Lots of people have expressed disgust at the new Facebook layout, and for a variety of reasons. Some feel it’s a shameless rip-off of twitter, others just think it’s impractical and irritating. Some of these complaints are quite funny. I found this comment on one blog post on this topic:

I just “became a fan” of you on Facebook. But I’ll tell you what I’m not a fan of… The new Facebook layout. It can go swallow some rat poison. IMHO. Of course, I’ve been on Facebook since you used to have to receive an invite from someone else to even be on the thing. So, I guess I’m sort of one-sided on the deal and am un-accepting of the new… But, I don’t have much of choice other than quit using. Naaaaaaah.

Actually, the best response I’ve seen has come from twitter. Someone called Mokokoma commented that “i love the way i hate the new facebook layout – it saves me a lot of time + bandwidth.”

Hilarious. But there’s now a much more serious reason to consider giving social networking sites a miss altogether: the government has plans to try and bring them under the remit of their “intercept modernisation programme” which is already supposed to collate information about email and internet usage.

This has been in the pipeline for a long time; the EU Data Retention Directive which came into being following the June 2005 bombings in London has prompted proposals of this kind for the purposes of monitoring potentially terrorist activity.

Since use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace has rocketed in the past year or so, the Home Office have now decided to include them in the database’s remit.

However you feel about civil liberties and even without getting into the whole ends versus means discussion, it is still slightly strange to think that the government can know things about your electronic correspondence that you didn’t actively tell them. Strange, and worrying.

If it’s any comfort, the database won’t actually store the contents of your messages. Just when and to whom you send them.

That’s acceptable, right?

I like reading diaries and letters, especially those of people that I think have had influential or amusing lives — Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man is a well-thumbed favourite of mine, to name just one. Part of the thrill for me has always been the sense of privacy a diary or a letter has; it wasn’t written with a reader in mind.

(Incidentally, I found this image on Compfight. Can’t recommend that search engine highly enough).

I always thought you had to actually buy a book to get your hands on this kind of thing, but no. There are now a number of famous diaries available in blog format (mostly facilitated by Project Gutenberg) which have been cunningly set up so that you can read the entries day by day as accurately as the modern calendar allows.

The Diary Junction blog has to be the first port of call for any diary enthusiast. They post intermittently on the musings of individuals as disparate as Neville Chamberlain and John Lennon and Linda McCartney. It makes for interesting reading, especially for those who are fed up of being credit crunched from every angle as soon as they boot up of a morning.

You can find a more comprehensive listing of historical diaries elsewhere, but I thought I’d highlight a couple of my favourites here.

Topping the chart has to be Samuel Pepys. Not only is he one of the most entertaining diarists of all time, but Phil Gyford, who runs the site has put a great deal of thought into it, including an archive, a search facility and a series of articles on the issues raised by Pepys’ entries.

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Beedogs. The (self-proclaimed) premiere online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.

This is one of those sites that reaffirms my faith in the true brilliance of the internet. Where else could those who enjoy dressing their dogs up as bumblebees come together to discuss their shared their enthusiasm for this most bizarre of hobbies?