Dadblog

• Bruce Springsteen Live 2008 Set Lists: brucespringsteen.net
  Set list for the frankly amazing gig at the Emirates last night
  (tags: music)

IMG_0539, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

It was like your Dad suddenly turned into the coolest person in the world and brought along his even cooler uncle and started singing. Not quite the Alarm at Tunbridge Wells Assembly Halls or Blur at the Academy, but definitely a strong third place….

• The Daily Mash - PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO F*CKING PARK ON BRINK OF EXTINCTION
  “There are now less than 50 people in the UK who are able to do this,” said Dr Logan. “That’s not just a tragedy for our planet, it’s doing my fucking head in every time I go to Homebase.”
  (tags: funny)
• Tourist bitten on penis by deadly brown snake - Telegraph
  “The man was having a roadside toilet stop when the deadly brown snake emerged from the bush and lunged at his crotch.”
  (tags: snakes australia)
• The Big Picture | The Costanza Energy Policy: 25 Ways to Drive Oil to $150
  A list of all the US policies (or lack of them) which have contributed to the increased oil price. Oh dear.
  (tags: energy oil economy)

Isn’t there something rather marvellous about the public spat between the Telegraph and the Guardian, first over stats and then over offensive content on their respective blogging platforms? I’ve long been somewhat sceptical of the idea of hosting “user content” on newspaper platforms, mainly because most of it, indeed almost all of it, is just plain rubbish. If a newspaper brand isn’t about the provision of quality content, it isn’t about anything.

But in this particular case, the instincts built up by the open hosting of discussion have allowed us to witness two newspaper brands slugging it out in public over quite important issues. In the case of the stats argument, I don’t think we’re any the wiser, but the recent debate over Richard Barnbrook’s blog has forced both titles to reiterate their talk policies, and to argue for them.

On the stats front, there’s only one question that really matters: which stats packages are both companies using, and how do they compare? And has the Telegraph’s recent ramp-up in unique users stemmed from a change in stats provider? ABCe doesn’t actually measure traffic, remember - it just audits the measurement used by the publisher itself. Until everyone uses the same stats package, these arguments are going to continue, because we’re not comparing apples with apples. Only Comscore does that, and it’s got its own issues. It seems ironic that something as important as who gets bragging rights over being “Britain’s biggest newspaper site” should be based on wobbly data, but there you go.

• BBC website £36m over budget: Trust raps management | Media | guardian.co.uk
  That’s 48 per cent over budget. Read that again. 48 per cent. Can anyone explain why bbc.co.uk is not, without doubt, the finest website in the world with spending like that being thrown around?
  (tags: bbc)

• May Carnival of Journalism » Invisible Inkling
  “What should news organisations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?”
  (tags: journalism innovation)

Fascinating piece by Siobhain Butterworth, readers editor at the Guardian, on the quagmire of being able to edit history in your newspaper archive:

We usually resist requests for deletions of names and quotes that don’t identify significant errors. But there are special cases - like the asylum seeker and rape survivor whose name we removed from an article, written in 2005, which included the information that she is HIV positive. “[She] is finding that people - even those she doesn’t know - are picking this up and asking her about her health, which she finds embarrassing and difficult to deal with,” her representative said.

Other cases are harder to decide. When you submit a letter for publication, post a comment or agree to be interviewed you are choosing to publish your views to the world at large. Should you be able to rewrite history by having them “unpublished”? If we were to accede to all such requests the online archive would become a patchy and unreliable record. As one journalist put it when I invited comments on this subject: “To add and delete risks ending up with a body of work that starts to look like a picked-over buffet.” But she added: “I think readers who want a piece or a quote removing from the web, because it embarrasses them years later, are on stronger grounds if it predates, say, five years ago.”

This absolutely encapsulates the way newspapers are changing: from immediate, ephemeral capsules of information, to curators of online information museums. That is the one fact that should dictate the reframing of newspaper newsrooms.

Jack on Prom Night, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

My son (in the middle) and a couple of mates on prom night last week. I did a quick straw poll. None of them had heard of the Specials.

Pay for info at Natural History Museum, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

Snapped this at the Natural History Museum on a school trip yesterday. You need to pay 50p for it to tell you what killed the dinosaurs. Two questions:

1. Did meteors really kill the dinosaurs? I thought it was volcanoes (Deccan Traps etc.)

2. Isn’t this rather against the spirit of museums?

“Fashion is porn for women.” Discuss.