The third national day of action in as many weeks against the British government’s plans for massive student fee increases and higher education cuts is underway. The BBC has an overview of the day’s plans up here, while The Guardian is liveblogging. Twitter hashtags include #solidarity, #demo2010, and #dayx2.

A number of university occupations started last week are still ongoing, and one new one — at Nottingham University — was launched this morning. Their blog is here.

At last week’s London demonstration police used a tactic called “kettling” to bottle up demonstrators in confined spaces, often holding them for hours without charge. Journalist and blogger Laurie Penny, tweeting from the scene as @PennyRed, says today’s demonstrators are on the move — “running at full pelt” without leaders or direction, flummoxing the cops: “These kids just want to run, police can’t keep up.”

I’ll be liveblogging events as they unfold.

2:30 pm UK time | The Guardian is reporting that London’s protesters seem to be scattered throughout the city center, while it raises questions about the legality of the police kettling tactic.

2:50 pm | Tweeter @reallyopenuni reports from the University of Leeds that the campus’s Ziff Building — which houses “student administrative services” — was occupied about half an hour ago. A factional dispute appears to have arisen among the occupiers, with Socialist Workers Party representatives on one side and “everyday students” — including local schoolkids — on the other.

3:20 pm | A new BBC roundup page reports on demonstrations in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool. Reports on Twitter of additional demonstrations in Newcastle, Brighton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford, Exeter, others.

3:30 pm | Huge kettle reported at Trafalgar Square.

3:50 pm | Protests at Belfast, Edinburgh, Warwick as well.

4:30 pm | The Welsh government has announced that it will be absorbing the costs of any tuition increases for all Welsh students next year, wherever they study in the UK. Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews says that with the new policy, Wales is “preserving the principle that the state will subsidise higher education and maintain opportunities for all.”

4:50 pm | Word from Twitter is that the kettle at Trafalgar has ended, and the crowd has mostly dispersed.

In the ranks of the most asinine, pointless, downright goofy acts of administrative censorship ever perpetrated against students in the twenty-first century, this one has got to be right up near the top of the list.

The administration at Cal State Long Beach is refusing to allow a graduate student production of “Night of the Tribades,” a 1975 historical drama about Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) to be advertised on campus property.

Why? Because “tribade,” an archaic term meaning “lesbian,” is also a reference to a sexual act.

Tribadism, a type of frottage, is — thank you, Wikipedia! — “a form of non-penetrative sex in which a woman rubs her vulva against her partner’s body for sexual stimulation.” Nowadays, it’s more often referred to as “scissoring” or “tribbing.”

A tribade, then, is one who engages in tribadism. And according to CSULB theatre arts major Courtney Knight, because someone in the university’s administration did a Google image search on “tribade” and didn’t like what they saw (or liked it more than they’d anticipated), the play’s name got banned from the school theater’s marquee.

Again, this is a 1975 Swedish play about a Swedish playwright who died in 1912. (The play itself is a “metatheatrical drama” about tensions between Strindberg, his estranged wife, and a female friend of hers — it takes place at a Copenhagen theater during rehearsals for one of Strindberg’s plays, and incorporates considerable actual dialogue from that production.) It’s got nothing to do with scissoring, in other words. There’s no tribbing, actual or implied, in it. The title is a reference to two characters’ ostensible lesbian relationship, not to any particular sexual act.

But of course protesting the administration’s silliness by dressing up as affronted 19th century Swedes wouldn’t have been any fun at all, so CSULB’s students took a more obvious and more gratifying tack — they staged a scissor-in.

Some two dozen theater students gathered on campus, some with shirts reading “tribade” or duct-tape over their mouths … and tribbed. Or mock-tribbed.

The university has to date not commented on the brouhaha, though the production itself got good reviews. It’s playing — marqueeless — through December 11.

Student protests over the British government’s plans for massive university tuition hikes and budget cuts reached new heights last Wednesday, as activists in two dozen cities staged simultaneous demonstrations. Police in London trapped demonstrators inside a cordon for hours in a widely-condemned tactic known as “kettling,” while students staged occupations at a long and growing list of universities. (This essay from the London Review of Books remains the best introduction I’ve yet seen to the current crisis in British higher education.)

And while most American students took the long weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving, protests in the UK rolled on. Here’s the latest:

BBC News put out a major new story out on the protests yesterday, reporting that occupations are ongoing at a dozen universities as the government plans a parliamentary vote on tuition increases by Christmas. Not a lot of breaking news here, but a pretty good introduction to the topic.

One of the more startling developments of the weekend was the reversal of course on direct action by Aaron Porter, president of Britain’s National Union of Students, which I discuss in this post. The Guardian leads its comprehensive morning roundup on the protests with the Porter story, but goes on to discuss plans for a flashmob today and another national day of action tomorrow, while providing a roundup of the current status of the various university occupations.

I’m still collecting links and info from student media, and I’ll have more of that soon. For now, here’s a list of university occupations from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.

When Britain’s new wave of student protest began with a massive demonstration in London three weeks ago, the president of the country’s National Union of Students should have been flying high. The NUS had called the November 10 march, whose participation wildly exceeded their expectations.

But when a large group of students broke off from the main march route to storm the national headquarters of Britain’s governing Conservative Party, NUS president Aaron Porter was caught flat-footed. As protesters smashed windows and clashed with police, Porter scrambled to distance himself from their actions. Even as live television cameras showed thousands of students on the scene at the party HQ, Porter took to the television to describe them as an insignificant and counter-productive splinter group. On Twitter he referred to the group as “a minority of idiots.”

In The Guardian the next day, Porter went further, claiming that those who had stormed the Conservative Party building were most likely “not even students,” and that their “indefensible” and “mindless” actions had the goal of “undermining” the larger protest.

In reality, though a few acts of violence against persons had been committed at the party HQ, the group of activists who were present there was a large and diverse one. The vast majority of them did not intend or cause any harm to other individuals, and indeed the group on more than one occasion acted collectively to restrain or shame those who did — chanting “stop throwing shit,” for instance, when a handful of protesters on the roof began lobbing things at the police below.

Porter’s comments were widely criticized by student activists, putting him in an awkward relationship to the growing movement. When students marched again throughout Britain last Wednesday, Porter neither participated nor endorsed the action.

Over the weekend, as occupations at British universities grew, Porter found himself a target of the protesters himself, as they called on him to support the new wave of action or step down.

And in a Sunday appearance at a student occupation at University College London, he took the former course, declaring himself in solidarity with the protests — while apologizing for his, and his organization’s, past inaction:

For too long NUS has perhaps been too cautious and spineless about being committed to supporting this kind of student activism … I’ve spent too long over the last few days doing the same. Wherever there is non-violent student supported action, NUS should and NUS will absolutely support that, because what we are facing is utterly disgraceful and I am not going to allow an internal civil war between students as that is what our opponents would want.

There is another national day of student action planned for tomorrow, and in a blog post this morning, Porter encouraged the broadest possible participation in those protests.

December 5 Update | When I wrote this piece a week ago I was certain that Twitter wasn’t blocking Wikileaks from trending. Now I’m not so sure.

So the Wikileaks organization released the first batch of a promised quarter million US State Department cables today, and it seems like everyone on the planet is talking about it. The story is front-page news at media sites across the globe, it’s all over the television, and for a while this afternoon more than two percent of all Twitter traffic was about the leaks.

You read that right — one in every fifty tweets was about Wikileaks this afternoon. To put that in context, it’s about three times as many as mentioned Justin Bieber.

And yet “Wikileaks” hasn’t hit Twitter’s trending topics list all day. Right now #becauseofjustin, a Bieber-related hashtag, holds the top spot on Twitter’s global trending topics list, even though it’s running just one tenth the volume of #wikileaks itself.

Twitter being Twitter, there’s no shortage of speculation about why this is. Some suggest it’s a conspiracy of some kind. Others claim that because Wikileaks is a username on Twitter, it’s excluded from appearing on the trending topics list. (This is false, as a quick investigation will demonstrate.)

So what is it? Basically, it’s the algorithm.

It turns out it’s tougher than you’d think to put together a trending topics list that really means anything. If you just go by the raw frequency with which words appear, you’re going to wind up with stuff like “the,” “and,” and “RT” at the top of the charts forever. And even if you exclude words like those, you’re still going to wind up with “lunch” trending every lunchtime and Glee trending every Tuesday.

Which is fine if that’s what you’re interested in, but the folks at Twitter have decided that they’re interested in something else. What they’re interested in is finding out what’s breaking — what people are interested in today that they weren’t interested in yesterday. And to find that out you need to look beyond the raw numbers. You need an algorithm, and it needs to be a sophisticated one.

Because any time you create a system like this, there will be people who try to game it. Twitter doesn’t want its trending topics list to be a list of the day’s ten most successful “RT if you love puppies!!!!!” campaigns, and it doesn’t want the list — or its feed — to be clogged up with “Tweet about Velveeta to win a free iPad” garbage, either.

All of which means that Twitter doesn’t really care whether “wikileaks” was the most-tweeted word of the day. What they’re trying to measure is something more subtle and more complex. And they won’t tell us what exactly that is. They can’t tell us, because if they told us, we’d have a leg up in gaming the system again.

So why didn’t #wikileaks trend? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it’s most likely a combination of things. First, #wikileaks is a hashtag that sees considerable traffic on an ongoing basis, so it has to spike higher to make a splash than a less common word would. Second, a large portion of the traffic #wikileaks has seen today has been in the form of retweets, and Twitter gives retweets much less weight than original tweets in calculating trends. Third — and I’m truly guessing on this one — #wikileaks is a hashtag, and as a hashtag it necessarily reflects a co-ordinated, organized push to boost discussion of a topic, rather than an organic outpouring of interest. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that putting a # in front of a word depresses that word’s weight in the trending topics algorithm, if only slightly.

Wikileaks rolled out a new hashtag today — #cablegate — and it quickly rose to the top of the trending topics list, despite producing far less traffic than #wikileaks. (That fact alone should quiet the conspiracy theorists, though it probably won’t.)

Some will take this last piece of info as a reason to spawn new hashtags every week, so that the tags’ novelty works in their favor. There may be something to be said for such an approach, but my own sense is that it’s counterproductive, for a few reasons.

For starters, trending topics are wildly overrated as an organizing tool. You constantly see people urging others to “get [whatever] trending,” or fretting about the fact that it’s not, but the reality is that having your hashtag show up briefly on a list in a sidebar isn’t going to do a hell of a lot for your movement. I’ll say more about why that is in a future post — this one is already ridiculously long.

Beyond that, there’s the fact of what you lose by switching hashtags — continuity and predictability.

Consider #wikileaks vs #cablegate. #Wikileaks drew huge traffic all day because people associated the tag with the topic, so using it came naturally to them. And they kept using it in the face of encouragement to switch to #cablegate. Even after #cablegate trended, in fact, #wikileaks stayed much more popular.

The point of hashtags — the point of Twitter itself — isn’t to get your tweets in front of random people. It’s to build a community of discussion. It’s to connect with people who are interested in what you’re interested in, and get them more interested. It’s to turn weak ties into stronger ties. And trending topics don’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with any of those projects.