The voice of treason...

An unintentionally amusing column in today's Hull Daily Mail by 'the Voice of Reason', demonstrating how woefully out of touch they are when it comes to modern methods of communication. Twitter, says the Mail, "points to the pointlessness that modern technology allows us". And this, remember, from a newspaper dubbed UK Multimedia Publisher of the Year. "Given the numbers of people now getting sacked (being made redundant, surely!) the Voice wonders whether these sites are filled with the bored unemployed," the Mail whitters on, tediously. "Or," it bemusingly harps on, "disturbingly, if the trend points to a bizarre new world in which no one really communicates by talking anymore, but just sends text messages." The Mail pleads with those that like to tweet, who won't, obviously, be reading, "Don't bother clogging up the Internet highways with your junk" 'the Voice' insists. Clogging up the Internet highways?! How fucking old is 'the Voice' and has s/he ever been online? Meanwhile, blogging is described as a "distinctly odd phenomenon". Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. But hardly a surprise - a traditional media organisation is never going to support the democratisation of publishing, is it? Nor just accept a threat to advertising revenues and readership without a fight (the Daily Mail's constant scare stories about Facebook and the evil internet appear with irritating regularity). Nor advocate the dissemination of free information. The regional Mail needs to remind itself that newspapers are in terminal decline and bonkers columns like this pretty much provide the reason why. It's a miracle they ever stopped using hot metal at Northcliffe. Adapt or die, you prehistoric editors. And realise that Twitter and other online applications, tools and methods of social networking and communication are not just meaningless chatter but part of a growing culture of sharing information, of telling people what's happening, where, as soon as you can. Y'know, a bit like newspapers used to be. Before they started to feel superfluous and on the verge of obsolescence. Still, 'the Voice' is the voice of the UK Multimedia Publisher of the Year, so I suppose s/he must know better than a mere blogger and twitterer.

Virtual terrorism...

It was from his bedroom down an ordinary road lined with trees and randomly 'laid' with dog faeces and on a laptop that Mr Killing Time set up a website to build a network of extreme half-wits. In the space of just a few years, or many months, as interweb users prefer to call the passage of time when they're not expressing their opinions in binary, Mr Killing Time 007, as he became known, was the king, and occasionally the queen, of cyber stupidity. When an international team of intelligence experts who had never actually been online descended on Mr Killing Time, they found him plotting to log off and go and have a cup of coffee. For several more years, forensic experts viewed the thousands of files on Mr Killing Time's computer equipment, finding dozens of half written plays, several jpgs of Agyness Deyn and Kate Moss and an mp3 of Goon Show clips. The evidence against Mr Killing Time is so underwhelming that he now intends to set up a central hub for terrorists.

Is it just me, or does all this Younis Tsouli business seem a bit, well, daft? I suppose it's more the John Craven's Newsround-style patronising coverage that makes Terrorist 007's crimes seem about as serious as an afternoon updating your profile on Facebook while sitting in the same office as the boss. "The number of websites doubles by the day," a Newsnight reporter has just told me. Well, as long as a good half of them contain funny .avi files of skateboard accidents I really don't object.

In more serious news, and back on a Facebook tip, Facebook has been asked to remove the rather addictive Scrabulous by Hasbro and Mattel, who are quite rightly keen to protect their copyright of Scrabble, which the popular electronic Facebook version rips off lock, stock and triple word count. Bit of a silly thing to do, really, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, eh? But Scrabulous was a bloody good way to pass a few hours.