Complete Tosh.com

We get huge numbers of comments across Guardian Unlimited’s blogs these days and – contrary, perhaps, to many people think – the standard is often very high. But one comment, appended to the sports blog post introducing the latest edition of Football Weekly (now Britain’s top sports podcast – we’re very pleased) takes the biscuit. Writes “Sidekick” from Canada:

“Podcast team: I’m rather glad at least one of you found the Gramsci stuff interesting. Not to be a complete prick here, but I really do think that philosophy has its place in football and vice versa.

For example, I was thinking deeply about the recent calls for technological measures to make sure the “correct” refereeing decisions are made (i.e.goal line camera technology; shinpad-embedded offside chips; video replay officiating). This seems to me to be indicative of what Heideggereans recognise as the decentering of human agency in favour of the technological enframing of existence. “Truth” is becoming more and more something we entrust to the objectifying metaphysical shift away from subjectivity that, as Heidegger notes, leaves the individual human alienated from Being.

In short, the technological paradigm of existence we are currently experiencing means that scientific application is invading every space of experience and culture – invalidating the idiosyncracies of the individual (“bad” referee calls; “judgment”) in favour of the “truth” (technologically “proven” facticity).

[...]

Anyway, the only technology that’ll make England look good at the moment is a radical dose of CGI. We are shite.”

While, once, reading fucking lame pieces about blogs, blogging or bloggers and its/their relationship with mainstream journalism used to make me want to chew my arm off in frustration, I like to think that I’m almost better now.

Not quite recovered – I’ve still linked to that irritating recent piece, above – but I’m getting there, one day at a time, thanks to the Grace of God or your Other Chosen Deity.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Lots of people find it’s getting depressing to state not just the theoretically obvious, but the now empirically proven every time some new commentator discovers, belatedly, this bloggy world, and leaps into print, broadcast or bits to say something stupid about What It All (Doesn’t) Mean.

At a rational level, I know it’s all to do with perhaps my favourite new media theory ever – Danny O’Brien’s Four Waves Of New Media – which predicts the progress of every new media innovation from initial, geeky discovery to the inevitable half-assed “and… finally” denouement on local TV news. Danny correctly identified a modern force of nature, and there’s nothing to be done to stop it.

Thus, as part of my continuing recovery from this once deep-seated anger, I’d like to offer up Steven Berlin Johnson’s post – “Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)” – as a kind of proxy for all my potential future output on the matter.

Now let’s let it lie.

Jeff Jarvis comes up with a replacement term for citizen journalism – “Networked journalism”. It gets my vote.

Not only is there considerable baggage around the cit-j term, but the new term could better embrace the underpinning theories that make the ongoing breaking out of the newsgathering process so interesting and exciting.

It’s also a fitting term for what I think will be the next area of online news development – a form of collaborative journalism that doesn’t produce linear, traditional stories, or ask members of the public to behave like journalists, but which looks to hundreds of thousands, millions, of small interactions that, collectively, create a new form of news and information. That will be networked journalism too.

Sorry to those who had their comments held in a queue for moderation… this was a side-effect of trying to deal with trackback spam, for which Typepad offers entirely inadequate tools. It’s impossible to globally turn off trackbacks without also doing the same for comments, and impossible to moderate trackbacks but not comments.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be using Typepad as the backend for a raft of newspaper blogs, as some titles are doing. It’s at times like these that you really appreciate the flexibility of Movable Type, and Mr H‘s ability to wrangle it at a moment’s notice.

The spamstorm appears to have passed (I’ve deleted, literally, thousands of the things over the last few weeks) so everything’s back on…. we’ll see what happens.

It’s time to stop talking, and start… umm… talking. Comment is free, our new superblog, launches today, bringing some of the sharpest minds to the blogosphere for the first time. We’ve got a remarkable list of contributors lined up to make their blogging bows as the week goes on.

Thus far, everything about this has been a departure. There’s the sheer number of bloggers (more than 200 so far, which more than doubles our blogging roster in one go). The groundbreaking design by the GU design team, aided by Guardian design chief Mark Porter. The complexity of the Movable Type backend being wrangled by Mr Hammersley. The integration with GU’s registration and content systems, which saw pretty much every GU developer pitch in over the last couple of months.

Now, beyond some tweaking, it’s down to the bloggers and the Comment is free editorial team led by Georgina Henry, formerly deputy editor of the paper. Building these things up is always a slog, as Emily Bell wrote on Saturday. But – even if I say so myself – it’s off to a flying start today.

Euan Semple writes probably my favourite blog post of the year so far. Maybe one of the top five ever

Good luck to him in his new professional life.

[A little earlier:]

Completetosh: "Well, my prediction would be that…"

Presenter: "Oh… we seem to have lost Neil there…"

Completetosh: "Hello? Hello!…. Hello?"

Presenter: "Never mind. Well, my prediction is…"

Completetosh: Damn.

Such are the perils of attempting to get all cutting edge on yo’ ass, and be part of a BBC Five Live panel via Skype.

Indeed, most of the panel was there via Skype – Kevin Anderson wasn’t, but I think Suw Charman and Tim Worstall were using it. And I was jolly interested to see how the technology might hold up in that kind of situation. Unfortunately, it was more Nationwide circa 1983 than News 24 circa 2005, but never mind. That it worked at all is some kind of everyday miracle, I suppose.

With a crowd like that gathered, albeit virtually, you blog watchers out there would hazard a guess on we were discussing, and you’d be right. We were discussing the blogging year that was, and looking forward to the year that is.

Everyone else came up with sensible predictions, and managed to sound substantially less curmudgeonly than I did (went on about how I don’t like most of Britain’s political blogs, again. Went on about the unbearable hype around so much citizen journalism, again). But, since this is my blog and I am free to be as curmudgeonly as I like here, I’m going to insist on offering up my three, slightly crap, British blogging predictions for 2006.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1/ Seen from the perspective of the mainstream media, the British blogosphere will be seen less as an alternative to the mainstream, and more as a breeding ground for writing and (later) broadcasting talent that’s then mainstreamed. In other words: we’ll see quite a few bloggers make the move to big media in 2006. Tim, making a similar prediction, suggested Justin McKeating, the blogger behind Chicken Yoghurt, might be a good candidate.

2/ But I’d be willing to be not all of "new" finds (not even a majority?) will be writing about politics or current affairs. Personally, I’ve high hopes in comedy and sport. There’s lots more to discover out there. And I haven’t given up hopes of finally producing Completetosh.com – the stage show.

3/ Finally – and seriously, folks – blogs will come to be seen as sitting at the "full-on" end of a spectrum of participatory media. The most interesting thought and work will continue to be around the other, "not much effort at all" end, of that spectrum. Some clown will insist on calling it all citizen journalism. I’ll probably moan about that.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The BBC News Online “magazine” writes up the Cillit Bang episode, as first seen on Plasticbag, and later written up here.

One of the reasons for silence here in recent days has been the imminent arrival of our latest blog, covering arts, books, film and teevee, finally launched yesterday. Written by a collaboration of desks at Guardian Unlimited, plus friends from the Guide and elsewhere on the paper, with expert Movable Type wrangling by Mr H.

Meanwhile I’m talking about why blogs need comments from readers, as Culture Vulture has, over here. And may I add that I’m jolly pleased with the Vulture, provided by Matt Buck. The big bird’ll be up to interesting things over the coming weeks…

RSS gets me into terrible trouble, you know. At blog socials, like Tuesday night’s very enjoyable geek dinner, there’s always someone ready to quiz me on why either this site, or the Guardian’s weblogs, don’t have "proper" RSS feeds. Now, for those who don’t know the code, "proper" in this context means "full text". Why am I not distributing the full text of all those blogs?

An example of this comes from the wonderful Boing Boing where, in an otherwise very complementary post about the Observer blog, Cory Doctorow initially thinks the feed is full text, only to discover it’s not. "The RSS is fulltext (crap, no it’s not — this is such an important detail, Observer — get it right!)"

Important? Really? Why? I know the reasons why syndication is hugely powerful, useful thing – and most of those positive things have to do with aggregating snippets of information, firing them about easily and aggregating them in new and interesting ways. We don’t want RSS being an alternative to old-fashioned web pages for big slabs of text, do we?

Well, maybe some folk do. So, for the record, here are four good reasons why I think full text feeds suck.

1/ Blogs are about conversations. By failing to represent comment activity, and by making it harder to leave comment, RSS feeds kill conversation by allowing readers to stay in their little feedreading bunkers. Now, I know many superstar blogs don’t have comments. But ours do. And feeds offer no indication of the conversation that’s taking place around that post, or that site. For instance, the design of this site deliberately puts new comments right at the top of the front page, to show what posts are active. I hope people are tempted to comment just because they see what posts have a conversation going on. At work, when we switched RSS from full to excerpt on Onlineblog a year or two ago, comments per post jumped up, and today all our blogs have fantastic post to comment ratios. That would fall if our RSS feeds went full text. (And, for the record, I think comments trump RSS every time. Yah boo sucks).

2/ RSS reduces pageviews. And pageviews are vital for ego (personal blogs) or ad serving (commercial blogs) or justifying the time spent (all blogs). And I keep hearing that putting ads in your feed isn’t cool either, so I can only assume people would like to have content without cost or even the burden of an ad nearby, which is a nice idea, but somewhat unsustainable in the real world.

3/ Full content feeds make it easy for people to nick your work. I think web-based aggregators are bad enough, and there have long been sites claiming to aggregate sites for people’s convenience, but which – in reality – skirt the boundaries of plagiarism. And now it’s getting worse – there are services out there taking RSS feeds, reformatting into HTML, and thus making it a skoosh for those feeds to be displayed on webpages sans context or, even, attribution. Read/Write Web has been doing some interesting stuff on this.

4/ Full content feeds are a pain. My RSS reader of choice – NetNewsWire – shudders to a halt when confronted with full feeds off the likes of Jay Rosen’s Pressthink. I’d be a much happier bunny if I could decide what to read – rather than download the whole damned thing every time I fire up.

So, in short, RSS is a useful way to shunt headlines and brief descriptions around the web, and lots of other things. It’s another thing that’s making the online news environment such an interesting place to be at the moment (Simon Waldman, our director of digital publishing, gave an interesting speech recently on its broader implications for the online publishing biz).

But, today, as an alternative means of distributing all your content, it sucks.