Please put all other answers in the comments section.

So in the interests of *ehem* research I asked the good people of Twitter what their favourite funny websites were. This is one of the great things about Twitter, you can ask questions and discover new things in what might be classed as an ‘organic’ way (like asking lots of people at a party rather than cold calling).

Anyway here are the ones that came back and they’re good. They’re very good.

http://www.framleyexaminer.com/
Terrifying insight into a rural paper in a small village.
From www.twitter.com/Nick_At_Velti

http://sexyexecs.blogspot.com/
Meet the silver-foxes and their lovely lady friends who rule our corporate world.
From www.twitter.com/mychemtoilet

http://theweekly.co.uk/
Charged with ‘maintaining Britain’s standards’
From www.twitter.com/liquidindian

http://mymilktoof.blogspot.com/
So cutesy it’ll give you toothache (fnarr fnarr)
From www.twitter.com/alexsheppard

http://graphjam.com/
‘Music and pop culture for people who love graphs’
From www.twitter.com/robboella

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/
The Escapist aims to capture and celebrate the contemporary video gaming lifestyle and the diverse global video game culture. Yes really. But apparently the Zero Punctuation videos are very very good.
From www.twitter.com/wonky_donkey

UPDATE: But wait there’s more…

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
Name says it all really…
From www.twitter.com/nkleiner

http://www.iccm-1.org/
Literally amazing, who knew that religion could be, well, so flashy.
From www.twitter.com/rupinjapan

http://www.gothsinhotweather.com/
A celebration of goths in the sunshine. Pictures are judged of gothiness and sweatiness. Nice.
From www.twitter.com/laura_scott

http://www.latfh.com/
‘Look at this f*cking hipster’, like looking at the Vice site, without the aspiration.
From www.twitter.com/rich_kirk

http://alienlovespredator.com
Cartoon strip where we all get to witness the greatest love story never told.
From www.twitter.com/rich_kirk

http://watchwithmothers.net/
TV commentary site with wicked wit.
From www.twitter.com/rich_kirk

This morning, in front of everyone, the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Tom Watson MP engaged in a bit of pushy-shovey (albeit virtually).

That conversation in full:

arusbridger: Daily Mail obssessed with idea of Guardian “putsch” (in collusion with BBC?). A question of media ethics, apparently. http://tiny.cc/7Wp3M

tom_watson: @arusbridger The Daily Mail are not the only people concerned. Many colleagues think you should report the news not make it.

arusbridger: @tom_watson er, so newspapers should stop writing editorials? Hmmm

tom_watson: @arusbridger Of course not but you have a unique status on the centre left. Why irritate your loyalists without allowing all sides a say?

arusbridger: @tom_watson so you didnt read Freedland or Milne or Bunting or McDonnell or Blunkett – all saying (in the Guardian) Brown should stay?

tom_watson: @arusbridger The only thing you haven’t done is publish his obituary. Be under no illusion that Labour readers think you have gone OTT.

arusbridger: @tom_watson love the thought of “labour readers” – as if they all think the same!

tom_watson: @arusbridger I know all of them in West Bromwich and they agree with me Love what you’ve done to paper but last week was too much.

arusbridger: @tom_watson Come into Guardian conference and debate it!

tom_watson: @arusbridger *gulps* Head into lion’s mouth. I gladly accept. Thank you.

After Watson accepted the invitation to the Guardian morning conference, which is a meeting of Guardian editors and journalists to discuss news  for the day, there has been increasing call for a live feed from the meeting. This has not yet been confirmed by the Guardian, but, thinking of the publicity, I can’t see that they won’t at least tweet it.

So Michael Martin is the first speaker of the House of Commons to be forced out of office in 300 years. Should the Queen be worried about her ability to wear hats (well we beheaded the last one just after we got rid of the Speaker…)? Or now that he has stepped down will the focus be brought back to the MPs who shamelessly embezzled public money for their own ends?

But in the meantime we need a speaker and most people are wondering who will replace him. Now it is a truth universally acknowledged that we the public can only be interested in panel shows that involve raw emotion, unlikable, cartoonish characters and public humiliation. Followed by a public vote. Why, it’s the very essence of democracy, Solon, Cleisthenes and all those other toga wearers would be proud.

So I have created Britain’s Next Speaker, to be aired on BBC Four (because it’s classy). It’s Britain’s hunt to find the next HoC Speaker.

But who to be on the judging panel? You need just the right blend of smarm, familiar face, scathing put down, the one who no one is sure what their relevance is (even to reality itself, let alone reality TV), and  one who’s likely to cry at everything… It’s very tricky.

So I put it to Twitter, and below in a poll; find me judges and tell me who you want (after all as I just mentioned democracy is at the very heart of this exercise). And the results are in:

• Phil Collins (Former speech writer to Tony Blair)          21%
• Simon Cowell          13%
• Armando Iannucci          13%
• Thatcher          4%
• Alistair Campbell          4%
• Alan Duncan          4%

But the most popular category was:

• Other         45% 

Including nominations for:

• Alexandra Pullin (thanks)
• Lily Allen
• Clarkson
• Rick Parfitt
• David Mitchell
• Kent Ertugrul
• Daniel Hannan MEP
• Tina Fey
• Rick Astley
• Noel Edmonds

So thanks for all your votes, I’ll let you know when BBC Four comes calling.

In the spirit of Hannah Betts’ excellent ‘Things you only know if you’re single’ column in The Times I intend to have a series of posts on things you only know if you work from home.

This will accommodate both the people who always work from home and those who usually work in an office. Obviously there is an important difference. Home workers and office workers view things from different angles but it gives me more to talk about and it’s also more interesting to see both sides.

If you would like to nominate an aspect of working from home or if you don’t work from home and would like to sound off on people who do, either email me or leave a comment below. All good ideas I will write about as well as a few of my own thoughts on a weekly basis. Every Tuesday.

I look forward to hearing your views.

I was wondering how many Journalists versus PRs there are on Twitter. And thanks to the joys of Google you can see that there are (in London):

• 211 people with ‘journalist’ in their bio and ‘London’ in their location here
• 254 people with ‘PR’ in their bio and ‘London’ in their location here

But what about outside London? There are:

• 2o3 people with ‘journalist’ in their bio and ‘UK’ in their location here
• 149  people with ‘PR’ in their bio and ‘UK’ in their location here

And globally (any location) there are:

• 7,140 people with ‘journalist’ in their bio here
• 13,200  people with ‘PR’ in their bio here

Could we therefore come to the conclusion that in the UK PR people are slower at taking up Twitter? Or perhaps that globally there are just more PR people than journalists? Or maybe that PRs outside of London are quicker on the up-take than journalists?

In fact it proves nothing.

Basically it is very difficult to come up with some snazzy percentages on the overall number of PRs and journalists as the number of new twitterers is quite hard to keep track of, for starters, and also the journalists and PRs that don’t state what they do. Or perhaps the copy-writers, sub-editors and those who don’t use the phrase ‘PR’ and ‘journalist’?  But it is interesting that globally there are nearly double the number of PRs to journalists, but in the UK this drops to a lot less PRs and in London is about equal.

 There are so many things wrong with the research, but it is interesting to see how the different proportions come up from changing the  location. I wonder whether it would ever be possible to actually work out the definitive numbers?

A British man has just accepted a job offer over 34,000 other applicants from all over the world to live, caretake and report from Hamilton Island, on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. Or to create a more visual idea of the ‘best job in the world’, he’ll be paid to live here:

Now we know where to send our ‘congratulations parcels’ to…

This is the new advertising campaign from the Evening Standard which went up all over London overnight:

The move to admit that the paper is out of touch was the brainchild of the new editor, Geordie Greig, after market research found that Londonders felt that the paper was negative, complacent and predictable.

Now this has caused somewhat of a fuss with Standard coloumist Roy Greenslade writing in the Guardian that  this will be seen by former owners, The Mail Group, as an open attack on their editorial style and previous choices in editors.  In his article he muses:

By saying sorry, Greig hopes not so much to distance his paper from its recent past as to shut the door on it.

Greenslade also points out the humbling circulation and readership figures when compared to free papers thelondonpaper and London Lite. Now surely this is where the real truth lies?

For example the Mail Group also owns the Metro in the morning, one of the most popular papers in the tube and also available in 13 other cities in the UK. Surely if they had got it so wrong with the Standard there would be similar problems here? But there don’t appear to be.

Could the answer be that, perhaps the Standard is just a reminder of another era? One where we had to pay for papers and spent time traveling home reading detailed analysis of the day’s stories? Sure, this will be what some people want, but it would appear that most people prefer the more tabloidy, more celebrity gossip fueled and less taxing journalism of the free papers. After all, at the end of a long day reading a series of serious essays isn’t always top of your agenda.

Which leaves the new Standard editor with a problem of targeting, how to maintain its image as the paper of culture, taste and so called ’serious journalism’, while still tacking the free papers? I have no idea what will happen but it’s certainly going to be interesting to see the changes (or perhaps read all about it… sorry).

Now don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for the older generations who are adapting to technologies of today. I struggle to speak to people only ten years my junior about simple things like music, which often I am not expected to like, so one can only imagine the patience and openness needed to take on board the plethora of new jargon and strange concepts that modern technology offers. I don’t mean this patronisingly either, I’m sure when I hit about 60 (let alone the Queen’s age) I’ll no longer care about keeping up with the latest gadgets or communication tools online (or whatever we have then) and will worry more about my non-existent pension and how I’ll have to work til I literally drop down dead…

But I begin to rant. Back to the news.

The Beeb has posted a story on how the Queen has emailed 23 ‘young, internet savvy’ people to congratulate them about something or other they are doing with the Commonwealth. The Queen is described as a ‘trendsetter’ as the article goes on to recount how, in 1976 she sent an email while visiting an Army base.

But wait there is more…

We are also told that President Obama gave her an iPod last month. Amazing, how forthright of him, I imagine she was thrilled and went straight onto iTunes to download all her ‘choons’ (probably explaining to him at the time that while she was at her laptop, emailing people, she preferred the seemingly limitless supply of death metal and gangsta rap available on Spotify but that an iPod would be useful while on the move).

The point I am trying to make is that this article seems to want us to know how hip and ‘with-it’ the Queen is, but eventually comes off a little bit patronising to her Maj. Why shouldn’t she be expected to email people?

Sure, this is part of a bigger story about good work with ‘internet savvy’ kids in the Commonwealth, but should we really be amazed that she has contacted them by email? Surely that’s something that a woman who is in the public eye would know how to do anyway, even if she is even an eighty-something year old. After all she’s been doing it since 1976. But there’s still shock as she emails (*gasp* emails!) some kids.

So yes, I probably won’t be able to keep up as well as her Maj when I’m her age, but I’m not expected to. And from this article, neither is she.