I've been chatting to a friend in America who tells me that the evils of our NHS have become a favourite topic among opponents of Barack Obama's healthcare plans.

Tory MEP Daniel Hannan (South East) has made a number of appearances on US television to explain to America why our healthcare system is so bad.

Mr Hannan became something of an internet sensation after his eloquent speech condemning Gordon Brown, in the European Parliament in March, received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube (currently 2.4 million).

Despite this, he doesn't get a great deal of attention in the mainstream media in the UK.

But his comments in the US have nonetheless been highlighted in the UK by users of Twitter.

The "micro-blogging" tool has been used by supporters of the NHS to defend the health service against the attacks by Mr Obama's critics, using the hash-tag #welovethenhs.

And some of these have also had a dig at the Tories - demanding Conservative leader David Cameron disown Mr Hannan.

Mr Cameron has insisted that he also loves the NHS, and spoken in a positive way about the Twitter campaign, on the official Conservative Party blog.

There was no mention of Mr Hannan, something that has been noted in comments left by the blog's readers.

But Mr Cameron has distanced himself from the MEP's comments elsewhere. It seems that Mr Hannan has become an embarrassment to his party.

And while the mainstream media has picked up on the story, from what I can tell it all began on Twitter.

None of us know what the future holds. Speculation about the way the internet is going to develop, how people will behave online or where they will get their information from, is little more than guesswork.

Let me give some examples:

Software

As a middle aged man who started using the internet a long time ago (mainly to play Ultima Online rather than do anything useful), I remember when an amazing new piece of software appeared. ICQ was the first popular instant messaging service to run on Windows.

All of a sudden, e-mail seemed slow and cumbersome. Everybody had to have ICQ.

Where is it now? My ICQ buddy list has dwindled over the years, while my Windows Live list has grown.

I'm sure people still use ICQ. According to Digital Trends, it has an estimated 15 million active users.

According to Microsoft, Windows Live is used by 330 million people a month (I'd guess many hundreds of millions more have it installed and never use it).

I don't know where Digital Trends gets its figures from, but I doubt anyone who uses instant messaging much is going to disagree that ICQ has been overshadowed.

So, will this happen to Twitter? I doubt it, but I don't know. Neither do you. Let's see what happens when Twitter is sold to AOL while Microsoft and Google launch their joint-venture micro-blogging service.

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I was trying to explain how the "Birmingham and West Midlands Politics News" gadget works to Andy Mabbett on Twitter, and did such a poor job of it I thought I'd try again here.

The gadget was created using Sproutbuilder. It takes an RSS feed of political news from the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail, and displays it as you can see. Clicking on a headline will take you to the web page where the story originally appeared.

You can add it to pretty much any website or blog, or Facebook/Myspace/etc page, for free, by clicking the "share" button and following the instructions.

The RSS feed it uses is one I created in Yahoo Pipes. This amalgamates four different RSS feeds from the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail, namely: every news story in the Post's politics section, my Birmingham Post blog, my Birmingham Mail column and most of my Birmingham Post columns.

There is, as you can tell, an element of self-promotion involved.

But the key point - and this is where I am afraid I made little sense when I spoke to Andy - is that anyone can make one of these. So if you want a gadget on your site which has sports news from the Birmingham Mail and the Express and Star, for example, you can just go ahead and make one.

All you need to do is sign up at Sproutbuilder. And if you can find the right RSS feeds, or know how to filter stuff in Yahoo Pipes, it's easy enough to make a specialised widget - for example, which only included football stories, or which pulled in any story from a dozen different websites which mentioned Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Sproutbuilder switched fairly recently from being free to charging. But it does offer basic free accounts, allowing you to make three gadgets with up to 10gb a month of bandwidth - probably enough for most needs?

So if anyone wants to add my gadget to their website, just go ahead. But if it's not what you want, you could make one yourself easily, and they are fun to do.

He could do this because he saw the IP addresses of forum users, and this poster was using their office computer.

(If you know someone's IP address, you can go to a website like this one and possibly get some idea who they are. For domestic users, you'll probably just learn their ISP, such as Virgin, BT etc. If they are at work, and work for a large organisation, you might learn their employer).

Many forum posters protested that this was unfair, an abuse of mod powers etc. I agree, but the mod in question made a good point in reply - that you are always representing your employer. It may not be nice, but it's a good answer because it's true.

I was reminded of this when Birmingham MP Sion Simon made headlines today by making a joke about swine flu on Twitter. He doesn't hide his identity, so it's not an exact parallel. But the lesson is that he can never be just Sion, talking to his mates, on Twitter or any other part of the Internet.

He's always going to be MP Sion Simon (Lab Erdington). Which probably has a moral for us all, hidden there somewhere.

This is what he said (actually re-tweeting someone else)

I'm not saying Susan Boyle caused swine flu. I'm just saying that nobody had swine flu, she sang on TV, people got swine flu.

I did speak to one Tory MP to see if they wanted to be outraged, but they burst out laughing and insisted they didn't want to comment . . .

Here's my take on swine flu.

You may have seen the story about Barack Obama appointing Kevin Werbach, an academic who plays World of Warcraft, to advise him on Internet and telecoms policies.

This led to an in-depth analysis of his gaming habits - you can tell a lot by looking at the character he plays, apparently, and he plays a giant cow - which concluded among other things that he enjoys helping people and is open-minded.

I was reminded of this by another story that is doing the rounds on the interweb, about recruiters avoiding applicants who play World of Warcraft, because their minds are on other things and they have weird sleeping patterns.

Cynical and evil people might suggest the same is true of many other potential employees, including anyone with young children, but definitely not me. I'm scared you'd throw things at me.

Is it true that people who play video games make bad workers? On the positive side, they know a little about the interweb.

And if you think internet communities are, or might become, an important part of your business, it arguably makes sense to recruit people who are already part of one.

But this story, which is appearing on professional websites which are at least half-way to being "big media", is also a warning to journalists, in my view.

It's a fun little story. But where does it come from?

A guy calling himself "Tale" wrote the following on an internet forum:

And that's it. So it's the equivalent of the man down the pub, always a great source of copy but perhaps best not to depend on without checking elsewhere.

Move over Second Life. Metaplace is better in every way.

I've never understood why businesses got so excited about Second Life (pictured, left). If you've never played it, it's a 3D graphical application - kind of like a game, except without the actual game - which allows you to create a character and fly around a virtual world full of things other people have created.

These creations can be buildings, vehicles, clothes other characters are wearing, or just about anything you can imagine.

It's like World of Warcraft without the elves. What it does have is lots and lots of porn, as people use the freedom it offers to make pornography and sell it for real cash.

There was a period, which hasn't quite gone away, of organisations creating Second Life material to promote themselves, such as an "office" in the Second Life virtual world.

It's also used for virtual conferences. Microsoft and the Social Market Foundation think-tank roped West Bromwich MP and Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson into taking part in a fringe event set in the Second Life world during Labour's conference in September.

Online gaming guru Raph Koster is developing something better.

His Metaplace project will allow people to develop their own virtual world and stick it on their website (by embedding some flash on the page).

It is better than Second Life because:

• There is no need for visitors to download a client. You just need flash on your machine, and 99 per cent of us already have that, even if we don't know it.
• People can access your world directly from any website you choose.
• There's no need to share your virtual showroom or conference hall with a thousand badly-textured penises. Worlds are self-contained, but you can link to others if you wish.

The only downside I can see is the cartoony default graphics, but you can create your own graphics if you wish.

Here is a video about the internet and porn (don't play it at work):

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!

Birmingham is currently winning the battle to be named Britain's Second City on Wikipedia, probably the most influential source of information on the interweb today.

Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia anyone can edit, making it useless as a source to be relied on. The problem isn't so much straight factual inaccuracies as bias and point-of-view pushing.

It is, however, immensely popular, with around seven billion page views (not unique visits) a month.

In theory, editors are bound by a strict set of rules, such as the requirement to cite authoritative sources and to achieve consensus before making major changes.

In practice, sources are frequently used to push a particular point of view. You simply start out knowing what you want to say and then search for a source to back it up, ignoring the ones that don't support your position.

As for consensus, this tends to apply to individual pages, not the encyclopedia as a whole.

Hence, the Birmingham entry tells us that "Birmingham is the largest of England's core cities, and is the second city of the United Kingdom".

The Manchester entry, however, states that it is "often described as the second city of the UK."

While they don't quite contradict each other, Manchester's entry suggests that Birmingham is often not considered to be the second city.

The reason for this discrepancy is obvious - Manchester's entry is edited mainly by Mancs, while Birmingham's entry is edited by Brummies.

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