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Tuesday 23 February 2010

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What are you doing to me Facebook? I thought we loved each other. I told you time and time again how much you mean to me. Didn't you get the flowers I sent to you? All those love notes? Think of wonderful times we've spent together. I've devoted hours to you and and does this mean nothing? You’re breaking my heart, Facebook. I’m falling apart and my soul is shattering into a million tiny pieces. How could you do this to me? We can’t go on like this... I thought you loved me too.


Choo chooooo!

Sunday 21 February 2010

I wish trains still went “choo choo” for three reasons: 1) I like the smell of steam engines, 2) the interior of aforementioned steam trains aren’t a sea of plastic and 3) my impression would not only be adorable but accurate too. There’s nothing interesting or onomatopoeic about an East Midlands Train. On the other hand, I doubt a steam train would have had a plug where I could have charged my Macbook. If you hadn't already realised, I am writing these here words from my plush seat on an East Midlands train as I speed through the countryside back to my beloved Lincoln.

choo chooooo

A little more newsworthy?

Friday 19 February 2010

In a bid to write an actually newsworthy blog I ventured to the BBC news website and had a little wander around. I found the headlining story (The Iraq Inquiry), lusted over some technoblather about the iPad, was sickened by a feature on Celebrity Big Brother but eventually I found this...



Since when were the love lives of swans newsworthy? I myself have doubts about the love lives of so-called celebrities being news (doubts in the form of "I don't give a flying f...duck!"). But swans?! Does it have an environmental factor? No... baby swans are fine. Are these particularly interesting swans? Nope, they're just swans. Is this happening anywhere interesting? Woop di doo... it's Gloucestershire. It's a fine example of those "and finally" pieces. The like of kittens up trees. I suppose most of them are a nice little moment where after the recession, various wars and natural disasters we can sigh and say "ah, the world isn't such a horrible place after all." But swan divorce?! This isn't a happy story... it's just generally pointless.


"Oh great... even the swans are getting divorced... now, where's the noose?"

A backwards move for blogging.

Wednesday 17 February 2010

I knew it. I knew as soon as I saw that we would be doing a blogging assignment that'd it'd be a step backwards for me.

I've kept my personal blog on Livejournal for several years and when I saw that we were to do a blogging assignment I was thrilled. Overjoyed that I was gonna be tested on something I loved. So I decided to buck up my ideas a bit. I started a proper (mildly journalistic) blog on Blogger (though as you see I've now moved it over to Wordpress) because I needed to write blogs that didn't include so many "lols" "wtfs" and "omg there's this guy in my seminar who wears really tight trousers". Even though I still write a huge pile of drivel it's now more of a blog than a diary.

But no. Apparently that's not good enough. Suddenly, having had a blog before being giving this assignment is a disadvantage. I've been told to set up yet another blog because it has to be (inexplicably) started today when the assignment was set. Are you kidding me? You want us to be journalists off our own backs? You talk about blogging having no gateways? But by these standards we are only allowed to blog when you say so. This is actually ridiculous. It's stupid. This is journalism... it should be one of the most up to date courses on the university curriculum. Surely it should be the assumption that your students already have blogs? Not that it's an entirely new thing that we're learning.

There is absolutely no good reason why I shouldn't be able to carry on using this blog. It's not as if it has a backlog of thousands of entries. It's not like it's my personal diary. It's my blog that I set up in acknowledgement that I'd be doing an assessment on blogging.

Suddenly I've become incredibly restricted in something I love. My passion for journalism is about new media, social media, the idea that anyone can get their opinion out of the internet, the fact that I talk to people across the globe. The internet is the most wonderful example of free speech but somehow, somehow this has been has been completely ignored.

I've never lost so much faith in journalism as I have today.

Texting Protocol

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Over half the population of our planet* own a mobile phone. And aren't they wonderful creations? You can contact your dear old mom from anywhere... not including lifts, the London Underground, the pointy bits of Wales and my old common room (unless you hung out of the window). You can text your friends from as far as the other side of the room, update social networking sites ("Suzy is on the toilet. lol" etc.), enter competitions, and when at my favourite rock club one can make a vain attempt at getting the DJ to play Love Shack. Then of course there's other things you can do with you phone: play games (I will never play a game that isn't Snake... oh Nokia, you genius), take photos of amusing placenames and phalic vegetables, bluetooth things back and forth endlessly and let's not get onto the possible uses of a vibrate function.

Didn't you used to love your Nokia 3210?