While we slept and watched England #fail at sport over the weekend, our American colleagues were having a rousing discussion of the rights and wrongs of allowing people to comment anonymously on news sites, blogs and forums. Mathew Ingram writes up the story here. In typical internet style, the debate moved quickly from pros and cons to GOOD vs. EVIL…

The Case Against Anonymity

There definitely is one and I’d sum it up as follows:

• The state of debate and personal courtesy on the Internet is fairly poor. On some very popular sites, it is awful.
• People make hateful comments; bully others; they ‘troll’ discussion forums and worse.
• This climate puts off people with milder opinions and manners, reinforcing the bad behaviour.
• Others fight fire with fire, again escalating poor manners and the likelihood of a Godwin incident.
• People would (mostly) not behave this way if they were (a) face-to-face with the people that they are debating; or (b) legally identifiable.
• There are other reasons sometimes suggested such as child protection and reducing the incidence of other illegal activity (e.g. file-sharing forums).

I think these are fair points. But, on the other hand, I completely disagree with making it necessary for people to legally identify themselves, even to a site’s owner.

Why’s that then?

There’s six big reasons that I’d propose for allowing anonymity on your site. These are above and beyond the fact that making people register reduces the number of comments significantly:

Privacy is a right. Making my online dealings linked to the-real-me and potentially Google-able without my control is wrong. I worked as a teacher by day in the late eighties and nineties and in the evenings contributed regularly and anonymously to far-left politics and computer game forums. Neither my students nor my employees needed to know that. At that point in time, it could have quite seriously damaged my professional reputation and prospects. Yet it shouldn’t have: neither activity impinged upon the other. It still shouldn’t. You don’t live in a house with no curtains; why should anyone be made to do so online?

Protecting democracy. People have a right to disagree; to have critical, minority opinions that would make them unpopular with others. The majority is a terrible bully if your beliefs don’t accord with its own. It will make you feel bad, turns you down for jobs and refuses to serve you in its shops. Simply saying that people have a right to free speech without the mechanisms to allow that to happen, is not democracy. Anonymity is that mechanism.

Personal experience. Before social networks, we used things like IRC (it’s like a chat board) and NNTP (like a forum) to talk to people and discuss the topics we found interesting. The thing was, there was no way to force people to identify themselves if they didn’t want to, and hardly anyone did. Most people – myself included – kept persistent pseudonyms, to allow discussion to take place and comments to form part of our overall persona.

That ‘overall persona’ thing is important. Because they way you became more respected by the communities of which you were a member was wholly in the value of what you said or contributed. Not your job title or your academic qualifications. What you looked like, your age or sex, didn’t matter. If you gave value to the community by making astute comments, offering advice or posting resources for others, then your prestige rose organically. At the same time, it was voluntary. If you were simply trying out a group or maybe discussing something particularly sensitive, then you could choose a disposable nickname for the period of one or more sessions. You could tell the people who were respected because their postings and comments got lots of praise and responses, even from people who disagreed.

Was it some sort of lost Eden? No, of course it wasn’t. But you could block/ban/ignore people who were rude or deliberately provocative. People knew not to feed the trolls and how to erase most spam. And here’s the thing. On many of the newsgroups and channels I frequented, the level of debate was higher than I tend to see on any Facebook group page, 90% of Twitter and nearly all blogs.

So no, there isn’t any correlation between accredited identities and quality of debate. On Facebook, where nearly all identities are confirmed, there are just as many spammers, trolls and idiots as there are anywhere else. [Check out this blog post from Malcolm Coles for some especially horrible examples].

Whistleblowers and the Silenced. Many institutions – banks, the Health Service, the MoD, large corporations – do not want their people to say anything online. And they make them sign documents to legally prevent them from doing so. That’s not good news for democracy either. But fortunately, there’s anonymous web posting. Often, these people can make others aware of things happening thanks to their anonymity. More often, they can offer expert opinion and evidence in a debate. Most often, they simply get the chance to express themselves. People still get fired for this sort of thing.

Sick/Vulnerable People. Health forums where people can discuss their ailments and treatments. Bullying messageboards. People seeking advice about how to get out of debt. Job posting boards. All necessary and valuable. All require anonymity in order to operate properly.

The Young. When you’re young, you tend to do silly things like download copyrighted software and music. You tend to say things that will make you very embarrassed in ten years’ time. Your emotions tend to be a bit fiery and disproportionate. But that doesn’t matter on the Internet, because it was NiteHawk99 who did those things not Paul Smith, 99 Hadley Gardens, Croydon. Do we really want to stigmatise teenagers with all the things they do online for the rest of their lives? We don’t; but our technology and state of cultural development makes it too tempting to remember people’s actions forever.

The other, equally important, side of the ‘youth’ point is that the Internet allows for roleplay and the exploration of one’s personality without commitment. That’s important to emotional development. Teens often operate several personae online — the flirt, the parent, the fool, the poet, etc. That’s a really healthy, danger-free way to develop without too much trauma — if one of your personae crashes and burns, switch to a new one. Oh, but some people who ought to know better want to stop you doing that.

One Last Note

The comments and discussions are terrible on Have Your Say and various newspaper sites for three very simple reasons.

1. The technical structure of the boards and the transient nature of their populations means there’s very little in the way of prior reputation and often few ways to counter objectionable input.
2. There’s no editorial input whatsoever. Comments and discussion boards are viewed, it seems, as autonomous traffic-drivers which sit independently of the real content. No one ever responds with a factual correction or a rebuttal, let alone any encouragement.
3. There’s often very little exercise of the sites’ own codes of conduct. Moderation is nearly always reactive [report this], rather than pro-active. Since site owners won’t employ people to watch and engage with discussions, pointing out transgressions and (yes) bringing down the ban-hammer, you can get away with murder. Almost.

If newspapers and other fora want good quality, humane discussion where intelligence wins over foaming-mouthed semi-literates, then they need to tend to the garden. They need moderators and editors. If commentators are treated politely but firmly, get feedback from the editorial team, know the rules and are encouraged to participate civilly through example then that is what will happen. Mostly.

picture credit: anjan58

Anyway, what do you reckon? Reckon away!

I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover little cheats in videogames that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don’t use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That’s worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the consequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesirable outcome, but less undesirable than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to counteract this for developers and publishers is to close down the cheat strategies or publically identify the abusers so that future potential opponents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iteration of the same game conditions turns the short-term gain into a long-term loss*. Creating a state of uncertainty over whether abusers will/can be identified can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that continuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely mathematical creatures. People are complicated and irrational: winning isn’t always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the consequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in videogame jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome extension Ad-Block. If you use Ad-Block, then it stops the advertising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing experience for you as an individual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advertising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-Block is still pretty-much a secret, or that most other people are more honourable than you. That you can block advertisements, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the obligatory 2x2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst — the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not filtering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-term game, are identified as free-riders or learn the consequences to our short-term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/we need to do? They need to make viewing and interacting with their content a long-term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s certainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-downloaded Firefox Add-on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any certainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dominated strategy ought to disappear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather different: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to commission this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the extension, with the recognition that this is a long game, even if our identities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-ride, on sites that are free-to-access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little inconvenience; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-Block but I have stopped].

On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative.

Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary — if depressing — reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso retrospective opens at the ICA’ or ‘Proposed Amendments to Digital Economy Bill’: it’s ‘footballer shags team-mate’s wife’. If you’re seeking the Wisdom of Crowds, look away now.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

Even worse is the equivalent list from the Telegraph:

Not to mention the Daily Mail:

Oh dear, oh dear. Showbiz, trivia, sport, sex and weirdness. And these aren’t tabloid publications. The Telegraph, in particular, paints itself as a serious business and politics paper with a concern for moral values. Its readers, on the other hand, appear to prefer sex scandals and weird animals. I can’t imagine its editors are especially proud of these results but ultimately have to shrug and be grateful for the extra page-views.

The Guardian has a similar widget, which isn’t as lowlife as the examples above, but again favours the funny and the odd.

Newspapers and news organisations are in a strange position with regard to these most-popular lists. The short-term value is that they flag up the items that new visitors are most likely to click on and enjoy. They get more page views out of their visitors and thus more advertising inventory to sell. They help the organisation bolster their claims to advertisers that their sites are busy and popular. Readers get what they want quickly and leave happily.

On the other hand. There’s a long term devaluation coming out of this for serious papers. When they sell to advertisers, they aren’t just selling so-many million eyeballs much of the time. They’re selling a certain quality of readership and particular brand values. For readers, there’s a similar brand attachment. They go to a serious news site because they trust the brand and want serious coverage. If they then end up then clicking on the story about a funny-looking gorilla, then that’s their own affair. Maybe, rationally, they should have gone to weirdanimalpix.com, but they don’t see themselves as the sort of person who does that.

What’s more. Papers don’t really have an ad-inventory problem. They generate thousands of new pages and hundreds of thousands of impressions a day and rarely sell more than 20% of what they have to offer. The only real reason for driving page views is the arms-war between the Nationals over who is the most popular. And being the most popular isn’t a great argument to advertisers if you are simultaneously claiming that your readership represents an elite, as is likely for any serious news site.

So maybe it’s a good idea to find a middle-ground; a way for serious news organisations’ websites to highlight popular items that doesn’t make them look like a zoo for morons: for readers or advertisers. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist – launched today – is one attempt to find that middle ground.

The idea is that it blends populism and curation. The most popular stories will appear on the grid, as you’d expect, BUT:

• The different sections of the site – news, features, opinion, sport, etc. — remain balanced in the proportions conceived by the editors. So if 90% of its visitors are looking at Sports stories, it still only occupies 2–3 slots on the grid.
• Like is compared with like. For example, Charlie Brooker’s satirical swipes at popular media are perennially popular on the site, but will only hit the grid if a particular column is more popular than the norm.

Guardian communities editor Meg Pickard explains:

…we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

We’re taking a range of these variables — enough that a single datapoint doesn’t skew the results — and mushing (that’s the technical term) them all together to get a value of “Zeitgeistiness” (another technical term) for each content object.

But — and this is the important bit — each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blogposts against other Technology blogposts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into consideration: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/section also published on Mondays. Because we’ve been storing and analysing this data overnight for a while now, we’ve got a good baseline to work from.

It’s early days for the Zeitgeist experiment, and I’m afraid it’s rather buried away from most visitors to the site, so it will be hard for them to see how popular the idea plays out compared to the regular ‘most-read/commented/shared’ widget. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting project that shows how news organisations might protect their brand at the same time as playing to the cheap seats.

picture credit: Joi

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.

…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

This ‘fast-food’ content is actually regurgitated. It’s the copies of original material being re-written hundreds of times again within a matter of hours of its original publication. This may already seem familiar to users of Techmeme. Apparently. if you create lots of content quickly enough about the topic du jour, you can generate lots of traffic. Whether it’s new, well-written or popular won’t really matter, Arrington claims. It only has to be ‘popular enough’ to tip the scales of Google recognition and AdSense style advertising revenues.

E-consultancy today attempted to pour oil on the waters, claiming:

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for restaurants of all types. You might scarf down an occasional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for information on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

I think I may be a bit thick, but I don’t really understand the problem:

• There has always been a wealth of cheap/free content on the Web. That’s part of what makes it good.
• Some of that is good quality e.g. much of Wikipedia and some of it is….mmm not so much e.g. Linkfarm material, Answers.com.
• Google – the search engine used by almost everyone – has worked out how to circumvent much of the bad material by depending on the volume of inbound links, whose weighting is in turn determined by the credibility of those link-makers, among other criteria.
• Google also regularly updates the ways in which it finds people trying to cheat their way to the top of search rankings by, for example, rewriting content from other sites and then inter-linking.

More importantly, I think we’ve already established at this point that lots of search engine traffic is not a very effective way to try to make money for a news publisher. The UK newspapers’ relentless war to become the sites with the largest number of monthly uniques over the last 5–10 years has left them all almost penniless. Randoms don’t click on the ads, you see.

What they really want is useful content and useful readers:

Relevant and responsive readerships for advertisers = revenue.

Brands readers trust for quality and such = revenue.

Readers who want value-adds = revenue.

Useful and valuable branded content for relevant readerships = revenue.

A bunch of randoms who found you on Google = MASSIVE SERVER FEES AND NO RETURN (see FAST FOOD).

Arrington shouldn’t fear the fast-food merchants, he should fear the mainstream media catching up on his turf. They may often be a little hapless, not terribly online savvy, but there are an awful lot of them and they’ve still got lots of money to invest in digital publishing to find models that work. And they will keep coming, wave after wave.

I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers — readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs.

[ABC — the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership ‘charts’ for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe’s work in the online world, but their cost means they’re only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site’s readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.]

While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution.

And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals — they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users.

I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS — they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think).

All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future.

I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007.

Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication.

What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers.

Do join us.

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium — Robert Harris — his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets — the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.

Once upon a time, television was full of national moments: mass audiences of 10 million or more tuning in and wanting to follow through the next day. But now that audience — fragmented across hundreds of channels — has virtually ceased to exist. Most of the time, any review of any show can only be valuable to a relatively small percentage of readers. Soaps? An exception, perhaps: you can catch up with them in the Saturday supplements. But through-the-week reviews have lost their relevance, just like television’s dominance of mass entertainment. (Goodnight ITV!) Use the space for more listings and previews, then, if you must. But recognise that the world has moved on.

I trust the bearing of this on the topic of this blog is pretty clear, even though I’ve never commented on broadcast TV. The role of ‘official opinion former’ seems, at least for the time being, to be something of an anachronism as almost every member of the audience is able to create a platform for their own opinions and to challenge those of others. Despite the fact that’s it’s a disgraceful Tory rag, the Daily Mail has actually done more than many traditional media owners in breaking down barriers between journalists and audience. Already, readers can comment on any story, even the front page headlines. Their recognition of a new reality when it comes to op/ed — that I and other readers feel as qualified to dive into the discussion as a seasoned hack. Editors become moderators and talent scouts as that discussion evolves.

Earlier this month, Jeff Jarvis noted that Guardian Online has taken similar steps with its arts and entertainment coverage, throwing its columnists into a conversation with other critics — the former audience. (More: another paper bins its critics)

Kate sums up the arguments:

(a) readers hate it

(b) full feeds actually increase traffic

The second point is, as she says, counter-intuitive, but basically it means that you can hang on to readers who aren’t committed enough to come to your site every day, draw in more occasional readers, and please your regular readers by giving them the choice.

Print consumption has remained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has doubled from two to four hours. Viewers are also spending more time watching television, up from 10 hours to 12 a week.

The adoption of broadband is shown to have a very positive effect on online consumption:

In France, where 79 per cent of online households have broadband connections, the typical user is online for five hours a week, compared with only three hours a week in Germany, which has a broadband penetration rate of 42 per cent.

Interestingly, the report identifies no losers in its survey, only increasing media consumption all round. Once again, the idea that traditional media are being driven into bankruptcy as our lives move online is shown to be not strictly true. Since there are no more hours in the day, one can only assume that the real losers are books, fresh air, face-to-face socialising and sleep. At the risk of sounding like my mum, this is not a development I can wholeheartedly welcome as positive, as much as I love the net.

However, the averages supplied in the headline statistics mask some clear differences in consumption patterns based on age:

The research found “a very clear new media/old media generational divide”, Mr Mulligan [research director at Jupiter] said. Under-25s now spend six hours a week online, half the time they spend watching television but three times the hours they devote to print.

So, the average amount of time spent online is four hours, but young people are up to six hours, and they’re watching less TV and reading less. It seems as though the implication of this is that the trends are reversed at the age of 25. Older people are watching a lot more TV and reading more papers and magazines. Their internet use must be far less than double what it was, to compensate for the six hours consumed by younger people.

Thanks, Antony

Seasoned googlers, of whom there is already a vast tribe, are nerds, anoraks and braces-wearers of the worst sort who spend every working moment searching the infernal engine for other people’s blogs.

They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of the bleeding obvious who in a more primitive era used to fool around with the office photocopier, circulating allegedly humorous material (“In these days of equal rights, why is Manchester not known as Personchester”) faxed or posted to them by fellow-nerds who in turn had painfully copied the stuff from a parish magazine.

The world is now their oyster — or their lobster as they would say, stealing the joke without acknowledgment.

They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.

Googlers and bloggers do not have an original thought between them. Their ruminations on tax reform, Europe, immigration, Iraq, security, education and the rest have already been googled ten times over by fellow bloggers copying their source material from some other blogger’s googling diatribe to the local newspaper.

Hopefully, they will google themselves out of steam, replacing their hobby with games of draughts or snakes and ladders.

I stole this story from The Register. To which it was contributed by TechDigest. What nonsense! (*cough*)