Yes, it’s that election today. I’ll be off to the Election Night Party at the US Embassy in just under 24 hours.

In the meantime, some links to amuse and / or take your mind off the waiting.

Solve the Italian Job cliffhanger once and for all - RSC puts up a prize for the best entry. C’mon, we know they got away with it.

What’s wrong with Neil’s new MacBook?

Cool, we made Sky’s caption competition. You’d all have got better photos if you’d backed off like I asked …

See Obama, Hook Up! h/t Wonkette. Really?

Large Hadron Colliderscope - h/t Theo

President Medvedev and I share the same taste in hardware - according to TUAW

… and finally, some Plinkety Palin (and McCain), via Tim Ireland. Brilliant.

PS not entirely sure what happened to the ‘Scouting for Girls’ post - it was there, and then it wasn’t, and now it’s back again. Odd.

Yesterday saw the first post on my ‘official’ FCO blog. Those of you who follow .gov.uk will know that the FCO has been slowly expanding its online presence, including encouraging more of us to blog on the fco.gov.uk platform. So, after much agonising, I’ve decided to give it a go.

Why agonising? @simond summed it up well in a tweet yesterday evening:

@jamesbarbour One blog not enough for you? :) Intrigued to see if/how you can manage them, especially when one is explicitly gov.uk

I’m not entirely sure myself, Simon, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been following the emerging debate on civil servants blogging for some time, contributing on occasion. But there’s still a fairly hefty unresolved grey area surrounding those of us who blog in a ‘private capacity’. So, as I’ve said a couple of times, I don’t talk about work on this blog. I talk about comms, tech, politics (carefully) on occasion - whatever floats my boat outside of the office, but I steer clear of goings-on at the Embassy.

Thing is, though, I want to blog about work. I have a great job which raises all sorts of issues I’d love to share. And blogs.fco.gov.uk is the logical place to share them.

Second thing is, I’m genuinely excited by the FCO’s moves to engage online. First steps, yes, but all the more important for that. And I want to be part of it.

That’s two pretty good reasons, I think. And, provided I can find the time, I hope there’s still room for jamesbarbour.org - I don’t want to clutter the FCO blog with random thoughts unconnected to my work. I reckon I can still be a civil service blogger and a civil servant who blogs.

We’ll see how it evolves.

Simon Wakeman has tagged me for the ‘Three Inspirational Communicators’ meme. Which, if nothing else, does at least prove that someone reads this blog. In fact, Simon, wasn’t it you who tagged me for ‘Five Things’ at the end of last year?

I quite like this meme - good call to Andy Wake for starting it. We all draw our influences from somewhere. Our influencers might be people we’ve worked, with, family members, people in the public eye - just about anyone, really. I’ve had a good long think about mine. Remember, these are my three inspirational communicators. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree. So, in no particular order, and with a quote from each:

1 - Roald Dahl. Wonderful, compelling stories which so completely involve and envelop you, no matter how old you are. The two autobiographies are even better than the fiction.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

And doesn’t this apply, to some extent, to all of us?

2 - CJ Cregg. There had to be a West Wing character in here somewhere. Jed Bartlett and Matt Santos and Josh Lyman all made the shortlist, but in the end there’s one clear winner: CJ.

Reporter: I think the question was, was he physically and emotionally prepared to make a life and death decision after what he’d just been through?

CJ: : He’d been through a TV interview and a press conference. The President finds you all annoying, but not prohibitively debilitating.

Sometimes, every now and then, my profession delivers up the occasional “West Wing Moment”. And I get to play at being CJ. It rocks.

3 - Bob Geldof. He never actually said “Give us your f*cking money”. But he could have said it, should have said it. What Geldof did achieve, though, was to invent a whole new genre - getting his message across rather forcefully in the process.  95% of the world’s TV sets, if you believe the hype, were tuned to Live Aid. That’s pretty inspirational.

We live in a broken world which has never been healthier, wealthier or bizarrely, free of conflict, but some 500 kilometers south of here they die of want … It’s not only intellectually absurd, but also morally repulsive.

And here are the 10 runners-up, again in no particular order:

Cartwright
Ferrabee
Shapiro
Zimmerman
Jobs
Mandela
Williams
Politkovskaya
Ford
Adama

Now for the fun bit - my turn to tag three more people.  Charles, David, Emma - you’re it.

I’ve been very remiss in sharing links lately. With apologies, here’s a few highlights:

EFI-x - run OS X on any old PC. Hardware issues here we come - but if it works on a tiny Vaio I’ll be tempted

Why “Old Etonian Simon Mann” is a twit - Gill Hornby in the Telegraph. Brilliantly insightful.

Charles Crawford on public sector and public service mawkishness. Priorities indeed.

Happy Birthday iPhone. Still loving mine, despite the awful camera. Interesting predictions here from The Reg.

Two great posts from Lords of the Blog. Compulsory voting - with (and only with) a box for ‘declared abstention’ - has been a hobby-horse of mine for some time. Not just for our (elected) representatives, but for all of us. Reading these convinces me even more. But would the electorate wear it?

Intel says ‘no’ to Vista. Me too.

Does anyone ever use ’sharing buttons?’ asks Simon. I suspect he’s right. In fact I’d go a little further - do the majority of web users actually use the likes of Digg on a regular basis? Or is it just for small groups of like-minded geeks?

Stairway to Brand Heaven (or Hell) from David Armano, via Steve Clayton. A picture telling a thousand words - again.

… and finally, a little Aussie humour from Theo.

More later, perhaps.

Interesting missive received through my ‘contact’ page the other day:

Dear James,

I understand from one of your posts that “Thanks to Google Reader, I have all of Civil Serf’s posts from some point in December onward”

I found myself in the same position as Civil Serf and was hoping that you know exactly what happened to her. Was she disciplined? What was the outcome? Has any light been shed on the whole civil servant blogging issue?

Would also be grateful if you could provide me with some of her posts to use as examples in my case.

Kind regards,

There was a name at the bottom, but I’ve edited it out for obvious reasons. Let’s call him / her (for it was an ambiguous name) Bob.

I sent what I thought was quite a helpful (if a little sceptical) reply to ‘Bob’:

Bob,

Sorry to hear of your troubles.

At this stage, and please forgive me for being blunt, I have a suspicion you might be a journalist on a fishing expedition - there’s been a lot of interest in the Civil Serf story. But, assuming you’re not, I’d be interested to hear some more background, although I’m not sure I can be of any real assistance.

Best

James

Haven’t heard back from him / her.

So was I too suspicious?

… it is now.

The Champions’ League final, that is.

I know I don’t normally talk about work on this blog, but I thought I’d point out our Moscow Football Diary on the FCO Website. There’s some photos on the Flickr channel, too.

Received an interesting Facebook event notification this morning, inviting me to vote for Rod in this year’s PA News awards. He’s up for ‘Public Affairs Personality of the Year’.

The profiles of the three shortlisted candidates make interesting reading. Rod’s, to my mind, doesn’t do him justice. I don’t know ‘Anne Longfield OBE‘, but despite an interesting enough write-up there’s no photo. This makes me nervous. Lionel Zetter’s entry, though, is well worth a read, if only because he comes up with a true Rod-ism if ever I saw one:

of course there is good lobbying and bad lobbying, just like there is good sex and bad sex - but let’s face, it most of us would rather have bad sex than no sex at all!

I voted for Rod, of course. And you should too. Maybe if he wins we can persuade him to start blogging.

Simon observes that, from Number Ten to Barack Obama, they’re all at it. Perhaps it’s just my rather small social networking and blog reading circles, but it seems like the political world’s going mad for Twitter.

I do wonder, though, what use much of it is. If you’re an Obama supporter, you may well sign up to his feed. But if you’re not, or of you’re undecided, why would you bother? More to the point, what proportion of America’s non-voters or floating voters (do the US have those?) are politically active enough to sign up to a potential President’s twitterings?

I signed up for Twitter ages ago, and then promptly forgot about it. I did have a BBC Breaking News feed being sent to my cellphone, but it seems to have broken. I’m just not sure it’s relevant for me right now. I don’t have GPRS so am not ‘always on’, and Facebook status updates take care of the keeping-up-with-friends side of what Twitter offers. Plus, and here’s the thing, none of my friends use it.

I’m not completely anti, though. I do think Twitter has its uses - maybe the concept just isn’t mature enough for we, the masses, to see them yet. And it must, therefore, be a Good Thing that the likes of our PM are Twittering.

In the future I can see Twitter as a replacement for clunky and costly SMS updates - flight arrivals, weather, travel advice and so on. And how about a Terminal 5 Twitter feed?

Perhaps this’ll cheer you up.

Just brilliant - almost makes me wish I’d decided to work in advertising after all.

Sorry for the hiatus. Believe it or not, until I get my replacement MagSafe adaptor I’m spending very little time online - using the laptop on a coffee table (the only place I can jiggle the wire sufficiently to get it to work) gives me a sore back.

Anyway. Jumbo helping of links to make up for my silence …

Sex Scandal Cheat Sheet - from Matt Bors. Excellent.

BBC Micro, we salute you - 10 PRINT “JAMES IS SKILL” 20 GOTO 10

Beau Bo d’Or on the Beijing Olympics

Theo on Civilian vs Military friends - for Rob, Nicky & Ellie

Richard’s Top 5 PR films - Great list but, as others have said, Thankyou for Smoking has to be on there

Aggregating the Walled Gardens - Neville on the future of social networks and the barriers between them

EDM1245 - Total Politics magazine - Sprung!

Tim Ireland on SOCPA - Marcus, Sam, this one’s for you

Tim Marshall on the cost of war - harrowing

Downing Street twitters - whatever next?

Still number one on Google for ‘Sinister Beard’, too. Woot!