Freddy Flintoff clones mourn the passing of Retro Yakking

It is with great sadness that I announce the closure of Retro Yakking, a project that has brought so much pleasure to so few with its acerbic wit and jokes pinched from QI. Little did I know when I began typing randomly at my keyboard in late 2008 that the place would still be attracting loads of visitors per day, even in its current vegetative state.

“But Yak,” I hear you cry, “Retro Yakking is still there, viewable for all to see on the interwebs!” Well, this much is true. But since my access rights to the blog have been revoked, and blogdog are currently not renewing old accounts, it’s highly unlikely any more content will appear there.

Yes, Retro Yakking shall remain merely as an archive of past glories, but there is no future for the site at blogdog.com. Since I have much less free time to dedicate to humour writing these days, it’s doubtful the site would have seen much activity anyway, even if blogdog rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of numerous dead bloggers left in the wake of today.com.

It was fun while it lasted, but this chapter in the tale of Harry Yack has now ended. Very slowly and quietly. David Gerard, you had it right all along, my friend.

A Nutri Grain for you if you cared enough to even read this.

Orchestrated Muppetry: A whole new ball game... and just in time for the World Cup, too

The transition period is over… Retro Yakking’s back, in the form of Orchestrated Muppetry.

I decided I liked the name of the previous post so much I’d give it a whole blog to itself. I suppose it’s more of a fitting name to be honest with you, Retro Yakking wasn’t always entirely accurate – whilst it did have some stuff  dealing with older subjects, it wasn’t really the sole focus.

Orchestrated Muppetry is the natural evolution from RY, with all the usual stuff you’d expect from Harry Yack plus a new freedom of expression not possible at Today.com. Hey, you know how it is when you’re employed to do a job.

So is Retro Yakking dead? Not completely. You can still visit an archived version over at Blogdog, and by all means do. Don’t expect any more updates, though, because the times they are a-changing, and so is Harry Yack.

Thanks for feigning interest once more.

This weekend sees the unofficial launch of my new project, Harry Yack’s News Network.

Said blog will contain the usual news stories and opinion pieces you see over at Retro Yakking only in an ad-free and more aesthetically pleasing manner. I’ve got some big ideas for YNN, which is effectively just a parody of generic news outlets including BBC News and especially The Daily Mail. The name is a play on CNN, the American news channel, and also that news programme off Family Guy. You know the one I’m talking about.

Content-wise, it won’t be too much different from the stuff going on at Retro Yakking – the only difference is that news will be brought to you live from a new home on the interwebs. Well, kind of new, because it’ll be hosted at the same server as Illarterate until further notice, but I hope it’ll grow large enough to move to yaknews.co.uk or something similar. We’ll see what happens with that.

It’s all a bit ramshackle at the moment, with only one or two stories to tide you over for now. Hopefully things will begin to pad out sooner or later, though, and I won’t keep abandoning it like I do with certain other projects. But what can you do, eh? You try and get motivated enough to update four blogs all the time.

Anyhow, I plan to start sharing my time between RY and YNN and take a more loose approach to the former. Perhaps.

Yak News Network is now part of Orchestrated Muppetry. View YNN stories here.

I am aware there are numerous people

Some time ago, the company laid off a rather large section of its most popular and active writers, leading to numerous speculations over their ultimate motives. Well, I am here, at the risk of being lambasted or even losing my Today.com account, to put the record straight and say to these people — in the nicest possible way — what the heck did you expect?

Now, I am quite fortunate (?!) to have been screwed over in the past by certain web hosts by virtue of neglecting to read the small print, blundering blindly forward without a care in the world, and am not one of the said bloggers laid off by Today. At least not yet. I’d like to think, however, that my (bad) experiences have given me a little bit of insight about how the business works – you scratch my back, I scratch yours; you get nothing for nothing and any other such cliche you could care to mention.

When you sign up to Today.com, you enter into an agreement that basically means you represent Today.com by the very fact your blog is hosted under their name on their server. If you violate the Terms of Service, you can expect to be notified and perhaps even warned, just like in the real life workplace.

In the same way, don’t expect to be rewarded if you’re doing nothing to earn it. Today.com is a business and has to first of all stay afloat in order to continue providing the service it offers, all the while catering for the interests of its bloggers (or ‘workers’, if you like).

Now, I will concede the aesthetic side of the business — variety of blog skins etc. — has been largely and unfortunately neglected. We all know we’re going through a tough economic period and smaller, more independent businesses are having to accommodate for this so as not to go out of business. Today.com is no exception.

Whilst I am not obligated to do so, I feel I have to stand by the company whilst I still can and do my part in helping the company as long as I can. Today, in my opinion, is a noble and honest organisation that deserves at least some credit for its efforts. Who knows, maybe tomorrow things will change and I will be forced to move to another host, re-establish Retro Yakking right here at Illarterate or perhaps set up a whole new website.

But I would not have any ill feelings towards Today should this happen. I would not feel ripped off or screwed over because of the experience I have gained from many months of blogging with a competent and honest company. Even if it turns out they have taken me for a ride, I wouldn’t really care that much because it’s been so much fun. And I think that’s the most important thing.

• Today.com went out of business in 2011, but you can read a brief retrospective of my blog, Retro Yakking Today, here.
  

Just a quick word for a blog I started up months ago but never gave the time it deserved. Up until now, I’ve been posting glitched up stuff on the Illarterate blog, but I’ve decided to give Autoglitcher another chance, at least for a while. I’ll look to retrospectively post some of my glitch art excursions from the past few months if I can get round to it this weekend.

As the title suggests, this site’s all about interesting glitches in television, video games and general media. The idea of autoglitching relates to those glitches you seemingly stumble across or have little input in, especially those created completely by accident.

A must for all fans of glitch art, even if I do say so myself.

Go there now.

I’ve been doing a little bit of guest blogging for Wigan Athletic media site [Thas] Not a Patch On Harry Lyon, which recently unveiled its new user blogs.

It coincides with the launch of my new football blog, Jesus Was a Wiganer, which you may remember I mentioned a week or two ago on this very blog.

Not sure if there’ll be much difference between the types of posts featured on each blog, but I plan to share them out somewhat, with the longer, more detailed stuff mostly reserved for the NAPO blog.

Expect my activity on those blogs to fluctuate through the course of the season as and when I find stuff to write about or feel the urge to blog and, of course, when I have the time.

Incidentally, that picture is one of mine. There is a possibility you may recognise it as it has been syndicated around the internet:

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

It’s on my Flickr account in its highest quality, so feel free to use it for your own devices – a plug might be nice, though .

It just goes to show that in the age of the Internet, it’s nigh on impossible to completely stifle journalism. Life goes on regardless, and even news sources as well-respected as the BBC are turning to the man on the street — or should that be, the man in front of his computer or speaking on his mobile phone — for their informational fix.

People tuning in to tonight’s BBC News could see pixellated, mobile phone-shot footage taken straight from YouTube in the place of regular crystal clear, polished reportage. It may have been lo-tech, but was it necessarily any worse off for it?

You may say that this new age source of news has the capability to be infinitely more biased than your typical centre-right news channel, and this is undeniably true. But is it any different from Jeremy Clarkson’s newspaper column, or a typical review on last night’s television? Well, only in the medium by which it is transmitted.

The truth is that, from time to time, we want bias. We want gritty, real-life stories from people that have experienced this stuff first hand – content undiluted by the need for neutrality and sanitisation.

Like it or not, the blogger is becoming as much a part of journalism as the newspaper editor, the television researcher and that bloke with the deep voice that reads the news on Five Live.

Spot the deliberate error

The BBC recently launched a new programme which attempts to seek out Britain’s best young orator. Among the issues raised by the series is that of technology (read: the Internet and texting) and its effect on the English language. Whilst some champion tradition and mourn the death of grammar in the country’s youth, I say we should stop being so wary of change.

After all, I’m sure Shakespeare received much criticism for his habit of making words up, and look where we are now — hundreds of words coined by the Great Bard are in widespread use in modern English.

I’m not saying that poor grammar and spelling should be encouraged. How many times have you tried to read a page of text but utterly failed to comprehend the meaning behind it due to the God-awful sea of indecipherable text language? In my view, once too often.

You will always get these — it’s an inevitibility that a medium as open as the Internet would be filled with incomprehensible blog posts and utterly unfathomable essays. We should instead look at the good parts associated with such a medium, namely kids getting into writing as a medium whereas before they would just sit in front of Chucklevision or something.

The point I am trying to make is thus: find your own style and stick to it. Proofread your work, but don’t send yourself absolutely batty with endless revisions of the same old posts. If grammar is not your strong point, don’t sweat it: as long as you are understood and can get your point across, that’s all that matters. Perfect Oxford English is, for most of us, an unachievable fantasy.

Ten things to keep in mind

1. Content is King. Blog about a variety of different topics within your specialist area in general terms so as not to be overly exclusive.
2. Write about your passions. What are your secret/not so guilty secret loves?
3. Adopt a conversational rather than formal style. Address people personally and speak directly to the reader as if you were talking to them in the pub.
4. Be an organised blogger. You can be as haphazard as you like behind the scenes but make sure people can find and understand the content you post.
5. Use concise headings and a snappy first paragraph to suck the reader in.
6. Make effective use of bullet points and ‘top ten’ lists.
7. Keep posts relatively short. Too many words intimidate people – split your posts up if necessary.
8. Linkify. Allow people to navigate the web via your posts and link to similar posts on other peoples’ blogs. Who knows – maybe they will reciprocate.
9. Use bookmarking widgets. Include ‘Add to favorites’, Technorati and Digg links encouraging people to spread the word about your blog.
10. Above all, work work work. Keep plugging away – make use of the seemingly infinite Internet outlets to promote your blog and it will happen, even if it takes a long time.