Following my recent interview with Julia Grant, she suggested that perhaps I could organise a public discussion about the future of the August Bank Holiday event (which has been known as Manchester Pride since 2004) and the gay village.

This was arranged with the help of other members of the Facebook group Facts About Manchester Pride and was called: “Pull Your Fingers Out and Claim It Back” — a reference to something that Julia said in the interview.

The discussion took place on Thursday 25 August 2011 at the Hotel International on London Road, opposite Piccadilly Station.

The first half was about past and present. A chance for people to ask follow-up questions about the interview, or anything they’d ever wanted to ask Julia Grant. The second was about the future. What changes we would like to see and how to achieve those.

You can watch the whole thing here. It’s in four parts, with a total running time of 128 minutes.

Manchester’s 6th annual World Naked Bike Ride took place on Friday 3 June 2011 at 7pm. Here’s my exclusive video of it.

In the latest example of free hosting services not being forever, Google is planning to close down its Google Video service.

Originally the service was due to close to visitors on April 29th with another two weeks for users to download their videos (until May 13th). Those dates have now been scrapped but it’s obvious the direction this is heading in. So, if you need to, save any videos you have on there while you still can.

When the closure happens, anyone who has linked to any content on Google Video or has embedded videos on their pages will end up with a bunch of links that don’t work or that redirect somewhere else.

Google is wealthy and could easily keep this service running so those pages and videos are online ‘forever’. But it’s a commercial company and primarily concerned about its image and business plan.

If you want a sustainable presence online in the longterm, get proper web hosting, run your own website and link to your content on there. That way, you are in control and really building something for the future.

You won’t be handing over rights in your content or suddenly have the rug pulled from under you at a few weeks notice. How long before Facebook goes the way of MySpace?

Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud continues to be down for some customers.

Crash 2.0: Amazon battles to restore confidence in cloud computing as web chaos continues into second day Daily Mail.

John Pilger speaks at Socialism 2009 in San Francisco.

On Tuesday 14 December, ITV1 will broadcast John Pilger’s latest film ‘The War You Don’t See’ at 10.35pm.