I'm chuffed as a small horse to announce that Kevin, my T'Other, has a new job working as Head of Blogging and Interaction for The Guardian. We are both delighted about this as it's going to be a fantastic opportunity for him to really get his teeth into blogging and community projects, moreso than he's been able to at the BBC. And I must say, I'm a wee bit green - he gets to do really cool shit with some really cool people, such as Neil McIntosh and Ben Hammersley, whilst I get to watch from a distance and make approving noises.

But more importantly than that, it means I get to keep him in the UK for a while longer, which is obviously my main concern. Yay!

Congratulations, Kevin. I'm really proud of you.

PS... You hiring?

I had a little package turn up in the post this morning - a copy of Tom Reynolds' new book, Blood, Sweat & Tea. I was on my way out to give a presentation, so I took it with me to open on the Tube. Like Euan Semple, despite being a reader of Tom's for a long, long time, I couldn't help but start flicking through the book and, despite recognising some bits as posts I'd read before, I couldn't put it down. In fact, I nearly missed my stop because of it!

I remember when I first met Tom we had a chat about books. His blog was already getting quite a bit of attention and he'd had a publisher contact him about doing a book, but he said he'd turned them down because he wasn't interested in being a writer. At the time, I thought, 'Well, I guess it's not for everyone', but I'm glad that he reconsidered. Blood, Sweat & Tea is a great read - just as fascinating as Tom's blog, but a lot more portable. I would recommend most highly that you go out and buy it.

Happy First Blogday to Steve! Glad you're still with us after all this time.

If this photo doesn't rend your heart with pity, nothing will. (Ta Kevin.)

Blog-City, the blog host I used for the second incarnation of Chocolate and Vodka (after Blogger went all crap) have summarily killed my archives. I have the data, but no way to import it into Blogware, or to make it publicly available, so I am a bit peeved that a chunk of my online past can just vanish.

I think this is a real shame. Storage is cheap, and I personally feel a bit like blogs should be forever unless the owner decides to delete, but obviously Blog-City wanted to clear off some space on their servers and I am sure that they would take the line that as I was no longer paying for the service (I paid for the last two years, even though I wasn't using it), and as the blog was dormant they have the right to delete it. I guess they probably tried to contact me but didn't get a response. Who knows. I never got the email, which may just mean that an old address was on file. Probably all my fault.

Still.

Ok... so any geeks here wanna take a stab at converting the old Blog-City archives into something that's importable by Blogware?

If you've been wondering what I've been doing, workwise, of the last few months, and want a fairly full and comprehensive update, then I've put it over on Blogiculum Vitae, my portfolio blog.

I just read this in my aggregator, and from the opening syllables realised I could steal it. Almost verbatim. Including the disclaimer at the top.

Then I got to the bottom and realised I was supposed to. Possibly apart from the disclaimer at the top.

I'm doing this for Heather Tom and for anyone who ever reads this site because I've been too busy and too distracted trying to get some movement in various areas of my life to post here as much as I'd like. So even though it's filler...

Four jobs I've had:

Waitress (for four hours)
Editorial Assistant
Music Journalist
Social Software Consultant/Digital Rights Activist

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Shaun of the Dead
Wonder Boys
Pirates of the Caribbean
MirrorMask

Four places I've liked

San Francisco
Prague
Sydney
Vancouver

Four TV shows I love

Battlestar Galactica
Lost
Spaced
Dr Who (new series)

Four places I've vacationed:

New York
Cornwall
Vienna
Brisbane

Four of my favorite dishes:

Crepes with cinnamon apples
Chocolate and hazelnut terrine (from the George and Dragon, Burpham)
Mushroom and truffle soup (from The Bistro, somewhere in Berkshire)
My mum's Roast beef

Four sites I visit daily:

BBC News
Gmail
Open Rights Group (and wiki)
Flickr

Four places I would rather be right now:

In my own flat with my boyfriend
San Francisco
North Wales
Anywhere hot

Four bloggers minxes cheeky monkeys I am tagging:

Kevin
Kate
Gary (because he doesn't blog enough)
Euan (because he doesn't blog enough about him)

When I first started reading blogs, I only read a few. A handful. Then I found through those few blogs a whole host of others. More and more and more. Wonderful, intelligent, amusing, interesting... A world of fascination.

Then I got work.

Now I hardly have time to read all the blogs that are in my reader. Don't even have time to thin them out by chucking out all the ones I don't read anymore. Instead, I've just reorganised a little. And I've gone back to just reading the few that I started off reading, with maybe a couple of additions, four years ago. There are about ten, in fact, that I am reading on a daily basis. Well, nine and a half, because Coatse writes too much for me to keep up so I dip in to his as and when I'm feeling brave.

Just reading a few blogs regularly is starting to hook me back into the blogosphere though. I am starting to feel like this is my medium again, rather than a medium that, basically, pwnd me.

The other thing I've done is remove my blogroll. It was way out of date, didn't reflect reality at all, so it had to go. I may do a new one in due course, but I think it needs a holiday for now.

So do I, mind you, despite the fact that today is just my second day back at work. The last three weeks doesn't much feel like the holiday it was supposed to be. I forced myself to take a week off completely, and that turned out to be a strange sort of hard work all by itself.

So yes, there's it all explained. Back to first principles and hope for the best.

This is just too funny not to pass on: The Morning News, Is He Cute Or Is He British?

I once spent a happy, drunken evening with my English friend Debs and our Welsh friend Aaron, sitting in Debs' lounge in Trefor, north Wales, making Aaron repeat the words 'guarantee', 'Llanrwst', and the phrase 'it's at the bottom of a runway', because when he said those things, they sounded like heaven.

(Remember A Fish Called Wanda? Remember Wanda's ... 'reaction' to foreign accents? Yup. Ditto.)

And here was me, thinking my friend Joi was a bloke... and all this time she was just leading me on and disguising her true nature:

8. Joi Ito of Technorati (http://joi.ito.com ) has her hands in a lot of Web 2.0 companies, some you might not even know about yet. This makes her damn powerful. Often times the one you don’t know that well is the most powerful. My personal favorite because she seems to help people get shit done.

From Jack of All Blogs.

Who says all bloggers do their research?

As you might know, I sometimes co-host The Movie Show on The Podcast Network. If you've never listened to it, my basic role in the show is to have the piss taken out of me by my darling friend Cam, and to giggle a lot. Yes, I too can see a bright future ahead of me in radio and TV.

Anyway, Cam's doing a survey of TPN listeners, so may I respectfully suggest that you either a) go fill it in if you're a listener or b) you become a listener by downloading the latest Movie Show podcast, and then go fill it in.

Thank you kindly.

I was going to open this post with a direct quote from a website that gathers salacious gossip about the stars, but which says about Neil Gaiman nothing more than, and here I paraphrase, "However lovely you think Neil Gaiman is, he's actually lovelier". Sadly, I can't find the link, so you'll have to take Mr Gaiman's word for it, as he's my source for this disgraceful rumour which just happens to fall in the the category of 'understatement' when compared to the actual truth of the matter.

Every now and again, the universe seems to warp a bit and throws me up on the beach of Somewhere Unexpected and watches me flapping around like a stranded fish trying to figure out just how in hell I got there. It's like that bit out of Hitchhikers. You know. With the shore washing up and down.

So, last night, I went to a launch party for Neil's Anansi Boys (which no, I haven't read because I'm saving it for Christmas when I can give it the full and proper attention it deserves, rather than stealing half-moments out of my over-full days). It was definitely one of those fish-stranded-on-beach moments, but really in the best possible way.

It's a bizarre story how I got there, centring around a throw-away comment made by me on this blog, a comment from Neil, the promise patronage for ORG and a number of emails, some of which were very long, complicated and slightly bemused and one of which invited me to 'a' book launch party.

Nevertheless, get there I did, and the first thing I did after I got there was get myself a vodka. There's not much a glass of Wyborowa can't help with. Then I went to introduce myself to Neil, who, much to my astonishment, recognised me before I had even said a word. He was somewhat caught up in talking to booksellers and signing books (book launch parties not being much of a party for the book launcher), and so we agreed to talk about ORG later on, and in the meantime I'd go find people to harass.

I actually knew no one else there so I just wandered up to people and said "Hi, I don't know anyone here so I thought I'd come and say hello!" and they'd look at me and ask "How did you come to be here then?" and I'd say "Oh, well, er, I know Neil" and that turned out to be a nice conversation starter pretty much every time. Can't imagine why.

Yesterday afternoon, as it happens, Paula and I were talking about how awful our memories are, and Cory gave us a tip for how you remember people - make some some stupid little mental story about the person you're meeting, a sort of mnemonic, and you'll remember them straight away. Employing this tactic, I now remember that I met the delightful Roz Kaveney, Mitch Benn, Faith Brooker, Vanessa, Gwen, Richard Howe, Tom, Clare and Andy Quinn amongst others. Wow. I never remember people's names!

Ended up having a really nice evening randomly chatting to people, and then towards the end, when Neil had done his duty, we got to chat about digital rights and what is happening with ORG and what a Patron-In-Waiting (which is what we decided he is, at least until we have a real membership organisation for him to be Patron of) can do.

I can't say I ever quite shook off my slight feelings of shyness and nervousness, but Neil is gracious and easy to talk to. I felt completely honoured to get to go out for dinner with him and some of his friends, and we had just the most entertaining time trying to figure out what some of the dishes on the menu might actually be made from as the menu writer had obviously decided that listing actual ingredients would be not just superfluous, but possibly also crass.

Anyway, tonight Lenny Henry is interviewing Neil, and with kind thanks to Andy Quinn, I shall be there.

The Financial Times ran a piece today called Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Blog?. It was in their paper and everything. Those famous pink pages. And it quotes me.

Wow.

It's not every day you get to be in the Financial Times.

I've even managed to impress myself on this one.

OK, so Radio Five Live went fairly well I think. I've never done live radio before, so yes, I was nervous, but more because I wasn't sure what the procedure was rather than because I felt I wouldn't know what to say. (Let's face it, the number of times I've been lost for words can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

So I was picked up this morning by car at 8.45am (inhumane time for a Sunday morning, in my humble opinion) and got to the Beeb at about 9.30am. Wasn't on air til 10.30am, so spent that hour talking through the script with Saira and Clare the producer, and then sat, and waited, and got nervous. I was a bit surprised at how meticulously the show was scripted, actually. I'd sort of assumed that these sorts of radio shows just ... happen. But no, they're actually planned down to the second.

The show itself just went so quickly. The schedule said it was half an hour, but I swear I was in the studio no more than a few moments. I didn't really get to speak to Julian Worricker, although he did send a few reassuring smiles in my direction which were very much appreciated. And I seemed to manage to speak in complete sentences, not repeat myself too much, or sound too daft, so I'm pretty happy with the way it went. It was cool too to hear Lloyd Davis and Geoff Jones add their thoughts - some recorded at drinks last week, but Geoff was on the phone as well.

The feedback from listeners was great - apparently they had some 37 texts, around 30 emails and 18 or so comments on Saira's blog. Julian mentioned afterwards that's rather a lot for a segment like that - maybe that's the power of blogs upping radio listenership?

I'm just listening to the show now on the BBC website (available for the next week, I think, and the blogging bit starts at about 30 mins in), which does make me feel a wee bit funny. I mean, the sound of one's own voice is always a bit weird, but hearing it in the context of a very professionally produced radio programme is even weirder (compare and contrast The Movie Show podcasts I occasionally do, where we just ramble on and talk crap for an hour).

Julian is going to be talking to a blogger each Sunday over the coming weeks to try to get a feel for this whole blogging lark, so if you have a blog you think that he might be interested in, you should email to let him know.

I'm relieved it's over, though, although that now allows me to worry about finishing up my public domain talk for this afternoon's RESFEST and getting my Uses of Blogs chapter polished and sent over to the editors.

Every now and again I come across a piece of marketing which is just so clueless as to be astonishing. Usually it involves blogs and some idiot at an agency somewhere thinking that they can 'leverage' the 'power' of blogs to 'virally market' their wares and 'increase brand awareness'.

Usually, I just take the piss.

This time round, though, the marketers have reached a new and despicable low.

One of my very good friends is the blogger Tom Coates. His is one of a now very small number of blogs that I read religiously every day, not just because he has a fascinating insight into stuff I'm interested in, but also because he's a friend and I want to know what's happening with him.

Over the last few months, Tom has been grappling with the task of finding his father, whom he hasn't spoken to since he was five years old. His story has been touching, and I marvel sometimes at the strength he shows in sharing his search with his readers.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom got a letter from his father. His first contact with his dad for 28 years. It's taken him two weeks to find the words to talk about this on his blog - it was a hard post for him to write, but because other people who were dealing with the same issue of finding lost parents have been so supportive of Tom, he felt he wanted to find a way to talk about what's happened.

Many of the comments on the post are very supportive, but one stands out. Not because it's not supportive, but because it was written by a fictional character used by an advertising agency to promote Cillit Bang, a cleaning product.

I cannot for the life of me fathom why an advertising agency would do this - it's wrong on so many levels. If they were hoping for Googlejuice, then they're unlikely to get any because of the way that blog tech works these days. But surely someone wouldn't be this insensitive as to pimp their product on a such a personal post? Would they?

Tom didn't think it sounded feasible either, so he investigated. Sadly, it turns out that, after quite a bit of phoning and checking and ferreting out facts, this is actually exactly what it appears to be - marketers writing fake comments from a fictional character purporting to be supportive of someone going through a real, emotionally stressful time.

There are words for this, as Tom points out (emphasis Tom's):

Now clearly, it was pretty difficult to believe that even a marketing / advertising organisation would be comfortable with trying to promote their product on a weblog where someone was discussing their first contact with their father for 28 years. I mean, sure there's some limited mileage to be gained in a link from a number of weblogs, although with all the anti-spam tech in place now they can't possibly have been hoping for Googlejuice. But still, surely thinking about how to exploit that kind of post would be beyond the pale. I mean, surely that would be revolting, corrupt, cynical, disgusting, revolting, sick and dishonourable. It would be - frankly - one of the most offhandedly unpleasant things I've ever come up against. And a trick! An attempt by these people to exploit a community and individual's good faith to sell a few bottles of highly corrosive cleaning fluid. And remember, this wasn't an automated message operating indiscriminately, this was a hand-written note posted by an individual human being.

I admire Tom for giving these people the benefit of the doubt to start with, and actually phoning round to find out whether or not an ad agency truly was behind this comment. Now that we know they are, it's time to make it very, very clear that this sort of behaviour simply will not be tolerated. (Emphasis Tom's in quote below.)

One way or another - whether these specific people are directly responsible for spamming our conversations with their marketing - this whole enterprise stinks to high heaven. The fake weblogs that pretend to be real are almost bad enough - it's an attempt to muddy the reality of a community with the fantasy world that they need to flog cleaning products and make it seem glamourous or exciting. But someone out there - associated with one marketing group or another - is also keen to directly stick their dirty little hands in the cookie jars of well-meaning, honourable people, quite happy to pollute or destroy the value of the enterprise for everyone else if they can derive even the tiniest return from it.

I'm going to give them the benfit of the doubt and say that this whole enterprise is based on clumsiness and stupidity rather than evil, but we have to make a stand and make it clear to these people that if you live by the sword you die by the sword. It's not good enough for just these marketing people to realise that they've screwed up and damaged the brands they were associated with, we have to keep making examples of them to stop other clumsy organisations viewing our self-created territories as nothing more than sales opportunities. Do not lie to us because we will expose you. Be honourable, or we will erase you. And all anyone will see when they search on Google for your products is that there is no depth to which you will not stoop to get another few bottles into someone's shopping basket.

The blogosphere is pretty good at self-regulating. When its body is invaded by a splinter, it will expel it. There can be simply no justification for the cynical manipulation of blog comments like this. There can be no leeway given to advertising agencies - in this case Reckitt Benckiser - who screw up like this. New to blogging? Well, use a bit of common sense before you post because if you fuck up this badly in public, you can expect to get yourself ripped a new one.

In fact, here, let me do that now. Reckitt Benckiser have behaved in a disgraceful, despicable, dishonourable, selfish, cold-hearted, insensitive, cynical, vile manner. They should be ashamed of themselves. I expect nothing less than a full and public apology from both Reckit Benckiser and their employee who so callously tried to gain benefit from someone else's heartfelt honesty. And if they had any honour at all, they would remove the Cillit Bang blog and stop polluting people's comments with their marketing bullshit.