Web Monitor

A celebration of the riches of the web.

So it's a post-bank holiday and as the UK, tries to get back into the work mood there's rich pickings in the world of diverting web ephemera. Remember to share your best links with us by either sending us a comment via the box to the right of this page or recommending them to us on Delicious where we're called "bbcwebmonitor".

• The first thing you may have noticed when you got back to your desk - if you work in an office environment that is - is the sheer weight of spam in your inbox. These illiterately-constructed missives advertising phony pharmaceuticals and fake watches are a plague of modern life. But could they be solved by a tax on e-mails. That's the idea of the day highlighted at the New York Times. If we all had to pay 2p, or 3c, to send an e-mail the spammers would be stopped in their tracks. The idea is from Edward Gottesman, originally writing in Prospect magazine.

"An average employee might send 100 emails a day. At 2p or 3c, the tax would be £2 or $3, less than a large caramel macchiato."

• Meerkats? Strangely appealing creatures? They've worked wonders for profits at car insurance website Compare the Market, with its cultish meerkat-related adverts. Or perhaps real meerkats are more your bag. Either way you may be interested in a discussion about the etymology of the word. Apparently it's a Dutch word roughly equating to "sea cat", which is a little odd as there are few meerkats out on the open wave.

• We all know what computer games are like, right? Frenetic, rapid, fast-paced, supersonic, prestissimo, and, well, rather quick. But apparently there is a movement towards slow computer games, detailed in Slate. They review The Path, a game which its makers say needs about six hours of your time to be enjoyable. You direct a woman around a lush environment and nothing much happens. It's caused a decidedly severe bout of head scratching in the games community.

• It's a thorny issue de nos jours. How exactly does one describe what is going on in the
environment in terms that are going to make people actually do anything about it? It's been tackled by some wise minds in Seed magazine. The answer is that you should avoid phrases like "dangerous anthropogenic interference in climate" and a raft of other chunks of jargon that have the potential to confuse and mislead.

• Last but not least, we have the latest installment in the Twitter-volution. Apparently the mini-blogging/micro-networking/Zeitgeist-monopolising site is planning a TV show and there is much discussion about the subject on the web. The Chicago Tribune's Swamp Politics picks up the story. The idea is something to do with tracking celebrities. Stephen Fry might be a good candidate. And everything will be in 140 characters of course.

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