Afternoon:
10°c
Hello, you psychotic, whoring skanks!
Ah, that doesn't work, does it? Not with my name printed at the top of this piece.
But if this was an anonymous blog I could have said anything I liked about your morals, sexual preferences or attractiveness.
And all behind a veil of anonymity that shielded me from physical and legal repercussions.
Why? Because the web is still a Wild West.
It is largely unpoliced and riddled with error and malice.
A vicious, defamatory culture is rife among high-profile bloggers and in the reader comment sections on newspaper sites.
Schoolchildren do their bullying online as well as in the playground.
And Wikipedia entries about people (you know: real, living, sensitive human beings) are regularly vandalised.
It is also insanely uneconomic. Piracy has become widespread.
Consumers expect to pay nothing for valuable commodities such as news, music, film, television programmes, computer software and encyclopaedic information.
Newspapers wince as paying customers migrate to the web, reading the same - or better and more up-to-date - news and comment without paying a penny.
But the tide is turning. When Google recently complied with a court order to reveal the identity of a blogger (the author of "Skanks in New York") who really did think it was OK to call a model a "psychotic, whoring skank", we saw the beginning of an important paradigm shift in the online world.
All around, things are tightening up. The Man is taking the power back.
Wikipedia announced this week that articles about living people will now be formally edited. Not only will GCSE coursework become more accurate (Henry VIII apparently did not marry Catherine Tate), it also means that you can't libel someone just because you feel like it.
News freeloading, too, is facing an uncertain future.
Many people have ridiculed Rupert Murdoch's decision to move his news websites behind paywalls.
But soon this will look entirely sensible. Murdoch commands a bloc of newspapers and television stations.
Move them all behind the same, or linked, paywalls (buy Sky broadband, get the Sun for free?) and a big portion of the game is changed. It will take a tough newspaper proprietor to commit to free news if Murdoch is proved correct.
Pirates, too, are under attack. Under new government proposals, ripping off music and movies could cost your average geek his virtual lifeline.
The biggest punishment a nerd can face is the disruption of his broadband connection. (Mere hours without pornography and Facebook Scrabble have been known to cause breathing difficulties.)
The message? If you want it, pay for it. Unjustified attack on the ethos of the web, or a long-overdue overhaul of the online free-for-all? I say the latter.
If you disagree, you can slate me directly at www.summerofblood.com. (No paywall, yet.) Let the defamation begin.
Best keep Wat Tyler well away from these peasants
Here's an exercise in (un)historical imagination. It is June 1381. You are Wat Tyler, leading a ragtag army of villagers from Kent and Essex on a righteous crusade of justice against corrupt government, punitive taxation and social injustice.
You are on the way to Blackheath, where you intend to set up camp. But on the way there, you step through a wormhole in the fabric of space-time and end up in August 2009.
When you arrive at your destination, you are startled to find that the whole place has been taken over by a load of Hampstead hippies, with foldaway Brompton bicycles, buck-teeth and deferred places to study PPE at Oxford.
Several of them are strumming guitars and a working group is pitching a wigwam, using the camp-building skills they picked up doing their Duke of Edinburgh bronze award.
Tell me seriously that you do not feel your hand tighten around the handle of your pitchfork.
Freddie's sober triumph
I am always suspicious when sports stories move to the front pages of a newspaper.
Unless England have won (or, more likely, been woefully eliminated from) some prestigious international competition, it generally means that nefarious deeds must have taken place.
I'm thinking of drinking, whoring, speeding, cheating, fighting, betting, roasting and so on.
This week football and rugby have both been up front, thanks respectively to the baleful reappearance of British hooliganism and the continuing pantomime known as "Bloodgate".
Cricket is the only sport there for the right reasons: England beat a rubbish Aussie side to sneak the Ashes.
Hurrah! Freddie Flintoff deserves another trip to Buck House for remaining sober enough in his retirement celebrations to avoid English sport suffering a blanket disgrace.
• Senator Ted Kennedy's death opens his life for assessment.
He is mourned by many Americans as a stately figure who transcended party politics in the name of liberal reform.
But his reputation is stained for just as many others by his fondness for living dangerously, symbolised most fatally by the Chappaquiddick accident in 1969.
How do we account for a man's private life in assessing his public legacy?
Generations of historians have scratched their heads over this question (and its inverse: how do we judge the Good Man who is a Bad King?).
The answer fluctuates with historiographical trends.
The easiest way to slip the question is to state that labels of "good" and "bad" are unhelpful in history.
But I can't help feeling that's an undergraduate's answer.
Human beings are essentially moral creatures, and to dismiss the difficult questions about right and wrong as oversimplifications is intellectual cowardice.
