The Orwell Award 2010: Request for help from readers

After fifteen months of blogging, I've just had an unsolicited email that's made it all seem worthwhile.

It's from the people who run the annual Orwell Awards, one of which is for a blog. It's open to anyone to submit their blog - so if you feel like submitting yours, you can find further details of how to do it and what they're looking for HERE.

Like all the other candidates, I'll have to submit ten of the things I've posted between 1 January and 31 December, 2009, which poses the problem of how to select a top 10 from the 319 posts that have appeared (so far) during the year.

HELP PLEASE!

As those of us who write are the least well-qualified to evaluate what we've written, this is where I'm hoping you might be able to help.

If you've seen any posts on the blog during the year that you can still actually remember, and/or that struck you as being particularly interesting, novel or consistent with the 'values' of the Orwell Prize (for more on which, see HERE), I'd greatly appreciate it if you could let me know which ones they were - either in the comments below or by email to maxatkinson(AT)speaking.co.uk).

And if you've time to refresh your memory and select a top 10, there's full list of links to everything posted on the blog since it started HERE.

Is there someone who doesn't want us to see 'Life After Death by PowerPoint'?

I've just discovered that an embedded link to a YouTube video on a post six months ago 'has been removed due to terms of use violation.'

This strikes me as being rather interesting, if only because I'd been writing about being under legal pressure to 'tone down' some of my comments on the pros and cons of PowerPoint before the publication of my book Lend Me Your Ears - and had pointed to this video as an example of something that was 'freely available on YouTube and, as far as I know, hasn't attracted any attention from Microsoft's legal department.'

The removal of the version on YouTube that I'd embedded suggests that someone somewhere isn't very happy about it.

But the good news is that, if you missed comedian Don McMillan's take on PowerPoint, you can still watch it by linking to YouTube from HERE or below:

Phone box becomes the world's smallest library and a worldwide news story

We've just had a visit from a German television crew, who've latched on to a story about our village that's been brewing for quite a few weeks - and has already been reported on as far away as Wells, Russia and Canada.

It all started at a tea party in the village square at the end of August, where a main topic of discussion was what to do with the phone box, which British Telecom had offered to sell to the Parish Council for £1.

Jan Fisher (interviewed HERE) came up with the idea of a book-exchange, as the travelling library no longer comes to the village.

So that's what happened and, as well as receiving a special award of £500 from BT, we've also received a huge amount of publicity (e.g. HERE).

Apart from being a nice example of how media outlets feed on each other for news stories, it raises a couple of intriguing questions.

1. Why has this seemingly trivial event attracted such widespread interest?
2. If I put my books in the book exchange, would it damage sales or work like a loss-leader and encourage readers to buy copies for colleagues, friends and relations?