blogging
Hard to disagree with this: Bring Back the Shadows: The Case Against HDR
I’m pleased to say that The Guardian are now acknowledging their earlier daily podcasts — but my point about lack of institutional knowledge retention remains.
This makes me sad. The Guardian was once a genuine innovator in the field of podcasts - and it both abandoned that and then forgot it ever happened.
We need to stop making this mistake.
Reading about the floods in Kerala and the clean up afterwards has been sobering. A year ago I visited the region to work with Malayala Manorama the leading newspaper in the region.
“Spray and Pray” is not a viable social media strategy for newsrooms. It’s worrying how often it is the default, though.
Prepping the latest issue of my sporadic interesting reading newsletter Commonplace Reading. Sign up for linky goodness in your inbox.
The internet is basically a stroppy teenager, getting in trouble with the authorities, and making us all wish it would just hurry up and grow up: Deleting the internet’s innocence
I love blogging. I really do. But it does feel like getting traffic to OM&HB is harder then ever. I can’t recall a time in past 15 years that attracting readers was so very hard.
Part of that is my own fault - I’ve been very inconsistent as a blogger in recent years. And I’d hate to abandon it after all these years of labour.
But my goodness, does it feel like harder work getting the audience than it is getting the content written. And I’m sure that shouldn’t be the case.
Just for my microblog chums, this is the piece I was referring to: Don’t be an influencer, by a grumpy old blogger.
Just spent a couple of hours writing a blog post, which pretty much guarantees nobody will ever read it.
Why is traffic so often inversely proportional to effort?
A little thinking on the serious violence and murders in India that follow WhatsApp-spread misinformation. Is our knee-jerk reaction of blaming the technology the most useful approach?
Villiers Street, London - 1994
I’ve been scanning some old negatives in a pretty random way - just grab a packet and scan whatever’s in there.
This particular film was shot in late 1994, or early 1995, when I was working on The Publican, a now-gone magazine for the pub trade. I think the last 10 or 12 photos are why the film exists. They’re of a cellarman course I went on as part of my job. I appear to have “burned off” the rest of the film by shooting a load of random images around Charing Cross.
And they’re fascinating. On one level, you realise how little structure of these streets has changed in a little under 25 years. But the clothes, vehicles and branding on the shops is what gives away just how long ago this was.