UK, Isreal miss the point.

Happy New Year, citizens of the blogosphere!

The UK's culture minister, Andy Burnham, closed out 2008 by once again demonstrating that politicians don't understand the internet. Burnham proposed in an interview with the BBC that websites come with movie-style ratings in the interest of keeping kids away from inappropriate material. Or making it easier for them to find it, as Ars Technica points out. Even if the scheme was only the law for the .uk domain, that is still a completly infeasible number of websites. And unlike movies, the number of websites grow literally by the minute. Perhaps in the intrest of reinforcing the US-UK alliance, Barack Obama should send some of his handlers over to give the culture ministry an crash course in the internet.

In a tech-forward but bizarre move, the Isreali consulate in New York announced it would use Twitter to post its side of the story on the recent air strikes into Gaza. While I realize that some people pretty much live on Twitter, I highly doubt this will do anything to reverse the overwhelmingly negative reaction of the westren press to this latest round of attacks.