Facts have become easier to check, and inconsistencies easier to display. And while the internet of a few years ago was a rather more boring place, a video is worth ten thousand words.

So, candidates of the future, do not be tempted to tell a small, convenient lies to get you through a single speech or debate, because someone, somewhere with video editing software and far too much time will be ready and waiting.

In the interests of non-partisanship, I offer the examples of clips featuring McCain, Obama and Clinton, whose ‘sniper fire‘ - um - ‘blip‘ became national news, of course. Which in turn prompted this spoof.

And if you are going to have to lie, dear candidate, just remember that unless you are 100% consistent, someone is going to point it out. And while the cable news channels are going to tire of such things, YouTube won’t.

An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse.

That is all.

For instant messaging, some people use MSN, some Yahoo Messenger, some AOL, some Skype - and while there are clients that can handle many of these and more, frequently they do so at the cost of not supporting features like video or audio chat, or by having only hazy support for filesharing. In the world of social networking, there are people’s Twitter feeds, their Facebook statuses…and so on and so forth.

To all of which I say, if you will forgive the American imperative, ‘pick a lane!’ I might even add, ‘Dammit! [sic]‘.

Let us compare with email. No one has to run more than one email client: but that is because email is an open standard, that requires no central service to operate, created before anyone had thought to lock users into a proprietary system to sell them advertising.

Part two is here.