The Flicker Blog and Podcast

I was sent a link to a highly entertaining site today – what can be best described as an mp3 archive of the weird and wonderful (wonderfully bad, generally) recordings of the past. Contains such classics as: ‘Michael Mills – Hidden & Satanic Messages In Rock Music’
and ‘Picking Up Girls Made Easy – The Women’s Clothing Store Pick-Up’

Psychological profiling at work aimed at identifying my personality type (thankfully I’m not all bad!) followed by a panel interview for a fairly senior position at work. No idea how it went – but typically I’m assuming the worst.

Louise sent me this item on branding which looks very interesting (and fits with some of the things I was discussing in my interview) – brands are more than logos:
Building Brand into Structure

Just discovered a very interesting South Korean news site that allows the audience to publish articles of their own by agreeing to a code of ethics. Looks like participatory journalism is coming of age.

Many thanks are owed to Ian Forrester and in particular Neil Charlton for their help in setting up PHP based RSS parsing on the site for me. I’ve quickly built a page (mainly for personal use) where I’ll add new and interesting feeds to as I discover them.

Louise sent me a link to a very interesting discussion about the impacts of the internet on journalism – essentially how blogs, RSS feeds, collaborative publishing etc is moving journalism away from the traditional media model of ‘filter, then publish’ to a ‘publish, then filter’ model.

I’ve just downloaded the PDF to read later.

Just spent lunchtime at a very interesting seminar at work – ‘Dis-United States?’
The speakers were Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian) Doctor Robert McGeehan (Institute of US Studies, and a self-proclaimed Republican) and Jane Little (BBC World Service Religious Affairs).

The main thrust of the debate was about the supposed ‘50/50 nation’ (referring to a USA divided entirely in half by it’s political allegiances), and to what the signifiers were. Jonathan Freedland suggested that the Democrats and Republicans had such distinct views on things such as the UN, abortion, gay marriage and gun ownership that politics had become very black & white to most US citizens. He cited many cultural references as evidence, including the recent US bestseller list – two of the most popular books of the day being non fiction, politically focused, and extremely right/left in their views:

Ann Coulter’s ‘Treason.’
and
Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men.’
About as polemic as you can get!

Gaz and I have just spent the long weekend struggling to finish a track (Key Dumb) to go with Dumb Key.

On Thursday last week, Graeme came around and recorded some lyrics for us*. I spent all day Saturday cleaning them up ready for when Gaz came down in the evening. Frustratingly, we didn’t get the track finished. It’s definitely starting to come together, but it’s not ready to go out the door just yet.
It’s exhausting spending 3 days solid listening to the same thing over and over, but hopefully, the end result will be worth it.

There’s a label in Chicago (KG Beats) already interested in Key Dumb, and another label in New Orleans (Sugarcane) chasing some material from us. I really need to get on with this stuff! Sometimes things just come together really easily, other times we have to really work at them.

*The lyrics are actually based on some stuff that Graeme wrote back in the early 90’s for our band at the time ‘Scrape.’