Fed up with Google redirecting visits to google.com to google.co.uk (or whatever your local variant is)? You can stop this annoyance merely by visiting this page. Tip culled from LMG.
Load of old pants
Is it me, or is the Beeb on a mission to write loads of rubbish about blogs at the moment?
- Looming pitfalls of work blogs going over the Queen of the Skies thing again.
- Bloggers reveal their motives – well, two do anyway, and whilst their motives are interesting, they are far from representative. And check out the fascinating "12 Rules" section.
- Web logs aid disaster recovery – note the lack of consistency of terminology at the Beeb – weblogs, blogs, web logs, etc.
- Blogs take on the mainstream – a shocking example of lazy journalism, as eloquently pointed out by Gordon.
I dunno. Is the Beeb just trying to be cool and "down wid da kidz"? They even try to present news coverage in pseudo-blog format, in which they cull reports from other media (mainstream online news reporting, radio and television coverage) and cobble them together in "reporters’ log" format (recent example). This does not really give the reporters completely free rein to report with any sort of freedom (FOOC remains the only true home of that, and that is a reprocessed radio programme). The only true blogs on the Beeb, as I would understand them, have been Ivan Noble’s moving tumor diary and the fabulous but late and lamented Newslog by Nick Robinson (a man who seems like a fish out of water at ITN).
Perhaps I’m expecting too much to have truly free reporting in blog format on the Beeb – it might be the wrong place, the wrong organisation or simply the wrong style for a "serious" news reporting organisation. But it would be good if there was a little more proper understanding of the form – maybe that is too much to hope for from a body so deeply entrenched in established media formats.
Who needs TV…
…when you have kittens? I’m currently sitting at the kitchen table. Monty is racing from the conservatory through the kitchen to the living room and back, carrying a length of red ribbon (favourite toy – who needs wind-up mice?) in his mouth, with Treacle about 2 inches behind him. It has to be said that his cornering ability when at speed on the lino needs some improvement.
Cover your ears
Stars to record fund-raising song for tsunami victims – all very laudable, but do we really want to listen to Cliff, Ronan and Boy warbling their way through a song penned by Mike Read??
De-Christmassing
My wife is de-Christmassing the house already. Somehow, I feel that it is slightly premature to do so, but she tells me that it is "New Year’s Day – not Christmas any more".
This does have one significant advantage. With all the cards removed from the shelves, I can now get to my CD collection again without causing an avalanche of festive greetings. This is a good thing, although I am reminded that I am yet to alphabetise the discs and update the catalogue of the collection to cover recent purchases (admittedly very few, but we got three CDs for Christmas and purchased a further eight in Brighton the other day). It also looks like we’ll be merging our collections, so there will be two or three duplicates that will be sold off on Amazon in order to fund a new purchase or two.
McGhee to leave?
Read the report following today’s goalless draw with QPR, and you’ll get the impression that Brighton will be managerless again just as soon as a better offer comes along.
Two thousand and five
We prepared for the New Year by taking the waters at the pub next door last night, before retiring to our sofa with the kittens. Today, we walked off the excess with a long walk through the fields and woods around the next village, in the company of a whole bunch of the locals, plus H’s parents, sister and brother-in-law.
And we’re still eating chocolate.