From the Online

FleetStreetBlues post with Belle de Jour’s quote referencing the manufacture of consent reminded me to do this post. Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to the UK was immensely popular: the LSE website was inaccessible within minutes of the tickets going on sale; at SOAS a line of last-minute hopefuls snaked down the corridor outside the lecture [...]

Last weekend’s OpenTech was great. Bill Thompson on two cultures. Ben Goldacre on Dore and his dream of some kind of auto-wiki thing. Sessions on government data, monitoring energy digitally, and geo-data privacy were also illuminating. BEST OF ALL: no bloody queues for the ladies’ loos. Because there were only about three of us in [...]

Interesting that when I googled “Hove European Election” (to locate the polling station & also read around who’s tipped to do well locally, even though it’s the whole south-east region) this is what I found. Nice one for the news prediction site Hubdub (top two rankings). Then Brighton & Hove council (next two), then the [...]

Healthy measure of web scepticism ['If web 2.0 flattens everything to the level of whim and self-actualisation, then it will have done more harm than good']: check

Emotive comparison example from expert [the lone blogger v professional journalistic teams]: check

Flashy attention-grabbing headline ['Break free of this world wide delusion']: check

All the ingredients for the Sunday paper web rant [...]

A long bank holiday weekend in Lancashire sans l’internet has left me uninspired to blog (out of work hours) this week. So, a real contrast of online stories over the last fortnight. Stories that couldn’t be conceived of without the web and 21st century technology. 
Last week, had felt exciting and liberating: the Guardian really showed [...]

If we suppose that newsrooms will continue to exist (perhaps some crowd-funded, perhaps some foundation or charity-supported, perhaps some run as a hobby while we farm the barren, carbon-ruined land by night) will they be split as broadcasters and news publications? Or will everything be a newsroom publishing its content online, with no divides?
Martin Belam’s [...]

I try and resist going on about this subject because I’m a little scared of getting branded as the One Who Goes On About Feminism All The Bloody Time, but given that Sunday was International Women’s Day and UNESCO is calling for the experiences of women journalists, here are my brief daily observations about women [...]

Today proved my point exactly. It all comes out in the wash. People don’t care really. So why do we bother to sack them in the first place?!
Once upon a time, about six years ago, a man who presented a popular news quiz show was alleged to have taken cocaine and ‘encountered’ prostitutes. No way [...]