I did something silly. They did just slash the prices though. Here’s hoping they can keep up with demand this time…

Thank you to everyone who sent me positive feedback on the first SPEAK prayer e-mail last week. I’d been hoping that over time we would begin to see prayers answered and that reporting them in subsequent e-mails would be an encouragement to the whole Network. Amazingly, there’re successes to report already!

Prayer points for this week:

1. Praise God for the successes in preparing for Soul in the City. Some of the Network Support Team prayed that the first people they phoned would have the stuff they needed, and they did! Continue to pray that everything else will come together as Zanna, who’s been organising it, is going on holiday.
2. Pray for an administrator to work in the Network Support Team. They urgently need someone with the passion and the skills to start as soon as possible.
3. Pray for SPEAK’s financial situation—they're struggling a bit just now.
4. Pray for people to go to Vocal Training, God especially, but also people in the network. The speakers are amazing and have much to teach us.

At the SPEAK Flower Model event back in April I volunteered to co-ordinate a Network Prayer E-mail that would go to strategic people in the network every week. I’ve finally managed to get my act together enough to send something out, but it’s now July—not the best time for student groups. The plan is to run on a test basis until September, and then go for a full launch, sending this to SPEAK groups up and down the country. Anyway, here are this week’s prayer points:

1. Vocal Training, September 3^rd-7^th, that it will be a key time of inspiration and information for the network.
2. Summer Festivals, for the stalls telling people about SPEAK.
3. SPEAK has just been asked to run a prayer walk and repentance service as part of Soul Survivor’s London Soul in the City event. It’ll be running 7-9pm in on 27^th July and 3^rd August with up to 1,000 young people.
   • Thank and Praise God for this amazing opportunity for SPEAK to have a huge impact upon the next generation.
   • Pray that the young people would hear and be able to discern what God thinks and feels about the injustices caused by the arms trade, debt and world trade; that they would be stirred to act.
   • Pray for the logistics of the event: For a good relationship with the police who need to be contacted about having a service in Trafalgar square and that Trafalgar Square would be available to use for the service; for the timing of the whole event, moving 1000 people around 3 prayer stations; that many people will volunteer to help steward; that a sound system and globes will be provided; that we will find a photographer to photograph the repentance service to hand to a government leader.
   • Pray for strength and peace for all those working on this event, as time is short.

OK, first off it seems that I once again find myself in the position of having to apologise for the infrequent updates. Sorry about that.

Secondly, I’ve thus far resisted the temptation to post the above button on this site; partly because it wasn’t something I really saw as within the site’s scope, and partly because the fact that I believe in the BBC more than most other media organisations doesn’t really warrant the phrase I believe in the BBC standing on it’s own. However, it seems that the government have hired yet another blairite Murdoch crony with no clue about new media to try and tear the corporation down. This time I have to say something.

The Graf Report was commissioned by Tessa Jowell in August of 2003, just over a month after the death of David Kelly, and a matter of weeks after the opening of the Hutton Inquiry. The author, Philip Graf, was Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror until 2002. BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas reports that Graf’s report pleases almost all, and then goes on to cite Hugo Drayton and the British Internet Publishers Alliance. The BIPA is an alliance of some of the largest old media conglomerates who’s sole objective for the last six years has been to attack the BBC’s online dominance, with little regard for the clear fact that the BBC leads because of the superiority of it’s content. Hugo Drayton, for example, is from the Telegraph Group. Other BIPA members include Capital Radio, EMAP, Guardian Unlimited, Independent Digital, News International and Trinity Mirror. Unsurprisingly, where they’ve even bothered to cover it, Graf’s report has received a resounding welcome from the whole of the mainstream British press—and the greatest praise comes from a political lobby group who for three years worked on Graf's behalf!

The Independent reports that the BBC web site is now used by a quarter of the adult population of the UK, and also that Simon Waldman, director of Guardian Unlimited, had been hoping for a rather more drastic response from the BBC. There is no specification of exactly what he would have liked, but unsurprisingly (again) there are hints that a dramatic slashing of the Beeb’s online presence and a fair number of redundancies would have been considered a good place to start. Guardian Unlimited is the ninth most popular web site in the UK. bbc.co.uk, I think, is the first.

Does Graf’s report please almost all? It seems to me that, like Hutton before it, Graf pleases everyone bar the licence fee payer. We know that the vast majority of web traffic is over web sites owned by only a handful of companies, and don’t get me wrong, that’s something I’d like to see change. Once upon a time there was a dream that web would bring true freedom of speech, unhindered by the bias of trans-national corporations. Make today a day for independent web sites.