as I read about this event elsewhere this morning I noticed that Nodrog was NOT promising to answer anything, merely stating that the wider population should have an opportunity to pose questions.

The purpose of PMQs is to ensure accountability. While there are some planted questions, he must be briefed to answer questions on anything which is current. This is A Good Thing. Indeed, one of the first abuses of Parliament perpetrated by the Dear Leader in 1997 was to have PMQs only once a week instead of twice.

However "responding to questions from the public via YouTube" really means having his flunkies carefully hand pick a sample of questions to which he can respond with some uplifting on-message response. I'm sure whoever thought this up will get a knighthood.

Why the fuck would anyone actually want governmental proceedings officially using Youtube? The service is crap compared to something like iPlayer and as we can be reasonable sure that voter apathy will continue its current trend we can safely assume that the bandwidth requirements will be minimal.

Additionally if it is in the power of the speaker of the house to have historical and relevant material stricken from the historical record (see the recent Hansard controversies) then it ought to be easy enough for them to require youtube.gov.uk to censor/bleep out the "offending" article. Naturally I would expect the encrypted archive copy to remain unaltered. Perhaps even have a crossbench committee tasked to deciding on whether or not the censorship should take place. The service doesn't even have to be live (although it would be nice since there seems to be no problem with the BBC running live commons) to alleviate that problem.

Are we in the 19th century?

There was this thing called a V.I.D.E.O recorooorder that allows you to "save" the magic picture box.

Now you can V.I.D.E.O to your Compuuuteeeer and change the magic pictures so they can go onto the world wide internet box. You can even make the people on the magic box, have funny voices if you want.

> The purpose of PMQs is to ensure accountability

That may, once, have been the purpose of PMQs, but now it has turned into a Political Pantomime with the Opposition chorusing "Oh yes you did" with the Government responding "Oh no we didn't" followed by "But *you* did XYZ" where XYZ is usually barely relevant to the original question asked.

As for David Cameron, he had a site where you could "Ask David" which turned into "David will answer whatever questions he damn well likes" and, not long after, was merged completely into the Tory Party website and the opportunity to "Ask David" was lost.

So I don't see much kudos for him in all this and I have little doubt that Brown will follow the same path.

Why do the higher powers let Politicians make fools of themselves with these transparent media stunts?

Politicians have no understanding of the technological world and to be honest I don't want them to, stay away from computers politicians and stick to what you're good at (whatever that is).

http://www.doeswhat.com/2008/05/19/dont-mix-politics-and-technology/

Just so amusing, can't believe I can't find any other reference to it.

Paris. No reason.

Simon Gunter (Strategy Chief, Tiscali) today announced a victory in his company's case to call upon the government to pay for the "Exceptional and Unnacceptable" strain which the government's new GordoPlayer has placed upon the ISPs network.

"It was at the stage where it had become ridiculous" pined Gunter stifling a small giggle. "At least 4 people used the governments service this week, which had a catastrophic on our network capacity and speeds. This is a victory for common sense!"

As of next April the governent will be investing heavily in the broadband infrastructure, with some areas being pencilled in for superfast up to 100 meg Tiscali Broadband (Actual speeds may Vary... A Lot) as early as 2025. When approached for comment Gordon Brown was undecided as to whether to speak or not, but his spin doctors assured us a decision on this matter would be reached in roughly the same time scale.