Web Monitor
16:07 UK time, Wednesday, 10 June 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor tells you who is saying what across the web, be that Anneka Rice or the President of Rwanda. If you find an interesting viewpoint, send the link by commenting on the box to the right of this page.
• Web Monitor announced yesterday that Naomi Wolf had crowned Angelina Jolie as the new queen of feminism because, after all, she has it all. But someone who gave up "having it all", or at least having a camera following her running around in leggings for most of the early 1990s, women don't want it all anyway.
In the Daily Politics, she explained:
"I was the real action girl, I had young children, I had an exciting lifestyle. It really must have seemed like I had it all but all that came at a price and I gave up a very high-earning job because I wanted to bring up my family...
I just don't think women want the same things as men do, that they're not driven by power success and money. What they want is emotional fulfilment...
Stop presuming that women want to be like men - we just don't."
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• . E-Gold was a private, international currency that aimed to circulate independent of government controls, and at one point was second only to Pay Pal for online transactions. But it was the currency of choice for card fraudsters who could transfer funds from anywhere in the world anonymously. Now the founder, Douglas Jackson, is serving the last month of his sentence for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting service and conspiracy to commit money laundering and he that he intends to start again, this time legitimately.
• asks one simple question: what are you optimistic about? Users fill the homepage with reasons to be cheerful. Web Monitor now knows that after the rain, the colours of the rainbow are beautiful, thanks to , or that . All this makes a pleasant change from message boards which consume themselves with how slightly annoying situations are comparable to Nazi Germany. But Web Monitor's glass is always half-empty, so an overdose of optimism can leave an unsettling after-taste on its rather delicate palate.
• The President of Rwanda, about the first US peace corps volunteers returning to the country after the 1994 genocide. He is calling for volunteers coming to the country to recognise they will learn a lot, just in case they thought they were going to get an instant sainthood:
"We will, for instance, show them our system of community justice, called Gacaca, where we integrated our need for nationwide reconciliation with our ancient tradition of clemency, and where violators are allowed to reassume their lives by proclaiming their crimes to their neighbors, and asking for forgiveness. We will present to them Rwanda's unique form of absolution, where the individuals who once exacted such harm on their neighbors and ran across national borders to hide from justice are being invited back to resume their farms and homes to live peacefully with those same families."
• collects blogs that only ever have one post before they run out of steam. , "Up until recently I didn't understand the draw of blogs" and then, one assumes, forgot what they had only just realised. Now - the legion of twitterers who signed up, tweeted once on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, then never returned. Most seem to be consumed by the question tweet asks - what are you doing? Thank goodness, now we know is standing up, is studying and is wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL). Slate just wonders if the reason they haven't tweeted since is because they are still doing these things so have no need to update their status.
• if we are a kinder nation than in the past. Despite ratings soaring for talent shows that film small children crying, Gee sticks up for the reality television audience by saying that - as well as pointing and laughing - it can also empathise with celebrities like Jade Goody:
"We can grieve for their deaths without having the hard physical tasks that attend to someone dying in our own lives, the organising and communicating, the enduring sorrow or guilt. We can project hatefulness onto them without actually harming them. We can love them without being disappointed by a lack of return. And sometimes, just sometimes, when they enact human pain or joy for us, we may genuinely empathise with them, too."
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