Thursday, March 27, 2008

Hello to everyone at Football 365...


... there are now more threads about my story for the Eye about you scamming Sky in your forum, than there were threads scamming Sky in the first place. Which is a bit odd.

Oh, and what is a paedobear, please?

For those not in the know, this from the current edition of the Eye:

Another week, another victory for citizen journalism at Sky News… as storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on the rolling news channel begged viewers to “help us put together the fullest national picture possible” by sending in their photos of the damage wrought. Hundreds took up the invitation – including posters on the Football 365 web forum, who, finding that such piss-poor efforts as a shot of a watering can (“the wind blew it round all night”) were being featured on the Sky website at yourphotos.sky.com, rose to the challenge and began to send in increasingly outlandish scenes created using photoshop and snaps lifted mostly from the rival BBC website.

By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed”, the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featuring either teddy bears or the athlete and television presenter Kris Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeleine McCann was clearly visible in the background.

Sadly, the fun was terminated after a mere 24 hours when moderators caught on and deleted all the images.


EDIT: As featured on Radio 4! Listen again to the Now show here to get the smaller, Jon Holmes-ier version. He's a lovely fella.

2 comments:

The Monkeyman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

pedobear is a running gag on slightly dodgy internet forum 4chan.

it's a cartoon bear that has become inexplicably associated with pedophilia/lolicon

Check out encyclopediadramatica - they will have an 'informative' page on the meme.