A day after the election, Dan Gillmor called for a new party of internet savvy voters to replace the Democrat Party from the "radical center". Clicky, interactive and no doubt "emergent" democracy would then flow from this happy band of mousers.

... Voter turnout rose little in prosperous areas with high broadband penetration, but dramatically in areas where broadband penetration was lowest: up over ten per cent in Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Meanwhile, the cornerstones of civic life - community and church groups - were far more effective in getting out the vote. These delivered a Republican victory.

So for Doctor Gillmor to prescribe the ailing patient 'more internet' is a strange choice. For him to advocate abandoning the US left's organizational vehicle (with one current useless owner, but a proven track record of some moderate success, if you look at the log book) makes senses only if, like Dan, you don't think the left should have an effective vehicle at all...

For some people, technology is the answer, no matter what the question may be. But Gillmor's reasons for wanting a new net party are rather like, to paraphrase Kennedy, asking not "what can the machines do for me?" but asking "what can I do for the machines?"

We've all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But "Clocky" goes all the way - it's an alarm clock that has wheels. If you hit the snooze button, "Clocky" rolls away and hides.

Uncowed by public ridicule, attention-seeker Professor Kevin Warwick has been appointed to a panel that will determine the basis for public research funding decisions for the UK's higher education institutions.

Captain Cyborg is one of twelve panelists chosen to set the criteria for public research funding in the UK's Electrical and Electronic Engineering departments. It's one of 68 panels encompassing medicine, the social sciences and the languages and is conducted by the Research Assessment Exercise, a quango funded by Higher Education Funding Council for England, and its counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The study, due to be completed in 2008, involves over 900 nominated academics. And Warwick himself, who in 1999 warned of the danger of "virtual reality drugs ...transmitted across the internet or using radio waves", and claimed that a passive radio tag implanted under his skin had made him the world's first cyborg.

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates must see Google everywhere he looks these days. He must even see Google when he closes his eyes, and enters that lucid dreaming state from which all of Microsoft's great strategies eventually emerge. What he sees at that moment, we imagine, is a Tellytubby landscape that looks a lot like the Windows XP default wallpaper - perhaps with Chairman Bill himself as the sun. But bouncing across this happy vista are the red, green and blue colored balls that have rolled out of the Google playpen.

In Bill's world, the living room TV of the future will look a lot like Google. Only it will look like Google with all the good stuff Google provides taken out: it will be a huge screen of contextual classified ads. A sort of useless, interactive test card logo. Now if this isn't the sign of a man obsessed, we don't know what is.

If you ask people what's really wrong with TV, they'll reply that there's nothing on worth watching - that there are no compelling programs that reflect their world. Other comments such as "too many adverts", "too much sex and violence", "idiotic and patronizing programmes" are simply ways of characterizing this dearth of good viewing material. Viewers are astonishingly tolerant of advertising, so long as the programme grabs their attention. But one complaint you almost certainly won't hear is that TV isn't interactive enough. If the people making programs are representative of their audience, and the programs are consistently good enough, TV isn't in any kind of crisis. In fact, we see plenty of evidence to support the idea that the TV and radio broadcast model is in rude health, and is becoming more highly valued than ever, but we'll come to that in a moment.

For the first time in its history, the word "digital" has negative brand connotations. Such is the pushback against glitchy digital TV streams, full of drop outs and hiccups, and hard-to-use controls, that people are beginning to clamor for the analog signal to remain on. "Digital" now means "crap", which should give lazy marketeers some pause for thought.

The phony box office crisis seems to suit Lawrence Lessig and Jack Valenti just fine. The fact that it doesn't exist spoils the "This The End of Entertainment As We Know It" pitch from the Utopians, and the MPAA's "Technology Is Killing Us!" propaganda.

"The web is now nature," says Glenn Edens, one of Sun Microsystems' most important executives, and its fastest-rising star.

The senior VP has been Director of Sun Labs for around 18 months, but the bright lights of Hollywood now beckon. He's been picked to head Sun's newest creation, a vertical business unit aimed at converged media, entertainment and broadband, which was announced with a flourish in Las Vegas at the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.

The new unit has inspired great excitement and anxiety at Sun. It may not be overstating the case to say that it represents a battle for the soul of the company.

In a wide-ranging interview last week Edens enthused about sensors and "digital ectoplasm", the value of amateurs, and the inspirational example set by ... er, PT Barnum. You'll begin to see why his new media unit is such a contentious move.

The middle class is on the march!

"The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population," claims ICANN's newest board member, Joi Ito.

Quite what scientific experiments he will wish to perform, once the desired sample size has been reached, remains a mystery. But like many people who spend too long in front of their computers, he's talking about a Platonic ideal rather than the real world.

A survey by the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration shows that the internet has entrenched the divide between rich and poor, and the races. Statistics reveal an internet that's overwhelmingly white, wealthy and urban.

Diversity in action: blogdom's Rainbow Nation

Like gay marriage, but for bloggers...

It's certainly an ambitious proposal. The city wants the network to work when a connected device is moving at 30mph, so people can use it on the bus.

"Taking advantage of such a portable service would not generate a traffic hazard," the city's technology department advises us.

But it may be enough to cause mass hysteria. Few San Franciscans will believe a MUNI Transit bus even capable of going at 30mph.

It was the most excruciating week ever in San Francisco to be white and middle class, wrote SF Weekly's Matt Smith [a must-read]. "It pains me to say that this perspective -- that picking one's ass is an appropriate and aggressive response to national catastrophe -- is one my white brethren identify with quite comfortably."

"If we can rely on almost limitless information available on the Internet, why do we need a textbook?" asked the Tucson school district's superinterindent, an enthusiastic technology evangelist called Calvin Baker.

Baker candidly admits he doesn't know quite how it will all work.

Joichi Ito, the American businessman who after a kind of immaculate conception hatched forth as a pre-formed internet celebrity a couple of years ago, is having a crisis.

Ito's gauche weblog has built up a cult following amongst hopeful software authors, lonely maternal housewives, out of luck marketing consultants, and excitable South American computer enthusiasts. His reports from the high table of the internet's High Society have enthralled an audience that runs well into three figures, and will keep sociologists busy for years to come. "He doesn't need employees; he has the posse," burbled one typical piece of ass-kissing published in Fast Company magazine.

But now Ito now wonders if the public diary format of the weblog is too restrictive for his talents as venture capitalist, tireless networker and ICANN board member.

...

"Emergence is our religion," Ito once told your reporter with a knowing wink, after a few beers. Over at life-enhancement.com, Ito recently enthused about how "a sort of intelligence will form just by connecting everyone together."

(When "getting everyone connected" is the goal, and a third to a half of the world stubbornly refuses to "get connected", the techno utopian invariably blames the people, not the computer).

So this kind of thinking attracts a lot of flakes, and it also produces rather flakey computer systems, which is where we begin to take an interest. If technology is going to benefit society it has to be much, much better than it is now. If it isn't, the results could be catastrophic.

You don't need to be a paid-up God-botherer to see the shortcomings of this as a faith. The collected works of the Brothers Grimm - or perhaps even Captain WE Johns - offer a more coherent and useful framework

"... and Three In Four Brits Lie In Internet Polls," replied several readers.

"The New York Times appears to have breached two of its own ethics guidelines when it gave op-ed space to John Battelle last week to promote the Web 2.0 buzzword. Battelle, who produced the Web 2.0 conference with MediaLive, used the space to assure us that Web 2.0 wasn't really a bubble, in a curiously nervous and defensive piece. But the Times failed to disclose that it's an investor in Battelle's new Federated Media publishing company - a very Bubble 1.0 kind of oversight. And neither did Battelle, until the admission was dragged out of him by Jon Garfunkel of Civilities.net."

Or maybe not -

"It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers," observes one regular Register reader.

Taking to his scooter, one young Wiki-fiddler roars into action.

"Old World is under attack. The authority of the book, authority of the journalist, authority of the teacher, is under direct assault by Wikipedia and other online efforts," claims the poster, 'Stephen'.

"It should come as no suprise [sic] a journalist and teacher ganged up on Wikipedia. Both have much to loose [sic]. Their claim? Authority. We will see much more of this backlash by the old guard in the future," he continues, confidently.

"The education system its self [sic] will come into question eventually. Universities are formed around libraries and libraries are physical things that require physical campuses. Take away the library, provide full access to every book ever writen [sic] online, imagine the consequences."

Kevin Browne writes:

"If the Emergent People wish to present themselves as authorities without the credentials to back up the claim, they already begin at a disadvantage. If they then lack the discipline and knowledge to write and present themselves correctly, should one have confidence in the knowledge they claim, or that they have the discipline to research it properly?"

Citing the excitable young wiki-fiddler who claimed, 'It should come as no suprise a journalist and teacher ganged up on Wikipedia. Both have much to loose. Their claim? Authority.' Kevin replies -

"Indeed. Authority. And training. And experience. And having received guidance from a predecessor who had those same advantages. And the ability to fucking spell!"

Please do not let up on these people for a second."

I concluded:

Wikipedia has a dilemma here. I'm sure many readers have been approached by people in the street claiming to have a big book that tells all the answers - people in various states of hygiene, insisting that their book is more trusted than others. But historically, the ones we end up trusting more than others usually don't make psychobabble their main selling point. Other factors are usually decisive - like whether it's authoritative, or just plain right or wrong. So Wikipedia can go two ways: it can grown into becoming a reasonable encyclopedia, or it can hide behind the psychobabble, and claim special pleading - like religious projects do. Expect a change in how the project is marketed fairly shortly.

It was almost a year before the cracks began to show, however...

He wasn't impressed by what he saw.

"This is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts," he wrote.

Something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry, he said, in response to the clock-stopped, right-time defense of the project, not by the fact it's got some good articles.

"In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness," writes Carr.

Only it isn't.

"An encyclopedia can't just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?" asked Carr.

Of course, an entry for "moral responsibility" was created hours later - job done. This discusses the view that we the public are responsible for ensuring what is written about us on Wikipedia is to our satisfaction. A very funny Wired online article by Lore Sjöberg satirized this view:

Q.What's this is I hear about Wikipedia saying some guy shot Kennedy?

That was actually a misunderstanding. The person who was accused of murdering Kennedy didn't realize that it's his job to monitor his own Wikipedia entry at all times and fix mistakes. By not doing so, by allowing his entry to contain libelous information, he was in essence accusing himself of murdering Kennedy. The Wikipedia board of directors is hoping that the courts will accept this as a confession and convict him of assassination. At that point, his Wikipedia entry will be 100 percent true, proving that the system works.

Few start-ups encapsulate the desperate utopianism of the times so much as Fon Technology.

Created by the Argentinian dot.com billionaire Martin Varsavsky, who built and sold the Spanish portal Ya.com and ISP Jazztel before the bubble burst, at the heart of Fon is a soulful of hope.

"A splendid and visceral story by Karen Lowry Miller in the current issue of Newsweek entitled 'The Wi-Fi Bubble' shines an unforgiving light on the public hot-spot mania - and the hypesters responsible for it.

The article doesn't make for uplifting reading, but it is a welcome counter to the juvenilia that accompanies the gushy reporting of Wi-Fi build-out. While no one doubts that 802.11 will form a ubiquitous part of computer communications for the next several years - a standard dongle, if you like - Miller strips away the hype by asking a painfully simple question: "Can you make money from public hotspots?" And the answer seems to be a pile of Emperor's New Clothes.

Miller wonders where the revenue stream lies? Can you explain the X for us, nicely and simply on a back of an envelope? See, we're stupid, and just want to know how the numbers add up...."

"How could they lure so much capital to a project that essentially, wanted to give its wares away for nothing? "

"The American obsession with therapy may almost be considered as a neurosis in its own right. But quacks see promising material in a growing number of internet addicts. "6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it," reports the New York Times."

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a thousand participants. Doziness, lethargy and an inability to focus are classic characteristics of a spliffhead, but email users exhibited these particular symptoms to a "startling" degree, according to Dr Glenn Wilson.

The deterioration in mental capacity was the direct result of the trialists' addiction to technology, researchers discovered.

So that explains it! So much for making us "smarter".

"... if RIM can play the "public interest" card in keeping its network open - why can't the public respond in kind and highlight the drawbacks of such socially harmful technology, which is anything but in the public interest?"

Pushing always-on as a lifestyle? It still happens.

My brush with the Crackberry "lifestyle"

Concerns are rising over the fate of a peaceful Mid-West town. Skokie, Illinois numbers around 60,000 residents...

Alarmed and concerned, we called the Mayor's office in Skokie, Ill. to find out what was going on. Was this just a seasonal thing? Was there anyone still alive in Skokie?

"Yes, absolutely. The population is reaching 63,000," a village spokesperson told us. There was no seasonal migration out of the town. Were there any strange happenings, we wondered. Had any UFOs been sighted?

"No, no. Absolutely no alien abductions," the Mayor's office told us.

So the villagers weren't running away from the students, as we first thought: the students were running away from the village.

As one would expect, Group-think is well in evidence in the survey. Over a third of bloggers cite peer pressure of one form or another. One in five say they blog to go with the herd, and more than one in eight say they blog because "it's the latest trend".

Written the day after the London terror attacks of 7 July, 2005:

No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn't seem to matter how high the bodies are piled - neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

"Blogs are almost as old as the web, and I'm sure they'll survive anything. But I'm beginning to wonder if Blogs can survive their own triumphalism." Some reflections on the early hype.