This week I helped out Peter John Meiklem on a story for the Sunday Herald about the future of journalism. Amid all the job losses in the Scottish media, the piece looks at whether bloggers can step up to the plate and begin to supplant traditional media outlets. My view has long been that blogging ...

I had a great time yesterday at the Edinburgh Twestival, an opportunity to meet other local users of Twitter while at the same time raising money for charity: water. A comment I heard a lot from other people was that the event wasn’t quite what they expected. It certainly wasn’t a total ...

The Scottish Parliament’s newest MSP has found herself getting a bit of attention from the media because of her blog. Anne McLaughlin, known to bloggers as Indygal, has become the SNP’s newest Parliamentarian following the sudden and sad death of Bashir Ahmad. The first story I saw about...

Music of 2008 A series of posts Music of 2008: #25–#11 Music of 2008: Top ten 10. Stereolab — Chemical Chords This is more or less what you would expect from Stereolab. Fantastically jaunty and slightly idiosyncratic pop songs. This is hardly Stereolab’s best album (and I say that ...

While perusing the stats for my blogs, I noticed that one of the referrers was this URL: http://www.charlesgordonmsp.com/stats/usage_200902.html. I clicked through to see what it was all about. To my astonishment, I was taken directly to the Webalizer stats for Charlie Gordon’s website. This s...

At the end of every year I write a post ranking my favourite music releases of the year. But for 2008 I was very busy, and I had other things I wanted to write about more. Now that it’s February, I think I’d really better get on with it. I know not many people will still be in the mood f...

The other day I learnt from my brother that the graphic design company The Designers Republic went out of business earlier this month. My interest in graphic design is not particularly heavy. But the interest I do have in it has all stemmed from my exposure to the work of The Designers Republic. The...

Scottish politics became exciting and sexy yesterday. Sexy as politics goes anyway. The excitement is over the fact that the SNP have failed to persuade the Scottish Parliament to back its budget. Cue lots of finger pointing. It’s the sort of thing that makes members of the public disdainful o...

I see that the BBC’s iPM blog is asking for the human stories behind the current unemployment figures. Well, I am a human face of two recent news stories. As readers are no doubt sick of reading by now, one of those stories was the loss of around 27,000 jobs at Woolworths. The other is the sho...

Series: (Almost) 100 years of WoolworthsTOC Woolworths: The curiously British US-based company Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected Woolworths: Childhood memories and adult gripes It wasn’t just the credit crunch The blunder of Woolworths Identity crisis The beginning of the end...