Since my new year got off to its stunning start, I have been debating a return, at some point, to the world of internet dating. When I first went on one of these sites I was pleasantly surprised by how the concept worked so well. It got rid of all the trepidation: you know that someone fancies you, you know what they look like (sometimes), and you are meant to be able to deduce whether you actually have something in common.

But revisiting the site (it’s the one where you’re someone’s friend) got me thinking about how annoying some of these profiles can be; and can I be arsed to traipse through all these profiles to find a good one? And there are loads. Initially this is fun, but as someone said to me, then it does feel like you’re perving in some kind of cyber pub, rather than looking for someone you genuinely want to be with. Maybe that’s just me.

One of the most common annoyances with internet dating profiles is that they try to cover all the bases. If I have to read another profile about a person that is equally ‘at home’ going to a pub as they are to a club, going to a festival or chilling at home, bungee jumping or fucking fly fishing, then I’ll scream. If you don’t give us a point of reference, then it’s difficult to start a converstion for fuck’s sake!. Then girls write about what a great friend their girlfriends are, and all the girly things about them they adore.  They say things like: ‘She loves Gok’s Fashion fix and watches it religously every week’ — oh yeah, because we men love that show. Or it’s: ‘She’s such a good listener and you can turn up with a bottle of wine and tell her all your troubles’. Good God! And my personal favourite: ‘If she was a character from Sex in the City …’.  Men absolutely, positively, and without a doubt could not give fuck what character she is from Sex in the City … unless it’s Samantha, of course.

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It is in the news today that News Corp and Microsoft are going to team up so we can only search for Rupert Murdoch’s news stories on MS’s worse than ever search engine, Bing. They just don’t get it do they? The Internet is no longer about large-scale news corporations delivering our news to us en masse. We can get what we want direct from the people and things that we are interested in. Stephen Fry, speaking at the Twitter conference, spoke about no longer having the need to pay for PR machine to get a message out about new book, TV show or film. He posts that news on Twitter then numerous followers disseminate that information.

I no longer want to buy a hard copy issue or online version of a newspaper I am not going to read all of. It’s a waste of my money and the old way, a waste of paper. I stopped buying the Guardian on Saturdays, because all I really wanted to read was Charlie Brooker and throw the rest in the bin. Surely it will not be long until Charlie will have his own site where a Google ad program will ensure that he gets all the advertising revenue direct to him, rather than it going through Guardian Newspapers who pay him a salary. I can’t see why he has not done it already; maybe he’s a lazy fucker.

Stories now come straight from people who it is happening to, who just want to tell the story and have no political, social or business agenda or motivation. I would like to think that having seen the sort of shit that Fox News pumps out, people will be sensible enough not to part with their hard earned cash to Murdoch. He is just whining because his business model of many years is looking obsolete in a medium that is moving so fast he can’t catch up. Oh and why would you pay for the Times Online or The Sun website? They’re shit. Slow, badly laid out and still thinks it’s newspaper trying to be a website rather than the other way round.

I find that more and more I don’t look for the big media channels for my news or reviews of stuff. Look at Trip Advisor as a great example of user generated content, I want to know from a person who went and paid for somewhere, what they thought of the accommodation and facilities. Not from a journo who got the whole thing for free, got paid for going and then has to bow to the ad revenue from the hotelier. The Internet is ours to stop that sort of bullshit, so let’s use it.

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