Look ma, no hands

Finally getting round to processing some photo sets and putting them onto Flickr. Starting with this trip to the circus a few weeks ago. Tabby loved it.

Edit – slightly fixed now

Then again, I might wait for the 10inch version.

As happy as I’ve been with my iPhone 3GS, I’ll never buy an iPad or another iPhone. It’s the obvious reasons, really – the inability of iOS to support decent multitasking, the walled garden of the App Store, the lack of Flash support, the general attitude of Apple in the wake of antennagate…

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is an extraordinary device which changed everything just by taking what people had been struggling with over the last few years and doing it right, but it’s time to move on. Waving goodbye to all the cash I’ve spent on apps which will be useless if I don’t stick with Apple is just something I’ll have to live with.

Which is why I can’t wait for the iPad competition to come out. I’m also still in love with my Asus Eee 901, but the netbook is such an inelegant and slow way of doing the things I want a tablet for that more often than not if I want to check Twitter or cross reference something I’ve just seen on TV, for example, I’ll end up using my phone instead.

Two pieces of news have got me excited this week, then. The first is that Viewsonic is unveiling it’s 7inch tablet contender (above), based on Android, at IFA 2010. It’s called the ViewPad 7 and has all the usual 3G, GPS and Bluetooth gubbins, but importantly has the USB port that the iPad lacks. If only it had an HDMI out too.

The second is that Canonical are coding multitouch support into future versions of Ubuntu. As promising as Android is as a platform for tablets, I’m not so sure I want Google to rule the web any more than I trust Apple with that role.

Arrived just after this update from the West Sussex Fire and Rescue service:

“ 13 year old boy at top of fir tree – approx 15 feet up – unable to find own way down”

I like Save the Children’s latest idea for generating coverage about its work a lot. Rather than partner up with someone from a broadsheet for a fact finding trip to one of its projects – as is usually the case for large NGOs – it’s taking three professional ‘mummy bloggers’ with it.

It’s a recognition that these niche blogs have huge and highly interested audiences, and getting direct experiential copy on them will likely result in a spike in donations to Save the Children.

My only concern is that often this kind of access is used by professional journalists to research bigger stories that may not always be the one the charity is interested in.

It’s not a problem for the charity – they’re getting better coverage which will raise more cash than if they took someone from the Guardian, say, and that’s exactly what their job is to do.

It’s a potential problem for the papers who have grown used to subsidising their international coverage by developing symbiotic relationships with NGOs. If charities discover that they can get the coverage they really want through social media and don’t need the mainstream press as much, the current strategy most papers have of gathering news off the back of NGO work will have to be rethought.

There’s a few kinks I have iron out, as the design was done on an old version of WordPress and moving it borked a few things. Perhaps I’ll take time out to overhaul it completely at some point… I think I have a couple of hours free in September, according to the diary.

If you tried to email me yesterday and got bounced, it’s because the server switch took a bit longer than expected. I’m still here. Honest.

Shoreham, now home.

When I was younger, I was interested in local politics and who did what in the area in which I grew up. Like most people, though, I’ve since moved around a lot over the years and been focussed on issues and news from around the world, which has distracted me from what’s going on right on my doorstep. As a tech journalist, what happens in Silicon Valley or Taipai is more relevant to my work than whether or not the council is paying over the odds to have the bins emptied every week.

That’s changing. Inspired by several things – the CIJ summer course last month, the growth of hyperlocal blogs, a new government, meeting Paul and the team from helpmeinvestigate.com and the fact that I plan on staying around Shoreham for a while (unless that dream job of African correspondent comes up…) – I’ve started trying to find out a bit more about this place.

The CIJ course had several sessions about investigating local government and politicians which I went along to and have been trying to put into practice locally (including an excellent one by Orchard News Bureau). What’s amazing is that even though this part of the country is a Mecca for journalists, the response from the councils has been complete and utter surprise. No-one takes advantage of the fact that you can walk into your council offices and examine the expense reports of candidates at local and national elections to make sure they’re playing fair. Likewise a request to take part in the public audit of the local accounts has proved painfully protracted, and no-one seems really sure where records are held or how to get them.

After three weeks (out of the four that council accounts are open to the public) I’ve finally got an appointment to view the expenses of the executive – the dozen or so members whose personal salaries account for almost 5% of the total budget of Adur district council, and therefore deserve a little bit of public scrutiny.

As I say, it’s a learning curve for me and next year I’ll be armed with experience as well as curiosity. Which will be interesting – because even my relatively clumsy approach has turned up a few very unusual facts I’m following up for further investigation…

If a 100 square mile iceberg breaks off and there’s no-one to hear hear it

I don’t usually like just relinking BoingBoing posts because the chances are you’ve all read them already. But the news that a chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan has broken off of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland hasn’t been picked up by any UK papers as far as I can tell*.

I have no idea whether this is related to recent warnings that 2010 could be the hottest year on record, but even it’s a slightly terrifying coincidence at the very least.

*Although it was covered in Pravda. Just goes to show.