D'log

Return of the King:You couldn’t make it up; Morrissey triggers a cultural-tourism boom in Manchester. They crave authenticity, they like the city’s old grubby bits. Coach tours run regularly around the old Moz-chester. Planners with bulldozer tendencies, take note. (The Times; free registration required).

Shopping for skills:An alternative (if limited) approach to skill-sharing at 50+; open a shop.

Wheely good:The national cycle-route network is seeing a significant increase in usage.

Docpop:A secret trailer from the new Michael Moore documentary.

Survey says:Blogads has released the initial results of their survey of just over 17,000 blog-readers.

Boomer blog:How do you market to the emerging 50+ baby-boomer generation of affluent retirees? Of course, there’s now a blog for exactly that topic. Linking with my previous postings; is there perhaps an untapped market here, for younger coder-creatives to help skilled 50+ creatives to develop income-generating “skills-sharing products” that would share their accumulated creative […]

ComicWorks v1.0:The first Japanese comic-creation software freely available in the west, ComicWorks. I’ve tried it out and it’s a fairly basic demo: only partially in English, B&W only, no balloons, no comic-book fonts. I’m not sure it’s worth the $100 asked. But, there’s no time-limit and you can export to a PNG. The same company […]

Knowledge sharing for fun & profit:My new Photoshop Action is selling well. I’d like to get the page & instructions translated into Japanese. Japan has a huge economy; the sub-region around the 2nd-city of Osaka has a bigger economy than either Canada, Brazil or India. But… there are still big barriers; a viable localised front-end […]

Flying down to Rio:From back in May 2003, a useful summary of how the Anglosphere’s notion of “the creative industries” has travelled around the world: The Evolving Creative Industries.

Flying War Bird:The true story of how a Margate bacon-cutter ended up photographing D-Day. Including Pyro, the flying ginger cat.

Tent tech:BlogAds posts on new tent technologies. Like earth/cob houses, I imagine these work best in dry climates and countries with lots of cheap land. But fascinating, nonethless. Sadly there’s no way to pitch a tent in my garden because it’s essentially the yard of a terraced house. Although it’s been made into something rather […]

New Cities for Old:Radio 4 has a full transcript of the 29th April Analysis discussion on the culture-led regeneration of British cities, that I missed when I was at the Creative Clusters conference in Brighton.

Scottish uprising:I said in my recent conference report that a mood for “art for art’s sake” was growing. A few days later the DCMS discussion paper on the subject was launched. I’ve also highlighted here the dismal nature of the recent Scottish cultural review. Now the Scottish arts establishment are up in arms because they […]

Old Flashers:As I’ve said here before, the retirees of the Baby Boomer generation are going to be very different “old folks” than the generation that won the war. According to the market-spin (“shields up, Scotty!”) over-fifties are now 44% of the population, have 80% of the wealth in the UK, and are worth £260 billion […]

Jerwood Sculpture Park:The Jerwood Sculpture Park is making the move to the West Midlands.

600 years of talent:The Burslem School of Art has a new web-site. The current building stands on land which has been a centre of craft pottery production since the early middle-ages. 2005 will see the 100th anniversary of the present building.

News from Somewhere:England’s brilliant philosopher-king & farmer Roger Scruton has a new book coming out, News from Somewhere, the title a play on that of William Morris’s classic News from Nowhere. The Independent is first with a review.

PopDizzy:PopDizzy has trolled over to a new bona lattie on BlogSpot.