A slightly more wordy list than usual today: I don’t think I will have time for any lengthy articles but will keep returning to this throughout the day.
- HipCal is the new name of MyPimp. Apparently the developers had originally thought the service would be used mainly by students, hence the vaguely amusing name. The realisation that quite a few professionals wanted to use it, but were put off by the URL, meant a change was felt necessary.
- Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, now has his own blog on the BBC news site. Entertaining stuff.
- My local council, rather strangely, have a VBulletin discussion forum on their website. Top marks, I guess, for trying to open lines of communication, but it has hardly been touched and the setup leaves a lot to be desired. Good use of Council Tax funds too, when phpBB is available for free and is surely the better option when user numbers aren’t known.
- There was an interesting interview with William Hague on Today this morning. Hague has returned to the shadow cabinet as shadow Foreign Secretary, as a result of which Malcolm Rifkind has flounced back to the backbenches.
- Not sure if I have mentioned it before, but Protopage is an excellent RSS aggregator and personalised homepage. You can add RSS feeds, link lists and sticky note anywhere on the screen you like, and can have multiple screens too, making some or all public, if you like. Good stuff.
- Absurdity of the day: Sainsbury’s and Woolworth’s have taken the DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera off the shelves for Christmas due to pressure from Christian groups.
Re the Nick Robinson blog: he’s a great political editor, effortlessly making politics brilliantly interesting (though I’m one of those sad sacks who thinks it’s pretty intrinsically fascinating anyway), bettered perhaps only by Mark Mardell, who has gone off to Europe, a subject worthy of a great explainer if ever there was.
The Robinson blog though is partly recycled bits-to-camera: the piece on the new Tory tactics (excellently named ‘Tony Flattery’) was just a word-for-word dump of his script for that day’s report on PM/the Six O’Clock News etc.
http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/nickrobinson/2005/12/tony_flattery.html
I noticed that too – one of his Radio 4 reports was just pasted in. A shame, because I think he has picked up the baton from Andrew Marr really well.
We’re going to see The Jerry Springer Opera in May – I guess we’ll need body armour to get through the protesters.