Web Monitor
15:09 UK time, Monday, 18 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: Why animals are so popular on the web, a story of North Korean jeans and the virtues of arrogance.
• why online animals are so popular. On Wednesday, after the Haiti earthquake, the most-popular story on the 91Èȱ¬ website was about a "Polish-speaking" dog.
Under a splendid headline, Mr Davies jokes at first that the popularity of animals on the internet is a variant on the popularity of pornography - the animals are all naked. He then tries on some philosophers for size to see if they can help, and concludes that their universality makes animals so popular:
"Pets sit mid-way between a global civil society and a global horror show... Human beings can't all partake in a single rational discourse about the nature of scientific progress, but they can all laugh at a cat that plays the clarinet."
• the story of three Swedish twenty-somethings who set up a business importing clothing from North Korea. Apparently an idea which started during some late-night drinking, the three sealed the deal thanks to one of their fathers dressing in a suit to add an air of credibility. The tale also involves a trip to North Korea and a shop of their own, which includes a museum about North Korea:
"This is the story of an experiment. How does one gain access to one of the most sealed-off countries in the world? In the digital age, North Korea is the last remaining bit of terra incognita in the Worldwide Web. Whereas Jakob Ohlsson, 23, Tor Rauden Källstigen, 24 and Jacob Aström, 25, spend a lot of time online, and they are never without their laptops."
• After helping out his ex-students to find jobs, internet guru about the differences between men and women in the jobs market. Women, he says, just won't lie:
"They aren't just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can't say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world."
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