The fundamental Questions of Internet life

Even though there are alleged to be millions of websites out on the Internet (one for every undiscovered planet), the fundamental questions remain the same :-

1. Do their pages ever get updated
2. Have their designers ever viewed them through the eye of a dial-up modem
3. Can people really read such small type
4. Can you really get rich from Spam
5. Has Labour Party's official election anthem been changed to 'come on baby light my pyre'

Well you may have noticed that there appear to be many people working here at 'e-contamination', some of whom are not what they seem to be.

Dr Hugo Hackenbush for one - is he real, well judging by the mail he gets, from spammers and the editor of one of the industry trade magazines, someone thinks he is.

I dunno, it was so easy in the early days, it was like the old joke about teenage sex (yes I know you have heard it at least 20 times already, but think of the other less well educated souls reading this who haven't).

Sorry where was I, oh yes teenage sex 'everyone is talking about it but no-one is doing it' (actually isn't it the situation that once kids reach their teens, their parents are too embarressed to indulge just in case the kids hammer on the ceiling and complain that the noise is distracting them from their end of year exam revision !)

So thus it was in the early days of contaminted lamb, all the politicians talked about it but not one of them did anything about it. Indeed until recently all was going hunky-dory, then suddenly the Labour Party converted to Aztecism and got the blood-lust.

They started off by deciding to save the foxes, possibly because in the words of such an outspoken despotocrat as Robert Mugabe, the Government was run by a 'Gay Mafia'. Certainly the evidence would point to at least some of the Cabinet having read Oscar Wilde (if only to get inside tips as it were) who as we know defined a fox-hunt as:-

the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable

From this point it was only a small step to another quotation from Foxtrot Oscar,

Anybody can be good in the country

which of course is true unless you happen to be a fox in a chicken coop.

Our wonderful leaders then put their foot firmly in their mouth and embarked on a killing spree, halted only by a snowy white calf called Phoenix - who by all accounts should have been called Rasputin, as like the Tsar's favourite faith community chairperson, even though pumped full of poison it refused to lay down and die.

We now have the delicious irony that dioxins from regulated high temperature incinerators are deemed to be dangerous, whereas dioxins from un-regulated low temperature impromptu barbeques are felt to offer no real danger to the general populace.

Afterall, thanks to the excellent way the foot and mouth campaign was run, there is no-one of any importance left in the country, so who gives a stuff if the straw sucking yokels who choose to stay there get a lung full of dioxins.

Well the point is this, we have updated the design of the homepage twice and it now loads like 'excrement off a tool consisting of a large shallow concave head attached to the end of a long handle, used for lifting loose material and moving it elsewhere' (anyway it certainly loads faster that that Eurocrat's definition of a shovel!).

Our aim is to produce a homepage that is useful, rather than one that is so stuffed with links and adverts that it takes the length of a party political broadcast to load up (and is just about as helpful).

Our design approach and philosophy is that a website should be built for speed not for pleasure

It needs to be Clintonesce - designed along the lines of a whorehouse somewhere in the wilds of Arkansas (wham, bam thank you Mam). Sadly the prevailing design view is more that of a Parisian bordello - full of frills, folderol and froufrou (and Madame de Pompadour saying 'Apres nous le deluge')

Shakespeare, as always, had a way of summing it up (King Lear act 3 scene 4)

Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend.

'Now look here I told you last time what our pledges were. Yes so OK there were 5 of them, and we have only fulfilled 3, but that's because those horrid people in the other party were nasty and forced me to call an election early'.

Strange isn't it that calling an election is known as 'going to the country' Dear old Tony certainly went to the country in a big way, but trying to win converts to the Labour party by offering animal sacrifices does seem a bit extreme, even for such a pagan country as the UK (well our favourite Sunday activities are to go to the shops and attend football matches)

So what are the new campaign pledges well

1. reduce webpage sizes
2. reduce waiting times for webpages
3. make webpages more accountable
4. blag some money off a few rich mugs
5. have an ethical foreigner policy

A very good question, which has not yet been answered. Well actually that's a lie, in a recent issue of the Guardian New Media Supplement (May 7th 2001) all was revealed - 'Porn is one of the few profitable industries on the Internet'

Now this is not very good news for websites trying to make a decent living (as it were) ,for whom until now, it seemed to be that the only options were:-

1. banner adverts
2. subscriptions
3. sponsorship
4. affiliate deals
5. asking punters to send them some money

Of course as we all know the main problem is that no-one actually wants to pay for stuff on the Internet - I mean it's all free right! But like the concept of 'free love' in Haight Ashbury in the 60's that ain't necessary so.

In the real world you can't go down to e-sda and 'liberate' a tin of baked beans coz you will get banged-up (look you Yanks - this is a British website, so keep your filthy thoughts to yourself) by the fuzz (unless of course you were clutching a Camberwell carrot at the time)