noodlepie

Saigon snapper

One of the blogs I subscribe to for my work at From the Frontline is MultimediaShooter. It occasionally throws up some excellent links that I probably wouldn't otherwise hear about. Today, I learned about the photographer Kevin German. Despite his name, he's American and he recently relocated to Saigon. He takes snaps like the one above. VervePhoto explains Kevin is a former staff snapper at an American newspaper, where he won an award earlier this month,

Former Sacramento Bee staff photographer Kevin German is off to Vietnam again. As is evident from looking at his site this young photographer shows exceptional promise. I especially liked his photo-essays about the truck stop in Sacramento and his time spent with Ben Underwood from the series “Echo’s in the Dark”. link

Kevin has a blog called Wandering Light.

British people eating

Been writing a bit about British food this morning and catching up on a bit of email when I notice this superb page of photographs of British people eating food. Press Association photographer Duncan Raban took the snaps. He was on the blogging/social media course I teach at the Frontline Club in London and has been playing around with blog tools ever since.

Student journalists talking about... blogs

I have a whole bunch of keyword search feeds across a range of social media sites that deliver relevant work information to me. One of the feeds I have in my newsreader is the search term "journalism" within Google Video. The resulting catch-all feed is mostly filled with American students mucking about in journalism class. Some of it, like the sample above, is a discussion based piece about journalism, blogging and the impact of digital media etc. as part of a class. Occasionally, there's even something interesting that slips through. However, almost none of it comes from the UK.

Now, I don't really want to see British journalism students arseing around anymore than I want to see American students assing around. I just would've thought British students would be uploading video, describing and tagging it appropriately too, but they ain't. If that's a trend that continues, newspapers like The Guardian will still be having awaydays for their staffers in 2018 still trying to help them get to grips with the internet. Andy, Paul etc. Why aren't we seeing more videos of journalism students pissing about in your classes?

My featured blogs

Some of you may be flitting through here for a mighty five seconds on the back of this. Before you bugger off back to where you came from, can I just point you to a few of my most newest, favouritest blogs culled from a combination of my internets sucking machine, worklife and foreign correspondent stuff. They're not Typepad-powered, but they're all interesting-powered,

• Mexico Reporter - all of Mexico all of your time in all of your media.

• Extra Extra - that'll be the Democratic Republic of Congo on the line.

• The Wire - all the journalism news all of the time.

• Rob Crilly - From Kenya to Darfur and beyond.

• John D. McHugh - Sniper shot survivor blogging from Afghanistan.

• Gastronomy - picking up where I left off. Yes, I am jealous.

• From the frontline - my other life about other lives.

Blogging for the BBC

I recently started blogging for the good folks over at BBC Good Food Magazine. This is a regular gig. I'll be blogging there every Friday. I've been chatting and working with the digital and the print side of the magazine on and off for around a year now and the blog just recently 'soft' opened. Please go take a look and tell us what you think. Also, look out for the February print edition of the magazine for more detail on the blog. I'll be covering completely different food topics to those I blog about at The Observer and to a completely different audience.

I now blog professionally in three different places and it does somewhat curtail the time I can spend on this blog. However, I wouldn't be doing any of them if I wasn't totally into what they all do. Just a quick recap, here are all the blogs I currently work on, some are paid, most are not,

• Noodlepie - This one. The one you're looking at. The good stuff is in the right hand column.
• awholelotofcrunch - All the Twiglets, all the time. The world's favourite only Twiglets blog.
• From the Frontline - news from the world of foreign correspondents, war reporters and the media in general. I really enjoy all the blogs I work on, but I am pretty much addicted to doing this one.
• Filthy France - don't tend to tread much in here these days. But France is no cleaner than when I started this blog.
• Word of Mouth - The brilliant food blog from the brilliant Observer Food Monthly magazine.
• BBC Good Food - The shiny new BBC blog from the ace recipe magazine.
• idrawsnails - And chameleons, whales, ghosts, spiders and caterpillars. Every kid should have a pixellated scrapbook.
• Commentisfree - Really don't know if I'll write here again. I hope so.
• Twitter - useless and useful. I recommend.

Blogging and Vietnam and blogging and...

From The Standard

...Vietnam may be a one-party state that censors its official media and the internet, but this has not stopped millions of young people embracing a world of carefree online chatting their parents could only have dreamed of."Blogs were nothing two years ago and suddenly everybody's got one," said 28-year-old Canadian expatriate Joe Ruelle, a celebrity in the local blogosphere."The number of people who have blogs is baffling. It's kind of like the Wild West right now. People write everything."......Even Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has shared details of his personal life in a one-off online chat to reach out to young and tech-savvy citizens......But for the most part, it is youngsters who have pioneered the form, usually with nonpolitical chit- chat.

cheers Mike

Technorati Tags: Vietnam, Vietnamese blogs, Nguyen Tan Dung, Joe Ruelle

Analytical and on radio

Was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Analysis programme the other week. I haven't listened to it - and I certainly can't remember saying anything very analytical... - but you can listen to it here. It's about 'travel and the mind'. One wee note, and I don't mean to knock Auntie here, but they called me on my mobile. I sat in front of my Mac and recorded my side of the conversation as an MP3 file using Audio Recorder. I then I had to email the 20 minutes or so as a 10.3MB attachment which proved to be too big for the BBC's email servers... So, I then uploaded the audio as a file to this blog and the BBC grabbed it from there... Nothing quite like working with the world's largest broadcasting organisation :)

Technorati Tags: bbc, bbc radio 4, analysis, recording radio audio

Party on

For these reasons and some of these, but definitely for these Oh, and not forgetting these mean that this is not what it used to be. The DJ at the decks remains the same, but the party spread into a few different rooms.

"Blogs and all that were always about connecting people, nattering about stuff. Now there are better ways to do it." link

Technorati Tags: twitter, microblogging, social media

Bridging Vietnam

At Global Voices HanoiMark has an interesting post about some of the most popular blogs in Vietnam, of both the Vietnamese and the English language variety. He references a story about a big Vinablog spat we talked about here last year. HanoiMark talks about a number of blogs I already know. He also mentions the phenomenally popular Joe Ruelle who I first heard about from a Vietnamese journalist back in Saigon. Unfortunately, as I can't read Vietnamese so well, I don't dip into Joe's world. HanoiMark's point is that,

"Bloggers like these help break down the barriers between the linguistic and culture divides that separate the various blogospheres in Vietnam. If the immense popularity of Ruelle’s blog is any indication, it would seem there is an appetite for the perspective of those who can bridge the gaps between expatriats and local Vietnamese." Link.

All of which I agree with. However, I'm still waiting... Is there a political blog scene in Vietnam? Where's the Guido Fawkes of Saigon? China's gone outspoken blognuts, yet I've heard nothing similar from Vietnam. We've talked about this before, but I'm still wondering... Some Vietnamese folk have told me 'sensitive stuff', that does not make it into the state press, is disseminated through Instant Messenger and email and not on blogs. Not yet anyway. I'm just suprised that; here we are, wth blogs a global phenomenon, and yet we're not hearing much dissent from Vietnam. I could well be missing sommit - like Vietnam really is utopia??? - please put me right if I am. But, for now Sod the dissent, the big question remains... where's the Vietnamese food blogger? It's a potential goldmine and I'm still waiting for him/her to surface too.

Phorati

A quick soup scan through Technorati informs me that there are more than a few people nattering about pho, the ubiquitous Vietnamese beef noodle soup. Three links worth noting for pho fans,

Husband and wife bloggers Faizis cooked up a version of pho in Singapore and they have a very detailed looking recipe.

Kalyn has a post at BlogHer with quotes and links out to various pho eating and cooking bloggers.

From Kalyn I arrived at Food Lover's Journey. This blog is written by Anh in Australia who describes herself as "a Vietnamese girl who loves to cook". She appears to have a penchant for Vietnamese cooking, although she cooks dishes from all over the place. There aren't too many Vinarecipes up there at the moment - she's only been blogging since October 2006 - but what she does have looks rather good.

If you know of a decent Vietnamese food based blog, let me know. I'm hoping to get my cook's hat on very soon to attack Andrea's mega Into the Vietnamese Kitchen book. Meanwhile, if you're a total pho head, scour the Technorati pho search.

I love the smell of blogging in the morning

It took them a while, but they've twigged. People in Vietnam are talking. They're talking about sex. Worse, they're talking about sex and they're blogging about sex. Maybe they're even having sex. The local press is not impressed,

"It is quite shocking to enter a blog whose nickname is enough to help readers conjure up all sorts of things like "Lustful gentleman." This blog isn't grossly sexual, though. Mr. Lustful "subtly" addresses sex through various stories about male and female animals, humans included."

Phwoarr. Hot stuff. And the Vietnamese authorities have ants in their pants,

"According to Mr. Vu Xuan Thanh, Chief Investigator of the Ministry (of Information and Culture), blogs are growing too fast for the Ministry of Culture and Information to manage. Mr. Thanh even said that the Ministry's investigators don't know much about blogs themselves."

Today's article on Vietnamnet Bridge spends half its time blethering on about the non-story that a miniscule number of 'black blogs' - blogs focussing on those nasty things the Vietnamese government calls social evils that they say will send us all to hell - whereas the real story is elsewhere. Where are the Vietnamese voices people are listening to in number, talking with, empathising with? In short, who are the Vietnamese blogstars? Well, we don't learn who they are, but we do learn that the government is on the case,

"The Investigation Agency of the Ministy of Culture and Information has recently dispatched a team to research blogs in order to find out ways to manage this form of writing diaries."

Back in July 2006, on The Guardian's Comment is free blog, I wrote that blogs were barely on the radar in Vietnam. Less than a year later and some Vietnamese language blogs are now attracting 5,000 comments. If this signifies the take off of blogs in Vietnam, it is highly unlikely the authorities will be able to keep up and 'manage' the growth of blogs.

Like many other 'sensitive' countries, writing something innocuous online in Vietnam can get you banged up, beaten up or locked in your home. But when you have a million people writing online, or when you have 30 million, even 84 million. Is it a manageable phenomenon? Hmmm... unlikely. Would listening and getting involved in the conversation be better? Well... probably.

"According to Mr. Thanh, most names and addresses of questionable blogs are false. Mr. Thanh also said that though there haven't any particular regulations of blogs, Regulation 55 and Circular 02 issued by the Ministry of Culture and Information prohibit Internet contents that are opposite to social and Party's values."

It's my understanding that to have a website in Vietnam you have to have it registered and approved with the communist state. Anyone remember the great grapefruit dotcom scandal that came to light a year ago this week?

Blogs would appear to fall out of this area as setting up a blog is similar to setting up a free email account. Having said that, way back in the late 90's access to Hotmail and Yahoo! email accounts was very patchy, due to an intermittent, but effective blocking system. Blogs run through Blogger and Typepad are also, on occasion, inaccessible within Vietnam.

There are no figures that I'm aware of that tell us how many people in Vietnam are now blogging. Technorati doesn't track Asian language blogs. However, we can assume the rate, like everywhere else, is on the up. The fact that the authorities have taken an unprecedented interest in blogging suggests that Vietnamese people have taken to blogs in sufficient numbers that the state organ's knickers are starting to get in a twist. Well, rather than twisting they might be better employed listening or at least looking next door. Surely if King Norodom Sihanouk of the Kingdom of Cambodia can blog, anyone can.

NB: I wrote this to post this for The Guardian's Comment is free blog, but they take so long to run stuff. It's only been 10 hours or so, and in all fairness they'd probably run it tomorrow, but... ach... 10 hours is too long...

Digging for blogs

The Observer Magazine in the UK have started an allotment blog called the Organic Allotment Blog. I don't know of any other allotment blogs - I'm sure many some exist - but I have a feeling this blog will be one to watch,

"We are new to allotment gardening and new to blogging (as seasoned gardeners and bloggers can probably tell) but we see ourselves as part of a growing community looking for an alternative to over-packaged supermarket food flown halfway around the world.

Most of all, we want to reach out to growers, other sites, other bloggers, to be part of a growing conversation, to share ideas and find solutions to common problems."

I can't seem to get the video working in Safari, however the slideshows are fun. Just wondering whether the Observer folks are doing this on their own time or whether they're getting paid to.... Hmmm??? Maybe they get to keep the veg?

Couple of other things worth checking out, part one of Observer Food Critic Jay Rayner's soon to be published Oyster House Seige book is up on eGullet. Here's the synopsis,

"It's General Election night, in the year 1983. The great and good have gathered in The Oyster House restaurant in central London to celebrate a Conservative victory that looks set to transform Britain. But when two masked gunmen burst through the door, chased by the police, and take a group of diners hostage, none of them will ever be the same again. Over the next four days confined in the Oyster House kitchen, one of the gunmen, Nathan, glimpses a different kind of life, dedicated not to crime but to cooking. But he has lost control of the situation and time is fast running out. His partner in crime, Trevor, is keen to hurt someone badly and the SAS are stationed outside and might end the siege at any time..."

And lastly, this flickr scavenger hunt based in the living rooms of London (and elsewhere) looks a lorra fun - February 11.

Update: Foodbloggers get their fill in the New York Times.

Real blogging

Very quick post to say Real Thai and Phnomemon are totally serving up the goods at the moment. And the two bloggers recently hooked up together in Cambodia. Here's Real Thai's take and Phnomenon's. And you'd be daft not to have a look at Real Thai's blogging of the swallow nest gatherers.

MyRadiation

There's one very simple rule to tweaking your blog design - shut up, don't blog about it, no one gives a monkeys what you do with your blog, so just, you know, shut the cakehole and get over it already. In keeping with that rule I'll ignore it. The radiation box you can see down there on the right is basically free ad space. If I see, hear, watch, read something I really, leary rike and that has more value than just throwing it into linkswamp then I'll give that thing a radiation slot for a few days, weeks etc. Why? Just because I can. And being nice is nice. Think of it like a ship passing thru the night. Click or not, up to you, earns me nothing other than a warm glow. That is all. Apart from... the header buggery and font nonsense will no doubt continue for a while. Redesign... yawn... yawn... Oh... and... if you know how to reliably create a horizontal menu with drop down things in Typepad, please let me know.

technorati tags:blogdesign, blogtweakery, myradiation

blog blog blog blog

Voyeuristic and bit indulgent, but at the same time interesting in a kind of not that important international social document kinda way. Iain of the Crack Unit has set up a flickr photopool of Computers behind blogs. Maybe it should be renamed computers and desks and stuff behind blogs. PS. The pics above are sequentially generated from the photopool. That's not my desk you're looking at there, although my mess is in the pool if you go look.

Does this make Adsense?

Could you give up the 9 to 5... at least theoretically... if you're a J list blogger covering a miniscule niche and you're living in a low rent part of the planet... Hmmm??? I planned to write a piece at the end of 2006 all about how a combination of Adsense and a J list blog could - could - help make some folk in some parts of some countries a comfortable living. However, I've written about this in more depth here and in the comments here. And in the end, I have nothing much to add to all that apart from one World Bank factoid,

"2.8 billion people—more than half the people in developing countries—live on less than $700 a year. Of these, 1.2 billion earn less than $1 a day"

There's an un-fleshed out argument to be made here that some development agencies would be well advised to learn about social media, blogging and Adsense. And for those agencies to see where blogging might be included as one part of a social and economic development plan. There's a better argument, or at least a more proven one, that says if you blog and you use Adsense and you can write at least moderately well then blogging may just pay for your rent and your rice.

It's war. Blog war.

Hehe - the leathery old debate between Hanoi and Saigon hits the net,

The latest north-south disputes started last week when a Saigon-based blogger who calls herself 'Crys' wrote a frustrated post on her website during a visit last week to the northern capital Hanoi.

'Old, dirty and ugly streets. Most of the motorbikes are manual shift, not automatic,' she complained in a post titled 'F---ing Ha Loi' (the title intentionally misspells Hanoi as a pun on some northern accents)...

...Trendy Saigonese often consider Hanoians plodding oafs clinging to the past - as opposed to the southern city's bright lights and bustling markets. Hanoians tend to see Saigonese as crass money-grubbers, lacking in culture - unlike the 1,000-year-old capital's serene temples and lakes. Read the rest at monsterandcritics.com via Mike ;)

Frustratingly, the article doesn't give links to the blogs. If you know the addresses, please post a comment. According to the article, debates like this, hackneyed and predictably incendiary as they are, are attracting 5,000 or more comments and (no doubt) umpteen emailed/IMed links, gossip, chatter, yack, yack, yack... I'm very keen to know if any of these Vietnamese bloggers are monetizing their efforts. If they are, they'll be earning a damned site more than me out of it. I'm convinced there's a legion of Vietnamese who could very, very quickly be earning good money from blogging if they knew how... and, obviously, if they had the balls. Talking and typing is an alarmingly easy way of getting yerself banged up in Vietnam. As one Vietnamese reader, who shall remain nameless, said in an email to me earlier this year,

I'd really love to blog... but I am hesitant to start.... it's not very difficult for the authorities to trace your identity once your blog becomes popular.

That's true of anywhere on the planet. However, I doubt the cops'll come knocking if I suddenly decide to say, "Jacques Chirac is a prick" every day on this blog. If my anonymous reader wrote, "Nguyen Tan Dung is a prick, Ho Chi Minh was a prick and a fuckwit and Nguyen Minh Triet a prick, a fuckwit and takes it up the arse" every day, there might be a knock at the door. Or maybe a steel toecapped boot and a short ride to some cockroach infested cell.

Fancy an Indian?

More links than you can throw a chapati at today. Mallika, not only has an ace name, but also writes Quick Indian Cooking. It's a new(ish) self explanatory blog from the home of Indian cookery, London. It includes some of those ultra-handy 'best of' local's posts. Here we have Maillika's 5 best London Indians. She's rather nifty with a spatula and a pot of yoguhurt and proves that not all bloggers have an expense account at the dermatological counter of Boots, but we've known that for donkeys. Bonuslinks - get'em while they're hot: my favourite online Indian recipe finds.

Can you earn a living as a "low level" blogger?

This is a subject I intend to return to at the end of the year. Some of you may have noticed that since January 2006, I've been opening up my stats and earnings on Flickr. Robin at CyberSoc has kinda jumpstaretd me by digging around my stats :). I've replied - at length in the comments. However, I will repeat my original and ongoing motivation why I bother doing this,

The reason I publicise these figures - and I'll only be doing it for one year - is because I wanted to show Vietnamese folk in Vietnam, where I lived until recently, that a blog can earn you a decent living. $100 per month is good living wage in Saigon. I thought it might encourage a few Vietnamese to look at starting their own blogs. And I CANNOT think of a better way to earn your rice than by blogging.

And, just to rub my point in a bit. Here's a massive story I blogged in my 'quiet moment space' which is not being very widely reported, but is so totally related to what Robin's banging on about.

More meetups

Ooh... Is that a further twinge of nostalgia I feel digging into my furred ribs? After the 'kinky' Hanoi blogger meetup, Antidote to Burnout posts on a recent Saigon blogger meetup. Spot the difference :) Wot no YouTube? filling the gap, here's a freebie from a past Saigon blogger meetup/night outing.

I want me a Friendship medal

Fellow foodbloogger extraordinaire, the Singapore-based ChubbyHubby gets grilled in NewsWeek. I love this bit from the intro by journalist Alexandra A. Seno,

In August [ChubbyHubby] won kudos from none other than Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who mentioned Chubby in his National Day speech. link

In a speech. I'm gutted. When I left Vietnam I finally hit it 'big'. Loadsa press and a local traffic explosion of sorts. Bigger than any other press I've ever experienced on the blog. So why am I gutted? Well, as a select few of you know, the real reason I started this blog was because I wanted to be the first blogger in Vietnam to win a Friendship Medal. It never happened. Nguyen Tan Dung - if you're reading - please kindly consider me in the Tet honours list, cheers. Meanwhile, total kudos to Chubs for getting the second best thing :)

Mag update

A few days ago I asked you European food bloggers to come forward for a magazine article - and you did in force - many thanks for that. The magazine is all but done and dusted and so eight food bloggers will find themselves in a topflight food magazine, with links back to their blogs and a bit of cash in their pocket all via the power of ScooptWords. As an aside, I was just going through the photos sent by some bloggers to accompany their words. At the same time I was multi-tasking through my RSS feed when I hit this link through spiceblog. I have no idea what she/he is saying, but just look. Gorgeous.

Form an orderly...

A new (ish) Great British blog. It's only a matter of time before its evil alter ego appears in the Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese etc. blogosphere. Wot's with this queue thing then? via Tim.

Permalinks not perms

If it pays my rent, keeps on keeping the cassoulet on the table and fills mon frigo with mucho locallo vino de callapso I can also offer a powerpoint lecture entitled 'Permalinks not perms'. It'll revolutionize your business. All for the fantastic one time only price of $1999. Cartoon from the usual suspect.

Wanted: European Food Blogger

Are you a food blogger? Based in a European city - but not UK, Madrid, Stockholm or Paris? Want to earn some cash writing for a big name food magazine and you can knock out 350 words to a very tight brief by this Friday, then email me now... NB: This post is brought to you via a lightning strike to Il Forno's Mac. Hope it gets better soon Alberto :)

UPDATE: Thanks to all who have responded. I now have a couple of bloggers lined up and a few more in reserver who have offered to have a crack in the hope they may be called off the subs bench.

Blog Day 2006

Bit sluggish out of the blocks on this, but here goes. It was Blog Day yesterday. Here are my five blogs worth checking out and (briefly) why,

Meskel Square - never been to Ethiopia, would love to go, journalist Andrew Heavens drops you right in it. He covers a lot of bases. Always interesting and insightful. Does what a good blog should. (And Andrew, if you're tuned in, I will chase you up on that interview when I'm settled in my new gaff.)

Ros Taylor - a Guardian journalist and regular contributor to the gargantuan Comment is free blog. As with so many bloggers on this blog, I like the writing, the style and the humour. Plus, if you listen to the Guardian News podcast you'll realise she has a classically cold, but secretly filthy, English accent. Plus she likes Brit puds.

Talking of puds... Jam Faced - is a very decent stop if I'm looking for a touch of home. It's one of the better food blogs out there, it's British and there's swearing.

Staying with Britain for a minute, Russell Davies - he of greasy spoon fame - also blogs thoughts, ideas and seeming randomness which, while entertaining, encourage thought - which is no easy thing to do. (One sidenote here; over a period of time in blogdom you tend to 'bump into' bloggers you have an affinity with, not neccessarily via subject matter, but in approach. Russell's one of those as is Adam and Mr. Brougahaloofah. I bet we're all Gemini.)

Which neatly brings me to the last Blog Day blog, No, We don't have kids yet - but maybe they will some day, or not. I hope they do. It's mental and inexplicable, so excuse me if I don't attempt to explick.

UPDATE: FurtherFreebielink - my new favourite blog, discovered this minute via nearly the hottest blogger on the planet, if memory serves.

I'm blogging this. I'm blogging that.

I wrote a column (yet another...) about blogging and journalism the other day. It'll run in a week or two. Soon after I finished writing it, I re-bumped into a eight year old quote, via a two year old quote,

The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn't require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day's news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.

Wee, large et mammoth. It happened. Which then reminded me of those folk who still have trouble seeing bushes for vegetation, florists for flowers etc. Which then lead me back to the guy originally quoted eight years ago. Funny that.

Bangkok blog radiation

Real Thai is a rather swish food blog from Bangkok, Thailand. Author/Snapper Austin Bush travels around the region a wee bit doing photojournalism jobs. He recently spent some time in Hanoi. See his pics from Hanoi. And compare his banh goi with my banh goi. His is better, and so it should be. Go hire him. Man, I could murder a bia hoi looking at the snap above.

Some lurve radiation pour les blogs

Been meaning to blog a bunch of links I've picked up on here and there and so, I um, will. Firstly, Le Tontons blogguers or Tom Cang - a group blog from Can Tho/Saigon in Vietnam. It's in French. I can't follow it all, but I'm assured by the missus that it's a bloody hilarious take on news items from Vietnam. Plus, I know one of the authors and he is an exceedingly nice bloke, speaks fluent Vietnamese and is arguably the tallest man living in Vietnam. One to add to the list of Vietnam blogs.

Launch pad

This is fun. My blog was used by Robin at the BBC this week as an example of "good practice" (hmmm??) for a training course in Britain about blogs. Squint and you'll spot the blog... honest. I've had a few odd and interesting connections in recent months. Someone is writing a book called noodlepie, nothing to do with the blog but interesting all the same. A London restaurant emailed me, interested in using the name noodlepie. A US TV station and a film company recently got in touch, so did MTV a while back come to think of it. And a magazine interviewed me a week ago. You really never know who's reading your blog...

Or where they might be reading it... hehe...

The journalist's weblog part 2

For the second installment of my wee-series about journalists who blog at journalism.co.uk I talked to Robin Hamman of Cybersoc. Robin works for the BBC. I started reading his blog a year or more ago. We had the chance to meet in London in May when I helped (in a very, very small way) organise his We Media fringe event in Soho. Robin's very clued in to the way 'the media landscape' is evolving and he's well worth reading on a regular basis if that subject at all grabs you. As he works for one of the world's biggest and most uniquely funded media outfits, he also has the inside line on big media's take on us new media minnows.

Thanks to everyone who has so far suggested the names and blogs of blogging journalists. I read all your suggestions. However, I'm still on the look out for more, especially the offbeat and the less well known out there. Maybe a guy in China reporting from his blog. Those doing something really unique with their blog. Are there any journalists out there who are solely reporting via blog now? I don't mean the so called 'A' listers here. I'm looking for the newest, freshest, hottest and hippest... well, at least, goodest :)

Saigon nooked

Never ceases to please me whenever I find a blogger who not only trawled this wee blog, but bothered to make a note of some places they deemed worthy of checking out. Many thanks nook bistro.

"I must say the highlight of our trip to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) must be the food. It was the first time we didn't do a single touristy thing - no museums (though we did plan for it almost everyday, we didn't materialise to the end), no Cu Chi tunnels (which I heard is an absolute must-see for all visitors to Saigon) and no temples. Just purely gastronomic excursions..." Read more.

Probably the sagest advice you'll ever hear about travel to Saigon. Forget all the usual tourist nonsense, there's nothing in this city that compares to the food you find in the sheds and on the streets. PS. Technorati keyword RSS feeds are a marvellous thing.

The journalist's weblog part 1

Thanks to all who dropped comments and sent me emails pointing me in the direction of journalists who blog. I'll be checking them all out in due course. The first installment, in a series of six, about blogging journalists is now up at journalism.co.uk. It's about Sandeep Junnarkar and his excellent Lives in Focus blog. Always on the look out for more...

Mo' link lurve

More nouvelle blogs kicking off in Vietnam...

First up Jonathan, who blogs at The Final Word. He's a British English teacher, plays footie for the Saigon Raiders and is engaged to a Vietnamese girl. He lives in Saigon.

Then there's Hau, an 'outted' Vietnamese guy living in Hanoi, who also blogs at Elmoooh, and is now blogging in English at Hanoi Rainbow.

Vietnam 555-333 is a French language blog. I think the numeric name refers to fags and booze. But I could be wrong.

Last, but not least, there's Chris who lives in Saigon, toils with Vietnamworks (nicely designed site...). Chris blogs at Charvey in Vietnam.

Whither the Vietnamese lingo bloggers? Will now go update the unwieldy Vietnam Blogs list.

Tuoi Tre eats noodlepie

Hard on the heels of The Guardian is Vietnam's second largest newspaper Tuoi Tre. With a circulation of 400,000 it just sits behind the scandal sheet Cong An (think The Sun sans tits) in the circulation wars. It's a Vietnamese language only newspaper. World News Reporter Nguyen Thi Thanh Truc wrote a column about noodlepie. She tells me the paper is a "more serious" read than it's competitors. So, it's for brainy folk then? Welcome to anyone who read the piece. I had no idea that I'd wake up to 22,000 extra hits on the blog. Or that any Vietnamese folk would be in the slightest bit interested in what I have to say about their/your/our food. Pleased, but embarrassed. If you've got tips, please place them gently in the comments box. And if you tried to email/IM me I will get back to you, if I haven't already. Meanwhile, Thanh Truc has promised me a tour of the Tuoi Tre Saigon bureau. I do like newsrooms. Will be fascinating to compare the Vietnamese version with the British. Hope to blog about it.

Guardian eats blogs

The Guardian Newspaper in the UK does the now seemingly perrenial foodblog roundup feature. They give me a lovely mention, see pasted below. However, I freely admit to feeling a bit of a fake in among the other esteemed scoffblog names. At least there are some new ones in there this time round.

"Fancy a little culinary tour of Saigon? Graham Holliday, a British journalist living in Vietnam, will guide you through the street-snack vendors of the city and their produce. Tiny pastry pockets of minced pork, steaming broths dotted with noodles, pancakes and crispy spring rolls are all documented in full Technicolor glory alongside photo-essays of Saigon's markets and restaurant reviews. Luscious pictures - and some equally delicious words - mean that Noodlepie racks up recommendations at the same rate Holliday Hoovers up mouthfuls of Vietnamese yumminess. And, what is more, he also contributes to Guardian Unlimited's Comment is Free blog."

I do love the way newspapers like The Guardian rarely correct my use of the word Saigon. For the record, it's just way easier to write, far easier on the ear and eeks far more chic than the modern alternative. Go check out the other featured foodblogs.

Asia Blog Awards 2006

I'll be one of the blogjudges (Bludges? Blodges??) sitting on the judging panel for the 2006-2007 Asia Blog Awards. There are stacks of categories available for nominations. Asiapundit's hosting the show. The nomination phase is OPEN. Punditmaster explains,

"Nominations are now open for the April 1-June 30 period, full-year awards are to be based on the quarterly contests. Details are below, nominations for the below categories can be made on the individual pages linked below until the end of June 16 (Samoan time). Awards are at present limited to English-language or dual-language sites." Link.

All blogjudges automatically disqualify themselves from the nomination process. Just as well with my track record.... Bon chance. Get those Vietnam blog nominations in in in. Here are some pointers.

Technorati Tags: Asia Blog Awards, Vietnam, Asia

Vietnamese God eats Vietnam

Been getting slack with the linklove, so here goes... Vietnamese God has been serving up stacks of food of late. Here's his take on the snazzy, but "Can you smell chlorine?" Nam Phan restaurant on Le Thanh Ton street. Then there's new noodles at Pho Vuong, a sit down at one of the many branches of Highlands Cafe and a look at the fish fighting phenomenon - "Gentlemen, start your flippers please". Well worth trawling the archives in the right hand column on the frontpage to see what you can reel in. Vietnamese God has netted baggsa VinablogLinks too. You can also cast an eye over my own (badly in need of a decent descale 'n' fillet) VinaLinks. See if you can catch a big one.

Vietnam blog news update

NoStarTravels pushed two new voices from Vietnam my way. Elmoooh is a young Vietnamese chap, based in Hanoi who writes his blog in English. Rose, who I think is a friend of Elmoooh, is also based in Hanoi and blogs at Rose's Blog. Lastly, a long overdue litre of linkjuice heads to Street Kids in Vietnam, a blog about the work done by the Blue Dragon Children's Foundation, "a grassroots charity working in Vietnam with street kids and the poorest of the poor." Have a gander. Meanwhile, I'll go and update the Vietnam Blogs list.

Not exactly the most meme-friendly blog here, but I came across a near future meme at Cooking Diva that has some merit and I intend to take part. Here's the meat:

BlogDay posting instructions: 

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting 

2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 2006

3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs 

4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and 

5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2006 and a link to BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

I'm increasingly on the lookout for hot new blogs - there's just so much damned fine stuff out there - but I'll keep my choices to five blogs I don't already know, but I will get to know (hopefully) by the end of August.

The most wired city in Asia...

... Saigon, not Seoul, not Taipei. Just look at those wires. Saigon is freakin' wired maan. An electrician's nightmare and a wire junkie's wet dream. Tomorrow I'll be in relatively wire free London which is paradoxically, and totally unlike Saigon, starved of free wifi access. Hotspotted may help me, but I'm not too hopeful. If you're in London and want to meet, let me know. Particularly keen to meet bloggers, journos, editors etc. Folk I'm already slated to share jars of Aqua libra with are:

Alfie from moblogUK
Fraser from Blogjam
Andrew from Le Cool and Prandial
Martin Stabe, New media reporter from Press Gazette
John Thompson from journalism.co.uk
Jemima Kiss from journalism.co.uk/soon to be freelance hack
Neil Baker: An idle writer
Hugh Fraser, the podcast king of Blog-Relations
Bobbie Johnson, Technology reporter at The Guardian
Nick from Scoopt
Robin from Cybersoc
Rebecca from Global Voices

Then there are all the new faces I don't already know at the We Media Global Forum. Like I say, I'll be quite busy. I don't get this opportunity every day in sleepy ol' Saigon, so I'm very much looking forward to meeting everyone. Anymore for anymore? I'll be blogging at noodlepie (wifi dependent) throughout the trip. Esoteric waffle will probably end up at Stillbop. I'll also be blogging at Morph during the We Media conference. You can follow We Media online. Should be fun. if Air France Chance lose my bags AGAIN. I'll sue.

Technorati Tags: blogclub, rendezvous, wemedia

PushcartNYC

One of the more novel food blogs I've come across in recent months is PushcartNYC. It aims to catalogue the charred offerings of streetcarts found all over New York City. Nice niche. One to watch. If they stick at it they could be up there with Slice and A Hamburger Today for quality NYC nichenosh content.

New York Times bigshot restaurant critic Frank Bruni - who blogs at Diner's Journal and is the subject of The Bruni Digest restaurant critic stalking blog - recently did a short podcast about PushcartNYC. Click and play below.

One thought... PushcartNYC/Frank. Why don't you podcast from one of the carts? Chat to the folk behind the stall and those queuing up. With all the sounds of NYC in the background it could be quite effective? I've recently been looking at buying a M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 Pocket Digital Recorder with a view to doing more podcasting. If any readers would like to donate one I will gladly take it off your hands :) And PushcartNYC - sort out your URL. I see www.pushcartnyc.com is already purchased. Map it (babee).

Technorati Tags: podcast, NYC, streetcart nosh

Information superfeedway

Been talking a bit with marketing whizz BL Ochman recently and she asked me, and some other far more well known bloggers, to jot down how I keep up with blog reading, dreaded 'conversations', in links etc.

Nothing revolutionary in there, but if you're fairly new to blogs you may find it useful. I will add that I've tried coComment, to track comments I have made, but I couldn't seem to get it to work. I couldn't see when comments I'd made had been responded too. I've also tried the excellent Ecto and I fully intend to buy it soon.

Blogbrain Doc Searls also lists his tips. He doesn't subscribe to specific blogs. He subscribes to keyword searches in Technorati,

"because I follow subjects more than people."

Makes sense. Beyond my friendosphere I do find my feed often consists of 60% of stuff I'm not really that interested in. Think I'll go the Doc way. Cut through the clutter.

Technorati Tags: blogger tips, feed tips, tip tips

Hey! You! Get off of my blog

There seems to be a nasty wee rash spreading across the bum cheeks of blogdom. Blog content is getting nicked, plagiarised, used without attribution and generally being buggered about with in an unseemly, unethical manner. The Huffington Post finds AP nicking and not-attributing,

"We contacted an AP senior editor and ombudsmen and both admitted to having had the article passed on to them, and both stated that they viewed us as a blog and because we were a blog, they did not need to credit us.What we are or are not is frankly irrelevant. What is relevant is that by using a term like blog to somehow excuse plagiarism, the mainstream press continues to lower the bar for acceptable behavior." via Search Engine Journal

The Cook's Cottage gets shafted in India,

"Who would have thought this little blog of mine would have such devout readers. Readers who are journalists, who want to spread my words with such faithfulness as to keep the original untouched, in its exact same form, word for word, comma for comma. And print it in one of the nations English dailies, with (purportedly) the highest circulation."

Ace chef and snapper Santos in Guam found a snap of hers in a magazine in Manilla and, after she blogged about it, she received

"an apology and full cooperation"

Santos cites bloggers Marketman and Karen who also found snaps of theirs in the national press, unattributed and with no offer of compensation. I've found snaps and words of mine on a tourism map, on a news website (taken down within 24 hours at my request) and in print. The fact that I just stumbled into the above mentioned examples of plagiarism from practioners of the copy & paste school of journalism suggest I would find many, many more from a wide variety of blogs if I went and looked.

Bloggers can protect their content, like I do, by using a Creative Commons Licence. A recent court case in Holland provides some comfort and precedent,

"Magazines can't just ignore Creative Commons licences and expect to get away with it." via Scoopt.

It's never pleasant seeing your stuff nicked and used somewhere else unattributed. Alors... what would happen if there was a way for bloggers to easily sell blog content for cash and for editors to easily buy it? Hmmm?? My inner clairvoyant (who's funnily enough called Clair) tells me next month could be very interesting.

Technorati Tags: cash from content, citizen journalism, projects spawned at street stalls in Saigon

Opt-in Orwell

Created by feeding my del.icio.us social bookmarks through a visualiser. Using it over time it's easy to see what topics interest you. I often just bookmark stuff to my browser the way my ancestors used to in the 18th centruy. Therefore, maybe the visualiser doesn't give a totally kosher representation of my interests. But, by the looks of it, I'd say it's pretty much on target. Poor old foodblogs don't get much of a look in these days. Oh well. All this brings me to another thought,

Just how social do you want to be online?

As well as the blog and sharing bookmarks, my listening habits are open to all (well, whenever I remember to flick on the iScrobbler they are), my wants are free to see, my photos to look at and with the help of Alfie, I'll be sharing my location as and when I start moblogging. All of which I opted to do, no-one had me over a barrel, trousers down, nervous about the near future.

There are probably a tonne of other 'social' things you can do online that I don't know anything about. In blacker, bleaker, more paranoid moments I've wondered whether or not we're just creating an opt-in-Orwellian society. A society that not only monitors itself, but allows others to monitor it monitoring itself. Or summit. Or are we just be nice? Sharing. And all that lovey stuff?

Technorati Tags: Orwell, police state, paranoia, online sociology

Nichepower

I reckon there'll be around 6,000 Saigon food related photos in my Flickr account by the time we leave Vietnam. That's a lot. Most are pretty crappy. Some are