• Stephen Fry
• Dave Gorman
• Sarah Millican
• Chris Addison
• Doug Naylor
• Bill Bailey
• Me

Then realised that their real name, as opposed to Twitter username, was the same as my brother-in-law and that it all made sense and I had not become unexpectedly famous after all.  Still… good to see another family member getting all Twittified.

There is every chance of the same thing happening here tomorrow.There are two reasons for this.  One is the cut-throat competition between TV news channels.  Sky News already has a bit of a reputation to broadcast anything, without checking.  I guess they calculate that if it is wrong they can issue a correction later (or, more likely, just ignore it) but if it is right they can claim to be first with breaking news.  Add that to the way all the news studios will have half an eye on each other and a wrong piece of information can easily get replicated.

The other factor is the huge leap in communications in recent years.  All TV stations have channels open for text messages, emails, mobile phone video clips and everything else to be sent in to them, and they keep an eye on Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and other sources of rubbish news.

Earlier this year, though it seems like a lot longer ago, a trainee journalist sent a tweet about Sarkozy and Carla Bruni’s marriage that, within hours, was being reported as news.  It turned out to be an experiment to see how quickly an unsubstantiated report could get onto news bulletins as fact.

Add into the mix the sheer mischief of many technology users and I reckon there is a fair chance of false rumours filling the election coverage, by exploiting the trigger-happy approach of Sky News in particular  All it will take is for a few people to tweet from a count that there is a recount in a supposedly safe seat and the experts in the studio will start extrapolating, explaining how the political balance has shifted, and then frantically backpeddling as the truth sneaks out.

Of course, being in the count myself I will miss all that fun.  And if you see reports of the Peace party demanding a recount in Horsham take it with a pinch of salt and remember where you heard it first

Looking forward to listening to this week’s SModcast!  The fact that it is called “SModcast 106: Go F— Yourself Southwest Airlines” on iTunes is a bit of an indication that he has not been mollified…

1. Top tip: try quoting that saying to the Toyota PR department if you want to see an example of spontaneous human combustion!

Capture from the Guardian's twitter feed, 16 Nov.

I saw this on Monday on the Guardian’s twitter feed, totally misread it and then went to all the trouble of making a screen capture and forgot to do anything with it.  Here it is, better late than never…

You can set it up to do this with all posts but while I am playing with it I have set it to only operate on posts within a specific new category.

I still can’t understand how the younger generation in this house consider that 500 texts a month is not enough, so I am thinking I might use some of my texts to tweet on twitter.  I think that means I will then be a twat.  I already have an acocunt, set up so I could follow realnickgriffin, and I think I have got my mobile pointing at it.  For some reason I already have 5 followers, even though I have been resolutely in read-only mode and never posted anything.

I’m sure there will be the usual accusations of ‘dirty tricks’ from the BNP, but this is good old-fashioned satire and as the feed itself points out “we’re a legitimate mainstream party now, son. that means we’re fair game for satire”