boss

 



- narrowly beating Snake in the grass ends day at races in the best headline stakes.
 

donc

You know there's a disconnect happening at Doncaster.



Opulence and crisis rubbing shoulders in newspaper columns.
Butlers/stylists/valets for the meltdowntowners.

From a few k away, we saw the new Shoppingtown steadily rising on the horizon by about 11%, opening for trade just as consumer confidence fell by 11%.

We checked out Donc* a few weeks ago in the not-quite-ready or Playtime phase, with visible cable lines and scaffolding surrounding the food-courts and fishmongers, and ye olde valets directing vehicles around the car parks with thumbed aplomb.
I liked the old Donc, actually, with its long narrow walkways of 70s mall, where walking groups of 70 year olds would sometimes stroll, its many exits, its mid century scale, its aspect looking squarely at the suburbs.
I am uneasy in Chaddy sized centres, disoriented in their no-place interiors, and certainly disturbed by pretensions of opulence in shops.

More at Sterne

* I don't think this name enjoys wide currency.
 

six up

soft drink can generator via J walk

six years today
 

finance talk

I heard this sequence on ABC radio this morning in a discussion on the latest market moves:

Is it a dead cat bounce?

One swallow does not a summer make.

But the elephant in the room -

I wish finance talk could be less esoteric.
 

see also
via presurfer
 

conditional

 


Via Customers who purchased this product also selected... at the rnd_time infinite wall clock


Collection of Unusual Clock Designs via The Presurfer
 

more micro

via Genevieve

More on microblogging trends at ReadWriteWeb State of the Blogosphere 2008.
From the comments:

People write where they hope and believe they have an audience to listen and possibly respond to their thoughts. i.e vanity of the blogger

Right now the audience is now on Twitter and/or Facebook/Friendfeed, so that is where the conversation has moved. In the future it may move to video e.g Seesmic, Qik, Kyte

So that's where the party's gone?
Funnily enough, I've always been a micro tumberly twitterly link blogger, so I may have to start writing long posts to stay well in the nichey-kitchen at parties.
 

indie blogs

Quiet around here lately.
And not just here (computer issues), but more generally. There did seem to be a mass desertion lull. Has blogging palled?
Content appeared to be going mainstream as a commodity, or perhaps it was invisible, facebooked elsewhere.

The point of my intended conversation wasn't to bemoan my lack of readers - content here has always meant to pleases only myself and perhaps a handful of others - but to maintain that microblogging and social networking combined with time constraints have made indie blogs obsolete.
Anne - in Comments at the wonderful Ample Sanity

But then The Presurfer turned 8:

It was great fun to start The Presurfer on September 24, 2000, and I'm still enjoying updating the site every day.

and I like is 6 and still going strong.

Every year I promise myself a bit of a sabbatical, changing tack for a while to talk more about why I do it, what I've learnt, where I think it's going. All a bit more meaty than the seaside and bubble cars. But then I think a lot of you are probably here for the seaside and bubble cars, not to hear my inner thoughts and there's the eternal conundrum.

Meanwhile, the meta musings at things (introductory or between the links) are always interesting

sometimes we think the internet is best simply for lists of things

A while ago, Fed By Birds posted a great link to the scrapbooks of Lewis Carroll, observing that the whimsical collection of items of interest resembled a blog.
I like that analogy. And whenever the blogging ennui strikes, it's good to keep in mind that a blog is allowed to be simply a web log of browsing.

And finding a fab new blog always helps.



(Update: I drafted this on Friday. Kim at LP today marks some local blogiversaries with related thoughts.)
 

mr cool

 
Mr Cool
 


(which reminds me - we liked the sundry pun here)