Ben Walker

Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast is a timeless mainstay of late-night radio (at least since I have been alive), but people are listening to the real radio less these days and I think the new #uksnow map could be a glorious replacement.

Updating weather-speak

The English have never been known for their conversational skills, and it usually takes some sort of social lubricator (usually booze or weather chat) to help things along. There’s no Twitter magic that makes it easier to make the first move, to establish connections, so the English reserve is usually reflected online. #uksnow is the digital incarnation of the notorious English weather-speak (“a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other.” - Kate Fox, Watching the English), which allows English twitterers to strike up casual conversations with people they don’t know so well.

Over the last few days a few inches of snow has enabled countless connections and conversations around the country: at bus stops, in shops, at work, and especially on Twitter, where hoards of relative newbies have found a way to get involved.

In case you missed it, #uksnow is a hashtag that lets you easily search for people talking about the snow. Since lots of people were reporting not just their experience but the levels of snowfall, a semi-formal code was quickly established: the hashtag #uksnow, your postcode (or at least the first part of it) and a snowfall rating out of ten. This was the turning point.

Suddenly loads of people who weren’t quite sure what they should be twittering about had something to say. A task. And they found that they were part of something. People were replying to them, even just to thank them for the useful update. And you could add your own little message, and maybe even a photo. We became a nation of weather reporters, which is probably what we wanted to be all along.

Then someone created a Twitter/Google Maps mashup that plots the #uksnow with pretty little pictures on a map…

All we want to do is talk about the weather.

Like the shipping forecast, it has a strangely soothing allure and is not really useful to most people. And unless the current snow-frenzy lasts, it will need a few more symbols so we can start to tweet our weather reports all year round. I’m thinking something like:

@uksnow OX2 sunny, light breeze, nice picnic weather. ;o)

If anything is going to get the English twittering, it’s talking about the weather. And if we get a new Shipping Forecast out of it, I won’t complain.