Cameron gives Brown the two finger salute

I walked into work the other morning only to find a load of blokes in suits who sat us down and explained how we would have to work for twice the number of hours for half the pay with a grand total of one week in holidays. Per decade.

They told us it’s the same everywhere else and nobody would even think about re-employing our sorry posteriors this side of Cheetham Hill. Which sucks just a bit.

The good news is that, for the next couple of months at least, we get free drinks in the canteen and can address customers with as many expletives as we like . Plus, we get to wear slippers and dressing gowns to make us look like Hugh Hefner without consequence or recrimination. Up to a point anyway.

Don’t you just love the Conservative-Liberal coalition?

A pointless little politics-related thought/mildly amusing quip there. Anyway, I’m here to tell you that for the time being I’m gonna publish all my Retro Yakking stuff here at Illarterate instead, mainly because I plan to wind that project down for good. Don’t worry, though, because I won’t just disappear from the face of the earth like last time. Or maybe I will, who knows?

I really should get that blogroll up and running again, plus there’s a whole bunch of housekeeping with regards to archiving old projects. I shall get round to that when I have the time and resources, but for now, console yourself in the fact I’m not rotting six feet under unlike certain street sweepers. Ciao for now.

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.
  

As a bit of a follow up to my earlier piece on Wikia, I’ve gone to the trouble of outlining some specific things you ought to know when creating a Wikia wiki. Don’t see these articles as a personal attack on Wikia, who, on the whole provide a very good service. Consider them a rant against the general over-reliance on advertising at free content websites, something that’s becoming increasingly prevalent in this current economic climate, and something that cheeses me off slightly.

Look out for more posts on this subject in the future and perhaps some sort of archive bringing all my Wikia pieces together.

I’ve witnessed the downfall of Wikia due to its increased reliance on advertising first hand in the past year. Whilst I don’t want to dwell on the events of precisely one year ago, I decided to breifly revisit the subject with a general account of what happened from my point of view. It can be found here, and is the first piece I’ve published at HubPages.com, an online content hub (as it were) for writers and businesspeople to post articles.

It’s been somewhat painful, though I hope to have exorcised one or two demons. Hmm, I know that’s unlikely, but it was nice to vent my spleen again.

The date was set – Teletext, the digital medium often seen as the spiritual successor to the Internet, would be switched off along with the analogue signal in 2012.

But now that date has been brought forward two years thanks to poor financial performance, possibly caused by the rise of the Internet.

In the next few years, analogue television will be phased out as one by one, the old transmitters are switched off. A campaign to ensure people are aware of this has been in force for a good while now, and OAPs have been able to claim a Freeview set top box free of charge. Unfair, I want my MTV! Well, maybe not as MTV has never been on free-to-air television.

Worse still, we now have to put up with this ‘interactive television’ thing. Now, I will concede that it does have its plus points and has improved markedly since its early days, but it has some major flaws.

The most annoying of these is the fact you can no longer go directly to a specific Teletext page. For example, if I wanted to see how the England cricket team were doing, I would punch up page 341 on Ceefax, but if I do the same on BBCi, I get the ‘page not found’ message. The page does exist, but I have to go through an extra menu to find it, wasting precious battery juice and increasing the risk of RSI. Please fix this now, BBC.

Technical issues aside, I miss the old pixellated aesthetic. Everything on interactive is clean cut and of photo quality, sometimes to the detriment of loading times.

But I miss the old teletext weather maps of Britain, Bamber Boozler’s blocky face and the cruddy flashing advertisements. Yes, I never thought I would miss those, but I do.

Maybe it’s a bit like losing a beloved pet that you’ve grown up with, through good times and bad. You think it’ll always be there, but sadly it does have to end. Teletext has far outlived arcade video games, numerous game consoles and other associated electronic media of its time to still be with us today… just about.

It’s a British institution that many will be sad to see the back of. Will interactive TV fill the void? Probably never.

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.