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The fate of weblogs at the BBC 

Stuart Hughes reports:

  Within the BBC, there’s currently some debate and head-scratching taking place over whether employees should be allowed to keep personal blogs — and if so, whether policies need to be formulated to advise staff on what they should and should not talk about in the public domain.
  It’s obviously an area of some interest to me — although I’m glad to say that the approach so far has been marked by dialogue and consultation rather than confrontation.
  There’s no sign that I’m going to be silenced just yet.

To my eyes, the BBC seems to understand the Web better than just about any other big media organisation. So I hope and expect that Hughes’s cautious optimism will be justified.

Forget it, Rudy 

I’ve only recently come across the wonderfully named PolySigh. Here’s its comment on the prospect of Rudy Giuliani running for president in 2008, in a list enticingly titled People Who Will Never Be President:

  If Rudy was realistic, he would run for governor of New York in 2006. Instead, he has convinced himself that he can be elected president. He certainly could be elected; he might even make a good president. But to be elected, Rudy first needs to be nominated. And the Republican Party is not going to nominate a pro-choice (including partial-birth-abortion), pro-gay-rights (including domestic partner benefits for city employees), pro-gun-control, thrice-married, opera-lover for president. If nothing else, the South Carolina primary would wipe him out. Conservatives are starting to make their opposition clear. If the issues don’t do it, his crossdressing will.

The limits of outsourcing for India 

Behind the Financial Times’s subscription firewall, Vijay Joshi has a fascinatingly heterodox analysis of the limitations of India’s outsourcing boom. His argument is that India desperately needs export-oriented manufacturing to supply the tens of millions of unskilled jobs the country requires. Outsourcing just doesn’t cut it in terms of job creation:

  Some people think that the information technology sector could be India’s saviour. But its quantitative significance in the near term is extremely limited. IT-related output is currently less than 1 per cent of GDP. More significantly the sector employs less than 1m people. This could increase by another million by 2010. While undoubtedly helpful, it pales into insignificance when one considers that India’s labour force will rise by 40m by 2010 to an estimated 450m people (and much of the rise will occur in backward states). We must remember also that growth of the IT sector will be constrained by the rate at which the supply of educated labour can be increased. Note that only 5 per cent of India’s relevant age-group receives college education.

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