Web Monitor
17:50 UK time, Thursday, 27 August 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Sibling rivalry is breaking out in Monitor Towers but Web Monitor, as always, rises above and uses it as an excuse to work hard in our slowly growing link dealership. Help our empire expand by sharing your favourite bits of the web via the letters box to the right of this page.
• Paper Monitor revealed, in what they no doubt saw as a hard hitting exposé, Web Monitor may not actually be too good at micro-blogging. Two words PM: Matthew Robson. Yes, he's the boy who, as Web Monitor mentioned, stormed it at his work experience after writing telling the old men at Morgan Stanley that he thought Twitter was really only for old men. Web Monitor thinks Paper Monitor needs to get with-it.The could be a good start. Then PM needs to take trip to perhaps the King of Cool - the website on the world of cutesy style which is big in Japan. They were also the first on the scene to witness the brigade reported in a previous edition of WM. Pink Tentacle has its tentacles, which are presumably pink, out testing the cool waters around Japan ranging from giving patients big hugs to mentioned by Web Monitor when just a wee nipper. Come on you monitorites, show Paper Monitor what you're made of and send your favourite trend-setter websites via the letter box to the right of this page.
• that Barack Obama's presidency has highlighted a group in American culture previously ignored by the media - the black elite. She says the group's heightened press presence has been coupled with some fundamental misunderstandings which she tries to clear-up:
"So, a little background for those terrified that the ship of state is about to be steered toward the shoals of Rush Limbaugh's wildest fears: it may come as a surprise that the black middle class is just that, middle class. It is conformist, pleasantly centrist, relatively conservatively Christian, overweeningly upwardly mobile and generally better (if more anxiously) dressed than its white counterparts."
• As Paper Monitor finishes for the day around midday and Web Monitor is still working into the evening, WM was interested by the question posed in City Journal. that we aren't going to get through the recession if we don't pull our finger out and asks whatever happened to the work ethic:
"After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith - who was a moral philosopher, after all - imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won't be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic - not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall."
As always, send us your links so that Web Monitor can start going home early.
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