In a massive public relations own-goal, Romano Prodi’s centre-left government in Italy has preliminarily approved a compulsory registration system for any web site involving “editorial activity”.

And it definitely, definitely, definitely doesn’t have anything to do with silencing comedian, blogger and general thorn in the Italian establishment’s side, Beppe Grillo (Wikipedia article).

Definitely not.

Since the story broke, the article in question has been watered down to presumptively exclude ‘personal’ sites, but the discretion to make that distinction remains with the ministry implementing the law, rather than the courts.

Thanks to Maureen Lister for the Times Online article. I expect that she’ll cover the story at some point on her blog too. Maureen makes an excellent point about Grillo in an unrelated post:

Grillo is successful first of all because he is a brilliant comedian, secondly because he comes up with a lot of information (rather than bla-bla opinions) and thirdly because he uses webtools intelligently, something that hardly anyone in the media has bothered to mention.Of course blogs, used by averagely intelligent people, are a serious threat to traditional media, (and therefore to traditional politics) and have the power to undermine the present RAI-Mediaset duopoly.   

More coverage:Beppe Grillo – original postBeppe Grillo – updateSlashdot coverageTimes online articleTimes online updated articleBoingBoing coverage

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0.5. Let me notice if anything works/looks screwy.

Cheers all.

Congrats to my good friend Laura, who has just (half an hour ago) started a new blog to replace her LiveJournal: Woman with an Opinion. She wanted to call it “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”, which would have been awesome…

Why I’m doing this:

I have a Livejournal and have done since I was 16. However, I have found I have wanted to broadcast my opinions further than my Livejournal friends list and to other friends who do not have access to Livejournal.

Does this mean I have a manifesto?

(Via Laura – Woman with an Opinion).

Truncated..

Ahem.

I realised last night that the hellish import procedure I went through to get my posts out of the old Blogsome site was to some extent in vain.

It turns out that the XSL stylesheet I used to turn the Blogsome Atom feed into RSS 2.0 chose the summary field and not the description field for each item to use as the RSS description.

The practical results of which is that all of my imported posts were truncated to about 300 characters, and links and images were stripped out.

I’m going through all of them gradually putting the needful back in.

Arr.

Blogschool:

Found on Blogshares (currently down after a DB Crash)

(Via Sen No Sen.)