ONLINE activists are discussing tactics to highlight the plight of Africa. The United Nations site illustrates the needs of the world’s poor, but there was a mixed response to the call on the Make Poverty History site. It wants people to “join tens of thousands of others in Edinburgh on July 2 demanding trade justice, debt cancellation, and more and better aid”, to coincide with the G8 meeting of world leaders at Gleneagles.

Parrotboy said: “I am not a violent protester, but I do believe that a protest should cause a certain amount of disruption. If we do not cause problems there will never be any reason to listen.”

Oddverse.com was less sure: “No matter how loudly people shout to make poverty history . . . nobody at Gleneagles is going to be any the wiser.”

Holyroodchronicles was vexed by reports that United States soldiers would protect President Bush in Scotland. “Could the Marines not just sit on their aircraft carrier, to be on call in case of emergencies?”

www.makepovertyhistory.org

www.un.org/millenniumgoals

www.parrotboy.co.uk

www.oddverse.com

http://holyroodchronicles

http://blogspot.com

Throat cleared

“This Deep Throat orgy, er, extravaganza is supremely uninteresting,” Greg Scobe said, before engaging in a little conspiracy theory. “Maybe the media establishment is indulging in this unseemly spectacle because recent developments have been less kind to it.” He cited cases where bloggers have forced news executives, though not world leaders, to resign.

Slate.com disagreed. “Deep Throat’s mythic role remains strong,” it said as debate raged over who first uncovered the informer that helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to topple President Nixon. “For years the better class of Deep Throat sleuth . . . has been fingering Mark Felt,” reel.com said, listing many online sources.

Gawker.com claimed that Bernstein’s son, Jacob, had divulged the secret to his friends in the 1980s. “It might be fair to say that Vanity Fair was sorta scooped by an eight-year-old kid at day camp. And even if it’s not fair, we’re still saying it.”

http://gscobe.blogspot.com

www.slate.com

www.gawker.com

Little Hitlers

“Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies . . . is an adage in internet culture,” says Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia. It says that as any online discussion grows longer, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler” increases until it becomes a certainty.

Beautifulatrocities.com explores a similar line, listing articles in which people or things are branded “worse than Hitler”.

Evils such as global warming and smoking make the list, as well as Robert Mugabe, who was compared to Hitler by . . . himself.

www.wikipedia.com

http://beautifulatrocities.com

Hen party

Is the Subservient Chicken site in reality a round-the-clock service where you can order a sinister chicken-suited man at the end of a webcam to do whatever you ask? Sadly not. “It’s all pre-programmed but still quite creepy,” the site’s creators said.

www.subservientchicken.com

Whose news?

Krishna Bharat, who designed Google News, described it as “a computer-generated newspaper . . . with an emphasis on diversity and balance” at the World Editors Forum in Seoul this week. But Andrew Nachison, director of The Media Center, said on the forum’s blog that Bharat revealed virtually nothing about how the site works. “What values, biases and editorial judgments are reflected? We don’t know because Google won’t name the sources.”

www.editorsweblog.org

http://news.google.com

www.mediacenter.org

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