Polling Day (Stand up and be counted)

China evidently blocked access to Twitter two days ago, two days before the sensitive 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Other Internet services that seem to have become inaccessible include Hotmail, Flickr and search engine Bing.

In recent years, access to YouTube, Western media outlets and many other websites has also been blocked, often before or after ’sensitive’ events. And now’s a good moment to remember those who blocked themselves.

A few days after the blog of artist and government critic Ai Weiwei was shut down, he simply opened a new one (which you can see here, in Chinese). Ai also uses Twitter.

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Only 22% of eligible British voters have declared their intention to vote in the European and county council elections today. In 2004 the turnout in Britain for the European parliamentary elections was 38.9%.

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Be irrepressible

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression … learn more

• Got a blog or website?

  Undermine censorship by publishing fragments of censored material on your site

Surgery Live update

The Operation: Surgery Live trending at #2 tonight. Looks like #wordsduringsex is going to be a toughie to overcum. Hundreds upon hundreds of really interesting questions came in tonight via Twitter, email and phone (mainly the former). The integration of the TV, website, Twitter and Facebook is everything we hoped it would be.

Jemima Kiss picked up the story today over at The Guardian.

What an incredible spectacle that was tonight – a real insight. Channel 4 at its boldest – and most educative – best. Tomorrow night: Key-hole stomach surgery live at 11.05pm on C4

After just two nights Surgery Live is making its mark online…

Porn to be Wild update

Sexperience making good Google impact – on Day 1 of new series ranking #1 of 532,000,000 on searching “sex education” (where it has resided since the last series in Sept 08) and #2 of 731,000,000 on searching “sex”!

In search of Sex Education

Searching for Sex

Update 7.iv.09:

Nice piece in Broadcast about this today

Reaching the parts…

Bit of a turn up for the books today – the Sexperience sex education/information site I commissioned from Mint Digital and Cheetah TV to complement The Sex Education Show on Channel 4 in September/October is now really making its mark on Google…

Searching "sex"

Searching "sex education"

So #1 for “Sex Education” and #2 for “Sex” itself – with 660,000,000 returns for the latter on Google that’s a pretty competitive space, making it quite a result for an 8 week old UK public service factual cross-platform project.

When I checked a few weeks ago Sexperience was running at 6,000% of the traffic of the official government sex ed site for teens (the sponsored link above). Meanwhile, the interactive dimension of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies which I commissioned from Maverick TV in Birmingham and which broadcast last week on C4 prompted 99,000 online STI Checks during the week of broadcast alone. So the big question for me remains how on earth do you get the government and its services to plug into and support this kind of energy, interest and engagement? Now those are parts that are harder to reach than you might think…

Paranoia Twitter-style – part 2

Twitter Paranoia

First a Russian idiot and now the blank generation… No followers, no updates, just me in his/her/its sights. Why me?

I tried calling the Paranoia Helpline but they asked me to ‘please hold while your call is traced’.

Eventually I calmed down a bit about the whole thing, and then got this funny feeling I was being Googled…

Are you Adam Gee?

By way of research for my upcoming project (Codename Sam I Am), I’ve just been watching ‘Are You Dave Gorman?‘ (DVD kindly send to me today by the lovely Dan Lloyd at Avalon Public Relations – Amazon are all out of them, reckless fools) and I can’t really go to bed now without starting to collect together my favourite Adam Gees, the bastards who fight me day after day for Google supremacy and the more retiring ones.

So to get the Adam Gee Collection off to a fruitful start who better than Adam Gee, Mr Gay UK from Barnsley (originally kindly brought to my attention by Mr Robert Marsh of Fremantle Media back in his heady days at C4).

Let’s offset that with a suit, New York attorney Adam M. Gee, a small town lawyer with big city results, specialising in personal injury and medical malpractice (suing against it, that is, not carrying it out).

On the sports front pride of place should probably go to Adam Gee, a shit-hot golfer, the first overseas player since Nick Dougherty in 2001 to win the Lake Macquarie International Amateur Championship. I kid you not.

Irritatingly the owner of www.adamgee.com seems to be some kind of drugged out hippy who makes clothes. Please don’t visit the site – it will only encourage him and probably cost me my top spot in Google in the process. Do you really want to know about the ‘Alchemy of Energee’? Do you buy the notion that fashion provides protective energee and inspiration leading to growth and well being? Or do you think it just keeps you warm? We’re talking about a character who makes clothes with “the fabric of the universe”. He’s peddling something called a Gee Shirt (doesn’t he realise the T refers to the shape? where’s your other arm going to come out in a G-shirt?) He’s flogging Geens – aargh! Let’s hope we don’t share any.

If you are an Adam Gee or know any good ones, please do add them to my nascent collection.

Photo courtesy of Adam Gee and Mr Gay UK

Update 13.vi.09:

Well, over a year has elapsed and things are looking up. Project codename Sam I Am was Osama Loves and it turned out well. Almost as satisfying, the freaky adamgee.com has at last begun to sink and is currently sitting at #4 rather than the #2 spot it clung irritatingly to for month after month. Only a couple of the more colourful Adam Gees make Google page 1, the golfer and former Mr Gay UK, the lawyer has been displaced to page 2 reflecting the times as no-one can afford lawyers these days – and, like a good Christmas game of Risk, I’ve now occupied 16 of the top 20 Adam Gee slots, including the top 3. It surprises me that no new Adam Gees have bubbled up like the geoscientist (not to be confused with the gee-o-science I’m currently engaging in) in Adelaide or the rugby league referee. Nonetheless we do seem to be a varied lot, pretty much no overlap, and if you are one (or know one) please do chuck yourself (or them) [via the comments] into the pot, that rich mix jambalaya that is the Adam Gee collection.