The Obscurer

As promised when I moved this blog over from Blogger to WordPress, I have done plenty of “tinkering and fiddle-faddling” with this website since, adding wee plug-ins and the like here and there that you probably haven’t noticed, and which I am happy to leave you to find for yourselves, and to make use of if they are of any use. But in lieu of having anything original to write about, and because I know many (many?) of you just read this via a feedreader, I’d like to just draw your attention to the new Recent Browsing section in the sidebar. In short it is a list of the last 10 posts or articles on other blogs or websites that I have added to my new del.icio.us thingy, and which I think may be of interest.

Dominating the list at the moment are three posts regarding the Craig Murray / Alisher Usmanov affair; if you don’t know what it is all about then Chicken Yoghurt is the best place to start, detailing the way the man hitherto known as “that fat Russian bloke who wants to buy Arsenal” has forced down a number of websites that were making allegations against him. In brief, rather than trying to defend his reputation, Usmanov’s lawyers, Schillings, have sought to crush dissent just by threatening legal action and without making any attempt to clear Usmanov’s name, a (apparently failed) strategy to starve their opponents’ allegations of the oxygen of publicity, which they boast of having used previously on their website, and which should be of concern to anyone with a vague interest in that old bauble “freedom of speech”. In addition to Chicken Yoghurt, I have linked to Unity’s post at Ministry of Truth regarding some tactics on how to deal with the UK libel laws (he is also excellent here on Schillings’ philosophy), and to Tim Ireland’s temporary Bloggerheads site (the original one being a casualty of the action) which details a timeline of what has happened, and what is going to happen next.

The rest of the links are a bit of a mish-mash; from the deadly serious (a link to a petition supporting the Burmese protesters, via Nosemonkey) to the hilarious (Andrew Collins showing a toe-curling corporate video for the free magazine ShortList); from more “old media” absurdity (Digital Spy report that UKTV G2 is being renamed Dave. Yes, Dave! How did that get past market research? Who do they speak to?) to “new media” brilliance (SBALB on being head hunted), I like to think that there is a little something for everyone there. There’s even a feed for my del.icio.us links to subscribe to if you want, but I know you don’t.

For how long I bother to continue updating the list only time will tell, but it is certainly a neat way of putting new content on the blog while expending next to no effort on my part. Whether anyone bothers to read it is another matter entirely, but it’s there for now anyway; check it out, ignore it, the choice is very much yours to make.