Posts by BenWilson
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A workmate tells me that after a year in Amsterdam and his third bicycle theft, he broke down and bought a dodgy second-hand one from a drug addict, just like everyone else.
Yes, they're big on their re-cycling there :-)
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I doubt our bicycle ownership is the issue in bike crime. It's bicycle usage. Got a lovely shot on holiday in Holland at the Central train station in the Hague of about 2 acres of parked bikes. The bike I hired had 3 locks and the insurance they made me take was entirely against theft.
Most bikes in NZ are probably locked up in garages most of the time.
Same exact thing applies to car crime, in reverse.
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Yes journalist's bottoms are just too small.
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Well someone has to review Prego, don't they?
They do. Although I think I'd personally trust someone who wasn't famous, because they might get the kind of service I'd be likely to get.
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Oh the humanity, we would have no coffee.
I grow coffee at home. People seem to forget that you can grow stuff under glass (or transparent plastic in my case). Admittedly I'm yet to get one cuppa out of it, so I'm chemically incapable of accepting self sufficiency at the moment.
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There's little demand for investigative journalism and therefore limited employment in this genre.
Yup, each blogger is at most one investigative journalist. To compare a blog with a newspaper is wrong. But compare the newpaper with a collection of the top 100 blogs and you'll find there's a shitload of primary research going on. For instance, Russell is talking today about his own personal experiences with a Freeview HD Decoder. This is primary research.
I'm interested in this information about the death of Arthur C Clarke, as a case in point about where blogs and freely contributed information fit in. I first saw it on Google News (which does no primary research whatsoever). That took me to C/Net, in which the author appeared to have first gleaned his info from Wikipedia. No doubt the Wikipedia info came from someone seeing it on the MSM somewhere, perhaps the BBC. Does that mean that nothing has been added to the original BBC info? All three places, C/Net, Wiki, and the BBC have slightly different things to say about him, and different ways of saying it. The BBC is your classic dry tribute. The C/Net article gives us a whole bunch of resources to look at, from YouTube and various forums around the world, and snippets therefrom. The Wiki gives you the encyclopedic view, for those who previously knew nothing at all about the man, or very little, it's a great place to start. -
Ralston has an interesting point that blogs don't do 'primary research', in terms of people on the ground actually doing interviews, taking footage etc. And yes, for most blogs, which are written by one person, that is of course true. They're not a huge newsroom with professional photographers and helicopters waiting to race off after ambulance or police emergencies. They don't usually get interviews with the PM. In general, the news is mostly parasitic off the MSM.
However, they are an alternative 'view' on that data coming in, and they are places of discussion. They go further than any medium before in that respect. If you want analysis, you'll get all you can handle on the blogosphere, and Ralston appears to know this when he both slags on blogs, whilst at the same time confessing to spending a lot of time reading them.
And the 'primary research' point is not totally true either. The commentators on blogs are numerous, and they will often talk directly about what is going on inside their own domains. As for interviews, we are starting to see quite a few people who would normally be the sole province of a TV or radio interview coming straight here and saying their piece, exactly how they wanted to say it, without any editing.
It's not the same as MSM news. It could not replace it, any more than than electronics have replaced paper. But it may very well become bigger, in exactly the same way that Wikipedia is bigger than any other encyclopedia, and Linux has more people working on it than any other OS. This could be very hard to see for people stuck in the model of thinking that unless you can make a lot of $ out of it, it won't last. Some ideas are just bigger than that.
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Building on yesterday's theme of Brown=Blogosphere, Ralston's really giving you a plug, whether he intends to or not. Anyone who was listening to him and thinking "I really should find out what this blogosphere is all about" now knows what name to type into Google. Then they can judge for themselves just how nutty PA is, by comparison to the talkback they were accustomed to.
Doesn't excuse all the abuse though. I wonder what it's all about? For Ralston to be jealous of Russell's journalistic career would just be silly. For Ralston to be jealous of the total editorial freedom that Russell has always enjoyed seems more likely, and he's having his own little run off the leash. Like most people who have strong opinions, that early time off the leash is when they are blundering around trying to find their new voice. I hope his one settles down a little bit, because he's got a very sharp mind, and still could contribute a lot to NZ journalism.
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Heh, they're not that rare. Everyone I know has some.
I hear that man made diamonds are now distinguishable only by their lack of imperfections. Won't be long before we laugh at our precious old diamonds.
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I don't get the attraction of diamonds anyway. As daleaway says, most people can't tell them from glass. Why not just use glass, if it's the look that people like? I'm sure it's because the look is only 1/100th of the value to most people - it's the price tag attached that is the real buzz.
For the record I feel much the same way about most precious metals. If asked which metal is the most beautiful, I'd have to say stainless steel is the prettiest by far.
On the other hand, fake breasts are horrid. Unless they're so well done you couldn't tell the difference.
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