Today was a day of recycling- both content-wise for Indymedia Scotland, various email lists, and practically. Mike stormed our flat this morning announcing he witnessed an office clearance and would like to fetch a computer table; however, it wasn’t just ONE computer table in the end, but two computer tables, 4 chairs, one wooden little flowerpot-presenter and 2 long-awaited computer chairs, and one electric heating. Magnificient! Everything else was crushed to pieces by the workers, and there was still really nice and useful furniture and office desks landing under the axe of capitalism. Furthermore, Mike gave me a present of a “Chiapas Zapatista Calendar” for next year, to say “Thank you” for immediately fetching the computer desk and in exchange.

So, yesterday was finally the day when the 5 judges selected 3 ideas out of 15 (1 person already resigned), for funding a documentary short film. Due to being scared as a frightened bunny, I left my preparations to last-minute 11 pm Friday night. In the end it didn’t matter: the BBC Gail Fraser, Mark Cousin, the Edinburgh College of Art representative = Bridging the GAP rep, the Maverick TV production company rep, the Channel4 rep, selected the 3 lamest ideas you could think of: technology/implants; ice-cream, and headscarves. I was pretty sure that they would select one idea of every one of the categories.

Me and my friend went to Sunderland University yesterday to turn up in a lecture as speakers. Sunderland is about half an hour south of Newcastle. Well, that’s what we thought and how it was described to us and looked on the map. However, we didn’t expect this major traffic jam, which seemed the last 50 kilometres seem like a 007 snail race. Luckily we dropped of the hitchhiking PhD philosophy student at the service station, good luck to him!, and made our way to this brand-new media building sponsored by Sony. Another astonishing thing actually is: I can speak for three hours nearly uninterrupted if I can speak about the things I am passionate about, and especially if it is at a university, where the students don’t have any chance to run away from my rant.

I have just typed a long article when it went down again in the depth of cyberspace. I was just surfing the Guardian online, a useful media, web and news resource, which thankfully has an open archive, which unfortunately is no guarantee to actually (re)find the article you found so amazing 2 years ago. The Herald, here in Scotland demand 2 pounds to view a past article online, I find this disgusting money making! So I looked at the Guardians “Best British Blog awards” and found some useful and interesting links I want to discuss in the following article as well as the article on “why I hate blogs”.

Of course, there is much more than the Ideasfactory competition. Journalist wise, of course, alternative wise, there has been today the new BBC activist page been posted on the Indymedia UK newswire. My first thought. “Well, that’s no real competition to Indymedia”. Take action: Campaign to get British people to walk on the left” and the featured special: “Speed bumps”. And: “add your comments”!. Sorry guys, but obviously they have a different target audience in mind than Indymedia. But whom? Another journalist approach has been the new Counterinformation on which we have been working. Especially Mike has been working really hard on the layout.