Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

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26 January 2006


“Due to a whale in the Thames services may be subject to delays”. And yes it’s true!

I should have blogged this sooner. It’s not as funny now that the whale is dead. I stuck it up on my Flickr account right away but forgot to cross-reference it here. You might find it interesting to check out or ‘subscribe to’ my photo feed there – particularly if you know me. I tend largely to take pictures of odd things I see around London that intrigue me. There’s a little ‘jigsaw’ of pics from it on the navigation bar at right…

8 November 2005

Just for fun and to give me an idea of who visits my site and why, I have put up a Frappr! map for this blog which I encourage you to visit and add yourself to (no registration required). Basically all this is is a really easy to use way of attaching a short note about yourself (and optional picture) to a map of the world. Use it to tell me about yourself, why you like (or don’t like) the site, and what kind of things you’d like me to write about more (or less). Or anything else you think I and the rest of the readers might find interesting!

PS if you are adding a URL just paste the address into the “shoutout” space – don’t try creating an HTML link as it doesn’t work.

PPS There are several web applications that let you annotate and share maps – I have started making an annotated list of these services using my favourite shared bookmark application, Netvouz.

10 September 2005

I suppose this is something I am bound to have to weather in years to come once I am published academically and people have the chance to interpret (and misinterpret) my work, but this morning’s surprise came as an unwelcome little shock. I discovered that I have been held up as a figure for abuse in a newsletter distributed in my neighborhood by Islington International Working Class Action.

When the latest edition of the “Mildmay and Highbury Independent” landed on my doorstep (not yet available online) I thought I would give it a read. I wouldn’t say I am completely ideologically aligned with them but I have some sympathy with their regular diet of stories of poorly maintained public housing and council property sell-offs that don’t result in significant benefits for the borough’s substantial population of working class people. I turned the page and found an article entitled “Gentrification: is it good for you?” following on from a recent Guardian article which pointed out the benefits of the restoration of a local park (that I had some part in) but also quoted some residents who felt they had not benefited from the changes. And there, to my distress, I read the following:

“Mr Brake has made it very clear which kind of ‘regeneration’ he wants to see. His website announces triumphantly that the: ‘Gentrification of Newington Green proceeds apace’… For Mr Brake the arrival of ‘a genuine French patisserie, several restaurants and a vegetarian deli’ is proof that ‘the benefits will be felt by all who live here for generations to come.”

Well I was a little baffled. None of this sounded like anything I had written on the official NGAG website (which is rather out of date now that I am no longer press officer). And indeed I hadn’t written anything like that in my official capacity. Then I went back through the archives of this blog and discovered that the quotes had been pulled from here – from this post and this one. Of course the quotes were selective and the author of this particular hatchet job hadn’t bothered to call me up and try to find out my actual views.

I don’t know whether having read my words through their own ideological lenses they felt they knew what I would say or whether they simply wanted to use me as a sort of punching bag and were deliberately misquoting me but whichever the reason the result was quite irritating. All the more so because actually I do agree with the author to some extent about the issues s/he was trying to raise.

So to be clear about what I think I have observed that Newington Green is gentrifying but with decidedly mixed emotions. I personally enjoy the arrival of the local patisserie and deli, which (it must be said) have not come at the expense of any authentically working class amenities that I am aware of. What I campaigned for and helped to achieve, however was the cleaning up of the Green itself, which has been turned into a proper park at last and my intention was that that green space used by everyone (not the restaurants) would provide the “benefits for all who live here” alluded to earlier.

I am uncomfortably aware that improvements to an area like this one can lead to gentrification which may alienate working class people but I would regret it if this did happen and indeed as long as the numerous council estates in this area remain it seems unlikely that working class people would be “driven out” as the author warns may happen. It is difficult, however, to see what the alternative is. Should we have left the green as an overgrown traffic roundabout to protect the neighborhood from gentrification? Shades of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”!

At any rate had I been approached I would have had some sympathy with the author and could have helped them with their piece – as it is (like all too many groups on the left) their rigid ideological stance has lost them a potential supporter.

9 September 2005

Dogs and Blogs New Yorker cartoon
Thank you Alex Gregory of the New Yorker this week for bringing us this cartoon – a lineal descendant of the justly famed (if somewhat inaccurate) 1993 “on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog“.

25 August 2005

Just to be l337 I have turned this blog into an instant podcast thanks to Talkr which essentially reads out the text as MP3s on demand – the results are not bad, I think. You can click on the individual audio links or copy this link into your podcasting software of choice. I have recently been trying out quite a few podcasts so expect to hear about more good podcasts shortly…

6 May 2005
Filed under:About this blog,Weblogs at9:16 am

If you have been reading blog.org before via RSS you may need to update the XML weblink to this (https://blog.org/wp-rss2.php) in order to read my blog now that it has moved. I also don’t know how to give each of my categories its own RSS feed at the moment though I am sure it is possible so you’ll have to read along with everything for the moment.

5 May 2005

Traditionally if you wanted a WordPress weblog (open source so free to use and arguably the most feature rich blogging product around) you needed to be techie yourself or at least have a techie friend with server space spare. Certainly it is only thanks to my own connections in the tech fraternity that I have been able to have this blog hosted using first Moveable Type and now WordPress.

Recently, however, I have discovered that blogsome offers a free hosting service similar to blogger‘s so anyone reading this could have a blog like mine. I’m a little concerned that blogsome don’t have any apparent means of gathering revenue to offset the cost of hosting so they could disappear one day – particularly if they get popular – but my guess is that by the time they do there will be lots of other places able to take over hosting.

If you are already running a weblog using another service you may need a little help getting your archives across to this new platform but once you have taken the plunge I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it to get features like categories, password protected posts and an extensible architecture for people to add features.

I am not using blogsome myself – instead this weblog, like my other group weblog at the LSE is now generously hosted by Tim Duckett.

Hope you enjoy the new look. Feel free to comment with suggestions and do let me know if there are any problems.

P.S. If you are in the UK don’t forget to vote!

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