Rhod Sharp, Kevin Anderson and Chris Vallance blog for Up All Night

Chris Vallance - 09 May 2006

First I mentioned that you could see some "behind the scenes" photos of David Blaine prepping for his unsuccessful "aqua-man" record bid at claytongray.net Unfortunately the pictures have been removed (as emailer Bob pointed out to us). Conspiracy theories will doubtless abound. But surely the fact that he didn't manage to complete his record bid proves it was a genuine effort by the master showman.

On more sombre ground, following the bad news out of Iraq we took a look at the role rocket propelled grenades have played in recent attacks on coalition troops. These relatively cheap weapons have proven to be highly effective against better equipped forces. Blogger Bill Roggio of the Counterterrorismblog.org told us all about them

Tony Blair is having a tough time as various people conspire to try and hurry him into early retirement. It is all grist to the mill for Britain's political bloggers. Blogger Recess Monkey joined us to talk about that, the local elections, and to make a shameless pitch to appear on Question Time.

We had hoped to speak to Alf Hermida of BBC News Online at E3 and Glenn Greenwald of How Would a Patriot Act but phone trouble for once defeated us and we ended up running a very moving, but not at all blog related package on Liberia.

The We Media conference hosted jointly by the BBC and Reuters is a key date in the blogging calendar but it turned out to be a controversial event.

Rhod spoke to Richard Sambrook the BBC's Director of Global News. While it may not have always been evident "front stage" he was one of the key people pushing the interests of the "Wee Media" as Rhod put it. He was certainly a great support to the organisers of the fringe that accompanied the main event.

But the "suits" in the Big Media still have a job to do convincing bloggers and podcasters that they really "get" the new media. Podcaster Neil Dixon covered the We Media Fringe for us, interviewing Suw Charman who left the main event with the impression that big media hadn't really moved much beyond the bad old days of "Points of View" when it came to respect for audiences and participation.

The debate, needless to say, continues in the blogosphere. If it's all a bit too earnest for you Guy Fawkes' satirical summary is a hoot .

And last, we joined the guys behind Britain's first podcast drama. The Paranormalists is a fictional account of psychic spooks in the West Country - think The Wurzels meets The X-files. It also stars "Bullet" from Grange Hill. Yay! I've only listened to a few episodes and already I'm a fan.