Manchester Hermetically-sealed Bubble Awards 2009

This is a story about a bubble.  A tiny hermetically-sealed bubble within a beer froth of other hermetically-sealed bubbles left on the teak surface of a small table in a bar in Manchester.  Inside this bubble are a small group of mediocre 'writers' (I use the term loosely) who feel something is missing from their blogging:  appropriate appreciation from an audience.

Now then, one day one of these characters has a brain-wave.  Why not create a blog award just for Manchester? They can all nominate each other's blogs, give each other awards, and use the event itself to post press releases on numerous websites under the guise of 'social media news'.  They can target  main stream newspaper web sites (who are so busy embracing reader-generated content and getting the graduates in the newsroom to edit down the 'real' news stories for the brand new on-line version of the paper, that they haven't noticed that traditional journalistic values are vanishing around them); each other's blogs; and other literary-minded blogs which number into the thousands in the UK alone.

Some members of this desperate group occasionally write for the Manchester Evening News - but mostly in an on-line capacity you understand - these are not seasoned journalists or anything approaching that.  So, the MEN agree to 'sponsor' the event ("is £50 for the beer tab all right?") and now the full power of the social media machinery the Bubble People spend their lives trumpeting about can swing into operation...

At least three of them regularly contribute to "The Mancunian Way", a dry, bland parade of culture-related press releases which describes itself as "part of the Manchester Evening News website" and naturally includes links back to the authors' respective blogs.  The self-authored announcement of the Manchester Blog Awards 2009 is given  prominent airing on the site, describing organisers and contributors alike with such endearments as "Queen Blogger" and "Digital Gadfly" and listing all their friends' blogs as nominees for the prestigious(sic) award.  Also used and abused is "The Manchester Literature Festival Blog", another witless list that reads like a Sixth Form 'Today We Learned How To Write A Press Release' project.

Soon, the nominations are in:

But it seems it's impossible to share the list of 200 nominees due to 'technical difficulties'.  Or dare I say it, because the list is somewhat smaller than suggested.

Shortly afterwards the actual Manchester Blog Awards site itself is proud to announce:

You guessed it, Creative Tourist is nothing less than yet another commercially-minded blog set up by members of the original Blog Award consortium.  They may as well have written: "I'm happy to welcome my other website to this website and I'm sure I'll be getting involved in the same thing I'm already doing..." God, it gets confusing doesn't it?

The Guardian - like all other traditional newspapers a sucker for 'new media' news - ends up posting a curious piece written by one of the group that goes for a curiously old-fashioned "Women Dominate At Manchester Blog Awards" angle.

Anyway, the scheme works!  The event is a triumph!  Well, at least on it's own terms it's a success.  Don't believe me?  Well, let's take a trip to youtube where we can watch the heady moment when the winner was announced to rapturous applause from a packed, standing room only (though to be fair, somewhat smallish max. capacity 50 persons) room.  Interestingly this youtube clip was uploaded by a user called 'visitmanchester' whose channel links directly to visitmanchester.com, and is clearly joined at the hip with a Flickr user of the same name.  Flickr is not meant to be for commercial users -

and this cynical hijacking and abuse of media channels that are supposed to be uncommercial lies at the heart of small groups like this determined in their self-belief that they are important enough to be listened to, and interesting enough to win awards for their blogs - even if they did have to create the award in the first place.

I'm sure they'll continue to promulgate their writing on as many spurious blogs, websites, Twitter accounts and channels as they can happily ever after... or until that bubble they live in bursts.

A Greener Dave For All

The Head of the Manchester Digital Development Agency is becoming mired in irony if the dull procession of press-release-speak entries on his wittily named 'Dave's Blog' blog are anything to go by.

Two successive entries describe how the MDDA is working hard with oversees organisations to develop ways of cutting carbon, saving the environment etc etc...  Sadly, in order to do this Dave has been forced to travel to locations in Iceland and New York.  By plane.

Saint Schwitters

 I'd like to talk about this.

I say I'd like to talk about it but it's not that easy.  It slips and slides through your brain's fingers because it is just so frighteningly complicated.  Oh, hold on a minute...  no it's not.

You see it is essentially an ill thought-out notion, dressed in the garb of academia and presented as 'interesting' and even important, perhaps a little like it's author.  To speed things up a bit I'll précis it for you:

There was a German painter called Kurt Schwitters.  His largely experimental work has been a huge influence on such movements as Pop Art, Post-Modernism and multi-media art installations.  The author and originator of the above talk begins by stating Schwitters should be named the "Patron saint of the Social Web" because he did collages and  "rejected the idea of completeness" which apparently mirrors exactly what everyone does on the internet nowadays.

In the written introduction to the piece the author concludes:

While Isadore of Seville is mooted as the patron saint of the internet (based on completeness and determistic processes), let us respect Kurt Schwitters as the patron saint of the web

You'll notice Schwitters has already been demoted to a lower case patron saint but promoted to saint of the entire web now - not just the social bit.  Unless the author just forgot to include the word 'social' and randomly formats names on a whim.  He definitely misspelt "deterministic" though and it's worth following the link for Isidore too, not least because one discovers he spelt that wrong as well, but also because his reference for this Sainthood is an obscure Catholic Church in Mississippi.

Are we getting an impression here?  A picture of less than rigorous research?

So, any road up, our restless, dynamic, ever-changing Web pages were anticipated in the 1930's by Schwitters because he did collages and "rejected the idea of completeness".

That's it!  Painless really.  So is this a useful paradigm to help us move forward to Web 3.0?  Or is it simple, witless and wholly redundant.

My three year old niece once pointed at the television and exclaimed "Daddy!".  Except it wasn't Daddy, it was Simon Cowell - who does, it must be admitted, look a little bit like her Daddy.  We eventually convinced her that Daddy and Simon Cowell were two different things even though they had certain superficial similarities and she accepted it.

At no point was there talk of canonising Cowell.