A Contribution to the Great Debate

Regular readers of this blog will know that they have to read the same thing again and again as I hardly ever post anything. But over the past few weeks I’ve been filling the web with garbage 140 characters at a time. Via Twitter.

I first started playing with Twitter a couple of years ago, as I’d read that it was the YouTube of 2007. I couldn’t quite see the point of getting constantly texted about somebody else’s supper choices, so I got bored and stopped.

Largely thanks to Stephen Fry (or @stephenfry as we Twitterers call him) I’ve suddenly got really into it - I’m on my third post of the day. And happily it updates my Facebook too - so I can be present in another online world that I can’t really be bothered with. w00t!

My Twitter account is here… http://twitter.com/kumquatkid

It used to be that news crews would go out with four people - reporter, camera, producer and sound man. In the very early days they probably had key grips, best boys and bee wranglers too.

Nowadays you’re lucky to get two - but increasingly, it’s just one. And so I can go out and shoot on my own, I’ve been trained to use a camera. Here’s the first story I shot myself:

I rather like taking pictures, so I found it quite fun. But it’s very hard to think about directing when your desperately trying to work out if things are in focus or not. So there are bits of this report which don’t really make proper sequences. And bits that are slightly out of focus.

Oh well. I’ll try and do better next time.

We’re making a new venture into the blogosphere - not that I’ve had anything to do with it, really, but it seems to get a lot of things right which we didn’t really get right with earlier projects.

The software is a lot better, it’s much easier to post a comment, and it’s more focused on the personality of Jon Snow, rather than the voice of an amorphous newsroom. I hope it takes off. Here it is…

One of the joys - and banes - of covering economics is that you get to do the same story every month, on exactly the same day, whenever big economic data gets released. Interest rates have been the biggest deal, so every time we have to come up with some clever new way of turning a discussion which is a) rather dry and b) almost identical to last month’s, into exciting television.

This month we went for an extended metaphor based on the idea of interest cuts as medicine. It was a hoot filming it, and I think we managed to stay the right side of silly. Just.

Not everyone agreed, including one viewer who wrote in to say it was ‘bloody irritating’ and threatening to run off to the Beeb if we ever did it again.

Anyway, here it is. Eat your heart out, Chris Morris.

The man in the white coat is Conrad, who’s here on work experience.

Happy new year folks. Here’s something I did at the end of last year. Pretty much every market there is seems to be collapsing at the moment - but used car prices are going through the floor as fast as any of them.

Having failed to post for more than two months, this blog has been inactive enough to be legally dead. I’ve had quite a lot on my plate recently, what with going on holiday, covering the collapse of the credit crunch and buying a new bookshelf in Ikea.

But I’m going to try and start posting regularly again. So if anyone’s still out there… please keep reading!

Much hard work lost today as a fire alarm took the programme off the air ten minutes early. Still, it was pretty funny. Here’s the moment it happened:

The Google Street View car has been spotted on the streets of London. Here it is:

I can’t wait for Google Street View London to go live - and I’d love to get my face on it somehow. But since I spend most of my life behind a desk, it seems unlikely.

If you’ve never seen Streetview, it’s here. They basically take pictures of every street in a city, and publish them on a map - so you can get a simulated ’street level’ tour of a city.

It’s quite entertaining for five minutes, but doesn’t seem to have any serious purpose, apart from minor invasions of privacy -a classic Google frippery.

A brief celebrity encounter - I booked Feargal Sharkey of the Undertones to come in and talk about music downloading.

You might expect a punk legend to be somewhat prickly in the flesh, but he was charming - and quite funny, as this interview shows. Made my day.

Here it is - the results of our live terror blog:

About half-way through I realised that I’d never actually sat down and watched a parliamentary debate from beginning to end before. With good reason, too - this is a pretty important issue and a moment of considerable drama, but the actual debate had long periods of exquisite tedium.

The House of Commons has some great speakers in it - and some exceedingly bad ones. I think I did end up knowing quite a lot more about the issue at the end than I did at the beginning, but much of the debate was bogged down in repetition and minutiae.

It’s nice to do some writing, too, after all these months (though not all this blog is mine - there were three of us working on it, but I probably type the fastest). And the shoot-from-the-hip forget-in-a-minute style of live blogging is quite fun. Probably easier to write about cricket than parliamentary debates, though.