politics

Miliband goes mad for Web 2.0

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David Miliband, the environment minister tipped to be the next Labour Party leader by a friendly Westminster press, says “a new spirit” is afoot in the UK, brought about by Web 2.0.

Miliband said the web had polarised debate into competing extremities, where the truth was decided by whoever shouted the loudest. Traditional engineering values, where things work, had been replaced by a “Permanent Beta” mentality where the vendor tries to escape its responsibilities by selling the company before it has to fix its own bugs.

He also lamented the devaluation of expertise in favour of what he called “a permanent idiocracy”. He painted a picture of high streets decimated by home shopping, and an atomised and fragmented society that could only express itself by blogging into the digital ether. The political class, Miliband concluded, had a duty to temper this dark side of technology.

Impressive stuff, or what?

Of course he could have said all that – but unfortunately, he didn’t.

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Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk

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Canadian cops staked out a bar in the hope of finding a journalist drunk, a court heard today.

The journalist in question, Edmonton newspaper columnist Kerry Diotte, wasn’t suspected of involvement in any crime. But Diotte had written a column criticizing the police force’s radar and camera technology as being more of a cash cow for the force than an effective measure against road fatalities – and the story enraged the local constabulary.

Diotte has been a consistent critic of the police’s technology dependency habit.

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62pc of netizens unaware of Pajamahadeen militants

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New research suggests that the internet’s echo chamber has much thicker walls than scientists previously thought. So thick, it seems, that an explosion the size of the Blogosphere can barely be detected in the real world. At best, only some faint, metallic clanging sounds can be heard outside – the eerie sound of the Pajamahadeen [UK English: Pyjamahadeen] inside the chamber, hammering away at their computer keyboards.

The research was conducted by good-news foundation the Pew Trust in the United States, and it contains some warming statistics for weblog militants.

More than a quarter of US internet users (27 per cent) had read a weblog at one time or another; 12 per cent had at least once posted a comment on a weblog. But almost two thirds (62 per cent) of net users didn’t know what a weblog is – let alone how one can be safely disarmed.

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