Wardman Wire Magazine

Noted in passing from the Guardian:

Red and White Holdings, the investment company owned by the Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, has today increased its shareholding in Arsenal to over 25%. Usmanov did have a 24% share in the club already and his extension of influence - the exact level of which has yet to be confirmed - only raises the possibility of him making a formal takeover approach. A bid would have to be made should he reach 29.9%.

“We are pleased to have now secured over a quarter of the shares at Arsenal,” a statement on behalf of Red and White confirmed this afternoon. “We are committed long-term investors and supporters of the club and are comfortable that we are now in a protected position. We also welcome the strengthening of the squad and look forward to a successful conclusion to the season.”

The Arsenal board, led by Danny Fiszman, the second largest shareholder at the club, has yet to offer Usmanov a seat on the board but may now be forced to soften its stance.

Little Brothers are still watching you. (Apologies, the Mulberry Bush has gone missing. It looks like a leftover migration issue).

Mick Fealty reflects on how the Slugger O Tool site has come to its current approach to moderating comments while seeking to avoid driving commenters away over the last 5 years.
I started my blog, Slugger O’Toole in early June 2002 purely as a research tool for a paper I was planning to write on the future of Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the time, I was still trying to assemble the writing team and hadn’t even approached a funding body.

Of course I didn’t need funding to start writing the blog. At the time the standard blogger didn’t come with a commenting facility; and I didn’t even put titles on my post for the first month or so. They tended to be short narrative summaries of the day’s news in Northern Ireland.

But by the following February, we had the funding and were in a position to roll out interviews with some pretty senior people in Northern Irish politics. We shifted platforms to Moveable Type, primarily to give Slugger the commenting stability it lacked in Blogger.

Almost immediately the comment traffic took off.

Click through on the title to read the entire article.

Things are different from usual this morning with no frontpages for the Daily Papers, as I’ve been developing marketing pages for a couple of Professional Services.

The first of these is for design of blog buttons; I have created more than 100 buttons for campaigns, blogs and websites in the last 18 months, and I have included a selection in this post. There are about 60 here, and there are around another 50 to go; I’ll put those in a second post.

Click through on the title to read the full post.

If you are following your own technorati “Authority” score you may have noticed a decline in the last few days.

It’s that time - 6 months since the Usmanov imbroglio, and all the links are dropping out of the Technorati scores. I’m down by 50 in 4 days.

The Technorati rankings don’t matter a damn, but perhaps it is a reminder - 6 months later - that it is time to pick up the Freedom of Expressions cudgels once again.

The dodgy libel laws are still on the books, and Shillings Lawyers are still to be seen strutting about bullying people into self-censorship on the basis of untested and unproven allegations that material that happens to be disliked by rich clients is defamatory.

I haven’t forgotten; neither should any of us.

And I’m looking for more nominees for the Usmanov Schillings Duck-n-Cluck awards.

This morning a commenter called Thevets (thank-you Thevets - if you have a blog let me know for a credit) has drawn my attention to the fact that Schillings Lawyer’s, who acted for Alisher Usmanov in shutting down critical discussion without addressing the questions raised, have appended their name to a letter in the Guardian yesterday calling for attacks upon free expression in Pakistan to stop. The letter includes this paragraph:

Independent media and journalists have been the target of sweeping press censorship and attack. Peaceful and legitimate meetings held by civil society groups and activists seeking to resist these unconstitutional measures have been broken up by the police.

General Musharraf’s actions are arbitrary and unconstitutional. He has bypassed Pakistan’s own legal protections to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to life and protect its citizens’ human rights and fundamental freedoms. An independent legal profession and judiciary such as we have in the UK are vital in ensuring the accountability of the state. For example, when the UK government argued that it was acceptable to use evidence obtained through torture, lawyers able to operate independently and free from fear were able to challenge them in the courts.

I have 3 points to make here.

I was interviewed on the Matt Revell’s Political Radio programme last night.

The interview was about how the Society of Homeopathy had a post removed from the Quackometer blog rather than addressing the (very serious) questions raised, and the changes that we need in the way the libel laws work in this country.

We discussed what homeopathy is (effectively a Placebo effect - which can work, sometimes, for certain conditions), and talked through what has happened, and some of the questions raised.

Two new wannabe Usmanovs in a few days. Ye Gods.

First the Society of Homeopaths, and now the Chancellor of the Exchequer.