| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 17:54:29 on 07 October 2008 | Add comment |
One of my favourite things is irony. So I'm quite enjoying the fact that I'm sitting on a Virgin train (first class, naturally) next to a sign that says 'Enhanced mobile phone coverage on this train', with logos for Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and Orange but not Virgin Mobile.
Clearly even Beardie himself realises that Virgin Mobile just isn't worth the hassle. As a long-suffering customer of the Dyslexic One's cellular subsidiary I can confirm that a signal is pretty hard to get at the best of times.
Someone just phoned me to slag off one of his commercial competitors for a story, and sure enough the line went dead soon after.
But first class is nice. You get a plug point for your laptop, a plane-style music system built into the seat, a free copy of the Evening Standard and a little tray with some cutlery and a teacup. No tea yet, though.
I spoke too soon! A man just came through with a teapot. All is well.
Since you asked, I'm on a train because I'm going to Coventry, and I'm going to Coventry for a work-related conference which will no doubt be a non-stop riot of joy. And no, I wasn't sent to Coventry, I'm going of my own free will. Which is possibly worse.
And I'm in first class because it was the same price as a normal ticket. Citywire aren't quite that extravagant.
Am using one of these fancy newfangled 3G dongles to connect to the Internet. It's really very good. Trying to convince the missus I need one; failing.
| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 23:17:27 on 15 September 2008 | Comments (2) |
I had cause to ponder this question at the weekend as I helped my teenage sister-in-law complete an astonishingly badly thought out GCSE geography coursework assignment.
The task was to stand in a river measuring the width and depth and water velocity and shape of the stones and names of the ducks and whatever other pointless data the examination board (may they fall into a ravine, the cretins) thought relevant.
It wasn't entirely without educational value - ten different points along the river had to be sampled, which was completely unrealistic given how long each took, so the vast majority of students simply won't bother, and will make up the results.
We certainly did. So there was a valuable lesson for all those impressionable young minds - no one will know if you cheat.
But the nearest river runs mostly through privately owned land. To do lip service to the assignment, you have to trespass. That's lesson two - respect for private property is optional. Hardly surprising from the communists who populate our education system, I suppose, but a breathtaking display of social irresponsibility to those of a more rational nature.
Sure enough, when we came to the first suitable point, the fence was mangled and the river bank trampled to mud.
But it did get me thinking: Given that the river will contain different water from one moment to the next, in what sense can someone 'own' it? And if you can't own a river, can you legitimately block access to it with a buffer of private land?
I'm inclined to answer the second question in the negative; that is, you have no right to deny public access to a public good, and so if we were to conclude that the river is owned by everyone (or no one) then you can't build your garden around it and put a 'Ramblers Piss Off' sign on the fence.
And so to the first question. We have to somehow reach a defensible position that you can own the river, otherwise Janet Street-Porter and her fellow kagool-clad seed-munchers will declare the right to invade your home.
The obvious line of argument is that you own the land, and the river only becomes yours by virtue of its having ventured onto it. But by the same logic guests would become possessions.
So we're forced to try another approach: the river is not the water. The river is merely the pattern made by the water - you only own the pattern.
This has the desired effect - you can own the part of the river that flows through your land. But the river, in any meaningful sense, has ceased to exist.
Of course, if you want to get all deep and ponderous and ultra-Platonic about it, the river is just a metaphor for all of reality and nothing ever existed in the first place, property or otherwise. Which might make you feel better if you own stock in Lehman Brothers, but is otherwise a poor foundation for a theory of property rights.
(Those ancient Greek metaphysicists - such anarchists.)
By the same token you would cease to exist as well - now that's what I call an identity crisis.
| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 23:47:46 on 11 September 2008 | Add comment |
This somewhat disturbing sketch was drawn by Cartoon Dick, a roaming caricaturist at an industry shindig I was at last night.
It could have been less flattering, I suppose. But if my nose was really that big I would topple over.
Anyway. I was cycling from the venue (the ridiculously posh Kensington Roof Gardens, owned by Richard Branson and inhabited by flamingoes) back to the station, trying to navigate London's vortices of one way streets, when I was flagged down by PC Knacker.
Needless to say I wasn't entirely sober, and I assumed he was going to book me for being drunk in charge of a pushbike. But in fact he wanted to tick me off for not having a front light (the battery had died), and throughout our conversation he remained apparently oblivious to the fact that I was breathing rancid alcohol breath all over him.
Did you know that flashing lights are illegal to use (though legal to sell, natch)? Epilepsy, apparently. It turned out to be a good thing the battery was flat, otherwise I'd have got a £30 fine.
Ridiculous, really - flashing lights (which are so much easier for motorists to identify as cyclists) are verboten, but wobbling around pissed on a bike is perfectly acceptable to our friend Knacker.
That wasn't the strangest thing though - when he stopped me the first thing he asked was: 'Do you speak English?'
| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 22:42:59 on 23 July 2008 | Add comment |
The discovery last week that bosses of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme were receiving ginormous pay rises - while the people who pay their salaries struggle to make ends meet - had a fairly predictable response when it was reported.
It went in the magazine on Monday and up on the website yesterday (Tuesday), along with a blog entry written by yours truly. The Citywire blogs are an interesting idea - they're like op-eds, only much shorter, and readers can comment on them (and frequently do).
In fact we did away with a letters page in the magazine some time ago in favour of reprinting the most entertaining commentary from our readers on the website. That's how new media we are.
Anyway, as I say, an entirely predictable response - universal condemnation.
The story and blog entry are here:
But you don't have to be a regular reader, or even registered, to leave a remark, meaning we get the very occasional drive-by comment. Such as this gem from the FSCS's chief spokesperson:
I fear you reporter has misread the information he found in our accounts at Companies House and the detailed information we provided to help inform the article, which shows the total increase for the chief executive was 12%. This follows below for the benefit of your readers.... cont. p94
Leaving aside the undignified and unprofessional manner in which he chose to respond (if you have a beef with a report, take it up with the reporter or his editor, don't bitch and moan in a public forum), he hilariously ignored the fact that I'd already included all of his points in the report. And at no point does it occur to him to offer an actual justification for the pay rise his bosses received.
What a plonker.
But hey, it's a body whose existence is guaranteed by statute, no
matter how badly they fuck up, so what does anyone who works there give
a hoot about doing a good job?
Fortunately the readers saw straight through him, perhaps realising that their compulsory levies pay his wage. Since he'd publicly questioned my journalistic integrity, I left a comment of my own (it's generally frowned upon, but a) he was sullying our reputation for accuracy and b) I was chomping at the bit, so I was allowed).
The full report is released tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see what coverage it gets. Through the website system we use at Citywire, which enables you to see which registered users have read a given story, I know that reporters from some of our competitors have read the article (I can't say who without breaking data protection laws), so I'm looking forward to see if they pick it up and if so what angle they take.
Watch this space.
| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 14:34:22 on 20 July 2008 | Add comment |
At work last week we were schooled in 'Writing for the Web' by a chap from new media consultants Sticky Content. Citywire is vastly more popular than its online competitors, but apparently there's still a fair bit of room for improvement.
There are certain differences between writing for print and writing for the web, for two main reasons:
- Web readers are different to print readers.
- Search.
Though the course gave some useful pointers, it was fairly depressing. I've never been under any illusions about the true nature of the publishing industry - publishers are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers, and whatever our delusions of fourth estate grandeur, the stories we hacks produce are merely the maggots on the advertiser's hook.
That being so, aren't we at least writing content that people want to read?
No. Not on the web.
Web readers, you see, aren't interested in reading. They're interesting in accomplishing tasks. My primary task as a writer is to facilitate that in the most efficient manner possible so that they come back the next day and look at more adverts. That means:
- Condensing stories into 150-200 words (brevity is good writing discipline, yes, but there's only so much you can strip out of a story before you start losing important details).
- Assuming that no-one will finish anything you write, because they're too busy.
- Writing stories as a series of bullet points.
My secondary task is to write stories in such a way that people find them accidentally via Google. This means throwing buzzwords around like confetti at a wedding, regardless of how appropriate they are.
As it happens, I have some experience of this. I wrote a short piece of code that analyses requests coming to this site and logging certain bits of data (nothing personally identifying, don't worry). One of those bits of data is the address of the previously visited website, which, if the visitor came via a search engine, means I can work out what they were searching for.
Now, I've previously written about a piece of software called PicLens, and I've also written about a BBC programme featuring glamour model Chelsea White in a post which included the word 'porn'.
Sure enough, the first visitor to this site to come via a search engine was looking for 'piclens porn slideshow'. Come to think of it, it's rather an effective use of PicLens, which converts websites into full-screen slideshows, leaving hands free for other activities.
Other searches leading here have included 'chelsea white page 3 teens', 'chelsea white topless', 'glamour', and 'chelsea white tits'.
Clearly the secret to increasing one's readership is to appeal to the all-important hairy-palmed demographic. It's incredible, really, that people looking for naked ladies would end up here when 99% of the Internet is actual porn.
I'm being facetious, of course - the trick is to write useful or interesting stuff about a topic that the whole world isn't already writing about. For example, someone searching Google to find out who Ross Kemp's nan is smarter than? would see Brainstorm in a Teacup at the top of the list and discover that the answer to their question was me. Task accomplished.
| Written by Rich | Permalink |
| Published at 10:00:01 on 20 July 2008 | Add comment |
Last night I had the unexpected privilege of testing the new 'miracle berry', which in case you somehow haven't heard of it is a tropical west African fruit which binds to tongue receptors, making sour and bitter food taste sweet.
I was initially underwhelmed – my Guinness still tasted like Guinness. But after a while it kicked in, and having discovered that slices of lemon from a vodka and lemonade tasted like Fruit Pastilles we set about looking for things to try before the effect wore off.
We were in a pub, so being too cheap to buy any food we got to work on the condiments. I can now report that:
- HP sauce tastes like treacle
- French mustard tastes like... well, I'm still not sure. Baby food?
- Malt vinegar still tastes like vinegar. Balsamic vinegar. With a sherry aftertaste.
- Salt tastes like feet. Salty feet. I don't recommend it.
- Pepper doesn't really taste of anything in particular. Just gritty. Like you're licking the bottom of your shoe.
- Ketchup and salad cream are truly vile.
Not the most significant addition to the sum of human knowledge, I grant you, but an entertaining experiment nonetheless.
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