You might have noticed a couple of recent posts that consisted only of introductions, followed by a “read more” link.

If you’ve followed any of those you’ll have found yourself on My London Your London, my new website. I’m not calling it a blog, because it is designed to appeal to readers who wouldn’t necessarily read a blog.

Anyone who does read blogs, however, will instantly recognise the general format. (It is WordPress – which I’m still learning but I have generally found to be excellent.)

It is designed to develop, I hope, into a significant cultural guide to London, with an average of two posts a day reviewing plays, museums and galleries, books and other “cultural” events in London. (That’s from me – there might be other contributors as well.) It is, you might guess, something I hope to make some money from, by means of advertising – both pay per click and paid-up adverts.

The recent article asking “what happens if the old media dies too soon” has helped to crystalise my thinking about what I’m doing. Tom Foremski asks:

… what happens if we lose much of the old media before the new media business models are formed?
It is Silicon Valley’s top companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Ebay, that are devastating the old media business models. But the new media business models have not yet “grown up” to support the quality journalism that we need as a society.
The New York Times, for example, pays about $1.25m a year to have a Baghdad bureau, not to mention the rest of its huge editorial infrastructure. In contrast, online publishing relies heavily on revenues from Google text ads–but Google ads won’t pay enough to fund a global network of journalists.”

The fact is, up until now, the blogosphere has provided very little original journalistic content. Look at the most successful blogs – in hits and revenue – and they consist mainly of links to the “old” media. But if the “old” media is dying, and I think it is, or at least being forced into massive, rapid change that it is ill-equipped to handle, there must be an opportunity for providing original quality content, while retaining some of the personal aspects of the blogosphere.

I can’t set up a bureau in Baghdad. But I can use my skills as a professional journalist, and my reasonably coherent areas of interest, to offer something that is a quality, original product.

The key will be getting search engine hits. As the Guardian’s online editor wrote recently, half of its hits are now coming via Google and other search engines, and I’ve found already with this blog that it is possible in fairly specialised areas to get pretty high on them. (There just aren’t that many reviews of fringe plays, for example.)

There will also be – soon! – another, books website, featuring books by and about women. There’s probably not so much advertising revenue there, but it does cover one of my main areas of interest. And there I’m hoping to encourage even more contributions. (Full announcement by the end of the week, I hope.)

What does this mean for Philobiblon? I hope it will become more coherent, because the reviews on this site will only be a couple of paragraphs, with the “read more” button, so the site will not be swamped by one long book or exhibition review. Everything else will continue much as it is now, including Femmes Fatales.

I might be starting this plan of becoming at least a semi-professional blogger too soon; I might be starting too late. The bank balance will tell. But I feel there is an opportunity, and I’m going to give it a shot.

Feedback, suggestions, and complaints welcome. And if you feel an overwhelming urge to tell me “you’re mad”, by all means feel free to do so.

(And should you feel like putting a link to My London Your London on your site, I’ll be extremely grateful!)

A pre-World War I murder mystery is solved, and the length of local memories in a French village revealed. (It is in the end, however, a rather common story – two blokes have a fight in a bar over a woman.)The killer’s family always knew, and you get the feeling the village had a pretty good idea, but nobody was going to tell the local gendarme, the representative of outside authority anything. Or maybe he was in on what happened, but wasn’t going to make it official.

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If you think you’ve got an “odd-shaped” body, it is not you at fault, but the clothes manufacturers. Although I don’t get the fact that I do actually meet their technical definition of an “hour-glass figure”, but I still can’t get trousers that fit. (If they fit at the hips, the waist is usually 10cm or more too big – don’t know what I’m going to do when hipster jeans disappear, as the ridiculous fashion cycle rolls on.)

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Even the Right is worried about Mailization of the British media. (To which I made reference yesterday.) Sir Peregrine Worsthorne writes in the Independent today about the Telegraph:

“What we are in danger of getting is not the revival of a newspaper which represented English conservatism at its nicest – as the Daily Telegraph was when Bill Deedes served as its editor rather than its fig leaf – but rather a cloned new version of the Daily Mail which represents English conservatism at its very nastiest. A double dose of the Daily Mail poison, could the English body politic really survive that?”

(Both of those Independent links will only work for a couple of days – sorry – due to the incredibly shortsighted policy it has of putting everything behind a paywall. Which is why I don’t often link to it.)

If you want to see great art, don’t go to the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy. If, however, you want to be entertained and delighted, surprised and enlightened, then this is an unmissable event.

From the first room, with its giant portraits of the emperors of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns* and the astonishingly crafted garments that match those they are wearing, you are dazzled with brilliant colours and swamped in the astonishing detail and craftsmanship that produced these lovingly preserved samples of what must be largely lost arts.

Almost everything in this extensive exhibition was made to the greater glory of these three men, or for their entertainment**. They appear again and again in different guises, sometimes as fervent Buddhists, sometimes as hunt-obsessed leaders of fierce nomads, sometimes as sober Confucian scholars. (Although the extremely formidable-looking Xiaosheng, Empress Dowager, painted in 1751 for her 60th birthday, does get an airing in this first room.)

Read more

There’s an extremely disturbing report out from Amnesty International about attitudes towards rape in Britain. It is no wonder that conviction rates are so low, when the general public – which means of course the juries – just don’t get that the rapist is responsible for his own actions, not the victim.

“A third of people believe a woman is partially or completely responsible for being raped if she has behaved flirtatiously, a survey suggests.
The Amnesty International poll of 1,000 people also found over 25% believe she is at least partly to blame if she has worn revealing clothing or been drunk.”

Woman’s Hour this morning had an excellent report on the Amnesty findings, and the broader issue. It seems that while there have been many improvements in police and other official attitudes (although they are still far from perfect), the next big step is going to have to be with public opinion.

Yet how to do this. How do you convince a Daily Mail reader?

I was thinking that the campaign that is yet to happen – one to empower men to report male rape – might have some answers here. If a man gets raped, was it his fault if he was drunk?

… while also talking about the great figures of her day.

She’s writing about her first recollections of William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and the Duke of Wellington.

But all of these pale before the man who seems to have been her first crush, Mr Windham. (Anyone know who he was?)

UPDATE 21/11: I think I’ve worked out who this is, or at least most likely is: William Windham, (1750–1810). The ONDB says of him:

“Acknowledged as one of the gifted young men of his generation, he numbered Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Samuel Johnson among his particular friends, and was a pallbearer at Johnson’s funeral. Windham vacillated between love of academic study and the duties of a public career. He was a talented linguist and wrote three mathematical treatises, albeit unpublished ones.
As late as 1790 he described himself as ‘a little of two characters and good in neither: a politician among scholars and a scholar among politicians’ (Windham Papers, 1.96). Deeply introspective and prone to bouts of indecision, Windham was nevertheless a popular figure in polite society. Wraxall deemed him ‘graceful, elegant and distinguished’ with conversation that displayed ‘the treasures of a highly cultivated understanding’ (Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, 4.73). A bachelor until his late forties, he married, on 10 July 1798, Cecilia (1750–1824), daughter of Commodore Arthur Forrest (d. 1770), and his wife, Juliana; they had no children.”

* After Africa elected its first female president, it looks as though South America is about to follow suit. Michelle Bachelet, a survivor of torture under General Pinochet, has a huge lead in the opinion polls for Chile’s general election, which will be on December 11.

What makes this even more unusual is that she appears to be confident enough to be explicitly feminist, saying that she will ensure that 50 per cent of her Cabinet ministers will be female – a figure that I think has only been equalled or beaten in Scandanavia.

* Then a Japanese royal escaped from the palace. Princess Sayako renounced her status to marry a commoner. (Of course he might only be a bonus, when you think of how the poor princess who married in has fared.)

This Guardian article says it was a “dramatic break with the past, and that was driven home to me by an email letter today from the Ichiroya Kimono Flea Market. (They sell antique kimonos and other Japanese antiquities, but also write a newsletter in entirely understandable if slightly off-key English that gives a fascinating insight into another world view.) Yuka writes:

“I love the photos of the both Emperor and Empress when their only daughter entered and came to their table. You may not believe it but they are the first who attended their children’s wedding reception. … You can see how happy they looked and their peaceful smiles are the ones of ordinary parents. They greeted all the guests stayed until everything was over and thanked and sent the guests off — it is a natural thing but was a very unusual thing in the royal family history.
… The children used respect language to the Emperor and Empress, and in public, we could never see them hug each other or speak frankly each other but in these short words, we could see their bond and warm caring of each other.
Many people lined the streets and wished their happiness. Some people said, they felt the royal family is now very close to them and they could never forget the smiles of relief of Sayako san’s parents-they certainly looked different from the faces we see in their public appearance.

The BBC has a series of pictures.

* Meanwhile in France, the apparent president-to-be, Nicholas Sarkozy, has had a meeting with an editorial house. After that, his ex-wife’s book was pulped “and deleted from the firm’s computers”. So much for free speech – although what’s the bet it is on the internet within days?