State of the Blog: other things, guest bloggers, Winter Olympics, Box-Eyed, and have we all lost the thread?

A number of shows are either done for the season, on winter hiatus, or just taking a short break for the Winter Olympics, so I've had more time to blog about other things relating to the media; TV ratings, cinema boycotts, SeeSaw, LoveFilm, etc. I'd love to continue that line of blogging more regularly, but to be honest I rarely have time when there are so many TV shows to review.

I also just wanted to remind everyone that Chris Howard and Dan Lester are continuing to guest-review Desperate Housewives and Skins, respectively, so if you watch those shows please read along and leave them a nice comment to show you appreciate their input. The future of those reviews (specifically) and guest blogs in general rests partly on levels of feedback, as there's no point asking those guys to put aside their time if nobody's reading or cares.

Out of interest, is anyone actually watching the Winter Olympics? I'm not a big sports fan, to put it mildly, but I have even less interest in the Winter games than I do the "proper" summer ones. It's all just minority sports, most of which look pretty easy to me (tobogganing, curling) and I get enough ice skating with ITV's Dancing On Ice show (i.e. none). I was hoping the BBC HD channel would at least offer some fantastic visuals, but the image quality has been a bit of a disappointment. But I don't want to open that can of worms here.

You may have noticed the recent lack of my weekly Box Eyed columns hosted at Newslite.tv. Simply put, I've decided to end my partnership with the good people of Newslite.tv, for a number of reasons, not least the increasing lack of time to commit to a weekly side-project like that. It was best to part company rather than stress over delivering material. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed those Sunday afternoon extras while they lasted.

My open-thread trial is still continuing, but I'm beginning to think it's really just another term for "micro-blogging", and the panel shows I'm tackling (QI, 8 Out Of 10 Cats, Mock The Week) are tricky to discuss every week. So, I've tended to only open-thread episodes that offer something different, or inspire me to blog about an aspect of the show I haven't mentioned before. I get the feeling I may just retire the "open thread" moniker and accept that it's really just a lazier blog post, though.

Anything else? Ummm, a few aesthetic tweaks to the blog are ongoing (did you notice how images for news items are now circular?), but nothing too major. I keep wanting to do something relating to caricatures, actually, so if you're reading and are talented in that particular art form, be sure to drop me an email if you want a fun (unpaid) project to do in your spare time. If not, I understand.

I've also been playing with a few new features of Blogger, but it's more behind-the-scenes improvements for me. They now allow you to create "pages" that aren't a chronological part of the blog, but separate pages. So, I recently moved my Movie Review A-Z Index into one, which I hope you'll check out. I created one to store my Competition Terms & References in, too. Plus, I'm in the process of doing what's essentially an "Intro" page to explain more about DMD for any newcomers interested to know about its history, aims, ambitions, successes, etc.

And that's about it. Oh, except to say that I think my Mad Men reviews will go up on Fridays now, because I prefer not to rush them. They require a bit more thought than most of my reviews, and I find that a whole day to tinker helps stoke my brain.