A Limey In Bermuda

Shootin' de breeze

Chris Gibbons is blogging again. This time he's not just talking about technology, but "music, football, movies, books, life, Bermuda - oh and maybe a bit of Mac stuff too". Welcome back, Chris.

The wrong tone

I'm glad to hear that Thaao Dill has admitted that he and Hott 107.5 are breaking broadcasting laws. I'm disappointed, however, that he seems to regard it as a legitimate act of civil disobedience. "We're in breach of a dumb...

Royal Gazette offers RSS feeds at last

The Royal Gazette finally gets some RSS feeds for its news, business, sport and lifestyle sections. Hurrah!

Not the Royal Gazette

For some reason, www.theroyalgazette.com is displaying Daisy & Mac's website, not the Gazette's. The newspaper's site can still be found at www.royalgazette.com, however. Technical error or a case of cybersquatting? UPDATE: A reader writes in to point out that Daisy...

Memory loss

One of the problems I've run into time and again while trying to research my posts is the difficulty finding old articles on the Royal Gazette's website. Earlier this year, the Royal Gazette took a leaf out of the Bermuda...

Dealing with criticism

So, it seems the PLP's blog will link to me, after all, as long as I'm saying something they want to hear. Three weeks ago, I contacted PLP chairman David Burt to ask if he would include this blog in...

Government TV

Writing on Progressive Minds, 30strong argues that cost of CITV, the Government's new TV station, is justified because its programming is cultural, not partisan. His comments echo those of Premier Ewart Brown at the channel's launch, who said, "On this...

Bias, fairness and objectivity

A recurrent theme of the PLP’s campaign is that the media has a pro-UBP bias. Is there any truth to this claim? Or is the PLP misrepresenting opinion as bias (whether deliberately or accidentally)? A thought-provoking discussion of the difference...

YouBoob

Might I suggest that if the Department of Tourism is planning to distribute any more promotional videos of Bermuda on YouTube, they make them considerably less boring than this one. Show, don't tell. Disabling comments on them might be a...

Blogging your convictions

Scott Karp nicely summarises how I feel about blogging: Think about all of the most successful bloggers — they don’t blog by consensus. They don’t try to please anybody — in fact, they routinely piss people off. They see the...

Blogging for the PLP

While the popularity of blogging continues to grow, I remain baffled by the one-sided nature of Bermuda’s political blogosphere. None of the blogs that regularly discuss local politics could be described as being friendly to the PLP. That’s a problem....

Most expensive and least effective

"Government has to consider all its citizens. Just about every house in Bermuda has a television." So says a Government spokesperson in today's Bermuda Sun, justifying the Government's decision to forge ahead with its plans for its own TV station....

GetLostBermudians.bm

One of the things that has always annoyed me about .bm domain names is that only Bermuda-registered organisations can apply for one. Ordinary Bermudians cannot. I’ve never understood the logic behind this. The supply of domain names is practically infinite,...

Ten questions for Ewart Brown

According to today’s Bermuda Sun, Ewart Brown is expected to give interviews on his vision for Bermuda next week. Bermuda’s journalists are a mostly spineless lot. They usually shy away from asking politicians anything that might make them feel uncomfortable...

Saving the Gardens

Local activist Lisa Vickers has started a blog to act as a focus for the campaign to prevent the new hospital being built in the Botanical Gardens. Save The Gardens will disseminate information about the Botanical Gardens and the plans...

Cutting off their nose

Last week, the Government was having some difficulty making the sustainable development documents available on its website. In order to ensure the public still had somewhere to get them from, the Department of e-Government asked if I would post them...

Who killed Bermuda's newspapers?

Last month, the Economist published a lead article looking at the challenges faced by newspaper companies in the West. The article quotes author Philip Meyer, whose book “The Vanishing Newspaper” suggests that newsprint will be dead in America by 2043....

Government starts blogging

The Government has launched its first blog. Titled “Charting Our Course: Sustaining Bermuda”, the blog has been established to help solicit public feedback on the draft sustainable development plan. Comments can be left on any of the posts on the...

Bermuda Maps

The Survey Section of the Ministry of Works and Engineering have released our own version of Google Maps. Bermuda Maps is, on the whole, an improvement over the Ministry’s current online address finder. The most obvious new feature is the...

Open mike: Impediments to racial understanding?

Weaselguard writes: “A few years back on CNN, on the dearly departed Aaron Brown show, Brown had some interesting guests. They were black leaders from various cities in the States. They were unknown to me. A major concern that they...

Blogging in Barbados

I was amazed to learn today that the PLP’s ideological cousin, the Barbados Labour Party (BLP), has a blog. Moreover, last month they publicly thanked the Barbados Free Press, one of their most vocal blog critics, for giving them "a...

One thumb up

A year or so ago I had the idea of building a website to allow residents and visitors to review local restaurants. I experimented with a customised blog format, supplemented with some free online tools, but soon realised I’d have...

Crying foul on CableVision

A warning to anyone planning to watch any of the World Cup matches on a CableVision box: don’t trust their electronic programme guide (EPG) to tell you what time the matches start. I turned channel 7 on at 1pm this...

News online first

British newspaper The Guardian is probably one of the world's most web-savvy newspapers. Earlier this year, the paper launched Comment Is Free - a group blog bringing together the paper's regular columnists and other writers and commentators, on which readers...

Web 0.9

Last week, I praised the Bermuda Sun for getting a story up on Friday’s protest at the House of Assembly the same afternoon. “If they can do it, why can't the Royal Gazette?” I asked. In reply, Mid Ocean News...

Independence poll

It appears that support for a referendum on independence hasn't suffered a catastrophic collapse, after all. Although today's Royal Gazette reported that only "one in seven" people (14.3%) want the issue decided by referendum, the paper has confirmed that that...

Pleasant questions

Yesterday's Royal Gazette featured a disappointing interview with Transport and Tourism Minister Dr. Ewart Brown. It eschewed difficult questions in favour of affording Dr. Brown another opportunity for self-promotion. What motivated his "back to the plantation" remark in the run-up...

Inside the Royal Gazette

An anonymous letter to the Editor appears in the 28 March edition of the Royal Gazette (RG). The letter writer, who signs him/herself “For an open and free press” takes to task the Premier and others who complained about the...

Airport security

Guilden Gilbert writes to express concern about the reports of US government officials being able to get bomb-making materials past checkpoints at 21 US airports. Or specifically, why the media chose to make the information public: "Shouldn't security agencies be...

Engaging the media

Alvin Williams and I don't agree on much. But his column in today's Mid Ocean News was excellent: interesting, measured and pragmatic. "Does the news media contribute to the racial divide and sharpen political antagonisms in Bermuda?" he asks at...

Shutting down LiB

I'm not quite sure what Government backbencher Renee Webb was getting at yesterday when she noted that the Government has the right to shut down a website if its content is offensive (in the public interest, of course). But I...

Bermuda Sun gets RSS feed

The good news: the Bermuda Sun has become Bermuda's first newspaper to get an RSS feed. The link isn't visible on the homepage, but it can be found in the 'News' section, suggesting that feeds for other sections of the...

Plantation questions

When I heard that Deputy Premier Dr. Ewart Brown will no longer answer questions from the press that he considers to be "plantation questions", I wondered what on earth he meant. So did the Royal Gazette. So I emailed him...

Culture of offence

First Muslims were offended by a Danish newspaper. Now Hindus have been offended by a French film and Christians by an American TV show (again). These religious folk really need to lighten up a bit. Mind you, I haven't heard...

The Robinson petition

Why would the Royal Gazette run a story about a online petition to clear the name of Dennis Robinson, one of the murderers of the Cooper twins, then not give the website's address? I hope it wasn't a deliberate omission....

Open mike: Danes, free speech and Mohammed

Njegos writes about the Danish cartoon furore: "By now, everyone has heard of the infamous cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed that appeared on the editorial page of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The crisis escalated recently when France-Soir ran the cartoons...

No need to poll

In the last few weeks, the Royal Gazette have been running a very odd series of polls on their website. The first asked what operating system readers were using. The second, what screen resolution they had. Now they're asking what...

Illegal to annoy

The US has just passed a great new law that would have come in mighty handy here on LiB a couple of months ago: "Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of...

Still here

Anyone reading yesterday's copies of the Bermuda Sun or Mid Ocean News could be forgiven for thinking that I've either died or gone back to the UK. In their reviews of the year, Larry Burchall noted that, "In Bermuda we’ve...

Books and bombs

It seems that there's a much more serious problem with the Logos II than those articulated by the Chamber of Commerce. From today's Bermuda Sun: "Logos II is docked by the Number 1 shed. There is an Open Day on...

Survivor and Bermuda's broadcasters

One of the most surprising things about last night’s finale of Survivor wasn’t so much that Danni won (though I thought that Steph deserved it more), it was the complete absence of local ads during the two-hour show. While it...

Making the most of cyberspace

Here’s a cool idea from the one of the guys who gave us boxoffice.bm: online movie rentals. Nice to see that Bermuda isn’t always stuck in the electronic dark ages when it comes to useful online services. Now if only...

Compelled to pay

I can understand why the Government compels Bermuda's cable TV companies to include the Island's local channels in their line-ups. What I do not understand, however, is why it now wants to make the cable companies pay for the privilege....

The alternative charts

BermudaSucks presents last week's bestselling books and top DVD rentals in Bermuda. Don't look for any of these at the Phoenix or Leisure Time, though.

Propaganda in Iraq

This weekend there was an interesting discussion here about the difference between news, opinion, bias and propaganda. But paying newspapers to run favourable stories, presented as independent accounts? Now that's propaganda.

Under-age designing

I've been using Evite to put together an invite for a party I'm throwing. It's the first time I've tried it, but it seems to work pretty well and there are a nice variety of designs to choose from. Some...

A disappointing redesign

Blank image placeholders in the pages of another major Bermuda website? It must be the newly-redesigned site of another MediaHouse company. Earlier this year I became excited at the news that the Bermuda Sun website was going to receive an...

At least our mothers love us

It’s a tough life being a “serious” blogger. Not only do most people have no idea what a blog is (a recent survey in the UK found that seven out of ten people don't know), many of those who do...

Music quotas

There are several reasons why the Government's latest diktat - that 10% of the music on local radio stations should be Bermudian - is misguided. First, according to ZBM programming manager Darlene Ming, traditional Bermudian music is not popular with...

Broadcasting Burch

I'm not sure I see the problem with newly-appointed Housing and Works Minister Lt. Col. David Burch being allowed to keep his radio talk show on Hott 107.5. His show is not funded by the taxpayer, so even if he...