Russell Davies

friendly legal

I've just finished reading through the first draft of the Terms and Conditions and Contract for Newspaper Club. Our lawyer sent them over this afternoon. To me, with no legal training or experience whatsoever, It all seems comprehensive, sensible and necessary, but it's in no way friendly or welcoming to read. I can't help wanting to rewrite it, but I assume any deviation from standard legal talk will cost us loads extra with the lawyer. (Who seems great, by the way, I'm not complaining about that at all.)

So, does anyone know of any Terms & Conditions or the like that have been written in a particularly clear or approachable way - or with explanatory notes? If we can find some, maybe it'll be useful precedent. We might even be able to create some less opaque boilerplate our fellow 4IPers can use.

Comments are now closed. Huge thanks for all the thoughts.

sudden vivid flashback

Paula Yates on the lyrics round of Pop Quiz getting that Hey now woo look at that did she nearly run you down is from Duran Duran's Rio.

following along slightly behind the podcast revival

A while ago it felt like people were getting interested in blogging again. I think that's happening. Some of the interest in weeknotes seems to be about getting the blogging habit restarted.

I bet podcasts are next for rediscovery. Roo and Leila are doing Shift Run Stop which is excellent (though it might be brought to a shuddering halt by my own dog-faced appearance) and James has just invented micropodcasting - helped by the advent of AudioBoo. Have a look at Mattins, it's a brilliant idea.

We're thinking of combining these two revivals and doing our weeknotes as a podcast. That way we can take the mick out of BERG and they'll never notice (you can't imagine them wasting time with podcasts can you?) This will probably include pointing out that the fancy new studio they keep banging on about is actually slightly more than half ours. I'm really looking forward to having our own space, and to sharing it with them. Next year's going to be ace.

scrabbling

There's a short story to be written about someone trying to tell someone else that they love them via a game of Words With Friends.

a bookish walk to work

Good listening on the walk to work this morning - a couple of bookish audio adventures; this feature from NPR's On The Media about the present and future of books and this programme from Studio 360 about Moby Dick.

being a catalogue of my relationships with music by age

0-10  This sound makes me go bouncy and I can shout it.

10-13  This music is good for dancing and singing and it reminds me of telly.

13-15  What music do my friends like? I must like the same music.

15-17  If I like the right music then girls will like me.

17-25  Nothing is more important in the world than [insert band] and only I and Paul Morley understand their significance. I don't care that girls don't like me.

25-30  What is it with [insert band]? They are ridiculous, strutting sell-outs. Music is just a rip-off man.

30-35  There's more to music than pop you know. This jazz stuff is fascinating, and there's music from round the world and have you heard some of those blues guys and John Cage and everything.

35-40  I'm still very much aware of today's music, there are a lot of incredible bands out there, even these days. I'll never get caught in some retro trap.

40-45  I only really listen to the music I liked when I was 17.

(I'm assuming that fairly soon I will revert to 'this sounds makes me go bouncy and I can shout it'.)

a funding model for newspapers must be found

somehow related

Apparently so.

compare and contrast

Not many people would argue that creating something useful, distinctive and successful requires hard work. Though I might argue with this particular definition of working hard. I would definitely take issue with the idea that constantly hanging out with people from your industry is a good idea, but I don't have to because Anil Dash has already done that.

in praise of fragments

Something Tom Coates entweetened about blogging the other day has stuck with me.

The urge to write longer things makes blogging more considered and therefore harder. Some would say that's a good thing. Filtering out the chaff. I'm not sure. For me, blogging is about momentum and 'more considered' makes momentum harder. Interesting things emerged from the less filtered rush of words. I enjoyed blogging because there was room for fragments of thought as well as something polished and finalised.

But we were seduced by the speed and reach of twitter and started putting our fragments there instead. But bits of thought on twitter are ephemeral, they slip away from us. Whereas on a blog a fragment of thought is pinned down, tagged, permanent and can become part of a larger body of accreted thinking. On a blog the fragments can become part of something larger and slower, on twitter they get swallowed up by something bigger and faster.

Or something. Anyway. Back to more fragments on here from me.

(He's right about Facebook too)