Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut cream spread, and the first version published online was really more of a proof of concept than anything else.

Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.

A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.

Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult again!”

Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about Gnutella, once stated that he was fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.

Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.

LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.

Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.

Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.

LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client. LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.

Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of 2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.

Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY-SA) Flickr user Jessica  Diamond.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: What’s Next for the Cloud? Distributed Architectures (subscription required)

Press F5 or use the autorefresh tool for the latest updates and email paolo.bandini@guardian.co.uk with thoughts and such

Angry Nemanja "Paddy Power are offering 20-1 on Vidic being sent off today," tinkles Kevin Wilson. "The most attractive bet in history?" I don't know Kevin - you would have thought given his previous that it would take quite something to provoke him into the same sort of mistake. That said if anyone has any suggestions for the Liverpool players I'm all ears. So long as they're funny.

"This has been a good week for Liverpool," declares Jamie Redknapp in the Sky Sports studio, choosing to focus rather more on the 4-1 win over last-placed Portsmouth on Monday, and rather less on the fact Albert Riera called his own team a "sinking ship" and accused Rafael Benítez of not listening to his players two days later.

Team news Sir Alex Ferguson reverts to a five-man midfield, with Dimitar Berbatov back on the bench. Foolishly, he also includes Nemanja Vidic, who has now been sent off three times in a row against Liverpool. Maxi Rodriguez replaces Ryan Babel for the visitors.

Man Utd: Van der Sar, Neville, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Valencia, Fletcher, Carrick, Park, Nani, Rooney. Subs: Kuszczak, Berbatov, Giggs, Scholes, Rafael Da Silva, Jonathan Evans, Obertan.
Liverpool: Reina, Johnson, Carragher, Agger, Insua, Mascherano, Lucas, Kuyt, Gerrard, Maxi, Torres. Subs: Cavalieri, Aquilani, Benayoun, Kyrgiakos, Babel, Ngog, Kelly.
Referee: Howard Webb (S Yorkshire)

Afternoon So, quite a big game this one. United can go back to the top of the Premier League with a win, but equally Liverpool know that their hopes of grabbing a Champions League berth are dangling by a thread. A victory here is imperative if they are to keep pace with Tottenham, four points clear in fourth place having played the same number of games.

United will draw encouragement from both their recent form - they have won their last five games in all competitions, scoring 13 goals - and the fact they haven't conceded at home since 12 December. The visitors will take heart from the fact they have not lost to United since March 2008 and last year won this fixture 4-1.

What price a repeat of that scoreline? 300-1, if you're betting with one of the bolder bookies. I still wouldn't take those odds.

Right, I'm going to rustle up some team news, but if you're want to know exactly how today's game could affect the overall standings, you can find out right now with our stats centre. We have also all today's fixtures in our live score centre, as well.

• Premier League
• Manchester United
• Liverpool

On 21 March 1960 the South African police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters who were part of political campaign organized by the Pan African Congress (PAC) against pass laws. It is estimated that 69 people were killed on that day in the township of Sharpeville. This horrific event is commonly known as Sharpeville Massacre .

Sharpeville massacre was the turning point in the history of political resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. Since 1994, 21 March is Human Rights Day in South Africa. March 21 is also the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in memory of the massacre.

Every March 21st, Rethabile posts his own poem to remember Sharpeville massacre. His Sharpeville poem for this year is posted on Black Looks:

the day king walked
from selma to montgomery,
the tops of trees shook
as in a forest, and shivered
for this man who had crossed a line
of centuries in the south, but
even more south, we worried for our lot,
resolved as we were to break you,
but you to put us with our ancestors.
of course there have never been questions:
why shoot them in the back? why shoot them?
why shoot? why? but our name got its shrine
where the children now gather,
for sixty-nine of us lay on the street
on that day in march sixty. as others
filled hospitals and covered cell-floors
with clenched bodies, dachau
was completed, stowe published her book,
alcatraz was shut down for good, and
we moved from non-whites
to non-carriers of passbooks.
© Rethabile Masilo

He also posts a poem by South African political activist and poet Dennis Brutus. It is titled, “A Poem About Sharpeville”:

What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back
retreating, unarmed, defenseless
and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms
killing it
Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event
Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated
what the world whispers
apartheid with snarling guns
the blood lust after
South Africa spills in the dust
Remember Sharpeville
Remember bullet-in-the-back day
And remember the unquenchable will for freedom
Remember the dead
and be glad.
© Dennis Brutus

Travel Blog Portfolio wishes all South Africans a safe and peaceful Human Rights day and ask them to learn more about Sharpeville Day.

How could such atrocities happen and no one is punished?, asks Sokari Ekine:

It’s been a long time coming, but change is gonna come, sang Sam Cooke about America. He could have been singing about South Africa, or the world, even. For what is baffling is how Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976, King’s and X’s murders, the Civil Rights movement, Mandela’s 27 years in jail, not to mention the thousands tortured and killed in South Africa, and tortured and lynched in America, what is baffling is how these have not entered the minds of all and instructed them on the evils of discrimination and segregation in all its forms. That is truly baffling to me.

It is also amazingly stunning that all these things happened and almost no one got punished for it, no international hunt for the wrong-doers, no motivation to see them “brought to justice,” as George Bush the son would say about so many who had committed so less. Today is a day to remember and to know why it should be remembered

Alpha Christian discusses the link between Good Friday, Human Rights Day and Sharpeville Day:

In a recent column in the Beeld, Nico Botha, deals with this anomaly where the Good Friday falls on the same date as the Human Rights Day, or, even better, the commemoration of Sharpeville Day. For many the debate was whether we will loose a public holiday as workers.

Where are we to find the key to link Good Friday to the significance of today, Human Rights day, Sharpeville day ?
I believe the little dialogue between Jesus and Pilate helps us to start to understand this link.

Michael Trapido remembers this day in his post on Thought Leader titled Sharpeville Redux and a Bit More:

On that fateful day a group of between 5 000 and 7 000 people converged on the local police station in the township of Sharpeville, offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their pass books.

As the large crowd gathered the atmosphere was peaceful and festive with less than 20 police officers in the station at the start of the protest. Police and military tried using low-flying jet fighters in an attempt disperse the crowd without success.

As a result the police set up Saracen armoured vehicles in a line facing the protesters and, at 13:15, incredibly, opened fire on the crowd.

He continues:

The official casualties were 69 people killed, including 8 women and 10 children, with more than 180 injured.

To date the worst case of police insanity in the history of this country.

As a result there followed a spontaneous uprising among black South Africans with demonstrations, protest marches, strikes, and riots taking place throughout the country.

This led to the government declaring a state of emergency on March 30 1960, which saw more than 18 000 people detained.

Texas In Africa notes that Sharpeville was the first major turning point in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and that the massacre led to the militarisation of the anti-apartheid movement:

The rest of the world started to question the regime's racist policies much more openly; South Africa left the commonwealth a year later.

It also provoked the militarization of the anti-apartheid movement. The ANC's militant wing, MK (Umkhonto wa Sizwe) and Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, both formed soon after the massacre. The next thirty years were marked with horrific acts of violence before - to almost everyone's surprise - the evil of apartheid ended peacefully.

Five years later to the day, American civil rights protesters led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began marching from Selma to Montgomery. The attempt by 600 marchers to do the same thing three weeks earlier culminated in Bloody Sunday, an attack by local and state law enforcement officials. With a protective order from a federal judge, five times as many marchers turned out for the March 21 walk. A few months later, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, which effectively ended the last vestiges of legal discrimination in the south.

My students (whom, you will remember, are almost all black men) sometimes debate the question: “Are you a Malcolm or a Martin?” What they mean by this is, “Is social change best achieved through peaceful means (as MLK carried out his work) or violent means (as Malcolm X advocated)?”

I cannot even begin to claim to be qualified to answer this question. If we look at political history, it's clear that MLK's nonviolent methods worked to restore voting rights and some degree of social equality for American minorities, and they worked relatively quickly. MK and Poqo's violent methods certainly also had an effect on the apartheid regime, although the struggle was very long and ultimately did not end because of violence but rather because of economic turmoil and Mandela's willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement with de Klerk. But nothing approaching true equality of economic opportunity has happened for the vast majority of blacks in either country.

Abioye discusses the international dimension of Sharpeville Day:

In 1966 the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. The Canadian government and various institutions in Canada including Carleton University and the University of Toronto, colluded with the white supremacist apartheid government of South Africa by refusing to
divest and continuing to trade with the government and South African companies.

South Africa Good News has posted a statement from Nelson Mandela Foundation:

March 21, 2010, marks 50 years since 69 unarmed protestors were killed by South African police outside a police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg.

Nelson Mandela burning his pass on March 28, 1960, in protest to the atrocities at SharpevilleWhen commemorating Human Rights day, during his presidency, Nelson Mandela said: “21 March is South African Human Rights Day. It is a day which, more than many others, captures the essence of the struggle of the South African people and the soul of our non-racial democracy. March 21 is the day on which we remember and sing praises to those who perished in the name of democracy and human dignity. It is also a day on which we reflect and assess the progress we are making in enshrining basic human rights and values.”

Three for 3D: ESPN3D adds Home Run Derby, Sky 3D launches 4/3, AcTVila makes the jump this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 06:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Several villages evacuated after fears melted ice would cause flooding but scientists say this looks unlikely

Authorities have evacuated hundreds of people after a volcano erupted beside a glacier in southern Iceland, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The eruption occurred around 1130pm yesterday, beside the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, the fifth largest in Iceland.

Authorities initially said the eruption was below the glacier, triggering fears that it could lead to flooding from ice melting, but scientists conducting an aerial survey today located the eruption and said it did not occur below the ice level.

"The eruption is a small one," said Agust Gunnar Gylfason, a risk analyst at the Civil Protection Department.

"An eruption in and close to this glacier can be dangerous due to possible flooding if the fissure forms under the glacier," he said. "That is why we initiated our disaster response plan."

Scientists can see lava flows in the half-mile long fissure, and are watching for further activity.

Authorities evacuated some 450 people in the area 100 miles south-east of the capital, Reykjavik, as a precaution, said Vidir Reynisson, the department manager for the CPD.

A state of emergency has been declared in communities near the 100-square-mile glacier, and three Red Cross centres were set up for evacuees in the village of Hella.

The Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration has ordered aircraft to stay 120 nautical miles away from the volcano area, essentially closing it off.

The last time the volcano erupted was in the 1820s.

• Iceland
• Natural disasters and extreme weather

According to Google's auto-transcription service, these two Google engineers (there's some noise in the audio and foreign accents) aren't talking about Google's 20% time... but reciting a Dada poem (click CC -> Transcribe Audio):

[Thanks Jerome!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Music of Percent Backed Loans: A YouTube ... | Comments]

Officers inspecting rail line after suspected bomb alert shot at by militants as security scares threw transport into chaos

Republican dissidents fired on police officers who were inspecting a suspect device on the Belfast-to-Dublin rail link at the weekend.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed today that shots were fired at the officers, who were examining a suspicious object on train tracks near Newry on Saturday night. No one was hurt during the gun attack.

The police and army technical officers have been at the scene of the alert since Friday, when road and rail routes were paralysed across Northern Ireland by a series of bomb scares.

The closure of the rail line between Newry and Dundalk caused widespread disruption for rugby fans travelling to Dublin for the final Six Nations clash between Ireland and Scotland, at Croke Park.

Three special trains taking Irish and Scottish supporters to Dublin had to be cancelled on Saturday. Fans were taken instead by bus across the border.

• Ireland
• Northern Ireland

Recently Edelman Digital launched a brand new web site, which features rich insights from across the organization as well as interviews with different people inside and outside the firm. Definitely check it out. One of the cool things we're running are interviews. 

Blagica Bottigliero: Let’s start with the basics. Your last name. Is it pronounced like the Russian currency? I’ve heard multiple versions, so help us set the record straight.

Steve Rubel: Actually it isn’t – it’s pronounced Roo-Bell, rhyming with “blue bell.”

BB: As a lifestreamer, you spend quite a bit of time online digesting content. How much time per day do you spend doing this? How do you break up your day to consumer such a large amount of data?

SR:I would say that on average I spend two-three hours a day “studying.” How and where I fit this in really depends on my schedule in a given week. If it’s a particularly heavy week and I am traveling or in lots of meetings, it’s whenever I can steal a few minutes during the day. If it’s a “normal” day then it’s often over breakfast, lunch or at night when I get home. But I make it a commitment to keep current since our teams and clients look to me to help them do the same.

My workflow here, however, has changed a lot over the last few years. Until fairly recently I was a heavy user of Google Reader. Now, however, I find myself relying more on Facebook, Twitter and reading email newsletters from my favorite blogs. Also, I am increasingly using my mobile device to consume much of it as well.

BB: In the last few weeks, you’ve put a stronger emphasis on utilizing Facebook as your epicenter for news and communication. With Facebook’s history of sharing its TOS, along with concerns around privacy, do you think more users will shift their attention to Facebook? The addition of Facebook’s new settings come in handy, but do you feel that users don’t feel like adding privacy settings to every single action?

SR: Facebook is at a pivotal moment in its history. All of the data points are trending up – time spent (a staggering seven hours/month in the US), total users (400M worldwide), mobile use (100M users), traffic patterns (one of the top drivers of views to news/broadcast sites), etc. This makes it impossible to ignore.

What’s more, I believe we have passed a key tipping point where a network effect takes over. Randall Stross summarizes this nicely in his New York Times column, comparing it to similar situations like Microsoft Windows. So I don’t see the train slowing down here in any way.

Still, there’s no doubt many have privacy concerns. Facebook needs to make this easier to manage so that an individual can really more easily separate personal and professional circles – if he/she chooses. The settings they have now help. But they have a long way to go.

The other trend to note is how businesses are starting to use Facebook as a hub. There are more than 1.4M Facebook Pages. Some 700,000 are small businesses. This also creates a network effect the way that Google did with Adwords. Also, I have noticed that more brands and movies are prioritizing their Facebook page in ads over their own web site. This is controversial, but in many ways it makes sense.

BB: You just created a fan page on Facebook. How will you decipher information that appears in this stream versus your blog?

SR:I have been on Facebook since 2007 when they opened it up to all users. At first, I was skeptical of their prospects for success. I saw a scenario similar to what AOL did back in the 1990s – e.g. a walled garden. So while I have been on Facebook for years and I was engaged there, I didn’t see a real opportunity, at least for me, to use it to connect professionally with our customers.

However, the statistics I mentioned earlier and my own use recently have evolved my thinking. I began to see that, professionally, there is a real opportunity there for any business to deeply engage their customers in a way that perhaps is not as easy to do elsewhere – and to build thought leadership. One key reason is that clearly people I care most about like our clients are spending time there. It’s easier to go where the people are than to get them to come to you. What’s more, it’s a broader audience than the people who subscribe to my blog or follow me onTwitter.

So as of right now I am largely creating exclusive content there. I am finding Twitter is better for link sharing but that Facebook is more ideal for short bits of insights that spark a larger conversation. My blog will probably evolve into just a place for essays. But I am syndicating the posts into Facebook as well. It’s all evolving right now.

In short, I believe that Facebook will become my primary content platform in the next few months. But I will continue to do it all. As should businesses that have stakeholders scattered on other networks like Twitter.

BB: Your opinions on Google Buzz are pretty strong. What do you think they could have done differently at launch? Do you think it was wise they launched the tool in Gmail?

SR: Google Buzz suffers from complexity because they only tested it within Google, which has a very tech-savvy engineering driven culture. Facebook and Twitter are simple. You get it right away. Buzz feels like something Google is forcing on millions of users to catch up in an area it’s not strong in – social. It would have been better if they launched in in beta or Labs.

Still, I see Buzz remaining an important niche player for the time being. But I would never count Google out. They can get it right.

BB: It seems that there are new tools popping up every second. Whether it’s checking in at a local bistro with Foursquare or taking a picture of a sunset and sending it to a larger network via Yfrog, there is a hefty amount of information to keep track of. Will there come a time where a mini social ‘revolt’ will occur?

SR: I feel there’s way too much focus in marketing on the venues and the technologies – even in the recessionary climate. Businesses must focus first on their stakeholders and the trends and then figure out how to leverage the technologies. Many still go about it in reverse.

In terms of the consumer, I believe we’re already seeing a winnowing down. Facebook is tops for the broadest group. Twitter is loved by a smaller, yet arguably more influential crowd. And YouTube meanwhile sits in the middle. The others, even FourSquare, are more niche.

In the end there’s only so much time in a day and everyone will need to make choices on where to invest. I see Facebook being the big winner and Twitter sitting in neutral for now. The others may eventually just become features of the big sites rather than stand alone entities.

BB: In the 90s, consumers may have sent a complaint via written letter or email to one of their favorite brands. Today, it may be a Facebook status message, YouTube video or tweet. What do you think this says about consumers’ expectations when it comes to corporate two-way dialogue?

SR: I don’t see it being an expectation around dialogue as much as it is power. People now know they have it and that some businesses will bend over backwards to meet the legitimate gripes in real-time. This creates a virtuous or some would argue a vicious cycle that just exacerbates the situation further.

This means that every business needs to understand what they will address and when – with the expectation that it will scale.

BB: With web sites incorporating tools like Facebook connect, video and real-time tweets, do you see social media being more ingrained in a digital strategy, instead of being an after-thought?

SR: Yes, I believe that we’ve passed an inflection. Everyone is looking at the data and the hype in the media and they realize that this is where our time and attention are flowing so they need to front-load social networking into their budgets. This is not just limited to consumer marketing but b2b as well.

BB: You are a big gadget fan and need to be connected a good portion of your day. How do you plug in? What is your go-to gadget that you can’t leave home without?

SR: Without a doubt my mobile phones. I switch back and forth between the Blackberry (a client) and the iPhone depending on what I plan to do in a given day. There are days or even weeks when all I use is a mobile device. I often travel without a computer – sometimes for 10 days at a time and internationally as well. It’s amazing what you can do with these devices. And both fit the bill nicely.

BB: You are a man on the move, visiting many up and coming tech start-ups. ExacTarget recently purchased CoTweet. Do you see more consolidation happening?

SR: Absolutely, I believe that integration between various systems will be key – especially for those providers who serve enterprise customers. It’s no different than how we saw similar consolidation in the desktop/enterprise software markets and for web-based platforms in the early 2000s.

BB: I know you are a big Yankees fan. If you could be a Bat Boy for a day, would you do it?

SR: Wow, I definitely would. I would love to travel with the team and and ask Derek Jeter all kinds of questions about his work ethic and efforts to be a better ballplayer every day. That’s what I hope to do too in my field. Jeter is a rare yardstick of professionalism and quality in a sports word that increasingly lacks such role models. And I find lots of metaphors in sports to inspire me in business.

BB: What is your newest tech obsession?

SR: I would have to say any tools that I an use for free that give me data. My favorites are Google Insights and Ad Planner, Facebook Insights and YouTube Audience Insights.

Image credit: Laughing Squid 

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['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

The Out-of-Print Archive alerted me that they've got an issue of '90s UK magazine Mega Drive Advanced Gaming available for download. That, in 'n of itself, isn't really news. I have an external hard drive full of PDFs of old game and computer mags, after all -- nearly all of which, I suppose, are a bit questionable in terms of legal status. The real news here is that the Out-of-Print Archive has received full permission from the publisher, Hugh Gollner, to distribute the mag online.

Gollner was the head of Gollner Publishing, which began with an Atari ST fanzine and eventually expanded to game titles ST Action and Amiga Action, both of which served their computers pretty amicably. Future's Amiga Power is the mag that UK computer gamers remember the most fondly these days, but Amiga Action actually outlasted it on the stands, continuing until December of 1996 -- a fair bit after there was no real action on the Amiga to speak of.

As Gollner recalls in the interview he did for the site, Amiga Action wasn't necessarily better written than the competition, but it did have Amiga Power beat in one important field:

"We just worked out that if you stuck more and more coverdisks on, then sales went up. I think we had at least three disks on at one point! ... I really respected Future Publishing and especially Chris Anderson, Greg Ingham and Steve Jarratt. Future revolutionized computing magazines -- they made them 'sexy' as Chris used to say. In the early days I got an offer from Chris to come and work for him -- I wished I'd taken him up on it, but at the time we had debts running Gollner Publishing and his offer was not very generous."

Gollner eventually sold his outfit to UK publishing giant Europress, where he worked on Games-X, a weekly game mag that launched in the spring of 1991 and lasted just over a year before folding under tremendous losses. After Games-X fizzled out, Gollner left Europress and founded another publisher, Maverick Magazines, which did Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, SNES mag Super Control, and the Edge-like PC Player -- one of the first masthead appearances from current GamePro EIC John Davison.

Until now, I didn't really know the name "Maverick" except from the rather poor job the publisher did on The One in its waning months. But Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, despite the stilted name, is a pretty decent piece of work -- at least as good as Future's MEGA in terms of content, although there were so many 16-bit console mags in the UK that it was often tough for any individual title to stand out of the crowd. It's certainly worth a download and peer-through for 16-bit fans, in my opinion.

Gollner has given the Out-of-Print Archive permission to release all of the mags his publishing outfits released, which is extremely generous of him -- I definitely look forward to seeing more of his publishing work. It'd be nice if more publishers gave out permission like this, but considering there's pretty much no money to be made off doing so, I doubt that the Futures and EMAPs of the world are going to agree anytime soon. Ah, well, back to my grey-area external drive...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

The saga of three judges and three newspapers continues in Tajikistan and has taken an interesting turn as the journalists fight back with a new recording revealing the corruption in the Supreme Court, neweurasia’s Alpharabius reports.

Author : Jacqueline Brasfield

I was 18 years old when they’d captured the first howlers.

Mom and I stayed up to see the first footage of them flash across the TV screen on the 11 O’clock news, blurry images of hollow-eyed men and women wearing orange jumpsuits, their arms hanging limply and obediently at their sides. I felt a pang of disappointment. From all her stories I expected them to be fierce, savage, proud creatures struggling and straining at their chains. I expected them to be warriors. They looked no more savage than my science teacher at school. Mom said I shared a connection to them. I didn’t know what she meant.

On the screen, three figures stood proudly at a podium adorned with microphones from various news agencies. My mother spit down at her feet when the camera panned over their faces – two men, one woman, all impeccably groomed. One of the men wore a military uniform decorated with medals, and it was he who spoke to the camera.

“We’ve prepared a small statement regarding the hybrids and then we’ll move to your questions.”

My mother spit again and took a long swallow of gin straight out of the small glass bottled held in her hand. I’d never seen her drink before.

“It is with great pleasure that we can confirm we have successfully located and retrieved all of the hybrids. The last remaining rogue tribes were identified and brought into protective custody for their integration into the United States Military Evolutionary Hybrid Unit. The success of the device used to free these hybrids from their condition continues to prove effective and provide a stability and peace of mind these individuals will not have ever known. All of them have been offered training and assistance and the opportunity to serve this great nation, and we can confirm we have 100% uptake on this offer. The public is safe once again – if not safer. We believe these hybrids will make the finest soldiers in the history of the United States military forces. My colleagues and I will take your questions now, on the understanding we cannot reveal information that is classified.”

Immediately, a flurry of questions came from the mob of journalists off camera. My mother turned off the TV before I could hear any of the replies.

“Why’d you turn it off?”

She sat there in the dark for several long seconds before answering me.

“Because they’re lying, Ben. About everything. All the stories I’ve told you. All of their history. Does any of that suggest to you that they would willingly give in to slavery and bondage? That they would agree to serve those who rape the land, and poison the water and kill the innocent?”

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her no I did not think they would, but she was quick to interject.

“And do you think they’ve really caught all of them?”

She looked over my shoulder as she said the words, eyes fixed on something behind me. And that something began to move, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up like orderly soldiers.

“Mom?”

I turned quickly to look behind and stood frozen at the sight before me. A woman more bone than skin prowling forward on bare feet. Her movements were alien and animalistic and savage. She spat haughty words at me in Russian that I didn’t understand.

I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.

“Meet the resistance Ben,” my mother murmured. “Meet Katja, your mate.”

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Sunday, March 21, 2010

Cabin crew workers at British Airways have begun three-day strike, affecting over 60,000 people, after last-minute talks between BA and the union, Unite, collapsed.

The strike will extend for three days, after beginning at midnight in London. After the first strike, the union plans another four days of industrial action, beginning on March 27th. According to BA, around 65% of the airline's passengers will be able to reach their destinations, despite 1,100 of the normal 1,950 flights being canceled. The effect of the strike varied between airports; while all flights were operating from London City Airport, only 60% of long-haul and 30% of short-haul flights were expected to operate from London Heathrow Airport. At London Gatwick Airport, all long-haul flights and around half of short-haul flights were still operating.

This year's Emerald City Con was... an extraordinary experience.

Truthfully, I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around some of it. Doing our Artist's Alley table as a fundraiser for the Cartooning Class was very much a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment decision, we weren't organized about it at all... and I was very moved, and a little awed, at how well the kids came through. Not just the current students but many of our grads, as well.

The experience could be summed up in this exchange between our friend Lorinda and myself. At one point, I shook my head and muttered, "This is so amazing... I mean, teaching, it's like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean, you never really know how it's going to work out."

Rin replied, "Well, you sure had a lot of bottles come back this weekend."

We took a lot of pictures and I think I'll just run those for you and talk a little bit about each one.

*

This is what it looked like before we opened.

And another.

This is the last time we would experience quiet until Sunday evening. LATE Sunday evening. My ears are still ringing a little.

Outside, the crowd was milling around panting to get in.

Clearly, convention security was going to be overtaxed so the stormtroopers thought they'd assist with crowd control.

And then we were off....

This may give you a little bit of an idea of the swarms that descended once the doors were open. Saturday, in particular, was Hell Day.

Fortunately, we had a great crew. I honestly don't know how Julie and I ever used to do this by ourselves. It takes a teenage metabolism to keep up with the Saturday hordes at a convention.

In the rear we have Rachel, Aja, and that's Katrina under the mop, with our friend Rin in the front. Rachel decided to be Rogue again this year, as you can see. Katrina wanted to dress up too but couldn't decide on an outfit (she'd brought a couple.) This is the one she started with, a character of her own named Connor, but Connor only lasted till noon or so.

Once again this year, we won the lottery by having awesome neighbors. One one side we had Jeffrey Ellis and the crew from Cloudscape Comics, a small-press artists-collective outfit based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

On the other side we had Two Percent Solution.

They do a raunchy humor self-published book and a podcast as well.

I'm so embarrassed I can't remember their names -- I know I introduced myself at some point, but I couldn't really hear them very well. The echo chamber in the hall, once the crowds were in, made it nearly impossible to converse on Saturday. But they were great, swore up and down they loved being next to us and claimed we brought them a lot of extra traffic. They were especially hilarious about pretending to almost-swear in front of the kids but they never actually did.

Since we were doing a for-real fundraiser, and thus actually accepting money, our setup changed a little this year.

The idea was that we had students on the left, alumni on the right. As people would approach, the kids would offer them a giveaway book, and if they stopped, then they'd volunteer to sign it.

Ben, Marie, and Eileen, working hard.

Then Katie or myself would explain about the budget shortfall and collecting for donations, and add that anything over $10 got you a custom sketch from an alum. More often than not, they'd at least stop and admire the sample sketches we had up, and put a couple of bucks in the box.

Here's a customer getting The Spiel. Marie, especially, was really good at explaining to people what we were doing.

Many did in fact commission sketches.

Once we were set up it went fairly smoothly despite being a bit cramped, up against the wall as we were.

That's me and my boss, Katie. For the last seven years I've exhorted my various supervisors at school to come to the convention and really see how hard the kids work, but this was the first time anyone took me up on it. It really was a lot of fun having Katie there as she knew nothing about comics, conventions, or geek culture in general. But she adapted quickly. Watching her take in the experience was a lot of fun, and by the end of her day there she was a complete convert. At one point Katie was even speculating on the possibility of doing this kind of thing more often and wondering what other shows there were that we could attend as a class. The Stumptown Festival in Portland, especially, was a possibility we talked about quite a bit. (Katie was also interested in hearing about WonderCon and APE, but I told her, "Baby steps. I'm only just now getting to a place where I think I know how to get us to THIS show.")

The alumni were kept very busy sketching all day both days.

Fortunately they love to draw but my GOD they worked hard. I wish I'd gotten more shots of their work, it was of an extraordinarily high level, especially the high school kids. I was so proud of all of them and the way they've all kept learning and growing as artists, years after leaving my charge.

I did get a few. Here's one of Aja's.

And this is one of Katrina's custom commissions. She asked the lady what she wanted and the woman said, "Well, I like octopuses." (Yes, I know it's octopi but that's what she said.)

For a second I thought Katrina was going to be stuck but then she blew out this caricature of the woman herself with an octopus on her head. Yeah, the kids are THAT good.

Some people were kind of crass about it. This mother, especially, was really annoying. First she wanted to know what she'd be getting for her ten dollars.

It takes a special kind of chutzpah to haggle with a sixteen-year-old volunteer over your CHARITABLE ACT.

Katrina rather helplessly pointed to the samples, but it developed that this woman wanted to see the actual sketch before she would pay for it.

And this woman wanted something special, too-- a caricature of her two boys... an action pose of the two of them in their martial arts class. Geez lady, demanding much?

Here's Katrina working on the commission -- I cropped her out, but cheapskate Mom is hovering just out of frame, watching like a hawk to make sure she gets her money's worth.

Katrina was amazingly diplomatic about it. I thought Rin was going to go ballistic on the woman and I had to squelch a few sharp remarks myself. She deserved some kind of smack.

The two boys with the final product. I think they were a little embarrassed over how their mother treated Katrina.

Fortunately, the finished product satisfied everyone and we got the ten bucks.

But most of our visitors were much nicer. You remember Rachel's shot of the X-Men at the beach?

Guess who got that one.

Yeah, that's Matt Fraction, proud new owner of Rachel's X-Men Beach Party. This may be my favorite photo from the show. Only in comics do moments like this happen: my former student Rachel, the world's most ardent fan of the X-Men, posing with Matt Fraction, current writer of the X-Men comic, who's just told her that her cartoon is brilliant, that he would love to do a scene of the team at the beach and that she's caught all their personalities perfectly.

Matt was great with all the kids. He signed autographs, talked with them about comics, and generally was awesome. Here he is signing an autograph for Emma.

It was only a couple of minutes out of his day but I know how hard it can be to get away from your table when you're working a show, and it really meant a lot to the students to have a pro take such an interest. Even my students, whose comics fandom usually begins and ends with manga, know who Iron Man and the X-Men are. They were thrilled that he stopped by.

Michael Alan Nelson also visited our table briefly.

The kids loved him too, though they had only the vaguest idea of who he was -- I explained he worked for Boom! Comics and I think many of them had the idea he worked on the Muppets or something, since that was always where the line was over there. I enjoyed getting to meet him at last -- I interviewed him here a while back, but it was via e-mail and we'd never met in person. I am a big fan of his Fall Of Cthulhu series, and I got Swordsmith Assassin at the show as well, since Chip Mosher sent us the first issue for review and I liked it quite a lot, I'd been meaning to pick it up for a while now... though I forgot to ask Mr. Nelson to sign it. Too busy chitchatting.

I was mostly at our table all weekend, but Julie got out some. There was no way she was missing Leonard Nimoy.

She was actually in panels for most of Saturday, she also went to see Wil Wheaton and Stan Lee. Of them all, I think Julie was the most impressed with Nimoy's, she said he was "inspiring."

As for me, well, I was enjoying my time at the table because it was turning into old home week. We had many visitors from past classes -- Amethyst, Jessica, Shane, Andrew, and Jay, among others. Some I hardly recognized because they're, you know, adults now. (The last time I saw Jay he was a scrawny little soft-spoken kid. Today he's in his twenties, six feet tall and ponytailed, very outgoing with an infectious laugh. And of course his voice is an octave lower.)

Some even volunteered to put in some time sketching for us, which melted me. Lindon popped up out of nowhere and immediately wanted to put in some table time. Of course I agreed.

A lot of the kids dressed up this year, too. Saturday Lindon was in street clothes, but Sunday she was Pikachu.

I took this one just because it made me laugh.

That's right, Pikachu supports Cartooning in schools!

This is Lindon and Devon. I shot this because when Lindon has her head down -- even today, she always draws with her nose to the paper like that, it can't be comfortable but she always has to get way down there -- anyway, it tickles me because it looks like Pikachu is sitting at the table.

Lots of parents volunteered time too.

That's Marie, Ben, and Eileen, under the watchful eye of Gus' mother Marilyn. She looks a little annoyed, not because of the three kids but because her own son has abandoned his post again.

I get three kinds of students -- the ones who want to write, the ones who want to draw, and the ones who just want to geek out and be surrounded by comics. Gus is one of the geeks. He will produce drawings if you lean on him, but for him the point of being at a con is to get cool stuff. All I ask of the kids is to put in a ninety-minute shift at our table on the day they attend, but Gus could hardly bring himself to even do that much, he'd brought money and it was burning a hole in his pocket. First it was Leonard Nimoy's autograph -- even if you brought your own item for him to sign it was still a wince-worthy forty dollars -- and then he negotiated an advance on his allowance to go buy some comics.

Marilyn has always been one of my favorite parents and her reaction to this was completely charming. She ordered Gus to stay at the table and do his job. Then she went off to go get her son's comics herself. Naturally, not being an expert, she consulted me.

"Randy's Readers," I told her. "He's your guy. He sells comics that aren't collectible, just in average shape... his market is people that don't really Collect with a capital C, but only want to read comics. If I ever get a chance to take a break I was thinking of stopping over there myself, to be honest."

Marilyn agreed that was the place to go and the girls were exhorting me to take some kind of a break, and Marie wanted to come too, so off we went.

Marilyn explained that Gus wanted war comics. "So violent," she said, ruefully.

Gus did the tank for the group poster. He's all about the war comics.

I laughed. "Well, I grew up on blood and thunder myself, it's not all that damaging really. The key is that there has to be a story, I try to make sure they aren't just doing a videogame shoot-'em-up. There's a fine old tradition of war comics that did great stories, Sgt. Rock, G.I. Combat, Unknown Soldier.... we'll find him some of the good stuff."

Marilyn perked up. "Yes, I know Gus liked that Unknown Soldier book you loaned him. I was going to try and find some of those."

I brought this to class to show the boys that even hardcore shoot-em-ups still had to have a STORY. For Gus it was love at first sight.

Mission defined, we now moved with a clear purpose. Once we were at Randy's booth Randy himself stepped in and was very helpful, explaining to Marilyn that there was the Unknown Soldier series from Star-Spangled War Storiesand then there were the ones in his own book.

"What's the difference?" Marilyn wanted to know.

"Later ones are probably cheaper," I told her, smiling. "But I don't think Gus will care that much, he'd enjoy any of them."

As for me, in showing the various war series to Marilyn I stumbled across this one and decided I couldn't pass it up for six bucks.

Sorry, Gus, I got this one.

Our Army At War #269, a reprint of stories featuring work by Joe Kubert, George Evans, John Severin, Russ Heath, and even Mort Drucker (!) I could spend hours just looking at the pictures in this one.

I also fell for a couple of Superboy Giant reprint collections from my childhood that I'd been trying to replace for a while. Mostly these days I'm a trade paperback guy, but nostalgia can still get me.

Marie said curiously, "I know who Superman is, but I never heard of Superboy."

"It's like Smallville, only he actually wears the costume," I heard myself say, and suddenly felt a hundred years old as i realized there's probably two generations of schoolkids now who know Smallville as 'their' Superman the way I think of Bates-Maggin-Swan Bronze-Age Superman as 'mine.'

When we got back I told Gus he had the coolest mother ever. "At your age I'd have killed for a mom who said, 'you finish your work, I'll go make sure you get your comics.' That's unheard of."

Gus blushed, grinned sheepishly, and gave his mother a hug. Marilyn beamed and said, "I have my moments."

There wasn't time for me to do a whole lot of shopping -- there never is -- but Rin found a dealer who had a big box full of graphic novels and trades for $5 and I fell for a couple of those, too.

Empire is one of those late 1970s Byron Preiss productions where he was deliberately trying to move comics into a bookstore market -- about twenty-five years too soon, it turned out, but he produced some handsome books when he was trying. This one was an original piece by Samuel Delany and Howard Chaykin, hoping to scoop up some of that newly-minted SF audience that Star Wars created back then. I'd never actually read it and I've always been curious about it. Holliday I've never heard of, but I'm always up for a Western comic, and for a $5 trade paperback it's hard to go wrong.

Most of our shopping, though, we tried to do in Artist's Alley itself as much as possible. We like to support the creators. Julie picked up the new Muppet book from Boom! where Amy Mebberson was -- you should pardon the expression -- doing a BOOMing business.

Possibly the most popular artist at the show this year.

She was kept busy all weekend. A lovely lady, she was great with all the kids that came up to her and sketched Kermits and Animals and Miss Piggys till her hands were raw, most likely. I don't think a single kid went away empty-handed.

And I made it a point to pick up a bunch of stuff from Camilla d'Errico on Sunday morning. I was able to catch her a few minutes before the show opened, when it was actually possible to have a conversation.

Camilla's a favorite with my kids.

Camilla has been a great friend to my students for many years now... they don't remember her name but they all know the Awesome Manga Lady From Vancouver. I bought about $25 worth of stuff from her because A) I can use it in class and B) she deserves to be rich and I do what I can. She had a line all weekend but I did get to chat with her for a few minutes on Sunday morning. Largely on what became the typical Sunday conversation topic in Artist's Alley, "Great to see you, sorry I didn't come by earlier, we were stuck at the table.... My God! Wasn't yesterday hell? How many people did YOU get?" Everyone loved the increase in business but hated fighting through the crowds on Saturday.

Sunday afternoon I did get around a little bit. I got a couple of books signed from Kurt Busiek and Len Wein, and I had a flattering couple of minutes with Les McClaine, original artist on The Middleman. He saw my badge and said, "Hey, Greg Hatcher! I love your column!"

Seriously. I was shocked speechless. I spluttered and fumfuh'd and blushed like a schoolgirl, finally managing to choke out that I was a huge fan of his, that my students and I all adored The Middleman. This pleased him, and we agreed that it was a shame it didn't last but it was great to have something that cool exist at all.

And I got to say hi to Pete and Rebecca Woods, from Periscope Studios. We hadn't seen Rebecca in about six years, she hadn't come to ECCC in a while, so it was great to catch up. Rebecca immediately wanted to know how Brianna was doing, since when Bri was my student years ago she practically camped out at the Periscope Studios table, and Rebecca happily adopted her. I told her that Bri wanted desperately to come this year but she had finals up at Bellingham, she was in college up at Western. Then we had a mutual groan about how old we are getting.

Because Bri couldn't make it to the convention this year, we wanted to at least let her know she was missed.

When I got the idea to recruit additional Cartooning alumni to do charity sketches for our fundraiser, my first two thoughts were Brianna and Nadine. They're both in college now, and they've kept up with their comics work as well. They were pretty amazing in the seventh grade, and they've only gotten better.

Here's what Bri was doing when she was in my class...

...and here's a more current piece.

Sadly, Brianna had finals or she'd have been there with bells on, she assured us.

Nadine had finals too but she did make it down, which delighted me. She was probably the single most gifted student I've ever had. Her serial "Mermaid's Touch" still gets gasps of awe when the kids go through the old books.

In fact, when Katrina joined my class when she was in middle school, she was so inspired by Nadine's work that she took the same pen name, "KittyBell."

Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has probably had better ideas.

Hoping Microsoft might allow Firefox on their new Windows Phone 7 Series, Sayre wrote an open letter this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Hola, amigo. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya,” is how it starts.

He then proceeds to make fun of Windows Phone 7 Series, the iPhone, Cocoa Touch, and Unix — all in three concise paragraphs. He notes that Windows Phone 7 Series has a “busted” UI, calls the iPhone’s UI “ugly jelly beans,” and mocks the “allegedly cool” Cocoa Touch “stuff.”

Once he’s done with all of that, he asks Ballmer to consider making an NDK for Windows Phone. An NDK is a companion tool for an SDK that allows you to build parts of apps in native code. For example, it’s the Android NDK that allows Mozilla to make Firefox for Android.

There’s currently no plans to make an NDK for Windows Phone 7 phones — hence Sayre’s post. Without it, a version of Firefox for the OS is probably unlikely. And that’s may be a good bet anyway, considering Microsoft seems to be pivoting its new phones closer to the iPhone’s closed model rather than Android’s open one.

Sayre’s approach to the post apparently didn’t go over too well — he quickly followed up with an apology post, “Things I’ve Learned.” “Blog posts that sound like Jim Anchower really irritate people for some reason. I won’t do it again, I promise,” he writes.

Lunch-hour cosmetic surgery – 45-minute boob jabs, nonsurgical rhinoplasty – is booming in the UK. But nightmare stories are also on the rise. So are the treatments safe? We speak to doctors to find out, and take a front-row seat at a no-frills nose job

Cosmetic surgery is changing. One advancement is the use of twilight surgery, where they send you only half to sleep. Clinics are alive with dazed facelift patients, who keep their eyes open, frowning and smiling on demand, who come to after the sedation's worn off, their skin tight but bruised, able to remember nothing of the knife at all. There are other patients who trip in off the street for a half-hour boob job under local anaesthetic, and still more who book a session of Botox in their lunch-breaks. The current excitement, in plastics, is not in the perfection of a newly sculpted nose but in the speed at which patients can recover, and the market for these fast, temporary procedures is growing wildly.

The Knightsbridge Laser Clinic is one of many that has recently started promising lunch-hour transformations, offering laser lipolysis to eliminate fat, the G-spot injection to enhance sexual stimulation, Macrolane breast injections, nonsurgical rhinoplasty and Botox fillers to remove wrinkles. A block away from Harrods, I climb their carpeted stairs to the waiting room as the lunch-time rush subsides. Outside a light rain is falling, and the smell of a wet fur coat, woody and dead, hangs in the air of the clinic's small landing. Its owner brushes past me, straight into one of three white and well-lit offices. In a corner room, beside a sheeted bed, I soon take my seat, an audience of one at a 15-minute nose job.

The patient, a young, elegant woman with jewelled shoes, had rhinoplasty in Harley Street as a teenager but now wants it still straighter. Her first operation, which cost £8,000 and required a week in hospital, had left her with a smaller nose, she says, but slightly wonky nostrils. "You might not notice it," she says apologetically, "but I do."

The doctor, Salinda Johnson, a slight and surgically tweaked woman who studied cosmetic dermatology in Thailand, warns of the possible side-effects of today's procedure as she applies a numbing cream to the patient's face. "Soreness, redness, bruising," she chants, "which will settle down within two weeks and break down completely within a year." Johnson rereads the patient's notes and holds up a pink-nailed hand. "There is a problem – we can't do the procedure on a pregnant woman." Her nose glossy with anaesthetising cream, the patient exchanges hurried words with the doctor, and I look pointedly out of the window. An unwanted pregnancy. A sense that the risk is welcome. Minutes later, she is gone.

"Don't worry!" the doctor chirps. "We'll show you the procedure on our receptionist!" Diane has worked at the clinic for four months and, at 23, has already had Botox to fill in a frown line between her brows. Her nose is small and straight, but she has self-diagnosed – she feels there's a dent. She asks the doctor if she thinks rhinoplasty's necessary. "Nothing is necessary," Johnson says, applying the numbing cream. "So can you do my lips, too?" Diane asks, pouting. Johnson shows me the syringe, prefilled with a mixture of anaesthetic and Restylane filler, a hyaluronic acid. The needle is long, and she pushes it firmly into Diane's nose before using both hands to massage the filler into place. The air-conditioning system screams on, and dies just as quickly – the only sounds are Johnson's gloves, baggy on her tiny hands, squeaking.

I gather myself. Does it hurt, I ask Diane, who's breathing calmly, her fingers gently worrying the sleeve of her sweater. "No, I can't feel anything. I can just smell the rubber gloves." Were you interested in getting cosmetic surgery before coming to work here? "No!" she says, through the doctor's fingers, her nose changing shape, delicately, before my squinting eyes. "But I see so many people coming in at lunch time and leaving looking... fresher, and you can't even tell what they've had done. So I had laser hair removal, which feels like being slapped, and Botox, which was really nothing, and then I saw that you could make your lips look more defined with filler, so I've been pestering Salinda to do me."

Dr Johnson wipes around Diane's mouth with a small antiseptic cloth, and warns her that, on a pain scale, this will hurt a seven. She injects Restylane into the lips, and Diane's eyes flicker backwards. With her fingers, Johnson pushes the filler into a cupid's bow – the effect is that of a mother wiping chocolate smears off a child's mouth.

The Harley Medical Group, the UK's largest cosmetic surgery provider, published figures in January revealing the nonsurgical cosmetic surgery market (which includes the Macrolane boob jab, an injection that increases your bust size, and Restylane rhinoplasty, the injection that straightens your nose) saw continued growth in 2009, with dermal fillers and chemical peels driving the increase by 26% and 306% respectively. Last year also saw a continued rise in the number of male patients (up 5%), with "Boytox" (male Botox) and "Sweatox" (anti-sweat Botox) both contributing to the leap.

"Minimally invasive procedures rule today – and this is what consumers, and especially men, want most," says Wendy Lewis, independent cosmetic surgery consultant and author of Plastic Makes Perfect. "The benefits for consumers are: subtle improvements over time; nothing radical; less risky; definitely cheaper than big surgeries; no need for anaesthetic or going to hospital and catching MRSA; and no scars."

"There are many reasons why day surgery is becoming more and more popular," Dr Johnson tells me after Diane has floated back to her desk, swollen but smiling. "People who thought they didn't want to get surgery because they were not brave enough, or not rich enough, are interested in these temporary and non-expensive procedures – our nonsurgical rhinoplasty starts at £350. And it's so quick! The talking takes longer than the treatment. We have a lot of clients who work at Harrods and really do just pop in on their lunch breaks."

The market continues to swell, imperceptibly smoothing the faces of colleagues, relatives, local hairdressers. A study carried out for the Girl Guides last November found almost half of secondary school girls said they planned to have plastic surgery. "Girls and young women are telling us that they are finding it quite hard to accept their appearance, and it is starting at a much earlier age than we had previously thought," says Nicola Grinstead, a trustee of Girlguiding UK. "The survey shows girls as young as 11 are dissatisfied with how they look and are prepared to use surgery to make a change."

All the women I talk to in the clinic's waiting room flicking through OK! magazines agree that today Botox, and increasingly cosmetic surgery, really is "no big deal". They nod, eyes wide, and reel off names like a BBC3 news bulletin. Last year Kylie Minogue, Geri Halliwell, Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox all gave interviews about their Botox use, while a film critic compared Nicole Kidman's facial skin to melamine. This month Cheryl Cole was photographed walking through a London airport with lips like salted slugs, and reality star Heidi Montag, 23, underwent 10 procedures in one day and ended up looking just like lingerie model Caprice, who is 38.

In a culture that celebrates youth, the appeal of an injection that appears to shave a little time off your age is clear, especially for the famous and often-photographed. As the demand for surgery has grown, academics have increasingly discussed the democratisation of beauty. If everybody could, in the space of a lunch hour, become symmetrical and clear-skinned, would the power of prettiness be weakened? If we accept that we will be judged on our appearance, is the fact that we can control it almost liberating?

Two years ago, Observer beauty journalist Alice Hart-Davis was one of the first women in the country to try the Macrolane breast enhancement jab. "I had never seriously considered having a proper breast enhancement. I don't feel surgery is something to be undertaken lightly," she tells me. "But I've always wished there was something I could do to boost my bust just a bit that didn't involve surgery."

Macrolane, which arrived in the UK in 2008, is a gel filler which is injected into the breast with a long blunt needle. It increases the bust by one cup size, lasts a year and costs around £2,000. "The procedure was amazing," says Hart-Davis, "an instant result. I was beyond thrilled with it." Though clinics advertise boob jabs in their list of lunch-time treatments, and the injections are over in 10 minutes, she warns: "It's by no means a 'lunch-hour lift' type procedure; it doesn't take long, but I reacted strongly to the local anaesthetic: it didn't hurt, but I could hardly speak straight for the rest of the day. And your body and brain go into a kind of post-traumatic shock after any procedure like this. You need to take it quietly afterwards."

Three months after her injections, one breast deflated – she settled for stuffing her bra with a sock – and the other went rock hard. Her surgeon broke up the gel under anaesthetic, then injected more to balance her bra. A few weeks later, she felt a lump in her right breast. She panicked and returned to the doctor, who reassured her that it was nothing to worry about – just a lump of hardened gel. "That experience," she concludes, "alongside discovering that the research conducted on the product was not half as extensive as I'd been led to believe, and talking to several surgeons who strongly disapprove of the procedure, has put me off trying it again."

One such surgeon is Mr Charles Nduka, who runs the not-for-profit patient information website safercosmeticsurgery.co.uk. "There's so much misleading information being published about 'lunch-time' procedures," he says, "leading, at best, to unrealistic expectations and disappointment and, at worst, complications. Facial procedures such as Botox may leave localised swelling, redness and in some cases bruising, even in the best hands. This means that if you wanted to keep your treatment secret, lunch time may not be the best time.

"A major issue in the UK," he continues, "is that because fillers are classified as medical devices – the same as implants – rather than drugs, the regulations about who can administer them are among the most lax in the developed world. The recently introduced guidance from the Ihas [Independent Healthcare Advisory Services] is a mockery. It's a system of self-regulation which means that the very practitioners who should be regulated will not sign up. There have been more than 100 fillers introduced in the UK and in many cases they were withdrawn due to side-effects. Essentially the UK becomes a testing ground for new products."

So would he recommend traditional plastic surgery over the lunch-hour treatments? "Few people have social lives so hectic that they cannot give themselves the luxury of having a treatment in an unrushed fashion," Mr Nduka says, "without the anxiety that swelling might show."

Dr Mike Cummins, a GP and cosmetic surgeon who, after requests from patients, agreed to carry out group treatments at Botox parties, agrees that the "lunch-time" label can be misleading, but says that as doctors' experience of anaesthetics increases, "there continue to be more and more advantages to daycare procedures, both for the patient and the client. Laser-assisted liposuction is getting to the point where it's more than reasonable to do it under twilight sedation and cosmetic surgeons are all working to get the least trauma to tissue under local anaesthetic as possible."

In Jeanette Winterson's novel The Stone Gods, published in 2008 but set in a futuristic dystopia, people alter their genes to preserve their youth and get plastic surgery to amplify what's left. Only the protagonist, Billie, chooses to age naturally, wrinkling slowly among the smooth foreheads and perky breasts. Winterson worries about the normalisation of cosmetic surgery. "What really bothers me," she says, "is that women used to be made to believe that their minds were inadequate, but we were allowed our bodies. Now that we can't be told our minds aren't up to it, our bodies are paraded as defective. It is the same old control. It is not just an assault on women – it is a war on feminism."

She emails me later that day. "I find 'lunch-hour surgery' savage and cynical. An insecure woman is a woman who will pay to feel better about herself. Disguising insecurity and feelings of inadequacy as empowerment is part of the usual twisted message of consumer advertising, but where women are concerned the strategy asks us to fund our own oppression. We pay to feel better instead of asking why we are made to feel defective in the first place... We need to understand that what is happening to women now is part of a disturbing bigger picture and not just a question of: 'Does madam fancy a nose job?'"

How does Winterson see society progressing in this era of perfectibility? Does she predict new lows, new depths? "We'll all get fixed eventually. Parents will do it to their kids. It will become routine. The Stepford Wives world of the 1950s was made impossible by feminism. We are heading back that way by another route. Women made in the image of men."

After Diane's 15-minute nose job, I take a walk through Harrods' beauty hall. I feel a little drunk. I had gone into the clinic expecting gore, or at least tears, but I left shocked only at the dry eyes, lack of fuss, the ease, the speed and gentle effectiveness. The women in Harrods testing the perfumes are largely blondes, largely wrinkleless, and largely slim. I see three people who look like Caprice, but as reflected in varying fairground mirrors. I watch a mother pick out scented candles for her granddaughter's wedding reception, and admire her shiny still forehead as she quietly exclaims over jasmine perfumes. I'm suddenly aware, looking discreetly from face to face, of all the "work" done and all the work yet to be done. It is an awakening of sorts. A half-awakening, maybe, to an odd new twilight world.

QUICK FIXES The most popular nonsurgical procedures

MACROLANE: BOOB JAB Created by Q-Med, the Swedish company behind the wrinkle-filler Restylane, Macrolane was launched in Europe as a correctional filler for body indentations. It wasn't until it was used in Japan in 2004 that it took off as an alternative for breast implants – by January 2008, when it launched in the UK, about 30,000 Japanese women had had the boob jab. The procedure, which takes 45 minutes, involves a gel filler made of hyaluronic acid being pumped into the breast through a flexible knitting needle-sized canula. PRICES from £1,800

RESTYLANE: NOSE JOB Restylane, a water-based filler, is a synthetic reproduction of hyaluronic acid, a substance found in living organisms. Until recently its main use has been to plump lips and fill crow's feet, but the new procedure involves injecting the bridge of the nose to fill in dents, and the tip, so it appears perkier. Effects wear off within 18 months. PRICES from £350

BOTOX An injection of Botulinum toxin A (a diluted and purified form of the bacteria which causes botulism) softens and prevents frown lines. The jab, 22 years old this spring, changed the face of cosmetic surgery, with celebrities including Simon Cowell admitting to relying on it to look younger. Each year it is estimated to make its manufacturers around £800m from more than 60,000 injections. PRICES £230 to £390

JUVEDERM: LIP ENHANCEMENT A series of injections of Juvederm filler around the mouth can make the lips fuller and reshape ageing pouts. Juvederm contains hyaluronic acid which, by attracting water, plumps up the skin. Results last for up to a year. PRICES from £250 

• Women
• Plastic surgery
• Social trends
• Health

The favourite new drug of clubbers and schoolchildren hit the headlines last week when two young men died after taking it. Sold under a range of street names – meph, miaow miaow, MC, drone and bubbles – and easily available on the web, mephedrone is not illegal. But should it be? Here, four people from different sides of the debate – a user, a mother, a dealer and a doctor – have their say on 'the poor man's cocaine'

The first time I encountered mephedrone, meow meow, plant food or whatever you want to call it, was about a year ago at a friend's house in south London. We were back from a night out at the student union and all wanting to continue the party when my friend's flatmate, Brandon, got back from work and, with a sly smile, disappeared into his bedroom, to return with a huge box. He dumped the biggest pile of powder I had ever seen on the table. "This, my friends, is mephedrone," he said with relish. "And this is the future."

Like many students, I've never been one to say no to a new experience. We all end up running into drugs at some point, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I've always enjoyed a spliff and, on occasion, a little more, so I assumed this was just another casual substance I would be bumping into.

Nicknamed by users as "poor man's cocaine", mephedrone has swept through our nation's youth like a strong dose of salts, permeating every aspect of the party and night club scene. In less than six months, it has come from obscurity; everyone knows someone who's on it. Paradoxically, it was given a chance to become popular because of an EU restriction that prevented the importation of two substances necessary to the production of MDMA (ecstasy to the layman) that made it impossible to make or purchase any MDMA in Britain from late 2008. Mephedrone filled the gap in the market, and at half the cost of MDMA; it was everywhere.

You can snort it, drop it in "bombs" (rolling papers filled with it), and I've even come across people who eat it. The effect is euphoric, in some ways similar to ecstasy but much shorter-lived; you need to take a lot more of it a lot more often. The first time I took it, I could feel my heart pounding; everything seemed as if it was about to explode into life and I was up till the early hours in a wild rampage of excitement. But there any comparison ends. With mephedrone, the romance period is very short: after taking it just a couple of times, your tolerance increases dramatically, to the point that you're doing three or four times more than you were in the beginning to get high. Your appetite for the stuff also increases.

Brandon was well ahead of the curve. He was importing it from China at about a £1 a gram and selling it to students at £15. By mid-October, when our student loans had still failed to appear and finance was getting tight, we hit on the idea of doing the same. We could simply make a trip down to a seedy office in Victoria where we could buy it in bulk at wholesale price and then sell it on to our friends at a profit. Doing this you could turn £100 into £400 in a weekend and have a bit left on the side for yourself.

It became a crash course in drug dealing for beginners, and we weren't the only ones at it. Hundreds of students had spotted the gap in the market. You couldn't set foot in a club or house-party without someone walking past offering you "drone".

Whether or not this was legal is a good question, because although mephedrone isn't covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act, it is illegal to sell it for human consumption. Companies get round this by putting stickers on their product saying just that. When selling it, we would always tell people that it was not to be used to get high – it was almost a running joke. A very dangerous joke indeed.

When on it, you get very edgy (hence the comparison to cocaine) and you constantly crave more. It is possibly the most addictive substance I have ever come across. What makes it far more dangerous is that it is the first of a new breed of designer drugs, made purely to evade the laws surrounding controlled substances.

No one has considered what this will do to people in the short or the long term, and no one cares. Mephedrone might be called "plant food", but it is a plant decomposer, so what it does to your insides I dread to think. I once accidentally left a spoon in a bag of the stuff and came back three days later to find it had stripped off the outer coating and my mephedrone scattered with tiny silver bits of spoon. We still snorted it.

My stance was changed dramatically by my experience of prolonged use. After three or so months of using it at least a couple of times a week, I found myself in the darkest depression. I stopped taking it and suddenly found myself looking round at my friends with their eyes rolling in their heads and realised how much rubbish we had all been talking to each other. Good, straight-edge kids who barely used to drink have become crazed drug fiends, sitting in their house snorting plant food five days a week.

One friend of mine took it once and now has to use an inhaler, because he has permanently damaged his lungs. Another has almost ceased to be a friend, and is now a socially apathetic zombie, chasing mephedrone around London with his girlfriend, no longer able to interact without it, constantly asking if he can borrow 20 quid.

We've always been happy to get wasted on a night out, but I've never seen anything creep into so many everyday lives like this. I am horrified by the effect this drug has had on the people around me, and would urge anyone thinking about taking some tonight to change their plans.

Jack Starks is a student in his early 20s who lives in south London

For all those parents who have read with sadness about the deaths of an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old in Scunthorpe, but allowed themselves to be even slightly reassured that their own teenagers can't have come across mephedrone because they are so much younger, not yet clubbing and living very different lives, think again.

I first heard about mephedrone six months ago, at first from another north London mother whose son had ordered this "plant food" off the internet and who had roused her suspicions when he couldn't explain why he had suddenly developed an interest in gardening.

Then from my own daughter, aged 14 at the time, whose friends had discovered this legal high. She described them as "talking rubbish as if it is the most interesting thing in the world, and that they dribble and lick their lips and gurn and grind their teeth".

She said that people shook, bit holes in their lips and cheeks, were unable to feel their legs, were frightened because their heart was beating too fast and that their skin looked grey.

This might seem like any teenage group that has discovered harder drugs. It is rather like a description of my own group of friends at that age. What is different is that, in those six months, those friends who thought they were just experimenting seemed to need to take greater amounts of mephedrone on more and more occasions. Mephedrone is often sold in five gram bags and, as it is so "more-ish", it seems to be easy – even common – for a user to go through a whole bag.

Surely that kind of ever-decreasing, short-lived high is what makes dealers extremely rich and leads to the kind of desperate endless addiction of the crack-user?

Should all of this mean that we should immediately ban it? Well, I have always had a liberal view about drugs, believing that the criminalisation of drugs just creates an underground. I look at how making ketamine (a horse tranquilliser) a class C drug didn't stop its use among the young.

On an intellectual level, I agree with Professor David Nutt's measured suggestion of creating a "holding" class of D drug category. Within this category, sales would be limited to over-18s; the product would be quality-controlled, at doses limited as far as possible to safe levels; and it would come with health education messages. I also agree with Nutt that what we should look into is why teenagers are so drawn to taking drugs and why binge-drinking is so prevalent in this age group.

On a much more visceral, instinctive level, this "let's wait and see how harmful this drug is" D category doesn't comfort me at all. For this younger age group, the legality of mephedrone is a real attraction. While they can get hold of "weed" to smoke (mostly through older siblings, and even parents), because they are not yet going to clubs but to each other's houses or private parties they are rarely able to get their hands on harder drugs.

They can buy mephedrone off the internet or from headshops (shops selling drug paraphernalia) or stalls. Teenagers of this age seem to think that its legality means that it is safer than other drugs, which might also contribute to the wild abandon with which it is taken.

Health warnings wouldn't do a thing (my daughter says that, perversely, the deaths in Scunthorpe have made her friends even more determined to take the drug) and surely an over-18s rule on the net would be just like those porn sites that ask you to click a button to say that you are over 18 and that's all the proof you need. Prosecution of those selling to under-18s would be almost impossible in cases of website dealing.

For this age group, making mephedrone a class B drug would at least put up some sort of substantial hurdle and make it much harder for them to get hold of.

Just making it so much more difficult to track down may cause enough of a pause for some sort of easing-off from the enthusiastic consumption of what seems to be a particularly addictive drug.

Oh, and while we are waiting for a decision on this, look out for a fishy smell in your teenager's sweat, nose bleeds, restlessness, headaches, insomnia and a traces of yellowy powder on the surfaces in their room.

Sophie Radice is a journalist and mother of two who first came across the drug last year

I have no background in narcotics. My worst offence is a puff on a joint in college, which I found unpleasant. I am at heart "anti" substance abuse, though I am in favour of free choice.

I own and run three normal, legitimate businesses, all of which, thanks to the recession, have had their troubles. Have you ever laid off a loyal member of staff? It's the worst feeling in the world. I was looking for a lifeline.

I first heard of mephedrone in September. A friend heard about a new chemical that was originally a kind of plant food. It was legal and its effects mimicked cocaine and MDMA. I started searching for information on Google and within an hour I knew this would be a winning business.

From the start, I wanted to run this completely legitimately. No shady cash deals, pay tax, give excellent service with a quality product at the right price. Was I comfortable with the concept? No. Did I want to lose my home to the bank? No. Decision made.

In the first weeks, I bought my stock inside the UK, but very quickly I began buying direct from a manufacturer in China. I registered a company and contacted a web designer.

This is where the problems started. Even before the press discovered mephedrone, it was not possible to find good professional help. Undaunted, I built my own website. No banks would touch the credit card side of the business. I fudged round this and I was up and running. I launched the website and within an hour had five sales. My first week I turned over £8,000; the second, £10,000.

Then, last November, mephedrone hit the headlines. Its use was blamed for the death of a 14-year-old girl, although this turned out not to be the case. I thought it was the end. How wrong I was. That week, sales doubled. When mephedrone is in the news, demand rockets. Last week came the death of two boys. (I cannot comment on this tragedy, except to say I do not believe mephedrone was the cause.) One of my websites, which usually gets around 1,200 hits a day, received more than 20,000. The media have made mephedrone what it is.

Before you leap to judgment, do you drink alcohol? It is deadly, with 8,000 deaths directly attributed to it in the UK in 2008. There is a huge trade in illegal drugs in the UK. But people do not have to be criminals. They don't have to buy bags of drain cleaner from dodgy blokes in pub car parks.

The process of importing has become difficult lately, as UK Customs has begun withholding shipments. I have had 40kg seized. No explanation has been given and Customs has made no contact. This is surely illegal.

Mephedrone looks likely to be banned. This is the most dangerous thing that can happen. It is essentially a very safe substance. There is no addiction and to date I know of no deaths directly attributed to it. There are suppliers online such as me who treat this as a genuine business and supply a quality product pure to the customer.

The day mephedrone is banned, I will shut up shop. The taxman will lose hundreds of thousands of pounds and the criminals will step in. Prohibition has always failed. And the genie is really out of the bottle this time. Millions have used mephedrone in the UK. If they are stopped from getting it legally, they will either buy illegally or, even worse, try something new.

No British government would have the courage to exercise the level of common sense needed to keep it legal, what with an election looming and swarms of horrified Daily Mail readers to impress. This government has already sacked the moderate, sensible and knowledgeable Dr David Nutt. Mephedrone will be banned – and be dammed.

Mark is a businessman and owner of several websites that sell mephedrone

I first heard about mephedrone last July. The young man sitting opposite me told me that it had just arrived on the nightclub scene. He had tried it at once. He was well-educated and from a prosperous and stable family (who knew nothing about his drug use). He was in my clinic to withdraw from another "legal high", GBL. After using GBL for a few months, he had been dismayed to discover that he had become dependent. His lament "I didn't know it was addictive" could have been uttered by most doctors and policy-makers.

We are all playing catch-up as new compounds are recognised, banned – and new drugs appear, the risks of which slowly become apparent. Legal highs are mostly compounds closely related to known (and banned) psychoactive drugs. Mephedrone is chemically very similar to ecstasy. The slight variation in structure makes it legal, but also means that mephedrone has different pharmacological effects and toxicity.

This makes difficulty for the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which advises the government on whether a drug should be banned, as it has little information to go on. It takes experience to find out about the harms of particular drugs. It was only in the late 1990s, after years in which cannabis was regarded as a fairly harmless drug, that studies demonstrated it caused the development of psychosis in some vulnerable adolescents. News that two people died after using mephedrone suggests it may be dangerous, but we don't know enough. Mephedrone can cause cardiovascular problems, but I suspect that the post-mortem findings will identify other contributing drugs.

GBL, which was classified in December 2009, is a case study in legal highs. Many users overdose inadvertently and a small proportion progress to dependence. On trying to stop, users can experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Throughout 2009, most GPs and drug services knew nothing of GBL, and were unable to offer treatment. It was to catch up with this need that a "party drugs" clinic was established in south London . Attendees have reported that, since being banned, GBL is still readily available for same-day delivery, from internet sites outside the UK.

Mephedrone and GBL both enhance confidence and sociability and reduce sexual inhibitions. However, it is easy to lose the plot. The first dose of mephedrone produces intense euphoria, but repeated dosing produces decreasing pleasure and increasing paranoia and irritability – yet some people keep chasing the initial high until exhausted. This binge pattern of use maximises risks and minimises benefits of drug use.

A pre-election environment is a bad time to initiate a discussion about drugs policy, as there is a risk that any debate will degenerate into which party is going to ban more drugs, more rapidly. "Legal highs" are an easy target for moral outrage, precisely because they are legal and something can be done about that. More difficult is trying to address Britain's prodigious demand for drugs, legal and illegal. A non-partisan debate about reducing the harm would be valuable.

Dr James Bell is an addictions consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust

• Drugs
• Drugs policy