When stuff goes wrong – and I mean everyday, non-life changing stuff – it’s easy to mope about it. I frequently do – there are plenty of toys around my pram.

I’d recommend picking up the nearest Kurt Vonnegut book, though, and seeing just how seriously you can take yourself after a few pages:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

But well before we had anything to do with it, this was well worth shouting about: an inspiring, jargon-free primer for anyone who wanted to know what all the online fuss was about. I’ve sent the previous version to friends working in all kinds of sectors – business, academic, charitable – and pretty much all of them have gone out their way to say how useful they found it.

The new version covers some of the latest developments (such as the rise of micro-blogging and Facebook), and includes more examples, references and a glossary.

No cheeky link out to Hackbash, although we’re working on it for the fourth edition.

There’s no doubt it’s happening. Consumers are today presented with a wider range of news sources and information than ever before, and therein lies the problem.

It would take some chutzpah to argue that television today, with however many hundred channels you can get, is better than television yesterday, with five. There are more repeats, more adverts, more celebrity talking head programs and more ‘reality’. There might be more good content out there, but it’s more dilute, and the audience has had to get better at finding it.

It’s pretty much the same with internet news. There are ‘traditional’ outlets such as the Telegraph, Guardian or BBC, agencies such as Reuters, corporate and corporate-sponsored sites such as those for which Charlie and I write, independent sites and bloggers – not to mention various social media such as forums, bookmarking sites and social networks.

It’s fairly safe to assume that, free from bias or not, the big sites have proper editorial processes and policies. A good corporate news site must wear its affiliations in the open.

But how do you judge the objectivity and accuracy of a blogger you’ve happened upon through a search engine? I could be in the pay of the devil for all you know – I do work for a marketing company, after all.

A little help?

I’ve previously argued that, exposed to this mass of content and authors, the reader has had to get better at the snap judgements that help them know how much to trust a site. It’s a lot to ask, though, and certain authorities could be doing more to help.

I’m thinking particularly of Google News, after receiving an alert this week linking to a story on Easier.com. Easier is a site that shows what happens when lowered barriers to participation allow marketers to set up a website that can publish advertorial under the guise of news. If that sounds harsh, this is the story.

I have a problem with sites like Easier being listed alongside genuine news sources, but Google doesn’t seem to. There’s astonishingly little in its publisher guidelines about objectivity, neutrality or anything else that defines news, other than a requirement not to “solely promote your own organization”.

I’m reminded of Lovely Rhod’s Facebook status (just a day after the Deathly Hallows’ release): “…is missing not knowing what happens next.” I wonder if he meant the subtle sense of anticlimax it conveys?

There’s no doubt, at least for me, that the seven books as a whole are a hell of an achievement, but with the final page turned I’m wondering if they were all they could have been. There are moments in all the books where it seems that JK takes her eye off the ball, and it’s normally either the pacing or Harry’s credibility that suffers. After the fifth book, which is so wayward you have to wonder if the series’ success left JK with too little time for a final edit, the sixth was a welcome return to form. For me, the seventh flits bewilderingly between the two.

Anyway, I’ve spent four weeks sticking two fingers in my ears and going “lalalalalalala” every time the subject of the final book came up in conversation. It’s not the result of cheap stage hypnosis, but of a friend’s son casually giving away the suprise of the penultimate book.

For him, then, in the unlikely case that he’s made slower progress than I, Snape is Harry’s father, Hermione his sister, and Dumbledore returns more powerful than you could possibly imagine.