Puffbox

No doubt Guido Fawkes’s piece on tonight’s Newsnight will attract much interest. I’ve been critical of Guido in the past, but he does have a point about ‘press release news’. I’ve seen this up close, and it’s true: some of the most respected hacks reduced to transcribing Alastair Campbell’s words at a briefing. Hardly journalism. But I’d take Guido/Paul’s point about politicians failing to offer themselves up for interview a little more seriously if he put his own name (or indeed, face) on his own material. Hiding in the shadows isn’t any different to hiding behind a written statement.

Incidentally – I found it quite amusing to see ‘<managingEditor>delete-paulds</managingEditor>’ in the source code for the Guido Fawkes site’s RSS feed. There goes the anonymity, Paul mate.

Norfolk’s morning paper, the Eastern Daily Press likes to think of itself as pretty smart when it comes to innovation. They’re making a big fuss today of ‘Brian’ – which stands for Believable RSS Interactive Avatar Newscaster. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be much more than Ananova, who/which was launched back in April 2000. Whatever happened to her? Orange bought the Ananova website from PA later that year, and Ana herself hasn’t been seen in a couple of years, despite promises that she is ‘under development’. (And my memory may be playing tricks, but I seem to remember Ananova being better animated.) Sadly, she never did ‘transform the delivery of news’ – and I don’t imagine Brian will either.

Always good to see someone else having a pop at the Sky News website. This time it’s Kevin Anderson, who happens to be chief blogger at The Guardian. He’s right of course. Sky’s policy as regards blogging is most charitably described as bandwagonesque and unfocused. There’s no attempt to encourage two-way communication. Thus far, I just don’t think they ‘get’ it.

It worries me to see Michael Wilson’s new blog being rolled out like this. This habit of creating ‘skynewsX.typepad.com’ with a big, ugly custom template seems to have become an accepted formula… when it clearly isn’t right. And besides, I used to work in the same office as Mr Wilson. Granted this was a few years ago, but he didn’t really buy into the web philosophy. Or more accurately, I don’t think he considered us on the web operation to be proper journalists.

I’m eagerly awaiting the new Sky News site, due next month some time (last I heard). But the fact that they’re still rolling out more random blogs like this does not bode well.

I normally try to keep my personal and professional stuff well separated. But I mentioned last week that I was doing the Reading Half Marathon, and if anyone’s interested in how I did… I finished in the top 10%, in a time of 1h 33m 32sec. Gordon Ramsay’s name doesn’t appear on the results sheets, so I don’t think he showed up. (Chicken.)

It turns out I’m the number one search result on Google for ‘تحلل‘. I could well be wrong, but I think it means ‘disengaged’. If any Arabic speakers are reading this, please confirm?!

There’s something truly surreal about a day when the lead story on the local evening paper is actually ‘man edits local paper’. And anyway, it’s a half marathon, not a full one – but I guess that’s not such a good headline. Inside, there’s an apparently serious suggestion in the paper’s leader column that the town of Reading should be renamed ‘Redding-on-Thames’ for search engine optimisation purposes.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=rtp5gNhBZgo]

You’re not as funny as the real PC guy, you’re not as cool as the real Mac guy… and no way does she represent the typical Linux user.

Here we go again, folks – it’s discount time over at your local Thresher off-licence, with 40% off all wine. This caused a fuss, then a news story, then a backlash, as people realised that Thresher does a permanent 3-for-2 deal on wine anyway. But people… 40% off is still better than 33% off. And you don’t need to buy in multiples of three.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about Thresher just now, given the very large Gordon Ramsay stickers in most branches’ windows. I find him quite amusing generally, and his tell-it-like-it-is style is something I can really identify with. But I’m racing against him on Sunday morning (I think), at the Reading Half Marathon… and it brings out all my worst competitive instincts.

An interesting take on blogging from Nick Robinson at the BBC. As the Chancellor was delivering his Budget to the Commons, Nick was delivering his thoughts to the blogosphere at a specially created Budget 07 ‘blog’.

But look again – lots of short updates in a very short space of time? You might call that ‘microblogging’… perhaps a classic use-case for last week’s darling of the blogosphere, Twitter?

If I’d had more time, I was going to register the Twitter ID ‘gordonbrown’, and twitterise the speech. But, like, I’ve got a day job. (And I’m quite proud to say I published my 600-word write-up of the speech within 30 minutes of Brown sitting down. 🙂 )