Glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults

Hanging about in Hannigan's Truss Boutique while waiting for my Tenor's Friend to be re-tuned I bump into Ken Barmy.

"Season's greetings and joy to the world," he says. "Smile, you cynical old fossil, it's Christmas!"

(Somebody got a case of hypocrisy in his stocking this year.)

We got talking and I remembered to ask him about something I noticed the other week.

"How come your business plan is published on Blogger?"

"Same reason our library news and the reader interactive stuff is."

"Which is...?"

"You're not the only one having problems with his corporate webmasters. We're not to have any pages longer than one screen and if it's not in the National Local Government Navigation list you can't have it on the web site. And I'm having to copy your idea of hosting pictures on Flickr. I'm having to do that so that we've got pictures in our kids' catalogue."

"Sounds horribly familiar... How many news items are you allowed at a time?"

"Just two."

"My God, are they using the same handbook?"

"The lead officer on our corporate development strategy is talking about setting up a Facebook account to host the pages explaining the strategy to the public. And you know the best what?"

"Go on..."

"The web team have volunteered me to do the corporate customer feedback pages."

Local government has a definite Alice In Wonderland feel about it these days.