hackbash

Ok, I promised that my next post wouldn’t be about the Beeb. Sorry. Just wondering if anyone else finds it annoying to be told to ‘log on’ to a website. The BBC do it all the time. Earlier this summer there was a particularly grating little segment they kept playing on South East Today (be [...]

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A few weeks ago I was trawling around on the internet trying to find road casualty figures for this post on Living. One thing which struck me at the time was how difficult it is to find global figures – the best I could come up with was a frighteningly large number I’d seen repeated [...]

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On one of the sites for which Charlie and I write, we also moderate reader comments. Aside from the genuine responses and the occasional shameless plug for people’s own projects, there’s an increasing influx of spam. Now, I consider myself fairly liberal when it comes to smut, but some of the links in our moderation [...]

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Writing online gives you the welcome opportunity to fix the kind of clangers that, were you in print, you’d be stuck with. On the other hand, changing stories that are already live can leave your readers with an insight into the editorial process that you might not have intended. Spending a lot of time looking [...]

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Dear God I’m addicted to Scrabulous. For anyone who hasn’t been playing (or reading Charlie Brooker), it’s a Scrabble plugin for Facebook. Except, inasmuch as I can be bothered to find out, it started out as a turn-based email game. Whatever, our Charlie’s “no Facebook till lunch” note to self is still as apt as [...]

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Another campaigner outside the Brighton Centre this morning, this time with a placard: Jesus is the only saviour for sin and all it’s consequences Now I don’t mean to come over all Lynne Truss*, but if there’s one way to get your message across it isn’t with an errant apostrophe.

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Well, it nearly did. At first glance, this morning’s immigration headlines suggested the LibDems had successfully got their conference agenda into the news. Alas not; a chief constable’s Radio 4 interview appears to have generated at least as much coverage as the party’s immigration amnesty vote. Anyway, a consequence of living in Brighton is the [...]

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Anyone would think the gentlemen of the press wanted Northern Rock to go tits-up. At the very least there’s been some incautious language going around these last few days. You can understand a bit of hysteria from people whose life-savings might be on the line, but isn’t it our job as journalists to get a [...]

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OK, so you might have noticed we’ve moved. This pretty much started out as me thinking out loud, so we ended up with an address based on my user name, a blog name that was the first thing to come into my head (and which sounded more pretentious with each repetition), and the first pretty [...]

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Attempting to extract information from a press office yesterday, it occurred to me that press officers need to get with the programme, or social media is going to whup their sorry asses. My request wasn’t a toughie. I’d seen a story on BBC News that I wanted to cover for a client. The source was [...]

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