Well, here we are. Day 7, with The Observer. It's been a tiring but enlightening week, which I plan to do again someday, with a different selection of newspapers. For now, I plan to take a day or two off, and then write a retrospective about this whole experience.
Today, I have been spending much time working my way through a weekend edition of The Guardian. I do normally buy this on Saturdays, but I don't normally give it the amount of time and attention I did today, which may have been a mistake. One more day of the experiment to go now, then my attention is focused on getting Shizuku from Kubuntu 8.04 to Kubuntu 9.04, which should be an experience.
Well, today I woke up after a difficult night sleeping, skipped breakfast, went to get two blood samples taken, then went to make my review of The Daily Telegraph. Which is a broadsheet, so it's really long. The surprising thing is, I then went on to make my longest and most enjoyable review yet. I expected it to be like The Times, but leaning more to the right. What I found was like the Daily Mail, but larger and on steroids. My love of debate takes over from there, read the review for more.
More than halfway through now, and today I take on The Independent, which is expensive but informative.
Also, my mum has been working away at the puzzles (which she quite likes to do) and I think it's time for an update now we're past the halfway mark. The Sun did quite well, but there wasn't much of it, so second place so far. The Times did very well with the right amount of content and the right difficulty level (with a moderate difficulty Killer Sudoku, while The Guardian always has them at hard difficulty) which gets it first place. But the Daily Mail was just too ambitious with their four-page coffee break pullout, which she felt was too much to get through in one day and would leave people frustrated, leaving it in last place.
On day 3, I talk about the Daily Mail, which I have more experience with than the others. On balance, it's probably my least favourite so far.
My experiment continues today with some thoughts on The Times. It's nice to be upmarket again.
I've also made a couple of minor corrections to the article from day 1, and hacked together a basic navigation bar to make it easier to go forward and backward through the days. This took some fighting with a very uncooperative XHTML specification and still isn't quite right. I may fix it later, if I can figure out a way how.
As promised, the Great British Newspaper Experiment begins today. Day 1 sees me give my opinions on The Sun.
I feel dirty.
Aren't I on a roll? My newest article is entitled Music in the Modern Age and argues against harsher restrictions on file-sharing by attempting to demonstrate that music is worth very little in the modern world, and attempting to change that will ultimately be harmful to everyone. An alternate argument to support this would be that 'intellectual property' is in fact not a property at all and does not deserve the same protections as traditional property, but I've seen that done better before and would rather not retread the same old ground again.
I also do intend to start the Great British Newspaper Experiment tomorrow, so watch this space.
I've now seen some gameplay from Final Fantasy XIII, and feel I now have enough information to write about my initial impressions. I'd call them mixed but somewhat optimistic.
I've also heard plenty about the Pirate Bay Trial and how it has ended, but I don't feel I have anything further to add on that.
Today I watched a video of a lecture by Professor James Boyle in relation to his new book, The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind (found via fredericiana, who found it via Boing Boing). I found it to be quite interesting, maybe you will too.
Well, after some time thinking about what to write, a new article! How to Lose Friends and Alienate People talks about how some debaters manage to drive away potential allies, and focuses on Americans because they're really good at this.
I'm also looking to start a week-long project looking at the great variability of British newspapers. I ended up delaying this because of Easter weekend, but I hope to start it for real on Monday 20th. More details coming if my motivation holds.