The morning coffee is gagged and optimized
Here in the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been banned from reporting on parliament.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
This is completely unbelievable. I don’t know what else to write about it, other than that a democracy in which it is forbidden to report upon the workings of parliament is hardly a democracy at all.
Research Digest (which, I assume, is quite different from Reader’s Digest) has asked the world’s leading psychologists to tell them about the “one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves.” Some of the answers are fantastic.
All you need to know about Search Engine Optimization. My theory about SEO is this: The better search engines get, the more they reveal actual relevant content. Hence, any work done to optimize your web page for current search engines is doomed to become irrelevant in the near future. I just write, and let the bots in. Or, to quote the linked article:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.
Related articles:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5417651/british-press-banned-from-reporting-parliament-seriously.thtml
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N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”
This seems to be the offending question. The people involved seem to have rather forgotten about the internet…
(sory if this is a double-post, IT are doing mysterious things)
Well, the point is not that the information cannot be found, but that they are ensuring that it is not widely distributed. How many people really go searching for these things after the fact?
Enough, I suppose, that it’s all over the internet now.