Information overload

By Dave Woodhall.

I’m on Twitter. Unlike many others I’m not obsessed by it. I don’t record my every movement, nor follow a host of my favourite musicians, actors and sports stars. I use it to keep up with certain things and some (a few. A very few) of the spoofs are funny.

Some of the stuff I come across, though, confuses me. For a start there’s the enter4entertainment.com business. This, for anyone who doesn’t read the Guardian’s media section, is a showbiz news site, started at the beginning of 2011, whose story is covered in a weekly column in the newspaper. It’s interesting, not least because we’re in much the same position at The Birmingham Press, although their visitor figures often make us want to cry. What makes their audience even more impressive is that their website doesn’t exist. Or if it does, it’s impossible to find. Unless, of course, I’m doing something wrong.

Try hitting www.enter4entertainments.com Every time I do, I get ‘Sorry, this page cannot be found.’ The only mentions of the site anywhere online are references to the Guardian column. Their Twitter tag  @enter4ents and @sam4ents are hardly ever updated and have less followers than @annewiddecombefantasies

Is the whole thing some e-injoke I’ve not been told about and in writing this I’ll be the laughing stock of the cyberworld? Someone, please, let me in on the secret.

On that sort-of subject, what does Steven Fry do that’s so bloody interesting? 2.45 million people want to know every intimate detail of the life of  a man who, as far as I can see, devotes most of his time to attending premieres and talking about his friends’ charitable works. Are all those lives so empty they have to seek some kind of second-hand glamour from a man who isn’t even that glamorous?

Or for that matter, why must Birmingham courts be tweeted? The police I can understand. Their football liaison officers are particularly useful in sending out matchday information, but direct, as it happens, instant information about verdicts and sentences? That’s an info-step too far.

However, there has been one recent development in the wonderful world of Twitter that can only be   good thing. Danny Baker, broadcasting genius and fighting cancer the same way he tackles everything else, has signed up. Follow @prodnose and marvel at being in the presence of greatness