Is it OK to tweet "fire" in a crowded theater?

Evidently not.

Or at least, it's not a good idea to tweet in jest that you'll blow an airport sky-high if it remains closed for snow, so preventing you from visiting your girlfriend.  Paul Chambers of Doncaster, England found this out the hard way, paying a fine of £1000, gaining a criminal record and losing his job in the bargain.  His appeal will be heard before the high court of the UK and his defense has had at least one high-profile fundraiser, but it's all a bit sobering, to say the least.

This lack of humo(u)r on the part of airport security is not new, by the way, nor limited to the UK.  I remember as a kid -- so, ahem, well before 9/11 -- noticing a sign at the airport we were flying out of saying it was a federal crime even to joke about hijacking, bombs and such, and promptly blanching and making a mental note not to make any smart comments to the nice folks by the metal detector.

With that in mind, the remarkable aspect of the case isn't so much that it involves Twitter, though it is one of the first such cases, but that the authorities chose to prosecute for this particular remark at all.  I don't know how often such cases are prosecuted, but I'd guess it's not too often.  They certainly don't seem to make the press much.  I doubt the story would have been less remarkable had Mr. Chambers been brought in for making the same remark in person at the ticket counter.

In any case, caveat tweetor.

More stuff to be uneasy about

Previously I mentioned a couple of attempts to mine the Twitterverse for signs of what's going on in the world.  It's also perfectly possible to mine the conventional media.  One such effort is globalincedentreport.com, a "global display of terrorism and other suspicious events".

Global Incident Report gathers together news stories and plots their locations on a global map using eye-catchingly garish icons.  There are several categories of incident, such as disease outbreaks, gang-related activity, drug interdictions and terrorist threats (you'll need to establish an account to view those and a couple of other categories, which seems reasonable).  Basically everything that makes your local TV news the angst-fest it is, right there in one handy web site.

Comparing this to Twitter, I'd say the geo-tagging is more accurate (though the site seems to think Miami, OK is on the Kansas-Missouri state line) and of course the information is more reliable.  Sorry, Web 2.0 fans, but I've been up and down this one.  Mainstream media have their own problems, but I'll take "rush-job vetting and curation aimed at selling ads" over no vetting and curation at all.

There's a clear sampling bias.  Since the reports are all in English, incidents tend to cluster in the US, UK and India.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the Commonwealth are sparser, but they're also generally less populated.  Beyond the bias toward English, it's not clear which feeds the site samples, which it self will be a subset of which feeds are made available.  So, definitely, caveat lector.

Even with the caveats, it's an interesting effort.  The mapped incidents link directly to primary sources -- transparency is good -- and the global view lets you get the big picture of what's going on.  Or at least what's being reported.  And tracked by the site ... anyway, still interesting.

Cookies in the UK (or should that be "biscuits"?)

I haven't tracked down wether Parliament decreed this, though it seems likely, but a number of UK sites I've visited in the past couple of months show you a brief popup or other announcement to the effect that they use cookies (small files that your browser stores on your disk and hands back to the site on later visits so the site can tell it's you).  The announcement is typically a couple of simple sentences with a link for further information.  For example:

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.  Find out more here.

The linked page details in clear, precise language what cookies are and what the site uses them for.  It explains how to set your browser to disable cookies for the site, with the understanding that you might not have as nice an experience since the site won't be able to remember who you are.  Once you dismiss the announcement you don't see it again, because -- of course -- it has set a cookie and knows not to come back (unless you disabled cookies or later clear the cookie).


Wow.  They Got It Right.  Well done!