Next in our series on the World Wide Web, following our forensic examinations of Google and Ebay, is our chums at MySpac. I occasionally cruise this social networking site, and I’m reminded of the very first websites I would visit after we got the Internet, the Yahoo chat rooms. For the first couple of minutes I had a great time, meeting new people who said hello and welcomed me to their room. Then they said goodbye to some people who left. Then they said hello to some more people who arrived. And goodbye to someone else who left… After half an hour of this I posted a comment saying ‘Hang on! You’re just saying hello and goodbye to people! That’s not terribly interesting!’… so they said goodbye to me.

We shouldn’t forget that we at Imaginary Scenes have a MySpac website too. I don’t think we’re biting the hand the feeds us with this story, so much as gnashing our teeth at the hand that sometimes waves a banana under our nose. I don’t think our MySpac website has done us any harm, and in general I’m not sure it’s a harmful institution. What it has done is absorb plenty of time, and maybe that’s the ultimate task of anything in this world.

So, fine, long may it continue to not cease to be.

This is quite long so you may wish to download a printable copy.

What manner of banana republic is Scotland, after all? With madmen on the loose destroying ballot boxes with golf clubs, this is the question on everyone’s lips.

What we can be sure of, though, is that those allegations regarding confusing voting slips are completely unjustified. Yes, people were asked to vote in three different elections, and yes, they had to do this in different ways. But as you can see from the specimen below, it couldn’t have been made clearer…