Just as I was getting on with something else, I am called hither to write a blog post. So this’ll be a short one, I’m afraid. And instead of talking about what I was doing today (fixing bugs, modifying database schemas, and other dull interludes in the programming life) I’ll draw your attention to a couple of NotApathetic things.

NotApathetic has (notwithstanding various teething troubles) been going pretty well, and there are some more cool ideas in the pipeline. For those of you who are enjoying the latest web-logger fad, “tags“, Matthew Somerville has implemented this experimental page generated from users’ confessions reasons for not voting. It’s rather fun; since, unlike the “‘blogosphere”, mySociety isn’t about throwing away all the lessons of the last forty years of research in information retrieval, we generate tags automatically rather than expecting users to annotate their posts with the most meaningful set we can manage. (They wouldn’t.) Hopefully this or something like it will become part of the site’s front page soon.

And something which I want to implement — later this week, hopefully — is a voting system to collect two types of data: firstly, which posts people think are particularly interesting, so that we can give them more prominence on the front page; and secondly, given two example posts, how similar (in some general sense) the two reasons are. The point of the second one is that, given a set of similarity data, we should be able to cluster and categorise the country’s apathy and better understand it (and, of course, draw beautiful pictures of it in gnuplot, too). You might not think that sounds like fun, but I do.