Web Monitor
15:28 UK time, Wednesday, 20 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
In Web Monitor today: predictive obituaries, naming earthquakes and what Cicero could teach tweeters.
• The idea of hearing your eulogy before you die spills out of self-help books and sit-coms. Thanks to GQ magazine, one person to do so for real is Peter Mandelson - GQ asked six people to write his obituary. Now the print version of the magazine has been and gone, . He predicts Mandelson will live until 2037:
"When he eventually returned for his fourth and longest incarnation, in the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson in 2016, at the age of 62, he called himself 'The Comeback Comeback Comeback Kid'. Each time he fell from grace, it seemed that his career was over, and each time that career up to that point would have satisfied all but the most ambitious of politicians."
, which is slightly more fanciful:
"By 2025, the country was teetering on the verge of economic and social chaos, and in June that year, the army stepped in to restore order. It was a 'very British coup' with no troops on the street. King William suspended parliament and on military recommendation asked the 72-year-old Senator Mandelson to come out of retirement to form a puppet administration. It has been difficult to locate the Senator, who, some years earlier had devoted his life to becoming a Buddhist monk wandering from village to village living off food handouts"
• One question the earthquake in Haiti has is why don't earthquakes have names like hurricanes do:
"Because they happen in one place. A storm can move 3,000 miles across land and sea in its lifetime, and the ability to disseminate clear information about its path and strength is crucial for public safety. According to the World Meteorological Organization - the body that coordinates the naming of tropical cyclones - giving storms pithy monikers like Mindy or Gordon makes it easier for the media to report on them and for 'widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea' to share data quickly and accurately. For earthquakes, no such warning system is necessary. So the informal nomenclature commonly used by geologists - year and then location, as in 'the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake' - works just fine."
• his first message on Twitter:
"'Hello World.' Hard at work on my foundation letter - publishing on 1/25."
who would be the best person to craft a powerful tweet. He finds the Roman speeches of Cicero can fit nicely into the 140 characters allowed in a tweet. He thinks President Obama can learn from this too:
"Perhaps, now that President Obama has tentatively made his first, ghostwritten tweet, Cicero might be a reminder that those who have chided him for grandiloquence merely wish him to write as they do. Twitter may be, in many ways, absurd; but it may also hasten the inner ear to the voices and glories of the past. [114 characters]"
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