Kind of blue

I do not know whether Claudia Lawrence Rrose Sélavy exists to any greater extent than the original Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego of Marcel Duchamp, lived and breathed. But the entity attained some level of digital realness, enough at least to become one of my virtual ‘friends’ (and the same goes for Mytho Geography and Hegemony Or Bust and agirlcalledTom and Fat Roland, so draw your own conclusions, send them in to the Gallery, sorry we can’t return any, but there’s a prize for each one we show).

Anyway, I don’t know where this photo came from – guessing London – but CLRS posted it on Facebook – which still comes up first if you put the word ‘book’ into Google – and it made me smile wryly, despite my current problems with some salt cod, so I leached it off her or him or it or them or whatever, and here it is:

Noughties media overload

Not only does The Noughties now have its own blog, it’s also invaded Facebook and Twitter as well. Roll up, roll up.

We discussed MySpace, but... naaah.

Dead links to dead trees

Some bits and pieces, connected only by their location on the cusp of cyber and meat:

• The Times wins the right to unmask police blogger Nightjack, a move that seems to serve no purpose than allowing old media to remind the blogosphere who’s boss. The whole thing makes me exceedingly angry; fortunately, Chicken Yogurt is clear-headed enough to point out the essential hypocrisy of The Times’s position.

• On similar lines, tight-collared reactionary Simon Heffer in the Telegraph spews extraordinary quantities of nonsense about the rubbishness of Facebook, never once questioning the privilege that accords him a platform.

• Graphic design student Rob Matthews prints off 437 articles from Wikipedia and turns them into a book. “It makes people laugh,” says Matthews, “which is good.”

• Ann Kirschner tackles the format question that’s got publishing in knots, by consuming Dickens as book, audiobook, Kindle and iPhone.

• Everett True offers a quantitative comparison between blogs now and fanzines then.

• The whole Iranian hoo-ha raises a number of questions about politics and technology, not least the question of whether we perceive the result to be unjust because Twitter users are more likely to be Moussavi supporters. However, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain makes a wider point about this most misunderstood medium, and why it is so successful at times of civic upheaval: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

PS: More on the Nightjack case from Paperhouse, Anton Vowl and Girl With A One-Track Mind, who suffered similar indignities at the hands of Rupert’s catamites, and also ties the whole grubby affair up with what's occurring in Tehran.

PPS: And the bloggers, inevitably, strike back.