The rumours are true: it’s been about six years since I last bought a new toothbrush. Want to know why (and how)? Come to my talk tonight at the Restore Cafe in East Oxford.
I have an idea to change the bottom half of the internet.
Lots of blogs, including mine, use captchas to prevent robot spam, but these are powerless in the face of human stupidity and aggression. Many other blogs moderate comments before publication, but this makes work for the blog owner, and that work is often very tedious.
Twitter is full of the claim that the Green Party is “anti-science”. Some of the people making that claim are on my own feed; they’re people I like and respect. So I’m disappointed that so many of these self-appointed champions of science seem to be basing their claim on the same Times article, while others don’t bother to give any source at all.
The #amazonfail furore made me angry, but not for the reasons you might expect. I'm angry at the sheer numbers of people who put their energy into mobilising against Amazon. The whole affair showed us just how easily Twitter and blogs can be used to spread a message about a company's unacceptable actions (in Amazon's case, removing LGBT-themed books from their sales rankings) and to generate massive amounts of negative publicity. Perhaps a month after the problem was first spotted, the complaints reached a tipping point; after that, it took just a few days to give Amazon the PR headache of a lifetime.
And I'm furious that it happened this way. Perhaps I should explain why.
This blog now has a LiveJournal feed. If you’ve got a LiveJournal, you can add the feed to your friends page here (once you've logged into your LJ account).
Earlier I criticisede-consultancy.com about an article purporting to explain what journalists look for when they come to a website. I'm going to post some constructive advice soon, but first I want to highlight the assumptions behind the article and why they're wrong.
It’s so easy to start a blog. People do it all the time. And I'm yet another monkey with a typewriter coming to join the party.
I hope that this blog will get across a rough idea of what on earth it is that I do. More ambitiously, I'm hoping that sharing my experiences and views will be a good way of connecting with others in my line of work - whatever on earth it is that we do. But, frankly, I'll be happy if I can avoid the deep pit of one-post wonders.