plasticbag.org

• Trusty Sidekicks A new comics-related weblog by the gorgeous and charming Sparky of Ultrasparky.org – replete with nostalgia, full of cool old ads from comic books and dosed up on homo juice. Awesome…
• BBC relaunches 6music’s website So the department in which I work have relaunched the website for 6music and – along with the Radio 3 site that I helped out on – it’s one of the most true-to-the-medium sites that the BBC’s done to date. Very nice.
• The new home secretary is sticking with ID cards – despite the fact that I don’t know anyone in this country who actually wants them “The new home secretary, Charles Clarke, today rejected calls to reconsider plans for ID cards after Labour backbenchers suggested the departure of David Blunkett yesterday should prompt a rethink.”

• Get The Booty Ye Deserve! Watch in shock as the ninja / pirate battle moves into altogether more modern and frankly litigous grounds…

• UK: 2004 TV shows fail to generate mass audiences Only six programmes in 2004 attract an audience in excess of 15 million viewers. In 2003, 50 programmes got between 17 and 20 million viewers. In 1999, 177 programmes had more than 15 million viewers.
• But though the big programmes are losing out, the audience isn’t watching any less TV (pdf) “Television viewing has proved remarkably resilient to increased demands on consumers … and in fact has increased slightly over the last decade (from 25.6 hours per household per week in 1993 to 26.1 hours in 2003)”

• My GamerTag stats for Halo 2 I’m Orlando II, by the way. You may have noticed I’m not positng that much at the moment. I’ve just lost two evenings to 50 games against American teenagers who call people “Faggot” a lot… Wankers. Good game though…

• MusicBrainz come to the BBC’s learning lunch After working on a project around programme information for most of the last year, I’ve started to get really interested in standard identifiers and metadata for all kinds of things. A universal CRID for songs is – I think – just a question of time…
• Millions to miss out on the net “By 2025, 40% of the UK’s population will still be without internet access at home, says a study.”

• The Homosexual Agenda “I know that many of you have heard Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others speak of the ‘Homosexual Agenda,’ but no one has ever seen a copy of it. I have finally obtained a copy directly from the Head Homosexual.”
• Skeletal Systems of cartoon characters “I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.”

• MSN Spaces (Microsoft’s entry into the weblog / representation of personal identity online sphere) include support for “Music Lists” The idea – that you can make a list of songs and post them up on your site – isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it’s not that far off integrating with your music app (Windows Media Player) and becoming a nicely distributed audioscrobbler…
• The bodging of the BBC “And none of this has anything to do with bricks, mortar and the ability to chart a course. None of it helps an institution we could easily help by guaranteed licence fee and lengthened charter if we wanted to, for barely the price of a new ID card.”

Hm. I didn’t realise that Google now had de facto ownership of the term “weblogger”. While trying to play with the new version of Google Groups this afternoon, I was confronted by this infuriating error message:

So years ago I did a journalism course and one of the early lessons in news reporting was just an exercise in trying to collectively define news. It was a pretty heavily-directed effort, and I think it had to be, because like many other things that we’re so used to in our everyday lives, it’s weirdly difficult to explain to people. Anyway, I’m cleaning up my flat and I find the definition that we came up with on a piece of notepaper, and I’m looking at it and I’m thinking: “This is actually quite interesting – and possibly quite useful for people who are setting up subject-based weblogs”. So here it is:

“New information of significance, interest or relevance which affects the lives or interests of a particular group of readers / listeners / viewers”

It’s not perfect by any means, but it gives you some places to start when you’re thinking about what to write. Know your audience, make sure you’re giving them information, and make sure that the information is actually going to matter to them. It’s not exactly revelatory information, but I figured someone out there might find it useful. And now I’ve transcribed it onto the net, it means that I can throw away the piece of paper!

• I’ve been playing with and installing MediaWiki And I have to confess – I’m pretty bloody impressed. One of the easiest installations I’ve ever done for a wiki and very powerful and flexible. This might be the core of a future project
• SXSW Interactive Festival Does anyone know how they source people, papers and panels for the SXSW Interactive festival? Let me know if so…
• Mr Jones on Tony Stark on ETech “The line up for 2005’s Etech has been posted, and so far it seems like the same people talking about the same pet subjects. Not many ‘genuine outbreaks of the future’ so far.” Plus, I’m a Beatle. Which is nice.
• Captcha as distributed handwriting recognition systems “Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.”
• Tiny hats on Innocent Bottles made by real grannies! ” As we speak, lots of nice grannies at Extra Care and Age Concern centres around the UK are knitting us mini bobble hats for our smoothies. For each bottle sold in EAT outlets across the UK, innocent and EAT will donate 50p to Age Concern”
• The weblog of Miss K, transgendered z-list celebrity Not only beautiful, well-constructed, web native and elegant – but also bloody interesting. It’s probably cos I’m gay, but I find this way more interesting than Belle de Jour…
• Vaughn pulls out of these new weblog award things because he doesn’t like the company Like much of what’s been happening online, I’ve completely missed the ‘2004 weblog awards’ (no relation to the Bloggies). I think this one emerged from the mostly right-wing ex-warblogger politico community/ecosystem…