virtualeconomics

Redesign

I done redesigned this blog. Which, yes, in practice meant clicking some buttons in Typepad and choosing designs and widgets that Actual Programmers and Actual Designers had left lying around there (thanks guys!). Prompted by whim, a vague sense that the old design and especially quite a lot of the old widgets were so out of the date that the companies behind them had long ceased to exist and a comment that the site had become a little hard to navigate. So here we are.

As famous as the Queen

I just spent an instructive few minutes trying to find people whose own websites are higher up Google's results than their Wikipedia entry. Jim Carrey has a very new website, but no; IMDB, fan pages and Wikipedia are all higher up the Google results. Sergei and Larry you'd have thought might have made exceptions for themselves, but again no. Barack Obama, Jerry Yang, Vladimir Putin, Mike Arrington, Bruce Lee, Silvio Berlusconi, Rupert Murdoch...no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

In fact, the only person I could find whose website comes ahead of their own Wikipedia entry was the Queen. (The website of her son and heir Prince Charles is beaten into fourth place not just by his own Wikipedia entry but by multiple listings for the West End cinema which shares his name.) Oh, and porn actress Jenna Jameson (link is safe, sorry). It works for me too, but that's only because I'm not famous enough to have a Wikipedia entry (I've never been able to tell whether the one I did have was deleted on reasonable enough grounds of non-notability or because it was composed entirely of lies by my friends claiming I was a spy for the Bratislavan government. Though possibly that's what all Bratislavan spies say). So...me, the Queen, Jenna Jameson. For everyone else in the world though there's the mighty Wik.

New CEO

Hopefully a sign of exciting times ahead that news of our (AND, my employer's) new CEO was broken on his personal blog an hour before it was even picked up via the usual leak to Media Guardian...

Apologies

Hello. I've been too busy to write anything here for about a fortnight. That isn't likely to change any time soon. Sorry about that.

Away

Currently away on holiday in Cornwall and so - I assumed - little or no posting. But I have brought my Asus EEE and today I discovered that the B&B I'm staying in for one night in Truro has free wifi. Free wifi has come a long way.

Normal service...

I'm both screamingly busy and suffering from a nasty cold, hence my silence since Sunday. Hope to be back with you in a few days...

Normal service...

Since some of you have been kind enough to ask (hi Max), I've been too busy at work to blog for more than a week. Normal service should resume soon.

(Reminds me of the poster I saw on the underground a few years ago. The staff has put up a whiteboard bearing the handwritten message "all London Underground lines are running a good service", and some genius has realised that this sentence would be considerably improved by the addition of a simple exclamation mark.)

Flagrant self-promotion #674

If you happen to be up at 2am tonight the lovely people at Radio 5's Pods and Blogs invited me back this evening to talk about my post What Did News Audiences Really Want To Read About In 2007? and see whether I could justify my (largely) frivolous claim that news audiences only really want to read about people having sex with horses and bicycles. (I can't, of course, but it was fun to try.) If for some reason you're not up at 2am when the show goes out I believe it'll appear as a podcast on the site shortly and include all sorts of exciting things that I'm not sure I'm supposed to tell you about before Chris - whose shows it is - has had chance to.

Off for Xmas

Some people hire blog sitters; some invite their friends to post for them while they're on holiday; I'm just going away for a couple of weeks, so there'll be nothing to see here until January. Have a lovely Xmas.

Some you win, some you lose

Over the course of the year neither humility nor hubris have prevented me from linking to the various people who have been generous enough to say nice things about Virtual Economics: from Press Gazette's list of the 13 top UK journalism blogs to Shane Richmond's list of essential journalism blog posts; to Adrian Monck's UK top ten journalism bloggers; to Journalism Daily (where my listing as the 16th "hottest" journalism blog would be more meaningful if such strange omissions as Digital Deliverance, to which I would not dream of claiming I held a candle, were rectified) I've shamelessly pointed them all out on these pages.

So in the spirit of balance I should probably point out that you are, right now, reading what may just be the least important or influential economics blog in the whole world.

So it goes.