Friday, April 04, 2008

User-created content

A piece that made me laugh in Private Eye last week:


As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on Sky News begged viewers to "help us put together the fullest national picture possible" by sending in their photos of the damage... posters on the Football 365 forum, finding that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can ("the wind blew it around all night") were being featured...rose to the challenge.


And so:


By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed,” the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from the environmental disaster movie
The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featureing either teddy bears of the athlete and television presenter Kriss Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeline McCann was clearly visible in the background.


In other news, I got a new job and moved to London. It's pretty hardcore but I'm on it.