Going for gold

These Noughties polls and lists are truly getting out of hand; does anyone out there really want to vote for the Liberal Democrat Backbencher of the Decade, outside the small but vocal band that is Liberal Democrat Backbenchers' Mums? In The Guardian, Hadley Freeman neatly skewers the Hornbyesque obsession; meanwhile, in the comments, the equally geeky debate about the point at which the decade really ends (not for another year, insist the pedants) churns on and on...

Sole survivor

One of the few cheerful moments of the whole Iraq débacle came when Muntadar al-Zaidi lobbed his footwear at President George W Bush. Like flash mobs and happy slapping, it seems to have become a Noughties violence meme; now Zaidi himself has become a victim.

Plane speaking

Yet another line that I wish I’d included in The Noughties. This is by Washington Post journalist Robert Kagan:

America did not change on September 11. It only became more itself.

Twitstorm

Stephen Fry identifies the pitfalls of Twitter becoming the Noughties answer to the press and Parliament rolled into one:

Journalists who don’t understand what Twitter really is (the overwhelming majority) will use my name as a kind of shorthand for the service. The fact that I have been on it for a whole year (ie a decade, see second paragraph above) and have in that time accumulated a fairly large number of followers allows them lazily to go straight to my “Twitter feed” (as they insist on calling it) and either crediting me with being a kind of a Citizen Smith of the Twitting Popular Front, or blaming me for hypocritically claiming to strike blows for press freedom with one hand while trying to censor journalism with the other.

#trafigura

In Chapter 5 of The Noughties, I discuss the extent to which blogs, Twitter and other phenomena complemented old media during the past decade and in many cases left it behind in the dust. The Mumbai attacks of 2008, and this year the Iranian upheavals and the G20 clashes in London are examples of this.

The efforts of bloggers and Tweeters to stand up against the oil company Trafigura (which was attempting to prevent the Guardian newspaper from reporting that an MP had asked a question in Parliament about illegal dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast) may not have been so dramatic, but with any luck they’ll have reminded a few corporate interests that the rules have changed for good.

Full story here.

Premature adjudication

I wish I’d been able to include the news of President Obama’s Nobel Prize in The Noughties. On the other hand, I’m still not quite sure what to say about it. Even the normally loquacious and articulate president seems to be a little befuddled.