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W.A Barista Championships

Just passing on a message here folks. The W.A Barista Championships are nearing, very close in fact. So here are a few of the details from the man himself, Ben Bicknell of the W.A Barista Academy, who is a representative of AASCA, and organiser of the competition.

W.A baristas, this is your chance to show your skills and get some great insight on the only competition that will give you access to compete in the Australian and World barista championships.

Get on down and get involved !

Hi,

Bringing you the latest event on the Coffee Industry Calendar of WA:
The official W.A. heats for the AASCA Australian Barista Championships!!

This is just a quick message to give you the initial information about the AASCA WA Barista Championships (WABC). If you are a coffee distributor, coffee roaster or just know of other people who may be interested in this event, feel free to forward this email on.

This year the WABC is moving to a bigger, slicker and more accessible location of the City of Perth Town Hall (crn of Barrack and Hay Street).

The event will be held over two days on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th of March. An information session consisting of a general run through, tips for the competitions and the opportunity to practice on the competition espresso machine will be held around a week before the competition (possibly Sunday 25th February). Additional practice sessions may be available throughout the week preceding the competition.

Any resident within Western Australia is eligible to enter. The winner of the WABC will secure their place in the AASCA Australian Barista Championships on April 29th, the winner of which will represent the nation at the World Barista Championships in Tokyo, Japan later in the year.

The WABC is an independent competition run by the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association (AASCA), a national non-profit organization. See www.aasca.com for more details.

If you would like further information, would like a copy of the rules and score sheets or would like an application form, visit the AASCA website: www.aasca.com. Also, feel free to either give me a call on 0439 511 881, email me at ben@baristaacademy.com.au or alternatively email AASCA at enquiries@aasca.com.

Further information about the event and prizes will be forthcoming.

Cheers,
Ben Bicknell
______________
Secretary for the AASCA Australian Barista Guild
W.A. Convener for the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association

Commencing ego stroke

This is my official “thanks to the academy” post for my recent success in a little online food photography competition called Does My Blog Look Good In This (DMBLGIT). I hosted DMBLGIT a couple of months ago to great success, and just last month Annie of BonAppgeek did an equally fantastic job of organising it, made even better by the fact that I won something :)

So I was fortunate enough amongst some excellent competition to come away with awards for Aesthetics and Originality for my little inadvertently grainy experiment called “Meanwhile In Italy…”, which is funny because I’ve never been to Italy, but I’m sure it looks something like this somewhere tucked away in a little cafe.

So thanks again to Annie for organising and to the judges for thinking me worthy of something. However after noticing a trend from my competition two months ago, and also from last months, I am totally making pistachio covered truffles next time… :)

A few things of note

Just a little note on a few things that are happening in the food blogosphere.

A Menu For Hope – This is popping up on virtually every food website in the world, and so just to be different, here it is on mine too. It’s an idea created by Pim of Chez Pim to raise money for the United Nations – World Food Programme, by raffling off prizes donated by food bloggers the world over and giving the proceeds to the programme. Last year $17,000 was raised, and this year looks to be much bigger. Check out Helen’s site for full details of how people in Australia can participate.
The Food Blog Awards have been announced over at the Well Fed Network. I may or may not be in the running for one of the categories, but if anyone should deign my little excuse for a blog as worthy of another, then feel free to drop my name.
Spam – an unfortunate part of life online is spam… and just lately I’ve been getting slammed by it. Over 3000 spam comments in the space of a few hours almost brought my site down for a while, and there doesn’t seem to be much let up. To try and combat that I’ve installed a few extra wordpress plugins, and upped the level on all my spam detection radars, so if you’re having trouble posting comments or viewing the site in general, please let me know by email and I’ll try and sort it out. On a completely unrelated note, if anyone needs some all natural hoodia or cialis, I may know where you can find some…

DMBLGIT November 2006

To those unfamiliar with the funky acronym, it might sound like Mary Poppins has a severe lisp… but what It actually means is:

Does my blog look good in this ?!?! (I added the exclamation marks for dramatic effect)

It’s one of a whole host of memes/competitions that exist for food bloggers to show off their wares (and one of the most prestigious too), namely being the best example of food photography taken in any given month.

So, food bloggers the world over are hereby encouraged to send in their entries, which will be judged on the three categories of aesthetics, edibility, and creativity.

The photos are judged by a panel, currently consisting this time round of Cate from Sweetnicks, Celine of Black Salt, Anthony of Spiceblog, Bron of Bron Marshall, Lara of Cook and Eat and Still Life With, and yours truly.

There are then three winners – those with the top 3 combined scores. There are also three category winners – those with the highest scores in aesthetics, edibility and creativity that have not already won 1st/2nd or 3rd place. So there’s plenty of chances to bag yourself a placing.

Only one entry per person and the photo must have been posted on your blog during November.

Please send all entries to:

dmblgit.nov.2006@gmail.com

along with:
– Your Name, and your blog’s name
– Your photo (in jpg format, preferably under 500kb)
– A link to the post its from
– Some info about the camera it was taken with

Closing date for entries is the 28th of December.

Best of luck and get crackin.

Check back here shortly for updates as the entries start to roll in. As they have now.
A gallery of entries now lives here: DMBLGIT November 2006 gallery

*Update* : I’ve decided to add the gallery into this post as well. Please spread the word and get those entries in ! Full details of all photos submitted can be found on the DMBLGIT November 2006 gallery.

*Update II * : Entries close today !! The 28th December. Get yours in now or you’ll miss out…

*Update III * : Entries are now closed. It’s already way past the 28th in Australia, and this should be enough time for those in other timezones to catch up. Thanks to everyone who has submitted photos, and look out here for the announcement of winners soon.

Latte Art Pro Style

WPvideo 1.10

Download!

I dropped into Epic again yesterday and learnt an important lesson. If you hang around long enough talking to the barista’s you get handed all sorts of great coffee to try :)

I happened to come in while Megan (W.A Latte Art Champion this year) was going through the motions of making and perfecting every drink on the menu… just for practice (!) My latte art skills are quite obviously lacking compared to this… but perhaps one day I’ll be able to pull a few of them out. The coffee again was great.

We have the technology

Just a quick post that will (read: will not) appeal to the geeks amongst you.

I’ve been updating my wordpress plugins and such recently, and a few nice additions have come up.

Firstly, I’ve added a print friendly version to all of my posts. Which means if you’d like to print off a recipe or one of my highly clever attempts at humour, you can do so without the harsh tones of my ill concieved green and pink theme to hurt your sensibilities. It will also remove the sidebar and other links, so you get just the content you might need.

I’ve also added a new version of the FAlbum plugin for flickr, which shows my most recent photos and albums. The updated version is a mashup of FAlbum and Lightbox, a very funky javascript library that you may have come across on many sites that will display the images in a special popup flash window. You can test it now by clicking on any of the photos across the top of the page.

There is also the “Subcribe to comments” plugin thats been getting a bit of a work out of late… making sure anyone interested keeps up to date with the latest replies to any posts they are interested in.

In photo geek news… I’ve recently purchased a new lens for my camera. It’s a 50 mm prime f1.8 lens, and its making me happy to have some sweet low depth of field photos coming out. I’m thinking about getting into the photography side of things a bit more seriously too, with some excellent posts by Lara on “Still Life With…” giving me some nice tricks to try out.

Oh, and it was my birthday yesterday, and Sharon’s two days before that. Yay us :)

Celebrity Spam

It’s happened to you before. You’re browsing away happily, surfing from one blog to the next, enjoying content that a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years would have no hope of recreating, when all of a sudden it happens. You come across a site that looks like a blog, calls itself a blog, is for all intents and purposes blog-like in nature… but reads like a paid advertorial on page 3 of your local gossip rag. Something that one monkey could knock up in a casual afternoon quite happily, and still have time for banana or two.

I’m not generally one to bag other people out, but it’s got to a point where I think something needs to be said, because it annoys me when the spirit of blogging and the organic dissemination of information is treated with such calculating disdain.

Such is the world of “Celebrity” Chef, Benjamin Christie, and his attempts to boost his own celebrity status by manufacturing hype. This takes the form of his blog, his Wikipedia entry about himself and his tv show, written by himself, and his frequent unsolicited emails asking me and others in the food blogging community for links and to visit his website, complete with web bugs and statistics tracking links built in (note the actual link address in image).

email scam

It’s no surprise why these kinds of sites exist. The Internet is an important part of our social consciousness these days. People rely on it for news, entertainment, and community, with blogs forming a large chunk of that world. It makes sense that where the people go…so the advertisers go. Everyone knows that you have to be online now if you want to capture that highly prized share of the market.

So why does this grate me so much ? Benjamin Christie has done a number of things. He’s appeared in a TV series and published a book (or had a hand it at some point), and from what I can gather (from reading his own publicity material) travels around the world as an ambassador for Australian native food. These are all good things… but that doesn’t make him a celebrity…

The blogging community is not stupid. We are normal people, with normal lives, who choose to congregate around each other websites in order to share ideas and receive inspiration. If you want to join in, feel free… Just don’t use your blog as a thinly veiled marketing ploy for all of your other products. If you do so, don’t call it a blog, call it a marketing portal. A self contained world where you are the most famous person in the world and everything else thinks so too.

Doing a number of searches online, you find it really difficult to find anything about him, that wasn’t either written directly by him (or one of his “team”), or posted as an advertisement for his various wares. Now I have no problem with commercialism. I have no problem with people getting paid for what they do. What I have a problem with are advertisements disguised as journalism, and with someone trying to hijack the food blogging community for their own marketing purposes.

The beauty of blogs is that they are written by real people. Ideas are shared freely and the comments you receive are taken on board and evolved into a new understanding of food, wine, or whatever you happen to be writing about. The best blogs have evolved over time through the authors writing great content that people want to read, and through actively commenting and encouraging others.

As soon as you start to try and change the course of public opinion through surreptitious ways, you start treading a very fine line between raising awareness and outright spam, and the nature of blogging itself takes a sharp and painful twist back to the days of media companies telling us what we should think.

To me it all seems like the emperors new clothes in blog form:

Yes there’s great content, because I say there’s great content !
Yes I’m a celebrity, because I say I’m a celebrity !

I think it’s time for Benjamin Christie to put his pants back on… because no-one wants to see it.

** Update **
Another article by Ed from Tomato about Mr Christie and his advice.
Responses to Ed’s post on Food Blog S’cool
A bit of history on the situation as pointed out by Sam from Becks & Posh

*** Update II ***
After some creative but accurate editions to BC’s wikipedia entry by Ed, the page was promptly reverted to it’s original glowing praise version. The IP address used to make that change, was incidentally used to visit my website recently, referred via one of his stats pages. The world is full of strange coincidences it seems…