Gold!

I’ve typed that and suddenly I’ve got a head full of Spandau Ballet for some reason. Hope you all had a relaxing Bank Holiday weekend. Wonderful to watch Team GB arriving home swathed in medals after the Beijing Olympics’ spectacular closing ceremony. Note To Whom It May Concern, however: Can someone please buy Boris Johnson a decent suit before 2012? Standing next to the rather impeccably turned-out IOC President Jacques Rogge and Chinese President Hu Jintau, he looked to me more like an unmade London bed than a stylish London Lord Mayor.

Mayoral sartorial quibbles aside (try saying that five times fast), it was great to see the Beijing Olympics pass without major disruption or incident. But I wonder if any Olympic visitors fell victim to data theft whilst in the People’s Republic? There was some internet hysteria pre-Games about Chinese government and industry intending to use electronic espionage to steal secrets from visiting government and business types, but no confirmed reports have as yet surfaced. No such problem at London 2012, I expect. Even if the UK Government does spy on visiting officials, after yet another sorry round of data gaffs last week, I expect they’d lose the information anyway.

Am also intrigued by recent internet chatter about the diminishing value of online social networking sites. The irony appears to be this: The more people interact on sites like Facebook, the more likely they are to encounter people they’d rather avoid. Concern about identity theft is also leaving consumers wary of posting personal details online. So I wonder what the new ‘gold standard’ for delivering secure, personalised content on the web will be? No doubt we’ll soon be able to log on somewhere in cyberspace and see.