Chris and the rest of the universe

So Ignite Cardiff 4 happened. It was the first Ignite event I've ever been to, and I'm privileged to have attended this one. It was both a great personal experience and a lot of fun. So I cannot let these lines go by without thanking @claire_s and @mstevenson83 for getting the whole gig organised. Even community initiatives like Ignite need organisers, and a lot hinges on them. Sometimes this all just flows by in the great big rush o' community spirit, and we forget to thank the people who put their time and energy into this whole story. So before anything else is said - thanks, guys. I really enjoyed it.

Apparently, though, not everyone else did. This *cough* article by WalesOnline twitterati @joniayn has now ignited (yeah, pun f'ing intended) a bit of a shitstorm around the whole event: http://yourcardiff.walesonline.co.uk/index.php/2010/03/05/ignition-fails-at-ignite-cardiff/ . As one of the Ignite speakers, I suppose I have a right to reply, too.

For one, I'm very sorry @joniayn did not enjoy it. It was a lovely evening, with a lot of people having a lot of fun, and albeit I'm a newcomer to Cardiff and not one of the Cardiff Web Scene people, I really enjoyed meeting all the people there. I so regret not having met @joniayn herself. As an aspiring young journalist, she appears to suffer of a sad condition all too similar in her stage of her profession - that of judging before gathering enough information and making one's mind up before having talked to people. Dear @joniayn, I was the guy in the dark blue knit sweater and the beige trousers sitting in the back after my talk. We've been having a lot of fun back there with my friends. You could've come and said hello - I promise, I don't bite.

But you know, instead you stayed walking around on your own, then writing an unduly acerbic article on what you believe you saw. I mean, acerbic in the sense that playground bullies are acerbic - +2 on malice, -4 on wit. I mean, call me used to high standards, but you're not going to move into the ranks of professional misery guts like Maurice Bowra with your lame running pun on salt.

Which leads me to the second point. I look at what people say for a living. Looking at your article, this isn't about Ignite. It's about *you*. I'm sorry, but words don't lie. I'm happy to give you the full analysis, but I'm in a hurry right now. The entire text is self-referential, there's a quick nod in the start to factuality but most of it is highly subjective, you reveal a degree of forced hypotacticity which is something we normally get from people who are unsure of what they are talking about and try to affect authority, but at the same time, you are appearing to force the whole text into a more colloquial tone when it comes to sentence-level structures - your word distribution for the most frequently used verbs is that of speech and not writing, and your article has a sub-average Flesch-Kincaid score, which appears forced when you consider it is most of the time bought at the expense of incorrect grammar, viz. starting a sentence with 'but'. If I may be so bold as to suggest you really had a shit time, and even worse, you actually got a bit bitter about this. Please, don't ever do that again. It's stupid and unprofessional. You didn't get a podium in journalism to vent your spleen. Report accurately, ask around, if you think something was a faliure, ask people whether that's what they thought, too. Just don't go about blowing off steam in an article. It'll earn you a shitstorm, and the shitstorm your article could've earned is a million times worse than it actually did. That's largely to the fact that we're kind and friendly people.

You've got the degree and you've got the job. Time to actually get the correct mindset, too.

Hope to see you at the next Ignite - please talk to people, and please say hi. It's not un-hip or unprofessional not to know everything. Ask, and you shall be given. Or told :P

Best wishes,

Me.