Amusing fact about Guardian Best British Blog award judge Anita Roddick. She’s supposed to be running her own site, except if you want to write to her the only e-mail address you can use is staff@anitaroddick.com. Thanks to Mr Morgan for that one (and for looking after my flat while the gas man came).
If you’ve been as fascinated by the whole warchalking thing as most of the geeks on the web seem to have been, then you’ll be delighted to know that there was a piece on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News about it yesterday – if you’ve got Realplayer, you can still watch it. It only vaguely misses the point – which is a significant improvement on most mainstream media…
One of the most gob-smacking parts of my birthday weekend was when my web-chums circled around me and, separating me from the flock of non-geeks, herded me gently but insistently into the conservatory. There they revealed to me that there had been a huge behind-the-scenes conspiracy going on for some weeks to get together enough money for me to get a digital camera. My eyes got a bit weird and scared when they told me this. Wider and weirder when they told me about this and mentioned who had contributed…
Well today I went with Katie and Mo Morgan to a little camera shop in North London and bought a little Ixus V2 with the ill-gotten gains, so finally you can expect a decent amount of pictures on plasticbag.org. It was really surprisingly exciting and I felt all weird but kind of nice about it. Well anyway – I’m going to e-mail everyone independently, but I thought I should do it all publically too. So lots of thanks to:
While I’m at it – thanks to Ms Hourihan for her instructions on how to destroy the world with computers – and to the other couple of people who sent me stuff from my wishlist – but didn’t put their names in!
Now this is funny: search Google for ‘a bloody stupid idea’. And how did I find out about that? By reading this very entertaining little article at Internet Magazine… I’m kind of surprised – I don’t want this to seem like a campaign – I’m just trying to explain why I think the Guardian competition isn’t really in the spirit of weblogging and encourage people who think the same to say so. If you want to enter, you won’t get lynched!
Birthday in a nutshell (I’ll complete the post over the day):
Thursday 18th July
Midday: There’s a tube strike in London so I’m working from home. The plan is to write a spec for a project at my new job at UpMyStreet, pack everything I need to take to Norfolk with me and then hop onto a train – having organised my gas problem at some point during the day.
4pm: The spec is still far from complete. I am starting to sweat.
8pm: The spec is still far from complete. I am starting to sweat.
10pm: Have a freak out about the spec. Far from complete.
Friday 19th July
12am: And suddenly, with the spec still far from complete, it’s my birthday and I’m thirty. I send a few e-mails and text messages, go for a little walk around outside and feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
2am: The spec is still far from compleete, but I’ve done enough for one day. Haven’t managed to get to Norfolk yet, but I’ll do that in the morning…
7am: Wake up exhausted like someone has dumped a bucket of cold water on my face and look around frantically. Check my watch which has been broken for the last two and half weeks. Yes, it’s still broken. Scrabble around for bags and clothes and things I have to take to Norfolk.
8am: Everything’s packed, but do I take a shower? I have no hot water, after all – not until the gas is fixed. Decision made on spur of moment – damn the shower. Run outside and wait for bus.
8.30am: Bus still hasn’t arrived. I now have an hour to get to the train station.
8.45am: The bus just drove past fully loaded with people.
8.55am: Arrive at tube station having given up on bus. Am carrying huge bag of crap. Tube station is closed due to flooding.
9.05am: Arrive at other bus stop, hop onto bus – surely everything will be ok now.
9.30am: Have moved about ten minutes walk down the road. Old ladies are lapping us. They’ve literally walked around the world once while we’ve been in this queue.
9.40am: Get off bus and walk to nearby tube station. Pay for ticket and walk through barrier. Take off iPod headphones. A message comes over the tannoy, “There are no southbound services on the Bakerloo line at the moment”. Swearing, I turn tail and get back on a bus.
9.50am: God it’s hot on this bus.
10.00am: Arrange to meet Nick C. and drive up with him from Primrose Hill as whole public transport thing is slowly destroying my mind.
10.25am: Bump into old friend at tube station. Declare that I am thirty. He’s older than me. Feel like I’ve joined a club.
10.40am: And we’re off to sunny Norfolk!
11.45am: Nick and I are driving around in the sun and it’s really good fun and we’re talking and really enjoying ourselves. I keep getting nice text messages from friends, and then – while driving through Elveden – I get a phone call from Gideon in St. Petersberg wishing me a happy birthday which is so entirely cool.
2pm: Arrive at my parents’ place in Norfolk kind of sweaty and exhausted. Which makes it sound like we arrived at orgasm rather than a nice house in the countryside, but we really didn’t. We lounge around for a while, I show Nick around the house and the village, we have a drink, get cleaned up and wait for the first people to start arriving…
Today ladies and gentlemen, I will mostly be writing like a barely-literate hack with no grasp of the English language and a tendency to create long, convoluted sentences with little structure, pace or glamour.
I’ve had my first interaction with Blogroots.com today – which I knew was on the horizon, but had somehow completely managed to miss the launch of. It’s a metafilter-style board in structure (except that it has a nice category feature that reminds me of Whedonesque) – and it’s all about weblogs and weblogging. It’s quite an interesting project in and of itself, but of course I came in at this thread – which is about (you guessed it) the Guardian’s weblog award…
Contrary to popular reports, my thirtieth birthday in Norfolk was not a weekend retreat for a cabal of elite webloggers. Quite the opposite in fact – I invited Mo Morgan for god’s sake! But there were webloggers there because I have friends who are webloggers. So thank you to Mo above, Cal, Matt and Meg and Paul for trekking across country to keep me company. Paul has written up his side of Saturday evening here.
As a brief aside before I get all excited about my lovely birthday weekend again (which I’ve no doubt is boring the world to death), I should probably return to the issue of the Guardian ‘Best British Weblog’ award – which is currently being defended over at Onlineblog.com. I feel a bit sorry for Neil, actually, because clearly the intent behind the event is completely altruistic – but as anyone who has participated in things even vaguely like this in the UK knows, the only thing you can guarantee about throwing something large and full of implication before webloggers is that you’re going to get a fair amount of stick for it. Someone somewhere isn’t going to agree with it, or think it misses the point, or is prepared to fight about it. It’s just a shame that this time the person throwing a strop has to be me… Increasingly though I’m wondering if there is enough groundswell of support to make a sufficiently large statement by not entering. By itself a weblog is a tiny tiny thing, mostly incapable of generating any kind of change. But weblogs are jumping off points for memes, and memes in blogspace can be all powerful. But if the meme doesn’t travel… Perhaps a better idea would be to enter the competition on the understanding that there is the tiniest possibility that it might give you a platform to explain why you think the whole thing was a bad idea in the first place in the most public and outspoken way… Although that could just be an attempt at rationalisation…