new media

YouTube Pron

YouTube Pron

After reading how people make money from films they post to YouTube, I sat down and tried to write a comedy script for the format. My first idea was to create a loosely-linked series called ‘How the World Really Works’, [...]

Confessions to a Cruel Internet

Dear friend, I like to start my notes to you as if we’re already in the middle of a conversation. That was a line from a movie, You’ve Got Mail. Apologies; one should always recite a quotation with forewarning, or [...]

Scrawl Wars in a Virtual Land

Two and a half years ago, I started Halfthoughts by drawing on a metaphor. I compared blogging to cave art. In both cases, a person feels an incontestable urge to create a representation of the world around them, by making [...]

21st Century Etiquette

Time was that if you wanted a manual for manners, you simply turned to a guide from Debrett’s. With the rise of interweb and netiquette, life is no longer so simple, though Debrett’s still try to give advice on civility [...]

Lily Allen: The New Arthur Scargill

Enjoy this blog as a podcast here or at iTunes. George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human [...]