NEGLECT!

So, as you can see, I appear to have neglected my blog.

Well, it is dissertation time after all!

However, I have found that most of my opinions can be summed up in 140 characters. Twitter: step forward!

So, look to the right and view my latest political/music/sport-related ramblings, you might just be tickled into a debate.

Follow me on twitter @glennhutt or comment on any of my tweets via this post.

Ciao x

GLENNERS ON ENGLAND'S WORLD CUP FLOP

Where do we go from here?

That's the question on the lips of anyone with some interest in English football.

After an almost faultless qualifying campaign under Fabio Capello, England were rewarded with an 'easy' group. We couldn't believe our luck when Algeria, Slovenia and the USA came out of the hat in December last year

But, as the English colloquialism goes, we made a right pig's ear out of it.

Expectations were great, yet performances were so poor. A goalkeeping howler, schoolboy defending, no imagination going forward, in the end it was no wonder we finished runners-up to our friends across the pond.

Then there was Germany in the last 16. Pundits and journalists cooked up the usual storm: "we can do it". The 2010 crop certainly weren't Germany's strongest, but they had enough to kick England off the park.

It was so easy for the German's it seemed like one of their warm-up games.

And with that the 'golden generation' became the 'lacklustre lions'. Given their obscene salaries and performances put together, criticism couldn't really be hard enough.

Moving up in the FIFA rankings was as farcicle as the decision to allow vuvuzelas into the South African venues. It's simple: as a footballing nation, we are not as good as we thought.

Realistic ambitions of England fans were distorted by the perception of the Premier League. Great domestic league equals great international squad? Wrong.

The mediocrity of the England internationals is concealed by the foreign imports beside them that provide the flair for the Liverpools and Arsenals of this world.

It's scary to guess what the Premier League would look like with no foreign players. I'm sure Frank Lampard would rather cross the ball for Didier Drogba than Emile Heskey.

I reckon Steven Gerrard would rather feed Fernando 'El Niño' Torres than Jermain Defoe. The strikers featured on the bench for their respective countries. Seeing Spain winning the tournament in such style underlines the gulf in class England need to reduce.

There is no way Torres would have sat on the bench if he was English. Meanwhile, I doubt Vicente Del Bosque would have given Defoe much thought at all if he was Spanish.

Another 40 years of hurt? Most probably.

GLENNERS ON THE WORLD CUP

The World Cup is a convenient distraction for what is really going on in South Africa.

It cost the South Africans $3.7 million to put on this tournament. Okay, the stadiums are impressive, it's a spectacle (at times), but what about the towns on their knees across the country? Somewhat of a kick in the teeth.

Same old story: "Let's show them how 'far' we've come...just hide the poverty while the world is here".

But not for long. The media haven't had to go far from Sun City to discover the cloudy backdrop that we shouldn't ignore.

Alan Shearer went to Guguletu, one of the wealthier townships of Cape Town, to find a black man who had lived through apartheid. He spoke of drugs and prostitution - not vuvuzelas and the 'beautiful' game.

"After the show is over, it's back to square one", he said.

Over in Nyanga, a young boy told Shearer of his excitement of the world's biggest tournament coming to his doorstep. But he will realise it won't pay for roads, it won't cut crime, it won't improve the poor conditions that he has to live with.

A BBC 5Live reporter saw how dirty water went straight from a reservoir into the stomachs of South Africans.

After all, this is what those people need. Blatter didn't want to bring the World Cup to 'ordinary' people anymore than I would want to be deafened by those ridiculous vuvuzelas.

Talking of Blatter, he couldn't even get the ball right. They might as well be playing with a balloon.

And what about the half-empty stadiums? I'm sure the kids of the South African townships would happily fill the empty seats left by FIFA's "corporate family" who are back home watching the games safe in their mansions.

$3.7 million. To think of what those hidden communities would do with a shred of that figure...

MY PAGE RANK UPDATE

I have decided to clean up my blog as part of my mission to get this site "on the map" so I have made a separate blog for my music called 'The Trance Hutt!'

Over the last few days I've been moving my posts on all things trance to that site and my Alexa Rank has suffered as a result.

The reason for this decline isn't that it was a bad idea to make this choice, it is just the spiders/bots getting used to this dramatic change I have made to my content and its tags.

Once the spiders see that I have 'purified' my content, I hope that my page and Alexa rank will start going up again, but at a quicker rate than before.

In the meantime, this blog still remains in the top 200,000 in the U.K and user's 'time on site' has risen by 162% to 9.25 minutes on average.

Analyse your site on Alexa.

Analyse your site on mypagerank.net.

MY PAGE RANK

The traffic ranking site Alexa has raised this site to 189,888th in the U.K. Mypagerank.net also shows it has a Google page rank of 2.

This site is now being viewed for 1.5 minutes longer than 3 months ago...I must be doing something right!

My next aim will be to improve its traffic and page rank.

I will keep track of this site's progress over the next few months.

WINOL REVIEW 2009

Watch live streaming video from winol2009 at livestream.com

WINOL: WHAT'S ON GUIDE

WELCOME TO GLENN'S BLOG

Hi, my name is Glenn! I am a student from Southampton studying Journalism at Winchester University. As part of the first year of this course I have been asked to set up a blog to keep track of what goes on in this crazy world, and to add my spin on it. This is what it will be used for, but don't be surprised if I get on my soapbox and start commenting/moaning about something that's totally off the agenda.

Me? Well, I have a relatively comfortable life but anyone who knows me will know that I carry on as if I'm the most hard-done-by person in the universe!

What do I like? Music that doesn't conform to the mainstream, Southampton FC (I may well have to open that can of worms on here soon), Facebook, getting up when I want, being independent...

...What do I dislike? Music that conforms to the mainstream, Portsmouth FC, spending money, getting up early, my job at the co-op, ignorant people...

There are, of course, many other things that I like/dislike...but c'mon, you're losing the will to live already aren't you?!

Anyway, watch this space and I'll try and take a break from my busy teenage life and give you something worth reading.