Ryan MacMillan

As though your lives were not exciting enough, here is a pant-wettingly thrill-filled round-up of web-related goings-on in this great country we call America, as written by me, your breathless correspondent, who is somehow managing to type this despite it being 100+ and the a/c being in a state of disrepair not seen since Lindsay Lohan fell out of a taxi.
ITEM! News reaches me via the increasingly - how to put this nicely? - Committee for Public Safety-esque (they’re publishing lists of people who are ‘true supporters‘ now…) DailyKos that those doyens of yoof culture (and crummy reality shows and piss-poor garage bands) MTV and MySpace are (sigh) “teaming up” to deliver a new style of Presidential Candidate “Dialogues” (why say ‘conversation’? when you can annoy everyone with ‘dialogue’ clearly being the mantra here)… According to one of DailyKos’s many sane and rational contributors:

Coupling technology with some bold planning, the dialogues will permit users to (1) submit real-time questions to the candidate, and (2) rate a candidate’s response to individual questions.”

And just how insightful will these responses prove to be? Well, the first dialogue is happening today. Naturally it is with pretty-boy no-hoper John Edwards, a man whose campaign never saw a pitiful web2.0 bandwagon it didn’t jump on faster than OJ Simpson at a memorabilia auction. So, soon we’ll be able to find out just what penetrating, interactive deductions have been made from MySpacers’ pointing and clicking at the following available options:

Options for approval ratings include:

• I agree
• Well argued
• Sincere/authentic
• All of the above

Options for disapproval ratings include:

• I disagree
• Full of bull
• Scripted/canned
• All of the above<

Brilliant, huh? Congratulations MTV and MySpace on your brave endeavour to reduce political campaigning to the equivalent of a note passed to you in high school reading “Do you like me? Tick yes or no”

ITEM! Youtube are taking their newfound sense of social responsibility very seriously, if by ‘very seriously’ you mean ‘crappy PR stunt’… Youtube are offering free video hosting to non-profit organisation. As Valleywag points out:

As opposed to the video hosting it gives away to everyone else, of course.”

ITEM! More from Valleywag, this time the sound of another tragic digital bandwagon being indecently assaulted by a brand without a clue. Georgio Armani, the people who brought you realy really good suits, are - but of course - opening up a store in (chokes back vomit) Second Life. Nononononono. As is pointed out, no-one who plays in Second Life can even fit into Armani clothes and

by buying into the metaverse hype, you’re just postponing the day Second Life goes out of style once and for all.”

NB, that day was, I believe, the day Jimmy Carr did a gig there.

ITEM! LinkedIn are going to let you post pictures of yourself on their amusingly phallocentric social netowrking site. Now you can not only worry about which school you got your MBA from, but how many chins you have, too. Thanks, internet.

ITEM! Pro-Choice Americans everywhere raised a cheer when wireless provider Verizon permitted NARAL, the abortion rights group, to use their network for a series of campaign messages, having previously pulled the texts. Text-messaging is an important political tool in the US and so this seems like a victory for net neutrality, but t Verizon still did not deny its ultimate right to decide what is put out across its network - effectively anything they think may be ‘offensive’. (They shouldn’t read any of my texts to Iain, then). What was genuinely offensive though was the actual text Naral put out:

“End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice.”

Look, I’m a big fan of Naral, but Thnx??? Thnx??? What is this, Lolabortions?

Stay tuned for more thrills and spills from the land of the Bacon Quadruple Cheesburger!