Blog posts

My last University of Reading meeting was that of the Careers Advisory Board this morning. It was the second meeting of the board this year, and therefore the place to discuss the annual, government-required Graduate First Destinations Survey. Such surveys are always good sources of spinnable material. The survey is prepared by HESA to ensure the same template is used nationwide, and the results themselves were relatively unremarkable. Some slight fluctuations, and a few concerns that electronic engineering students seemed to be having some trouble finding employment in that field, but no real surprises. ...

There is currently much discussion about reforming the university admissions system in the UK. The current system, whereby students apply to universities during the autumn of their final school year and are then offered places subject to interviews and particular grades in exams yet to come not only places a huge amount of pressure on students, but leaves a high degress of uncertainty for universities. It is also said to often fail to adequately distinguish between the high number of students achieving the top grades, and certainly produces dilemmas of how to respond to particularly able students held back by a range of societal factors. ...

If you’re like me, you often feel like it would be good to have a recording of a concert, but are rarely prepared enough to take the requisite equipment. According to CNN there are moves afoot to outfit clubs with booths where you’ll be able to instantly download a recording of a night’s performance onto a USB flash drive like this to take home and copy to your home computer. ...

Perhaps the most curious story being carried by the BBC today is that of German band Super Smart who have taken to releasing their albums in only one format: polyphonic ringtones for mobile phones. I certainly share their belief that the traditional music industry routes to releasing records should be avoided wherever possible, but are the majority of mobile phones advanced enough for this yet? ...

Sleeping till 2pm, as I did, I missed the phone call from Kevin Walsh at Apple. Calling him back this afternoon, I was informed that Apple did indeed lose my laptop. And despite having had three weeks to do so, they haven’t found it. So they’ve ordered me a new one. He wasn’t clear on the specifications of the new machine, but I was told it would be the new equivalent of the machine I had, which should be significantly better. ...

Bags are packed, cleaning is almost finished and the time for yet another transatlantic flight looms. I must check flight times, numbers and departure terminals. As term has now started again at the University, the chaplaincy have published their latest newsletter, including a snippet from my review of The Passion Of The Christ.

Will Davies’ latest article at Progress Magazine makes interesting reading. He uses the term ‘democratish’ to describe the plethora of media and similar organisations which are often seen as part of the democratic process but which don’t contain democratic safeguards, and goes on to look at some of the effects of consumerist politics.

One of the best surveys of ‘social software’ I have yet found is this from a Canadian University’s Communication Studies course. It provides a good overview of many of the developments in communication technology and online community over recent years (and reminds me that I really need to read some works of Howard Rheingold). What continues to be lacking in much discussion of online community is an analysis of the results of the overlapping layers of relationship which exist between members of various online communities. Tools such as Technorati, which detail links between blogs can articulate some of the links which exist between blogs but fail to represent any explanation of how that link came to be made. Similarly, technologies such as XFN ( XHTML Friends Network) can go some step towards articulating relationships between the creators of sites and content, giving some indication of the nature of those relationships, but they are still some way from contextualising the content of the conversations which are interwoven in those relationships. ...

Once again picking up on a story that is rapidly making the rounds on blogs, I picked this quote out from Gregory Wright in G2’s latest article about blogging: I like the idea of just writing something. If it wasn’t for keeping a blog, my written output would amount to about 10 words a month. I’m sure someone once said something about people writing in the past because they had something to say and people writing nowadays to find out whether or not they’ve got anything to say. There’s probably something in that. ...

With thanks to bananie for the tip-off: Donnie Darko is to be re-released. Having only seen the original cut in the theatre/cinema (choose your language) three times, I’m rather glad that I’ll have the chance to do so again. And very glad I didn’t get round to buying the DVD as yet. Does anyone know if this new release will be more than the original with the deleted scenes from the DVD edited back in? ...