Pakistan and pregnancy

I was in the local kebab shop last night (yes I know, far from organic, but the wife's pregnant and this is what she was craving - last month it was pickled onion Monster Munch) and along with my two small donners with chips and a battered sausage I got a neat summary of the political situation in Pakistan.
While it may not sound like the kind of conversation you want to be having in a chip shop on a cold December evening, it was actually welcome. Having been off-line for the last week I've avoided most of the news (local and national) and it's refreshing to get an analysis from someone with a real interest and insight. The West Country has a lot to offer that the rest of the country can't, but there is no doubting that it lacks a rich cultural mix. It can sometimes make it difficult to really engange with issues far from home, even those that rolling 24-hour news tell us have such a global impact.
The problem with rolling 24-hour news is that it tells you the events have such a global impact so many times that you rapidly become desensitised. There is a truth in hearing about the story from someone who sees the images on TV not as stock footage, but as home.
Hmm, maybe a few days back in my own hometown of Leicester has left me craving a little more diversity here in Devon. Better avoid the new year sale at Trago.
Anyway, back to the main news of the day - yes, the wife's pregnant. She says she is in her 20th week, but in Dad Time this is week one.
The difference between the two is that she starts counting from the moment of 'conception' (some point during a week-long holiday in London), while I start counting from the moment of 'acceptance', which is when I start to realise that she isn't just getting fat from too many Quality Street and Monster Munch, and that her breasts aren't getting bigger for my benefit.
This will be our second, the youngest is now three and is very excited about the forthcoming arrival. She has already decided if it is a girl she will be called Lolly and if it is a boy, Mr Bump.
The first half of the pregnancy has gone smoothly. First scan at 12 weeks and second scan on December 28 were perfect, no health problems, nothing out of the ordinary.
The only glitch came when little one refused to play for the camera and we couldn't find out the sex. Wife, who jumped up and down in the examination room before making the sonographer have another go, says she is getting fed up of being asked 'seven times a day' whether its a boy or girl. Of the 14 grandchildren on her side of the family all are female so far, so grandad (who has three daughters and no male heir) still has his childhood train set locked away under the bed in the spare room.
Wife's sister is also pregnant, due at the same time, so there's a race to the finish. Will either have a boy? Who will be the first? It's a race to build a face when you play Mr Pop.
Hmmm, that doesn't sound right.

Is it just me or does 2007 seem to have flown by? I guess for me that's mostly because the web site has kept me constantly busy. When Holloway decided to sample the delights of Leicester we were pushed well over 500,000 page views a week.
Blogs, like this one, have been read well over 70,000 times in the last year and I'm hoping to rapidly increase that in the near future by tidying them up and adding a few exciting new writers.
Video has also gone down well online. Other titles have experimented with and dropped daily bulletins while our strategy of creating video that adds value to the stories has worked well. You especially loved the footage of a drink driver being chased by police and that has been watched well over 10,000 times since it went up earlier in December.
We also get all of our news online earlier now. For me that has meant getting into the office for around 6.30am every day, but the response has been positive and I'm starting to acclimatise to listening to Sarah Kennedy's bizarre ramblings on Radio 2.
And we've embraced the weird world of social networking, with the Herald's entries on Facebook, Bebo and Myspace arttracting more than 850 friends.
Well, time to get back into the old routine after the disruption of Christmas and New Year. I'm not one for resolutions but I'm hoping to keep my blog a bit more up to date over the next year, with regular updates on the pregnancy and the state of the website. Fans of pointless rambling nonsense rejoice!
Happy New Year!!!

The Long Way Round

Buying fresh produce that hasn't travelled as far as Michael Palin before it reaches your table became a little harder this weekend as close to a century of milk production and distribution in Totnes curdled.
More than 160 employees at the town's Dairy Crest wandered into the manager's office on Saturday morning to pick up their redundancy cheques, then spent Saturday evening pouring some of it across the bar at their leaving do at the Grand Hotel in Torquay.
For those 160-odd, their friends and families and all those whose own livelihoods depended on the Totnes site, the impact of the closure is obvious, and potentially huge.
For the average shopper at Morisson's in Totnes picking up four pints of Westcountry semi-skimmed you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed. But it has.
Because while last Friday those four pints of Devon white gold collected in our fair county travelled just a couple of hundred metres from the front door of Dairy Crest, where they were processed, to the back door of Morrisons, where they were sold, those exact same pints now travel well over 350 miles to get to the same destination.
And the same goes for whichever Morrisons or Sainsbury's you buy your local milk from (because it will still be sold as local), or even if you have Dairy Crest drop your milk at your front door.
While the milk will still be collected locally, in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, before it reached your doorstep or your shopping trolley, and will end up at local depots like the one in Plympton, and supermarkets like Sainsburys at Marsh Mills and Morrisons in Outland Road, it now has to go on a sightseeing tour to a processing plant in Gloucestershire or London on the way.
So even if you live next door to Farmer Giles, the dairy farmer, and its his milk you buy - you could well find it now travels hundreds of miles to get to you.
This is the challenge consumers now regularly face when trying to buy local. You can shop at farmers markets and organic shops where each product is labelled with its point of origin, and you know it took the most direct route to get there - minus several middle men.
But achieving that inner warmth only middle-class satisfaction can generate can be expensive, inconvenient and it can limit your shopping choice.
So off you pop to your local hyper-mega-uni-corp supermarket where, handily, they have recently taken to selling hundreds of lines of local produce.
Fresh fruit and veg, milk, cheese, meats and more all now come from that bloke down the road.
But that still doesn't mean they have just been driven down the road - the chances are they have taken the long way round.
Until recently Tesco shipped all of it produce, local or not, to a giant central depot before then shipping it back to the places where it is actually local to.
Recently it started experimenting with local depots, including one in Plymouth, so Westcountry produce will stay in the Westcountry.
Not perfect, but a step forward. In order to be perfect the produce would have to take the shortest possible route from producer to retailer to consumer. Farmer drops it at the back door of Tesco, you buy it at the front. Of course the logistics of an operation like that, and the cost it would add to the produce mean it won't happen. Tesco will never be a farmer's market, and wouldn't claim otherwise.
But, while I've quoted the example of Tesco's, there is really no need to single them out. You can be sure that the local produce you buy at just about any other supermarket will have taken a little vacation on route to your plate.
Some supermarkets, Sainsburys for example, have a great system whereby you can check right down to the farm or producer where your goods came from. But that doesn't mean you get the full theaa.com routemap of the journey it took.
In the US produce travels an average 2000 miles between producer and consumer. In the UK, Defra reckon that between 1992 and 2002 our food miles here in the UK rose by 15 per cent.
The lesson here? Well, firstly that if you buy your milk at a supermarket or get it delivered to your door you could well find this morning that your carbon footprint got a little bigger over the weekend thanks to the couple of hundred extra food miles on every pint of milk. And secondly that, when it comes to supermarkets, local doesn't mean that an item has always been local right through the chain it takes to get to your plate.
Want to know more? Here are some useful links.
The BBC has a good page, defining food miles and why they matter, with articles and a discussion at http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.shtml
For a more in depth analysis, check out the Wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles
You can get a rough idea of the food miles taken to get to you if you know the country of origin of your produce with a basic food miles calculator at
http://www.organiclinker.com/food-miles.cfm
...and you can then calculate how much CO2 is pumped into the air by that journey at Farmers Weekly, where you will also find a host of other useful links at
http://www.fwi.co.uk/gr/foodmiles/more.html

Two things I hate about Flavour Fest

There are two things I hate about Flavour Fest. One is that I've just come away from it with my wallet £75 lighter. The other is that it isn't held every month.
As a Plymouth exile (I live in the wild yonders of Torbay) I braved the rains, the 45 minute trek along the A38 and the stench of the Theatre Royal carpark to make my way to Plymouth's fourth annual festival of local produce.
And I wasn't disappointed, I was stunned to find a dozen local growers and producers of organic produce I'd never even heard of among the hundreds of stalls tempting me and thousands of others with their wares. I filled my shopping bags, and my belly, just for research purposes of course. Balancing a tagine in one arm and six bags of organic plants in the other I scoffed my way through a Thai curry and a banana crepe, along with more produce than I can mention here without alerting the Health Police.
You will often hear and read people running Plymouth down, or dismissing us as a crumbling industrial oasis in the heart of a rural paradise, but Flavour Fest shows us for what we really are - diverse, vibrant, innovative, passionate, adventurous and thriving.
What really warms my heart when I wander through the stalls at Flavour Fest isn't the vast, diverse array of extremely high quality local produce across hundreds of tables, it is the thousands of people who turn out to enjoy them.
Even in the grey drizzle the event was packed. People love Flavour Fest and they turn out to support it, to enjoy it, and to relearn what the Spirit of Discovery really means.

Live Earth had an instant impact on me, an impact beyond the initial anger at the BBC cutting away from Metallica to rerun Crowded House.
I awoke this morning and unplugged all those little adapters that usually cling to the wall, with their green or red glowing eyes, waiting for me to recharge one of my mobile phones, mp3 players or myriad other electrical devices.
When I boiled the kettle for a cup of hot, strong, organic coffee to enjoy in the early-morning sunshine, I boiled just as much water as I needed.
My shower was taken in half the usual amount of time, and breakfast was eaten in a room illuminated just by the light from the window, not from the bulb.
When I wiped spilled butter from the kitchen surface I used a sponge, instead of the kitchen towel I would usually reach for.
Now, all of this probably didn’t offset that moment I reached for the remote control and burned out the batteries trying to find the rest of the Metallica set. Or the moment I then reached for my CD player and cranked up what Jonathan Ross called “The Sandman Song”.
But the changes I made, if they are made by a million others, and if they are made every day, will shift the course of our planet.
I could say I don’t know why I didn’t realise this before, but that wouldn’t be true.
What is true is that the environmental message, the global warming warning, has been around us for years. In fact it has been around for too long, and has been too prevalent.
It quickly became wallpaper and muzak and Big Brother Eight. We saw it everywhere and so we came to take it for granted.
What Live Earth did, despite what the cynical arms of the media are saying, is make us look again at that wallpaper.
We can now see it isn’t just a meaningless pattern, it is a series of images and a tract of words that spell out our future – or lack of it. Each meaningless swirl is a picture of a species we have wiped out. Each patch and blotch is a swathe of earth burnt and wasted to provide fuel for our greed.
What we need now is for Government’s to make two or three major changes. But in lieu of that one million of us making 10 million minor changes will have the same impact.
My choice to lead an organic life was, until now, a selfish one. We ate organic produce to prevent our daughter taking in the kilos of chemicals she would otherwise be lumbered with every year.
Now it will have an environmental dimension too, as I seek to eat not just organic food, but locally-grown organic food to reduce the carbon used to bring it to my plate.
My lightblubs are already low energy, but now I will continue the new trend of switching off even the small lights that blink at me from adapters, TVs, computers and music systems.
I already split my rubbish into three, compostable for the worms, recyclable and the rest. Now I will also stop being lazy and chucking glass in with that landfill waste just because the binmen won’t take it once a fortnight with the green bin – instead I will store it in a box under the stairs and take it to the bottle bank when my box is full.
I will walk to church this morning, instead of driving.
All this, and the other changes I can make, will add up to very little. It will reduce my carbon footprint by a few microns. But we can hope that if a few thousand or a few million others take similar measures, we won’t have to put up with another global concert opened by Genesis.

The Enemy Within

Terror attacks at select sites across the UK, and we look within. Well, there's no need to look for the suspects - the media already have them hung drawn and quartered under headlines such as The Docs of War and Doctor Evil.
On websites across the country you can see the messages popping up just minutes after Sky News starts running its 'breaking news' banner. "Send them, all home" the posters rant.
But even before that racism was lurking just below the surface. We (the white majority) never experience it, and find it easy to believe we left all that behind in the 70s.
But my eyes have been opened after taking in a couple of foreign visitors.
No, Chez Shaw isn't the latest Al Qaeda terror training camp. We're hosting foreign students for one of the local language schools.
Every day they come home, we ask them how their day has been, polite conversation through thick accents and broken English.
Then three days in the first reports. Both our student visitors, one German, one Swedish, had been experiencing racism on the streets. Shouts of abuse. Bad language. Threats. Just days into their visit and they were targeted, several times. In fact most times they go out there is some unpleasant behaviour.
Our German student was warned by the school not to tell anyone where he was from for fear of abuse or attack.
Perhaps my shock at this level of abuse to our foreign visitors is in part due to the fact I spend so much time online. The internet brings us closer together, it removes all social distinction, we talk with people of all races, colours and creeds withour even considering such meaningless variables. But when we step outside our door we look not with the virtual eyes of a 21st century citizen of Cyberspace, but with the cold, fearful eyes of a nation told it is under siege, nervous of the enemy within.
Terror attacks need to be put into perspective, and they need to be seen for what they are designed to be. Okay, the bombs didn't explode, the fires never caught, the lives were not lost - but the main aim of these attacks is to drive a wedge between us, to divide neighbour from neighbour, to make us fear, and retreat and shout abuse from behind the wall.
If we do that, if we even think that, the terrorists have won without lighting a single fuse.

Cider, spamming and Girls Aloud

Apologies for the delay in posting - wow was it really the end of April that I last sat down to write a blog? Time sure flies when you're joining Girl's Aloud online fan clubs.Now, before you contact Operation Ore, this was all in the name of work. Sometimes you just have to make these sacrifices, and visit websites packed with saucy pictures of Nadine and the Ginger One.You see, as web editor for the Herald, my job doesn't just involve writing the (very) occasional blog, and making sure all the latest news appears on our website in the right place at the right time.I am also the cyber-equivalent of that bloke sitting in a box in Armada Way shouting 'Herald!!!'Part of my job involves letting other people know what's on our site. So when we have news about Girls Aloud I join up with the bulletin boards and post the info.Not just Girls Aloud, I've joined discussion groups and social networking sites on everything from the Royal Navy to archaeology, and from crime to Elton John.Most of the boards receive me well. I consider myself an online ambassador for the Herald and try to respect the rules of the boards I visit.Some just ignore more, some post replies grateful for the news. Only once have I been accused of spamming.Well, if joining a bulletin board just to post links to your own site is spamming then...oh yeah.Ah well, must go.I'm locked in a heated debate over which one is better, the Ginger One or the one who gets rowdy in nightclubs, then this afternoon I'm off to an organic cider festival. Its an eclectic life.

April 25 2007

Six months into the Herald running its own website, and we were invited to attend a prestigious industry award-ceremony, not bad going - if I do say so myself. Now, there are several industry awards ceremonies each year, just like the film industry has its Oscars, Golden Globes, Baftas, TV Quick Awards etc etc.

So which of the newspaper industry gongs are the most prestigious? Hard to tell, everyone has their own opinion. One quick test is - the most prestigious awards are whichever ones you just been shortlisted for a prize in. The least prestigious are the ones you just walked away from empty handed, vowing never to enter again because 'it's all political'.
Fortunately for us, we swanned, or more staggered, out of the Hilton Park Lane with a commendation for thisisplymouth in the Most Innovative Technology category. Not the top prize, but like I say we've only been running the site for six months and we were beaten by the Financial Times, so I don't think there's any shame in that.
It was an eye opener, not just the £50 a bottle wine, the steak to die for and the best dessert ever created by man (an indescribable chocoalte souffle), but also the chance to talk with some of the other nominees. They included the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday, some international newspapers and many, many more. Elite company.
Sitting next to me was the deputy editor for the BBC's world news website. We started comparing sites .They're coming up on their 10th annivesary...and have a team of 250 dedicated journalists.
I almost spat out £4.75's worth of Bordeaux at that point.
"You mean you share them with TV?" I managed.
"No, no, just for us..."
"And the radio?"
"No, just for the website
"And that includes all your production staff and technical team and coders?."
"No, just reporters."
"Huh!" was my considered response.
As I say, six months, but its good to know what we're up against. Taking the Herald forward online puts us in direct competition with people like the BBC's national and international news websites. The fact the judges would put us in the same room as leading national and international titles is more evidence of that, and of the fact that we are competing at the right level.
For example, at the time of the Iran captive crisis, people from across the world were logging on to thisisplymouth to discover the latest, as well as visiting sites like the BBC and Sky News.
The circulation of the Herald no longer stops at the River Looe in one direction and the River Dart in the other. Now at least 10 per cent of our online readers are outside the UK, and many more are in the Uk but outside the Herald's traditional heartland.
So how are we approaching this huge opportunity? What are we doing to make thisisplymouth the best site for the people of Plymouth and beyond?
Six months ago just a fraction of the Herald's content appeared online on thisisplymouth. Every day a few articles would be blasted along the cables to a small team of technicians outside the city who watched it flow into the site, checked it looked okay, pressed a key or two then went on to one of the other three-dozen sites they managed.
Okay, there may have been a little more to it than that, but you get the picture.
Since November we have been working hard to ensure all content goes online, and that we make the best use of it all. Which is why you can see new folders and sections for everything from our features content, reviews and previews and our motoring section to euchre results and American Football.
Every news story that appears in the Herald now appears online, and it appears earlier than before. Back then nothing appeared before 12pm, then you had to wait until 12pm the next day for more.
Now we start adding content in earnest at 7am, then we don't stop updating until 10pm. Any breaking news overnight will also prompt a dash to the nearest keyboard to make sure it hits your screens as soon as possible. People start commenting straight away by adding their thoughts to stories, sending in emails or joing the debate on our bulletin boards.
And its paying off. the figures show 250 per cent increases in traffic to our news and home pages, and a 450 per cent increase year on year in new visitors.
On top of that we also now offer you a host of online exclusive content, like this blog. We have well over a dozen bloggers writing on everything from Polish community and Islam to basketball and fishing. In the first six months you've read these pieces more than 20,000 times.
We've also added video, including footage generated by headmounted camera by Herald reporter and fellow blogger Tristan Nichols in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and the Falklands.
Talking of the Falklands, I've been busy beavering away to update my programming skills, which were somewhere at the level of being able to write a version of Space Invaders for the Spectrum48, to take in HTML, Java, Javascript, ASP, JSP, CSS, MFI, B&Q and D.I.S.C.O. and we can now create minisites like the one holding all our content for the Falklands 25 commemoration at www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/falklands.
We've also built sites for Face of Plymouth 2007, the forthcoming election, last year's school nativities, the Royal Marines deployment to Afghanistan, Entrepreneurs Bootcamp, Gold Star and others - including Battle of the Bands 2007. This site, similar to the others, included picture slideshows, audio, video, a discussion board where the judges, bands and audience talked about the evenings before they happened, then disected them afterwards, band profiles, latest news and more. In its six weeks it drew in close to 20,000 hits.
During the last six months thisisplymouth has also been extensively redesigned. We've added online photosales so you can buy all Herald pictures online, we've added a new video section with our reporters trained in filmwork and we add audio files to some stories, like Ollie's latest rant or one of Martin Freeman's excellent interviews.
So are we happy to have come away with a commendation after a busy six months? Yes, very. But personally I'm even happier that we've added 4,000 new registered users to the site, boosted registered users on our bulletin board by a quarter and that the site has had well over six million page views in the last four months, because that means that we're providing what you - the users - want, and that is what it's really all about.
So any tips to those out there hoping to become a succesful web editor? When you find one, ask one!! The best advice I would give today is "If you've got to sit the first part of a nine hour exam in advanced web deign at 6pm in Paignton, try not to be drinking at an after-party in a bar in Soho at 2am that same day."

April 5 2007

Over 13 days it threatened to escalate into all out war. Hour by hour, minute by minute the language became more belligerent, more confrontational. At times it spilled over into an all-out us-and-them nationalistic furore.

Diplomatic efforts were made, perhaps the right word in the right place could bring it to a conclusion but, with the world watching, all seemed in vain.
I refer, of course, to the web chatter on thisisplymouth and other sites (yes there are other sites out there) following the capture of our sailors and Royal Marines by Iran.
For every comment posted on our site in response to a story, or on our bulletin board, offering support and messages of hope for the captives and their families here in Plymouth and elsewhere, there were two raging against the British war machine and the 'loonie Muslims'.
Thankfully those 'loonie Muslim' comments were few and far between on our site, but if you check out 'Batch's' page on bebo you will come across a few comments that would have Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning dialling the Racial Equality Council. Yes, okay, they got the geography wrong. And the spelling, the grammar, the history and the politics. But they were offensive none the less.
There was the odd comment on thisisplymouth which may, or may not, have been racist. In an age of political correctness gone mad, and an age when people can post their every thought with minimum effort or consideration, it falls to us to decide whether a comment is or could be perceived as being racist.
For example, one post refered to Mr Ahmadinejad as Mr Ahmedinnerjacket.
Is that racist? Possibly, probably. The writer almost certainly never meant it to be racist, simply ridiculing of a man who had ridiculed our service personnel. Certainly it has enough potential to be perceived as being racist that we decided to remove it.
But then again, Tony Blair is only ever refered to by our posters as Tony Bliar. Tudor Evans is only ever refered to as Toady. The Lib Dems are only ever the Limp Dims. Offensive certainly, but not racist.
Then again, as for comments on thisisplymouth raging against the war, you could hardly move for them.
In fact, when Mr Ahmadinejad started speaking about the folly of Western troops being in Iraq, and the evils of putting a woman and mother on the front line, I thought he was reading from the user comment section on thisisplymouth. No, seriously.
Few things get our online correspondents more riled than war. Being a naval city with a proud history of sending its sons to give a sound kicking to anyone who may have deserved it, or perhaps just looked at us a bit funny, there are many in Plymouth who treasure our military might and will happily expound the value of war for hours on end.
At the other end of the scale, we have have posting on our site some of the most aggressive pacificists that you could ever wish to meet. Trident, the Middle East, military budgets will all have them calling for the dismantling of the New World Order. "OR ELSE!!". Any excuse will find them posting an anti-war comment on a story.
Say, for example, we posted an online version of the Our Father. It wouldn't be long before we got a comment saying something like "Our Father, in old English that's Vaeter Unsere. Vaeter sounds a bit like Phaeton. Phaeton was a 38-gun-frigate which captured the Dutch in Nagasaki in 1808 and fired upon Japanese and Chinese vessels. YOU MUST DISARM NUCLEAR MISSILES NOW."
One post leads to another, soon it gets personal, and people say things online they would never say face to face, not just for fear of being punched but because the Internet grants us an assumed anonymity and also makes the person we are attacking anonymous.
Even the Falklands War commemoration section of the thisisplymouth bulletin board has attracted anti-war posts. People who would never in a million years think of vandalising a war memorial will happily 'vandalise' a virtual memorial by posting comments that veterans and relatives of the fallen will find offensive.
As more and more of us have access to the Internet and find new ways to express our views, it looks like we will have to learn all over again the rules of polite society, learning to respect the opinions and feelings of others not through fear but through compassion and understanding. While the Herald will continue to police all comments posted on any section of its site, as all responsible website owners do, there must come a time soon when we as users learn again to police ourselves.
If we want the Internet to remain a place free of censorship, we must learn to censor our own dark and hurtful thoughts rather than posting them 'in the wild' where they could do more damage than we could imagine, and certainly more than we would wish.

March 23 2007

As a nation, in fact across Western Culture, we have come to expect more and more for less and less.

The thought struck me twice yesterday, the second time was on arriving home to find all the neighbours in the street and up in arms as the house across the road had been burgled in broad daylight.

Two men in their early 20s had fancied a couple of large flat-screen televisions and hadn't fancied paying for them, so they popped into someone else's home and helped themsleves, also doing a bit of impulse shopping and picking up a PS2, some games and some jewellery. All this at 2.30pm as the neighbours were watching. Of course they were supicious, and of course they approached the men and took down the car registration so the two may not keep hold of the gear as long as they had hoped. Everyone wants something for nothing.

A similar thought had occurred to me earlier in the day, pondering on how the hi-tech Internet had regressed us all to a free-love, free world, pre-tech 1960s. Admittedly, the thought occurred while sat in a dimly lit cafe listening to reggae munching an organic cheese and ham toastie and banana smoothie in the middle of Totnes, but that's not the point.

The reason for this thought? As newspapers across the country begin to focus increasingly on the Internet, the company accountants are looking at how they can make money from a platform that traditionally gives everything away.

Since its inception content online has been free, and we as users expect it to remain free. As soon as someone tries to charge us for something, we go elsewhere.

Newspapers in various places have tried to run subscription services, and have found just handfuls of people signing up, while the masses go elsewhere to get their content for free.

It doesn't stop those accounts and sales types trying to squeeze the extra penny out of users when they can. And why not, newspapers are, on one very important level, a business, and businesses have to make money.

Some newspapers will offer the content for free, and then offer premium services on top which you pay for, but again it doesn't seem to generate a huge deal of interest. Every day we here at thisisplymouth look at what services we can bring you, some go looking to see what services they can persuade you to pay for, others go looking to see what services they can bring to improve the site. Hopefully at the end of the day the result is the same, a bigger and better thisisplymouth for all users.

So what is the answer, how can we make money from the net while providing content people will want to keep coming back for, and maybe even pay a little for? Answers on a postcard please. I would pay you but...you know how it is.

March 19 2007

So another weekend bites the dust. More and more often I seem to be glad to get into work on a Monday, to have a break from the chaos that is Saturday and Sunday. So much for the day of rest. So much for keeping the sabbath holy.

In fact, the last three weeks have been a pretty manic time, packed with firsts.
On the organic front, while I have been a devotee of pesticide free produce for three years the one thing I had never done, until this month, was order an organic veg box.
The reasons not to order a veg box always seemed to outweigh the reasons for ordering one. Firstly the boxes are only delivered on one day a week, so you have to arrange to be in, and make sure you hit the ordering deadline, and hope the arrival of the veg fits in with your eating plans for the week.
But much more of a disincentive for me was the random lottery factor of the whole thing. When you order a veg box it isn't like online shopping at Sainsburys or Tesco. Your choice tends to be limited to the size of the box, the contents are down to the supplier.
Now personally I was never happy with that. I always had visions of opening up the box to be confronted with something like the second round of Masterchef Goes Large. That's the bit where Jon and Greg torture the candidates by showing them random food items under pressure and asking them to identify the mystery items. Like CSI without the AOL sountrack and MTV camerawork.
But while I've been engaged in a heavy-duty DIY project in recent weeks (more of that later) the wife has taken over the duties of cooking, and she decided to risk 'The Box'.
Week one, we ordered online from Riverford...and my fears were allayed. I could recognise every item in the box, knew how to cook it and was willing to eat it. And so to the second first. The wife has spent three weeks cooking, a job I normally take care of. Even with the range of random produce from Riverford, she went through the first week turning out great food.
Then week two struck. The second box, and 'what the devil is that' was the cry when we peeled back the paper. Forget CSI, this is X-Files.
Okay, so the veg inside may not be the most exotic things ever, but they were certainly something we'd never eaten, cooked or bought before, and had no idea what to do with. Each week's box does come with a newsletter and some suggested recipes.
So away we went trying out celeriac, raw beetroot, Swiss chard and artichoke hearts for the first time.
The conclusion. Well, ordering an organic veg box is a bit like a day trip to Crealy. Some of it is fun,. some of it is terrifying, some of it will leave you feeling queasy and the whole thing leaves you lighter in the pocket. But you are left with some great memories and undoubtedly you will want to go back for more.
The third first? If that makes sense. Back to the CSI. If you're new to this phenomenon, so was I. Basically its like The Bill, but American, and rather than going round chasing people through dody housing estates and bashing down cheap doors on council flats, they use cotton buds to pick up something that is obviously blood, then cut to a five minute sequence of strange camera angles and fades set to a Richard Marx track, then all stand around and say "It's blood."
Each show starts with a murder or six and an obvious suspect, the team spends 44 minutes pursuing someone else, then it turns out it was the obvious guy you thought it was at the start. This doesn't just happen in CSI, also try out CSI NY, CSI LV, NCIS and JAG for similar results. Oh and Criminal Minds. Or should I just call that one CM for the sake of completeness.
So why the sudden change in my TV diet?
Back to the DIY. For the last three weeks we have been converting a concrete shed in our back garden into a flat. Now this project is well beyond my abilities. Then again, so was ficing a leaky washer on the bath. In steps Bob, the wife's dad's sister's husband. A builder by trade who works at an inexpensive rate if given a solid diet of American cop dramas and tea.
And so we come full circle to the busy weekend. Saturday was a mad dash to get the shed, sorry annex, into a suitable state for the family inspection. The whole of the wife's family were turnimng up in the afternoon for a meal as her parents were celebrating their 40th anniversary. So the morning was a mad DIY dash to get concrete and carpets laid, paint in all the right places etc etc.
The afternoon was a mad dash to cook 3.5kilos of organic lamb and all the accompaniments.
The evebing was entertaining said family. Sunday. Mothers' Day. Damn, i have to do it all while she stays in bed. Why wasn't that one in the wedding ceremony? "Biut I spent the whole of yesterday working for your family..." I tried. "Unnh..." she grunted from under the duvet.
"Unh" indeed. Only three hours later did Mothers Day come up as the topic of this week's sermon. Our vicar chose that moment to inform us that Mothers Day wasn't about Mothers, it was about the Mother Church and the Mother of God and should be used to celebrate all family. So I had to get up at six o'clock, look after the youngling, make breakfast, clean up Saturday's mess through four dishwasher loads and then get back to making the shed, sorry annex, for nothing?
I'd also made the mistake of asking our two-year-old what she wanted to buy mummy for Mothers Day. I expected the answer to be playdough, or a dolly. Easy enough, I thought,. Back came the answer "A necklace with some flowers and a card with a doggy."
"Huh?", damn that brain-boosting organic diet. Now I have to wait another 10 years for her to return to answering in monosyllabic grunts. Like her mum.
I had briefly considered entering the sterile corporate cathedral of Drake Curcus to find the gift and card all under one roof, before falling for the IQ marketing and heading to the Independent Quarter. That's the part of Plymouth City Centre that used to be called 'the scuzzy bit round the market'.
And the result? Excellent. Once I managed to negotiate the sparows and chavs in Colin Campbell Car Park, and get past the second hand shops without being forced to cash any cheques, but a samurai sword or buy back stuff nicked from my home in a burglary, the IQ was a pleasant(ish) place to shop.
I endedup in Tor:Pedo where, far from that corporate cathedral, the stock was unique and interesting, the staff courteous, interested and informative and the purchase was perfect and unique rather than settled for.
Ah well, that's the weekend over, here's to an easy week before whatever next Saturday and Sunday have to offer.
Right, where's that calendar, I'm planning my Fathers Day revenge already.

February 21 2007

Sitting at my laptop this morning, through the fog of half-sleep that is 6.15am, I was uploading some tracks to my iPod and got to wondering if anyone would be bothered to upload audio or video headlines from a local newspaper. Perhaps a little abstract, but I was still shaking off the strange dreams that come from reading lists of pesticides in Organic Life magazine before falling asleep.

I had to conclude that the answer was probably no. And to make the issue a little clearer it is something we have been discussing at the Herald in recent months. Several papers across the country already add video and audio clips of their headlines every day, and there is nothing to stop the Herald doing the same. We have the technology, as they used to say about the Bionic Man, before he became the Fall Guy.

But really, I thought while waiting for 9 Crimes (Damian Rice) and Heresy (Nine Inch Nails) to squeeze through the little white cable, what's the point. Uploading tracks at 6.15am is a very rare occurence for me. Mornings are usually a rushed affair in which I try to spend as little time as possible between getting out of bed and getting out of the house, and most people are the same. So who can really be bothered to turn on their PC, hook up to the net, find their favourite news site, find the video and audio feed, download it and then upload it to an iPod. If not me, a news-junkie early-adopter with a technical arsenal the size of CTU (off of 24), then who? Even if you were able to subscribe through RSS or some other system, would you really be interested in watching or listening to someone else read the paper? Good plan, instead of breakfast tomorrow I'll download video of someone tucking into a bacon sandwich.

In reality if you want to hear the local headlines you are going to tune in to your local radio station. Even knowing I can go online and pick up the headlines, I will still tune in to BBC Devon for 45 seconds to hear what's going on. And if I want to see the headlines in the Herald Express (at this point I should explain I live south of the border in Torbay) I'll flick through it in the queue at Sainsbury's like every one else.

The Herald so far is concentratiing on adding video and audio to thisisplymouth where it adds real value to stories, such as watching a Tanner make a pancake, watching a crane knock down buildings, watching Scott Dann get back in the ring or watching pole dancers... err pole dancing. Not to knock what anyone else is doing, all credit to all those trying out what new technology has to offer, and I hope it becomes a success.

But while we could put a lot of resource into generating those headlines every day, at this stage I remain to be convinced of the point. But if anyone out there has an opposing view, and if anyone would like to hear me read out the Herald headlines every day in my 6.15am voice, I'd be glad to hear it.

Anyway, time to try out listening to Headhunter (Front 242) while reading a recipe for organic smoked duck salad.

February 13 2007

Despite the recent explosion in interest in organic food, few things are more frustrating for those trying to live organically than the constant hunt for a good supply.

You can pop down tou most good supermarkets and find a decent range of organic food, but it will vary from branch to branch and from day to day.

For example, I can go to one branch of Sainsbury's and find a very basic range of organic fresh fruit and veg, with only the minimum requirements and sometimes not even that. Or I can go to another branch five miles away and find the most amazing range of weird and wonderful produce. The same is true of Tesco. If you get a spare half a day, with nothing better to do, just compare the difference in what its available at Roborough, Lee Mill and Newton Abbot.

And of course organic is about a lot more than supermarkets. There are a host of farm shops, farmers markets and other outlets available locally as well as a huge number of etailers selling produce to various parts of the country.

But, the hunt for particular produce can be frustrating. You can end up hunting from shop to shop, from site to site for what you want. While those willing to flood their bodies and the environment with tonnes of hazardous chemicals?can do their shopping in half a day (lets face it, they should make the best of every minute while they can), those shopping organically have to put in a lot more effort.

And then, in steps www.organicassistant.com.

This new website aims to bring all the information you need under one roof. You can search for organic suppliers or a particulr product item and it will tell you where you can find them, either locally or online.



OrganicAssistant.com is the brainchild of former WH Smith sales

executive Graham Crisford, whose interest in organic began with his own illness and a chance meeting with a doctor on a Scottish hillside.

Now that interest has been turned into a massive online resource (around 30,000 records and growing) allowing shoppers to search for free for organic products near their home by postcode, type or retailer. When they have found what they want users can store their shopping list for future reference.

Farmers, retailers and wholesalers can also use the site to find new suppliers and customers.

Graham, 63, was converted to the benefits of organic food when he found it helped him to manage his ME (meningococcal encephalitis). But his eyes had been opened to the link between health and an organic diet ten years earlier.

While out walking in Scotland he met Dr Walter Yellowlees, a proponent of food produced without the aid of unnecessary additives, pesticides and herbicides. Over lunch, Dr Yellowlees told Graham of his research into the links between diet and health. Graham, who is now based on the Channel Island of Alderney, said: "The issue of organic food became very serious for me after I sustained an injury that required an operation. I found that the quality of food I ate had an effect on my condition and began looking in earnest for organic food ? but it was often hard to source precisely what I wanted. That led to my beginning work on OrganicAssistant.com, which now has more than 30,000 entries in the database and is really a complete resource for finding organic food." Building the database has been a labour of love for Graham who has invested heavily in the data and the technology that powers the site.

New investors also joined the project prior to launch.

He explained: "My grandparents farmed between two wars. What would have been called conventional then, we now call organic. This is how I came to understand what organic was ? straightforward, non-poisoning farming." OrganicAssistant.com was launched this month.

As time goes on, if the site grows in popularity, it will also grow in usefulness. Try a few searches and if you know anything about the local organic scene you will see a few holes. Shops and suppliers you know are there, aren't on this list. But if?the site continues to grow and continues to improve its coverage it will prove to be an invaluable resource.

And, no, for those still paying attention, it doesn't list any suppliers of organic custard.?

January 15 2007

I've come up with an innovative way to become more aware of how much water you waste every day - try waking up on a Sunday morning with a shower where your living room used to be.

Of course it had to be Sunday, the only day I tend to get any kind of lie-in, that I was woken early by my other half telling me there's a leak coming through the ceiling. "Do I look like a plumber?" I mumbled, it didn't go down well. Sunday also happened to be the day we had 10 people coming round for lunch.

You can cook for 10 people without water right?

Out come the assorted screwdrivers and wrenches I've acquired over the years, off comes the bath panel and, yep, there's a leak. I look into my 'tool box', look at the leak and realise there's not a thing I can do about it.

I know the washer's gone. I know it's a simple job to fix. I know I don't have the tools or the know-how to do it. I rummage in the tool box just to be sure. Three screwdrivers of assorted sizes. Two adjustable wrenches of different colours and more rawl plugs, tacks and misshapen screws than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and a stick.

I could rush down to Focus, buy the right kit, come home, spend time trying to fix it when I should be trying to fix the roast beef, make it worse than before then call a plumber. I choose to skip to the last stage.

More on that later, first, back to my original point.

After realising I couldn't fix the leak my first course of action was to switch off the water at the stopcock. Instantly you realise how much water you use every day. Suddenly we can't shower, wash in the sink, use the toilet or brush our teeth. The dishwasher with the dishes we need for lunch has to switched off half way through the cycle. We can't even fill the sink to wash up.

The heating has to be switched off at the boiler. We can't clean the house.

Then it comes to lunch. No water to wash the veg, none to keep them in once they're prepared, none to cook them in. None to make gravy. I dash down to the 24-hour garage at the end of the road and buy?four litres. As the dinner preparation goes on, it all disappears.

When the guests turn up we have to politely inform them there are no toilet or handwashing facilities. That's okay when your guests include five children, right?

When we start asking what drinks they want, we try to persuade the kids to stick to dry sherry and?shiraz instead of squash and water. After dinner, spills mopped up with wet-wipes, we offer coffee and tea all round, using the best Derren Brown tactics to try to persuade people to say 'no thanks'.

But, at the end of the day, we survived our six-hour drought.

We realised we could get by without leaving the tap running for teeth brushing. You don't have to flush the toilet every time you use it. You can get away with much less water even when cooking three kinds of veg and 'real gravy'. Okay, it was only a few hours, but it was a real eye-opener as to how?little water we can actually get away with using when we are?pushed into it.

Not as much of an eye-opener, however, as entering into the world of trying to find a plumber. I quickly realise that this is a 'world', entirely seperate from the world in which we live, with its own reality and its own time continuum.

In the ordinary world in which we live, no call-out charge, one-hour response, means they won't charge you just to come to your house, and they'll be there in an hour. In PlumberWorld it means ?120 call-out charge and we'll be there 9am Tuesday.

And this isn't just the 'cowboys' I'm talking about. My first instinct when opening the Yell, the online Yellow Pages, was to go for the big shiny companies and the names I recognised. British Gas may say no call-out, for example, but they wanted to charge a call-out and they also wanted me to sign up to a monthly scheme before they would turn up. Oh, and they don't do taps. "What!?!" I garbled down the phone at the end of a lengthy conversation with a British Gas woman, the fourth I had been passed to in my quest for a dry lounge. "We don't do taps." She said. I couldn't think of a reply, so I just put the phone down. Drain Doctor and Dyno thingy were similar stories.

I tried a few more of the big names. The story was the still same. At least if this world has its own reality, everyone living in it sticks to the same rules. I appreciate that, a solid internal narrative is important if they want the punter to maintain suspension of disbelief.?I tried a few local plumbers. No chance, they laughed. So I tried a big ad, name I didn't recognise, but it looked like they'd spent a lot of money to advertise. Has to be legitimate right?

First impressions were good. They said someone would be there in 90 minutes. Yes, they were going to charge me ?120 an hour. But it was?a washer, it would only take even the most inept of plumbers 10 minutes to fix.

90 minutes later, as I was basting the organic roast beef from a Ruby Red herd in Exeter, the phone went. So begins the first of a series of calls making excuses as to why the plumber wasn't at my house, getting me back my water.

And so it went on, every 90 minutes through the day, more excuses, 'we'll be there in 90 minutes'.

Eventually I give up waiting for that 90 minute call, slow and inevitable as Chinese water torture, and I call them, to be told my appointment is actually for 9am Monday. Now, anger isn't my thing, but let's just say the hot water tap in my bathroom wasn't the only thing exploding at that particular point.

"But you said..."

"I know what we said, now we're saying 9am Monday"

"But..."

"We'll see you tomorrow at 9am."

"I can't go without water until tomorrow morning I've..."

"We'll you're going to have to, see you tomorrow."

Down goes the phone, in I dive to Yell, pick another large and shiny add, talk to a very nice lady who assures me someone will be with me within the hour.

Five minutes later my phone rings, "Hello Mr Shaw, I've got some good news for you."

"Oh yes," I reply, my voice cheery and hopeful for the first time in hours, even through the parched throat "Yes, you've just double booked us. We'll see you at 9am tomorrow."

"But..." I now approach a similar state of emotion to that which would have been displayed by my gas boiler if I hand't turned it off "...so what do you want me to do, what do I have to do to get a plumber out here now?" I gush.

"Nothing you can do," the man in a Birmingham call centre chuckles, "Most of the ads in the Yellow Pages will come through to us. See you at 9am."

And down goes the phone. I was about to detonate a blast that would have left half of my neighbourhood uninhabitable for 100 years when in comes the wife. She who couldn't fix the problem at 9.30am without waking me up has now, after six hours of raising my blood pressure to something higher than the pressure of water in a street main, has decided to take action. One of our guests has pointed out that a plumber lives three doors up from us. She's been to see him, he's on his way.

Let's just say I delighted in calling back Mr Birmingham again, "Look I've told you Mr Shaw..." he starts, I interupt, "Just cancel the order thanks, I won't see you at 9am tomorrow."

As predicted it took just five minutes. Simon Reddy, a fully-qualified plumber and lecturer in plumbing for 16 years studying education and preparing for a four-year doctorate in education, fixed my washer. He is as disappointed as I am in the state of the plumbing industry in this country, and bemoans the fact youths are pouring into the industry lured by the thought of ?125 an hour. With just 12 weeks training, in a classroom, they can set themselves up with no accreditation or affiliation and set about annoying the general public.

Mr Reddy has a plan, he wants to use his doctorate to become a vocational educational consultant and set about teaching people how to really teach plumbers.

He wants to see all vocational education done in the field, back to the old apprenticeship scheme, with classroom teaching the exception rather than the norm.

Before my conversation with Mr Reddy I was contemplating educating all plumbers using my selection of adjustable wrenches and the application of unneccesary force to their skulls. But as?he took a quick tour of my house giving free estimates and advice on work I could get done if I want, slipping now and again into Latin to fully explain the odd point, he soothed my savage breast.

Can I give you any advice from my Sunday in purgatory? Well, no. The best I can say is, if you have a good plumber hang on to them. If you are a plumber, try dealing with your customers with a little honesty and respect. Online or offline when it comes to finding any tradesman don't rely on a big name or a big advert, there is no guarantee the service will be better. With any online interaction, always make sure you know where the person you are dealing with is operating from, and if you can get that service locally, even if you do the research and contact online, so much the better.

Also, try cutting down on your water consumption, maybe even turn off your stopcock for a few hours to try it out.

Oh, and never deal with a plumber based in Birmingham.

January 5 2007

Happy New Year! Apologies for the delay in updating this blog. I had meant to write nearer to Christmas but was rather distracted by one of my presents. A violent stomach bug kindly given by my two-year-old nephew.

Generous to a fault, he gave the same gift to the entirety of three different families over the festive season. On the downside it meant I ate and drank nothing for three days, spent two more days restricted to toast and water and couldn't play with my new sonic screwdriver for the best part of a week.
On the upside I lost a stone even before the New Year's Resolutions kicked in.
So that's my diet tip for the year, find a small, sick child and rub them all over yourself.
But, before the illness, we did manage to enjoy a virtually organic Christmas.
Much of the food for the feast was ordered online, many of the recipes were researched online and much of the complex calculation required to cook a Christmas meal for 13 were done online, using NASA's latest supercomputer.
"Computer, I'd like to cook a giant turkey with three kinds of stuffing, four different vegetables, roast parsnips in maple syrup, real gravy and Nigella's goosefat roast potatos without getting up before 8am, and have it on the table for 12.30pm."
"Im afraid I can't let you do that Dave."
You get the gist.
The turkey itself, a 12lb beast, was ordered online weeks in advance from Well Hung Meat in Buckfasteligh and led an idyllic, organic life in the fields of Fowey before arriving at my door plucked and chilled on December 23.
I avoided online shopping for most of the vegetables, knowing that Tesco has a strange habit of throwing in the most bizarre of substitutes if they run out of the thing you ask for. You could order organic parsnips, organic brussels and organic cranberry sauce and instead end up with a small Mongolian tribesman pondering the meaning of faith in the 21st century. Or a bottle of Cif.
So shopping was done in 'the real world' at two supermarkets and a farm shop, but some of the trickier ingredients did involve online shopping and research.
I was determined to ensure all ingredients of every element were organic, which involved ordering the icing sugar for the Christmas cake from a mill shop in the north of England.
You will find, if you ever develop the desire to eat organically to an obsessive compulsive level, that the internet is the only way to track down all the ingredients you need.
And then back to the net for recipes. I tracked down several different versions of sausagemeat stuffing online so I could modify my dad's recipe to cater for my other-half's dad's tomato allergy. Is there no end to what you can do with the world wide web? Did Tim Berners-Lee ever envisage this is what his invention would be used for? Why would you put tomato in sausagemeat stuffing anyway?
And finally various websites allowed me to convert pounds to kilos, farenheit to celsius and perform various other complex calculations to ensure the meal hit the table just an hour later than planned with potatos slightly overdone and brussels just half-cooked. The under-cooking was, by the way, deliberate and thanks to the net. Just tap sulphur and sprouts into Google for the reasoning, but to cut a long story short it means the only smells in your lounge after Christmas lunch are pine needles, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and children regurgitating too much chocolate while bouncing around on moon shoes.
So in the post-25/12 world it is time to start making your resolutions, and going organic is one you could consider.
Check out the benefits at whyorganic. Personally, we ignore the tree-hugging hippy stuff about organic farming being better for producers and the environment. The only reason we're happy to pay twice the price for a bag of carrots is to avoid the kilos of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, genetically modified organisms, radioactive elements and chemical colourings, flavourings and preservatives we would otherwise eat each year.
Yes, the Government says these chemicals aren't dangerous in the levels you find them in food. Yes, they also said that about DDT, Thalidomide and the Teletubbies.
Truth be told, some of the chemicals are dangerous at any level, the legally permitted herbicide Atrazine, for example, has been found even at levels of one part per billion, to cause male frogs to turn into female frogs and start producing eggs.
So yes, my apples are more expensive than your apples, but at least I won't have to spend my money on college education for a thousand tadpoles.
Interest in organic food is growing rapidly in the UK. By January 2005, 686,100 hectares of land was managed to organic standards. Organic food sales increased from just over £100 million in 1993/94 to £1.21 billion in 2004 (an 11 per cent increase on 2003).
The movement isn't new, in fact the principles go back to the start of industrial agriculture. And while all the study and research on whether pesticides are good or bad is conflicting, the Guardian (aaagh, I'm reading the Guardian and eating organic food, break out the emergency Big Macs) summed it up beatifully in an article last June weighing up the benefits of organic and dangers of pesticide. Journalist Leo Hickman found that the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, which is the committee that advises the Government on pesticides, Professor Jon Ayres, eats organic.
If you intend to make it a resolution to join the revolution (and no, you don't have to move to a hippy haven like Totnes to do it) check out The Soil Association and Wikipedia for more information and The Guardian website for places to buy organic.