Got to love the idea of Jane Austen’s Fight Club!   (hat tip to Stroppybird)

While Francis Maude has been busily rounding up government websites for the chop in order to save money, the government has been active in creating new ones to replace them.  Best of the bunch, just for the sheer entertainment value, has to be yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk.

If the site is a bit much then somebody has very helpfully set up a site to capture the best nuggets from it at http://yourfreedumb.tumblr.com/ which is already one of my favourite sites for a bit of daily diversion, right up there with Angry People in Local Newspapers.The home page of the new government site says:

The Coalition Government is committed to restoring and defending your freedom – and we’re asking you to participate.

What could possibly go wrong?

I think The Register summed it up nicely when they described the new site as “a lunatic magnet“.  It really does seem to be designed to reach out to those people who normally inhabit Have Your Say, the Daily Mail Online’s comments and various local bulletin board-based forums up and down the country.

I don’t know how much it all cost, though I am sure Tom Watson will have a FoI request in to find out by now, but having looked at the site it is money well spent however much it is because it is keeping a lot of dangerous people off the streets.

Via Tom Freeman (an all-around-my-hat tip?)

We saw the picture of the plane, nose down in the snow, and were more than a little concerned.  Was anyone hurt? we wondered.  There is no sound on the TV feed on these screens, but Jim saw the banner text going across it and passed on the news “all passengers were removed safely”.  While we were all breathing a sigh of relief he followed up with “but they’ll want their pound back!” and hilarity ensued.

I guess you had to be there, but it really tickeld me.

When accepting his award from Boris Johnson he said that he and Boris would be doing everything they can to undermine David Cameron.

Normally I find politicians’ attempts at humour very poor – even such widely-acclaimed wits as the late Tony Banks – but Mandelson gives me some genuine laughs.

Screenshot of the English Defence League website today (Hat tip: qwglhm)

As any fule no, targetted advertising works by looking at keywords on a page and then serving up an advert related to those key words.  Unfortunately that means you sometimes get a situation where, for example, an anti-islamic, right-wing fringe group display a prominent ad on their front page for…  a muslim dating agency.

(As tweeted by Chris Applegate)

I suspect this statistic will outlive the story and by next month will be quoted as fact all over the world.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry