The Wall Street Journal asks who’s responsible for the fall in price of crude oil over the past few days: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/falling-oil-whodunnit/

Thomas Friedman in the NYT (clearly just back from strawberry picking in the Nordics) asks is it better for oil to remain high: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?em

Tom Raftery has been saying for months that oil is better off over $200 per barrel: http://greenmonk.net/the-sooner-oil-hits-200-per-barrel-the-better/

And back to the WSJ which claims at off-shore drilling is really a complete non-issue despite the above: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/rigged-why-does-offshore-drilling-dominate-the-debate/

Image courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/welshy/

Shell made £2,000,000 profit per hour last quarter.

Some points from GreenBang:

• First, Shell maintains it is committed to investing in renewable energy and clean technology and the company does spend $500m a year on alternative energy resources. But let’s put that into a bit of perspective – that’s about five days’ profit based on today’s results.
• Next is the fact these latest profits were boosted by Shell’s Canadian oil sands business. The high price of oil now makes this controversial form of oil extraction financially viable for the big oil companies (not just Shell), but it is more energy and carbon intensive than traditional extraction.
• Finally let’s not forget Shell recently sold its stake in the Array London wind power project – the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, although Shell maintains that decision was not a reflection on its commitment to alternative energy and points to its involvement in many similar projects around the world.

More on the Guardian

What’s the opposite of cheap, easy, global? How about this, a proposed 10,000 year old clock. Lots of background info on http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com. And some big time TED-esque thinking at the Long Term Thinking blog.

Here’s a talk made for us at TrashBlanc.com. On Thursday 31st July the ICA poses the question of why it’s so hard to ship fresh English lettuce into E1.

The blurb:

Leila McAlister of Leila’s Shop will pose questions about why, from her position in central London, E1, it is so complicated to stock certain ‘normal’ things, such as fresh lettuce from England. James Alwyn of Chi London, a company that promotes commercial opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, will talk logistics of transporting and the artist Caitlin Elster will discuss materials and packaging, addressing the normalisation of salad bags.

Lettuce will be available on the night.

Tony Juniper, the director of Friends of the Earth is stepping down this year. He writes at length in the Guardian about the issues he’s faced over the past 30 years and those still in front of us. This final analysis stands out:

In order to solve global problems, we need a different kind of
globalisation, based on different global networks, global agreements,
and global level playing fields. This, in turn, suggests that western
environmental bodies should put far more of their resources into
building up their partner organisations in other countries, especially
those in the developing world. In fast-growing emerging economies in
particular, it is necessary to urgently create a new politics that sees
development and environment as complementary and overlapping - rather
than competing - agendas.

A different emphasis will need to be
built into organisations’ campaign strategies. Campaigners should seek
common cause with human rights activists and labour unions, as well as
economic actors. Conservation groups need to broaden their horizons to
embrace questions of consumption and the economy. Development groups
must deepen their ecological analysis, not least because efforts to end
poverty are being massively undermined by environmental change.

What Tony doesn’t mention is the role of networked media in global conservation and environmentalism. New media giants like Google and Facebook have the oppertunity to take a huge leadership role in this space and drive change faster than any government could. And what’s more, they don’t even have to do the hard work themselves, they can facillitate the rest of us.

David Kaplan at PaidContent.org looks at a skeptical report on the ability of magazines to profitably transition to digital. Nothing particularly surprising, but it is incredible to think of just how few magazines have moved successfully to the web. Magazines publishers employ a ton of smart, creative people. Why can’t they find a way to publish successfully online?

The last thing a stressed out family needs whilst awaiting the delivery of luggage in Dublin Airport is advertising shoved down their throats. DAA, you’ve got more important things to do.

FACT! £20bn of wasted food goes down the swanee every 365 days in the UK. On wasted food. That’s according to this three month old report in the Independent.
There’s lots wrong with food in Britain right now, from battery operated chicken to Gordon Ramsey’s utterly inconceivable ubiquity. But surely none of these issues come close to the sheer scale of the waste mountain we’re creating. Forget late night eating. It’s time for Trash Blanc to live up to it’s name, get amongst the garbage and see what sort of madness is going on in the Great British food industry.

Surely the highlight of this year’s RCA Design Interactions show must be this, Alice Wang’s grass greenness measuring device and associated PARKTONE cards. Allows users to measure the green quotient of their garden lawn against the standards set by the Royal Parks of London. One for today’s modern living. Thanks to we-make-money-not-art.com for reviewing the show and taking the pics so we don’t have to.

That’s 30,000,000 people. Nearly half the population of the UK. Not exactly a few poor farmers kicked off their land by unthinking palm growers.

Earth2Tech reported this yesterday. The number is staggering. And further on in piece they highlight another heinous issue related to biofuels that is going largely unreported. The CO2 impact of the palm oil plantations.

The report goes beyond the humanitarian consequences and puts numbers to the environmental boondoggle that is the current biofuel economy. Oxfam estimates that land-use changes largely from the palm oil plantations that have popped up around the world’s equator, are emitting a huge amount of CO2, and it will take 46 years of projected 2020-level biofuel use to make up a “carbon debt.”

So it’s time to tell UK transport minister, Opus Dei practitioner and ardent biofules supporter, Ruth Kelly, exactly what you think of the UK’s continued support of this energy source. Information on how to do this is here.

There’s always been new media. McLuhan traced the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to shifts in adoption, usage and availability of papyrus. Gutenberg, to paraphrase David Cameron, was the future once. So simply hailing or blaming new media for your particular organization’s respective good or bad fortunes is a little lazy.

I mention this in relation to the ever continuing debate over the death of news journalism and the role of bloggers in the media. I’m not particularly interested right now in what future news rooms will look like, whether they’ll be staffed by editors, journalists, bloggers or algorithms. What I am interested in is what makes this blog infused new media “new”. It seems to me it’s the conversation. Yes I’ve said this before in relation to broadcasting, but lets look at it again in the context of the written word.

Greenslade mentions this today.

I say this as a preliminary to explaining why journalists, especially print veterans like me, are so suspicious of bloggers. We have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that’s wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.

The King James Bible wasn’t meant as a conversation starter, it was a diktat on how to live your life. When the Sun asked the last remaining person in Britain to “turn off the lights if Kinnock and Labour won the ‘92 election it was telling its readers exactly what to do, not inviting them around for a considered debate on the single currency.

Further on, Greenslade really nails the crux of what I’m getting to here.

I think journalists are failing to grasp that truth. Blogging, though democratic in spirit, does threaten the established order of journalism. I was inspired to write this after reading a blog posting by Adam Tinworth (courtesy of a tip from Kristine Lowe. Many thanks). Tinworth writes: “Most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process… They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”

Yep, it’s the conversation. Never before has it been possible for all range of people to have global conversations they way they are now. That scares much of the news media. It shouldn’t. Because never before has it been possible for the news media to facilitate and host conversations at a global, 24/7 level. We should be enthused and excited by these possibilities.

It’s what Ballmer was getting at when he referred to IP advantages over TV. And if Steve Ballmer at Microsoft gets it then so should any high ranking executive in the news business.

Now for the really exciting bit. These conversations shouldn’t just be left to the tail end of blogs and the depths of Technorati. They should be taking place all around our news media, both written (by pros and amateurs alike) and video. Tools like Discqus, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and for video in particular the Seesmic Wordpress plugin are starting on the edge of the blogosphere and moving in towards big media, but big media shouldn’t wait.

We have to start innovating around the conversation and that innovation should start with syndication.

Let’s wrap a the conversation around the content layer wherever that content is consumed and wherever there is a danger of the conversation breaking out. News organizations aren’t doing this quickly enough.

A practical example of what should be possible here is the Associated Press in the US.

The AP have been in the news over the past fortnight for trying to shut the convesation down, not allow people use their direct quotes as part of their everyday blog conversation. How stupid is this? Imagine the feds busting into your office and taking down the guys by the water cooler because they were quoting verbatim scenes from the Office. Ridiculous.

The AP actually should be embracing the conversation. Jeff Jarvis mentions that one way for the AP to move forward would be for it to stop homogenizing content and list the source news agency. Well how about this. How about it lets anyone take its stories, but as part of the deal you’ve got to take its simultneous conversation feed. And that’s an absolute must all newspapers and websites downstream of the original AP article. In one go this move brings in a huge amount of intellectual capital to the AP content eco-system. The AP ends up providing a centralized discussion engine, a virtual Speakers Corner.

All of a sudden we have an old media giant using its inherent advantages (relationships and distribution channels through all media) to enhance rather than shut down conversation. The challenge for the rest of us to how to do this without these advantages. We have our users and if our content is any good we have the conversation starters. That should be enough to get going.

Julian Cope discusses the “Northern Heathenism & Paganism Beyond Rome” lecture he gave at Birmingham Town Hall last month. Of course he does. Worth reading.

One grumble though, Julian mentions he’s not publishing the 70 minute lecture as it forms the basis of a chapter in an upcoming book. Julian, by publishing the chapter you’ll surely drive much more interest in the overall book, you’re taking the attitude of a music industry exec here.

This is great. Not only are Americans leaving their urban sprawls for cleaner, greener, cheaper cities, the Telegraph of all papers has a report on it.

Looks like Steve Ballmer and Keepfakingit are pointing in the same direction on this broadcasters-treating-their-viewers-with-contempt theme we’ve been banging on about recently. Except Steveo is coming at it from a different angle. IP he says is the delivery method that will transform all media not just TV.

Ballmer notes to the Washington Post that kids playing XBox Live are interacting using TVs with people all over the world. Why? because they’re using an IP network that enables two way communication. He’s convinced that within ten years all media, TV, magazines, books, will be delivered this way. And once they are people can start talking to each other and back to big media.

Last night we contended that it would take all viewers having a device, a laptop, iPhone or some other wi-fi gadget (note all IP), on their lap before broadcasters were willing and able to respect their audience. Well here’s the other option. Deliver the broadcast to the device, whether that’s the gadget, or a set-top box.

Once that happens we can get on with building all sorts of interesting communities around the content. This surely is a better way of driving extra revenues for broadcasters than fleecing their viewers using premium sms and phone charges.

Summing up keepfakingit’s previous post: Broadcasters have for years in the UK shown nothing but contempt for their audience. Despite their audience paying their wages, the corporations have insisted that the AUDIENCE PAYS (through SMS, premium rate calls etc.) every time they communicate with the broadcaster. This is ridiculous.

Let’s examine a few facts here. I recently wrote about Clay Shirky’s assertion that people are clawing back some of the time they spend with their TVs and putting that into more creative endevours. Shirky calls this Social Surplus. As someone who works for a broadcaster and sees far too much TV, keepfakingit calls this common sense.

Now let’s look at a trend that’s on a huge upward curve in the US and is following suit in Europe, the simultaneous usage of PC and television. TV ownership per household is somewhere north of 3 right now (can’t find a reference so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) PC ownership is over two and rising fast. Something’s got to give right? According to Shirky there are only so many hours in the day we can consume (or create) media. Well not really. In ever increasing numbers people are watching TV whilst warming their knees with their 15″ Latitudes. IMing and Facebooking whilst contemplating which buffoon to vote out of Big Brother, by text of course.

Right now I don’t see any major broadcasters attempting to tap this in a meaningful way. Yes the news channels ask and use UGC in ever increasing amounts, but live TV has not yet embraced IM, Twitter or even simple commenting and ratings systems.

Dual users are still in the minority but there’s one breakthrough coming that’s about to push dual usage into the ascendancy. Usable, affordable mobile internet. When everyone’s got virtually free bandwidth in their pocket thanks to wi-fi devices, all of a sudden everyone has a conduit to shout abuse at Davina McCall.

And they won’t have to pay for doing it.
All of a sudden Soccer AM’s MySpace profile or Facebook group can have a meaningful roll before, during, and after each show.

It’s time for the producers and creatives involved in mainstream television to start listening at their viewers level, and maybe even start listening where their viewers are talking. With SMS and premium line voting now almost untouchable in the UK, what have broadcasters got to lose?

The BBC are in trouble again today over what is essentially information flows and how they communicate with their paying public. The Daily Mail and other fine institutions of British journalism are claiming that the Match of the Day “Goal of the Season” result has been rigged. Their evidence, a ton of cash has been laid on a Emmanuel Adebayor, Arsenal’s Togolese hitman. True, it’s a great goal, but it had been only third favourite until yesterday. Something stinks.

Whether or not the BBC is in the manure for real on this one or not is irrelevant. The episode serves only to illustrate that at this juncture the public simply don’t trust either the BBC, ITV or any other national broadcaster in the UK. Thanks to stealing their viewers money by way of rigged phone-in and SMS quizzes the broadcasters have only themselves to blame.

Much has been made of live TV shows who kept asking for more audience responses after they’d already decided the result. Or production teams to asked for competition entrants from any part of the country when it was already decided that only those in a certain region would win. But these underhand tactics by producers and APs belie an ignorance and contempt of their audience by short sighted layers of management from top to bottom.

Let’s look at the facts, even if Ant and Dec hadn’t been taking the piss, and oh yes, taking the piss they were.

First, what the hell were BBC and ITV doing asking their audience to pay the relevant broadcaster so that said audience was “allowed” talk to them. Seriously. We pay expensive TV licenses in the UK that fund the BBC. And ITV is no bleeding heart charity. So why should I have to pay to tell Ant or Dec which crappy Cher rip-off I think deserves another shot next week. I shouldn’t. They should be honoured and thrilled that I want to interact with them.

Second thing, if I do find programming that is so compelling I want to communicate with it, or shout at it or whatever, surely there’s a better way than automated switchboards and text messages. These methods of communication, certainly in the context they are employed by the broadcasters do nothing but atomize an audience. They are one way missives that become detached and decontextualized from the viewer as soon as the send button is hit.

There’s got to be a better way.

There is a better way, and I’m going to list some tomorrow, so Grade, Thompson and Duncan, listen up guys.

I’m halfway through Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Forrester backed study on social technologies “Groundswell“. Their definition of groundswell:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

100 pages in there hasn’t been anything earth shattering in terms of unexpected insight, though the case studies and different approaches of different industry are worth reading. What is great is the raw data that Li and Bernoff have access to and expose.

From a European perspective some of this data is more than a little troubling. Some hard facts:

Percentage of online consumers using RSS in 2007:

• US: 8%
• UK: 3%
• France: 5%
• Germay: 4%

And some figures on blog and UGC usage (US - UK):

• Read blogs: 25% - 10%
• Comment on blogs: 14% - 4%
• Write a blog: 11% - 3%
• Upload UGC video: 8% - 4%

Yet the percentage of users visiting social networking sites is much more evenly balanced with the US at 25% and the UK at 21%.

Again usage rates differ significantly when it comes to participation in discussion forums and postings ratings and reviews:

• Participate in discussion forums: 18% - 12%
• Read ratings and reviews: 25% - 20%
• Post ratings and reviews: 11% - 5%

And again when various social media roles are looked at the level of engagement of UK audiences are roughly half that of US audiences. Why is this? In some markets lack of broadband is cited as a reason, but it doesn’t take a 2 meg connection to use Google Reader. Similarly, engaging in review cites such as CNet isn’t a high bandwidth task.

Is there then sociological reasons at play? Are Brits simply less inclined to both complain and applaud products and services online? Are they less willing to experiment with new media and plaster the results all over Flickr and YouTube? It would appear so but keepfakingit isn’t so sure why.

Li and Bernoff ( or maybe I’ll call them Charlene and Josh, this is after all social media) point to the reasons for participation in groundswell technologies. Going through these let’s see if there are any pointers to this great Atlantic divide. So, we participate to:

1. Keep up friendships (Facebook etc.)
2. Make new friends, lovers, one night stands (Facebook etc. again)
3. Succumb to pressure from existing friends
4. Paying it forward (you use a review site so feel eventually obliged to submit your own review)
5. The altruistic impulse
6. The prurient impulse (Showing off is fun)
7. The creative impulse (UGC etc.)
8. The validation impulse (we all want to be assured of our place in the world, the rationale behind many blogs)
9. The affinity impulse (Big use case for sports fans).

Nothing in the above jumps out at me as the reason behind this US/UK drift. Let me know your thoughts.

Keepfakingit writes one post on the impact of technology on society and then along come a whole bus-like fleet. So keepingitbrief, here’s quick comment on Jeff Jarvis’ post this week on the subject of media singularity.

Jarvis makes a couple of points.
1. The internet is not a medium but a place.
2. There are very few new mediums, just different ways (iPhone, online paper etc.)  of accessing them. This illustrates point 1.

Then to requote Jarvis quoting John Naughton:

While I’m blathering on about this, let me quote the wonderful John Naughton of the Open University and the Observer, who wrote this for an essay for an Ofcom report:

‘Media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another, more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. And that’s a very interesting interpretation for our purposes.

In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. The most famous example, I guess, is the mould growing in Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes which eventually led to the discovery of penicillin.

What I want to do is apply that perspective to human society: to treat it as an organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment – in the media that support social and cultural life – will have corresponding effects on the organism. Some things will wither; others may grow; new, mutant, organisms may appear. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium, and you change the organism.

This way of looking at our media environment is not new. I picked it up originally from the late Neil Postman, a passionate humanist who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and was an unremitting sceptic about the impact of technology on society.

I posted yesterday on the dangers of social exclusion from an increasingly ghettoized social cyber space . Naughton’s point above illustrates the point I made that it’s increasingly important for the gate keepers of these communities to recognize these dangers and tailor  online environments to be inclusive and open space. Yes they will naturally self select their populaces, but this doesn’t mean we should allow and encourage the building of cyber walls between them.

Naughton is reminding us of Postman’s thesis that the medium makes the messanger, or at least the person that receives the message. As long as we control the medium we should have a duty of care to that end-user.

A week ago I was on a web seminar call with Nick Carr, journalist, dismisser of corporate IT and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Google to Edison.
Having just finished reading said TBS I was looking forward to getting up close to Carr’s ideas. The seminar was hosted by Google but so what, a lot of things are hosted by Google. What transpired though was an unfortunate sales pitch for Google’s cloud services. You get nothing for nothing so not much complaining coming from keepfakingit, but it would have been good to see Carr get stuck into some of the real issues he addresses in TBS.
Issues such as: Thomas Schelling’s theory of self selecting neighbours as applied to online communities and social networks.
Schelling’s thesis was that a randomly placed collection of nodes in a network, when given the ability to move independently at random, will eventually choose more like minded neighbours. for nodes and network replace ethno-racial families in city boroughs to get a real flavour for the social theory here.
Carr agrees with Schelling and points to examples of this happening in real life online communities. He argues that whilst many “Net defenders” points at a rich tapestry of life and opportunities online, the reality is an even bigger ghettoization of thought than happens on our streets. Net communities are more homogeneous  and polarized.
A great example is the inward looking nature of the political blogosphere in the US. A study of blog coverage of the 2004 presidential election found a clear split in red and blue blogs. Republicans talked about their issues, trashed Democratic policy, but for the most part only quoted and referenced their on blogs. And vice versa.
Crowd sourcing is another danger area. Take for example Amazon’s auto recommendations. I bought a Nick Cave album from Jeff Bezos six months ago so now every time I login to Amazon I get offered random selections from Nick and his Bad Seeds’ back catalogue. Not a bad service and it’s getting better all the time. Or is it? Is it not the case that what Amazon have created is the ultimate pseudo-AI feedback loop. Instead of refining, Amazon is narrowing my choices and the more I use it the narrower it gets. If I were to pay attention to Amazon I’d have all 14 Nick Cave albums in my collection within a few months but not a lot of other additions. And there’s only so much Anglo-Aussie guitar slinging anyone, or their neighbours, can take.

All this would seem to fly in the face of the logic that has made Amazon exhibit A in the case for a long tail economy but it is a social insight that must be paid attention.
This is happening throughout cyberspace. Is the internet becoming the world’s biggest feedback loop?
From first hand experience the online sports community follows similar patterns. The net has embellished and enhanced real world walls and barriers. Spurs and Arsenal fans rarely if ever congregate together. Even for an England match they’ll silo themselves. In fact it could be argued that in an online sports community the team allegiance is an even bigger social marker than it is in real life. And once marked, and outsider will find it even harder to integrate into a hostile neighbourhood. Ultimately in the case of the Premier League we’re left with 20 silos of fans who are even more divided online than in reality.
And as we spend more time online and when online in social networks the real life effects are tangible and numerous.
Of course this isn’t to say social networks are inherently bad, but as we start to port more of our real life tasks to networks (job hunting on LinkedIn, date hunting on Facebook, new band hunting on MySpace) we should be aware of the allies we’re running down. And there should be an onus on the gatekeepers of these alleys to clearly signpost them and keep them well lit.

Finally, this is something new media patron saint Marshall McLuhan warned against but ultimately was optimistic about in Understanding Media. On the subject of television he wrote that man rejects uniform integration because he becomes more deeply involved in the human condition…

 The entire approach to these problems in terms of uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another, will come to reject such mechanical solutions.
It is more difficult to provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.

It’s up to us to make sure that we’re constantly pushing the uniqueness and diversity envelope.

Rugby themed pubs don’t usually do a lot for us here at AZBarLondon, but occasionally we scrum down and just get on with it. For F we’ve decided to check out Ricky Casanova’s local in Finsbury Park, the Faltering Fullback, a rugged establishment if ever there was one. Someday AZBar is going to come to you from somewhere less salubrious, but not this day.

We’ve been taking our viewer feedback pretty seriously here and everyone has been mauling us about the lack of information on the actual bars themselves. Our initial reaction is to direct people to Beerintheevening.com, a place where no one knows your name, but everyone knows a little something about most pubs. Fair enough, but we like to get a little bit more up close here on AZBar. With that in mind we’re introducing a new feature, the 3 second review. Take a look, we think you’ll like it.

View video here.

Big thinking critical technology theory, yep, that’s what it takes to shake Keepfaking it from its slumber. Well that’s what we’re looking for in life and we’ve found plenty of it at Clay Shirky’s shirky.com.

But before we get into the heavy stuff, what is it with Gilligan’s Island? Talk TV studies to an American and it’s the most discussed program of the 60’s. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire episode. Sure I grew up on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I thought TV entertainment was a common language. The Cosby Show, Seasame Street, Bewitched, all shows that spoke the common language of TV-Land-eese. Gilligan’s Island, a foreign tongue if ever there was one.

But back to the theory. Shirky writes in-depth and rather cohesively about the concept of social surplus. Social surplus is the time people like us are clawing back from TV networks by creating internet content instead watching two minutes of Madison Avenue four to six times an hour.

The rise of the web, the blogsphere, social networks and most probably LOLCats means that this decade is the first in which we’ve started turning our eyes increasingly away from the TV and onto something different. Note, I certainly don’t think these new endevours are necessarily any more worthy. But Shirky does. Hence, coupled to Shirky’s social surplus is the notion of the heat sink:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. This cognitive heat is now being directed elsewhere.

Let’s take that at face value. If we weren’t all stuck indoors watching plasticly enhanced actors living outrageous fantasies we’d all be doing something more worthwhile. Maybe we would.

Shirky then goes on to look more closely at the relationship between heat sinks and social surplus but I want for a second to dwell on the heat sinks. What else in society is a heat sink? Religion? Professional sport? Are these institutions sucking in society’s intelligence and thought time without reward? Probably, but so what if they are. Well, let’s go back and look at what’s happening to TV.

Traditional TV is imploding. A one to many broadcast model simply won’t work and the distribution model gets more and more confusing every year. One only has to examine the perilous state that ITV and Channel 4 are in right now to confirm this.

Organized religion in Europe is in exactly the same state. Turning up to church at an appointed hour weekly is a game more and more punters are unwilling to play. And how about pro sport? Well that’s a trickier one. Despite more money than ever going into Premier League football, average gates year on year are dropping. So maybe these heat sinks are cooling down and drawing less of the social surplus they once were.

So what does all this mean, for TV, religion and sport. Back to Shirky:

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

So Mr. CBS/Viacom/CNN/Sky/ManchesterUnited/RomanCatholicChurch, it’s easy, let us produce and create and share with you. Give us the content, some safety scissors and glue and we’ll go to town on the catechisms.

Again though I’m not so sure. Sharing for sharing’s sake. Are we merely dreaming of Life 2.0. a dangerous principle:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

Just why is the creation of badly photoshopped kittens a more valid use of brain space than taking in a dose of Desperate Housewives?

My thoughts:

Is this new creation on the internet actually good for anything? look at all the erroneous Wikipedia entries. Most of the content on PhotoBucket is rubbish. When did YouTube actually do anything for humanity?

Sure we have to find out where the users have been locked out of participation with big media/sport/religion. But “if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Ultimately we’re going to have to get the carving knives out, just let’s not fool ourselves that we’re creating a better, more cerebral society merely by letting the users play with the product.

AZBarLondon did it’s first ever back to back this week. The result was E and F on the same night. We did it the night of the Champions League quarter finals and just like the matches themselves it was a night of two halves.

The first 45 minutes was spent at the Edinburgh Cellars, 125 Newington street, between Highbury and Stoke Newington. Check out our full review below. While it wasn’t a bad spot we didn’t feel at all inclined to stay beyond one drink. We drained our Cracks in the Jacks and left for F quick enough.

View video here.
View Larger Map

We’ve long bemoaned the difficulty of acquiring top notch food at a decent price after the hour or 11pm in London. A city that purports to be a world capital turfs it’s citizens onto the street at closing time where the choice is grim. A bag of chips from the chippy or a pot noodle to take home from the corner store.

There are gems out there, we’ve been to one or two, but it’s a hard job tracking them down, and you can almost forget about finding them spontaneously.

So with all that in mind, and not wanting to come over as our usual negative selves, TrashBlanc.com is going to spend a bit of time on the coal face of late night London Eating.

Here’s our first report, and for the weekend that was in it we started at the Marathon Kebab. Befitting of it’s Camden location on the Chalk Farm road, Marathon is a big hit with the local musos. So much so that there’s a resident jazz-guy playing his sax along to lounge tracks in the back room. Atmospheric, yeah. The food is a step up from the standard kebabary. But only just. And for that it charges a pretty penny. £3.00 for a falafel kebab, £1.80 for nine onion rings and a mammoth £2.80 for a can of wife-beater. As Ricky points out in the video, getting served cans of Stella in a chip shop is a bonus to begin with, but paying nearly three large ones is a steep price.

Whether all of this is worth it depends on a couple of crucial variables.

1. Your distance from Camden. If you’re there already by all means go for it, but it’s not worth more than £5 in a taxi.

2. Your level of inebriation. This isn’t too crucial. TB had only a couple of pints and still took some enjoyment from the experience.

3. You tolerance for jazz, man. Speaks for itself.

All in all we’re giving a positive review, but with the proviso that there’s got to be better late night eats out there, right?

We wrote last week about Londonization, chain eating, the pleasure of knowing the same over-priced menu on ever high street. Well what are we going to do about it? We’re going to tell you what, right here on TrashBlanc.com we’re going to find the very weakest links in an all too familiar rusty toilet chain. Nobody is going to be spared. If we see what we think is a self replicating food emporium, we’re going to KAM IT HARD.

And we’re going to back that camera action up with some good hard facts. Like just who owns these cookie cutter outlets drowning London in a sea of ubiquity. And why the UK is a particular victim to this widespread lunching malaise.

Now we’ve got to lay down some guidance here as to how we approach this task. Sure MickeyD and the King are bigtime chains, but they’re not even trying to fool anyone. They’re saying “We’re cheap, we’re shit, we screw the planet daily, but hey, we sell 50 gazillion burgers worldwide per hour so fuck you pal”. Point absolutely taken.

No, we’re after the likes of old man Carluccio. The sly conieving types who pretends to inject class into the market until you get home to find your house knocked to the ground, your children gone, and a plate of very average blue cheese gnocchi being sold at £9.95 in their place. We’re not standing for this shit.

So here’s the chain of shame. It’s not definitive by any means, you comment and we’ll add.

• Carluccio
• Apostrophe
• Hamburger Union
• Busaba Eathai
• Gourmet HotDog
• Strada
• Eat
• Pret a Manger
• Pizza Express
• Leon
• Paul
• Ping Pong
• Wagamama
• Yo Sushi
• Wasabi
• Miso

TrashBlanc was in London for a full week last week so our AZBarLondon.com side project got a boost of life. Check out our visit to the Dolphin on Mare Street, Hackney.

This is my last post on SXSW. It may be the most important one though. As I’ve written, I went to SXSW thinking it would be a tech event. I’ve come back to London with the realization that it’s not about bits and bytes. It’s about people. It’s about the keynotes and the audience who take on those keynote speakers. It’s about regular panels and the individuals who stand up and wait for a turn to ask a question at the mic. And it’s about all those lunatics who see a twitter calling for a mid-afternoon tweet-up at a random bar and despite knowing nobody turn up and make friends. Thanks for that twitter.

I would like to briefly go through some standout panels and keynotes at SXSW. He was subsequently outshone, or certainly out hyped by other big guns, but for me Henry Jenkins really brought his A-Game. Thesis: Society and its leaders and its media are switching from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture. Examples: Survivor and Lost’s level of audience participation. These prime time shows do not exist without their online audience examining every last secret detail of every frame of every episode.
Exampe: Barack Obama talks using the post-boomer inclusivity language of ‘We’. Hillary Clinton does not. ‘I’ plays a big part in Clinton’s speeches and represents a person born of a political generation that wholeheartedly embraces the one way medium of TV. That’s over Mrs. Clinton.
Daniel light adds to Jenkins’ thesis in his excellent post:

“This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.”

Social Networks such as Twitter and Seesmic are obvious manifestations of this communalism. They represent the audacity and urgency of intimacy that I think Jenkins talks about.

Mark Zuckerberg
A whole ton of stuff has been written about the Zukerberg/Lacy interview. It was a cringe worthy affair. So what, let’s get on with the show. Neither Zuckerberg nor Lacy came across as particularly interesting individuals in person, but I do want to examine a few points Zuck tried to get out between acts of audience revolt. Sure, audience participation via online social network back channels is interesting but not in a huge manner right now. Come on, this is one of the biggest geek fests on the planet, if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen here.

One interesting side note is the reference Zuck makes to how Facebook is helping revolutionaries in Colombia. Look at the Guardian piece on FB’s backers. Is this thus a huge surprise. Government and big business have sought to control information and access to information since mankind invented media. ie forever. The reformation was enabled by Guttenberg’s wresting of information control from the Catholic church after all. If I’m the CIA, you better believe I want to control, or at the very least have readily available access to these information paths.

One worry here is that as with Google, as large corporations start to gain an ownership on our information and relationships they can massage these in different ways. McLuhan’s statement on medium and message rings true. Our thoughts and the way we think adapts to the medium. Control that and control the message.

Zuck stated quite audaciously that Facebook represents the biggest paradigm shift in media since the launch of the newspaper industry. Maybe he’s actually right, did anyone think of that?

Newspapers didn’t shift society’s thought functionality on their own, it took the invention and adoption of the telegraph to put them over the edge. The telegraph removed the limitations of space and time on the newspaper industry. The newspaper press was then free to become the first medium to involve human interest and sentiment en masse. With that the telegraph ultimately dimmed the privacy of the book form.

Nearly 200 years later social networks are doing a similar job in dismantling barriers of intimacy in our communications. The generation of school children on Bebo has grown up with almost a complete, non-technological, tool set to use social networks to communicate.

Commentators in their twenties and older wonder how this generation is going to grow up and hit the work force with all their teenage trials and tribulations shared online for the potential employer to vet. But that isn’t the employee’s problem. They are comfortable with their shared intimacy. It’s the employer who’s going to have to deal with it. In the past decade we’ve had two presidents in the US and a leader of the opposition in the UK who have crossed this Rubicon in terms of records and recollections of student drug usage. This is surely the start of a societal change from punishing past indiscretions to an open acknowledgment of mistakes.

We’ve already stated that the newspaper press wasn’t the catalyst for the changing of media consumption in the 1800’s. It was the Telegraph. And so social networks. Flash AJAX deployments and integrated APIs aren’t the killer app here. These aren’t changing society. But what might do that that is the integration of mobile devices. This is why Google is spending so much on Android and wireless. It may be that Social Networks will finally come of age and be the instruments of change that MZ proports them to be when they fully embrace a mobile world. This is the only way they are going to penetrate Africa for example.

So to Frank Warren
I’ve been a fan of PostSecret since I first saw it in some Sunday supplement or another. It’s collage like art/intimacy I think connects with a lot of people. We’ve all got something hidden inside us.

However seeing Warren’s name up beside Jenkins and Zuckerberg was something of a surprise. This guy’s an artist/currator. How does that fit into an interactive conference?

Well let’s look at what interactive means. Warren has created more direct interactions than perhaps anyone in the auditorium. And on an incredibly intimate level. It’s fair to say that Warren knows how to extract the intimate in just about anyone. The hour long talk featured quite a few tales of anonymous secrets, but the amazing thing was what this outpouring of secrets did to the audience. The Q&A section, or rather mass secret section produced one spontaneous proposal of marriage, lots of confessions and one hug from Frank for a woman who fell into floods of teams in front of 2,000 super-geeks. Wow. Nothing I write here can do him justice. Some of his talks are online. Find them.

Four points from Jane McGonigal’s talk on the happiness industry. All recent research on happiness points to four key areas that are pre-requisites for bringing happiness to a life:

1. Satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Time spent with people we like
4. A chance to be a part of something bigger

What’s this to do with interactive? Jane’s a multi-player game expert. And multiplayer games bring all four of these in spades. If your industry doesn’t it’s time to think why not.

So on to other highlights. George Kelly gave the most sombre talk of the weekend. He read like a Telegraph obit. The funeral was that of the newspaper industry and George obviously cares. Not that that’s going to stop the declining sales, slash and burn approach to the world’s news rooms and a mass exodus of advertisers to green online pastures.
That leaves me with this question though which I want to explore over the coming months. is it a given that these forms of communication and participation will jump the gap between international geek community and mass adoption. Facebook has done it, but can Twitter and Seesmic really go mass market in their current guise or will they simply be sold off for their API’s. Does the real innovation lie in ancillilary apps?

Finally some learnings at a basic level. Despite our web 2.0 tools it’s vital to connect in a real way, not just at a Facebook or MySpace level. Without real interaction, and maybe even face to face communication these web2.0 relationships do not mean a whole lot. Gary Vaynurchuck understands this. Watch how he communicates with his audience. But big media doesn’t. It they get Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, it’s at a marketing level. Useless.

Nike is a company that I find absolutely offensive for their continued outsourcing/labour issues, BUT they get this. They are using their brand and social status to connect people in the real world. More companies need to get this too. And like Nike they may well be companies that haven’t done this before. If you work in the world of sport, an area that is invented to accomodate social interaction you better be thinking this or you’re going to be left way out by your audience.

(Scene of the detestation, Haymarket Wagamama. Thanks for pic Ewan-M)

Londonization. The French term for the decimation of the high-street by chain stores and chain restaurants. Walk down any street in the UK and you’ll see exactly what they mean. While we at TrashBlanc.com have to ‘fess up at this juncture to a fondness for H&M under-garments (boxer briefs, size large since you ask), we’re growing progressively less fond of eating where everybody knows the names, on the menu.

We’ve discussed prime offenders such as the Gourmet HotDog chain before. But now it’s time to do some solid investigation. Why? Becasue we’ve just eaten in Wagamama and let us tell you something, it was the worst bowl of soba noodles we’ve had in a seriously long time. Like ever! Bland, oily, mushrooms that tasted like they’d come from a metalworks. Three pieces of soggy tofu. All this ours for £7.50 (US$15).

When Wag came on the scene it was a breath of fresh air. All minimal underground hipness. Communal benches, open plan kitchen and servers with PDAs. Wow, the glamour. Surely this was modern China at it’s very best. Shame the miso tastes more like run-off from the lifeless Yangtze river.

Wag was launched by a man, Alan Yau, who has a handfull of Michelin stars and an MBA-esque know-how in successful franchising to his name. Well Yau has sold starred eateries and he’s obviously enjoying the proceeds somewhere far away from London.

Wag have over 20 locations in London, 50 in the UK and imminent expansion is planned in the US. They’ve also opened up in Heathrow T5. Now that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is a notion that TrashBlanc will ever eat in Wag again. Not happening.

What is happening is a month on TrashBlanc devoted to exposing London’s other hyped but dodgy chains. We’re looking at you Carluccio.

I went to SXSWi expecting to be dazzled by technology. I wasn’t. Instead I was impressed by the application of technology. That may not sound like a huge difference. It doesn’t matter how good the technology is after a certain point, it’s the passion the user-base brings to the table that puts an application or a service over the edge.
So back to the point, the impressive technologies and apps were those that were being used, that had all the ad-spend but none of the on-the-ground grubbiness. I’m thinking you in particular Silverlight.
In no pearticular order shout outs to:

Utterz
If I had a US phone bill I’d have been using this in a big way. A tumblr crossed with friendfeed for mobile access (kinda). (I think).Utterz is just about unique enough to work. It can be accessed via any mobile or landline in the world and it connects to your kitchen sink.

Seesmic
Didn’t take the convention by storm the way it could have, but for my money it’s the best insta-vlogger on the market. Once it perfects it’s mobile interoperability and good video handsets (ie a few more N95 clones) come down in price Seesmic is going to explode. So see me after SXSWi 2009.

Friendfeed
I thought FriendFeed was going to save my life. It aggregates all you ‘friend’s’ web2.0 feed and delivers them in a daily dose. But now I’m not so sure. After using the service for a couple of weeks I’m starting to think spam! Maybe I should just turn off the daily notifying email. Lifestream services are 10 a penny right now, and the word on the twitter feed says the best two out there are FriendFeed and Social Thing. We’ll see.

Meebo
Meebo’s been around a while. The best thing about it? It works. Meebo were a major sponsor for SXSW but their investment went beyond some sales inventory in the guide books. They created a live chat room for every panel of the interactive conference and they were used as a pretty good back channel for some of the discussions. So far so 1999. But it worked. Social networking doesn’t have to ride the zeitgeist like a Harley every day of the week. Nothing wrong with improving proven concepts.

Twitter
Last night twitter saved my life. Glad to see Gary Vaynerchuck is on the same delayed reaction post SXSW buzz as Keepfakingit. Read and watch him here. garyvaynerchuk.com—twitter-vs-facebook kinda. I endorse his view on Twitter completely. Though my Jersey accent isn’t quite so pronounced.

Wordpress
When the bloggers of the world combined at SXSW they did it in a sponsored press-area-esque room called the BlogHaus. And Wordpress continues to dominate the market. Not an interesting statement but a true one.

Viddler
Is Viddler the most interesting streaming video player on the market right now? It could well be. I saw nothing at SXSW from Brightcove or YouTube or any of the other big players. It’s time for someone else to step to the plate. Viddler may be ready to go. It’s got the social comment thing down. And it looks nice too. Check it.
Drupel: Fast Company have just jumped aboard the good ship Drupel and at a panel on the current state of CMSs the open souce solution looked good.

Next New Networks
I’ve already said it but these guys are where CNN was quarter century ago. And they’ve got the feet-on-the-ground professional approach to content that means they may succeed where the podcasting and blogging aggregators have failed. Theirs was also one of the best parties. Public displays of Rock Band in an adult environment is a good thing.

Android
I didn’t hang with the Google guys. Not my scene. But amongst those whose scene it was, Android was making a serious impression. There may be no such thing as the mobile web, but it’s going to take a big heave to get the world’s population mobile access that really works. And there’s no denying that that’s what the world’s internet population wants.
I’ve seen enough shysters in my time telling me they were going to make me, and those I represent, rich from half-baked mobile apps. Mobile apps aren’t going to make anybody rich, but apps that can go mobile are. And Google are primed to pick up some of that revenue. If I were a startup, or a blue chip app creator, I’d make sure I had an incubator with with Android developers beavering away on something. On anything. Can’t win the game if you don’t know the rules.

Live.Rezpondr.com
So that’s the overview. But I keep coming back to the people and the talent at SXSW. live.rezpondr.com is a great example of smart creatives using a host of different services to put together a media package that meets specific events, in this case SXSW. So big shout out to Phil Campbell and Documentally. Big media could do worse than bring these guys in on a consultancy gig to shake up their news room.

So now we’ve got a mission statement for SXSWi 2008. Or at least I do. What are the supporting themes that are going to shape and direct this media adventure? From the hip: Personality and Participation.

The first formal panel I attended on Saturday was “Quit you day job and start video blogging” chaired by Next New Network’s Tim Shey. The panel featured Shey along with a host of video blogging pioneers. A couple of interesting points worth noting. First off, all of these people were talent and talented, knew how to act in front of a camera and crucially had something more interesting to say than the “fed-the-cat” stories that many blogs consist of. Whether the distribution medium is network tv or online vod, talent is talent. You simply can’t succeed without it.

The second more interesting point taken from this panel was I think mentioned by an audience member (note, the audiences at SXSW are the best in the business, but more of that later). The current state of play for online video producers and aggregators was likened to that of CNN and the cable networks in the US thirty years ago. The cable nets were a new game in town, run by young entrepreneurs who could think quicker move faster and than their counterparts in CBS, ABC and NBC. And crucially the FCC had limited jurisdiction meaning that there were virtually no limits on what the programmers could do. They utterly changed the rules of TV. Well guess what, that’s what it looks like to those working at the likes of Next New Networks. As the barriers to entry for online video networks lower, the truly creative are taking over from the truly geeky. The talent is spending more time on the shows and not worrying about html, bandwidth and hosting. And the likes of NNN are putting in place a layer of professionalism to bring in the revenue and quality control.

One question that has only occurred to me since SXSWi relates to the level of audience participation these new video producers are bringing to their shows. It would seem that they should be ahead of their network cousins. Are they? The subject simply didn’t come up.

That the old networks still don’t understand their audience isn’t even a question. Exhibit A: the text and phone scandals that hit BBC hard and brought ITV to its knees in 2007. Had these institution a clue about how to communicate with their viewers the voting rip-offs simply couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened. But back to Texas…

I suspect participation has been a theme of SXSWi since its inception; come on, ‘i’ is for interactive. But let’s take a quick look at what participation meant in 2008. Every single one of the tech companies that I’ve highlighted here have mass audience participation as either key USP or a key functionality component.

I’ve already mentioned audience participation. During every single keynote, panel and talk there existed back channel conversations involving the live audience. These conversations were formally or informally hosted by the likes of Meebo, Twitter and Utterz. The more astute chairpersons paid attention to these back channels and directed conversations accordingly, props here to Robert Scoble and David Dylan Thomas amongst others. The less astute and plain bad (I’m thinking Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg here) simply lost control to a collective intelligence in the auditorium that was simply too powerful for them to handle. It was amazing to be in one of these auditoriums, filled with maybe 2,000 normally sedate tech people, and be part of a collaborative revolt against the person meant to be directing proceedings.

If this behaviour is going to happen anywhere on Earth it’s going to be SXSWi, where thousands of the earliest adopters are gathered trying to out-geek each other. But there will come a point when these technologies and behaviours go critical and spread to the outside world. This was the participatory theme of 2008.

SXSWi finished a fortnight ago. Over those two weeks I’ve traveled home, read what others have had to say on the event and tried to pull some of those thoughts together. No apologies for the delay, there have been some advantages to waiting this long before writing about SXSWi.

Below I’ve attempted to distil and bottle my version of the SXSWi elixir. Maybe it’s easier to start off with what for me SXSWi is not. It’s not a tech conference in the manner of E3. It’s not a West Coast think-in á-la TED and it certainly isn’t an economically driven cock-fest such as Davos. It shares common factors with all of the above, as well as some PodCamp, BarCamp and any other kind of tech/media trade camp show that you may care to list. It takes elements from all of these, cross pollinates and spits them back out into one very social and sociable long weekend in Texas’ capital. What struck me most of all was the insights into current media culture on display. By that I mean media in its truest form, as extensions of our senses, not the definition of media limited to depressing discussions on the state of our commercial mass media such as network TV and the newspaper industry. I was so taken with this big picture look at media that since the event I’ve dusted off “Understanding Media” and gone back to McLuhan to structure some of my thoughts.

Of course I’ll put an asterisk against the opening words here. This is my take, there are a thousands others many of which will show deeper and more informed insight than myself.

It is human nature to look for patterns and assign themes where only true randomness exists. I’m most definitely guilty of that below, but I think it still worth while to look for common threads across the five days of SXSWi. Reading the discourse coming back on the event online one concept is calling out over all others. With the year that’s in it let’s call it “the audacity and urgency of intimacy”

Through posts on the themes, technologies, events and questions of SXSWi I intend to show that the out of control freight train that is new media is pushing social communication into truly new places and there isn’t anybody out there who really knows where it will ultimately take us too. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt and certainly not myself.

So let’s take my newly minted paraphrase backwards. The Intimacy comes from the new level of connectivity society is embracing, particularly those under 20 and living in the West. We’re connecting and sharing our lives at a base level never before done through a mass medium. This is urgent in that we’re pushing these connections right now and regardless of consequence. The teens of today may be in their thirties before the ramifications of this new connectedness comes homes to roost (that sounds like a warning, it isn’t, I’m optimistic for this Bebo generation). Finally the audacity. Anyone who has heard Mark Zukerberg speak his enthusiasm for Facebook’s mission can’t help but describe him using the adjective ‘audacious’. He believes he’s fueling a media revolution not seen since the dawn of the modern newspaper. And he thinks that despite the very public pushback the likes of Facebook’s Beacon are getting. Zukerberg may well be right though.

TrashBlanc get’s back to London on Tuesday and the first stop is going to be a trip to the personal trainer to lose the South-By-Belly. After that we have a ton of video and written SXS-Eeats to get live so stand by.

In the mean time we’re fully up to speed with our photo uploads. Check them out at flickr.com/photos/keepingitfake

Everyone should have a dream in life but few of us really do. The Ice Cream man does though. To give away a half a million sticks of frozen dairy throughout the US. A truly amazing individual

Watch video here.

Here at TrashBlanc.com we like to think we go the extra mile so that you don’t have to. We bite the burgers, finger the fries and taste the tacos so that you can get straight to the good stuff. 8 out of 10 times we come away with exactly what we put in. Three dollars worth of bland bananas. But every once in a while we hit the mother lode.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Stoney’s Pizza Van is something special. Check it out.

Overall rating ****
(out of 5)

Price: $3 per slice.

Video’s here.

We’ll have more on our trip to the wonderful Hula Hut out by the lake in Austin, but for the moment you can check the Trash Blanc lowdown on the Mexican Margarita. A little sweeter and greener than the standard tequilla cocktail, this house drink started off our last night at SXSWi with some style.

Overall rating: *****
(out of 5)

Price: $4 per shaker of liquid goodness.

Video’s here.

We’ll have our Nuclear Taco event video up later, but for us here at TrashBlanc.com the taco show was well and truly stolen by the Ice Cream Man. In fact, he may well have pilfered our entire SXSW food experience. In terms of right time, right place, right man, this guy hit a three run home run.

His stated goal is to travel the world and GIVE AWAY half a million ice creams,

“If I can do that I can do anything”

An obvious next question is how many have you given away so far mricecreamman. But TrashBlanc.com had brain freeze and we were thinking of nothing but blue food colouring. We had two ice creams, paid nothing and gave four TB stars to the man in the van.

Looking at theicreamman.com website, we can’t help feel there’s a more than a little corporate payola going on, but we’ll resist cynicism for the moment. Lick it up.

Overall rating ****
(out of 5)

Price: $0 per ice cream.

TrashBlanc doesn’t always have to enter a premises to bring you the full lowdown. This time it’s the 710 Room on Red River Street.

Watch video here.

SXS-Eats: The 6th St. Pizza showdown part II.
TrashBlanc.com takes it to the house for the second in our heavyweight pizza reviews. Check it.

Overall rating: * */2
(out of 5)

Price: $4 per spinach/mushroom slice.

Video’s here.

SXS-Eats: The 6th St. Pizza showdown part I.
TrashBlanc.com takes two for the team on 6th Street. We go where you doughn’t want to and take slices at Papparazzi Pizza and RoppoJo’s. Priced at $3 and $4 respectively neither stood out from the stodgy crowd of eateries on Austin’s party street. First through the sausage machine that is the TB review is Papprazzi.

Overall rating *
(out of 5)

Price: $3 per cheese slice.

Video’s here.

There isn’t enough weeks in the year for TrashBlanc to properly review all the bars in Austin. But over the week of SXSW we’re going to bring you the ones that stand out. Red Eye Fly on 7th and Red River hits the spot for us. It hosted SXSWi’s Café Fray on Sunday night. It also hosted TB’s crack pool team as they took on the locals.

Heath the owner, friend to the stars, is booked 6 nights per week every week of the year. Quite the gent, he gave us the lowdown on south-by and graciously let us beat him once out of four occasions.

But one feature of the bar stood out above all else. The poignant tribute to Dimebag Darrell.