The final cut

Hope you all had a good Easter break. Here are your final instructions for the blogging project.  The main assessment criteria will be concept, content. effort, traffic and technical ability. I will take a final snapshot of traffic figures next Monday.  I will be sending you a final self-assessment form today. Could you email it back to me – in txt format -  by 5pm on Monday (May 07). Feel free to ask any questions. Good luck!

State of play (ii)

Here are the details of the second snapshot of your traffic figures. It was taken this Monday afternoon and only includes those blogs with a webstats counter who have received over 100 visits (around 15 of you remain skulking beneath that particular threshold).

The first thing to notice is how the top five blogs last week still occupy the highest positions this week, although in a different order. If you look more closely at the figures you will see how Maia and Cecilia have almost doubled the amount of visits they have reveived at their sites in a week (or so); Katriona and Jonross remain steady away; while David has gone as flat as the horizon over the ocean.

Other winners include Fran and Vlora (indeed it really was a week where the girls simply outpaced the boys) and you can also see that there are a couple of blogs – although still low in the rankings – that have suddenly burst out of nowhere. Have a look at the traffic figures for both Ruth Jacob’s This is Catford and Louise’s Looking after your drinks. Both prove that even relative late comers can catch up quickly. We’ll take a final snapshot at the end of April, so there’s still plenty of time.

1). Size Zero 1,210
2). Nato in Afghanistan 1,155
3). War of graffiti 871
4). The first casualty 856
5). Gun London 625
6). GlaxoSmithKline news 581
7). Kosovo and Kosova 519
8). Gambling Crazy UK 445
9). Euro blog London 422
10). Ethical Shopping 405

11). A presciption for addiction 350
12). Black youth empowerment 283
13). How the congestion charge affects you 283
14). Foreign owners in football 270
15). This is Catford 259
16). Looking after your drinks 232
17). The clothes line 203
18). Sex and pregnancy 198
19). Multi-culturalism in the UK 180
20 ). Children of the Iraq War 167

bubbling under …

Go fly green 156
Death of the high street 143
Ethiopia’s interference in Somalia’s business 140
Drug experiences and news 127
Crossing the goal line 121
Empire of fake goods 118

What’s Web 2.0 all about?

I’ve uploaded this before, but i think it’s worth doing so again (as only a handful of you clicked on it the first time). I personally hate the term web 2.0, but not the ideas it embodies. If you can spare five minutes please watch this video with the sound turned up. I think you will be a lot clearer about the distinction between the first-generation  web and the second.

See more: mediatedcultures.net

The real deal on fake goods

It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that spans the globe. What’s more, the volume of counterfeit goods is on the rise. According to Nazia Dewji, fakes “are said to account for 5 to 7% of world trade costing the global economy $1000bn each year.” That’s a one with 12 zeros on the end of it. Now the counterfeit market has its own blog thanks to Nazia’s Empire of fake goods. It is, she insists, a 100% genuine journalistic exercise and not just a blog about fake handbags.

State of play

The current top ten

This is a chart showing the current amount of unique visits received by individual City bloggers since installing a webstats4u counter.

1. War on Graffiti 782
2. Nato in Afghanistan 683
3. Size Zero 631
4. The first casualty 630
5. Gun London 403
6. Gambling Crazy UK 379
7. GlaxoSmithKline news 319
8. Kosovo or Kosovar 279
9. A prescription of addiction 258
10. Ethical shopping 256

Just bubbling under: Euroblog London 243; How the congestion charge affects you 238; The clothes line 161; Multiculturalism in the UK 144; Foreign owners in football 130; Black youth empowerment 123 and Go fly green with 105.

The rest remain below 100 or have not installed the webstats4u counter …

Blogging on drugs

Not literally you understand, but there’s a group of you blogging about them. First up, Srishti Mittal has launched A prescription for addiction, which examines why such “an alarming number of people rely more on drugs to carry out their complex lives.” Srishti’s blog focuses on over-the-counter drugs which, she points out, can be every bit as dangerous as the illegal kind.

Elsewhere, Megan Gillett returns with a blog about the use and abuse of narcotics, while Louise Naughton presents an even more specialist blog looking at the dangers of having your drink spiked with drugs. And that’s not all. Over at GlaxoSmithKline news, Fran Singh writes an incredibly heartfelt post about her mother’s former dependence on prescription drugs.

A new seat of learning

You have probably noticed by now that this page has a new image header. It’s all thanks to Cecila Anesi who kindly provided the image. I think we can all show our thanks by reading the following statement, clicking through to her blog and signing the petition,  if you agree with it. I am sure she would appreciate your help and support.

She writes, “why should we all sign the petition to free Daniele Mastrogiacomo? Most of you would think this petition is not going to work, than a bloody criminal like Mullah Dullah will never listen to a petition, even if there are 80,000 signatures. I think we should all sign the petition for the value of it, because it represents our empathy with a professional colleague who has put his life in risk in order to tell the truth.”

The wheel of fortune, oh how it spins

I am not going to condone gambling. In the long run only the bookies can win. But, for now at least, hats off to Vatche Cherchian who has written his most fluent post yet. It revolves around an intoxicating night at the casino table. Nevertheless, this remains my favourite piece of journalism on the culture of gambling.

A most majestic list

Our very own HRH Doyin graces us with a post about the 50 most powerful and influential black women in Britain. She writes, “I personally have found that black women, in fact ethnic minority women in general, do not appear to have a voice and are rarely featured in the British media. When they are it tends to be for negative reasons. So it is nice to see 50 black women receive positive recognition.”

Click through to read more about one of the Britain’s first black female judges, Constance Briscoe … .

The trouble with MySpace

“The responses were … not the intelligent answers I had hoped for, instead it was a lot of people with big egos trying to say something clever and funny, which of course turned out to be neither”. Maia Pollo gets frustrated with the quality of debate on MySpace.