noodlepie

Like that was ever gonna happen

Ha... revisited something I wrote from three years ago,

The second point that interests me from a practical point of view is how a combination of twitter/blog/flickr/crowdsourcing can aid the reporter in best reporting the raw facts and then help develop a story. I think the idea of a Twitter network has legs for journalists/editors. Blogs are well proven as are Flickr, YouTube et al - and remember if I hadn't uploaded these pics to Flickr I might never have found out (or it might have taken me longer to find out) that the police were actively deleting digital images in Toulouse on Sunday. For the journalist, the skill is in meshing all these tools together in a meaningful way. link

Ha... Like that was ever gonna happen.

How to be a mobile foreign correspondent

I've been doing a lot of training for the BBC College of Journalism of late. I took the opportunity to blog a little bit of the background on doing the photojournalism story from Rubona, in eastern Rwanda the other week. If you're interested in how to be a mobile foreign correspondent with minimal (and in some cases pretty old) tools, take a look at this post on the College site.

Watching Stoke vs. Arsenal in Rwanda

I went to Rubona, east of Kigali last Saturday to watch Stoke City vs. Arsenal. Click the bottom right "full screen" mode on the slideshow above to find out why I was there in the first place. And what the people of Rubona think of Stoke... It's my attempt at a bit of photojournalism.

Don't speak to the locals

What is the point of swallowing the last 10 years of Hanoi food writing from U.S. magazines, visiting said city for a holiday-come-assignment, talking to the self same people you've read about in those U.S. magazines and spewing 2,129 words of uninspired, unoriginal, factually inaccurate, poop out the orifice of an American printing press at the other end? I dunno, but maybe the editors at The Smithsonian can tell us.

Let's look at the title of food writer Mimi Sheraton's article first - Searching for Hanoi's Ultimate Pho. Hmmm... couple of things here:

• If you're searching for a superlative, you'll need time and local knowledge. Mimi seems to spend most of her time - and I'm guessing she had a max of one or two weeks in country - with various members of the New York Philharmonic, the U.S. Ambassador, his missus and (stifle yawn) Didier Corlou - yes, we know Didier is French, has a Vietnamese wife, runs a posh restaurant in Hanoi (that no Hanoian Pho seller will ever set foot in) and has featured in every single page tearingly dull article ever written by a tay on Hanoi food. Enuff of Didier already.

Which brings us to point number two:

• Hanoi has a population of 6.5 million, ALL of whom have an opinion on food. So, here's an idea - admittedly this may be a tad radical for your parachuted in food writer - but why not try and speak to some of them? They don't bite - unless they're eating... You spoke to one - a violinist in the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra. Think you might need more than one Vietnamese opinion, and less foreign nonsense, if you're in search of the Ultimate Pho.

Next up, focus on the job in hand:

If you're writing an article about Pho - sorry, a search for the Ultimate Pho - why would you ever want to step inside the Sofitel hotel, let alone try the Pho you found there? Why? Even the biggest food idiot in Hanoi would never, ever, in a million and one lunar new years, send you to the Sofitel for... Pho. OK, so maybe you want to compare the "flash" with the "street", but don't drown your feature in highfallutin, nambypamby eateries that pay the merest nod to the down and dirty Pho.

Open you eyes and get your facts right. Lines like this make me wonder how seriously you take your job,

Between dodging motorbikes and cars that streamed unimpeded by stoplights—an amenity missing from the burgeoning capital link

As Our Man in Hanoi mentioned, after bringing this article to my attention,

Why do travel writers and bloggers keep saying there are no traffic lights in Hanoi - they're everywhere. link

Even back in the day, they were there. OK - so a lot of folk ignored them, probably still do - But, I can confirm that Hanoi has had some traffic lights, even a lot of them, since at least 1996. Has there been another revolution? Did they all get trashed? Did I miss sommit?

This next gripe has me a little confused.

Justin Mott's fabulous photo of Chuyen Bo, shown below (also his ace video above) looks like a pretty sophisticated Pho stall, with a number of cuts of meat, fresh Pho noodles and chopped spring onion. However, the text mentions tofu, crispy noodles, blood, "eight kinds of greens" etc. All of which are no-no's in Pho, especially in Hanoi where Pho comes sans herbs. I think you are describing somewhere else. Also, these things don't seem to appear in the picture,

Our destination was Chuyen Bo, a pho stall with stools so low that Honna had to pile three atop one another for me to sit on. The choice of ingredients was staggering: not only eight kinds of greens, tofu, soft or crisp noodles, but also various cuts of beef—oxtail, brisket, shoulder, kidneys, stomach, tripe, lungs, brains—plus cooked blood that resembled blocks of chocolate pudding, a pale pink meat described to me as “cow’s breast” (finally decoded as “udder”) and a rather dry, sinewy-looking meat that one of the workers, pointing to his groin, said was “from a man.” I was relieved to learn that the ingredient in question was a bull’s penis. I opted instead for a delicious if conventional pho of oxtail and brisket. But later I worried that I had missed an opportunity. Perhaps udder and penis pho might have made a more stirring, not to mention memorable, finale to my quest. Maybe next time. Pho better or pho worse.

Lastly, why didn't you just take my advice?

Go to Saigon. Hanoi Pho is a load of crap. But, if you must... I know where the Ultimate Pho is in Hanoi. It's in a scummy shack at 13 Lo Duc street. Sticky Rice and Our Man in Hanoi might disagree with me, but I know I am right and they are wrong. See below.... arrhhh, the memories...

Lost in translation

I wondered why I was getting so many emails from Vietnamese folk in Vietnam and overseas. A piece I was asked to write late last year for Tuoi Tre newspaper finally appeared over Tet last week. It's basically an "expats who've left Vietnam remembering Tet thing". I thought I'd test Google Translate's Vietnamese translating power on this story. Not sure which one makes most sense... Firstly, here's how Google regurgitated the story through the Vietnamese to English translation engine,

TTXuan - It was the mid-1990s, then I just came to Vietnam a few months. I am in Hanoi to teach English for a public official and they invited me to stay in Vietnam for Tet.

The last day of the year old, remains in my mind is the image of the motorcycle passes by the rear fan, are debated in the market should choose to buy flowers plant training can bloom right on Tet to bring luck and prosperity for the whole year.

Song of the new vendors is what I most attractive. One thing that I am very chinaware, even in the early days in Hanoi, is to try the Vietnamese food. So eventually I had four years of blogging about the cuisine in Vietnam on my blog noodlepie (noodlepia.com). What I eat any dish, the dish I can touch to the sauce, noodles, porridge please, more soup, noodle buildings. The items you can tell I have sampled. And I put up blogs all or nearly all, I is.

I bought the first blow in the death certificate wheel in Trang Tien street on a freezing morning a few days before Tet. Very heavy blow wheel, are wrapped in banana leaves and red wires required. It must be heavy to 2 or 3 kg, so is quite large for a food, but I think you're in Hanoi that should do what the people do Hanoi.

I welcome's Eve with his family a student at Gia Lam. They regale me what is the food of man, the chats, a two beer Hanoi and is a great bottle of Chivas Regal. I was advised to go home before midnight to avoid bad luck for the owners of the new year, although the family home was also to say that international death that may not apply to foreigners.

Tet in Hanoi on an incredibly quiet. In fact it is one of the few times I can remember four years living in the capital when there is no free street motorcycle and free car horn loudly. I invite you to a few people to "attack" one proof wheels. We open the banana leaf wrapping class and see a platform with sticky pork, fat and green beans. We cut it into bite try a piece. All wrinkled face, put down the pie and wonder if there are any restaurants still open or not.

Only after I was Tet best tips that how to eat bread is fried up and eaten with bulbs types. That was how I was eating ngấu grinding wheel certificate (and later bread tét) throughout the word, from the bread tét by her landlord in city my own packages to the wheel on Tet festival in the France - where I had moved about ten years later.

Currently I live in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. In Rwanda has no embassy in Vietnam and Vietnam do not have any restaurant. I'm not sure can find proof wheel here, but me and my family will inevitably raise the cup to the New Year and remember about ten Tet we had experienced in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Happy new year!

I'm sure you will agree, it makes for a fascinating, if completely incomprehensible, read. Let's try the original Vietnamese edit, that appeared in Tuoi Tre,

TTXuân - Đó là vào giữa những năm 1990, khi đó tôi chỉ mới đến Việt Nam một vài tháng. Tôi ở Hà Nội để dạy tiếng Anh cho các viên chức chính phủ và họ đã mời tôi ở lại Việt Nam để đón tết.

Những ngày cuối cùng của năm cũ, đọng lại trong tâm trí tôi là hình ảnh những chiếc xe máy đèo theo những cây quất phía sau, là những cuộc bàn cãi ở chợ hoa nên chọn mua cây đào nào có thể nở hoa đúng vào ngày tết để mang lại may mắn và thịnh vượng cho cả năm.

Song những người bán hàng rong mới chính là điều hấp dẫn tôi nhất. Một điều mà tôi rất sành, ngay cả trong những ngày đầu ở Hà Nội, là thử các món ăn Việt. Vậy nên rốt cuộc tôi đã có bốn năm viết blog về ẩm thực tại TP.HCM trên trang blog noodlepie của tôi (noodlepia.com). Tôi ăn bất cứ món gì, những món tôi có thể chạm tới như bún mắm, cháo lòng, tiết canh, bún ốc. Những món bạn có thể kể tôi đều đã nếm qua. Và tôi đưa lên blog tất cả hoặc gần như tất cả, tôi cho là vậy.

Tôi mua đòn bánh chưng đầu tiên trong đời ở phố Tràng Tiền vào một buổi sáng lạnh cóng trước tết vài ngày. Đòn bánh rất nặng, được gói bằng lá chuối và buộc dây đỏ. Nó phải nặng đến 2 hoặc 3kg, như vậy là khá lớn cho một người ăn, nhưng tôi nghĩ mình đang ở Hà Nội vậy nên hãy làm những gì như người Hà Nội làm.

Tôi đón giao thừa cùng với gia đình một học viên tại Gia Lâm. Họ thết đãi tôi cơ man nào là thức ăn, những cuộc trò chuyện, một hai ly bia Hà Nội và tuyệt nhất là một chai Chivas Regal. Tôi được khuyên nên về nhà trước nửa đêm để tránh xui xẻo cho gia chủ trong năm mới, mặc dù gia chủ cũng đã tử tế khi nói rằng điều đó có thể không áp dụng cho người nước ngoài.

Ngày tết ở Hà Nội yên tĩnh một cách không ngờ. Thật ra đó là một trong số ít những lần tôi có thể nhớ trong bốn năm sống ở thủ đô khi đường phố không có tiếng xe gắn máy và tiếng còi xe ầm ĩ. Tôi mời vài người bạn đến để “tấn công” cái bánh chưng. Chúng tôi mở lớp gói lá chuối và nhìn thấy một tảng nếp với thịt heo, mỡ và đậu xanh. Chúng tôi cắt nó ra cắn thử một miếng. Tất cả đều nhăn mặt, đặt miếng bánh xuống và tự hỏi liệu có nhà hàng nào còn mở cửa hay không.

Chỉ đến sau tết tôi mới được mách rằng cách ngon nhất để ăn bánh là chiên lên và ăn với củ kiệu. Đó cũng là cách mà tôi đã ăn ngấu nghiến bánh chưng (và sau này là bánh tét) suốt từ đó, từ những cái bánh tét do bà chủ nhà của tôi ở TP.HCM tự gói đến những cái bánh tét trong ngày tết ở Pháp - nơi tôi đã chuyển đến khoảng mười năm sau.

Hiện nay tôi sống tại Kigali, thủ đô Rwanda. Ở Rwanda chưa có đại sứ quán của Việt Nam và không có quán ăn Việt Nam nào. Tôi không chắc có thể tìm thấy bánh chưng ở đây, nhưng tôi và gia đình chắc hẳn sẽ nâng cốc vào dịp năm mới và nhớ về mười  cái tết mà chúng tôi đã trải qua ở Việt Nam và Đông Nam Á.

Chúc mừng năm mới!

Here's what I actually wrote,

My first Tet in Viet Nam was a bit of a disaster.

It was the mid-90's,  I'd only been in the country for a few months. I was based in Ha Noi to teach English to government officials. They encouraged me to stay in Ha Noi for the Tet festivities.

I remember the motorbikes with kumquat trees strapped to the back, the debate over which peach blossom plant to buy - it had to flower on the day of Tet to guarantee good luck and prosperity for the coming year. But it was the street food sellers that intrigued me the most.

One thing I had become adept at, even in my early days in Ha Noi, was trying the food. I ended up blogging 4 years of more of eating in Ho Chi Minh City on my noodlepie blog I ate anything and  everything I could get my hands on; bun mam, chao long, tiet canh, bun oc, you name it, I enjoyed it and blogged everything, or almost everything, I consumed. But, this was my first Tet and I knew little.

I bought my first ever heavy brick of Banh Tet wrapped in banana leaves and tied with red string on Trang Tien street one chilly morning a few days before Tet itself. It must've weighed 2 or 3 kilos, a little large for one person but, I thought, I'm in Ha Noi, do as the Hanoians do.

I spent the eve of Tet with a student and his family in the Gia Lam district of Ha Noi. We had copious amounts of food, plenty of talk, a glass or two of Bia Ha Noi and the best part of a bottle of Chivas Regal. I was encouraged to get home before midnight so as not to bring bad luck for the new year. Although, my host did kindly say that maybe this rule didn't apply to foreigners...

The day of Tet is incredibly quiet in Ha Noi. In fact, it is one of the few times I can remember in the four years I lived in the capital when I did not hear motorbikes on the streets and horns blaring. I invited a couple of friends round to attack the Banh Tet. We unwrapped the acres of banana leaves and looked at the lump of rice, pork, fat and mung beans. We sliced it up and took a bite each, we all winced a little, put it back down again and wondered which restaurant might still be open...

It was only after Tet that I was told the best way to eat it was to fry it and eat it with small pickled leeks. This is the way I have devoured Banh Tet ever since. From my landlady's homemade version in Ho Chi Minh City to France, where I moved some ten years later.

Now I'm based in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. There is no Vietnamese embassy in Rwanda, although one is scheduled to open very soon, and there are no Vietnamese restaurants. I'm not sure I'll find a Banh Tet, but my family and I will be sure to raise a glass come the big day and remember fondly the ten Tets we did spend in Viet Nam and the region.

Chúc mừng năm mới!

Graham Holliday, Kigali, Rwanda, 5 December, 2009

Picture overlooking western side of Kigali, taken by me yesterday.

Not a nerd not lonely

Just for the record... Not too much a disagree with in this piece in this New York Times piece, but I take issue with the nerdy lonely bit :)

Few writers of books, magazines or newspaper columns could compete with, say, a lonely, Vietnam-based food nerd who’d spent the last 10 years eating at every food stall in Ho Chi Minh City, exhaustively documenting every mouthful. link

I'll take whatever compliments I can get... The piece did get me perusing some of the back catalogue. So many standout dishes in Saigon, but if you happen to come across this post at this moment and you are in Saigon now, click the image above, hover over the dish you like, click the link and go eat eat there. Guaranteed good eating. Alternatively, follow Andrea Nguyen's excellent advice.

China in Africa

The excellent New York Times Lens blog recently displayed a series of photos about China in Africa by Paolo Woods. It's a fascinating document, well worth looking over,

This is a big story. And it was the toughest story that the photographer Paolo Woods has ever pursued. It demanded two years of preliminary research and infinite patience in obtaining access. Mr. Woods and his collaborator, Serge Michel, a Swiss journalist, finally arrived in Africa in 2007. Now they have a book to show for their efforts: “China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa” (Nation Books, 2009), written with Michel Beuret. Mr. Woods’s photographs are also being shown at the Open Society Institute in Manhattan as part of its “Moving Walls” series.

“We are trying to show a very important phenomenon which is changing the face of Africa,” Mr. Woods said. link

I know what I want for Christmas... If only I could take snaps like Paolo... It's photo series like this that make me want to make more of an effort with photography here in Kigali. I get the occasional shot I quite like, but nothing approaching the pros :(

I took my favourite, the one above, on Avenue de la Paix in central Kigali. It's the main commercial district in the Rwandan capital. I was handing over a 1,000Rwf note to buy a newspaper and the seller was offering me the change. I held the camera at chest height and wasn't even looking through the viewfinder when I took it. Design and a bit of luck can sometimes get a decent enough shot.

If you've read this far, you might want to take a spin through the photos I have taken thus far while living in Kigali. See the slideshow below. I use three cameras, but for the most part it's the (pretty crappy) iPhone I have to hand.

Online publishing, distribution and collaboration

Creating an online newswire:

It started with a task I set myself to find information on pirates in Somalia and filter it in a meaningful, but automated way, and send the result out to Twitter and other public facing websites as a kind of niche newswire. @somaliapirates was the result. And it continues to publish news on piracy off the Horn of Africa for those who are obsessed with that story.

I then decided to try and create a number of "country wires" - I made about 30 of them - such as @iranwire, @pakistanwire, @afghanistanwire, @congowire and @rwandawire. Each wire was built upon a single cloned/adapted Yahoo Pipe which I then fed into a country specific pipe i.e. Iran. This way I could add sources to the core pipe if neccesary - which would then filter down to all the country specific pipes. In addition, I could further tweak each country specific pipe to fine tune the results.

My idea was that I could turn the automated twitterfeed off and "go human" when a news story in any given country kicked off allowing me, or someone else, to update in near real time - both Yahoo Pipes and Twitterfeed are clunky, unreliable and information often arrives after some considerable delay - certainly not something you'd want to rely upon for breaking news.

In reality, I had no time to do all this and certainly no time for global coverage of news across 189+ countries across Twitter. And so, I let the Yahoo Pipes & Twitter combo keep on pumping out the news on the 30 or so accounts I had already created.

However, with the move to Rwanda looming back in July 2009, I decided to turn my focus to one account - @kigaliwire. I've since spent a fair bit of time focused on how to distribute news from Rwanda across the whole web and not just a fairly small, but very active, group of folk who use Twitter. That's what much of the presentation above is all about - I've added some notes, so the presentation should almost make sense without me speaking over it.

Distribute wide and far. Too far?

I didn't just want to send out links. I wanted to find ways to splice up any content I produce right across the web. I now use a combination of publish2, pixelpipe, hellotxt and various blog aggregators to do the heavy lifting for me. I now distribute content across almost 100 sites.

How does it work in practice?

Take photos as an example. Using pixelpipe I can send a photo that appears in a blog post at kigaliwire.com simultaneously appear across 45 or more photo-sharing sites. Each photo is tagged appropriately containing a description with a link back to where it sits on kigaliwire.com. The idea is that anyone searching for photos, video, audio... on Rwanda will eventually come across something I have produced and might then be inclined to see what more information there is at kigaliwire.com or, as often happens, just start a chat wherever they happen to see the image whether it be on flickr, moblog, radar, 23hq, ipernity and so on...

Conclusions this far down the road:

• This is an interesting way to publish, but will only be truly effective when I start producing more original content beyond photographs. To do that in Rwanda, I'll need a press card. which I intend to get just as soon as the price comes down from $1,000 per year to $100 per year (soon I'm told)

• Building castles in the sand - all the services I use to distribute information are free or low cost. Most of them do not appear to have much of a business model. I doubt whether a good 30-50% of them will be around in a year or two. As Ethan Zuckerman says, maybe we're building these places on the shakiest of foundations? Well... Yes and no - One of the key tasks of publishing this way is to keep an eye on what new tools are coming out and try them to see how useful they are. And to discard those that are of no use, don't work and/or start charging prohibitive amounts of cash.

• It's a lot more labour intensive to publish this way than it might look. Working on it as a kind of hobby, it took a good couple of months to wire everything up and figure out how best to try and make it work. Add another month to build and test the resulting kigaliwire.com website - which still does not work 100% - however you look at it, you're faced with a lot of time building foundations. And the thing is, much of this labour is probably futile. How many folk are there on Plerb who are likely to be really interested in Rwanda??? None, is my guess. It's more about finding those networks that are highly interested in Rwanda.

• It's more than a one-man operation. Ideally, I'd have one or two other people to create and publish content, monitor all the networks and start finding the people who are interested in Rwanda in a far more efficient way than I have done so far.

• In it for the long run. This way of publishing is a slow process, that will build over time. There are no quick fixes publishing across social media sites if you expect to engage along the way. And, is it really possible for one bloke to engage across so many social networks simultaneously? Of course not. I just focus on the ones that matter at the moment and keep an eye on those that "bubble" in the background.

We're gonna need a bigger mop

When an article is published in a newspaper, bookmarked on del.icio.us, linked to on Twitter, but deleted from the newspaper website a few hours later, does it still exist? Yes it does.

More on media training

 

I was asked by Laura Oliver to do a Q&A for journalism.co.uk as part of their "Meet the media trainers" series. However, as I recently moved to Kigali, and I can't realistically train for them from here, the Q&A got shelved. Alors, here is the Q&A, but I am still available for training worldwide - will be in the UK and Austria in November, possibly Nigeria, Liberia, Vietnam and Jordan soon after,

How has online changed the nature of 'breaking news' in your opinion?

Increasingly, news breaks online before it arrives on TV, in a newspaper or on the radio. Facts, rumour and gossip spread rapidly across hundreds of different sites mostly through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The problem at the moment is these sites are quite daunting for both journalists and news junkies to navigate. For the most part, these networks tend to self correct rumour quite quickly, but for anyone new to the space something like Twitter must just look like a maelstrom of tittle-tattle that's nigh on impossible to make sense of, let alone verify. However tools like Twitter, or what comes after them, are here to stay and journalists need to learn how these places work and how to utilize their journalistic skills in the online environment.

You can almost guarantee the first question I am asked whenever I discuss Twitter in training is, "But, how do you know it's a real person? How do you it's true?" It's bizarre, so many journalists seem to leave their brains behind as soon as they look at a website. Very few see this as a challenge to find out how you might start the process of verifying information online.

Are their simple changes a journalist can make to their work to better equip themselves for tracking breaking news online?

The first task for any journalist new to sourcing information online is to get involved in the culture of online networks. It's an unavoidable first step as there's really no other way to understand social media tools unless you have used a few of them and understand how they work.

The other key task is to learn how to use an RSS newsreader and subscribe to the RSS feeds of keywords and key phrases across a wide range of sites as soon as a story breaks or even before it breaks.

I remember while I was delivering a Track breaking news online course last year a bomb went off in Bangalore. Using the skills the trainees learned during the day, they were able to find pictures, video, tweets and the email addresses and mobile phone numbers of potential sources on the ground within 20 minutes.

Twitter is the hip kid on the block, but that shouldn't detract from it's usefulness. To paraphrase Alan Rusbridger, if you find the right people to follow it's like a personalized newswire. Although it helps if you learn how to filter it, search it and share information effectively on it.

How do you personally keep up-to-date with the latest tools for tracking breaking news online?

I don't actively go out of my way to find stuff a lot of the time. I tend to pick things up on Twitter. I don't follow a lot of people on my personal account, but most of them are pretty clued in to journalism and new tools and are generous when it comes to sharing links and retweeting interesting tidbits they find.

I use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us a lot. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of a few good bookmarkers and sometimes their networks and I occasionally subscribe to highly targetted tag feeds in del.icio.us which can be an incredible resource if you learn how to filter it effectively.

Lastly, I use Yahoo Pipes a great deal especially when I need to follow a very specific, often under reported, story. Pipes takes the donkey work out of grouping, filtering and sorting huge amounts of information. The only downside, as far as breaking news is concerned, is that Pipes delivers information quite a bit slower than a straight RSS feed.

I tell all my trainees the key tools they have to really get their heads around are RSS, del.icio.us and Twitter. I also tell them that the course I teach them this month will not be the same course I teach next month. New, useful tools appear all the time and I adapt the course every month.

A key part of an online journalist's job is to know what's new, to try things out and to assess the usefulness. It's also useful to experiment with ways in which you can bundle up a bunch of tools to get a job done for you, like publishing a newswire across more than one site - update: something I'm playing with doing at kigaliwire.com (not quite live yet). More on all of that thinking in here.

Lastly, you have to go where the conversation is. The "conversation" is happening on Twitter at the moment, but that might not be the case in 6 months time. Keeping it with new tools for online communication is a very important aspect on doing online journalism, IMO. The people who make all this stuff work well were all on Twitter 3 years ago or more and not just after Stephen Fry mentioned it on TV.

Media training tips for trainers - part 3

faves, originally uploaded by noodlepie.

Not so much a training tip as a useful way of "jotting notes down"

I often see what look like potentially interesting links posted to Twitter on my phone when I'm on the move. However, I often don't have the time/bandwidth/inclination to click the link when I notice it. So, I use the favourite function on Twitter to favourite the tweet and subscribe to these favourites as an RSS feed.

The link is far more likely to grab my attention sitting in an RSS reader than it is sitting on a favourites page on Twitter that I never visit.

"Uninterupted High Speed Connectivity"

The US$133 per month Rwandatel ADSL wires that connect us from Kigali to the rest of the world. Looks like a pretty tenuous connection. And it is.

Let's move to Kigali

If France couldn't re-kickstart my foodblogging habit, how about Kigali? Worth a shot ehh? We've only been here a week (of an 18 month stretch) and it already looks unlikely the Rwandan capital will succeed in re-igniting an interest in foodblogging. However, it does appear there's plenty else of interest going on. More on all that in good time. Meanwhile, the above slideshow consists of just a few snaps I managed to capture in between getting settled in the new house and learning how things work in east Africa. I'll be posting more here, tweeting on kigaliwire, as well as on noodlepie as per usual, and setting up kigaliwire.com in the coming weeks. More soon.

Rick Stein on Ben Thanh market

Fellow Vietnam foodhead Cathy at Gastronomyblog features in the latest series of food ventures of Padstow's finest TV chef Rick Stein in Vietnam. I've been a fan of his for a while myself. Vietnam is just one episode in a series that takes in other parts of south east Asia. I watched the whole Vietnam episode today and just discovered it on YouTube. It's a good broadbrush, although I noticed a few wee errors - at least errors to me - and why did he go to the old, tired and grumpy Cha Ca La Vong??? They really do not deserve the press. It's similar to the Anthony Bourdain show in Vietnam recently, with a bit more depth, a lot more "how you can do this at home" and a few more sites. After all it's a longer show. All in all, a very enjoyable reminder of life on the streets in Vietnam (if you ignore the posh junks, boats, cars and hotels...) Watch the clip above. Our Cathy appears at 2 minutes in on Ben Thanh market.

Media training tips for trainers - part 2

Equations, originally uploaded by Dunechaser.

There was a time I'd subscribe to 200+ blogs, but not any more. Apart from a few friends, mostly old blogs I've always read, I simply don't subscribe to blogs anymore. It's been this way for about two years. Boil it all down and blogs were always about finding interesting and useful nuggets of information. These days it's far more efficient to pick up information in places other than blogs. The following are two methods I have used to keep up to date with news on the future of journalism and online journalism training:

• Set up a delicious account.
• Now, you need to find the accounts of the really Obsessive-compulsive journalism bloggers/tweeters/researchers. How do you do this? Some OCD journalism bloggers, like Paul Bradshaw for example, make it obvious on their blogs that they use delicious - see right hand column on his blog. Go to his delicious account, find his network, find some bookmarkers you like, add them to your own delicious network, then search their networks, add more users to your network, rinse and repeat for other bookmarkers. This way it's very quick to build a free research team of like-minded bookmarkers to work for with you.
• Finally, subscribe to the resulting network RSS feed. For me that's at the left hand side of the bottom of this page http://delicious.com/network/noodlepie

It's quicker and easier to read nuggets of "research" in an RSS reader than to lumber through 30+ blog posts or more on the subject. In some ways Twitter is replacing this as many of these same folks post great links direct to Twitter. Or, like me until earlier this week, they publish through several networks simultaneously. However, a delicious network RSS feed is a very efficient way of distilling the information you need into a single place - your RSS reader.

Increasingly, I have found I don't have time to follow news on the future of journalism. At least not in the same depth as I used to do using the method above. Therefore, to tweak this research method yet further I distill all the above a little more,

• Create an account in Yahoo Pipes and learn how to set a basic pipe up.
• Find the bookmarkers within your network who consistently provide good links that target your specific interests. Copy those RSS feeds.
• Send them through a Yahoo Pipe. Make sure to filter for rubbish and duplicates if necessary - using the unique, filter and sort Yahoo Pipe operators.
• Once you're done, subscribe to the resulting RSS feed.

That's what I ended up doing with nine of the journalism bookmarkers I like best with the crude Online Journalism News Wire pipe. In some cases, like bookmark crazed Martin Stabe, I have used the RSS feed of a single tag from his delicious account. Others I take the whole feed.

It takes a little time to set things up this way, especially if you are unfamiliar with the tools. However, once it works to your liking you should find a fine trickle of information you need arriving in your RSS reader every day as opposed to a flood of information you don't really need.

For topics you need to keep a very close and extremely comprehensive eye on this method won't work. We'll take a look at how to do that in a later media training tip.

Read more in Part 1 in this Media trainer training tips series.