Pete Ashton's Weblog

Okay, you'll have noticed I've been a little quiet these last couple of weeks, especially after all that noise about running a blog for Birmingham. Well, a spanner was thrown into the works of all that, but it was a really nice spanner. Possibly the nicest spanner I've seen for a while as a matter of fact.

As of today, and for the next three months, I'm a professional blogger. Which even this age when every company that matters has people on staff dedicated to blogging still seems a really weird statement, like being a professional tea drinker. So what does Pete being a professional blogger actually mean?

In short it means I'm getting paid a decent amount of money, enough to support my frugal lifestyle anyway, to write a weblog full time.

The title of the blog is Created in Birmingham and its remit is to survey all the creative activity in the city in blog form, from artists to writers to film makers to designers to musicians... all of them and the organisations and agencies that support them.

Which is why I've been kinda quiet of late as I try to figure out exactly what the hell that involves. I think I've got a handle on it though. Best to read the about page to find out more.

The main thing I want to do, though, is to make sure it's an actual weblog and not just a bunch of articles and interviews dumped online. It's quite different to the sort of blogging I've been doing here - I'm talking to people and relating their ideas in my own voice, something I never do on peteashton.com, and the tone is a little more formal - but I'm keen for it to have a narrative and a personality that runs through it as it develops.

In the meanwhile I will, of course, keep running this blog and I'm very keen to keep the Brum Blog going with the aim of eventually spinning it off onto it's own site in the new year. However, while I get CiB off the ground I'm going to be a little distracted, so bear with me.

So, yeah. Professional blogger!

Howabout that?

Okay, time for an update, for reasons that will become apparent.

Before that, though, I should give credit to another inspiration for this Brum Blog thing which didn't really strike me until I'll started - Dirk Deppy's Journalista comics blog. Obviously the subject matter is completely different but I really like the way he structures each day's post into a little magazine that sucks in the links but keeps a sense of personality. (The massive events listing at the end of every single post I'm not so keen on but you can't have everything.) So, credit where due.

Two days in and I've hit a drought - there ain't nothing of interest to report today. This isn't too surprising since I'm doing this completely from the computer and not generating any news myself. The first two posts had the benefit of being able to go back and cherry pick the past. Now I've done that I'm just waiting for something new to come along. Given that my reasons for starting this enterprise was the paucity of online information for Birmingham and given that I'm trawling my usual hunting grounds it was bound to happen.

But all is not lost. While the actual content of those two posts wasn't exactly mind blowing I'm pleased with the methodology used for the Edwards blog roundup, the "photo of the day" was a nice touch and while the Mark McGowan story annoyingly found itself everywhere for a short while I feel I did add a bit of value to the piece by drawing attention to his previous work. Otherwise the second post did feel a bit like newsfilter rather than original blogging and I'm not so happy about that. A bit of news relaying is good but too much and you just become the same as everyone else, regurgitating the same old stuff.

Currently I think there's enough online resources to power a Journalista style post about Birmingham once a week, maybe twice at a push, which has the benefit of allowing time for some deeper research and reflection. Otherwise I'll start regurgitating the Google News feed and nobody wants that.

Actually, a brief word about that feed. While I'm sure it could be fine tuned (and any tips would be welcome) I'm currently monitoring any UK news items that mention Birmingham but don't have the words crime, stabbed, blues, alabama, death, murder, sport or football and even then it's a very depressing read with far too much sport. Footie aside (I just have no interest in it whatsoever so there's no point it clogging up my feed) I've often been perplexed by people's negative attitude towards the city compared to my generally positive outlook (people look at me odd when I say I've walked home through Digbeth at 2am for example), but then I never consume local news and rarely watch or listen to anything other than Radio 4. If your only source of news came from the Birmingham Post and Mail group you'd think you were living in a hell hole, albeit one very keen on football. This is not my city. Still, it has to be parsed.

The football thing is also mildly interesting in that most articles about the sport don't mention its name (thus making it impossible to completely filter out). It's assumed that you know who the players and teams are and why what they do is important. I guess this is reasonable since most of these articles will live in the sports section of the paper but on a jumbled up news feed it's like getting reports from an alien civilization.

(Note to self - add "paedophile" to that blacklist...)

So, in summary, bedroom blogging about Birmingham has its limits, at least until a decent blogosphere develops for the city. That's actually one of my aims for this project - that along with the few others I'm aware of who are thinking along these lines we might encourage more to join us. That would certainly fulfill the Community criteria.

As for me, I'm now thinking of other ways to fill the blog and that's going to involve getting off my arse and out there in the city. Which isn't a problem!

In the mean time, any recommendations of other places to look for regular local information, be they blogs or council stuff or whatever, please leave a comment or email me.

Okay, after those one, two, three posts on blogging about Birmingham it's time to actually start doing something with the idea.

Some notes before hand though.

1) I have no real concrete idea how this is going to work in the long term. This is not a problem. Currently my vision of Birmingham is limited to that which I know. As I start to write about and explore the city this will change and hopefully grow. So no predictions about content.

2) At the same time, no wild expectations on the outset. I don't expect to be doing anything radical to begin with - that will come with time.

3) No trying to set up a group blog. Given the above it'll be hard to lay down commonly agreed rules and guidelines so best not to bother. That's not to say some kind of collaboration might emerge in the long term though. Also, I've become aware of other people planning vaguely similar things. Hopefully we can spur each other on and develop a community that way.

4) There's a rather nice paradox to this whole thing. My motivation for starting this is that there isn't a decent site that tells what's going on in Birmingham. However, to produce one I need to know what's going on in Birmingham. But the reason I want a site like this to exist is because I don't know what's going on in Birmingham. Hello brick wall. Then, assuming I get over that brick wall and find myself knowing exactly what's going on in Birmingham, what is my motivation for continuing the site? (The latter is, of course, silly talk - I'll never know everything and it's always changing, but the former is something of a stumbling block.)

So here's the plan. I'm going to start blogging about Birmingham on this blog. This will initially be in self contained posts comprised of a few links, a bit of commentary, some news and other bits and bobs. Some of this I've been doing already (such as the occasional upcoming gigs posts) but there'll be more of it and it won't just be about music and photography. Okay, initially it's just be music and photography but I intend to expand out from that.

Each post will be suitably flagged (so non-Brummies can ignore it) and normal Pete-blogging will continue alongside. So don't all un-subscribe just yet. This is just an experiment, running for a month or so, to see if this might be viable and to force me to hook into local activity I'm not aware of.

If it is viable then I'll spin it off into its own blog, with all that entails, some time in the new year.

Actually, in a moment of pure coincidence, Diamond Geezer's recent Cultural Update for London is pretty much the sort of thing I was thinking about. (As well as being the best thing he's written for a while.)

It all starts, ooh, some time tomorrow I guess. right now!

You may want to read these two posts before continuing.

So what we're looking for is a blog for a city like Birmingham that fulfills the following criteria:

1) It has enough content to be regular and in-depth.

2) It has the potential to develop a community of its own and/or become an valuable part of the wider local scene.

3) It is sufficiently different from other media offerings online and off.

4) It's fun to write and, most importantly, enjoyable to read.

5) It has the ability to develop, mutate, adapt and hopefully grow over time.

A question folk might ask is "what is the blog about?" The immediate answer is "it's about Birmingham" which then leads to the next question "so what is the blog about?" How will it cover Birmingham? What angle will it take on things? What will the tone be? How long will the posts be? Will it be links or articles or both? What sort of subjects will it cover? Who will write it? Who is the intended readership? Most critically, what colour will it be?

If I've learned anything in my many years of doing stuff it's that you can't answer these questions beforehand. Projects like this have a tendency to take on a life of their own and go in directions you never conceived of in the outset, partly because they're so vague. A blog about Birmingham is a terribly vague mission statement, so let's narrow it down.

It's a blog about Birmingham as seen by the writer/s of the blog.

Which is pretty much the definition of a blog. Life as experienced communicated through words.

So, going back to those five criteria again...

1) Can one person or a group of people experience enough of a city to write regularly and in-depth on a wide range of subjects over a prolonged period of time? Tricky, but I think it can be done. In fact, the act of working on the blog should encourage the writers to see more of the city, rather like my going out and photographing things pushes me to areas I wouldn't normally go to. It depends on how willing the writers are to get out of their comfortable niches.

2) Can you develop a community around the writings of a small number of people? I think so, at least one sufficient to support the egos of the writers (as mentioned in the previous post). And I'd hope that any such blog would slot into the wider community well, especially as it'll be covering what people are up to. Funny thing - you write about people and they become aware of you.

3) Can the blog be sufficiently different from what's already out there? Possibly. You could argue that a Birmingham blog already exists but it's distributed around various sites. Gig reviews over here, political stuff over there, observational stuff somewhere else. Doing this stuff in one place would be novel but not really revolutionary. That said, the act of doing the blog over time could hopefully make it more unique, trying out new ideas and approaches to the city and it's people.

4) Can it be fun to write and read? This is the million dollar question really. I guess the answer depends on who's writing it, whether they enjoy writing it and whether they're good enough. I'm a strong believer that absolutely anything can be made interesting if it's written about well. That's the whole point of art - taking the everyday and making it fantastic. Actually doing this on a long term basis however would be hard work.

5) Can it develop and adapt? Yes, if it's intrinsically connected with the city it's writing about. Cities are always changing and if the writers actually get out there and actively interact with the place there's no reason the blog shouldn't mirror the city. If it doesn't then it's failing.

What I'm getting from these answers is it all comes down to the writers. Just saying "I'm going to blog about Birmingham" isn't enough. Neither is "I'm going to blog about myself in Birmingham" because it needs more than that. Certainly the personalities, interests and habits of the writers are an intrinsic part of the blog but they should just act as a filter on the real subject: the city and the people who make it what it is.

There's more, but thankfully not too much more. I hope.

This post continues from that post.

Running a group blog is a tricky business, especially if you're not running it as a business. What usually happens is someone has an idea for a blog about a subject and, in the interests of community and variety, thinks it'd be a better blog if more people were involved. So they gather their friends together and people they know who are interested in the subject and invite them to join this blog. At first everything runs swimmingly but eventually people lose interest, the originator becomes the sole contributor with maybe a couple of others popping in every so often when they remember and before long the blog starts to die.

The problem with blogs, real blogs in the traditional sense (and yes, I know any definition of real is very subjective but that kinda proves my point in a way), is that they're very personal things and will mean different things to different people. They also require a level of commitment and not everyone will have the time or even inclination to contribute to them.

Let me explain using BugPowder as an example. After a year or so of running it myself I opened the BugPowder blog up a few years ago to anyone in the UK small press comics community who wanted to contribute. While it's been reasonably active ever since and has a modicum of reputation in its field it never really attracted the big hitters in the scene to contribute on a regular basis. And why should they? By definition, anyone who is important in any area is important because they are already doing things which pretty much precludes them from getting involved in another project, especially when they don't have any real control over how it operates. Looking back at my involvement in DIY culture I've never taken over someone else's operation or joined a pre-existing project or collective. While I have been inspired by and worked with others I've always preferred to strike out on my own terms. Is it any wonder that when I then try to bring in others who I feel are on my wavelength they're not interested? After all, I wouldn't be.

(It's interesting that BugPowder, while I was trying to get more people involved, became less of a "real blog" with a personality and more of a noticeboard. There's nothing wrong with a noticeboard, especially in this context, but it doesn't have the spark and vim you might expect from a blog.)

So, to run a group blog everyone involved has to have an investment in it. This doesn't have to be financial (though that wouldn't hurt given the time involved) but there has to be some reason why people should get involved and stay involved for the long haul.

There are many such reasons but I'm going to narrow it down to three key ones.

You're getting paid.

This can be very motivating, especially if the blog starts to take over your evenings. More to the point it can keep you focussed. Actually getting paid for blogging is another matter. AdSense style ads can bring in some cash to cover costs but it would probably work out a pennies per post, unless you really got lucky on the keywords. And then there's the complications of sharing the profits out amongst the contributors. Who get's what? Probably more trouble than it's worth.

There's a higher purpose

If the contributors really believe that they're doing something important, that the blog really matters, then they'll keep writing. The thing is, does any blog really matter? And can such a belief really be sustained in the face of having to post something interesting all the time? I have my doubts, especially if you don't have...

Feedback

If it's not fun and you're not getting paid and it doesn't really matter then there's no point doing it. What makes it worthwhile? Feedback can help. I know hearing from complete strangers that the stuff I've done, be it online or off, has been very important to them has certainly spurred me on. While there was a "higher purpose" to organising the Birmingham Flickrmeets this year what really made it worth doing was the positive feedback I got from people who went on them and the fact that people took what I'd started and developed it in ways I hadn't considered. It's intangible, you can't put a value on it, but it's probably the most important motivating factor.

I think feedback is the key thing here, either being part of a wider community or having a community built in through comments or (urgh) forums. I have a theory that weblog comments aren't there for the readers. Sure, the readers write them but only a small percentage - the rest just ignore them on the whole. They're there to reassure the blog writer that someone out there is reading their stuff and enjoying it. Whenever I write something or post a photo on Flickr I find myself constantly checking for comments even though I know it's pathetic and shallow to do so. Regardless of their content and use comments are a form of closure, a confirmation that the job is done. In the absence of a pay cheque they give validation to the exercise. (And yes, I'm fully aware, painfully aware, that the preceding post to this has had no comments as yet. But I struggle on, safe in the knowledge that this is a series and comments will come by the end. They will come. And if if they utterly miss the point it won't matter. But I digress.)

To summarise this rather messy chapter, group blogs on their own are failure prone, so much so that they might be an aberration in the blogging world, but they can be done if it's worth the contributors while in doing them, and a sense of community, usually built by feedback, can facilitate that.

Building a community, however, is another matter altogether. To do that you've got to give the community something decent to build around, which is the subject of the next post.

I've been thinking a fair bit about city-specific blogging recently. More specifically about why there isn't a good general blog for Birmingham, whether there could be one and whether I could actually do one.

City blogs had something of a mini boom a while back with the expansion of the Gothamist and Metroblogging networks, both originating out of the US. While they have made some inroads into non-US areas it's been a bit hit and miss. Just dumping a structure in place and expecting it to develop doesn't work. Londonist appears to work well but it used to be an independent group blog called The Big Smoker before joining the Gothamist network. On the flip side the Birmingham Metroblog is pretty much a one man show.

Why did the Brum Metblog, relatively speaking, fail? Or more to the point, why didn't I, an established blogger who occasionally writes about Birmingham, join the thing? At the time it was because I didn't think I'd be able to commit to their 3 posts a week requirement but thinking about it, why should I? I have a blog with a healthy readership. It exists within various networks of blogs and in nicely indexed by Google. Any Birmingham content generally finds its audience through these communities. More to the point, Metroblogs are plastered in adverts but writing is voluntary. Someone's making a profit (however small) and it's not the writers. I wouldn't have felt like I had any ownership of the blog and since I have my own blog there wasn't any real incentive.

There's also the point that while I'm sure Gaz, the sole contributor to Metroblogging Birmingham, is a nice guy with his heart in the right place he's not exactly, shall we say, on my wavelength. With something like Flickr this wouldn't be a problem as photos are relatively neutral but blogs are about opinions, view and ideas. Sharing a platform purely on the basis that we live in the same city really isn't enough - there needs to be something more than that.

That's the thing about cities. They tend to be rather large with populations in the millions. While there does exist some sense of community and identity, the in depth perception of a city - its merits, relative safety, efficiency and so on - is a very personal thing. My Birmingham will be different to your Birmingham, even if they overlap a lot. Come to think of it my Birmingham next month will be different from my Birmingham today.

Leaving the perils of group blogging aside for a moment, the next question is whether there's actually enough in Birmingham to merit a dedicated blog. This isn't a stupid question. One of the reasons Londonist works and why there are so many London bloggers compared to Birmingham (1206 vs 60 according to Britblog.com which won't be accurate but it makes the point) is that it's London and in a different league. Birmingham has stuff but does it have enough stuff?

A cursory look at the traditional media outlets for the city wouldn't imply there is. BBC Birmingham is probably the best but other than the occasional article I don't find it particularly inspiring while icBirmingham, covering local rags the Mail and Post, tends to inform you how may people were shot and stabbed and how the football is going. Suffice to say it doesn't represent my Birmingham.

I think there is enough stuff going on in Birmingham but its happening under the radar. That's not to say it's all underground alternative weird stuff by any means. Take Artsfest, the massive, um, arts festival run by the council that's been taking place in the centre of Birmingham every summer for nine years. I'd never heard of it until someone on Birmingham Flickr suggested we photograph it. How could that happen?

Next question - can a blog hope to "fix" this? And is that the right question? Maybe a better question is what can blogs do well?

• The can filter information and pull together things that aren't usually pulled together. People are generally more complex than the genres, niches and other boxes we usually put things in and a blog will reflect that.
• They tend not to be slaves to their perceived audience or advertisers and will have a different system of prioritising subjects based on what the writer finds interesting.
• At their best they fill in the gaps, drawing out things that aren't getting attention elsewhere.

Continues here...

"Being in your own band and making your own music, or making your own zine or drawing your own comic and putting it together yourself in this day and age really is a revolutionary act. I truly believe that. The way things are designed now, you are supposed to give up your self power, to give up your choices, your freedom to act, to make your own decisions or to do things for yourself in the way that you want to do them. And it's because - "Look! There's all these options here for you that are already prepackaged, and they're very convenient. I'm sure you can find one that will fit you just fine." Well, no. I really believe that just the act of saying "I'm going to do something myself" is revolutionary. It goes against the grain, in a very real way. That continues to be where the excitement is, for me. It always has been and a lot of people don't understand that."
John Porcellino, interviewed by Zak Sally in The Comics Journal #241, Feb 2002

That paragraph struck me as god's own truth four years ago and re-reading it this weekend it again jumped out and grabbed me by the throat.

John P's coming from an earlier, pre-internet perspective and I've always thought the pioneering work and ideas that came out of the punk / DIY / zine scenes has a huge relevance to the brave new world of internetworking, or whatever you want to call it. And yet no-one really seems to be making that connection. Maybe the pioneers of the social internet are too young to have experienced the relative power of zines for themselves, maybe they just never came across them (zines were by their nature a small-scale phenomena so it's not too surprising they weren't on the radar of code monkeys) and it's not inconceivable that many of the major players in the zine world rejected the early web. Whatever the reasons for the disconnect in continuity I believe you can draw a very distinct line from someone in the early 90s putting out a zine to someone in the early 2000s writing a blog, not just through similarities in content and expression but in the way no zine was an island. They were part of complex ecosystems supported by the mail service that were incredibly vibrant and impossible to map, just as out unfortunately named blogosphere is today.

I think we're at an interesting point in the development of the DIY internet. On the one hand more people that ever before are publishing their work, be it a text diary, ramblings like these, photos, movies, artwork, whatever form of self expression takes their fancy. This is truly revolutionary, vitally important and something to be celebrated. On the other hand the tools that we use to do this are owned by a small number of businesses who dictate how this expression shall be packaged and distributed.

I use Flickr a lot these days. It's where I spend most of my time when online and it's been very good to me over the two years I've been a member. My photography has significantly improved, I've made new friends, learned lots about the art and craft of taking photos and so on. If I'd set up a photo gallery on peteashton.com and posted my photos on there I would never have gotten to the stage I'm at now. I needed the networking environment Flickr provides to do that.

On the other hand, my Flickr page looks like everybody else's, I can't organise my sets as neatly as I'd like, I can't manipulate the photos in the groups I manage in interesting ways, I can only export my photos in a specific number of sizes with sightly crufty HTML I have to edit... In short, I can only do what Flickr allows me to do.

This is not necessarily a problem (and the Flickr API does allow me to take the information and write my own programs to manipulate it however I'd like, except I'm not a programmer), but it is a trade off. By accepting Flickr's limitations I benefit from their community and their tools give me more time to actually look at other people's photos and take my own.

Another interesting side effect is that photographers outside of Flickr don't really exist for me. I'm locked in, not by force but psychologically. This only recently occurred to me and I'm not sure I like it.

MySpace is another interesting example. The success of MySpace was, in part, explained by their letting users do whatever the hell they wanted with their profile pages making it, in my mind, the closest a modern social networking site has gotten to the zine aesthetic. Most of them are utterly illegible and look atrocious, but they're done by people who are expressing themselves. But even so, there are limitations on how you use MySpace and again you've got the lock-in thing. Either you're in MySpace all the time or your not. I haven't been in for ages now, partly because I can't be arsed with the retarded user interface but mainly because I've been in Flickr, and now I dread logging in and check my messages because there'll be a hell of a catch up to do. As such I'm sure I'm missing out on things within the Birmingham music scene, which was my main motivation for getting involved with MySpace in the first place.

On top of shutting out the rest of the internet the two services, while sharing the same origins, are mutually incompatible. It's all or nothing.

Blogging, in it's purest sense, should be the natural heir to the zine ethos. There's a low barrier to entry, no preconceptions about content and anyone who can write can do one. However, recent developments have me worried about how this is going to mature over the next decade.

Firstly there's that lock-in thing again where services like LiveJournal and Vox (both, as it happens, from Six Apart) encourage people to form communities within their walls. The motivation for this is pretty benign and useful if you want to restrict your readership to those you know and trust but I think parallels with real world gated communities need to understood. Putting it bluntly, when you're in your safe little community you're oblivious to the outside world. This, of course, is often the whole point because the outside world is full of twats, but it does mean you're invisible to anyone out there who might be interesting, who you might learn from. Why would anyone go to the trouble of Friending you when all the stuff that shows you to be an interesting person worth Friending is hidden behind a friends-only wall? As the blogging services try to emulate the success of Flickr and MySpace and YouTube and the rest, again with benign intentions, this is going to become the norm.

My other worry is more personal and I'm not sure how important it is in the wide scheme of things, but it comes down to presentation. WordPress, which has one of the most daunting templating systems I've ever cast my eyes over, is currently gaining ground as the recommended DIY blogging platform based, it seems, on plugins and what they call Themes. The idea, as I understand it, is you never get your hands dirty with the actual code. You simply select one of a few thousand themes (essentially a CSS file), add a few plugins for your sidebar and whathaveyou, and that's it. Movable Type, previously the platform on choice, is loosing ground because it doesn't have such a seamless Themes system and in trying to move towards it have made their templates more and more complex so hacking them by hand is a chore I personally don't have time for.

I know I'm an old hack but when I started blogging part of the point of doing it, apart from the major factor of publishing my own work online, was designing my own site from scratch. It wasn't enough just to have my words out there - the whole package had to come from me. That's what DIY means. Getting someone else to do it, whether your paying them or not, really isn't the same as doing it yourself, and I think this is quite important.

Of course, back in the old days learning basic HTML wasn't that hard and you could get by with some pretty shoddy coding. Nowadays we're using CSS for the styling and, thanks to a myriad of factors, coding CSS from scratch to create anything that doesn't look boring is an absolute bitch. Web design, which had its roots in DIY, has become a profession only to be attempted by experts, and even some of those experts can't be arsed. I'd even go so far as to say the evolution of CSS over the last few years has all but killed grass roots DIY website design.

I should conclude (and yes, I really should conclude - I was only meaning to post the John P quote and leave it at that. Insomnia is a cruel mistress...) by reiterating that whatever concerns I've badly articulated in this post the fact that millions of people are able to publish their work and find a receptive audience for it, even if that audience is just one other person, is a fantastic thing that should be celebrated. But I worry that in rush to make things easier and safer we're in danger of losing the very thing that made it important, the thing that made it revolutionary.

Here's hoping I'm wrong.

(You'll no doubt have noticed that having urged people to appreciate the rich history of zines I've neglected to outline any of it. There's a reason for that. It's a dauntingly huge task and quite hard to articulate. Maybe later.)

At the top of your Flickr account, should you have one, is a count of the number of "views" you've had. This, I believe, counts the number of times your photos have been loaded up on their own pages on Flickr and doesn't count remote hosting (such as when I post to this blog) or viewing in RSS feeds. Last Monday my views passed 100,000. To put this in some perspective, most of the other Flickr users I've asked (which, to be honest, is about four) have between 1,000 and 6,000 views. I was rather chuffed.

A week later I had 102,000 views. That's two thousand in a week. That's actually quite a lot. I got a bit suspicious.

There are a number of explanations for this.

1) I'm a shockingly popular and everyone loves my photos. Actually I've got a fairly average rep for someone who's been on Flickr for two years. 186 people have me as a contact and my photos get between 5 and 20 views in their first day or so of being uploaded. I've also been concentrating on the Birmingham photo scene a lot this year and don't post to themed or popular groups that much. I might have a tangible rep within my niche but I'm no Laura Kicey. So that's not the answer.

2) I'm a Pool Tart. Check this guy's photo out. It's a pretty good photo and its owner is somewhat proud that it's been viewed 9,250 times. But look down the sidebar at how many groups he's submitted it to. I don't do this, partly because Flickr make it quite longwinded to spam the groups and partly because it really fucking annoys me when people spam groups I administer. So that's not the answer.

3) I'm a Tag Whore. Generally I like to tag my photos properly. Some people don't. Like this cock who has tagged his stupid Flickr Badge with seemingly every word in the dictionary and then some. I found this because he'd used one of our deliberately obscure Birmingham Flickrmeet tags, jqfm2006. The prick. By polluting the tag system he's gathered 1,970 views for this "photo". Needless to say I don't do this, so that's not the answer.

4) The hits are coming from somewhere else and have nothing to do with my activities on Flickr. I think this is the answer.

Here's a mirror of my Most Viewed Photos page (you can't see it on Flickr itself unless you're me). You'll hopefully notice this doesn't have many of my "better" photos and bears no relation to my personal Top 100, something that has often bugged me. Number one is the Working Gloves montage with 2050 views which gave me an enormous clue. The related Working Gloves blog post on this site is one of my main Google honeypots, gathering (until I closed comments on old posts) 67 messages from Pakistani glove exporters who thought I was a shop which in turn got it indexed as the prime directory for Pakistani glove exporters, so the Flickr views are probably coming from here. Down at number nine is Polysics - Fumi, taken at their Barfly gig last November (and, I should add, one I'm quite proud of). Out of curiosity I Googled polysics photo and there it is at number three. Same goes for (sigh...) Monkey Penis.

Nuff said.

So having made stats watching utterly pointless for my blog Google has fucked up my Flickr stats as well, which isn't that surprising given how much I link to my Flickr stream from here. It's kinda ironic that while half the world is scrambling by means fair or foul to get up the Google tree here I am with PageRank of 6 (which in turn has given my Flickr stream a PR of 5) and it's a mild irritant.

In some ways it's nice to be this visible but in others it's a bit of a pain. I'm sure a significant number of valued long-term readers came here via a random Google search but they only add up to a few dozen. The hundreds of thousands of others mostly come here by mistake and take the blog completely out of context and I could do without them. The reason I closed comments on all my older posts wasn't because of spam (touch wood that's reasonably under control right now) but because idiots who couldn't read were leaving comments that showed off their inability to use a keyboard and it was getting boring. That said, I'm not ready to enter the gated community environment of LiveJournal or Vox or to strip down my RSS feed and stop search engines indexing me. I'm kinda stuck in the middle ground.

Moan over.

And so The Girl With A One Track Mind is outed. For the uninitated The Girl is a blogger who writes about her sex life but unlike most blogs of that ilk she's taken the radical approach of being all human about it, which is what makes her blog interesting. Because she's writing about sex, and this being the internet, her blog is pretty popular and, since blogs are, y'know, hot right now, she got one of them book deals that all the popular blogs are getting. The book was released and, since the real world is a lot like the internet, it got a fair bit of coverage. The Girl, or as she's known in her book Abby Lee, wrote under a pseudonym because, let's face it, she'd be stupid not to since she was dealing with personal stuff that often involved other people. Today the Sunday Times "unmasked" her. Here's the article, linked with nofollow so they won't get my Google-juice.

The "journalist" responsible for that piece of tosh is Anna Mikhailova who, according to a quick Google search, was recently a contributor to The Oxford Student. Presumably she recently graduated and got a job at the Times where she's desperate to make her mark. How better to do this than by revealing the identity of someone who has the audacity to write about her sex life under a pseudonym?

This sort of thing annoys me, and not just because The Girl is a fellow blogger. The question I find myself asking about this whole thing is "Why?" What was the point of this exercise? It's not like we're talking about some major literary scandal. The book is published by Ebury for crying out loud! As anyone in the book trade will tell you Ebury are the division of Random House who publish the novelty books, some of which are quite good but most of which will be out of print in a year. They seek out the hot trends and get them into print with as much hype as possible and they do a mean trade in Xmas stocking fillers. If an Ebury book gets a long shelf life it's by accident rather than design. Most of the books by bloggers are published by imprints like Ebury which says lots about how the publishing industry feels about them. Blogs are cool. We'll milk this for a few months and then move on to something else. That's not to diminish the bloggers themselves, or to begrudge them their advances. I encourage them to milk this while it lasts. But unfortunately the rest of the world sees a book as something important and journalists doubly so.

What's most irritating about this is the outing adds nothing whatsoever to the picture of The Girl. All the important details (such as her work in the film industry) were already alluded to in the blog and the name means absolutely nothing. Mikhailova's research has brought nothing new to the table. All she's done is complicate the life of someone who really didn't deserve it and if The Girl stops writing in the way she has I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Which is really my point. We have, over the last few years, seen an explosion of non-professional people taking to the writing game, not to mention photographers, musicians and all manner of creative endeavors. Some of them are getting attention from the professional world and that attention isn't always welcome. There's a reason why people reject the "mainstream media" and it's not that it's blinkered or biased. It's that it's fundamentally fucked on so many levels. You could say when The Girl signed her book deal she should have expected this to happen but why is that an excuse?

So congratulations, Anna Mikhailova. You've got your first scalp. I hope your employers are happy with your work and that you get to ruin the lives of many more. Or perhaps you might do some investigative research into what journalism is supposed to be about and do something useful with your skills.

And if you find someone hiding in your garden waiting to take candid photos of you and repeatedly phoning you to find out personal details which they'll then make public...

Okay, I've only just started playing with Vox so these will be more negative than positive, and on the whole kinda niggly. Also remember Vox is still in "preview" so things I'm missing might turn up later.

No HTML option. Entries posted with HTML, such as links and bold, will be displayed as raw code. You have to put in hyperlinks and styles within the Compose window by clicking on buttons. The arguments for this being a good thing are reasonable but it'd be nice to have the option to switch to raw HTML (as I believe Blogger does), if only so I can run the post through an external spell checker. Also that Compose page is kinda annoying, but then I'm used to something different.

Tags on blog posts - I'm really not convinced by this. I get where it's coming from but its going to take a bit of getting used to. Tags are for photos, because photos don't have words. Blog posts already have words.

[This Is Good] - If I was still participating in the FleePlii community then I might be pissed off about Andre letting this go mainstream, but I haven't been in there for years and, to be honest, every blog system should have this sort of thing by default.

Notifications - As far as I can see there's no way to get external notifications of comments posted and the like. LiveJournal emails this sort of thing. I expect this to come. [Later: They do send email notifications of comments - they just went into my spam folder, which is not Vox's fault of course.]

Icon - Kinda confusing upload system. I had to load it into my photo library which seemed like unnecessary duplication.

Privacy - This was my main reason for trying out Vox - the desire to write in varying degrees of privacy and to limit who could comment on my writings. Currently you can specify Neighbours, Friends and Family in the same way as Flickr does. I was kinda hoping for a more granular system whereby you could put people into groups and then allow those groups to read certain posts. So, for example, person A could be in my Comics Chums group and my Birmingham Chums group while person B would just be in the Comics group. In real life I have many different social groups to whom I communicate in different ways and it'd be cool if this could be reflected on Vox.

Design - Ooh, I really want to tweak the blog design. Yes, this is in my nature but remember user-customization is cited as one of the main reasons for MySpace's success. The problem with a limited selection is the plain ones all look the same and the decorated ones are too specific. There must be a middle ground between rigid formality and the chaos of MySpace. To be honest I'd be happy with a really basic layout if I can't do anything with it.

Feeds - It might seem obvious, but the RSS feed for Vox blogs doesn't include private posts. But LiveJournal allows you to read Friends Only posts via RSS with a little bit of hackery (use http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/journal/data/rss?auth=digest) so it shouldn't be too hard to port this over.

Flickr Integration - I'm assuming the ability to post from inside Flickr will come in time.

Adverts - This could be the killer for me. They're just Google ads but they feel really intrusive and I'm sure I'll get sick of seeing Ashton Kutcher's bloody name every time I look at my blog. This'll be the first time I've considered using AdBlock on Google ads. At least they're at the bottom of the page though.

At the end of the day most of these issues stem from my having had complete and total control over my blogging experience and Vox is the polar opposite of that. It's my intention to use Vox for a type of writing I don't normally do (thanks to this blog being wide open to the world). Right now there doesn't seem to be much difference between it and LJ, but since they're both owned by Six Apart I can't imagine this staying that way.

One thing that really struck me was how it felt like Flickr For Words but in a good way. I'd like to see more Flickry features like being able to add posts to groups (yes you can do this with tags but it's hard to build a community around tags) and so on. One of the motivations for Vox seems to be to reclaim that spirit of community that existed in the old days of blogging before it all went wanky after 9/11. Mimicing Flickr would pretty much achieve that.

I'm going to stick with Vox at least until it launches properly (if anything launches properly these days...) but you won't be able to read most of what I've written unless I add you to my network, which I might not do, and you have to be in Vox to begin with which is kinda hard right now. It's nothing personal!

Doing that run of posts, especially after a bit of a drought this week, has given me one of my silly ideas: 24 Hour Blogging, riffing off Scott McCloud's 24 Hour Comic exercise, in which a cartoonist creates a full comic from scratch in one day the idea is simply to write 24 posts over 24 hours.

However, these posts must be original writing of a standard equivalent to that which the blogger is usually known, so no cut-n-paste, no linkloggery, no memes and no stream of consciousness. It has to be good. No planning is allowed and no storing of ideas in the preceding days. Just get up in the morning and write until you drop. I reckon a 1000 word minimum per post would be a good benchmark.

It's not meant to be an inclusive thing - more an exercise for people like me who've been known to spend 6 hours crafting a post which garners 1 comment (usually followed by an off the cuff blurting about tea which everyone loves...). The idea is to loosen up, get rid of the preciousness and improve.

Of course I would come up with this idea when I'm in the middle of some steady employment...

If you skim read this and intend to leave a comment, bear in mind I'm not talking about you. Probably.

I've been checking out the Guardian's new Comment is Free blog-portal-thing and generally speaking I'm impressed. While it's good to see the traditional Comment sections of paper reproduced as blog content it's also nice to see the regular contributors to the paper writing in what I suppose we could call a "blogging voice", slightly more informal and off the cuff.

The name of the blog comes from a quote by C. P. Scott, editor of the paper from 1872 to 1929. "Comment is free but facts are sacred", which is a nice piece of brain food if ever there was one and quite pertinant to our modern era of blogging.

In newspapers "Comment" is an important area of the publication, putting the day's news into context and laying out the paper's point of view. In blogging, however, comments are what follow on from the main content, are open to pretty much everyone don't represent the blogger's opinions. If you like, Blogging is giving a speech or telling a story and comments are opening things up to the floor afterwards.

There's a reason why most blogs with large readerships turn off comments. People who comment on widely read blogs are inherently fucking stupid jerks who should be shot. On smaller blogs this is not such a problem as they'll invariably have some kind of relationship with the blogger, even if it's as tenuous as having followed a link from another blog, but even here it can go wrong. I find myself doing it - skim reading a blog post and coming up with some stupid opinion about it which, when I go back and re-read the thing I'm supposed to be responding to, turns out to be completely irrelevant. This is the main reason I very rarely leave comments.

Comment is Free has comments enabled and will eventually expand to allow commenting on every relevant article in the paper. This is a brave and noble experiment but, by the gods, have you ever read through a popular comment thread on their blogs?

One of the most mind-warping things is that some commenters think they have rights. As someone's who's managed a comment-enabled blog for a few years, even at my meagre level, this is a patently absurd idea. Rights? Ha! You're a guest in my house. Certainly, I invite you in and welcome your company, but if you start pissing up the walls and pouring tea on my cat then you're out, matey. One of the amusing aspects of that time the band I slagged off found the post was the fact that none of them realised I could delete their rantings and close down the comments. That I left them there meant I felt I'd won. This blog is not the public sphere. It's mine. I control it in every way. You have no rights.

Over on the Guardian blogs (and countless other places like it) I wonder, do those muppets who rant and rave really think that their comments really hold any weight? Why on earth do they do it?

I don't think enabling comments is a bad thing, per se. I have them here and enjoy the conversations that happen, because they are conversations between myself and a manageable number of people who come here often. This is a good thing and I'm dead chuffed I've been able to nurture it over the years. It's like you've come over and we're having a nice chat in the kitchen.

Comments on the big sites, though, is like someone talking from a balcony and asking for feedback from a crowd of thousands. If there is anyone out there with something pertinent to say they're going to be drowned out. It's probably the potential audience that makes them do it. Sure, they can go to Blogger and respond to the articles on their own blog but no-one will read them, at least not at first. If you're writing about current events building up an audience is fucking hard so it's easier to try your luck in the comment sections along with everyone else. But the nature of people who can't be arsed to do things the hard way or accept that their opinions are nothing new is they very rarely write anything of worth.

There are many lessons here, I think. One of them is that a large audience isn't conducive to a conversation. It's actually the antithesis of a conversation, and blogs, the majority of blogs, are a form of conversation. You can't have a conversation with a major national newspaper.

Just to reiterate, I like Comment is Free a lot. It looks like becoming one of the few sites I'll bookmark and dip into for a bite of thought and opinion. But the comments? Yeurch!

Those who know me, especially those within comics, will probably be aware that the BugPowder website has been something of an albatross around my neck for the last couple of years. BugPowder is, amongst other things, a weblog for the UK small press comics community, of which I have been a relatively major player at various points over the last 15 years. Originally BugPowder was a mail order service running from 1996 to 2000 and the site was intended to be an online shop along these lines but that never transpired and then Blogger came along. Since then my involvement with the scene has waxed and waned. Sometimes I'm incredibly enthusiastic, other times I really couldn't care, but BugPowder was always sitting there, regardless of my levels of interest, demanding to be updated. Since 2001 I've gotten other people involved but, understandably, they often had their own projects on the go which required their attention. And seeing as when I'd started BugPowder it was as my own thing rather than joining up with someone more established at the time, this made sense. Recently I started thinking about grooming people to take over but the one guy who looked like he was a good candidate went off to become a Wikipedia Admin before I twigged, which was bloody typical.

So here I am with a site I feel obliged to look after but really don't have a huge amount of interest in doing so. I recently put out a call for new contributors and when it appeared that one of them a) was posting a lot of stuff, b) was relatively new to the scene, c) appeared to be likely to stick around for a while, d) didn't appear to have any other major projects on the go and e) wasn't stupid (not that anyone else posting is stupid, but it's an important criteria) I consulted with my man Jez and made the offer.

From this day on Matthew Badham owns BugPowder.

Which is a kinda weird statement because technically Jez owns the site because he pays for it and I own the name in the sense that most small pressers of a certain age think of me as "BugPowder Pete" and will no doubt continue to do so.

But Matthew's running the site now. It's his responsibility. Not mine.

An analogy I used when talking to Matthew was how old fanzines in the 70s and 80s, such as Fantasy Advertiser, would change hands but retain a list in the masthead of "Editors Emeritus" - those who used to run the zine but have now moved on. I'm now the Webmaster Emeritus of BugPowder, available for sage advice and the occasional contribution but with no real say in how it develops. And from Matthew's point of view he has a site with a good pedigree which he can keep running as it is and/or can develop into whatever he wants, with whoever he wants. And that's the essential, exciting part of all this. I've always been aware that BugPowder has an enormous potential to grow and develop into a really useful resource if only I gave enough of a shit about it to do so.

The way we're going to run this is Matthew will become the public face of BugPowder (once I get around to editing the About sections of the site) and any queries will go to him. Initially he won't know what to do with them so he'll come to me and I'll explain it but eventually he'll be able to run everything on his own with no hand-holding, probably around the time of the Caption convention in August, and we'll do the final hand-over.

Interestingly I don't know much about Matthew. He wrote a long article about small press comics in the Judge Dredd Megazine recently which showed he knew his stuff, and I think he's connected with the Engine Comics guys on some level, which is good as Barry Renshaw is, from my perspective, one of the key movers on the scene these days. But he's not part of my extended "gang", and that's a good thing. New blood and all that.

As for me, I'm free!

This is probably more revolutionary that you care about but Ben Hammersley has stopped using Movable Type for his blog. He's moved to iWeb, the Apple app for making web pages with the minimal of effort. What's interesting is that Ben is no slouch when it comes to blogging - he's responsible for the current implemetation of blogs on the Guardian site (powered by MT) and has written a book on RSS. He's one of the people I've looked to regarding what's going on it blogging over the years, and he's moved to Apple's version of FrontPage for his personal site. Web standards and semantic markup be damned. What's that all about?

As he explains in these two posts, he's having fun. iWeb allows him to play about with typesetting and layouts that a template-driven site with strict validation won't allow. The text in that second post is just a big PNG image for heaven's sake! But the thing is, it looks really good. Each post is crafted as a unique object where photography, type and content work together. (And yes, there's still an RSS feed.)

Last year I designed a site for my mate Dave to host the trailers for his short movie. Being a professional Photoshop user with a good design sense he sent me the designs as fully realised screenshots which I tortuously adapted into reasonably compliant markup. It was a pain in the arse for both him and me but we got there in the end. A month ago he got hold of a copy of iWeb, threw together a new site in a couple of days and uploaded it. And he enjoyed the experience. He now has a site that looks exactly how he wants it to without having to involve a 3rd party "expert" who repeatedly tells him that sort of thing can't be done "properly".

Have you noticed how weblogs all look the same these days? Not the Blogger ones with the standard templates - the so-called A-list blogs. They're all very simple column layouts with minimal clutter and a lot of white. Now, simple is good and very hard to get right, but I suspect there's another reason. If you want to do anything other than the basic text-document layout with CSS it's a monumental pain in the arse and when you get it right nobody notices. So why bother?

As it happens I still like playing about with raw HTML and CSS occasionally. I'm slowly working on a new blog at the moment based on some designs by a friend of mine and it's going to be pretty much standards based. And this blog is going to stay with MT for the forseable future because I like it. But I'm a pseudo-expert, a dilettante who likes getting under the hood and understands the limits. Normal people don't get that. They want it to look the way they want it to look and bollocks to the "right way".

And, if I'm honest, that saying bollocks is a damn good thing. All the great leaps in design (and granted a whole heap of messy shit) came from someone saying bollocks to the right way. There wasn't a standards council for the wild world of zines back in the day and for good reason - every zine was a unique object from the words inside to the way it was stapled it represented the person who made it. "You can't do this, you can't do that." If web standards suit what you want to achieve with your internet presence then use them, but if they don't then fuck 'em.

Which is one of the reasons I'm no longer doing web design for hire. The way I see it, if your content is good enough it does't matter what the layout looks like so get over to Blogger or LiveJournal. And if the design is that important to you then Do It Yourself. Either learn the hard stuff or get iWeb or some other point-and-click design package and get on with it.

I wrote something similar on this topic last year

While I'm on the subject of teeny things that irk me in blogging (and I'll keep it brief this time)...

Feedburner...

Lovely service, used it myself for a couple of projects and highly recommend it, but they do have this annoying option to satisfy the stats junkies. You can use Feedburner to track how many people are subscribed to your feed, which is fine, but you can also track how many people click from your feed to your actual site. Why you'd want to know this I have no idea, but they do it like this.

Say your permalink looks like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/06/02/17/blog_entry.html

Feedburner can replace it with this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourID?m=123

Then whenever that link is clicked on Feedburner makes a note and redirects the clicker to the correct URL. Simple.

The problem is this isn't at all accurate, but not because of anything Feedburner does. When I post a link that I found on your feed I'll credit it with a (via) link, but I cannot be arsed to go the extra mile and find the real URL for your post. I'll just simply copy the URL that appears in my feed reader and paste it into my blog, just like I would with every other feed. Then when someone clicks on the link to your blog Feedburner assumes they've come from the feed and does a +1 to your stats. Except they didn't. They came from my site though you wouldn't know that because Feedburner is sitting in the way. And I'm sure I'm not the only blogger to do this.

Also, these are not really future proof. I'd imagine the feedburner URLs aren't intended to last for years so there's a significant chance they'll change the format at some point, or you'll change your ID, or reset the count or something. Then all those links scattered around the web are broken. And not just broken in the sense that they'll go to your site and produce a 404 not found, but broken in that they'll go nowhere near your site.

So if you're that concerned about your stats be aware that this service is a false god. And if anyone can explain the advantage of knowing how many people brought up your post in their browser when the full post is already in the feed I'd love to know.

End of the world? No. Mildly irritating? Yes. Therefore worthy of blogging.

Sorry, not as brief as I'd hoped. Normal service will now resume.

Teeny little blogging related moan. Attribution for links is a good thing. It shows humility and gives credit to the person who showed you the link to begin with. An absence of attribution implies that you found the link yourself and if that's not true then you accrue bad karma. (The exception being those links that spread so fast you can't narrow it down to one or two people.)

But that's not my moan.

The other use of attribution is it gives your readers a chance to check out the source of your link where they may find further information on that topic or other links of interest. For example, if you found the link on MetaFilter there's a good chance the discussion there will be of interest.

So here, finally, is my moan.

For the love of all that may or may not be holy depending on your degree of faith in holy things, please link to the actual post! Saying you got the link from MeFi, or Boing Boing, or some other uber-blog site that has 100 posts a day, but merely linking to the home page is next to useless. It's like:

"Do you like my new scarf?"

"Oh, that's nice. I'd like a scarf like that."

"Yeah, I got it from a shop in Oxford St"

"Which shop?"

"Not telling."

"WTF?"

"That's right. Despite drawing your attention to the scarf I'm going to force you to visit every shop in Oxford St that might or might not sell scarfs should you want to get one of your own, and I'm not doing this out of malice. Actually I've no idea why I'm doing this."

Moan over.

The amusing thing about that Tumble/Rambleblog entry was the reaction on a couple of blogs, namely Jamie and Marv, expressing confusion that this apparently new thing was, well, it was just blogging, the sort of blogging they and to be honest most people do. Which is quite understandable but you have to bear one important thing in mind.

The sort of people, and I include myself in this category, who get excited about this sort of thing are, generally speaking, tossers. In fact the Americans have a term for it: "circle jerking", which I believe is the practice of a bunch of blokes sitting in a circle getting so excited about something that they all have to masturbate furiously. It's not a nice image, I grant you, especially as we're talking about blogging here. So you should always remember that when people who have been blogging for a long time, usually about blogging, talk about blogging, they can frequently be ignored, or at least patted on the head in a condescending manner.

What the whole Tumbleblog thing is really about is actually quite simple. These people, when they started out on their wildly successful blogging careers, just posted a load of shit on their blogs like everyone else. But then this great illusion of weblogs being the next big thing, storming the barricades of respectable society with their revolutionary new ways (boy, that does sound familiar [cough]comicscirca1989...) they began to write "properly" treating their blogs as publications, taking great care over what they wrote and giving everything proper titles with their complicated content management systems and so on. And now they look back on those freewheeling days of freedom to just write rubbish with nostalgic dewey eyes. If only they could just write whatever they wanted without worrying what their readership (read: ego) thinks.

But as long as they clearly delineate between their grown up sensible blog and this random rambling then they can! And because they've spent the last five or so years living in the neologism garden they shall give it a new name and all will be well.

The rest of you, just carry on as before. Nothing to see here.

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to start up my Fartleblog or whatever but I have been practicing. Check out the tumble-quality of these three:

Another thought on the sw**ring thing that always bugs me (if you're going to swear then fucking swear already!). Sometimes putting asterisks in your curse can be acceptable when you want to give the impression of muttering it under your breath in exasperation.

Fireworks are here again but they're not bothering me this year. Last year they were going off in my neighbours gardens and exploding outside my window shocking the shit out me. This year they're in the distance and no bother at all. Ah, suburbia, how I don't miss you...

I was once asked what the indications were of being "grown up" and a new one came to me today - when your parents reach sixty years of age. Paternally this happens to me next month (7th Nov if anyone wants to send a card) with Maternally following next September. They will have free bus passes. This is odd. (This indicator only works if your parents had you in their 20s, I feel.)

Tumblelogs are, apparently, stream of conscious blogs where folks unload their brains without worrying about formatting, links, or any of the structured stuff that makes up your traditional blog. I've been thinking of starting one of these for a little while now (so I'm somewhat annoyed, in that petty pissing-up-the-wall way, to see them breaking out like this) and the only thing holding me back was how the hell I would squeeze yet another column onto the page. That and that most of my brain-fart ideas come to me while on the bike or in the kitchen, never when actually on the computer.

Quite often I'll start a post that never makes it on here because once I've sat down and thought it through with a few Google searches I realise that I'm not saying anything new and that my argument or observation is cliched, pointless and glib. Which is all well and good but I think there's a place for the cliched, pointless and glib because it gets you thinking. A good example would be how Wikipedia considers bad edits to be a good thing because they'll prompt someone to correct them resulting in an improved article. In the blogging context if I spout off some ill-thought out rubbish about something you haven't really thought about it might make you think about why I'm wrong.

It would also balance out my blogging activity nicely. The Linklog reaches out, the Weblog is my public face while the Tumblelog reaches in to the mass of ideas and thoughts bimbling around my brain. Kind of an Id, Ego and Superego approach to blogging.

(naturally having thought about it for a while I don't like the term "tumblelog" preferring my own coinage "rambleblog" but that's by the by as any term will be somewhat stupid.)

So, once I figure out a way to record this stuff and then to display it...

The comment spam menace seems to be exploding like a fleshy Japanese Anime monster created by government scientists that goes out of control and consumes Tokyo, or something. I've noticed a number of Blogger blogs complaining about it for the first time, which is rather worrying as you'd think Blogger, being a centralised service run by Google, would have some rather hefty defenses. A number of the bloggers seem quaintly confused as to why they're getting comments pushing utterly irrelevant things. in short, it's not personal. The spammers don't care about you - they're just looking to improve their ranking within Google by putting links on your site.

The deeply tragic thing about this is it doesn't work. All centralised blogging platforms (such as Blogger, LiveJournal and Typepad) and anyone using a reasonably up-to-date version of Movable Type or Wordpress have rel="nofollow" implemented which very simply tells Google and Yahoo "I don't necessarily trust any links in my comments so don't give them any pagerank". On top of this the search engines look out for patterns of link spamming and adjust accordingly. It's utterly pointless.

And yet they're still at it. To put things into perspective I'm currently getting hit by comment spams at least every 1-5 minutes. I'm probably getting hit even more than that since I only know about the ones that make it through the first barrier. And thanks to this deluge a few of them, maybe one or two each day, are getting all the way through to the site itself, which is fucking annoying as I thought I'd gotten that fixed.

This also means that anyone posting a link-heavy comment to my blog risks it being moderated or worse considered junk. If it's moderated then there's a chance I'll find it but if it's junked with all the spam then it's pretty much lost for good. So don't post link-heavy comments, or email me when you do.

Ever since that day long ago when someone looked at a website that had entries organized in list form added to sequentially that recorded places online that the creator of said site had found interesting interspersed with wry observations and anecdotes about their life and declared that this was a log of the web, or weblog, or what the hell, let's call it a blog, many has sighed and cursed that someone for coming up with such a stupid name. Much in the way comics aficionados curse one Igor Goldkind for, in the early 1990s as publicity bod for Fleetway, popularising the term "graphic novel" to describe something that, while certainly graphic, was not really a novel. But we got used to it, and it was certainly better than the using the term "comic" to describe Maus, at least to civilians.

But I, as ever, digress. The main criticism I've seen against the word blog was that it was an ugly word, a grotesque utterance that just sounded silly. As someone who quite liked the earthy clunk of the word I never really understood this until I realised most of the people expressing this distaste were Americans and accents don't travel well online. To them a blog is a "blaaawwwg" so to blog is somewhat akin to what a student does after a rather hectic party. You can see their point.

I think the word can be reclaimed but only once the ex-colonials learn how to say it properly. Of course I have no idea how to phonetically write the word "blog" so that the Yanks don't see it as "blaaaawwwg". I would say it rhymes with "clog" but I can't be sure they don't pronounce that "claawwwg". So here, then, is an audio guide: How to say "blog", a teeny little mp3 that will hopefully have a disproportionate effect.

Of course correct pronunciation doesn't excuse use of the word "blogosphere", or "blaaawwwggaaaawwwsppaaaaaiiioorrr" as I fear it's probably more commonly known over there.

This might already exist but if it doesn't it really needs to.

Here's the situation. I have friends who use LiveJournal for their blogging. I have an LJ account I use to comment on there but I don't use it for posting or reading, preferring to use the RSS feeds that every journal and community pumps out and do all my blogworld reading in one place.

Here's the problem. LiveJournal users tend to use the "friends only" function a fair bit, usually for their more interesting posts. I'm able to read these thanks to my LJ account being "friended" but I never do because I have no clue as to when these hidden secret posts have been posted.

Here's what I need: Some way of getting notification that a friends only post has been posted. I don't need the whole post, just a short slug telling me it's there. Ideally this would be within the normal journal feed. Then I can click through and not miss all the juicy stuff.

Get to work, Lazyweb. Or LiveJournal. Or both.

I'm still not 100% what my point was in the last post, but I know for sure it wasn't to try and get reassurance and sympathy from my readers. But that's what I got in the comments and some quite long emails. And thank you for that, especially those new-to-me folk I had no idea were reading it.

For the record I really wouldn't want to be hugely popular. There's a distinct advantage to being lost in the mire of D-Z list blogs - you can write about what you like with no danger of becoming self-conscious. It doesn't bother me that I'm not on those lists. It really doesn't. I don't care because I get more than enough satisfaction from what I do, as I'm sure does everyone on those lists. If we didn't then we'd stop, popular or not.

I suppose the point was that these stats are not a reflection of the individual looking at them, and given that the internet is overwhelmingly experienced on an individual basis, that personal experience is way more important that an aggregation.

Everyone who comes here (or anywhere) takes something different from it, mixes it up with their other experiences on and offline and produces a unique reaction. If you want proof of this check out some of the more schizophrenic-seeming comments people leave.

And of course you can aggregate the stats and come up with generalisations about the character of the average blog poster or reader but I don't find that very interesting. I'd be more interested in the individual case study, but that's much harder to get hold of.

Okay, time to move on. I'm sure you're all bursting to hear all about Bournville and South Birmingham generally, but before I do Matt Haughey commented on my blog! W00t! Oh. It was an accident. Now that was funny!

I'm writing this after a few beers mainly because I know I won't write it when sober and that doesn't mean it's anything particularly soul exposing - I've been at this game long enough to know when not to blog when drunk. No, this is tedious meta stuff that my sober self would normally just let slide by like the easy going chap he is, but walking back from the taxi (always get out of the taxi with a fifteen minute walk ahead of you - it gives you a chance to think and not be quite so rowdy when you get in, plus you save a good 50p of so) it occurred to me that I need to address this. It also occurred to me that I wouldn't address it tomorrow and that I'm not so drunk that my sober self will hate me in the morning. Although he'll no doubt correct any obvious typos that occur.

Background first. A week or so ago the Blogebrity list appeared on the scene, attempting to give some substance to the "A-list" joke that has been going around blog-land since there were enough blogs to justify such a concept. I took a look and, after seeing I wasn't on it (yes, of course I checked), gave it no more thought. Then the lovely Mike of Troubled Diva put together a list based on Technorati data detailing the most linked UK weblogs. Again, I wasn't listed. About now you might be thinking I'm about to indulge in some sour grapes, given that I've been blogging now for five fucking years and have never even scraped one of these lists, but I'm not. Simply put I look at these lists and I don't recognise a good half of the blogs on there, if that. And I've been paying attention. I'm interested in blogging and all that it can do, yet I'm not aware of a significant chunk of what are apparently the major forces in this scene.

And I'm putting my ego to one side here. Really. When I was walking back home tonight I looked at my silhouette on the pavement, a skinny bloke with his head misshaped by his hooded top, and was struck by my insignificance. And, since this might be taken out of context, I should add this wasn't some major revelation that put me in my place. I'm just some guy, like every other blogger out there (guy in the non-gender-specific sense).

The fact is that these things are wonderfully relative. On the same day the Blogebrity list appeared Andy Luke posted this somewhat embarrassing endorsement of me. I was going to just let it go, but it illustrates a point really nicely. As far as Andy's concerned I'm as A-list as it gets. While I might be looking to Andy Baio and Matt Haughey for inspiration, Andy's looking to me. That doesn't mean Andy is living in some closeted world where he doesn't know what other great stuff is out there, no matter how much I might think so. As far as he's concerned, I'm a major source for him online, and for him and, as far as I know a number of other folk, that's a good thing.

So what's my point? Ah, I dunno. Am I trying to strike some kind of balance on the whole blog popularity thing while also being a teeny bit pissed off that after five fucking years I still don't get to play with the big boys, even though I've never bothered to even audition for that league? Yes, there is an element of that - I am human after all - but there's something else, something that's beyond the A-list bollocks and the linky-lurve stuff.

Remember that I look at these lists and don't recognise most of the blogs on them. I've always been of the belief that there isn't a single "blogosphere". There are as many blogsopheres as there are bloggers, all overlapping and changing every time someone logs on and sticks a link on their site. You can aggregate them and come up with statistics and yes, some will be more influential than others, but for each individual those stats don't mean shit. It's not an isolationist thing, more an illustration of how wonderful this whole bloggernet environment is. A good blogger is someone who points you to things you hadn't considered before, not just links but ideas, notions and experiences. And that blogger does not function alone. By the very nature of the medium they are getting links, idea, notions and experiences from others who in turn are doing the same thing, and those others can be on or off line.

Yes, I do get a lot of my stuff from the usual places, but I suspect what I consider "the usual places" might not apply to others who are looking in different directions. And that, as I start to sober up and think it might be a good idea to get to bed before I start to regret writing this and delete it before posting, is probably my point. Everyone I link to is, at that moment, "A-list" in my book. That individual link is, at that time, more important than anything else. It will fade, probably quite quickly, but when I saw it it was the most important thing, something that I felt the need to share with others.

And that's possibly why I keep hacking away at this even though I know I'll never reach the glory heights of blog stardom. If I can give one or five or ten or fifty or a hundred people something interesting to read or some neat link to follow then my job is done. The fact that I'm not alone in doing this makes it all worthwhile.

Right, time for bed. If this has turned out to be just a drunken rant of stupidity them my apologies.

(I couldn't squeeze it in relevantly but Meg's recent post Nostalgia isn't what it used to be is worth a read since she did used to be the Queen of the UK blog scene back in the day. Like I say, not strictly relevant but it did get me thinking...)

[Update: A sober reflection]

I just installed Movable Type on my desktop Mac using this guide (there's also one for Tiger but I won't be getting that for a while) and while it was a, shall we say, somewhat interesting experience it has thrown up an unexpected thing. I was expecting this local installation would be most useful for designing new MT powered sites without the need to connect to a remote server and while I probably will use it for this the primary use looks to be a bit more vital.

As anyone who's lived or worked with me knows, I'm not desperately good at filing things. My physical system tends to be a big pile of papers, maybe two piles, sorted in the order in which things were put on them. It's more a sedimentary system requiring an archeological dig to find stuff. On my computer I tend to file stuff in the same way, throwing everything in the Documents folder and leaving it there until it gets to the stage where there's too much stuff so I create a subfolder called "old stuff", move everything in there and start again. Same goes for my email inbox, though thanks to filtering this isn't really an issue. (Books and GNs do tend to be sorted, but this is more a zen thing, a hangover from the bookselling days.)

So far this system has served me well because I always know exactly where something is. It's in the pile. Where in the pile might take a bit of time, but it's definitely there. However, I'm now on the cusp of running my own company and in the process of doing brand new things like keeping accounts and invoicing people I feel this need to be a little more organised.

Now, what part of my life is incredibly well organised? Well, my Weblog has 1,689 and counting entries spanning five years, sorted by date and listed in numerous categories as well as being searchable and I often search through the 1,628 and counting entries posted to the Linklog to find that resource that seemed interesting at the time and is now vitally useful. The only problem is it's been created for an outside audience. I post things that I think might be of interest to others. I also don't post things I don't want others to know about.

Most importantly, blogging now comes naturally to me. I'm not going to keep to a new system of recording and filing but I can blog. And so that's what I'm doing - keeping a local blog of all the jobs I do for other people and all the tedious little things I do that are relevant to me and my business but not to you, all sorted by date, neatly categorised and fully searchable. No notebooks, no folders, no printouts, just a nice fat database with an interface I'm 100% comfortable with.

I should have done this ages ago.

[Update: I'd been toying with using the excellent Scrapbook Firefox extension to record stages in page design that would otherwise be lost and with this new blog now have the motivation to do so. It took a little wrangling (setting the data directory to within the localhost server) and it's not perfect but already I'm finding new ways to sort and file stuff. Shame I can't link to anything outside the WebServer directory.. unless someone knows a trick...]

[Another Update: Obviously static pages load quicker from your own hard drive than they do flying over the internet, but it's worth noting that pages that are dynamically generated do so significantly slower than on a hosted server. Because I couldn't get MySQL set up my pages are all static and I think I'll be keeping them that way.]

When I was younger, growing up in Croydon during the late 80s, I didn't feel particularly patriotic. As ever the reasons are complicated by the naive idiocy of youth along with a hefty dose of nihilism but one of the main reasons, or at least the reason that still stands up to scrutiny, was that people I didn't like tended to be patriotic, ergo I wasn't patriotic. Thatcher covered herself in the Union Jack for a start, and then there were footballs fans. There wasn't some complicated socio-political thing going on - I didn't like the Tories and I didn't like football. Since the teenage way of expressing your distaste with something is to reject everything everything associated with it, I rejected patriotism.

Then when I was 16 I went to the States to visit my dad for the first time in years (messy divorce, ask me another time) and I remember being very aware of my Britishness, which isn't hard as Americans, and particularly Texans in my experience, are endlessly fascinated by us. As, I should add, are we of them. But anyway, I started noticing things about me, things I liked and things I believed in, that could only be explained by the country in which I grew up. Did this make me patriotic? Is there any real difference between identifying with things this country had infused me with and loving this country?

Skip forwards a fair number of years and bring the internet into play. Since it's inherently untrustworthy and full of errors, one has to develop a system of filtering in order to get the most out of it. Who has written this? Who linked to it? Who links to the person who linked to it? What else do they write about? What communities to they belong to? Why should I listen to them?

Another way of sorting it all is to make snap judgments based on appearances, just like in the real world. I'm guessing the what we're looking for when we do this is someone who is kinda like us. So since I'll be holding myself in very high regard when judging others I'll be looking to see if they write well in a slightly self-depreciating, witty and insightful manner, read what I consider good books and comics and listen to what I consider decent music, have their own domain rather than a LiveJournal or BlogSpot blog, have designed their site themselves rather than using a default template and, this is probably the most crucial point, provide a well constructed full RSS feed for their blog. And then they turn out to be a twat, but I digress.

Possibly the most important thing in this woefully inaccurate judgment game is where they're from. The areas of the web I tend to surf around tend to be dominated by Americans, usually from the States with a decent smattering of Canadians. When a British voice pops up on, say, MetaFilter, I notice it and pay attention. Conversely when I discover that some blogger I had assumed to be British due to their dry wit and effective use of sarcasm turns out to be a Yank I feel a palpable sense of disappointment. Similarly, when British bloggers win US-centric awards or get published by US based publishers I feel proud of them.

I even go so far as to consider some Americans honorary Brits which I'm sure would weird them out if they knew or cared about it. Maybe, if I'm not the only one who does this, we should start a directory or poll of honorary Brits from the western colonies? I wonder if they'd consider it a compliment or not...

It goes hopefully without saying that this is all very stupid of me. At the end of the day it doesn't make any difference where someone is from as long as what they're doing is good in some way. The beauty of the net is that I can have a communication with someone on the other side of the planet as easily as I can with someone down the road. So why, even though I know it's idiotic, do I do this? Could it be the net has made me more patriotic than I would have been otherwise? Does exposure to a wider range of "others" make you more protective towards those who are more like you? All I'm doing is whittling it all down to something manageable, but why on this criteria?

It's an interesting one, I think. Xenophobia and racism usually comes about in communities that don't have any contact with or understanding of people outside their self-contained and self-sufficient little world. This is different to becoming more aware of people outside your physical community, but how different? I don't think other cultures and countries are worthless but I do give people, ideas and notions from my country more weight and importance. How does this differ from the flag-waving BNP moron down the street?

What I think I'm driving at is can I be patriotic and not be a wanker?

Like the Queen, my weblog has two birthdays. Unlike the Queen I can never quite remember when the first one is. It's sometime around now, that I'm sure of. In March 2000 I'd just moved to London and was without a job for the first three weeks so I started keeping a diary, edited by hand and FTPed onto some free webspace from the ISP. One of my friends said I'd gone mad. Another replied saying I was just being Pete. Little did they know I'd stumbled upon the next great communications medium of our age. Go me.

In June I started using Blogger and which is when the archives you'll find on this site start. That's the blog's other birthday and the one I really celebrate. Okay, not celebrate. Mention.

Anyway, while vainly trying to find what the URL of this lost diary was so I might try and find it in the Wayback Machine I discovered that its Jez's blog's 5th birthday on March 20th, something he never mentions. I'm pretty sure Matthew started his around then too. All those were the days. What memories.

And so Jason Kottke has announced he's quit his job and is going to try blogging full time for the next year and, since he's like an A-List blogger with seven years service, those who care for such things sit up and take notice. It's an interesting one mainly because he's not really doing anything out of the ordinary with his weblog. It's about as tradblog as it gets. Most of the blogs that have made it "big" have done so because they've got a theme or a gimmick or they're replicating some "normal" media thing in a blogging format, but Jason's just blogging. Can he live off this? And if he does manage it, does it mean anything?

As usual I think it's been blown out of all proportion. And I can kinda speak from experience because I did a similar thing a couple of years ago. When I quit my job and went to live on a farm for three months I was taking quite a risk. Admittedly my situation at that moment meant the risk didn't feel that great but I needed help to do it, from friends driving the van that took my stuff into storage to my mate letting me borrow her room for a few weeks (thus saving rent money) to my family letting me stay with them rent-free when it was over, and many other favours small and large from many other people. I couldn't have done it without them and I'm eternally grateful. And it strikes me Jason is doing the same thing, only whereas my network was based around my chums in the real world, his is based around a blogging community. Note the a blogging community. That's important.

So often in this cyperspatial world of ours people confuse the pseudo-personal with the public. Understandably, because it's all so terribly blurry, but confuse it they do. Jason Kottke may be the uber-blogger with the most hits but even though he has millions of readers he still only has a limited number of actual friends, and it's those, the people who actually give a shit about whether he eats or not, who will help him achieve his goal. It might be nice to think that in our lovely interconnected internetty world strangers will help strangers, but they tend not to, at least not in any reliable monetary sense. But you can pretty much always rely on your friends to help and support you in your crazy decisions, because, without getting all soppy, that's what they're for.

So to the folk decrying Jason as an egotistical wanker, you're kinda missing the point. He's got this idea, that maybe the blogging medium can be something more than it current is without resorting to commercialisation, and he wants some help giving it a go, raising a pot of cash that will see him through it. And given the number of people he knows and, more importantly, has helped, who understand what he's doing and why, I think he'll reach that target.

I'm not one of them, I hasten to add, but if a good friend of mine had an interesting idea for a project that required he quit steady employment for a while, and if I could help in some way, chances are I would.

And that's kinda the problem with this experiment. If it works and he is able to support himself through patronage then it'll only prove that Jason Kottke is able to support himself through patronage. Yes, he'll have developed a system by which to do it, but in order for it to work for you you'll need to have a large established network of friends who understand what you're up to and are able and willing to help. Maybe what you need is years of consistent work in the medium and a reputation for being a nice guy who tends to give more than he takes. Maybe that's what the haters are so pissed off about.

Ask me a question.

Tell me to write about something specific.

Give me some focus.

Okay, where were we...

February 30th is [Dan Black]'s blog, one of the UK comics fandom types I'm chummy with. He recently left London after living there all his life. He sometimes posts up useful geeky stuff.

Assistant Blog is a nice example of a blog that was intended to do one thing but does lots of other things instead. Ostensibly it's to promote Jonathan's band, Assistant, but in actuality he just blogs about everything else, which naturally makes Assistant seem like a much more interesting band than they would have seemed otherwise.

Ghostwritten is by Andy, one of my old bookselling colleagues. When I set this up for him the idea was he'd write about books but of course that's not how it's panned out.

Smoking Women Are Sexy I stumbled across and linked to for a laugh, and then got all caught up in. Our man is a non-smoking teenager obsessed with women who smoke and he's a little puzzled by this so he's trying to figure it out while detailing his adventures in meeting girls who smoke. And, of course, taking photos of them without their knowledge. It's all very odd and yet incredibly human.

Blogjam is another old-school blog of consistent quality thanks to Fraser's wit born out through his brevity. Or something. Pretty much every post is a gem. Go read.

BeaucoupKevin is probably better known for his HULK'S DIARY THAT IS ON THE INTERNET which is always good but his own blog has caught me too. He's an unashamed mainstream comics geek but without the paranoid screamy arseness one often finds in that area. The kind of blogger you'd like to have a drink with sometime, only he's on the other side of the planet.

Billyworld. When you first encounter Billy's writing it's a bit overwhelming thanks to his verbosity and strange use of punctuation but stick with it, it's worth it. In-amongst the rambling stream of consciousness there's a lot of honest truth that never slips into mawkishness. And he posts, at length, every single day.

Pete The Trucker. I set Pete up with a blog after he left a couple of interesting comments here and it was a somewhat inspired notion if I say so myself. A self-identifying Middle Class Trucker, Pete drives around Europe delivering stuff. If you don't know why this can make for a good blog then you need to get out more.

Sparkwood and 21. I'd come across Britney before on FiPi and was surprised when I followed a random link and discovered her blog. Good writing from a 20-something waitress who is so much more than that.

Have You Been Out Today? is Dave Shelton's blog, yet another cartoonist chum of mine. What I really like about Dave's blog is not just the nice sketches and drawings he posts up but how he's really mastered that art of talking about the utterly mundane and effortlessly making it really interesting.

Fidget is by Matt Abbiss. Can you guess what Matt does? Yup, he's a cartoonist. I set him up with a blog a few years back and while it went a bit quiet last year he's been putting up some nice stuff in the last month.

73 Bus was part of some sociological study into the use of public transport, specifically busses, but has morphed into a more wide-focussed blog since the study ended. (I think that's right.) Public transport is always good blog fodder.

And that ends my four part selection of blogs I'm currently reading. If you're not on there, don't feel bad. If you are and I've managed to utterly misrepresent you in 20 words then my apologies.

But it's not over yet. You see, that was just the blogs I like where I consider the writers in some vague way to be peers or somesuch. Tomorrow I'll be running through some of the blogs where I get my links from. I'll try and articulate the difference a little less clumsily as well.

Me(ish) dot org, being the digital approximation of Meg Pickard, was another of the first blogs I ever saw back in 2000 (when it was called not-so-soft) and am still reading. It's about Meg. I find Meg interesting. You might too.

Nucleus is Garen Ewing's blog. He's another cartoonist, and a damn good one too. Mainly of interest if you're a fan of his work but like most of the creative types I know he's annoyingly multifaceted playing in bands (and teaching himself the banjo), appearing in plays, researching obscure-to-me areas of British military history (I think that's right) and knowing a lot about Charlie Chaplin. And he lives in East Grinstead with all the Scientologists.

Tinyjo is another rambleblog by someone from the UK small press comics scene, and there's nothing wrong with rambleblogs at all. Jo's also quite involved in LiveJournal support and has a habit of syndicating blogs she likes into LJ. If you've ever found yourself in a Friends list despite not having a LJ she's probably the culprit.

Kitsch In Sync is my housemate's LJ which I always find fascinating because it's strictly one part of her personality and quite unlike the Sam I know. Whether you'll find it fascinating is moot and not really the point when it comes down to it but hey, we're a two blog household. That's nice. [Update: Sam is somewhat horrified that I've linked to her and requests that you don't follow this link or else she'll go totally Friends Only or something.]

Troubled Diva. What can I say? Mike just rocks. Period.

Diamond Geezer also rocks. In fact if you're only going to read two utterly unique British blogs, these would do the job. So good I can't begin to describe them here.

Crinklybee. When he's not burbling on about football Jonathan gives good postage.

That'll do for now. I'm a bit tired and The Rotters' Club is on telly in a bit. Plus you had actual content from me already tonight. What more do you want?

Approximately another 20 or so to go.

Google are, by all accounts, making shedloads of money from their AdSense program, which is, of course, interesting since they've recently opened it up to a much wider base of websites. When it started I would never have been able to host AdSense ads but for the last few months I have been. And in January I passed the minimum revenue whereby I can get paid. (I decided not to get paid just yet though as they're "looking into" other ways of making payments other than the current US cheque (sorry, check) of which my bank would take a hearty chunk out of so I'm waiting for them to introduce PayPal or something, but I digress.)

What's not been so widely reported, though, is how Google are essentially profiting from bad search results, "bad" here being quite a lose term and not meant to apportion blame to Google exactly or to the users who don't fully understand how to search, but meaning where the page indicated as giving the information requested plainly doesn't.

I get a lot of traffic from Google, so much that it renders my stats pretty much useless. This happens partly because I have good PageRank (for my sins) but also because there are many many words on this site and the chances of those five words you searched for appearing somewhere scattered in one of my monthly archive pages is often quite high.

So, Google sends someone here and they're disappointed. Maybe they're intrigued by my sparkling wit and acrobatic verbiage, but they probably haven't solved whatever problem it was they were searching for. (Of course, sometimes they do, and that's great, but often they don't, and that's my point).

So, I have two classes of readers. The first is my regulars, you lot who actually read what I write most of the time and understand it within the context of the blog. If any of you have ever clicked on an AdSense ad in the archives I'd be surprised since they tend to be as detached from the spirit of this blog as can be. Then you have the rest, those thousands upon thousands who've come here by mistake, who didn't want to come here in the first place and are now wondering where to go next. They're the ones who, occasionally, click on the ads, and they're the ones who are generating a small amount of cash for me and a large amount of cash for Google.

I'd imagine the same process happens on the Google search pages themselves - if the results are useful then you're going to use them but if they're bobbins then you'll check out the sponsored links on the sidebar. Is it not interesting that when Google gets the job done properly it makes no money but when it fails it generates an income?

This isn't a criticism by any means. The ads are probably useful as a last resort, since they're generated using the same algorithm that sent that searcher to my site to begin with, and they're probably the only way of generating income for Google so I don't begrudge them at all. And I don't mind them aesthetically, unlike the ads on Yahoo which can only really be surfed using Adblock. I just think it's interesting.

Here's the second chunk of blogs I'm reading these days. I should point out that this won't be all of them (I follow 170 feeds at the moment) and they're chosen on a quite unscientific basis, so if yours isn't here please don't take offense. One criteria I might be using occasionally is that they're of interest to a wider audience, unearthing unknown-to-most gems if you like. Another criteria might be "here's when I rip off links from" though not so much with this list. And there will be many other criteria, some of which I won't be aware of myself. What I'm trying to avoid is that social-circle-bonding-incestuous thing and I'm far to old in the blogging tooth to get all "I link to you so you must love me". Whatever, click and enjoy.

Crawfish, the blog of Craig Smith, poet, musician, film maker and O'Reilly trade representative for the London region, which is how I met him. He was selling me a book on blogging, I told him I had a blog, the next time he came in he asked how my birthday went. And then he went and got his own. Also looks after Simon Armitage's site, which is cool.

Waffle is a group blog run and dominated by Reinder Dijkhuis, a Dutch cartoonist who has a comic on Modern Tales which I have to say I don't read. I dig his blog though.

Nugatory is the blog of Steve Miller, someone I met through UK comics fandom though he's probably more interesting to me (god that sounds self-important) for his music interests. He also blogs about music for Donewaiting as their British correspondent and should be podcasting soon.

Unified Review Theory by the brothers Cameron has slowed down of late but if you've not checked it out go dig through the archives. They review everything and were, to the best of my knowledge, the first people to do so.

Groc's Bloggette by Groc, another cartoonist, though perplexingly you wouldn't know it from the blog. Be sure and check out his photos too.

Gremlins Online, a relative newcomer to my faves, Marv is an archivist in the old-school style, cataloging old letters and diaries. When she moans about work it's fascinating.

Gareth's Journal. I can't for the life of me remember how I came across Gareth, but he's a bookseller (ex?) so that might be it, but also a comics readers, so maybe it was that. Doesn't matter. Tends to highlight interesting new books and links to articles and reviews about books. (This is not the Gareth who often comments on this blog, should you think otherwise.)

Wherever You Are, one of the old-school blogs from the 2000 club, Vaughan has a tendency to moan but in a highly entertaining manner. Currently he's doing some strange countdown thing which I haven't quite gotten my head around yet.

Finally for today, the Russell Davies empire of A Good Place For A Cup Of Tea And A Think and EggBaconChipsAndBeans, blogs which celebrate great cafes and make me wish I lived in London again, not because there aren't any decent cafes in Brum but Russells staked out all the London ones. To top it all this lovely man works in advertising! What were the odds!

I think I'm about half way now. More tomorrow.

It occurred to me that I hadn't updated the blogroll thingy on the main page for an age, but I'm slightly reluctant to update it because it'll only get old again. There are ways of making it dynamic and such but in the meanwhile I'm going to go through my Bloglines account and pick out some of the blogs I'm currently enjoying. I was going to do them all at once but cycling uphill into a gale rather took it out of me tonight so it'll be a serial. Hold me to that, okay?

Stupidmonsters, Gary Northfield's stripblog, has been somewhat quiet of late as he's been developing the excellent Derek's Diary, "the day to day ramblings of a sheep in a field". I think this could be the first instance of a Beano character having his own blog.

Robot Alert! is the blog of Matt Broersma, Birmingham-based-Texan-cartoonist-published-in-France and friend of mine. He usually blogs about robots.

Cleanskies, the LiveJournal of Jeremy Dennis, is always good value for words links and pics. A prime example of how a LJ can be consistently excellent and still intrinsically part of the LJ world. Jeremy has a new Blogger blog and does the wonderful Weekly Strip because she's also a cartoonist of note.

LinkMachineGo was one of the first weblogs I ever came across in 2000 and it's still exactly the same, one link a day, every day, which is a testament to Darren in some way or other.

PlasticBag was also one of the first blogs I saw and it's been weird watching Tom grow into something of a major player on the international blogging scene, hanging out with Cory and IMing Mena. More "supplementary links" than blog entries of late, but they're often good quality.

Thinkbottle is Jim McBride's stripblog. Nice blocky art and strips about pebbles.

The Coffee Grounds by my man Jez. Nuff said.

Hydragenic I raved about here. Still applies.

More to follow...

I've been involved in a fair few projects, firstly in the wacky world of small press comics and zines and for the last few years online. Some have been great, some have rapidly drifted into obscurity and some have taken on a life of their own. One thing that nearly always happened, though, is that they tend to fade. Usually this is not a problem. A good rule to work by is if no-one's interested any more then it's not worth continuing and it was fun while it lasted. (The problem occurs when you lose interested in something you've set up and everyone else still wants it to continue, but that's another story...)

The issue seems to be one of a low barrier to entry. When you have an idea and it's not hard to implement it, it seems seems silly not to at least try. The music, zine and web revolutions were revolutionary because suddenly pretty much anyone could put out stuff in ways that used to be controlled by market forces, which made everyone a little giddy. If you'd written a song you could record it in your bedroom, make up some cassettes, send them to a trading club and people would listen to it. If you'd written a story you could type it up, photocopy it as a zine, send it to a review zine and people would read it. And the internet is just self explanatory. What this meant for people like me was we saw all this anarchy and got even more giddy, thinking up ways of facilitating all this underground creative activity with reviews, mail order distros, conventions and the like. And again the internet has taken this to a previously unimaginable level.

However, as many if not most of the music, zines, comix and websites that were produced were ill-conceived and a bit crap, so were most of the ideas from people like me. Some of them were brilliant, of course, and without that low barrier to entry a lot of the more creative and interesting ones wouldn't have come about, and that's an important thing to remember about this lark. Most weblogs are not much cop, but without them you wouldn't have that gem you stumbled upon last week.

So today's question, in relation to the projects that people like me do, and with specific concentration on the web, is what to do with the failures. In the old days if a zine wasn't working you'd just stop publishing it. The back issues would be there, floating around in people's collections, but it wouldn't be part of the current scene. With the web, you have a crazy idea, get others all enthusiastic about it, implement it in a couple of days and within a month it's just sitting there because it wasn't actually all that great or useful and people, including you, have moved on to the next crazy idea. But the project is still there, still functional and working but out of date and mildly embarrassing, given the high expectations you had of it. To get rid of it would require actively doing so, and people will get upset about that, especially if they've contributed their time and energies to it. Turing it into an archive is a possibility but that would require a fair bit of work, and you're just not interested in it enough to be bothered. So it just sits there.

I'm not in any way suggesting these things aren't worth it. Like I said before, in order to get the really interesting stuff to stick you have to throw a lot of shit on the walls. I'm just wondering if there's a way to effectively build retirement plans into new projects, so when they slow down to a crawl it's not hard to mothball them without killing everything or leaving a faintly sad relic gathering cyber-dust.

After a year or so of dealing with its ever growing menace, I seem to have comment spam under control, at least for the time being. I'm still getting hit by the bastards, more and more each week, to the level where a comment is being submitted every five minutes, but none of them are actually reaching the site. That, to me, is victory enough. So, for those of you running Movable Type and suffering, here's how I do it.

As you may have heard, an mp3 blogger has been cease-and-desisted for hosting mp3s on his server. It's happened before but this time he's in the UK so it's a little closer to home, although his hosting service is in the States, so I guess that's moot, although the letter sent to his host was from a London address - it's all so complicated in this global world...

This is another long post in which I look at the concept of gated online communities and speculate how moves like this might make such an environment the essential norm. I think it's interesting but your mileage may vary.

...it kinda stops the spontaneous blurtings. That may be a good thing of course.

Finally caught up with the BugPowder blog backlog - I'm sure I've missed stuff so feel free to tell me again. I've still not done my Caption report - maybe I'll just list all the other Caption reports but that's what I did last year... Oh, and there's an article I'm supposed to be writing for Baz at Engine Comics' Rough Guide to Self Publishing about BugPowder which is due in, ooh, two days. Maybe by outing my failure to get this done in public I'll actually do it.

Also on a comics note, I did Phil Hall a favour and sorted out the RSS feed for his new Movers and Shakers gossip blog as well as tidying up a few rogue template issues. He was reluctant to mess with the guts himself and having seen them I understand why. It's easy to knock Blogger but this kinda has me worried. When I started out using Blogger in 2000 the template system was simple and as such I taught myself a lot about templates and what I later learned were modular content management systems. I owe Blogger a lot - without the service I wouldn't be the blogging guru/help-desk I am now. However, if I was starting out today I probably wouldn't get further than selecting pre-designed templates and leaving it at that. The learning curve has gotten steep again and that's no good thing.

(If anyone who knows me wants help on this kind of thing don't hesitate to ask. It's probably just a five minute job and if it isn't I can always just say no.)

On a more positive note, have you noticed how most of the blogs that really break out into the mainstream consciousness tend to be hosted on blogspot with standard layouts? Dear Raed, Bell De Jour, etc. Not only does this mean when they get millions of visitors they don't run up bandwidth bills but it also says a lot about content over style. Something we should all perhaps think about more often maybe...

Right, now I have to be off to the pub. Sorry Baz!

To celebrate this blog's 4th birthday I'm launching a new sidebarblog, so those of you reading this via the feed go to the website now.

An mp3 blog is something I'd wanted to do for a while but fear of getting my bandwidth smashed always stopped me. Now they're pretty ubiquitous it's less likely that one is going to be swamped by a swarm of message board monkeys and since I'm paying for all this bandwidth that never gets used up...

To keep things safe I'll only be making them available one at a time on a weekly basis. Once the song is off the main page you won't be able to download it. Same goes for the RSS feed - only the most recent one can be gotten - the rest will take you to the website. Unlike the Link Farm you can leave comments on the songs - struck me a good thing to do so please do. Currently it's a pop-up but I'll be changing this to static pages once I've sorted out the archives next week.

Like most things bloggy it'll evolve and mature but for now I'll be using to share interesting and/or slightly odd tunes I've come across plus some I consider important or excellent. In many ways it'll work like a linklog in that I'll try and post stuff that's new to most people. I'll try not to be too obscure or post anything too ear-bleeding but no promises.

It's funny how context affects behaviour, as rapidly apparent at last weekend's big comics convention/festival/gathering/whatever in Birstol. I've been going to these things in their various incarnations regularly since 1989 and it's got to the stage where there are things I do and ways I behave that only ever occur in this environment, specifically the consumption of alcohol.

Matt Haughey points to an interesting weblog phenomenon where a blogger posts something innocuous and gets thousands of hits from Google about it. Writing for Google is something a lot of bloggers, myself included, do from time to time but sometimes it just goes way out of control when you add a lack of context, a lack of intelligence and an open commenting system into the mix. To quote Matt:

If you've been reading lots of blogs in the past year or so, you might have noticed that sometimes people searching the web mistake a blog post about a subject for the actual subject. Someone makes a post about Prince, and you see a comment that starts out "Dear Prince" and in all sincerity, people believe they are talking to the subject of the post.

This has happened to me though never on such a large scale. Ages back I stuck up an article on BugPowder by Toby Tripp called How to get an ISBN and what to do with it. It was actually genuine Google fodder though only relevant to the UK market though it's attracted a fair few comments from non UK people asking about their own local situation, and for a while I was getting emails as well. What's of note is that some of them think we're the authority on the matter. Actually that's quite a sad example. Where's my army of morons? Maybe I should write about daytime TV or something...

Well, I appear to have hit a dry patch blog-wise, which is fine, but while the link-farm keeps plodding away on the sidebar this main bit in the middle is looking somewhat un-dynamic. So since I'm not finding myself fascinating enough to write about I'll take this opportunity to point you towards some other blogs that I like.

Hydragenic: I met Stuart at a London blogmeet over a year ago and while no real contact was maintained I've been following his blog pretty regularly ever since. It works on a number of levels. Most importantly there's a sense of self there - the style of writing, choice of links and selected quotes build up a nicely rounded image of the man. This is something I've always looked for in blogs and zines, something that's not conversational and not formal and seemingly impossible to teach. But it's Stuart's subject matter that keeps me returning. Calmly obscure but never inaccessible he introduces me to things I've never heard of be they music, art, literature or simply ideas and ways of looking at the world. Above all Hydragenic shows that it's not enough to just pull out the usual links and write about the minutiae of your life (um... anyway...). In order to achieve greatness you need that something else. Stuart gets close to this while giving the impression that he's sitting in a big comfy chair smoking imported cigarettes and wearing a rather natty dressing gown. Which is how it should be.

More recommended blogs to follow, and feel free to mention any you like in the comments.

Obviously I'm looking forward to the released of Movable Type 3.0 with the kind of anticipation I usually deride in others. While I'm probably not a "power user" I'm getting close and have been gently leaning on the limitations of the program of late. That's not to denigrate it in any way - the fact that it's so easy to get frustrated that there isn't always an easy way to do something specific is really a testament to the possibilities it opens up to the non-programmer. So for the last few months I've been thinking that all kinds of things will be fixed, tweaked and added to MT with this much vaunted update. Obviously it's not going to match my every desire but I'm sure it'll still be a good-un.

That said, the recent news update rang some alarm bells. As you might be aware, MT blogs have been targeted by comment spam of late where wankers write programs which post link-laden comments to random blog posts in a vain attempt to boost their Google rankings. Currently I delete about two a day which is more a mild irritant than anything, but it's still something that Movable Type should fix as today's trickle could easily become a flood, and 3.0 promises to have a raft of features to combat it.

"With a suite of comment management features and versatile comment registration--utilizing a centralized authentication service we're calling TypeKey--Movable Type 3.0 will give you more control than ever before over the public face of your website. We've spent a lot of time planning a comment registration system that will fit the needs of different types of webloggers, and we have focused our attention on a system that will encourage registration and open communication."

Curse you spamming bastards. Curse you to your own personal hell.

I've just discovered that all Blogger blogs can have RSS feeds, which is stunning news as it brings all those Blogger blogs up to date. The only problem is I suspect most Blogger users won't bother switching it on because, like 95% of the non-techy blog community they don't understand them. So this is a request - if you use Blogger please follow these instructions. At the very least it'll mean I'll be more likely to read your blog!

I'm working on a brief guide to RSS feeds so expect to be illuminated soonish.

Y'know, it's easy to laugh at the kids on LiveJournal, finding a cruel humour in their naive teen angst, but while I'll confess to raising a smile at things like the LJ Times it's always occurred to me that there might be something quite important going on here. Not at the moment, but potentially, in the future, when they all grow up and get a clue.

This article in the NY Times is very interesting for an old skool (hey, check out my archives d00d! June 2000!) 30-something blogger like myself. The reporter has done what good reporters should and spent some time with these kids trying to understand what they do and why, and it's possibly the best piece of journalism on blogging I've read to date.

Some quotes:

I was half-expecting a pimply nightmare boy, all monosyllables and misery. Instead, J. turned out to be a cute 15-year-old with a shy smile.

In daily life, most bloggers don't talk about what they say online. One boy engaged in vociferous debates on Mideast policy with another blogger, a senior a year ahead of him. Yet the two never spoke in school, going only so far as to make eye contact in the halls.

Just completed the annual redesign of the BugPowder weblog. Well, annual in as much as I last did it a year ago. Back then it was my first real attempt to get to grips with CSS and over the months I've become more and more embarrassed by it, especially compared with my own site here which I've been constantly tweaking. The problem was I'd coded it with my HTML head on so it was utterly inflexible meaning any redesign (other than changing the colours) would involve a total overhaul. Which is what I've now done.

In essence it's just a copy of this site with some little tweaks (the sidebar is on the right). I initially rejected doing this as it seemed a bit of a cop out but then I figured since this site works and since I'd spent so much time on it I might as well exploit that. At the end of the day it's just another weblog layout, there to serve the content rather than to be the end in itself, and it's now a lot more flexible should I or anyone else want to tweak it a bit. In all it probably took me four or five hours to do, and most of that was spent figuring out the colours (not my strength), re-jigging the external content feeds (such as the TRS2 reviews) and figuring out what order the sidebar contents should be in.

And now I can look at BugPowder and not cringe, which is all for the good.

Here are ten weblogs displayed in "thumbnail" style in their entirety. Oh, go look for yerselves. What I want to know is how is this done? You see this type of thing in glossy web design books and the like and I always assumed they're made up of a number of screen grabs stitched together in photoshop, but the immediacy and disposability of this page implies their might be a quick way of creating them. Either that or someone has too much time on their hands. Any ideas?

(I'm interested because this strikes me as a really good way to analyse why a particular site works well)

I can't make it, but if you can it should be a laugh. Or scarey. Or both.

Details

LMG points to an Onion article - Mom Finds Out About Blog, which raised a smile.

Seeing his blog through his mother's eyes, Widmar said he knows there's no way the site can remain unchanged. "I know Mom will instantly become the site's most avid reader and most vocal fan," Widmar said. "As I write it, I'll think, 'How would Mom feel about this?' Even worse, I'm sure she'll give the address to all our relatives."

So, what I'm rambling towards is a question - those with blogs, do your parents know about them, and if so, do they read them? And is this a weird thing?

Jez starts a series of posts related to a comment I left on his blog 18 months ago:

About one million years ago, Pete said "You know what'd be really useful? The JezUK recipe page. All that groovy vegetarian stuff you make. Think about it." So I did. For a long time.

Kottke brings to attention the news that Google is rolling back the paid-for Blogger Pro service and putting the extra features into the standard, free, Blogger/BlogSpot service. What strikes me as interesting is this means that nearly every weblog will now have an RSS feed, previously a luxury only afforded to Pro users. So using a feed reader (such as the excellent web based Bloglines I've been playing with today) to read your regular blogs will mean not missing out on the entry-level ones. And thus the RSS revolution is finally upon us. All praise.

(Update: RSS feeds aren't included. Arse.)

Meg picked up on our most illustrious and often downright worrying tabloid discovering weblogs and I mosied on over to have a giggle. Imagine my surprise when I see they've ripped off parts of the Samizdata Blog Glossary including StripBlog, which I coined, ooh, very nearly a year ago. So that makes it official then. Anyone not using Stripblog to describe an online comic strip published as a weblog is wrong. I win.

For some reason I haven't been in a writing mood this week. Can't think why but I suspect a fully loaded RSS reader has probably kept me more that satisfied. Especially with the recent explosion of sideblog/linkfarm/low-threshold linkblogs that are cropping up everywhere. Here's a project for y'all. Grab an RSS reader (Newzcrawler is okay for PCs, NetNewsWire for the Mac) and load it up with all the linkblogs listed on Cameron's Overstated blog. Then watch your browsing quality rocket. Gary kindly noted I was blogging well and this is why. Try it.

That aside I've been working hard which is probably the other reason for no writing. The cable pulling job turned out to be very dull but extremely tiring with a fair dollop of emotional stress. But it's over now. I'll probably write about it later if it still seems interesting. On Friday I worked at an old people's home cleaning the toilets and emptying bins. Now that was fun!

And now I'm off to Banbury to stay with sister for a couple of weeks. Then it's probably back to Winchester to dig up mum's garden for a few days (she wants a patch of lawn to, g'wan guess, do yoga on) before finally making it to Brum on or around September 14th.

So, that's me news. Or some of it. I'm not sure how frequent my blogging will be over the next month but I'm pretty sure it'll be less that this one.

Okay , one link. This was put in the link farm but it really deserves a proper post. EVERYONE should read Quickos' weblog. There can be no excuses.

No posts tonight, not even on the organic link farm, because I've spent the evening putting the finishing touches on Matt Abbiss' new stripblog. Actually it's the same as his old one only it's now on Movable Type rather than Blogger. While it slightly pains me to say so Blogger realy doesn't seem worth it for serious blog stuff any more. Maybe I've moved on and am looking back with more experienced eyes, or maybe the fact that the archives had vanished and the option to "republish" don't exist any more had something to do with it. Anyway, had some fun playing with the layout (nice and simple is always deceptive) and talking Matt through the joys of MT. All in all it was very painless. I might be on to something here...

Well, we're calling it a Yoga Diary (get indexing, Google!) but it's really a blog. Early days but I have high hopes...

Figured I'd doa quick google for any yoga-specific blogs and found a few, though not all are yoga specific. Alan Little blogs about it occasionally but has lots of nice yoga photos, the Sivasakti yoga blog reads like a stuck record but maybe it's just a temporary glitch, Mike's Yogablog is much more promising being more of a links based tradblog, American Swami is a full-on MT blog and looks comprehensive though a lot of it is over my head, the Yoga Fitness Magazine yoga blog looks like it was a nice idea at the time, and finally Michelle's yoga blog, well, I think she's being too hard on herself.

Any others of note out there?

Friday is accordion video day!

To celebrate this great milestone in the upward trending of the accordion, I have decided that the I would perform the first accordion video naked. Then I decided I'd look even better if I wore my Famous Cowboy Hat. Then I decided that the most appropriate song would be Britney Spears' Baby One More Time.

It's all go at Movable Type. Details about TypePad are being dripped out this week (I'll try and give an opinion tomorrow when the pricing plan is announced) and they've moved into an office. Being a blogging company this has of course been photoblogged (using TypePad, natch).

However, this photo is intriguing. It's not strange that Anil has a Blogger t-shirt, but is it deliberately being worn for the purposes of putting furniture together? Is this a deliberate slight?

Anyway, thought I'd get in there before I saw it questioned elsewhere. :)

Salam "that Iraqi blogger" Pax has a photoblog. Interesting because he tends to look at the everyday.

Meg, previously of the blog not.so.soft, is now of the blog me(ish). Congratulations are due for finding a five letter top level domain in this day and age.

And she's back on a roll, judging by this post - a load of Amazon lists made by employees with an actual gosh darn it sense of humour that isn't crass or forced. I'm particularly intrigued by Great Sex and Five Circular Saws though the library nanny-ware has blocked it.

The first typepad blog I've seen just happens to be by a friend of mine, Steve Miller's Cluttered Like My Head. And so far he's turning out to be a not bad wee blogger.

Oh joyous day! Gary Northfield has resurrected his Stupidmonsters stripblog with regular if not daily comic strip goodness.

It's been a while since I raved about a new blog on the site. Going Underground's Blog is not only wonderfully specific (a blog about travelling on the London Tube) but also very well written with a good turn of phrase. No mean feat either when you consider how dull it could be.

Today I was unfortunate enough to get on the Piccadilly Line that had come in from Heathrow, where there seemed to be the annual convention of backpackers from Oz reunion. I have never seen such large backpacks and they proceeeded to congregrate on the floor in front their owners taking up the space of four adults or at least ten small children.

One of the owners of the backpacks whistled to it and it leapt upon his shoulders as he left the train proceeding to stamp heavily on my foot as he left. I left after him and watched him nearly concuss half a dozen people as he made his way upstairs.

The image of a large Austrailan whistling to his obedient Afgan Hound of a rucksack will stay with me for a while...

(link via LMG, because I'm lazy...)

As Salam Pax's Raed blog has been quiet since the 24th, Arte Paz has put together the Where is Salam? blog as a repository for news about him. All very meta but a nice idea.

Last Christmas I went to my mate Graham's flat for the day and had dinner with an Brian,. an American warblogger, although he said he didn't like the phrase applied to what he does any more. But he definitely blogs from a political perspective. While we were introduced to each other with a "hey, you're both bloggers!" we found the only blog we both knew about was good ol' Doc, an exception with proves the rule. Doc's quite political but has also been involved in the net for a long time (he co-wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, required reading for anyone thinking of making money online).

The Guardian's Online section has a good selection of Warblogs today. I'm particularly taken by Stuart Hughes' Northern Iraq Weblog. As a BBC reporter in Iraq he not only writes about the events going on but links to articles he's reading and posts up photos taken on the ground.

Cypherpunk's Mixed Bag is a blog that looks like it done by someone in India, or an Indian living elsehwere. Unclear from the text but they're part of the Indian Bloggers webring.

Anway, it's a current affairs blog, obviously war based at the moment, and I found it quite readable and offering a fresh perspective.

Anyone know of other non-American, non-European blogs, specifically talking about the war?

[Update 27/3] Just read through it again and I now don't find it readble or offering a fresh perspective. I find it the mirror of tedious pro-Bush, pro-war blogs. Methinks the desire to find a non-Western POV blinded me somewhat. Sigh...

Just realised why I'm getting so many hits from people searching for Salam's blog. Typo. Oh, how we laughed....

Came across Gareth's Modern Life is Rubbish weblog while looking for stuff about those Anti-Esso Poems On The Underground that have been cropping up of late, and while he does mention them the blog as a whole looks pretty keen. I'd keep an eye on it if I was staying in blog land. But I'm not. So you'll have to.

As blogging becomes ever more widespread and new applications of the format and software increase in their variety, there is perhaps a need for a catch all phrase for weblogs that have what we can call a traditional look and operation. Therefore I propose the phrase tradblog.

In my personal case, I am about to run my farmblog which will not be a weblog in many respects: it doesn't relate to the web in any way, it won't be published regularly and won't even run in reverse chronological order. So when describing my web publishing enterprises I can say currently I run my farmblog, but I ran a tradblog for a good three years before that.

Tradblog. You know it makes sense.

Now that the Guardian and other mainstream news sources have picked up on Salam Pax's blog it looks like it's tipped over into the general consciousness. I was wondering where comments like the first to this post on this site were coming from, and it appears that peteashton.com is quite highly ranked when you search for certain combinations of salam, dear, raed and blog.

While this is a nice thing in some respects it does mean my site is about to be inundated by redneck, blinkered opinion jockeys unable do anything but troll and rant. So please don't feed them.

Sometimes I think Google is something of a curse.

Just upgraded to Movable Type 2.63 (which is what I run this blog with) - an incredibly painless process I must say. This post is to check it all worked. Any probs you encounter, do let me know.

While doing so, I was interested to read about the proposed Movable Type Pro due out this summer. Lots of interesting new features that seem to blur the distictions between a weblog and a forum, and which look super keen for something like BugPowder.

I knew this would happen and I'm kinda ready for it, but the fact that Salam Pax hasn't updated the Raed blog since the "Shock and Awe" started and that his pictures have gone offline is rather worrying. Of course, it's very likely his net access has vanished (aparently it's via the Iraqi state ISP), but given the constant 24/7 news we're getting a few hours of silence is still rather spooky.

Over on Hydragenic, Stuart's got the Black Dog visiting him. I like his description of what is always a very hard thing to describe:

This time it's been such a small, yappy one that I've hardly noticed it nipping at my heels. I thought I saw it scuttling around earlier on in February, but when I looked more closely it had disappeared and I put it down to a trick of the light. Now I realise that it's been there all along, with its stupid, slobbering tongue and its vacuous, infantile grin.

"Woof," it's saying, "throw your stick-like issues as far as you possibly can, but I'll be bringing them back to you. Plan your eight hours of sleep, but I'll be waking you at 5am all the same. Cosy night in front of the fire? Oh no, it's blowing a Gale Force 9 out there and we need to go for a walk, mister."

I get the feeling we're about to go mainstream, only on our terms. Nice to have some good news!

First up, here's photos with linkage. And so, thoughts that have buzed through my mind after such a momentous event...

People who don't already know me read my blog. While not a surprise, it's the first time I've come face to face with a readership I wasn't already aware of. A rather strange feeling.

Mo Morgan is not as miserable as he appears to be online.

A significant proportion of the UK blogging community, especially those who mess with code and stuff, are in their early 20s.

Meg talks very quickly and this isn't a problem.

"A-list" is so passe. It's "Old School" these days. As in bloggers approaching their third birthday who remember when all the "recently updated blogs" on Blogger occurred in the same minute for the first time in April 2000. (ticks on both of these for me!)

Very similar in many ways to comics pub meets. Some scary hardcore looking people, some really geeky looking people, some extremely normal looking people, some perfectly abnormal looking people. And Tom.

Anna really does know everyone and even if she doesn't, talks to them in a way that makes them think that they know her, slightly confusing them but in a good way.

Stuart holds a grudge when you forget his name within 10 seconds, but still buys you a drink.

Mike is just like his blog, so much so that you immediately feel like you've met him many times before even though you've never met before and actually only read his blog a few times and not for a while now. Or maybe he's just a nice, open, friendly guy.

We're both single and, within reason, available. So, um, that's that sorted out then. Hmm. Yes.

Why did I post this again?

Yes...

Interesting collection of 200 bloggers that seems to operate in a totally non-automated manner, which bucks the trend of RSS-fed aggregator sites somewhat. Or it is just a massive community blog?

An aside about paint and the Magic Kingdom: when Cory and I went to Disneyland back in 2001, he told me that they paint structures such as construction walls and other things they want you to ignore a special colour called "Go Away Green". It's a colour that blends into the background of just about any landscape setting. It's the next best thing to setting up one of Douglas Adams' "Somebody Else's Problem" fields.

And so, to bed...

These are taken from the XML-RSS feeds of said weblogs and integrated into this blog using the mt-rssfeed plugin. While this might be technically impressive/baffling, what it does mean is when you look down my list of blog links you can get some idea of what they're about and whether you want to visit them. Which can only be a good thing!

The point is, the person who made the mirror site is Jo who is involved in running the Caption small press comics convention in Oxford which I've been going to for years. Normally when these circular things happen you can explain it through friendships, etc. This one is completely random.

what it's like, at least in a small way

i am in the midst of a minor stalking at the moment, via phone and email. i was much more seriously stalked back in '92 by a suspected rapist whom i'd never met, and i know stalking can be much more damaging and dangerous that this man is... but it occured to me that the blog of even a minor stalking could serve as a helpful history for women (& men!) to refer back to should this ever happen to them.

So, for the third time today, a new thing on the site: Pete's Portal

Info for those who use Blogger

Blogger has suffered a security intrusion by a "haX0r." We have all the data that was changed backed up within a couple hours of the attack, so we can have things pretty much back to normal soon. Of course, we're assessing the situation as thoroughly as possible to make sure it doesn't happen again. Also, if you store your FTP login information in Blogger, it wouldn't hurt to change that on your server though it is unlikely that information was accessed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Stripblog

noun. A cartoon/comic related weblog, either pertaining to cartoons/comics or featuring graphics of that nature.

Matthew's started a new blog:

"Along with my attempts to amuse you, the reader, this will be a record of how people can escape from a prison of their own making - be it mental illness, a mortgage, or an idiot boy. As a great person said "It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be fun. But it's the only way."

Monday night has mostly been spent thinking about weblogs and comics and then writing about them. This is a work in progress awaiting feedback from a couple of comics mailing lists, but it's an indication of where I want to take my comics activities. For a year or so now I've not actually done much other than accidentally or deliberately inspire people to do stuff within the comics scene based on my having done stuff in the past. I've been cruising on this because it means I don't have to actually do anything while still taking the credit, but it seems I'm now taking it to the next level.

I was inspired to write this after reading We Blog by the Blogroots trio and thinking about what RSS feeds could do for the comics scene. We Blog is actually a really good book and I intend to plug it here properly soon. The Philip and Alex for the next generation, I reckon.

Browsing around some GBlogs I saw this neat little chat box thing called a TagBoard which describes itself as "The least technologically advanced
message board ever" which in itself appeals to me. So I figured I'd stick one on this page for a few weeks and see if it's worth using. If you don't need to send me an email or have a comment on a post, feel free to bash a few words in the box and post it on the site. Especially if you have your own site.

When I was a student, some very close female friends shared a house together and had the entire text of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto covering one wall of their living room (which I had photocopied for them), interspersed with pages from a sex-toy catalogue they'd nicked from the only guy in the house. So, in the spirit of Ceri, Kath and Katrina, it's with great pleasure that I present to you The Valerie Solanas School of Art Criticism. Made me smile, laugh and remember those good days... Sigh!

Inspired by yet another kooky chick lit title spied in WH SMiths last week (Pink background, kooky handdrawn illustraton of a multi-armed brown lady holding in her arms 1) A mobile Phone 2) chappati 2)whatever else lame artifact of pointless fucking existence the gendertraitor deemed was amusing, and with the tagline of "can a traditional asian girl keep in line with her families wishes and marry the white man of her dreams? Oh thats new a cross cultureal confusion 2nd gen book about growing up in Dudley and wanting to become a fucking meedical receptionist instead of a housewife FUCKOFF FUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFF), I SHALL BECOME A CHICK-LIT AUTHOR

My witty book shall deal with the cross-scultural confusion and jokey McBeal laffs when a legal secretary in Truro decides to become a Sufi mystic, whilst stilllooking for the man of her dreams in a formica coffee bar.

I shall call it DOGFUCKER.

Another example of how blogging adds a twist to life. (from MeFi)

This 15 year old kid runs a weblog. Sometimes he updates it from the school computers. The school find out and decide he's breaking the rules, even though the rules are not up to date enough to cover blogging. He, a good student, gets expelled. So what does he do? He writes about it on his weblog. He gets loads of feedback and gets linked to by various censorship and liberty sites and so forth. The end result is he goes from crying in the principles office to thinking, hang on a second, I might be able to fight this.

Nice.

Chum John Weeks, an American living generally in Cambodia, though often elsewhere, and cartoonist / underground activist, has two blogs: his mainly comics blog and his mainly Cambodia blog. Though I suspect there's a crossover there.

Any more new blogs by folks I know?

Go away for a week and what happens? Your friends start blogging. If this keeps up...

Jamie has a weblog.

Dave has a weblog.

And at the weekend I was talking to my brother-in-law about weblogs.

I think I've said this before, but a five or six years back only a handfull of friends had email. I predict by next summer nearly everyone I know will have a blog.

More BlogTree nonsense (I'm sure I'll get bored with it soon...). Thinking it through, BugPowder is really the child of Pete's Weblog, although the former was originally at the latter's address before moving away. It started as a diary, I started mentioning comics stuff, then I split the personal stuff to another address to make the comics stuff stand alone. Which means I am my father, and my son, at the same time. Cool. And also my own sibling, because they were both inspired by the same blogs.

It turns out in the comments that my Dad's blog is one of my children. And I thought my real life family was complicated!

Noticed that Brad has cited BugPowder as a parebnt blog, so I figured I'd sort outBP's BlogTree, and in doing so decided to err on the side of interestingness and add Luke and Meg as parents too. They were definitely two of the first blogs I read.

Now, I want more children. Get to it.

Well, I've got three parents so far on BlogTree but no kids. Surely I must have inspired someone over the last 26 months! Not sure about one of the parents though. Was I reading LMG before I started blogging, or just after...

The kinda-maybe-actual story behind this is Jez had registered BugPowder.com but was busy becoming a father to do the thing he wanted to do with it. In the meanwhile, I was just about to move to London. I started keeping a diary on some free webspace and it was decided to move it on to BugPowder (and then more recently I moved it here). Jez said I was keeping a weblog and, I think, put me on to Blogger. Then again, I might have discovered Blogger via something like LMG and asked Jez what it was all about. Or maybe some other version. To be honest, I can't remember what happened at all. All I know is I was really confused by it all at the time but I knew it made sense.

Pitching Blogs: "Many [webloggers] still consider their sites to be personal forums for their views and perspectives, and are wary of corporate or PR interference."

Fuck you.

(thanks Tom, everyone else, beware)