Collective Wisdom

• Kate Feld
• 16 Jan 07, 05:12 PM

You can learn a lot from bloggers. Take Manchester’s Journal, for instance. This strictly local group blog/bulletin board open to Live Journal users and guests is the place for anyone looking for a tip from their fellow Mancunians.

Amid the calls for restaurant reccommendations, help on job hunts or moving advice there are some pretty far-out quests. This week alone, posters have been looking for the name of a long-lost song, a tough nut umbrella that can stand up to life in the rainy city, and a butcher selling kangaroo meat – that last courtesy of an Aussie in exile with a craving for “Skippy burgers.” It’s remarkable what collective wisdom can come up with.

All of this interweb interaction has some side-effects, however. Over at Faithscape21, Matt Wilson has been thinking about the rise of blogging and online chatting and the not-unrelated decline in actually talking to people, face to face. It seems conversation is a dying art:

“If I was brave enough (and if it was July not January) I might drag a sofa into Piccadilly Gardens and erect a sign saying, TEACH ME TO CHAT! I'd ask passers by to share with me the Tai Chi of conversation - how to get it started - how to keep it going - how to wrap it up. But who am I kidding? ….the house is warm, the keyboard is convenient and somebody out there in cyberspace might just want to talk back.

Meanwhile, Cinema Fool has been to the pictures, taking in Mel Gibson’s much-maligned Apocalypto. Yeah, KazGraz says, she knows that the flick has a lot of negatives – the director’s bad press and justifiable unpopularity of late, the film’s violence and the fact that it’s scripted in an ancient Mayan dialect and subtitled...

“But could you just do something for me?” she asks. “Forget who made it. Accept that ancient Mayans would not speak “American”. And just watch it as one of those great films with a great hero who must face a difficult journey filled with adventure. Because that’s all it is. Strip away all the supposed alienating qualities and you’ve got a basic adventure story. And you know what? It’s bloody good.”

The ranks of the city’s photo bloggers can be expected to swell once everyone gets their shiny new Crimbo gagdetry up and running. One of the best around is ysr23, whose aim is to post a photo a day for a year.

Monday was, he wrote, “possibly the most photogenic day of the year so far and I am stuck on a plane. Back just in time for the sunset so I scramble around Wythenshawe International looking for the spectator terraces, pleasingly located on the 13th floor. What the signs don’t tell you is that they have been replaced by a building site, so pics are from behind a fence.”

To see the resulting photo, go here.