Web Monitor
17:39 UK time, Monday, 20 July 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor acts like an automated interestingness-filter for the internet - but in human form. You can simply read on, follow the links and give your brain an evening treat - or you can jolly well take part, by linking to the best online features you've seen using the box top right.
• , yells the Daily Mail's website. What's especially eerie about these pictures, at time of publication, is that the background is entirely different around different parts of MJ's body - almost as if, as speculated at , the eerie pictures have been eerily put together from more than one eerie source:
"In one of the newly-emerged images, taken on Tuesday at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, the singer points towards the audience as backing dancers perform in front of a huge This Is It banner."
• Staying with music, Web Monitor has always regarded as a juvenile waste of time and energy that could better be spent bringing you the finest of the web, but is prepared to make an exception for 's remix of Rick Astley's biggest hit with a certain Nirvana track (but was precursor really six-odd years ago?). Ben Parr at Mashable in a fair and balanced manner:
"The beats and the lyrics match up almost perfectly. The video editing combining Kurt Cobain's guitar prowess with Astley's giant puffball of hair is just extraordinary."
• "Cricket commentary's like Norfolk, football commentary's like Soho," . Maybe, but why mention it? Because the chap who brought us Permanent Bedtime is continuing his search for "ambient speech" as an aid to repose. (Attentive readers will already have listened to Giles Turnbull's London, and those with memories as long as they are keen will recall that Mr Turnbull was a contributor to .)
"It's the background sound of a cafe or a bus. A conversational, human noise that lets you know you're alive and not alone but doesn't intrude too much.
The is a great example, and , and baseball commentary, and recently reminded me of which is a splendid example (and you can ). And there are some perfect ambient speech moments in Giles Turnbull's lovely ."
• In one of the leafier of The Times' groves, considers the (and Private Eye's Adam Macqueen in a post with some direct language). Beard is not impressed by impediments to academics visiting schools (which is, she says, "[a] jolly good thing"):
"There is something dreadful about the name of the Act anyway. It seems to imply that if you are against it, you really don't care about Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups. A better title would be 'Mass compulsory registration and tracking of all those working with the under 18s' Act."
• More bookmarks to add to Web Monitor's straining-at-the-seams Favorites. is, , a valiant effort to sort the weblog wheat from the chattering chaff, and looks round these parts like a good opportunity to watch and, well, learn:
"We are starting small and maybe we won't succeed but it's always worth having a dream. Imagine if there were hundreds or even thousands of amateur bloggers signed up so that the best content we produce gained the kind of impact and recognition that is now generally restricted to professional journalists."
• And to close, we return to music - specifically hip hop. Web Monitor has no way of knowing what your immediate reaction was to the reignition of the rap wars between The Game and Jay-Z. Not so, though, in the case of associate professor of political science Marc Lynch, who (like finance guru Alvin Hall before him) finds :
"[My first take], me being a professor of international relations, was to start thinking about how this could be turned into a story about the nature of hegemony and the debate over the exercise of American power."
The 
