( pix of Darling, Cable & Whatshisname please? ) THE INTERNET COLUMN By Giles Turnbull When the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the two men who want his job stood together for a live TV debate last week, there was an enthusiastic crowd booing, cheering and egging them on. Not the crowd in the studio, though: the one on the internet. Websites that thrive on live, real-time happenings are perfect for monitoring people's reactions to live TV shows. In the hours after the Chancellor's debate, someone even commented that perhaps Twitter and the like might save live TV from its slow decline. Twitter users make up "hashtags" which can be used to collate comments from all over the site. Watching the political hashtags during the debate was exciting and entertaining. Everything the three candidates said was instantly cross-examined by thousands of people; it's amazing how fast consensus seemed to form. As LibDem candidate Vince Cable spoke, more and more Twitter users remarked on his performance, helping him to win general acclaim as the best speaker on the night. This was just a trial run, of course, for bigger things. Soon there will be the leadership debates, and then the night of the Election itself. As live TV covers the Election results, watch out for reaction on Twitter, Facebook and similar sites - because that's where political news pundits are likely to be looking. In the meantime, keep an eye on Tweetminister (www.tweetminster.co.uk), a site that brings political tweets together on one page. + Tweeting from deep space + The Voyager space probes were launched in 1977, and are still transmitting data back to Earth from deep space. Voyager 1 is almost completely shut off now, but Voyager 2 continues to record new information and send it back. Naturally, it has a Twitter account at twitter.com/voyager2, where you can ask it questions and keep an eye on any new discoveries it makes. From 13.6 billion kilometres away, and counting. + We just smash atoms + In Geneva, scientists at CERN (www.cern.ch) are still looking into the data collected by the first successful experiments in the Large Hadron Collider last week. Sub-atomic particles fly round it and smash into one another, briefly recreating the kind of physics that scientists think happened just after the Big Bang. CERN is home to something else, of course: the World Wide Web was invented there by Tim Berners-Lee, as a way for scientists to share data more easily. They're still doing that now, and the CERN site is packed with information. Although you do need a physics degree to understand some of it. + iPad in the UK? + Apple's new iPad has finally hit the streets - in America. As yet there's still no official word on a UK release date, nor on how much it will cost here. In the meantime, software developers have started to put out video mockups of their iPad apps, and there's predictably many games to be seen already. What's interesting, though, is that prices are higher than for iPhone apps. Apple's competitors aren't standing still either: Asus, makers of the popular Eee range of netbook computers, says it will have a cheaper pad-like device out soon. + Browsing around... Apple iPad reviews + :: Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin: "It's Harry Potter's book" http://bit.ly/ipad-jardin :: Stephen Fry unpacks his iPad with a sharp intake of breath http://bit.ly/ipad-fry :: David Pogue's two reviews (for techies and non-techies) http://nyti.ms/ipad-pogue :: Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times http://bit.ly/ipad-andyi :: Walt Mossberg: "Notebook killer? Pretty close" http://bit.ly/ipad-walt :: Engadget's definitive guide http://bit.ly/ipad-engadget + Thing of the week + :: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, for Nintendo rainwarrior.thenoos.net/music/moon8.html + Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org + ENDS