Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, laid into Facebook in the Guardian the other day (With friends like these). I despise Facebook is his first sentence, and he doesn't get any keener on it as he goes on.

He starts and ends with the usual Luddite garbage, about how it's going to stop people interacting in person, and we'd all be better off reading. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ ‘Endymion’? he asks, a little pompously if you ask me. Now I once drank an entire pot of coffee to inspire me to do some work and then spent the next five hours trying to simulate the Game of Life on Microsoft Excel, so I may not be a hugely reliable source on timewasting, but even an achiever like Graham Linehan can find it in him to retort that not reading Keats’ ‘Endymion’ is a task I look forward to achieving every day, and he's not that wrong really.

Keats aside, his argument misses the point. I hardly use Facebook myself, but I do spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it hasn't reduced the amount of time I spend on social interaction, it's reduced the time devoted to mindless gawking at the telly. Partly.

And he entirely fails to get the Internet buddy thing. Again, it doesn't replace your face to face friendships, it complements them. It's interesting to relate to people without being able to rely on body language, and with no idea whether or not they actually look like that. Although I can assure you that xoorx really does look like this.

In the middle of the article, though, it gets quite interesting. He lists the people who own Facebook, and it turns out it's the libertarian fringe of the Republican Party, in cahoots with the CIA. Who'd have thunk it? It put me right off.

And it is being used for research (Researchers plunder social networks). If academics can use it to track their students, the CIA can use it to track us. Well they might. Listen, I've got a long history of radical protest, I have. I've signed petitions and everything.

On reflection, what a weird approach to activism that is. Protest campaigning step one - tell your opponents who you are, and where you live.

Incidentally, I had a very nice email from Jane Slavin, author of The Facebook Diaries. She said how much she liked my writing, which is especially nice from someone who's actually been published, rather than just clicking on a button labelled Publish. She's moved to a place called S----------, and is living in a place she describes as a secular nunnery. To try and find an interesting link for her, I googled for S---------- secular nunnery, and second in the list of links was - this blog. How amazing is that? It's not as if I've ever written about S----------, or  nunneries for that matter.

Apparently a friend of hers living in Sydney told her about me. This means I have two readers in Sydney. Comments are open, you lovely sheilas you, come up and take a bow.

It's just occurred to me that sheila might be a derogatory term. Oh well, too late now, it's all stream of consciousness today I'm afraid. Yes I know it's still grammatically correct. My subconscious is made out of sentences, all right? It's an Enlightenment subcounscious, more Bentham than Jung.

And while we're all waiting for me to have an original thought, here's one I've nicked from my mate Dave's blog, Pieces and Parts. How would Tom Waits and Nick Cave get on on American Idol?

I also want the gossip. One of my lovely readers had a date. She told us she was getting ready, but it's a day later and she hasn't said how it went. This is either a very good or a very bad sign. Which is it? I must know.

I'm away this weekend, visiting zombizi in Frome. I may blog live from the most culturally significant town between Trowbridge and Shepton Mallet, but otherwise I'll tell you all about it next week.