91Èȱ¬

A celebration of the riches of the web.

Find out only in Web Monitor, what the West Wing has to do with the money free trend and conduct web search for happiness. Share your favourite bits of the web by sending your links via the comment box.

• Web Monitor has been tracking the "free" debate - the idea that we could be seeing the end to a money economy - for some time now. And this point of view must be older than the idea itself - that the problem with offering labour for free is that it leads to class discrimination in professions.
his personal view on the issue:

"I am a journalist. I live in Islington. I listen to Radio 4. I have even, in my darker moments, been known to talk about house prices. I am, in fact, a symptom of the problem I am about to discuss, and what follows is quite appallingly hypocritical. But I am going to say it anyway: the media is too middle-class. The rise of the unpaid internship is to blame. And no one seems willing to admit it."

Elledge also makes reference to the mentioned in Web Monitor last week.

Web Monitor has been a bit remiss not to mention Lawrence Lessig in this whole free debate. He put the idea out there in 2005, with . So, in the interest of being the fair 91Èȱ¬, we felt we should give it a mention. It had nothing to do with being able to mention that Lessig is the only person (known to Web Monitor at least) who as appeared as himself on the West Wing, as . Lessig was modest about his starring role but, ever the intellectual, seemed chuffed that the episode covered the construction of laws:

"...it captured beautifully the single most important thing that I learned from my years working on 'constitutionalism' in Eastern Europe: that 90% of the challenge is to build a culture that respects the rule of law, and that practices it."

As always, if you want to be Web Monitor, send us your links via the comment box and, to stay with the trend, we will not pay for the tip-off.

• If you want to make the big bucks in the free economy, ask Google. , Google are saying to get big figures in your bank account you have to be crunch numbers of the statistical kind. Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google said:

"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians... and I'm not kidding."

And if you like the look of all that data, check out this blog entry on You Might Not Know.
• Web Monitor searches all day for web links and all night for happiness (that's right after the worms from the bottom of the garden have been nicely fried up with some garlic and caramelised onions). Well, the search is off it seems - as happiness may be in painting.

At least that is the hope of Will Alsop. Alsop is British architecture's most colourful personality, . But he's giving the game up to colour in. Hurst writes:

"...He added that, along with teaching at Ryerson University in Toronto and the Technical University in Vienna, he now intended to spend two days a week or more painting.

"It's a serious inquiry into painting," he said. "It would be nice to think it would contribute to the coffers but I'm not doing it for financial reasons... this will make me happier.

"Whatever age you are, you shouldn't be afraid to make changes to your life."

last year suggests that painting may not be the answer for everybody. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

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