Web Monitor
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor has been clicking through the internet to bring the most interesting bits. Send us your favourite links by commenting in the box to the right of this page.
• that Sacha Baron Cohen's newest film, Bruno, follows a trend in cultural and financial fakery. To make his latest fake personality believable, Marche says Baron Cohen set up more than two dozen shell companies (no, not petrol filling stations) for Austrian fashion presenter Bruno. Now, he argues it's our responsibility to make sure we don't get played either by investment managers selling a quick buck or by presenters promising TV time.
• that although unemployment is high in the US at the moment, ex-officials for George Bush are not among the jobless. If they aren't penning their memoirs like Donald Rumsfeld, they're getting paid to talk (George Bush himself is on a speaking tour), think for think tanks or just be talking heads on TV News. Salon concludes:
"With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land."
• Whatever the economic situation in the US, it's still along way from the Horn of Africa's most troubled state. Foreign Policy has worked together with Funds for Peace to create the . And top of the shop is Somalia - the world's most failed state. It scores 10 out of 10 for having a delegitimised state, poor security apparatus and prevalence of a factionalised elite. And if that's not enough to contend with, Newsbiscuit notes that however impatient the British are to claim a winner at this year's Wimbledon tennis championships, .
• Web Monitor has written before about the rise of homeless people having a virtual address, be it an e-mail address, Facebook profile or Twitter account (dedicated Magazine readers will, perhaps, remember the ). Now .
"Blogger Matt Barnes helps run and - both online projects dedicated to giving voices to homeless people around the globe. As he was sifting through a slew of tweets in a search related to the homeless, he came across the first online 140 character uttering by Twitter user,- or Brianna, a blogger who writes for . Matt became her first follower and quickly fell head-over-heels in love."Web Monitor is getting all dewey-eyed.
:
"So inaccurate is the public perception of homelessness that the world cries foul when a homeless person is seen with a mobile phone or an iPod or heaven forbid; a laptop... They sure as hell don't have the right to fall in love. Do they?"
Well apparently they do, as with news that Matt has visited her in the US and only flew back to Scotland today for visa reasons.
• It's festival season which means that some switch from trying to figure out how not to lose their car in a multi-storey car park to how to find their tent amongst thousands of others. The to make your tent stand out. Web Monitor remembers back in the day when your average Glasto-goer was in such an advanced state of other dimensioness, the challenge was figuring out how to get the tent to stand UP let alone stand out.