Robin Brown

In the grand scheme of things, what Twitter client you use on your mobile device is small beer by anyone’s standards, but it’s recently become a big deal to me.

Having taken the plunge with the iPhone, the search was on for a decent Twitter client so I could enjoy sitting in pubs, ignoring my friends and e-wanking away on my shiny new Apple thing (shamefully, one of five products I now have from the company).

Hootsuite, which I use on my computers, was discarded as being rather too clunky and busy: Echofon, used previously, didn’t do it for me either. Having asked on Twitter – where else? – someone suggested I use Twitterrific.

It was by far the simplest and most user-friendly of all the applications. It looked nice; it was simple; you could change the font sizes and themes; you could have multiple accounts; it made a tweeting noise when it updated. I particularly noticed that.

There were problems. The Twitter API seemed to be at lunch half the time, and this became more and more of a problem as Twitter began cutting back on third-party app API use.

Then, without warning, Twitterrific just stopped working completely. It said my login details were incorrect, but I re-entered them several times to no avail. I noticed an update, but that didn’t help either.

So I went to Twitter – where else? – to see what was wrong and learned there was a new version. They’d simply switched the old one off. Pretty poor, I thought to myself, but hey ho.

I downloaded the new version. But it looked confusing: I couldn’t change the font size; I couldn’t add more than one account; and I couldn’t work out how to do anything. It still made the tweeting noise, but that wasn’t quite enough to swing it.

I browsed the reviews on the new application to see a column of one-star reviews. And what made it so frustrating was that everyone, like me, loved the previous version.

The new version costs £2.99 but that doesn’t bother me in itself. If it was as good as the previous version, with a few more bells and whistles, I’d have gladly swallowed the expense.

But the way the previous version was simply turned off annoys me, and I’m not the only one. Have a look at some of these reviews from iTunes.

People who used V2 of Twitterrific loved it. They were classic brand evangelists; people who would recommend an app to someone else simply because they really liked it.

With its cack-handed upgrade and attempts to monetise the new version, Twitterrific has gone from a social media success story to a villain almost overnight. Those evangelists have lost their faith, and they’ll be more than happy to tell you about it.

So let me get this straight. To access that money – my own money – that’s hanging around collecting dust in this Paypal account, I have to:

• Print off the form, input all my bank details
• Find out the amounts of cash Paypal have deposited in my account
• Photocopy my driving licence
• Locate a fax machine – a method of communication virtually no-one uses any more
• Fax all highly sensitive information drivel to a fax number in the US

How am I supposed to know where all this sensitive information is going? Why can’t I use this bank account in the first place? Where can I find a fax machine? What if I don’t have a printer? What if I don’t do internet banking?

To do this I may conceivably go to a friend’s house to use their printer; locate a shop with a photocopier; go to my bank to discover these two amounts; and locate a friendly office worker whose fax machine I can use. This is an internet business.

All this. Just to access my own cash.

I’m not sure at the moment whether I think this is more stupid than NatWest’s determination that every single customer of theirs have their own portable car reader in order to move their own money around or not.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not ten times harder.

I’ve spent quite a few months pondering the value of social media for businesses recently, in work and outside of it.

In work I’ve been looking into whether social media, when paired with strong content and multimedia, can work for automotive businesses. Yes and no is the predictable answer I came to.

And, outside, I’ve been ruminating on how social media can help launch SevenStreets, a website about Liverpool I co-edit and is a couple of months old.

Facebook and Twitter are incredibly useful in the latter case, and I expect I can find similar uses for LinkenIn and Foursquare. Flickr and Youtube haven’t really developed beyond simple platforms, so I don’t really take them into account.

I think Twitter is useful for any company of any size. It’s the new email, the new phone number, the new business card. It can be wielded professionally in a way that Facebook cannot, and LinkedIn does not, because not enough people use it.

So I like Twitter for business. And at first I dismissed Facebook for business. But I was wrong.

Facebook will be the ultimate website for business in a few years, in my humble one. I have no stats to call on to back this up. No charts, no graphs, no expert opinions. It’s just obvious to me, as someone who uses the internet every day, that this is the case.

Why? Because Facebook is taking over the internet, conquering everything in its path. I thought of a few naff metaphors for Facebook’s assault on the web. Something about evolution, something about conquest, or maybe some kind of medical simile. I even thought about calling this piece ‘Why Facebook are the Daleks of the internet,’ but I was nearly sick in my mouth.

Facebook and Daleks: Bad comparison

Pick your own. Either way, Facebook is muscling in on every other piece of web real estate you can think of. Flickr? Photos. Digg or Reddit? That Facebook Share button, rolling out across the web. Blogging? Notes. Twitter? Status updates. Youtube? Facebook video. Email? Facebook Messages.

Facebook apps can cover just about anything, including games – one of the biggest uses of the internet globally. Apps also make Facebook a big favourite of PR companies and virals.

Facebook is revamping Pages for business. So that’s business listings and personal websites ticked as well.

Facebook users can follow all their favourite topics and organisations within the site. Why use an RSS reader when you can follow every conceivable topic on the web through Facebook pages, including pages for your favourite media?

I’ve noticed a few pages ranking organically that seem to be for Wiki-like entries on generic topics. The Facebook Encyclopedia. No need for Wikipedia.

Why join a specialist forum, or several fora with all their fiddly login details when you can join a community on Facebook?

Why visit any external sites when you can access it all through Facebook?

Facebook is advancing on all fronts. It’s a frightening, stupefying land grab of the internet in just about every conceivable way, and it’s all prefacing the very reason I was wrong to write off Facebook for business.

Why use different accounts and websites to upload pictures, check-in your location, update your status, read an article, interact online with friends, join a discussion, watch a video, research a topic or play a game when you can do it on Facebook?

Come to think of it, why buy something from a dozen different merchants when you can do it all on Facebook? Just stick your bank details in once and Facebook will do the rest. One-click buying. There’s Amazon and Ebay conquered too.

All that data Facebook is harvesting about its users will make it one of the biggest exporters of CRM data going. Maybe that data could be used to make a new kind of tailored, intelligent search. Sayonara, Google.

I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of using something like Facebook to make significant purchases, and the idea of buying big-ticket items like cars certainly doesn’t appeal. Which is why I initially dismissed Facebook for business.

But the next generation of computer users, the ones coming of age right now, won’t bat an eyelid about buying cars – or anything else – through Facebook, or similar social networks.

Right now, I don’t see a huge ROI – if any, in cash terms – for small-to-medium businesses on Facebook. For larger brands that people can identify, certainly. But is there any point in whacking your used-car inventory on Facebook at present?

Facebook and Cybermen: Better comparison?

Maybe if you do it properly. But it’s worth doing anyway, because pretty soon everyone will be on Facebook. Not to be on Facebook in a decade will be like not having a mobile phone or using the internet now.

Any buying a car, ordering your shopping, booking flight and setting up direct debits will be as prosaic as updating your status. That’s not just conquering the rest of the internet, its making the rest of the internet like Facebook.

Facebook is not a conqueror, it’s an assimilator; cannibalising the best bits of the web and adapting them for use within itself.

Absorbing other bits of the web in this way means Facebook ends up as the default choice for casual WILFers, who may otherwise visit half a dozen sites on their daily trawl around the internet.

And that list of services will only grow as Facebook expands, to the point where pretty much anything that can be done online can be done through Facebook.

Maybe Daleks are a bad comparison. I should have said The Borg.

NB. If you’re English, you may prefer Cybermen.

EDIT: This literally never worked on any of my blogs. Neat idea, poor execution.

The Guardian has launched a new WordPress plugin that allows self-hosted bloggers to reprint content from newspaper’s website.

The Guardian News Feed plugin is surely designed to act as a direct counterpoint to talk of paywalls and charging for newspaper content and is an extension of the Grauniad’s Open Platform system, which allows people who sign up to access the paper’s massive databanks and develops apps based on it via an API.

There are over 1m articles available published as far back as 1999 available through the plugin, which theoretically looks quite simple, and users can do pretty much anything they want with the articles, so long as they leave the actual content and code alone.

This is pretty much an ultimate expression of the idea of content as online currency – exchanging content, apps or services for traffic, leads and revenue.

In this case, the Guardian content is exchanged for increased traffic, backlinks, harvested data and ad revenues, leading to more exposure, brand equity, SEO juice and cash.

A screenshot of the Guardian News Feed plugin back-end

It’s hard to see a downside for The Guardian. By signing up and republishing articles from the site I had to enter more data about myself and every Guardian article reprinted on my blog gets more backlinks, domain authority and ad clicks for the paper’s website.

Depending on what they do with anchor text and ads, they can probably pull off targeted SEO campaigns and ad campaigns too. Now multiply that by potentially hundreds of thousands of blogs around the world.

In return I get a nifty new toy to play with, potentially higher traffic and – arguably – a little more authority. If I’m clever and use the articles well I could even get a boost in search engines and ad revenues too, if I displayed ads on my blogs.

The exchange is complete, both parties have something of value. It sounds like a win-win situation, and it’s a great way to further leverage the latent value in the Guardian’s article bank, by doing virtually nothing on an ongoing basis.

Already some on Twitter have started to voice their scorn about the plugin. And, really, what we have here is a very clever form of inbound marketing, using the Grauniad’s massive and powerful archive of content – it’s simply leveraging that content to make money in the same way that Murdoch is trying to leverage The Times’ content via a paywall.

Whereas The Times uses content for more explicit transaction – using content as a currency to generate cash directly, the Guardian’s more elegant approach delivers all sorts of other benefits, besides revenues – brand equity, SEO authority, increased engagement – albeit somewhat nebulous and of indeterminate cash value.

But it’s a smart bit of PR too – while everyone was talking about News International’s attempts to place more value on its content by charging for access, The Guardian is throwing its content out to whomever wants to use it; it can be sold as a direct, and opposite, move to that of Murdoch.

Finally, I’d hoped to include an article using the news feed below, but I can’t get it to work – probably something to do with my host I suspect. Which just goes to show that even the simplest, most elegant, ideas can be undermined by a lack of technical nous or user error.

• Go here for instructions and more deetails

Seriously, what is it with Sky at the moment? While the press has, on the whole, thrown a bit of a wobbler because it didn’t get its own way over Cameron during this election, the broadcast media – Sky specifically – has suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown.

I think this is a crisis of confidence and direction on the Beeb, ITN and Sky, as they increasingly search for lines that are engaging to viewers yet don’t break any rules over impartiality.

As I’ve outlined before, I don’t believe the media really has an idea of how to do political reporting anymore, unless it can find hooks that it believes it needs to maintain the interest of the idiot population.

As has been evident throughout, the UK’s population has been far from passive – or idiotic – in the election; with Twitter protests, protests against the media and protests against Sky specifically, following Kay Burley’s bizarre outburst against David Babbs for daring to engage in his democratic right to protest.

For my money, Burley is simply an idiot who has no place anywhere near political reporting, and I don’t have much time for Adam Boulton either.

However, Boulton does have the right pedigree and seems to be generally respected as a political correspondent – until today.

Boulton absolutely lost it in an interview with Alastair Campbell today, who gently teased Boulton in the way that only he and Peter Mandelson truly can, over Boulton being secretly angry that Cameron may find his anointed path to Number 10 blocked by a brilliant bit of political chicanery by Gordon Brown.

Campbell is voicing what has been whispered less and stated openly more and more during the election campaign – that Sky’s coverage has been less than impartial.

Perhaps that’s what touched a nerve with Boulton, though I personally have found Nick Robinson’s punditry more and more intriguing during the election. Campbell was again present in a live round table – with David Steel, Huw Edwards and Andrew Adonis – responding to the news of Brown’s resignation hit the airwaves today and, again, seemed to fluster Robinson.

So, what is it? The media suddenly angry that their previously-unchallenged position as interlocutors is threatened by social media and pressure groups? Or the cracks showing in the political dead bat of political correspondents as the situation becomes more volatile? Or is it evidence that some in the broadcast media, Sky specifically, are testing the waters of the UK’s objectivity rules, perhaps in preparation for a more Fox News-like controversial stance on politics?

I’m not sure. I do sense that Sky may attempt a more entertainment-news approach in the future that may test the barriers of what Ofcom deems acceptable. And I do sense that a few correspondents, Boulton most obviously, have found it hard to disguise their true feelings.

But I suspect it’s more a case of political correspondents finding it tough to keep up with the twists and turns of a genuinely incredible campaign, and trying to keep pace with social media, in tandem with the demands of 24-hour rolling news.

So, Sky cracks first. And maybe there’s not a grand conspiracy to get Cameron into Number 10, maybe it’s just a case of folding under the pressure. Boulon certainly seems to be feeling it at the moment

Apart from the shrieking Burley. I think, more prosaically, she’s a fool.

NB. Seems Boulton nearly lost it again with Ben Bradshaw

EDITED TO ADD:

Journalism.co.uk has a good account of Campbell’s run-in with Boulton, which makes the Sky correspondent’s behaviour seem even more bizarre. This bit is particularly good:

ADAM BOULTON:
Why hasn’t he had a Cabinet meeting before making this offer?
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
He is about to have a Cabinet meeting now.
ADAM BOULTON:
Yes, but now he has made the offer, what can the Cabinet do, why haven’t you had a meeting with the parliamentary Labour party like the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have had?
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
He’s having one tomorrow, he’s having one tomorrow.
JEREMY THOMPSON:
Gentlemen, gentlemen.
ADAM BOULTON:
In other words it’s you, totally unelected have plotted this with …
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
Me?
ADAM BOULTON:
Yes. You are happiest speaking about him …
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
That’s because the Ministers are going to a Cabinet meeting …
ADAM BOULTON:
He has got a parliamentary party, you’re the one that cooked it up, you’re the one that’s cooked it up with Peter Mandelson.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
Oh my God, unbelievable. Adam, calm down.
JEREMY THOMPSON:
Gentlemen, gentlemen, let this debate carry on later. Let’s just remind you that Gordon Brown said a few minutes ago…
ADAM BOULTON:
I actually care about this country.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
You think I don’t care about it, you think I don’t care about it.
ADAM BOULTON:
I don’t think the evidence is there.

Campbell’s predictably amusing response, later posted on his blog:

Adam gets very touchy at any suggestion that he is anything other than an independent, hugely respected, totally impartial and very important journalist whose personal views never see the light of day, and who works for an organisation that is a superior form of public service than anything the BBC can deliver.

After the rollercoaster thrill ride of three men disagreeing with each other and an off-camera man occasionally shouting, I’ve compiled this exhaustive list of newspaper and website coverage taking place both during the debate and over the next 24 hours.

• Debate clearly won by Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Nick Clegg

• Tiresome analysis of clothes worn by three candidates

• Article on Richard Nixon / JFK Presidential debate

• Infographic making inexplicable use of shapes in three primary colours

• Daily Mail picture of Gordon Brown looking sweaty

• Analysis of various ‘blunders’ by three party leaders

• Composite images of three leaders with mouths open

• Tiresome ‘Have Your Say’ section with numbingly tedious and/or ill-informed user-generated content

• Hopelessly unfunny sketch by Simon Hoggart/Rod Liddle/Amanda Platell

• Shit Sun mock-up of Gordon Brown looking like Compo from Last of the Summer Wine

• Dull profile of Alistair Stewart

• Live blog from short-straw reporter in pub in Hartlepool

• Millions of links to Twitter feeds churning out pointless quotes

• C4 blog by Jon Snow’s tie on what Brown, Cameron and Clegg were drinking backstage

• Swing-o-meter-style mock-up based on how many times each man says ‘change’.

• Live panel quizzed throughout debate consisting of white-van driving racist, muesli-eating hippie and boring middle-aged woman

• Plaintive whinge from Alex Salmond, live from reactor building in Dounreay

Now with added Clegg!

It’s a week later, and I deliberately spent the night cycling, editing photos and watching cricket. Anything really to avoid the dreaded leader’s debate and the ensuing media volcanic ash torrent of drivel. If you did too, here’s what you missed.

• Lots of articles and reports about end of two-party hegemony

• Right-wing press fall in line to paint Clegg as nutter/shirker/gay/gyppo/foreigner-loving liberal who is, quite possibly, a maniac

• Some of the broadcast media inexplicably start reporting rumours they’ve heard about Nick Clegg from hostile briefings

• Someone from Keane backs Nick Clegg

• Lib Dem supporters wonder how much further ahead they’d be with Charles Kennedy

• DPS Observer interview with Vince Cable called ‘The man who would be King’, trailed with front page lead headlined ‘Cable to bring City to heel’

• Marina Hyde writes shit sketch about how she fancies Vince Cable. Called The Cable Guy.

• Sue Malone writes poisonous article about Miriam González Durántez’s wardrobe

• Scratchy radio interview with Paddy Ashdown, saying how great Clegg is, and what a bastard Tony Blair is

• The Sun mocks up a shit photo of Nick Clegg heading down a hill in a tin bath.

The Huffington Post was number one in The Observer’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs at the weekend, alongside plenty of other aggregators.

The Post, says the article, ‘hoovered up traffic’ and ‘made the first generation of bloggers look like two-bit prospectors panning for nuggets in shallow creeks before the big mining operations moved in’.

This is, undoubtedly, true and a pretty decent simile to describe the awesome site’s Death Star-like entry into the blogosphere.

But the Huffington Post isn’t just a big mining operation – it’s a strip-mine operation that decimates the blogging landscape by using the value of whatever it republishes, vaguely repackaging it and leaving a credit-plus-link behind.

Huff Post editors will argue that those links and that traffic are of value to the original site, but really the Post’s aggregation model is the online equivalent of harvesting a village’s annual crop and leaving behind an IOU. The Observer article continues:

In the era pre-Huffington, big media companies ignored the web, or feared it; post-Huffington they started to treat it as just another marketplace, open to exploitation.

That much is true. Huffington, and other mega-blogs like Gawker, opened the door for aggregators that use work done by other people to generate cash, traffic and engagement.

But Huffington and others like it have gone beyond aggregation as it used to be understood; it scrapes, albeit using a human hand as opposed to a bot, taking much more than a header and abstract. Was the effort that went into your blog post or article really worth that hard-to-find link back from the aggregator?

In its wake, other mass meta-aggregators such as Mahalo have followed, blurring the definition of ‘fair use’. It’s a tough one to call, but it’s easy to make apocalyptic predictions about where this sort of thing ends. What else is left when everything has been mined of its value?

Ironically, The Huffington Post was set up to take on the right-wing US blogs and news corporations; to provide a ‘liberal’ point of view and media beast to rebalance the landscape.

But by introducing the slash-and-burn aggregation model to publishing content, it’s allowed corporate behemoths to enter the mass aggregation game, with revenue-generation as the first and last priority.

And, greatest irony of all, Mahalo – a great black hole of aggregation – is backed by none other than News Corp; the greatest enemy of mass aggregation in the world.

So, when you’re confronted with SERPs results consisting of content scraped by Mahalo, earning plenty of cash for Rupert Murdoch into the bargain, remember to thank The Huffington Post.

I’m fairly dubious about claims that GPS-based social networking show-off app Foursquare could lead burglars to empty houses, prompting insurance claims for thousands of iMacs, X-Boxes and Garage Band kit as nerds around the country fall prey to social media criminals.

The idea that any of the smackheads who lurk at the road at the end of my street might be checking out my Crunked Badge status before jemmying open the back door and making off with my collection of Doctor Who DVDs strikes me as fairly remote.

But there is a significant downside to Foursquare that no-one has really discussed. It’s the fact that my heavy drinking has been exposed to me in terrifyingly irrefutable binary data.

What all of those dots and code and pixels add up to is the fact that I have a significant drinking problem*, my check-ins forming an accusatory dot-to-dot around Liverpool like interconnecting veins on a discolored liver.

In under a month I’ve checked in at at least twelve different pubs, bars and clubs, more than once in many instances. And I’ve been unable to check in on several occasions due to lack of iPhone, lack of reception, or – bafflingly – lack of the kind of social media twattery that compels me to start fiddling about with my phone the second I enter a building.

This adds up to a very sorry state of affairs, from the perspective of anyone viewing my life through lens of my Foursquare status updates.

Where are the check-ins of the galleries, theatres, cafes, parks and restaurants I’ve visited? Why did I not check in at those places? I’m just glad I didn’t check in at the off-licenses I’ve visited over the last month.

All of this does raise the possibility of new apps that use a FourSquare API to pretty much create a kind of location-based tapestry of your life – which could reveal all sorts of unsavoury information if you allow your phone to merrily pass on your location to all and sundry.

All of a sudden those unexplained visits to a house on the other side of town could start looking suspicious; that day spent at a rival business could need some explaining; the repeat trips to the bookies; those lonely late-night visits to a brothel, a late-night garage or a crack den…

The possibilities are endless. There’s probably a pleasant upside to these tools, but it’s not immediately clear what they are. As it is, I’m probably lucky to escape looking only like a rather hapless boozehound.

• You can find Robin on Foursquare here

* I’d like to make it clear that, as far as I’m concerned, I have no such drinking problem. Then again, I would say that wouldn’t I?

I tend to watch Question Time after a few pints down the pub, as I suspect most do.

I’ve started to wonder, recently, whether the programme is actually pitched at a demographic of half-pissed pub goers who may happen to come across BBC1′s flagship discussion programme while channel hopping.

The reason why is there’s been a steady flow of genuinely awful pantomime dames and villains on recently on QT, who make it genuinely hard to watch.

There’s always been a wild card element to the QT panel – an Ian Hislop here or a Mark Steel there – but recently we’ve had Nick Griffin, Carol Vorderman, Kelvin Mackenzie and David Starkey, all so odious that I’ve not been able to sit through it for more than ten minutes.

I generally head over to Twitter to see if it’s just me going stark raving bonkers, but the Twittersphere seems to be in agreement (although that’s a demographic that, in all likelihood, is pretty similar to my own).

While Starkey is a renowned historian, he’s also a renowned nutcase but I can see the logic in getting him on. But Mackenzie? He’s just a fat horrible twat. And Vorderman? A celebrity debt-pushing adder upper? And that’s before I get to Griffin. Who’s next? Eugene Terre’Blanche?

I’m putting this down to the desire for an outspoken right-wing professional splutterrer to articulate the voice of the fabled common man, but really it just makes the whole thing unwatchable.

Seeing politicians trying to score points off one another is one thing. Seeing the latest right-wing rent-a-gob frothing, ranting and generally being oafish just exposes the pointlessness of the whole thing, especially with the increasingly fogeyish Dimbleby failing to preside over the whole sorry mess.

Below are my favourite Starkey reactions from Twitter, where the pompous old hobbit briefly became a trending topic earlier tonight. Keep a look out for Jim Davidson this time next week.

My favourite David Starkey reactions
 on Twitter

@jonboy79 [David Starkey has] spent so long studying the lives of pompous priggish royals that he has become one, by some sort of historical osmosis


@heppy: If David Starkey didn’t exist he’d have been invented by The League Of Gentlemen

@NinaGleams: RT @zofiewonkenobi David Starkey looks like an evil doormouse


@marcusbrig David Starkey is so utterly vile that I feel weepy, tired and unwell everytime he speaks


@Bethemediauk David Starkey is a pompous, overbearing, stuck up old tosspot. Which overshadow the rare ocassions when he actually has a point


@DCPlod It’s not just America that has crazy conservatives: David Starkey on BBC Question Time said 25% of British children are feral
 


@samdbarratt David Starkey is properly bonkers, too much. Next week a panel of Farrage, K McKenzie and Street-Porter? 
 


@Ruaridhnicoll Could David Starkey look any more like a Hogarthian nightmare? I can smell the corruption from here




@Scalded_Bollock I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say David Starkey is absolutely batshit.
 


@Drattigan Hello. My name is David Starkey, the Toad of Toad Hall
 


@dooobeee David Starkey, YOU ARE NOT AN ECONOMIST! listen to the 60 leading economists and IMF! 



@Julie4GS: David Starkey needs to be catapulted back into the seventeenth century where he belongs. Shut up you antiquated old


@Joemuggs Is David Starkey a ludicrous, clumsy prank designed to discredit Conservatism?

n.b. these represent a snapshot of about five minutes of tweeting. There was a whole hour to choose from.

It was with no sense of satisfaction today that I scanned the morning’s front pages to a sea of blurry Jon Venables shots, but it was proof that the tabloids are scenting blood over the man’s return to prison.

The Mirror reports that Venables has been returned to prison for fighting at work and that he has been struggling with drug use for some time – shamefully for a Labour paper relegating the death of Michael Foot to a masthead boxout – and apparently breaking the worldwide injunction that prohibits any reporting on Venables or Robert Thompson.

The details, vague though they are, are clearly sufficient to allow dozens of people to confidently guess Venables’ assumed identity – which obviously poses significant problems for Venables, the probation service, the police, prisons, the Ministry of Justice and dozens of other auxiliary services.

This is presumably why Jack Straw was so determined not to allow this to come to light. At best, Venables requires a whole new identity and cover story somewhere else in the country, or spends the rest of his life in prison with a round-the-clock guard. Or, more simply, someone murders him.

I’ve been considering how the public interest has been served by these revelations coming to light. In what way are we enlightened, I wonder. What’s the benefit to society in these details being brought to light?

It’s fascinating trying to watch the newspapers maintain some sort of moral high ground on this issue while exploiting the grief of Denise Fergus to sell some more papers.

In today’s Sun, we’re told of the ‘Bulger Case Outrage’? What ‘outrage’ is that exactly? The manufactured outrage of tabloid editors denied the opportunity to make another meal of a genuine human tragedy?

It’s an unfortunate – or is fortunate? – coincidence that the outing of criminals as part of serving the greater good dovetails so smoothly with the media imperative to sell copy.

Who’s to say what the real reason behind the Venables muck-raking is? Every newspaper editor will point to the former, explain that it is a duty of the media to reassure society. Whichever way you paint it I can’t see the moral justification in the howls of anger over the government’s refusal to cave in to the papers.

But it won’t stop here – this story has legs now, and we all like to know how a story ends. I’ll save you the bother of actually buying these papers.

In a few days time, following a tidal wave on unrelenting pressure from the papers, reflected and intensified by other mainstream media, spread far and wide by social media, which will in turn be re-reported by the tabloids, people will start coming forward with stories to sell.

Some time next week one of the papers – probably the Sun – will get recent pictures of Venables and decide, on balance, that the legal risk is worth taking, arguing that to do so is in the public interest. Then the rest will follow suit.

The public interest will have been served. Paper sales and website traffic will increase accordingly. Some hack will win a self-congratulatory ‘Scoop of the Year’ award.

It remains to be seen what happens to Venables. At best, a life of looking over his shoulder. At worst… well, we know the worst.

I genuinely wonder if, at any point, those in the media demanding to know these details have ever thought beyond the scope of ‘public interest’ and considered the high stakes of this game. That convenient public interest defence can cover a multitude of sins.