Found this through Guido Fawkes.
The latest Direct.gov initiative for informing kids and parents about how to use the internet safely can be found here. For a short while it was called ‘Buster’s World’. I would encourage anyone reading this to head over to everyone’s favourite evil-less search engine and enter that term in. See the first hit. Yup. Gay fetish site.
The question I have to ask is why is the first line of any organisation’s naming strategy not “Upon thinking up idea, Google it. Is it in use elsewhere? If so, what for?”? Seems like something that might be worth adding…
You’ve got to laugh.
P.S. The site is so so so full of flash. The HTML only version is horrible. My relatively decent MBP started to stutter under the strain of it all. Oh dear Direct.gov. Not really your day.
Found via syntheticpubes
yesand:
The second class, the vast majority of Americans, are people who cannot think for themselves. I call these people “idea consumers” — metaphorically speaking, they wander around in a gigantic open-air mall of facts and ideas. The content of their experience is provided by television, the Internet and other shallow data pools. These people believe collecting images and facts makes them educated and competent, and all their experiences reinforce this belief. The central, organizing principle of this class is that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, “them.”
Aren’t we all at least part-time members of this Second Class? I know I am guilty, and as much as it stings to admit it, I think I’d blush harder if I tried to absolve myself of such. In fact, what happened to the cynical conclusion that originality is dead, that it is impossible to have a purely original thought? I think that those magical persons described above are simply the ones who combine or rehash the most esoteric material. Perhaps geniuses are simply those who excel at recalling ideas that have briefly slipped away from the collective consciousness.
ps: Of course, yesand is first to admit it, but what are most tumblogs beyond blatant collections of external images and facts?
I’m back at Magdalen now and I definitely feel this applies to me a fair amount of the time and that is depressing. Although there is something of an irony in perpetuating the idea that all most of us do is perpetuate ideas.