The now very tired debate[] going on between MSM and the journalistic Blogosphere went another round recently thanks to this piece by Christian Kerr in The Australian and some mud thrown back.
I distinctly remember a time when I enjoyed reading The Australian. It hasn’t been that way for a while, and they seem to just keep putting nails in the coffin, becoming more and more conservative and petty (among other adjectives).
Here is a post in reply by the blog being heavily trashed by Kerr. I hope this unavailing and pointless slinging match is abandoned by both sides soon.
Update: More of the same sentiment from Andrew Bartlett.
So, we attended V Festival on the weekend. It was awesome. Here is a random assortment of highlights, lowlights and other shit.
Highlights
- Muse. Best gig of the weekend.
- The Presets. This was the first act we saw and the only disappointment was its extreme brevity. 25 minutes is not enough Presets. We were left wanting more, much more.
- The Hoosiers. Don’t think I’d heard of them before, but they put on an awesome show.
- The Zutons. After listening to their latest album You Can Do Anything a lot, I was really looking forward to seeing these guys. They sure didn’t disappoint. Their version of Valerie was amazing live and really highlighted how boring the Amy Winehouse gig was, as we’d heard her sing Valerie about 15 minutes earlier.
- The Kooks. I’d never really got into their music, but seeing them live was a treat. There was something about their gig which just screamed quality.
- Kaiser Chiefs. Closing the festival, they put a huge exclamation mark on the weekend. What a show.
- Friends. As always with these kinds of events, the friends we hung out with really topped it off. It wouldn’t have been as great without them.
Lowlights
- The camping facilities. The other three day music festival I’ve camped at a few times is Splendour In The Grass. The toilets and showers[] at V are seriously lacking when compared to Splendour. You definitely have to expect a degree of disgusting shit when you camp at a festival, but most times I visited the toilets at V there was very literally[] shit up to the rim of the bowl. They were simply unusable.
- Amy Winehouse. Boring! That’s all I can say, not that I expected or hoped for much.
- Line-up changes. Spending ages in the crowd working our way right to the front and waiting for Sam Sparro didn’t pay off when we found he’d been switched with Robyn, who was also cool, but we were there for Sam.
- Waiting. There is too much waiting between shows.
- Missing The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. I’d seen them both before so we chose Muse and Kaiser Chiefs instead, choices I don’t regret, but it would have been awesome to see them both again.
- Unidentified flying liquids. There was far too many unknown liquids being thrown around for comfort. I don’t mind a bit of water being thrown around a hot crowd, in fact I love it, but it’s simply rude to throw anything else. It’s very sad that people do because they can. An extreme lowlight was being hit (along with many people around us) with a distinctly warm liquid; much to warm to be a warm beer.
Other shit
- Extreme inebriation. Seeing a chick who had pissed her self and was left stumbling around looking dazed with soaked jeans was a bit funny - in a sad kind of way.
The whole weekend really was a blast, and it’s re-invigorated my love of (live) music. The other acts we saw were: Royworld, Alphabeat, Taio Cruz, Lost Prophets, Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, The Pigeon Detectives and Stereophonics.
A while ago I was asked by my employer to write a short article on something web related to add some decent content to the company’s new website. I ended up writing a short article on blogging for business promotion which included a short (and very incomplete) list of what I think are essential elements that must be included to count a website as a blog.
I am sick of stumbling across websites labelled as blogs which are missing one or more elements which I believe are essential to the blog paradigm. This miss-labelling is particularly prevalent within traditional media organisations and other businesses who want to have a blog because it’s now the done thing.
Today I found an article by Merlin Mann (via Daring Fireball) which is a much better, and more comprehensive (even if slighlty different) list of what he thinks consitutes a good blog. I can’t say (as he suggests I should) that I disagree with any of it but, that doesn’t mean this blog meets the mark (or, neccesarily that I’m trying to have it meet the mark).
As far as I’m concerned we’ve got a good two weeks of summer left, but the past week or so[] has seen a decided - and somewhat unwelcome - swing to autumn. The English summer, all four weeks of it, was a glorious experience - but the leaves are now falling.
The long summer days of latitudes above 51° 30′ really are something to treasure. It’s a new and delightful pleasure - if only it wasn’t so fleeting - to get off work at five (or so) and have a full 4 hours of daylight left to play with. Picnics in London’s oasis where the bright blue sky and impossibly elastic twilight provide a catalyst for the friends, cheese and wine to coalesce into memories that should last a lifetime.
I must get around to taking some pictures of the estate we live in before the summer leaves disappear entirely.
The English autumn will be a new experience to enjoy, and the winter has its own charms which I can look forward to, but the summer will be missed. How time flies.