Web Monitor
16:00 UK time, Tuesday, 1 September 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor is back at work and clicking away to divert you from the internet motorway on to the web scenic route. If you've found a good picnic spot along the way - or a more tortured metaphor than this - then send your link via the letters box to the right of this page.
• Working your finger to the bone and what do you get when you take one piddly day off?
You get Candace in New Jersey telling on you to Magazine Monitor:
"So Paper Monitor is hard at work, but where is the update from Web Monitor after all the moaning about long hours? Off playing badminton and sipping a mint julep perhaps?"
Sadly not, but when it comes to bank holiday fun seems to have got to root of what makes a quintessential bank holiday.
• So, down to business. Web Monitor asked for all your findings of weirdly wonderful occurrences of the world pimp on the web. If you haven't been following, no this is not a glib take sex trafficking - rather a mission to document how the word's definition changed from a prostitutes' agent to it's current meaning - dressing something up.
Web Monitor was delighted to see the prevalence of pimping in hospital situations - until Jenny in Chicago pointed out, doctors have not been trying to be down with the kids. No, it's a legitimate medical term:
"The verb to 'pimp' has long been used in medical education. It is not considered offensive but does have negative connotations for those being 'pimped' (ie the possibility of public embarrassment) by their superiors."
It turns out pimping is controversial in medicine as well but not the word itself, the method it describes. Pimping is a "Socratic" form of teaching in medicine and not liked by all as :
"What is the purpose of pimping? Well, the Socratic method is meant to involve carefully chosen questions that challenge the preconceived ideas of the student, and through a process of rational discussion and refutation allow the student's knowledge to grow."
So, pimping is seen by some students as an opportunity for their tutor to persecute or embarrass them.
Incidentally, Web Monitor suspected the Life in the Fast Lane blog was going to offer glorious insight into another world when the description for the blog was "Emergency Medicine Blog, vernacular insights and health 2.0 reasoning." Send in your favourite blog straplines and let's see if the content is as good as the sales pitch.
• We'll start you off with one surprising strapline: : "Not Anonymous, Not Neutral". So just your common-or-garden blog, until you discover that Felix is blogging on behalf of world renowned news agency Reuters.
looks at why shops remain empty and tries to uncover why landlords don't just accept any rent - after all low rent is surely better than no rent. Salmon says it is all to do with lease lengths:
"I think the answer lies in the fact that commercial leases tend to be very long-term things - so long term, in fact, that the discounted cashflow from any given lease is likely, in a normal (non-bubbly) property market, to be more or less the same as the value of the commercial property itself."
Salmon found Australian artist his own solution - short term rents. Westbury has long been campaigning to stop the neglect that he says follows the empty shop fronts in his home town Newcastle and the solution is perfect for artists who cannot predict demand for their business far into the future.
there is a problem with short-term rents for the tenant:
"... once they've made the capital improvements, the landlord has them over a barrel."
Anything for art's sake.
The 
