aggregators of culture venue data should be funders or govt agencies (or their partners like MLA or agencies like Collections Trust). How do we get people to play ball and use the system? I think it should be a rock solid funding requirement for projects and venues that payment only comes after core info is entered into the publicy availalble, free-for-use, uber-database.

A large culture agency that I have worked with in the past still has no central database of projects, or funded venues, or collection objects aquired; I think a Digital Britain strategy needs to get to grips with such information deficits urgently and make cultural data acquisition a strong organisational priority. Just imagine 25,000 journalists turning up in London in 2012 and there being no trustworthy info on hand about our culture and [sporting] heritage…

Writing as a committee member of the MCG, I think this has been one of the best ideas threads we’ve had for a long time. Yes, it’s been passionate, and that does indeed get people thinking, and firing up laptops in reply.

I think voices who advocated tact in the exchange (Nick Poole, myself via Twitter, and others) did so because we’re already engaged in working with museum people all over the regions, not always in the most glamorous places; we’re all working for peanuts, doing about ten million things at once, including managing that puzzling interface between museum directors and the onward march of digital technology…

To me, that’s one of the reasons there needs to be some tact in the way we review each other’s projects; if you’d been behind the scenes of projects like NMOLP you’ll have seen the sort of passion it arouses. I also saw people (like Terry and Carolyn, and the teams of writers like Rachel and Rowena L) working like absolute stink to get the project done, and ploughing through all sort of effluent to manage relationships across and through the project. Those who stuck the course deserve medals.

I think the emotionality was also caused by the big fees funding the project – big ticket jobs like this cause a certain amount of envy, and that too, leads to comment that doesn’t always please. One gets a picture sometimes of vast (National museum) battleships manoevring around a smallish patch of sea, each one guarding it’s own flanks, carefully manning the bulwarks, in case a stray shell cuts the rigging, or someone jumps ship.

Best things coming out of the Creative Spaces debate for me?

A) The emerging discussion about ‘the plumbing’ (nice metaphor from Paul Walk) being the first job to tackle when working on these complex cross collection projects. Yep. Of course the data scheme underneath is critical. The website (if there needs to be one!) should be sat on top of the database well down the line of projects like this. How you get the data, on what (copyright)terms it’s given, and how the data is related and relational is the first key task.

B) Another plus has been the thread (from Frankie, Mike E, Kate Fernie and others) about how social nets work in reality, and why you might want, or not want, to play for a while, culturally. This stuff needs to be explored more. Already one or two culture orgs have made abortive attempts at trying to get things going, and they mostly failed ’cause they didn’t spot that sites get massive visits when they get the bigger publishing picture about mass audiences, massive budgets and massive human resources and tech support. That insight mainly comes from expertise that’s mostly, at the moment, outside the museum sector.

C) We’re starting to get the idea too, that the cool culture venture we dream about here might not be a big project, but smaller-scale, evolutionary, more experimental, more informal. There aren’t any more big pots of money (like ISB)now for this kind of work. We’ve got to be coming up with sustainable and scaleable ideas, so some wisdom about the scope and depth of project concepts needs to be found when ideas are still at the back of an envelope stage.

My interests in this?

I’ve long evangelised (and written about, in 2005)’the inside out web museum.’ At my former workplace, my enthusiasm for a more’datacentric’ publishing offer drove quite a bit of our re-design thinking, though the final realisation of those ideas is still in the pipeline. But look outwards at recent tech trends and think about how near we are to some sort of breakthrough. We’re wrong to expect a ‘killer app,’ but continuous development and playful experimentation like the (Mike Ellis) Mashed Museum sessions at UKMW08 will get us nearer to some sort of nirvana.

Where to go now, post-Creative Spaces? We ALL need and deserve (as a sector, everywhere) access to data channels that come to us, and do the neccesary spidering and data mining to make the most of all the content we might choose to expose and share. And, importantly, let it be live data exchange, not a day old, or a week old, or some such OAI-harvested old hat. The next culture web must be live; after all we have come to expect that through our day to day fun with Twitter and FB.

To get live, we need APIs; they are, of course, the way forward as Richard Light, Mia and Mike all say. API’s need standards, and Collection Trust work with DACS and towards the new BSI data standards is excellent.

Sharing freely and offering culture content to others for their own use opens doors to commerce and business models, so some movement there gets us towards a more commercially-geared culture web.

And finally? The success of #hashtags on Twitter (check #fakeanimalfacts) proves people can come up with vocabs and impromptu syntax that bind humour, culture, conferences and news together using simple XML. My research interest now is to see how we can map some simple #-like tagging and vocab structures (and maybe the National Curriculum) so we can have cultural fun without needing to build big and expensive portalised web projects…

JP

And if you tire of watching that vid of the animation, Barnabu has done a browser-borne version of it, minus the rather fetching music: http://www.barnabu.co.uk/visualizing-twitter-activity-inside-the-google-earth-plugin/#more-494

(Just for once, I haven’t hidden those links behind easy, short urls.)

This lovely socially-generated, but individually-curated work made me think about how people ‘situate’ themselves in cultural terms. Is it important that #uksnow tags have geodata? Yes, because there was a collective or memetic agreement, an agreed context,  that taggers were buying into when they Tweeted using the # tag.

But take the situation across to the cultural space, the place where today #Darwin taggers may well slow Twitter down, and there’s less understanding of the informational context in which people are #Darwin tagging. I can see that it would be great to be able to see where in the world people are digitally remarking about the founder of evolutionary theory.

It’d be interesting to analyse the mix of political, religeous and cultural cues that result from a geographically placed map of #Darwin tweets. Where might it take the debate between creationists and evolutionists if we can visually show the geo-distribution of the protagonists?

Getting people in the arts to begin to think about place in digital terms sounds really geeky, but when you suggest thinking about Barnabu’s #uksnow map and, say, landscape painting, or poetry, people might begin to embrace some ideas around this. As I wrote yesterday, it’d possibly need some central co-ordination, inspiration or creativity to sketch out some agreed #tags for art/artist terms or vocabularies.

Maybe that’s a useful role for cultural authorities like the Arts Council; in the past, however, ACE have shown no interest in centralised informational policy.  There’s no time like the present though…

Charles Darwin goes on Twitter - is he more Web 2.0 than you?

Just when you think the world of information science and the web has gone to sleep, bored to tears with endless discussions about when the semantic web will pop up, along comes something fabulous.

Hard on the heels of last week’s fascinating #uksnow Twittering and the lovely animation of tweets across Britain as the snow rolled us over, this week we’re being over-run by Darwin200 tweets using a #darwin tag.

Naturally the great man himself is Tweeting from beyond the grave – if you’d like to follow him he’s @cdarwin, not surprisingly. I wonder if he’s got a netbook with dongle, an N96 or an iPhone? I don’t suppose there are many powersockets on The Beagle. Have a look at his homepage on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cdarwin

Please can someone now do a #darwin mashup map so we can find out where everything is? Over the next weeks and months a string of events are being held all over Britain.  Check out http://www.darwin200.org/ .  Disappointingly, while a few months ago there was a rudimentary RSS feed of D200 events, it doesn’t seem to be around any more. The D200 site seems really flat and web 1.0.

Thinking about Twitter tags, these user-tagged info clouds could be great low-tech, high-flexibility models for socially-driven information creation. I think it’s fascinating that within just a few weeks, people are making up their own tag taxonomies, placing them in a networked environment, and letting nature take it’s course. Kind of like Darwin, really.

What’s next? A simple, standardised list of artist names, eras, types? It’s not that complex, because what seems to be happening is that users quickly twig which is the most powerful or sticky #tag to use and then the memetic effect that seems to energise Twitter takes over, and the #tag goes everywhere.

Meanwhile, check out the latest #darwin tweets in my RSS feed box up there on the right of the Machine Culture homepage.

JP/Feb 10

Twitter: @jon_pratty

It’s quite unsettling how I assume the world spins the same way as me; and for a journalist and culture sector consultant, not actually that good either. I’d assumed that other people in museums and galleries also used Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. We all use eBay, Amazon and stuff like online banking don’t we? We all muck about with RSS feeds and know our way round Google maps and things that help extend our horizons.

Well, actually, no we don’t, of course. In a user-centric world (which means, in plain English, real life) there’s lots of people who don’t know about newsfeeds, web 3.0 and Creative Commons.  And in fact, if you go round the corner to your local (regional English) museum and ask them if they have an online collection that is commentable by members of the public they’d look at you like you’re an alien.

The reality is that in our local backyard, many museums are run by volunteers. The venues themselves are often only just joining the web revolution, with perhaps, at most, a simple brochure website and an email account that’s checked less frequently than it could be. And one pc in the corner of the room.

In spite of ten + years of lottery-funded largesse that has successfully grown IT for the library sector and built the People’s Network Discovery Service, there’s not been much digital development in small local museums. As the editor (until August 2008 ) of the 24 Hour Museum since 2001, I had lots of contact with some smashing people all over the uk doing a great job running tiny museums, telling us their stories about great discoveries, plucky tales of resourcefulness and occasionally, funding battles for survival.

Clearly – there were, and still are, some splendid tales to tell about UK history and heritage. And yet, there seems to be an increasing gap between those who have digital tools to tell their stories, and those who don’t. Ironically, while post-1997 Labour cultural policy has been all about meeting the needs of users and politically-inspired audience targets for cultural creators, a major group of disenfranchised and under-represented people has emerged.

This group is us – people who make the exhibitions, curate collections, accession the objects, paint the pictures, run the loan box schemes. Curriculum Online passed us by. Culture Online flew over our heads. Lottery money from nof-Digi did come our way to a certain degree. But by and large, right now, there’s an underclass of cultural workers in museums and galleries, libraries and archives, across the whole country, who don’t have access to the means to make online content about our own work, our collections, our lectures or our events.

The recent debacle of the Cultural Olympiad, which saw major promises being made on the behalf of the museum and gallery sector, with no funding stream whatever, only re-inforces this thesis.

While it might seem negative to make these points, I’m merely setting the scene. There are now many, many, well tried and simple means to get presence online. As 2008 closed WordPress, the most popular, free and simple blogging software out there, is gradually morphing from a calendar-based blog tool into a versatile and customisable platform for all sort of publishing tasks.

And, while some in museums find a website of any sort unattainable, others are using free and well connected social networking systems like Facebook, Flickr and MySpace. They are doing this because sites like these are free, vastly popular, and easy to maintain.

So are there lessons we can learn from culture sector users of digital platforms like Facebook and Flickr? Are they the answer to the current lack of infrastructure, support and mentoring, resources and know-how that we are confronted with? What challenges to our traditional ways of working and values do social networks bring?

To begin examining some of the issues at ground level, Renaissance West Midlands commissioned me to carry out a programme of research centred on an event pulling together people from museums in the Midlands.  The event, held at The Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry on February 4th, 2009,  explored some of the issues that we were aware of, and opened out some more that need further enquiry.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sketching in issues discovered, resources contributed by participants at the event, and new directions for further work. A set of pages, links and other resources will be put together on the Renaissance West Midlands website as a record of what come out in our work. In the meantime, I’ll be pulling it out and posting it up on this site to keep the pot boiling.

Further outputs are likely, and may include suggested templates for Facebook use, ideas for advocacy within your museum to help win over unbelievers, and a systematic approach to local government network difficulties.

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far – and welcome ot anyone who wants to join in and help! There’s a Google Group (museums_midlands_network) to house our conversations and ideas, but of course, feel free to comment right down there – below these words.

Next report – the event itself at The Herbert Art Gallery

One place I want to explore is Twitter, a constantly changing, evolving and (perhaps, sometimes) contextually obscure platform. We mostly imagine that our tweets (Twitter messages) are between just us and our friends – but in fact they’re out there in the [data] cloud, and searchable by tag, keyword, phrase or whatever.

Yesterday, I looked at what people were saying about the UK government’s Digital Britain ideas, and I posted a feed that captures the buzz from Twitter about these new strategy directions. To do this, I simply did a Twitter search from the site homepage and then saved an RSS output of the search, pasting it into my WordPress RSS widget. If you want to try it, one moment of warning; you’ll find it really slows down your WordPress editing client.

Today, since it’s the end of the week, I’m posting a new feed to suit the mood: I’m looking at what people are saying about that familiar Friday feeling.

I’m not leaving any of these rather voyueristic syndications up for very long: I think there are very real concerns about copyright, publishing context, privacy and so on. In addition to that, if anyone objects to this exposure, I’ll take the respective feed down immediately.

Please email me if that is the case: jonnypratty(at)gmail.com

JP

From Look to the Stars, a German charity sector website - the real Andy McNab?

Picture the scene: it’s monday morning, the coffee is cooling, I’m blankly trolling around in a free-associating Google image search. For some reason a glimpsed headline suggests the name Andy McNab to me and I end up looking at a screenful of pixellated thumbnails of the celebrated SAS survivor.

In one corner I notice an undisguised head and shoulders shot – a bit of a shock as, famously, McNab guards his identity carefully: he’d won the Military Medal for service in Northern Ireland and later trained anti-Cartel forces in Colombia; so he’s got all sorts of understandable reasons to keep his head down.

Here was an odd-looking face – head shaved, strong neckline, glancing slightly ostentatiously at the camera, in what seemed to be a PR faceshot. A quick look at one of McNab’s books in WH Smiths showed that the neckline, chin and cheekbones on the web pic looked quite close to the only other undisguised pic of Andy, taken in 1977 in South Armagh.

Could this be the first undisguised pic of the famous Mr McNab? (Link checked on January 27, 2009, still there). It’s on a German-based PR flummery site that seems to be soliciting money for charity contacts. Why was the pic there? Was it just an innocent mistake by an inept webmaster? After all, in newsrooms all over Britain there are photos of the man himself before the pixels are layered over, and in edit suites there must be hours of video of him without his digital disguise in place. Must be easy for someone to pop the wrong pic in the queue to FTP to the webserver, I wondered.

Wanting to find out more, I popped off an email to McNab’s publisher, Bantam (an imprint of Random House). I asked if they knew about the site. I guess I also had bought into the mystique of McNab – if he really wants to keep Sinn Fein/IRA and the Cali Cartel off his tail he’d want to know about this, I thought.

A press assistant at Bantam gets back to me: “It is always good to know that people will comment when they see something that is not right. Fortunately in this case the gentleman pictured is not Andy McNab, nor does he look anything like him – so a potentially disastrous situation is actually quite amusing.”

Ok then, so it’s not McNab. In a way I’m relieved not to be mixed up in outing McNab: if I had, he’d possibly turn up on my doorstep with some of his former friends from Hereford to remonstrate… A contact in the intelligence community tells me that McNab’s real ID is well known ‘in the trade’ and his wishes to keep his head down are merely a great way to build his brand as an author. So there we’ll leave the real McNab.

But if it’s not him, then who is it? While our friendly Bantam press assistant might find it ‘quite amusing’, if McNab’s really got mobile units of trackers on his tail then surely the person misidentified in the picture is going to be pretty cheesed off to be woken one day looking up the barrel of a nine millimetre pistol.

Now, publishing law is one of first (and most worrying) bits of professional practice you learn about when doing your NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) course. Misidentification by hacks can cause all sorts of distress and has resulted in some biggish payouts to unfortunate innocents.

Robert Rigby, as seen on Random House's own website

Some days later, things move on. I find the not-McNab pic again, in another Google Image search. This time it’s got the name Robert Rigby underneath it. Rigby turns out to be the co-writer who pounds the keyboard while McNab yarns away about the years of gunsmoke and car chases.

OK – stand down the lawyers and bodyguards – this seems to me to be quite benign, with one big proviso: if I were Robert Rigby, I’d get onto that German webmaster and get the pic of him taken off the site asap. We don’t know how long the pic’s been up, misidentifying him as McNab, but search engine servers and spiders have been indexing this pic for months and the error, if left, will linger for a long time.

In online journalism, early action to correct legal errors is absolutely vital because of the danger of  search engine caching of the legally unsound material.  Once it’s out there in Google Image land, it’s in the wild.

JP