Web Monitor
17:39 UK time, Tuesday, 20 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: stealing your identity just to be more boring than you, the end of hip-hop and self-service politics. Share your favourite bits of the web by sending your links via the letterbox to the right of the page.
• Identity theft can empty your bank account, but for the celebrity, it can divert vital followers from their Twitter presence. Followers miss out on their whereabouts or in the case of , can find out interesting, albeit fake, insights. Worst of all, the faker can do nothing at all. Now property enthusiast Kirstie Allsopp is speaking out against Twitter theft. on her real account:
"I really want to get @KirstieAllsopp, she's still never tweeted & follows no-one & I am the only Kirstie Allsopp!"
• in his prediction of 2009 being hip-hop's last year. Unsurprising, maybe, given that the rapper Nas made the same mistake in 2006 by naming his album The End of Hip-Hop. Nevertheless, the prediction is made and Frere-Jones judges the killer will be hip-hop's mutant form gangsta rap, rather fittingly:
"After years of bloated expansion and leveraging of fantasies, "gangsta rap" has largely become a meaningless term. Unvarnished reporting delivered with a panache that balanced the pain - this was gangsta rap's first achievement, not unlike the cry of mid-seventies reggae artists like Culture and Bob Marley. Somewhere along the way, the struggle to escape became a love of accumulation, and underdogs ended up sounding as smug as the authorities they once battled."
• Web Monitor mentioned before the to stop writing reviews for fear they are just making money for other people.
Now saying, online work is part of a trend of customers sleepwalking into doing manufacturers' work for them:
"Manufacturers and service providers have succeeded in transferring work from the producer to the consumer... we have more or less accepted the massive amount of time we are asked to devote to researching and assembling consumer products, not to mention the input that is considered mandatory for customer services of all sorts."
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