First of all, Olympic Minister Tessa Jowell is digging herself out of the hole she made a while back where she said that we wouldn’t have bid for the Olympics if we’d known there would have been a recession – now she’s taken the Keynesian line she should have taken in the first place, saying that they’re a “shot in the arm” for the economy. Meanwhile Boris Johnson was praising the public transport system being built to accomodate visitors, and borrowed from Twain when he insisted that the weather wasn’t going to ruin the Games: “rumours of our wetness are greatly exaggerated”. He makes it so hard to hate him sometimes. Still, the two of them seem to have got their stances crossed on what’s going to happen to the stadium afterwards, Jowell contradicting Johnson by saying it wouldn’t be maintained for the 2018 World Cup bid.

But for all their optimism, renewed or staged, there are concerns about both the Olympics staying on track and the legacy delivered after them being worthwhile. The Guardian has a piece on worries that health initiatives are targeting already sporty folk like schoolkids, and not the terminally unfit for whom mobility scooters are a source of constant jealousy. Simon Hart at the Telegraph similarly worries about the lack of bricks-and-mortar facilities being left for many sports, and upholds that paper’s always reliable finger on the pop cultural pulse: “for the majority of Britain’s Olympic sports one is reminded of Anne Robinson’s catchphrase on ‘The Weakest Link’: ‘You leave with nothing.’”

The FT, whose reputation is constantly chipped away at by the legion of embarrassing dads clearly hired to be their headline writers, has increased its pun level to Defcon 4. Actual headlines from today’s paper include: “City clears first Olympic hurdle”; “The benefits of an early start out of the blocks”; “Finish line is also the start of the race”, “Building is on track as recession drives down costs”; and “Financial glue that binds Olympic rings holding firm”. In order to leave for an early lunch of alcohol, the subs finally dashed off “A transport of delight” as their head for a piece on improvements to the DLR. What does that even mean? Is it to snare that important “transport + delight” search-term demographic?

The Sun meanwhile was concerned with the plight of sex workers being trafficked to coincide with the games, with the characteristically tender “Tarts fear for 2012 Olympics”. And today’s Evening Standard defined what’s presumably going to be its games stance in its new post-Wadley happy-clappy incarnation, namely unquestioning devotion to the awesomeness of it all: “London races to golden Olympics”. Golden?! It’s the Olympics as iconic calf to be worshipped.

Still, the Standard’s rose-petal-strewing is at least hearteningly in the spirit of the Olympics as a source of wonderment rather than hand-wringing, and the differences between the Beijing and London Olympics become a bit clearer. With Beijing, enormous amounts of pre-recession funds were lavished on a games that served as China’s entrance into a post-Communist global business community, while London’s just trying to scrape enough pennies together so that everyone will have somewhere to sit. But perhaps the bigger difference is the general attitude towards it – where the Chinese (at least the ones who weren’t being relocated) recognised the pride and prosperity that can emanate from the games, by the looks of messageboards Britons are responding with the kind of grumpy cynicism that depressingly passes as a charming national character trait. We may have to endure many more headlines of the “Olympic progress speared by javelin of funding cuts” variety; but constant bellyaching from anti-sporting Britons is going to be the real, er, marathon.

The service is known as an API and is common to sites like Google – basically it’s a tailor-made content interface, a rare and ambitious step in the media industry. The Guardian hope to eventually create an ad-network, using their acculmulated intelligence to be reach more eyeballs than the visibility and diversity of news-site would allow. Like all games, more eyeballs mean greater profit.

One half of Open Platform is dubbed Content API, allowing developers access to a vast array of archives, which would permit, for example, the free use of Guardian articles about relevant artist on a museum’s webpages. In addition they offer Datastore, a “collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists.”

It’s not all puppy dogs, confetti, and the beginning of web utopia. Eventually, commercial use of service with be served alongside adverts. The Guardian aren’t purely in it for profit; their composition assures that they don’t intend to seek profit for shareholders benefit. Instead, their motivation is independence and conformity to their trust’s founding values. They can afford to be innovative and take risks in order to lead the way: being courageous, as their values state, is important. Indeed, shareholders “would normally have a heart attack at such a move.”

The New York Times and LA Times have both been flirting with billionaires recently, as they fight for survival; the NYT have had to sell off and lease back parts of their headquarters, landing themselves with a $24m annual rent payment as they try to pay back their Carlos Slim loan. The LA Times may have the best deal, with their potential suitor pointing to the Guardian as an ideal model. “Newspapers ought to be owned by foundations, not look for great financial returns” suggested philanthropist Eli Broad.

This API sees the Guardian setting the pace ahead of competitors like the New York Times who launched a similar but more restrictive service recently, featuring – wow! -a search facility and access to live headlines. The Guardian’s model is different, focused on allowing commercial use of their content and data. The result may be a smart mash-up of data and content, much Guardian branding, and a new revenue streams from which the same water can be continually recycled, reused, and resold.

If content is king, then this is service is a hundred of the king’s best horses, and thousands of his best messengers, sending the Guardian far and wide. A misstep online is unlikely to cost the Guardian much, and should only encourage competitors innovation—the industry sure needs it. With this move, the Guardian redraw of where the boundaries of the newspaper industry lie, using to technology to reach as far as possible. It’s enough to make Conrad Black spit his prison breakfast all over his email-inbox. He would be right to be worried, though he may have to wait until his release in a few years time to see the Guardian’s plans for complete media-domination realised.

Peston was blamed for the queues outside Northern Rock after he revealed the bank’s woes to the nation, as well as for the rise in HBOS’s share price after Peston revealed they were going to be taken over by Lloyds. More specifically, he was accused of being a pawn in some insider trading scam, with a mole feeding him information that would affect the markets. It was an accusation that George Osbourne ratified and then Peston, with typical aplomb, deflected with the Deripaska-Rothschild-Osbourne yacht scoop, while the FT defended Pesto to the hilt.

Still, the criticisms haven’t gone away. “Newspapers have the same sort of obligation as they do during a war”, said Simon Jenkins on the media’s role in the crisis, i.e. shut up and not “scare” people. Jenkins of course chose instead, on the day of the worst stock market fall in years, to romp up Cader Idris and uncork his babbling, Biblical prose. How responsible of him!

So Peston faced the committee yesterday, and he rebuffed the criticisms in a hyper-Pestonian manner. This was Pesto off the leash, allowed to roam free over vowels and clauses, a style described politely as “loquacious” by the Guardian and perhaps more accurately as having “sentences like giant sausages” by Quentin Letts in the Mail. “I know lots and lots and lots of people, including you, and, y’know, I talk to lots and lots and lots of people”, was his version of refusing to outline his sources. Slick.

The main thing is that Northern Rock was screwed even if Peston did create a run on it, something that the other journos at the hearing all concurred with. Jenkins’s wider notion of not reporting financial stories to maintain market stability is flawed too, as transparency moves to the front of the agenda. Jenkins, for his part, kept pretty quiet at the meetings, only piping up to tell the assembled committee kettles that they were black: ”By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch. What have you been doing all the time?” Well, at least they haven’t been telling people to “invest in sanity” and buy “shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love”. If only we’d just given Fred The Shred a nice big hug, then none of this horridness would have happened!

Peston, meanwhile, nailed the whole conundrum when he says that impact upon share price is “peripheral” to the provision of information to the masses. That’s what journalism is – can you remember that far back, Jenkins?

NBC rolls out the English stereotypes –  ”Giving such a weather-obsessed country a day to natter about nothing else has let them drop the stiff upper lip and pick up a snowball instead” – while it also manages to get in a Dickens reference, something that the Times also does in a very silly editorial:

“The first thing to say about the snow is that it is extraordinarily beautiful. There is a joy to trampling through unspoilt snow that some children enjoyed yesterday morning for the first time in their lives. Some children built their first snowman and rolled their first gigantic snowball. The scene out of every domestic window was a Christmas card from the fables of Dickens, five weeks too late. Dull would he be of soul who would not look out of his own window and note a scene touching in its majesty.” Terrible would he be of writing who could not avoid Victorian idiom in the 21st century.

More saucer-eyed nonsense in the Indy from John Walsh, where, alongside his attempts at pop culture (Paris Hilton and Verne Troyer references, really good try) he makes playschool similies (“The leafless trees, holding globules of white in their long black fingers against a white sky”) and then personifies clothes pegs and catkins in an adorable, itsy-bitsy way:

“The clothes pegs on the washing-line, their reds and blues and yellows and greens enhanced to perfection by the surrounding whiteout, are freighted with tiny caterpillars of snow; so are the catkins, the buds and the smallest twigs. They all seem a little stunned by the turn of events – the heaviest snowfall in London in 20 years – and resigned to silent, indignant contemplation of the magic white stuff that arrived overnight to settle so insistently on their tiny backs.”

Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian sketches a (by his own admission) ridiculous portrait of a very Guardian-y London where chav and cyclist remember their “forgotten innocence” amidst a charmingly ramshackle yet painterly landscape. The Telegraph continues the theme – “Those who walked a long way to get to work yesterday found strangers talking to them. Travellers swapped stories. There was a helping hand for the elderly” – before getting back to usual editorial business by shoehorning in an attack on big government – “Six million who normally catch buses in the morning were disappointed. That illustrates the centralised precautionary policy that has overtaken us.”

The Mail’s Harry Phibbs really outdoes himself in a truly barking thinkpiece, musing first that “snow should be proclaimed by the United Nations as part of the basic human rights of a child”, before managing to equate the hours-long failure of the London transport system to the fall of the British empire:

“When the snow falls, the nation of Drake, Wellington, Raleigh and Nelson goes into a state of paralysis…British Rail told outraged commuters that the quantity may not have been too severe but that: ‘It was the wrong sort of snow.’ That phrase has lived on in infamy as symbolising the defeatist mentality of those who gave up and offered excuses at the first sign of difficulty. The mentality that lost the empire.”

And with business slowing, the FT has had to run with Onion-flavoured headlines such as “Restaurants find dining out is not essential”, while sentences like “Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race” are chucked onto the front page in a desperate bid to fill space. Meanwhile bankers sounded like they were having their own epiphanic moments as the reality of their avaricious lifestyle was brought into sharp relief by the innocence of childhood – “I got to leave work early and go for a walk in Victoria Park. It was much more fun watching children play in the snow that being in work”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country noted that it’s snowing, just like every other year.

Norman Lamont, the former Tory chancellor so memorably characterised as a complete ignoramus on ITV’s Spitting Image, was yesterday announced as a non-executive director of the advertising technology firm Phorm, following a boardroom dispute that has seen three US-based directors ousted from the company.

Lamont, who is presumably enjoying the current financial crisis on account of it making Black Wednesday – which happened on his watch – look like a gentil tea party, has been drafted in by Phorm to help slime the wheels of their ongoing campaign to persuade the government that their company’s working practise doesn’t actually constitute a Big Brother-style snooping service, where users’ private web habits are recorded and monitored for the purposes of big business clients (which, funnily enough, is pretty much an exact description of what they do). In his company’s press announcement, Kent Ertugrul, Phorm’s CEO and a former seller of joyrides on Russian fighter jets, was fairly explicit about Lamont’s role:

“I welcome Lord Lamont, Kip [Meek, former executive at Ofcom], Stefan [Allesch-Taylor, co-founder of the Fairfax investment bank] and Stephen [Partridge-Hicks, MD of Gordian Knot, an investment management company] to the Board. They bring extensive experience on government, business, regulatory matters and financial markets.”

Phorm, which offers brands a targeted advertising system based on “deep packet inspection” of web browsers’ behavioural habits, needs all the help it can get, as it has come in for heavy criticism from privacy campaigners and most sane thinking citizens. One of these is Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man who founded the world wide web, who told the BBC in March, “I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5%.” Apart from the legal issue of privacy infringement, Berners Lee also pointed out that there’s also the question of Phorm’s collection of cookie data from web browsers, which is arguably theft; “If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”

ABOVE – HOW PHORM'S ADWARE SERVICE WORKS

In mid-September, the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform concluded that Phorm’s activities did not contravene EU laws on data protection. However, the government advised that any service would have to be “opt-in” to satisfy British law – i.e. sites using Phorm services would need to present customers with an option to exercise choice about whether they’d like to be involved.

‘Opt-in’ is a slippery term though: would anyone apart from a hardened simpleton knowingly sign up to a service that exposes their private Internet data (i.e. every site you visit and all your transactions) to multinational corporations, for free? It’s not exactly an easy sell, so presumably the questions will be massaged to some degree, assuming they are immediately visible at all. And what constitutes ‘opting-in’? Subscribing to BT or Virgin services? So far, several media companies who initially expressed an interest in Phorm’s services have backed out – including the Guardian (who stated “… our decision was in no small part down to the conversations we had internally about how this product sits with the values of our company”),  the FT, and the BBC – after their consumers expressed deep-seated anxieties, but surely not all other companies will be so scrupulous. 

The government’s Information Commisioner Office (ICO) has claimed it will closely monitor Phorm’s activities to make sure they comply with data protection laws, and the Crown Prosecution Service is currently investigating whether secret BT tests of Phorm’s adware system on customers in 2006 and 2007 breached wiretapping laws. 

Still, with Lamont’s help Phorm are hoping to achieve their stated ambition of turning their data pimping gaze on over 70% of Britain’s broadband users.

A report released by the SNP this week claims that the majority of people asked about the new local income tax thought it was far bonnier than council tax, but businesses aren’t so enamoured. It will impose greater administrative charges on businesses, especially those with a high staff turnover like tourism. Do you mean the tourism that’s a central part of Salmond’s vision for a prosperous Scotland? Thought so.

Scottish Chamber of Commerce oppose it, CBI Scotland oppose it, the Tory and Labour finance spokesmen oppose it, and 66% of 34-54 year olds, the largest section of the workforce, oppose it. And this report that shows that everyone loves local income tax was created from just 500 responses, of which the vast majority were individuals; only 10 businesses or organisations supported it. Hence the thoughtful timing just as everyone’s going nuts over UK-wide income tax changes.

Salmond’s been raising hackles south of the border too, by complaining about Darling’s pre-budget report that cuts £500m from Scotland’s budget. Darling, who’s clearly now one Scottish PM comment away from a stress-induced psychotic episode, said of Salmond on Newsnight: ”If he thinks he can’t be more efficient, no doubt he will let us know why. I don’t believe it’s beyond the wit of either Alex Salmond’s administration – and remember, he has got double what Donald Dewar had eight years ago – or beyond the wit of us at UK level to be more efficient.” Served!

Maybe we shouldn’t bash Salmond too hard though, as he’s been feeling a bit ropey recently. He’s had to have a week off sick from a chest infection, prompting this piece from Severin Carrell in the Guardian that’s like a upper-middle-class version of those Reveal magazine articles that feign concern for Cheryl Cole’s weight but actually gleefully sharpen their talons on her vulnerable, papped frame: “Observers and opponents at Holyrood have watched his waistline grow, his pallor grey and the tiredness around his eyes increase markedly”. Carrell later tells Salmond to “eat properly and join a gym”, before scouring pictures of deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon for evidence of cellulite.

Rather than heed Carrell’s advice though, Salmond has taken to a more traditional Scottish form of medicine – hard liquor. After cancelling a week of engagements, Salmond lurched out of bed for the chance to open a new whisky distillery in his constituency. Get well soon, Al!

After journalistically fellating Nat Rothschild the other week, the Evening Standard’s Chris Blackhurst once again whacks the fawning up to full power for the “truly incredible” Staveley.

“Obviously, although she doesn’t say so, her looks help. But there is more to it. She has no side to her, she isn’t grand but straightforward and very direct. They clearly like that. She also claims to do exactly as she promises, never stitching anyone up, never letting anyone down.”

Debatable, Blackhurst, considering she played Mephistopheles in the bargain that allowed Barclays to get out of the strictures of government bailout cash, set to cost shareholders £3.2bn. The deal also means that Barclays bosses get to keep paying themselves mega-bonuses. So there may be some who would argue with your painting of a snow white Staveley.

The Mail has her as a Yorkshire lass/maverick – “She never tried to conceal the echoes of her Yorkshire accent and [Prince Andrew's] friends got used to her calling them ‘Luv’…she was not cut out to be a passive princess carrying out official duties and keeping her opinions to herself”. With predictable sexism, they continue to focus on the Prince Andrew connection rather than her business achievements, and this after their outraged news piece about the deal. In the Mail’s world, only men are fit for business profiles – this little woman is for drooling picture-led puff pieces about her love life. Which is great for Staveley – she doesn’t have to worry about genuine probing or questions of accountability.

The Times continues the theme of the bluff Northerner, a woman “who does exactly what she promises, has no airs or graces and calls interviewers ‘love’ and ’sweetheart”’.

These profiles seem to reveal only one thing about Staveley – that she is intelligent enough to know that she can manipulate press hacks to have her presented, after a few “sweetheart’s”, as a harmless, charming anachronism: a funny Northerner doing her gooey Northern things. Better that than as ruthless and money-drunk.

Kudos to the Guardian though for even-handedness, and picking up on her reality-defying statement: ”It is not about money – it wouldn’t matter if I was making £8m or £200m.”

Melanie Sykes would never say that!

Update: thanks to ‘Lord Dacre’ for the kind tip…