It’s the second time I’ve been back here lately. The first time was a couple of weeks back where a nightmarish deadline made it altogether too much like old times. Today is better.

I never lived in London, and the stress of the work and the cost of the commute took the pleasure out of being here. Ultimately it made it impossible.

On days like this it seems a shame – many of my old colleagues still work at Cleveland Street, and I have a lot of good memories of the time.

They say you shouldn’t go back, but as a freelancer, coming here a couple of times a month, it feels weirdly like I shouldn’t have gone away.

The other part of it is that I enjoy freelance and I don’t like feeling that I’m doing it badly. The extra time should allow me to catch up with existing commitments before seeking out a few new ones.

The prospect seems to have given me a boost, even extending to some renewed enthusiasm for blogging. And today, my first day ‘off’, was good. I learned:

-I can see stereograms, but the ones with dots are shit.
-Pigeons actually bob their head so they can create motion parallax, and thus judge the distance of objects.
-A dog’s head with a man’s hands is inherently funny.

We use Google News among our sources. I’ve written before of my concerns regarding its apparent lack of judgement, but I still find it useful – particularly its new(ish) custom section feature.

Recently its results have begun to include the peculiarly car-headlight-bulb-focused Autobulbs Direct News, providing such fetishistic takes on motoring news as:

Bentley launches new vehicle, with gloss black finished car light casings

and

Car lights of Spyker supercars to be fitted in Coventry (where, in fact, the whole cars are to be assembled).

We’ve seen this kind of deal before: take a press release, rewrite it, crowbar in the term you’re trying to optimise for, publish and submit to Google News. Even so, a recent story went too far, mis-attributing a focus on headlights to a Virgin Money spokesman:

[Grant Bather] suggested that this could include cracked car lights or other damage caused in a traffic accident or claims that result from breakdowns or theft.

This is just naughty. There’s no mention of headlights in Bather’s quotes, or indeed anywhere else in the Virgin release.

Taken in isolation, tucked away in a news feed that’s written for Google, perhaps this kind of search-term loading hardly matters, but it depresses me all the same. I expected Google to become more wise than it was in 2007 to the quality of the news it aggregates.

Back then, in a few months of optimism, it was tempting for Charlie and I to believe that we were part of a potential new direction for journalism. Like us, we assumed, other journalists would want to maintain decent standards when writing news for the websites of corporate clients, and that Google would help by favouring those who bothered.

For me, our two motoring news feeds are all that remains of that belief.

Anyway, as part of the test I’ve agreed to add a quick blog post on Brighton Pier. This nomenclature was decided by the others, though. I’d like to point out that it’s rightly called the Palace Pier, no matter what its current owners like to claim. The one that fell down (and burnt down) is the West Pier, and there used to be a Chain Pier from 1823 to 1896.

Normal service will resume…

That’s what I’ll be doing for the next couple of days, then. You can read about it here, see pictures of it here, and watch films of us here.

Now look, this next bit’s painful after everything I’ve said, but probably the best way to follow our progress will be via tweets on the iQ Twitter feed.

There. I’m a broken man. Take aim, Charlie. Do your worst.

UPDATE: back home after two exhausting days. We managed 504.2 miles on one seven-gallon tank of fuel, averaging nearly 72mpg and driving into the centre of 18 cities in the process.

And it’s a great job, thanks to the hard work of almost everyone on the team except me. It looks better, works better, supports a wider range of content and allows for third-party adverts.

Best of all, the background doesn’t look like a J-cloth.

UPDATE:

Found an old screenshot of the front page, circa March 2008.

Anyway, getting a break at Christmas this year. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, but it won’t involve Lapland, and it probably will involve Google Earth’s Santa Tracker*.

Sadly, freelance is going to come into it at some point, but them’s the breaks.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post about the state of the economy, but when I re-read it I realised I really didn’t know what I was talking about. It was easy not to worry about it back when it was the credit crunch. It sounded like breakfast.

I’ve been having something of an involuntary holiday from journalism of late. My mojo’s fucked off again for a start, but I’m less comfortable than I have been with work. An ex-colleague’s leaving do at the Dennis local stirred up a host of memories: I’ve come a long way in the last couple of years. It hasn’t all been the right direction.

So, normal Hackbashing will be resumed at some point. In the meantime, talking of Dennis, the man himself is in Brighton tomorrow night to read from his latest book of poetry. I’ll be there if I can get a ticket.

blah bla blah blah

Kin regards,

Joe Bloggs

Marketing Manager

Sweary sign-offs are *so* much more fun, don’t you think?