blog terminology, TV chefs and iPhone killers

A quick catch up on stuff I've read recently and recommend:

Like me, Pete Ashton (and Stuart Feeling Listless before him) get irritated by misuse of the term 'blog' - as in "I liked that blog on Scout Niblett the other day", where clearly Assistant Blog is a blog and that post was a post. Fairly obvious, I would have thought, but if you're still confused, here's Pete's Taxonomy of Blogging.

Over at his New Statesman blog, Simon Munnery is on typically fine form. He's talking about TV chefs this week.

Chefs always use 'the finest ingredients'. Isn’t that cheating? Shouldn’t a great chef be able to create a decent meal out of mediocre ingredients? Where do chefs get off anyway taking the credit for food; they didn’t make it after all - they only heated it up, chopped it and slapped it on a plate. Food behaves according to the simple equation I have devised below:

Food + Food = Food

What a chef creates on a plate is a collage, not art. Then again, writers rarely invent words, and painters seldom manufacture paint, so I’m wrong. Sorry.

More celebrity bloggers now - it's good to see Stephen Fry entering the blogosphere, and amusing to note that his is probably the most techy blog I've read in many moons - still good fun though (as you'd expect), and very interesting to anyone interested in the iPhone and its various competitors:

Of course, this essay, if it can be described as such, is a response to the rise and rise of the SmartPhone, as most publicly trumpeted a few weeks ago with the arrival of Apple's iPhone. I am not here to laud or review that device however, it has had enough publicity and I really want you to believe that, Apple addict as I am, my eyes have always been open to the virtues of anything good, exciting, functional, elegant, pleasing to use. In fact the real precipitating reason for writing this is the fact that within three weeks I have bought/been sent, aside from my iPhone (which, yes, I dearly love), three soi-disant 'iPhone killers' - the HTC Touch, the Nokia E90 and the Sony Ericsson P1i. While I don't intend fully to review, road-test or benchmark each device (as if I could, anyway), I do want to share my thoughts about where these devices appear to be going.

Interestingly, while we're on the subject of Apple, I was talking to a friend this morning who informed me that on receipt of a brand new Nano yesterday, he discovered that - utterly ludicrously - it is only compatible with Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later. The same goes for all the new iPods, even the shuffle. So if you're thinking of upgrading, that's worth bearing in mind.

Lastly, this is naughty, but good - it allows you to download any music up on myspace as a low-quality (but listenable) MP3. Just enter the site address in the search box and it'll provide you with direct links to each song. You can even do it for my band, if you want.

myspacegrab
get assistant songs at myspacegrab

Right, that's me for now - my train is about to pull in to Chichester.