Web Monitor
14:57 UK time, Thursday, 18 June 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web monitor's been clicking its way through the internet to find the most interesting bits.
Make sure you share your favourite bits by sending your links via the comment box to the right of this page.
• Here's somewhere that isn't featured in that daytime property show A Place in the Sun. how much an Isreali settlement property costs. For example, a two-bedroom house in Tel Aviv comes to about $400,000, but you can get a place for around $180,000 in the settlement of Modi'in Illit just 25 miles away. The outposts, Palmer says, are ripe for the speculative market as they are dirt cheap but risky - they may be knocked down at any moment or could grow into huge communities.
• Whilst the rest of the web is watching the Iranian protests on Twitter (), :
"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS [real-time strategy] to govern the country.
That's an entirely different gaming skill set. It's much easier to wreck than to build, and not only do they have to build, they also have to stop all those first-person action heroes who want to lead their own revolution."
• the price of buying professional wedding guests. In India a guest would set you back as little as £2 or up to £7 of you want them well-dressed and good looking. It's big business in Korea and paid guests cost around £15, whilst in Japan the price jumps to £125 per guest, more if you want them to make a speech or sing. The balancing of guests to make sure each side has the same amount is a big motivating factor.
• Web Monitor's daily splurge on blogosphere opinion makes it more than aware of the pundit, who is prepared to say anything on radio, on TV and online. So it's no surprise that this , appealed. He wants to make pundits accountable as nothing happens to them if their predictions are wrong. The ways of regulating the rent-a-gobs go from ridiculing the worst offenders on late night talk shows to to basing a whole corner of the betting industry on the reliability of the comments.
• The that investigative journalist Peter Lance has found a friendship blossoming between the mob and al-Qaida. He says he discovered Ramzi Yousef and mobster-turned-informant Gregory Scarpa Jr were placed in adjoining jail cells and started passing letters to each other. Lance says one such letter was a step-by-step instruction sheet entitled "How to Smuggle Explosives Into an Airplane".
• So the official MPs' expenses are out today (You can ). their nursery rhyme interpretation in January of Harriet Harman's expenses, blacking out almost everything. This isn't far from the truth - not the nursery rhyme bit, the blacking out bit. Page three of and page 31 of are just two examples when the whole page has been almost completely blacked out.
The 
