Picture by Andréia, noticed after reading Jemima Kiss’s Google piece.

I don’t know what made me read the television guide in The Times yesterday (I don’t have a TV*), but I was taken with Kevin Maher’s review of “Martin Clunes: A Man and His Dogs; Britain from Above”. Maher said the programme had pancake intellect. Basically, that means – because of the internet – our knowledge and intellect has become like a pancake: very thin, but spread over a wide area.

In this piece Maher was observing that television production was also applying laws of pancake intellect. In his later review of Andrew Marr’s, Britain from Above, he wrote:

‘Thus poor old Andrew Marr, who had literally become a human cursor whizzing over a Google map of the country, strapped himself into a microlite and barked melodramatic hyperbole such as, “We think of this country as having a genial, almost cosy landscape. And yet [dramatic pause], all around us there are great forces at work!” Needless to say, a whirlwind tour (pancake alert) of Skye, Loch Ness, St Austell, Co Tyrone and Norfolk revealed that these great forces were, in fact, wind, rain, tidal erosion and continental drift. Which ultimately meant, well, nothing.’

And that’s sort of why I gave up my TV (that, and an in-built snobbery), but perhaps the internet will just enhance my pancake intellect. And I don’t work in the right trade either: PR people probably have the thinnest knowledge bases of anyone around. I know a little bit about a broad range of technology subjects, but probe me about AJAX or Celeron2 processors and I’ll be running for the hills.

I’ve almost stopped reading trade magazines now and get all my media, pretty much, from the internet, mostly courtesy of RSS feeds – with a bit of old fashioned newspaper reading thrown in. What’s worse is that I actually find reading people’s blogs more interesting than many traditional media sources. The news is quicker, more fun to read and personal. Maybe I should just embrace my pancake loving intellect after all.

* OK, I do have a TV, but it’s not plugged in to the aerial and I only use it to watch Wired, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood and other such shows on DVD

Computer Weekly has announced the winners of its Blog Awards. Congratulations to all the winners, although I have to confess that only two are them are on my RSS feed. It’s particularly encouraging to see business blogs given prominence, if for no other reason that giving me another answer to the question, “why should businesses blog?”  

Computer Weekly also gave the ‘Best of the Best’ award to Steve Clayton, whose blog, Geek in Disguise, won first place in the company blogs category by popular vote and got the thumbs up from the judges.

Computer Weekly has also created a preview of all the winners in a special RSS feed.

The best example of brand worship I’ve seen in ages, the Hong Kong Lego User Group has recreated the Olympics - entirely in Lego.

The story appeared in the Daily Mail (good spot Danny), which reports that more than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people (models or modellers?) were used to create the display.

The only disappointment is that there are no velodrome pics. Lego must be chuffed to bits with the story though - it’s the kind of PR you can’t create. With around 60 Google news hits and about 800 blog posts (and counting) it’s a sure fire contender for the gold medal viral story of the week.

Ashley Norris, the founder of Shiny Media, is today’s guest author for Tech Crunch and is ruminating on why the UK lags behind the States when it comes to monetizing the blog industry.

“The last five years have seen an explosion in the number of independent commercial blogs, blog networks and websites in the US. The Huffington Post, Sugar Publishing, Perez Hilton, Gawker Media, Engadget - the list goes on forever, and they are just the Web 2.0 premiership. There are thousands of individuals running less high profile blogs and websites who are making a significant living from their work.

“In the UK it is a depressingly different story….. There are some amazing blogs and sites out there, Hecklerspray, Anorak, The Spoiler, Coolest Gadgets, Unreality TV and Pocket-Lint spring to mind, but of those only one can claim more than a million monthly readers.”

According to Ashley, the main problems are:

1. Limited number of UK online eyeballs
2. Lack of imagination in the ad industry
3. Lack of UK media entrepreneurs
4. Lack of VC support
5. Too much competition
6. The omnipotent BBC

You can read the post for a full explanation of Ashley’s views, but the one that stands out for me is “lack of imagination in the advertising industry”.

There’s no denying it is growing at a rapid rate. According to the IAB, online advertising grew by 38% between 2006 and 2007, representing about 15% of the overall ad market. But, search dominates the space, making up around 60% of the market. And, imho, it’s difficult to get creative with search advertising; besides most of the money flows in the direction of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I think the problem is that most display advertising is poorly targeted and uncreative - hands up if you find online ads boring and obtrusive? This needs to change and provide website publishers with revenue streams to make their sites more attractive to investors. This’ll feed through to better content and more visitors.

I’ve also had an early viewing of some market research recently which shows that in the B2B tech space, blogs lag a long way behind traditional online media and business websites when it comes to readership and trustworthiness. This won’t change overnight, but given time and a bit more money flowing in the direction of publishers the quality and popularity of blogs, particularly media blogs, will only improve.

Last week I ran a survey about sports betting and online gaming in a bid to find out the most popular type of gambling, specifically looking at what people gamble on and how much they typically spend.

So what do the results tell us? Well I’m going to keep the juicy stuff for work, but you’re not the bunch of addicted gamblers I took you for.

I was surprised that only 60% of you like a bet, with online gambling and gaming sites pulling 29.8% of punters (the high street is evidently not dead yet).

Sports betting is by far the most popular making up 60% of betters, with poker coming in second at 25% and casino games only accounting for 15%. If I was going to repeat the research, I think I’d include the national lottery, though my mother would refuse to believe that she’s a hardened gambling addict.

The Olympics has obviously failed to whet your betting appetite, with just 10.7% per cent putting a stake on athletics. Football and horse racing, not surprisingly, were very popular, scoring 60.7% and 32.1% respectively.

Participants of the survey will be more interested in finding out who won the draw. And the winner is…  Russell G, who hails from Cheshire. Congratulations Russell – the Amazon vouchers will be winging their way over to you shortly.

Rather than the national lottery’s Camelot machine, I used random.org and Russell was lucky number 23. Thanks again to everyone who took part.