Why can’t it be as easy to buy a holiday online as it is to buy a new printer or a shirt? Why do you always have to start by typing in where you’re going and when and then wade through a lot of options you’re not interested in or can’t afford?
  It’s a question […]

I’m not the only one who can’t see the point of all these 1,000 Places to See Before You Die books. There’s a good piece on the subject from Frank Bures on the excellent World Hum site.

Would you pay twenty quid for a holiday brochure? I’ve been sent a book by a company that thinks you might.
  It’s a hardback, the fashionable shape of a big bathroom tile, beautifully designed, with gorgeous colour pictures. It’s full of suggestions for “Big Short Breaks” — holidays that are supposedly short on time — […]

On the cover of his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen is described as a “digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider”. He sounds, though, like a very angry outsider.
The book is a polemic against Web 2.0 — that phase of the internet in which the audience, rather than just reading and watching […]

Today’s Daily Telegraph had a story in which the BBC’s use of misleading footage of the Queen in a documentary trailer was described as “the so-called ‘Crowngate’ affair”.
By whom is it so called? Not by our readers, I reckon. Maybe by a few old-timers at the BBC and by headline writers lacking in originality. Headline […]

You’d expect to find a fan letter to Bruce Springsteen in a blog. But would you expect to find it over two pages in El País? That’s where I found one yesterday. It had appeared first in The New York Times on September 30, to mark the release of Springsteen’s new album, Magic. It’s by […]