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Big Brother Watching

Saw a rather neat feature on the BBC website. They have a way to rank order their most popular stories near real time based who is reading them around the world. It was interesting to see how stories stacked up in popularity in different parts of the world.

The same idea implemented on something like Google Earth could allow one to zoom in on a street, maybe home and know what an individual was reading at any given time - a distinctly and discomfortingly Orwellian thought. The notion of empowering everyone to play Big Brother does seem to be in currency these days.

It would be nice though to have a net nanny keep an eye on your children while they were online or warn you if someone was trying to hack into your bank account. That would hark back to older times when we lived in close-knit communities and the whole village was family - except our friendly cyber-neighbor would be two continents removed from us.

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